Second World War

The Second World War is present not as a single narrated battle but as a history embedded in the places Ray and Moth pass. Airfields, forts, requisitioned land and improvised homes carry its effects into later decades, linking military use of the coast with industrial hazards, displacement and disputes over who may remain on the land.

Wartime military sites

The former RAF Portreath was built during the Second World War. By 1950 it was no longer needed and had been returned to the government, but its military history continued in a different form: using equipment brought back from Nazi Germany, the government converted the site into a chemical-weapons plant associated with Porton Down. The plant made Sarin B and other chemical weapons for two or three years. The book thus traces a wartime airfield into a postwar weapons programme, rather than treating the end of the war as the end of the site’s military purpose.

Tregantle Fort offers another physical reminder of wartime preparation. Built in the nineteenth century to defend against the French, it became a gas school during the Second World War, where soldiers prepared for gas attacks. When Ray and Moth pass the concrete surrounding the fort, the narrative places their deep breaths of clean air beside the historical preparation for chemical warfare: the landscape’s quiet present does not erase the dangers for which it was once organized.

Requisition and displacement

In 1943 the army requisitioned Tyneham, displacing its residents. The villagers later accused the military of failing to return the village; after the war, however, a compulsory purchase order transferred the land and buildings to the army. The distinction between wartime removal and postwar legal ownership matters: the military presence continued, while the villagers’ sense of home and connection to their history was lost.

The ranges’ restricted public access, limited intensive farming and occasional small-arms fire also allowed vegetation and wildlife to flourish. The account describes this unexpected outcome as a form of military conservation: ecological renewal arising from the very land use that had displaced the village. The contrast does not undo that loss, but it shows how the wartime and military history of a place can shape its natural life as well as its human one.

Homes made in the aftermath

At Rame Head, an older resident explains how cliffside plots first rented at peppercorn rates between the wars drew people who cut platforms into the slope and put up tents and shacks. After the Second World War, people who had lost homes in the bombing of Plymouth joined them; the resident’s own family came in this way and stayed. Over generations, the structures were added to and stabilized, turning emergency shelter into an inherited place of residence.

The land later passed into council ownership, and the council tried to remove the occupants, who won the right to stay. By the time Ray and Moth see the scattered shacks, nearly all have become holiday homes and the rents have risen. This layered history connects wartime destruction to a longer struggle over shelter, tenure and the changing value of coastal land. The Second World War’s significance in the book lies partly in these afterlives: its effects persist in the places people lost, the homes they made, and the landscapes whose uses changed around them.