EIGHTY-six-year-old John Boaz cannot remember exactly where he was on VE day. He was then living at Middle Lightwood Farm, Cotheridge, near Worcester, and to his knowledge, villagers did not hold a party.

It makes village life sound a little sedentary, until he begins to talk about what he can remember.

His war stories of secret meetings, underground bunkers, guns, knives and explosives come not from a far off battle-scarred land, but right here in a tiny Worcestershire village.

It sounds incredible now but as an 18-year-old Boy Scout, he was recruited into one of the auxiliary units, a resistance organisation known as Churchill’s secret army, whose members were to wage guerrilla warfare if the Germans invaded the county.

Mr Boaz was known locally for farming and delivering milk – but villagers were unaware he was also learning how to kill enemy invaders with his bare hands and make bombs.

He said: “The Home Guard was supposed to face the enemy and fight. Our job, if there had been an invasion, was to go underground, wait until they were here and then blow up their camps.

“There were six patrols around Worcester in all.”

His unit, called Samson patrol, was made up mainly of Scouts and farmers who met secretly at the First Broadheath Scout hut or at the Boaz farm.

Mr Boaz said: “We had four cellars under the farm and the middle one was empty, so I asked my father if we could use it.

“He never knew the Army used to come and store explosives and bomb-making equipment. We also had lots of coils of steel wire so we could run it across the roads just high enough to cut the dispatch rider’s head off when he passed on his motorbike.

“Some of what we were trained to do was a bit gruesome.”

The Scout troop became an unlikely hotbed of Worcestershire resistance after one Scout, Geoff Devereux, was recruited by a mysterious phone call.

Mr Boaz said: “They said, ‘At lunchtime I shall be across the road in a car, bring your ID card and just get in’.”

Mr Devereux was driven out into the countryside and asked to form a patrol.

He and Mr Boaz’s older brother Robert were original members and when they joined up, Mr Boaz was approached.

At the time he was just 17 and joined the Home Guard so he could wear the uniform publicly to deflect attention from his secret activities.

On his 18th birthday in October 1941, he was finally able to join the auxiliary unit and was sent to Coleshill, near Swindon, to learn combat and sabotage techniques.

The youngsters were also trained by Worcester butcher and former boxer Peter Price.

Mr Boaz, of Saleway, near Droitwich, said: “It was all this thuggery really. Our job was to dispose of these sentries silently by knife or with our hands and put explosives into the fuel dumps to do what damage we could.

“We had revolvers but we weren’t supposed to use those, only as a last resort.

“We were supposed not to surrender. We were told we would be tortured and killed because we weren’t protected by the Geneva Convention so we were supposed to save the last bullet to finish ourselves off. You just accepted it.

“It doesn’t seem like it now but in those days you expected to get up every morning to find the Germans had invaded.

“They didn’t tell us until later but if we had gone into action, they would have given us a lifespan of a fortnight.”

Soldiers built an operational base, or underground bunker, for the unit in the middle of a wood near Broadwas.

Mr Boaz said: “When they took me there the sergeant put his hand up a bit of a hollow tree and pulled out a little metal handle.

“There was an old hazel stump and he just turned this handle and the whole stump lifted out and the base was there underground.

“There were all these big Anderson shelters buried in the ground and there were four bunks and a toilet.”

Mr Boaz believes he was chosen because as a “country lad”, he knew the area well. He had ambitions to be an air gunner but had to stay at home to help with the farm so he remained in Samson patrol until he was stood down in November 1944.

Fortunately, he never needed his lethal skills but he remembered practising with explosives.

He said: “My father had been told to plough a field up and in the middle was a great big old pear tree.

“We got these boxes of explosives and had four big charges under this pear tree. One of the lads went on the road to stop the traffic and we got in a ditch and watched as the whole tree went up in the air.

“Dead wood went all over the place. I think we used too much.

“Later, Geoff Devereux’s mother called me into her house and it had cracked all the ceilings. I think she had an idea what we were up to.”

TOMORROW: How the Berrow's worcester Journal reported VE Day