A soldier’s personal account of World War 2 from 12th December 1939 – 2nd March 1946

Part Eleven – Back to school

The 25th FHS football team. The author, middle row, second right.

With Frodsham as our base, the activities of the unit became spread over a wide area of Cheshire, Lancashire and Staffordshire and very few weeks passed without my being away for several days at some camp or other, inspecting, report writing, supervising or advising on camp lay-out, health and hygiene and sanitation arrangements, water supplies and buildings, drainage and all the varied aspects of our work.

From here I went home on leave to see the ruins of blitzed Southampton for the first time.

The Central Station had been put out of action by a stack of bombs and the train was diverted to the Terminus. From here I took the tram to Shirley. All along Oxford Street, Bernard Street, High Street and Above Bar to the Junction there was nothing but smoking, smouldering ruins and burnt-out shells. The rubble was heaped shoulder high across the roads with only a pathway which had been cleared to the width of the tramlines to allow traffic through.

I looked for old familiar and well-loved landmarks. Very few remained. The ancient Holy Road Church was a shell, the GPO was shattered and the old Hartley Building disappeared. A miracle had happened at the Bargate. There it stood amongst the ruins – it had defied the bombs as it had defied the centuries. The department store, Edwin Jones, had gone, so had Mayes, Tyrrells, Bradbeers and Plummers as had the old Palace Theatre.

By the time I reached the Junction it was a fight to keep back the tears. Commercial Road was wrecked. A burnt-out fire engine , a charred skeleton, stood outside the Central Station. Into Shirley Road and still more burnt-out shops and houses, bricks and rubble. As I get off the tram at Shirley Library a sudden fear gripped me. I hurried on. York Road was heavily damaged. Into Foundry Lane – and more charred shells, in Freshfield Road too. I was almost afraid to turn the corner into Ampthill Road. Another miracle surely – it showed no signs of damage at all! And there was No. 23 whole and intact. Not quite – a broken window in the back bedroom and an incendiary had landed in the roof guttering but had been put out in time. Never before in my life had I felt so humbly thankful, never has there been a homecoming so tragic and yet so happy. My hometown gone, but my home still there!

Although I had now been in the Army for almost twelve months this was the first leave, other than a couple of short forty-eight hour ones, that I had had.

By the time I returned to Frodsham the Merseyside blitzes were beginning and as we were in the direct path of the bombers on their way to Liverpool, we had to remain very much on the alert and when on picket duty had the additional task of acting as spotter. I was on duty the day after I returned from leave and during the night spent the whole of my tour of duty, steel-helmeted and with respirator, at the alert listening to the bombers droning overhead and watching the flashes of exploding bombs, the ruddy glare of the many fires, the trails of the tracer shells and the hundreds of shell-bursts twinkling in the distant sky.

The new heavy gun batteries a hundred yards down the road went into action that night and when I returned to my bed it was to find the barrack room almost knee deep in plaster – the concussion of the nearby 4.5’s had brought the ceiling down and all the lads were well and truly awake and more than usually profane in their comments on the enemy in general and the Luftwaffe in particular!

Within the next day or two a party of our lads set off for Liverpool to join the salvage and rescue operations. By the end of the week I myself was billeted with Walter Burr (RASC driver) and Dick Taylor in a school at a village called Maghull, a few miles outside of Aintree on the Liverpool-Ormskirk road. This school was being used as a rest centre where each night some two thousand men, women and children, bombed out of their homes in Liverpool, came to sleep, leaving again in the morning. In the afternoons it was still being used as a school. Each of the evacuees was issued with a blanket on arrival at night and as this nocturnal population of Maghull was fluctuating and ever-changing it was impossible to ensure that each person had the same blanket each night and for this reason each one of the 2,000 had to be disinfected every day. For this purpose we were equipped with the unit mobile steam disinfector mounted on a three-ton truck.

We were drawing daily rations from an ack-ack unit stationed about a mile away and cooking our own meals. The daily routine was rise at 6am (we slept on the floor in one of the class-rooms), cook breakfast on one of the stoves in the cookery class and on the job by 7am. This was very necessary in order to get the disinfecting done and the blankets dried, folded and stacked ready for re-issue in the evening – and it was wise to get the bulk of the job done before we became surrounded by curious children in the afternoons.

At night the WVS and other voluntary workers took over the task of issuing the blankets, making and serving sandwiches and tea and generally organising the centre. We first became involved by being recruited one evening to try and exercise some control over some rather wild teenagers who were making themselves a nuisance and refused to acknowledge the authority of the women keepers. A little military discipline soon settled them, but from here we gradually graduated to cutting bread, making tea and serving corned beef sandwiches.

Eventually our working day stretched to 20 hours – from 6am each morning until 2am the following morning, but we had no complaints – indeed, we enjoyed the opportunity of being of good service and the friendly and cooperative atmosphere made it a pleasure. We kept this up for three weeks until the reorganisation of Civil Defence and Local Authority arrangements made the continuance of the school being used as a rest centre unnecessary and we returned once more to Frodsham.

In the months that followed, in addition to carrying out our normal duties in the East Lancs military area for which we were responsible, we assisted in forming and training two new Hygiene Sections from allied forces.

The first unit was Czech. About 20 Czechs were billeted on us for a course of lectures and demonstrations and shared our accommodation, rations and meal tables. After the Czechs left we acted as hosts to a similar number of Dutchmen. Largely, perhaps, because they spoke English more fluently than the Czechs we preferred them and their stay with us was thoroughly enjoyed by both English and Dutch boys alike.

We played quite a lot of football whilst we were at Frodsham, mainly against neighbouring anti-aircraft batteries and we played several ‘international’ matches against the Dutchmen. As they were attached to us for all purposes we also felt justified in recruiting some of them to strengthen our team in inter-unit matches as, being only 28 strong, a Hygiene Section has a much smaller pool of sporting talent than almost any other British Army unit from which to choose teams for competitive sports.

To be continued

Main Street, Del Rio, in the 1940's

Two years ago I drifted into the border town of Del Rio in Texas. I was on the road, travelling from Laredo to Big Bend and needed to stop for a break. I spent an hour or so in the town strolling back and forth down Main Street trying to conjure up its heyday, the days when Del Rio’s heartbeat was here, before the world moved on and took its business to the malls on the edge of town and left behind thrift stores, gift shops and a faded, melancholy nostalgia; this the story in so many towns in the States whose glory days have gone.

Had I known then that this was the place where legendary DJ Wolfman Jack had broadcast his show to the United States, his signal even reaching Korea if the atmospheric conditions were right, then I would have paid better attention and shown due respect. A recent two part programme on Radio 4 revealed what I had missed.

Growing up dirt poor in Brooklyn, New York, like many street kids The Wolfman (Bob Smith) found escape in the music shows he heard on the radio. He was particularly taken with the Mexican border radio stations, operated at powers 3-5 times higher than those at which US stations were permitted to broadcast. They were located on the borders of Mexico and Texas or California, but were leased to Americans. They were in reality "outlaw" US stations, mostly catering to an English speaking audience.

If the ionosphere was just right the "outlaw X" XERF in Del Rio would blast into New York City as clear as if it was a local station. The electricity coming off the transmitters was so powerful that birds flying too close would drop dead. The extreme energy would cause nearby parked car’s headlights to glow.

The Roswell Hotel, Del Rio, the Wolfman's home while a DJ and joint owner of XERF - still standing today

These "bandit", "outlaw", or "border blasters" as they were called, transmitted programmes by all sorts of wild characters, usually pitching something. Bob dreamed that one day he would be on the air at one of the border blasters broadcasting around the World. He finally fulfilled his desire and as ‘The Wolfman’, became the King of DJ’s. When he agreed to a cameo appearance in the 70’s movie ‘American Graffiti’, his identity was revealed, cited as the moment the myth was destroyed for many hitherto fans. By then, The Wolfman had moved on from XERF and later became a successful establishment broadcaster on US radio and TV. He died in 1995.

Hang on. What’s this? Triple British gold on day two the World Track Cycling Championships. Steady. This excess of success could be catching. BA’s beleaguered Willie Walsh could do with some of that gold pixie dust right now. Or a bike to disappear on.

At a cost of £4bn, the state-of-the-art Terminal 5 at Heathrow received its first flight this morning. By this evening, the first full day of operations ended in humiliating failure for BA and by association, the country, with delays, long queues, cancelled flights, lost luggage, closed check-ins, security chaos, untrained, clueless staff and risible statements from a pathetically inept management.

It was the mother of great British farces with the rest of the World looking on and laughing, with the exception, that is, of those overseas passengers unfortunate enough to have been unwilling extras in this debacle. And tomorrow, many that were left stranded overnight without luggage or hotels, get to do it all over again: Carry On Heathrow.

Snapped on a recent visit to Winchelsea in East Sussex, the gravestone of Spike Milligan, which bears the inscription, in Gaelic, ‘I told you I was ill’.

The use of mobile phones to be permitted on planes. What a nightmare! Give me snakes, babies, stag weekenders, singing nuns, Richard Reid, anything, but please, not bloody mobiles. Imagine - a ten hour night flight stretched out before you and as the pilot flicks off the ‘fasten seat belt’ and newly installed ‘no mobile’ signs, the click of unbuckled belts mixes with the cacophony of two hundred phones chiming simultaneously into life, swiftly followed by the robotic beep of dialling and then, a universal chorus of the dreaded words, ‘ Hello - it’s me - I’m on the plane’. Aaaaaaaaargh!

A soldier’s personal account of World War 2 from 12th December 1939 – 2nd March 1946

Part Ten – The Blitz and Beau Geste

Aintree, June 1940. The Author and Geoff Farmer

From the dockside at Gourock we were transported in lorries to Greenock a few miles away and billeted there in a large woodwork factory with some hundreds of other troops of all arms from the convoy and after a meal and a clean up went out to explore the town. That evening came the news that the BEF were being evacuated from Dunkirk beaches and that Mussolini had declared war on Britain and France.

Greenock had a lot of Italian shops – mostly fish and chip bars and ice-cream parlours and the civilian population declared war on Italy with a barrage of well-aimed bricks through the plate glass windows of these establishments. As the evening wore on and the anti-Italian feeling rose, their enthusiasm for the job spread to other shops and other nationalities and a certain amount of looting took place before things were brought under control. It was rumoured that in Glasgow a mob set fire to the Italian Consulate.

Our stay in Greenock lasted two days and then, by some rather obscure arrangement made by Major Wybourne with some higher authority, we set off back to Macclesfield.

He evidently had the idea of going back to Highfield House, but on our arrival at Macclesfield we found that our old billet was now occupied by another unit and the lads we left behind there had departed to an unknown destination. So we were stranded and eventually spent the night at the Police Station, but not until the local Chief Constable had raised the funds to treat the entire unit to a welcome home supper at the UDC restaurant in Chestergate and dozens of old friends in the town had turned out in force to give us a real reception. We had really made a hit during our stay in Macclesfield.

The next day saw us off on our travels once more , this time – after much telephoning by Wimpey – to Liverpool. We spent two days in a billet not far from the Adelphi Hotel right in the heart of the City and here, for the first time since we joined the Army we had beds. Just wood and canvas camp beds, but nevertheless, real beds. But such luxury was short-lived. We moved again – to Aintree racecourse.

An enormous canvas camp had been set up here, housing about 6,000 men, most of them from Dunkirk and we took on the job of camp hygiene section. After about a week it was announced that we were going on leave three or four at a time and for long enough for each of us to have two full days at home. The only snag was that there was no new clothing for issue and we had to travel in the same one-and-only, begrimed and tattered battledress we had worn in Norway – but at this period of history most of the British Army seemed to be in rags and tatters and anyway, in the summer of 1940 it added something to our prestige. These were the first minutes of Britain’s finest hour and we were battle-hardened veterans going home.

I was greeted, as I left Southampton Central station, together with Mum and Dad, aunts and uncles and cousins who had turned out in strength to meet me, by the wail of air-raid sirens. The town’s first air-raid had caused damage and loss of life the night previously at Millbrook and so, after three months of almost ceaseless bombing in the Arctic, I spent the first few hours of my leave once again in a shelter amidst the roar of gunfire and aircraft engines. But it was Dad’s birthday and I had 1/2 lb. of Capstan pipe tobacco I had bought duty-free on the ‘Lancastria’ for his present as well as such souvenirs as Norwegian money and packets of German Army issue cigarettes and the air-raid siren was soon forgotten. Anyway, compared with what was to follow a few months later, it wasn’t much of an air-raid.

On arrival back at Aintree we found that the Section had been promoted from tents to the grandstand where we set up home in what had once been a bar – and German bombers were now beginning to find their way to the Merseyside area and air-raid sirens, aircraft engines and gunfire were becoming commonplace nocturnal sounds.

I remember a most touching little incident in Liverpool. Harold Lewington and I were in Woolworth’s one day when a rather poor looking, elderly little woman stopped by us and slipped a shilling into each of our hands. We began to protest but before we could get a word out she said, ‘I had a boy at Dunkirk and he didn’t come home – buy yourself some cigarettes, bless you…‘ and was gone in the crowd of shoppers. Harold and I just looked at each other and we both had tears in our eyes.

One night we were all fast asleep on the bar floor in the grandstand – all, that is, but one. Presently I was awakened by being roughly shaken by Brian Keites. As I opened my eyes he was sitting bolt upright, one finger raised and said ‘Hark!’ The only noise to listen to at that precise moment was the whistle of a bomb earthbound at a speed and in a direction which hardly seemed to be in keeping with Brian’s attitude towards it. Actually, he had been just as scared as I was but just couldn’t bear the thought of being the only one awake and listening to that whistle which seemed to last for hours! A few minutes later we saw an enemy bomber shot down by a night fighter.

After we had been at Aintree for a week or two I was one day summoned to the orderly room with Corporal Don Foster. There we were informed that we were being sent on detachment to a big camp at Trentham Park, just outside Stoke-on-Trent, to take on the hygiene supervision there.

When we arrived at Trentham we discovered that it was the temporary home of some 2,000 men of the famous French Foreign Legion. The British staff consisted of the Medical Officer – our immediate boss – a platoon of the Worcester Regiment to whom were attached half-a-dozen South Lancs, a medical orderly and a couple of RASC clerks.

Trentham Park, summer 1940. French Foreign Legionnaires

We were several weeks at the Park – before the war a noted beauty spot – and got to know a few of these ‘Beau Geste’ characters quite well, mainly through an Englishman we discovered in their ranks. Just about every European nationality was represented, including, rather incongruously, a German. There was also an American negro, but the largest proportion of them were Spaniards who, having fought on the Government side in the Civil War, had fled from Spain when Franco came to supreme power. The camp closed temporarily when the Legionnaires left for the Middle East where, later in the war, they distinguished themselves in the now famous forced march under General Le Clerc, from Lake Chad across the Sahara desert to cut off the Africa Corps forces retreating from El Alamein.

By the time we left Trentham our unit had moved from Aintree to Frodsham, a village in Cheshire about twelve miles from Chester and we joined them there. Subsequently, I again went back to Trentham Park, on this occasion occupied by the French Navy – the majority of them Vichy supporters. Those who wished to return to France were eventually sent back in a hospital ship which was torpedoed by a German U-boat in mid-Channel with considerable loss of life.

It was while I was at Trentham the second time that the blitzes started in real earnest. The Battle of Britain had been fought and won and the Germans, with the approach of the long winter evenings, were turning their attentions to the heavy night attacks on London and the chief provincial cities. From here I heard the bombers fly overhead on their way to attack Coventry and saw the bright red glow in the sky as the city burned some 40 miles away. It was here that I first learned that Southampton had been almost completely destroyed as a thriving, busy port, in three successive nights of horror, but that my family were safe and unharmed. On returning to Frodsham, I learned that Brian Keites and Peter Carr-North had both lost their homes but that their families were safe.

To be continued

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Wind, rain, hail, sleet, and snow; whose bright idea was it to hold Easter so early? Fact is, nobody really seems to know. Unlike Christmas, which is fixed, Easter seems to slide up and down the calendar at will.

The early Christian church had a habit of supplanting pagan celebrations with its own major festivals and I seem to recall that Easter does just that. I believe the phase of the moon also has a part to play in the selection of dates. The decision to simplify the process also requires the agreement of all the different manifestations of Christianity, not merely the big two, Catholicism and Protestantism. Good to give everyone an equal say I guess, but not so great when it comes to getting a resolution that satisfies all.

So, until the next time the matter is debated, Easter will keep slipping and a sliding around, although I hear it’s not due to be so early for another one hundred and sixty years. By then, thanks to climate change, snow at Easter will probably be no more than a distant memory, trotted out as a long-gone freak of nature, like the Thames freezing over at Westminster in wintertime and wet August bank holidays.

Yesterday night I watched with interest a recording of last Sunday’s South Bank Show which had as its subject the political unrest that erupted onto the streets of Europe and the USA in the spring and summer of 1968. Having also recently read a book that chronicled those events and despite living through it, I was again reminded what a very turbulent and violent year that had been.

Here in Britain the peak of the unrest was the anti Vietnam War demonstration in Grosvenor Square, when the crowds did battle with mounted police in an attempt to storm the United States embassy. For my generation it was the first time that such violence had been witnessed on the streets of Britain and what made it more shocking was that it represented the authority and power of the state versus the people. Now, of course, much has followed - Bloody Sunday, the miner’s strike, the poll tax riots, Brixton – each event eroding the power to shock, the violence escalating ever higher to once unimagined levels, culminating in the 7/7 bombings, with the promise of worse to come.

Back then, the scenes in Grosvenor Square came less than year after the so-called Summer of Love, when love was all we needed, first being sure to wear some flowers in our hair. How soon that hopelessly naïve dream came burning to the ground, the only love we now witnessed on our TV screens being for the smell of napalm on a Vietnamese morning. The outrage at this war, together with a desire to change the old order and imbedded institutions, combined, and the talk of revolution was in the air. No more so than in Paris, where students forged an alliance with workers, who together, ripped up cobblestones and hurled their fury at the black riot shields and helmets of the state police, the hated CRS. CRS = SS was the slogan painted on the walls of the French capital that summer.

In Paris, they had the Sorbonne. In London we had Hornsea College of Art. In Paris the finest young minds in France manned the barricades. In London a bunch of art students staged a sit-in. In Paris, the intellectuals linked arms with students and workers and marched, their manifestos for change held aloft. In London, Mick Jagger joined the back of the crowd in front of the US Embassy and wrote ‘Street Fighting Man’. And he was right when he wrote– ‘in sleepy London town there’s just no place for a street fighting man’. Not so in Prague, where the brief spring under the leadership of liberating reformist Alexander Dubcek was by August, ruthlessly halted by Russian tanks while the world looked on powerless, western governments willing to extend no more than outrage and sympathy. Some causes, it appeared, were just not worth fighting for when faced with a powerful enemy. Popular protest too, it seems, was selective. I recall no riots in the streets surrounding the Soviet embassy in London that August.

Where then, did this great outpouring of discontent lead following that turbulent year? To a utopian idyll? To peace? To freedom? The answer is all around us. And what was the ‘freedom’ that tripped so easily and carelessly from the lips of countless 60’s rock revolutionaries? Maybe the answer does after all lie in the lyric of a song from the time:

‘Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask unto me,
How good, how good does it feel to be free?
And I answer them most mysteriously,
Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?’

As fellow blogger 'frankofyle' says, the Romney Marshes are unique, with a haunting atmosphere. Below is a selection of more photographs from my recent visit.

A soldier’s personal account of World War 2 from 12th December 1939 – 2nd March 1946

Part Nine – Dear old Blighty

HMS Walker

We were taken off this time by the destroyer ‘HMS Walker’. There must have been two or three hundred men packed into that ship in addition to the crew and most of them, it seemed, in the fo’c’sle with me! It was choppy and with all the hatches battened a hot sticky smell of oil pervaded the atmosphere and led to an epidemic of seasickness. I sat opposite Bill Stent and Dizzy Taylor and watched them competing with each other as to how green your face can get. Poor old Dizzy was terribly sick, but once again I survived without blotting my copybook.

Until this moment I had always thought that the Army were the champion tea-brewers, but the Navy were on good form that day – they ran a veritable shuttle service of tea from the galley to the fo’c’sle and though the time and place and circumstances were scarcely appropriate for entertaining, those matelots certainly did us proud with their hospitality and proved beyond all doubt, at least to me, that as perfect hosts the British Navy would take a lot of beating.

After some hours of steaming at top speed the vibration from the powerful engines quite suddenly ceased and we realised that we had reached our destination, wherever that may be. I calculated that we must have covered about 200 hundred miles. We received orders to get up on deck. We were in another fjord – Tromso fjord we discovered later and now 250 miles or more inside the Arctic Circle. The scene has always reminded me of a kind of fairy grotto in pantomime. The predominant colour was grey; grey scudding clouds flying swiftly over and all around greyish green razor-back peaks that had the sharp and flat appearance of being made of cardboard and the sea, grey too, broken and choppy and ridden by white horses. And right alongside us the tall grey wall of the troop transport – the erstwhile Cunard liner ‘Lancastria’.

The next operation was of a most precarious nature. A gangplank had been slung across from the bridge of the ‘Walker’ into the ‘Lancastria’. Owing to the rolling motion of both ships it was only fastened at our end because each time the ships rolled apart the free end of the plank pulled away from the ‘Lancastria’ and fell down between them. The drill was that we formed a single file right around the deck of the destroyer and up the companionway to the bridge. Each time the ships drew together the gangway was hauled up into position and as many men as possible ran across it until it fell seawards once more and then there was a delay until the ships drew near enough for the operation to be repeated.

How all the troops eventually managed to tranship without even as much as a ducking goodness only knows, but it came off. However, more than one item of webbing equipment went floating off down the fjord, became waterlogged and sank, becoming just another small item on the expense account of the war.

As soon as the ‘Lancastria’ had loaded up she put to sea. The idea was that each transport that became ready to sail got as far away from the Norwegian coast as possible to the protection of the British minefield, there to await for the remainder of the convoy and the escort and then for home. For two days we were alone, just cruising around in a tight circle until one by one we were joined by other transports and finally our destroyer escort and set a course for Blighty.

HMS Glorious and destroyer escort

A day or two later, a large German aircraft appeared on the scene and flew over us quite low. It was greeted by a few bursts of fire from our ships but did not retaliate and did not linger, circling and flying back the way it had come. We awaited the next move but within an hour we became enveloped in a thick white fog and it was necessary for marker buoys to be trailed over the stern to avoid collision. It was 24 hours later that we heard that the aircraft carrier ‘Glorious’, which had been guarding our retreat somewhere down below the horizon astern, had been sunk by the German heavy cruiser Scharnhorst, as well as an escorting destroyer and a tanker. Her scouting plane had found us too! Evidently the fog – that had enveloped us for an hour or two – had saved us from a similar fate.

The Scharnhorst

We arrived at Gourock on 12th June 1940 after having been on deck since dawn, straining our eyes for the first glimpse of the magical, misty islands of the Highlands that showed us that we were home once more after three long, hard and weary months of war. And as we stepped ashore we were greeted by Herbert Morrison’s new poster ‘Go To It’ pasted to a wall on the dockside. ‘Blimey’, shouted someone, ‘we’ve just bloody well come from it!!’

To be continued.

I like country churches; the walls, weathered and worn by years counted in centuries; the steep pitched roofs; the towers and spires; the draughty porches with piled dead leaves and flapping notices held safe by rusting pins; the heavy iron hung doors; the stillness inside, the pale sun’s light falling at angles across smooth stone flags and the dark grain of wooden pews; the chill smell of ages; the peace.

On the Romney Marshes each village has its 12th century church, separated only by a mile or two in this pocket-sized world, still standing out on the flat landscape as their builders had intended. Touring slowly from one to another in the bright March sunshine along quiet mid-afternoon lanes, was a journey to a place not of these times, the spirit of Betjeman in each shaded churchyard.

Dawn broke on the day that the forecasters of doom had predicted the mother of all storms. Unexpectedly I slept through its arrival, opening my eyes with the sun already risen, the great orb unseen and obscured by a thick blanket of slate grey cloud that was releasing gallons of water, sweeping in dark waves across the high view I have of the town and hammering the glass of south-facing windows. Drawing back the curtains I checked for the silhouettes of the two large trees at the foot of the garden that hover high and Damoclesian over the shingled roof of the shed I call a studio. Both were still standing. So far, so good. But I think I’ll stay out of the studio today. No point in tempting fate.

The gym was empty, save for two others; a couple, man and woman, who are regulars most weekdays. After exchanging a brief observation on fair weather members, we went about our exercise rituals in silence. Gyms, like carriages on commuter trains, are not noted as places of prolonged conversation. On the train, talking too much and too loud was openly frowned upon by those wishing to sleep, read or work on their laptops, although things have never been the same since the proliferation of mobile phones, which has led to the need for ‘quiet coaches’ on most inter-city services. With the odd exception, the gym has remained blissfully mobile free, especially among the regulars. This probably due as much to the difficulty in carrying out a conversation while pounding the treadmill as a regard for other users.

Then, off to the Post Office to claim a letter that wasn’t delivered due to the absence of a stamp. Driving through the lashing, horizontal rain, I parked as close to the door as possible and made a run for it. Handing over £1.40 in exchange for the A4-sized envelope I ran back to the car and tossed the anonymous rain splattered letter onto the passenger seat. It had better be worth the trouble. It wasn’t. Ripping open the envelope in the kitchen, I found the contents to be a letter from a company promoting homes in northern Cyprus. Now, before I read this, a home here was not high on my wish list. The brochure with photographs of white-walled villas draped in technicolour bougainvillea, the turquoise pool water rippling in the bright sunshine, did nothing to convince me on this storm-lashed day, especially after the time and money wasted on retrieving the damn thing thinking it may be something important.

After a brief respite, when the skies cleared and the sun shone, the storm returned with a vengeance. The light fell as if dusk, the wind rose once more and lightning split the sky on its earthbound journey while hailstones bounced from the windowsill. Another lightning strike, this time much closer, before a strip of blue appeared over the dark line of trees that top the hill half-a-mile distant, quickly expanding to a point mid-way up the window. The skitting, broken clouds turned from grey to white, the sun catching the diamond flash of the water droplets hanging in the soaked branches of the blackthorn along the fence, the tree’s small white flowers about to bloom.

Tomorrow, with perfect timing, I’m off to spend two days on the coast. Although remaining windy, the worst is predicted to be over today. Anyhow, some bracing walks along the shore will fill the lungs with salty air and put some colour in my cheeks. Who needs a villa in Cyprus? Not me when I can have the sea-pummelled shingle of Dungeness.

A soldier’s personal account of World War 2 from 12th December 1939 – 2nd March 1946

Part Eight – Harstad

L to R: Harold Lewington, Brian Keites, Synovve Haagen, Keith Loughlin, The Author

We were billeted in a large wooden hall with another Hygiene Section. We slept on the floor in our new sleeping bags, ate bully beef and hard biscuits three times a day, grew stubbly beards because we had no means of heating water and were not allowed to shave in cold – and didn’t spend too much time over washing in it! We did guards at night and found it strange standing in pale sunlight at mid-night.

We received instruction on not touching metal with our bare hands because of the danger of frostbite and got used to wearing six or seven pairs of socks inside our size 12 hog skin and hobnailed ski boots. The bombers came every day and the Scots and Irish Guards went into action in the hills with the green uniformed Norwegian infantrymen.

The billet was taken over as a garrison theatre for a divisional concert party of ‘local talent’ that was formed and we moved into what had once been a Temperance Hall. More convoys arrived and French Chasseurs Alpine, Foreign Legionnaires and Polish troops began to arrive and move up to the front at Narvik.

We were given the job of administering to the lines of communication troops and as the snow began to melt our chief problem became the attempt to maintain a safe water supply as the wells became choked with the water that poured down from the hills causing pollution from the primitive sanitation of the small fishing community who lived here. Whilst the snow remained we found time for fun in off-duty hours with toboggans and skis we acquired, honestly and otherwise, from the local population.

But the disappearance of the snows opened up the way to greater air activity by the Luftwaffe and the raids became heavier and more frequent as more airfields became usable for the Germans. At first we had only a handful of bren guns mounted on tripods as an air defence and the bombers came in at will, little more than roof high, to bomb and machine gun the streets and houses and in particular the ships and harbour installations. We never saw a British plane. We had no bases in Norway – though there was tale of an airstrip being hewn out of the hillside some few miles away, which the Germans attacked daily. No fighter aircraft had sufficient range to defend us from airfields in Britain and until, some weeks later, the aircraft carrier ‘Glorious’ arrived in the area, only the black swastika appeared in the skies above us.

When more warships arrived in the harbour their fire-power added to our feeling of security, but their presence had the effect of increasing the raids and the number of planes that made them as they turned their attentions from the harbour itself to the warships that anchored there. But I shall always believe that the cruiser “Effingham’, both from the heavy armament she carried and from her attraction as a target, saved us from a fate far worse than that which was actually ours. The discipline and coolness of those sailors as they fought off attack after attack from enemy dive-bombers will never be surpassed.

The attack from the air stepped up to an average of eighteen hours a day and we were losing sleep and becoming haggard and nervy from the continual noise, danger and lack of proper rest or food. Major Wybourne instituted a system whereby we were allowed to sleep in relays during lulls in the bombing. But in spite of all, spirits and morale remained high and but for one or two, less fortunate than the rest because they found it more difficult to hide the fear we each of us felt at times, nobody showed signs of cracking. What we endured was little enough compared with what followed at Dunkirk, Arnhem, Alamein, Imphal and Kohima, but we were among the first to experience modern air attack on such a scale. Under normal circumstances we would still have been regarded as very green recruits, less than six months removed from civilian life.

Narvik was captured by a combined British, French and Polish force and we became over-optimistic. It was but a prelude to complete collapse of the Allied force in southern Norway against overwhelming odds and soon we in the north were left, cut off except by sea. Narvik, after the demolition of the harbour works, had to be evacuated and on the first day of June 1940 we embarked once more in the little ships of the Navy and left Norway to five long years of German occupation.

To be continued

So Barnsley have lived the dream of the FA Cup and dumped holders Chelsea out of the competition. This after overcoming Liverpool. With the widening gulf between the super-rich Premiership and the rest, it’s heart-warming to see desire, grit, and teamwork overcome privilege and wealth.

And Manchester United out too. Pity it had to be Portsmouth that triumphed with a penalty. My goodwill only stretches so far. Maybe Barnsley can make it a hat trick by drawing Pompey in the semi-finals. Dream on lads, me and you both.

No country for old men: the land in West Texas that borders Mexico. Flat, dusty, sun-hammered earth only just short of desert: a hard place. Unforgiving. Del Rio, Sanderson, Marathon, Alpine and Marfa, small towns strung out along Highway 90, these days undergoing something of a renaissance. Refurbished railroad hotels for tourists, galleries moving into main street, opened by city slickers seeking a simple idyll on the very edge of the United States, their urbane ways eroding the very thing they came to find. But life here continues to teeter on the shifting slope of fate. It’s easy to fail in this country. Many do.

The Coen brothers Oscar winning movie ‘No Country For Old Men’ is set here in the late 20th century, in the bleak years of self-doubt and disillusion that seeped into the soul of the nation following the Vietnam War. Old ways are giving way to new. Life’s certainties are being swept aside by lawless anarchy. A different breed, no longer willing to take what life blows in on the wind, are out to get rich by brewing up a storm of their own making, on the wrong side of the fence, both sides of the border. Those that cross the violent path taken by these new outlaws are rubbed out with no more regard than it takes to toss a coin; unlucky to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time in a changing world they no longer know or understand. Sound familiar? Scarily so.

A soldier’s personal account of World War 2 from 12th December 1939 – 2nd March 1946

Part Seven – Baptism of fire

One day after boat drill we were paraded on the deck and issued with two additional kit-bags and the equipment with which to fill them. The first needed only a single item to fill it – a double-lined, kapok filled sleeping bag. For the second we received a large canvas, sheep-skin lined greatcoat, a sheep-skin helmet complete with ear flaps, a thick turtle-neck sweater and a leather jerkin. Then two pairs of extra boots, one rubber, the other pig-skin with ice-studs in the soles. These were all size 12, regardless of the size of your feet (Keith Priestly normally wore a size 6!) and twelve pairs of white woollen socks to fill up the vacant spaces. There was a pair of sheep-skin lined gloves, two pairs of woollen mittens and a pair of yellow-tinted goggles. We now only needed a sledge and a team of husky dogs to look like a polar expedition!

One day shortly after this, the ‘Warspite’ and her destroyer flotilla left us and steamed ahead and out of sight over the horizon and we were mustered at our boat stations and given the news that we were bound for Norway. This was exactly what we had long expected. But we were then told that it would, in all probability, be necessary for us to make a landing at, or near, Narvik, under enemy fire.

The following day one of the lads came tearing down to our sleeping berth in the corridor and breathlessly announced that he has sighted an ice-berg. Within seconds there was a full attendance at the ship’s rail, wide eyed with wonder at the magnitude and magnificence of this wonder of nature. It must have been an hour or so before it began to dawn on us that this must indeed be the biggest ice-berg ever known. It was the Norwegian coast-line.

Later that day we were informed that the ‘Warspite’ and her destroyers had, the previous day, attacked in Narvik fjord and that twenty-two German ships, destroyers and supply ships had been sunk and were blocking the entrance to the port and that we would now be compelled to land elsewhere, further north.

We saw the skipper’s orders brought aboard by dispatch from one of our escorting destroyers. She came right alongside whilst steaming at full speed and the dispatch was transported to our bridge by a line thrown from the warship. The sailors comprising her crew were quite unrecognisable as the smart and dapper boys in blue we had been accustomed to seeing at Portsmouth Navy Week in the days of peace. All balaclava helmets, sweaters, duffle coats and beards – a rough and tough band of privateers if ever there were – but with a rugged air of fearless resourcefulness and courage that inspired confidence in the hearts of the battle-dressed troops who waved and exchanged cheery greetings with them over the rail.

The day was yet to come when we would have occasion to bless those scruffy looking sea-dogs who, although the clothes they wear and the ships they sail in have changed beyond all recognition, are still made of the stuff of their forbears who sailed with Drake and won at Trafalgar.

The ‘Reina del Pacifico’ and one of the other transports left the main convoy and with the destroyers sailed into a fjord, a veritable fairy-land of lofty snow-covered razor-backed peaks soaring up into the cloudless blue sky and reflected down into clear and seemingly bottomless blue water. The beautiful magnificence was rudely shattered by the submarine explosions of depth charges. As the destroyer escort steamed at full speed in a wide circle a mile or two astern, we learned that a German U-boat that had attempted to follow us into the fjord had been sunk by the prompt attentions of the Royal Navy.

A little later we hove to and almost immediately were surrounded by scores of rowing boats which had put out from the shore where we could see clusters of small wooden cottages nestled in the snow at the foot of the mountains. We were most surprised at the number of Norwegians in the boats who called out to us in English and one young girl who could have been no more than nine or ten, stood in the bows of her boat and sang, in perfect English, ‘Little Sir Echo’ – a song popular at home but a few months earlier.

‘Little Sir Echo, how do you do?
Hello! (Hello!) Hello! (Hello!)
Little Sir Echo, we'll answer you
Hello! (Hello!) Hello! (Hello!)
Hello! (Hello!) Hello! (Hello!)
Won't you come over and play? (and play)
You're a nice little fellow
I know by your voice
But you're always so far away (away)’

As may well be imagined, her efforts were enthusiastically applauded by the boys lining the rails and the little craft was showered in coins. The sun was sinking below the peaks transforming them into a blazing extravaganza of colour, the brilliant reds and yellows and turquoises of the sky cascading down the snow-covered slopes and reflections like an artists palette shimmering in the bottomless water of the fjord.

Overawed by such breathtaking beauty, Harold Lewington and I leaned spellbound on the port rail quite oblivious to the roar of approaching aircraft, until a sound which I will always remember as the sound of a great quantity of dried peas being poured onto the steel boat-deck above, became the prelude to a pandemonium of noise as orders were shouted and the anti-aircraft guns of the destroyers and our own troop transport roared into action. And then we saw the first Stuka dive-bomber climbing away from us, the rear-gunner pumping his tracer bullets at us over the tail of the machine. Harold and I flattened ourselves on the deck as the crash of splintering glass was added to the general melee just above our heads.

Everything was confusion. We afterwards learned that the first plane had dropped a bomb that had fallen six yards from the starboard bow and damaged some plates. These were the days before Tannoy radio systems in troopships and the attack had taken everyone by surprise, the dive-bomber having dropped out of the sunset over the mountain peaks.

The canteen had been open down below and the shock of the exploding bomb had thrown the queue off their feet and someone had shouted ‘Torpedo’, causing a stampede towards the companionways as the lads tried to get up on deck as required to do by standing orders in the event of torpedo or surface attack. But the men on deck, knowing the true state of affairs, were also obeying standing orders, which clearly stated that in the event of air attack all personnel not on duty should make their way below. And so the situation between decks resembled a tube station during rush hour and if one of the German bombs had found its mark then the casualties would have been horrific.

The raid did not last long. There were about six bombers in all and they each attacked singly, dropping a bomb at the end of the dive and raking the decks with machine-gun fire as they climbed away. There was some damage to life boats and deck installations but no casualties and no planes were shot down. But this was our baptism of fire and to us had been a major battle. There was no panic, no hysterics. Plenty of white faces and sheepish grins and rather forced wisecracks, but in that last few minutes we had become soldiers – not just parade ground soldiers any more, but battle-inoculated ‘veterans’ – some of the first British troops of the war to come under enemy fire. My own feelings are difficult to remember now. I was trembling a little I know and probably very pale, my reactions a mixture of fear and bravado – I rather expect almost identical to the reactions of every other man on board.

It was decided that disembarkation should commence immediately and we were mustered in units, in full equipment and each man was issued with a large wooden box containing iron rations to take ashore. The destroyers started a shuttle service from ship to shore and as we were waiting our turn we saw the enemy planes had reappeared and were attacking the troop-laden warships.

It was rather apprehensively that we stepped aboard our ‘ferry-boat’ – ‘HMS Electra’ (later sunk in the Java Seas battle against superior Japanese forces). We were not attacked, but the destroyer steaming on our port side received the attentions of the Junkers 88 bombers that had now joined the party. I shall never forget the coolness displayed by the Captain of that destroyer, standing on his bridge watching the bombers through his binoculars as they pressed home their attack, waiting until the bombs had been released and then, judging the direction of their descent, giving the order that sent the ship zig-zagging so that the bomb missed its mark.

Nor shall I ever forget the big, tough, bearded bluejacket perched above us with his ‘Chicago –piano’, steel helmet nonchalantly perched on the back of his head. As a bomber flew low above us towards the gallant little ship on our starboard beam, he trained his sights upon it, his mouth moving in a stream of oaths, his words lost in the din as he pumped a hail of lead at the large black cross painted on the fuselage. Pity he didn’t bring that bomber down – his elation would have been a joy to behold!

We steamed for a mile or two and rounding a bend in the fjord, we came upon the small wooden town of Harstad. The bombers had been here too. The Norwegian inhabitants were beginning to board up the windows and sweep the glass from the snow covered pavements.

To be continued

While watching ‘There Will Be Blood’, it occurred to me that despite the film's running time, the screenplay must have been on the thin side. For the first eleven minutes or so not a word was uttered and from then on, nobody in the tale, save for a charlatan preacher, could be accused of verbosity. A contrast then, last night at The Old Vic.

From the moment the curtain rose on David Mamet’s play ‘Speed-The-Plow’ we, the audience, were treated to a tidal wave of dialogue that would have cast a long shadow over Paul Thomas Anderson’s script and all delivered in just about half the time. What’s more, the torrent of words came from the mouths of just three actors who were the cast. And what a performance they gave.

Kevin Spacey, Jeff Goldblum and Laura Michelle Kelly were outstanding, their energy breathtaking. The play begins with movie executive Charlie Fox (Spacey) literally falling through the office door of old buddy (and newly promoted) Bobby Gould (Goldblum) with news of a sure-fire hit delivered to him personally, at home, by its writer. The opening verges on slapstick as the two exchange rapid-fire dialogue, fantasising on the riches that the prison-based buddy movie will bring, winding each other ever higher on pure adrenalin.

But Charlie’s dream of fortune and a name next to Bobby’s over the title are brought crashing back to earth when the temporary secretary (Kelly), lured to Gould’s home as a bet that same evening, convinces him to drop the buddy movie, and press the green button on an adaptation of an apocalyptic novel about the destruction of mankind. What then takes place is a battle of art versus money. Which one wins? That would be telling. I recommend you go see for yourself.

There will be blood. And there was. Some. And a great deal of acting. Not least from Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis. He dominated the film with a dark tour de force that the Academy would have ignored at their peril. For in character, Daniel would have surely hunted them down and cut their throats in the dead of a black night.

For black is the overriding colour here. Black oil, black hair, black looks, black thoughts, black deeds, and when it flowed at the end of the movie, black blood.

Unlike Charles Foster Kane in the Orson Wells’ film to which ‘There Will Be Blood’ has been compared, Daniel Plainview has no true feelings of humanity towards his fellow men. I can’t include women, for none seem to have featured long in his life. At least Kane started out with his heart in place. You doubt Plainview has one. He didn’t even have a ‘Rosebud’, an inanimate object that symbolised a memory of his only source of fleeting happiness. Everything Plainview does is driven by a compulsion to get what he wants, whatever it takes, whomever it destroys. It’s this destruction of others and not wealth, that is his one warped version of fulfilment.

Several couples left the cinema before the end of this long film. They apparently found the pace too much. And that pace is slow. Unlike Citizen Kane, that had passages of frantic activity and dialogue often delivered at machine-gun speed depicting Kane’s unstoppable energy, the speed here rarely rises above that of Plainview’s troubled gait, the result of a mining accident early on. Lines of dialogue are delivered in a similar manner. Plainview is a man who is prepared to wait to get what he wants and you’re made to wait right along there with him.

He ends his days surrounded by the luxury of his vast wealth; alone aside from the solitary servant and living like a pig. Stepping over the piles of uneaten popcorn and discarded drink's cartons that littered the carpet of the auditorium as I left, I could only suppose that some of those that stayed to the end had been moved to take a little of Plainview’s character to heart. Except, he had an excuse. He didn’t have one.