Of such then, were the Volunteers. Soon all distinctions were blurred and forgotten as we moved to Hungerford in Berkshire to increase our vehicle training. No military vehicles were available to us so we had to make do with a variety of old buses commandeered from many sources.
The one I was allowed to drive was bright orange with the name Tommy Tappin of Wallingford on the sides, and the passenger seats were all stripped out to convert it into a goods carrying and training bus and after a few weeks of practice driving around the narrow roads and estates near Kintbury, it bore many scars down It's sides from the walls and gateposts that the novice drivers encountered.
The little Morris dual-control training vehicle we had brought from Harborne was used mainly as a company runabout and one of the regular drivers was a red haired recruit named Whitney from Worcester, and his favourite trick when he carried a novice driver was to say "It's all yours," when entering a series of twisting country lanes. He would then let go of the steering wheel on his side of the cab, and with his arms folded would jam his feet under his clutch and brake pedals, preventing the duplicate set of pedals on the learner's side from being used, at the same time pressing the accelerator flat to the floor. This left the unfortunate and terrified novice with only a steering wheel to control a careering vehicle round sweeping bends at high speed.
And so our training continued and our confidence and skill grew with the constant practice until the great day dawned... and our first issue of genuine Army trucks were delivered. Most of these new trucks were 30cwt Bedfords, very light and skittish compared with the lumbering buses we had got used to, and at first difficult to handle especially with their powerful vacuum-assisted brakes and many a skid was performed before we became accustomed to the change. The sorry-looking commandeered buses were now abandoned and presumably returned to their owners, minus the seats and covered in dents and scarred paintwork. Farewell then, 'Tommy Tappin of Wallingford.'
Rumour grew and spread, embroidered with each telling, as to where we were going next, Leave was due for all of us, and home we went, almost oblivious to the fact that this was embarkation leave, and for a brief while we forgot the Army and reverted for a few days to the same care-free life that we had enjoyed in those earlier Spring and Summer months.
Leave over, we returned to Hungerford to make preparations to join the British Expeditionary Force in France, and soon we were driving in convoy to Southampton where we watched as our trucks were dangled by crane high above our heads and lowered on to the ship. We went aboard and settled down for a night's crossing to Le Havre. Knowing my weakness as a sailor I chose to stay on deck and dozed as best I could, preferring the open air to the cigarette smoke-laden fug below.
By early morning we were moving slowly into the harbour entrance, and I stood at the ship's rail, with a silent personal congratulation that I had survived a Channel crossing without being sick. I stood a while and looked at the gently heaving green swell out beyond the harbour.
Thirty seconds of watching the mesmeric movement of the oily swell was sufficient, although now within calm waters, I leaned over the rail and gave my all to the sea!
Thus in disgrace I came to France and went to war.
It was now bitter winter. We moved into the bleak concrete warehouses on the Le Havre quayside and chose one of the lesser draught-free corners to make our bed on the ice-chilled floor for the next night. Our lorries were lowered on to the quay, and as they had had the petrol drained out of them for the journey, each of them had to be pushed to the nearest petrol point.
One of our leaders of men, carrying his leather covered rattan cane under his arm, shouted at me in encouragement: "Push the bloody thing, you idiot. Don't stand there like a cretin!" My education had been neglected to the point that I didn't know what a 'cretin' was and by the time I looked it up a year or two later, it was too late to protest. Besides, I thought, he too was standing there not pushing.
That night, the Le Havre dockside warehouse was deathly cold. The massive doors were permanently open and the wind blew through. By good fortune, we had taken a quilted engine cover from our lorry, and by lying in a close group of four on the cover and using our overcoats and each man's Single blanket over us. We shivered in fitful sleep, until the chill got through to our bones and we rose to empty our bursting bladders, and walked about to keep warm. Our leader of men was nowhere to be seen, but we felt sure he was somewhere, suffering as we were.
Most of our officers had been recruited from the sons of Birmingham industrialists and had been commissioned immediately upon enlistment. Their quality varied, our major came from the Fray family and in his way was a reasonable leader given that he was as inexperienced as the rest of us and also given to stupid foibles as when we had to 'port arms for inspection' he would walk along the line of waiting soldiers with a tiny pearl-handled penknife in his hand. Pausing here and there to look at an otherwise immaculate rifle he would seek out a minute particle of grease with the point of the knife from a crevice on the barrel cover and scrape it painfully on to the back of his victim's hand saying, "Filthy! Take it away and clean it, and bring it back spotless"
A Lieutenant Jones was a thin giggling youth who had apparently only joined because they had promised him he could wear a revolver. This he would take out a dozen times a day, to twirl, cowboy fashion, around his finger. The stiff canvas Army holster prevented any exotic quick draws, to his annoyance and we always watched his antics assiduously in the hope that one-day he would at the very least shoot himself in the foot.
Other officers came and went and made little mark, but one, Captain Broderick, given to dashing about in a Humber staff car, would remain dear to our memories following one incident. By now, our lorries were each carrying a full 3-ton load of ammunition of one sort or another. Fred Berwick and Ralph Draper were travelling in convoy ahead of our 6-wheeled Karrier in their Albion lorry laden with hand grenades, when the camouflage netting stored behind the cab fell on to the red-hot exhaust pipe and caught fire. We saw them stop and we stopped too, at the regulation 100 yards gap, mandatory for obvious reasons for lorries carrying explosives. We saw Fred jump out of his cab holding a small brass pyrene fire extinguisher - all that was fitted on our lorries - and start to pump it away at the fire. Norman and I took our extinguisher and ran to help. The fire was going well by the time we arrived and the most fascinating sight was the plume of flame about 10 inches high that was burning from the vent hole in the large petrol cap on top of the 50 gallon tank located behind the cab. This was petrol vapour and although the first jet from my pyrene extinguisher put it out it immediately lit again. A second squirt had the same effect and I gave it up as a lost cause.
At this point, Captain Broderick turned up in his Humber, with a flourish, He looked out of the car window at the blaze, "Catch up with the convoy when you've put it out", he called, And disappeared in a cloud of dust. He had earned his entry in our book of 'classic remarks of our war'. The burning petrol jet had an almost hypnotic effect on me. I knew that it was lethal and thought that a rabbit too must have a premonition of death when fixed by the snake and quite suddenly and weirdly inside me was a second self screaming at me to run as far as I could and lie down as flat as I could.
A more rational self held me there and we turned our attention to the burning net and the blazing canvas cover over the load of grenades. The net was pulled away easily but the cover was strongly laced with ropes in zigzag fashion on hooks. All down the sides of the lorry. For the first time our Army issue jack knives. With the tin opener, spike and single blade and black diamond pattern composition sides, came in useful. By good fortune we had kept them sharp, and the blazing cover was cut away while Fred stood in the back of the lorry picking burning pieces of canvas from between the boxes of grenades. We paused, and breathed again. A polite "Messieurs" made us turn. A small grey-haired French lady stood quietly watching, holding a bucket of water in each hand.
After disembarking earlier at Le Havre, we had moved inland to Montevillier, a small town in Brittany. The local people seemed to regard us with a degree of suspicion and aloofness but this was not the first time that a war had passed their way, so we carried on with our daily routines and as time went on and they realised that we were not there for rape and pillage, relationships gradually improved. Fred, Norman and myself were billeted with about thirty others in a wine merchants loft. A long well lit upstairs room above the barrel storage area. The shelves on the walls were laden with jars and bottles labelled as Kirsch, Cointreau, Benedictine and dozens more exotic liqueurs. To our, then simple tastes, it was a closed world and during our time there, not one was ever touched.
A hard winter had now set in and ice and snow covered the pavements and streets and our prime concern was to keep warm it is strange how previously simple matters of everyday life assume such disproportionate levels when considered in terms of group usage and participation. Our toilet facilities in Montevillier [Editors note: I believe this must be a place called Montville as Montevilliers can't be found on any maps] made available for the use of our Company was the single continental-style cubicle at the local station some 250 snow-covered yards away. It was too cold to stand for long in a queue and look-outs were posted at a convenient window in our loft to give a report of the hour by hour situation for the benefit of those who needed to go braving the weather rather than remain with the constipated majority. When one got inside the cubicle, with it's two foot-shaped concrete islands barely standing proud of a sea of excrement, the difficulty, from the Anglo-Saxon experience, was to squat and aim where the hole was supposed to be, at the same time avoiding ones trouser legs drooping on to the foul floor. Paper too was at a premium and due to the severe frost no flushing water was available. Instead, to maintain a reasonable level of usefulness, someone had provided a long pole, which leant in a corner. This was intended to poke the coagulant mass a little further down the hole and every time I pumped the pole up and down, a mental image flitted across my mind of a slow, obscene, toothpaste-like extrusion emerging at the other end of a long pipe into the waters of the nearby estuary.
Illustration by 'JAQ'
It was my twentieth birthday and we were in the early stages of what came to be called 'the phoney war' period of the BEF campaign. There was nothing 'phoney' about our little bit of the war. My birthday was celebrated with all the others in the Montevillier wine-loft wrapped in our blankets in lines along the floor, laid out with severe influenza, like so many brown-wrapped mummies.
The medical officer paid a cursory visit and doled out Aspirin but a more welcome visitor was the wine loft owner who appeared twice a day carrying a large bucket of hot sugared red wine. He would walk along the rows, ladling the wine generously into our enamel mugs. This soporific drink, coupled with the aspirin gave us all a brief unconsciousness from the misery of the cold and our surroundings. Still in the 'phoney war', we prepared to move across France to the Pas de Calais nearer to the likeliest area to be attacked by the German Army. The impregnable Maginot Line finished short of the Belgian border, as it was thought that it would be a war fought to rules and Belgium was neutral. So tucked safely behind the Maginot line we settled in the small village of Plouvain a few miles from Arras. Plouvain had barely recovered from the ravages of the' 14 - 18 war; the battlefield evidence lingered around the single small street that formed the village and in the very early morning springtime mists. The eerie ghostly circles of tens of thousands of old shell holes appeared across the level ploughed field which stretched to the skyline as the softer patches of earth gave up more readily, their moisture to the air above.
We settled down to an orderly programme of vehicle maintenance drills and any other occupation that our leaders could devise to prevent boredom. Older members of our Company would disappear to Arras from time to time and return silently smug. I think they knew that we younger soldiers were still virginal and they were hesitant to be the first to initiate us into the mysteries of the sexual act.
Curiosity grew in our minds as snippets of their exploits emerged. We were allowed one day a fortnight off for recreation and up to now we usually visited the local Cafe des Pecheurs for a mid-day beer and stayed in Plouvain for the rest of the day, as we still needed to eat, and the Army food was free. One Saturday however, the three of us decided that our French vocabulary and available funds were sufficient to support visit to Arras.
We stood and drooled at the window of our first real patisserie and decided we'd call back later, if funds allowed. "Tell me where is fancy bred". Quoted Fred giving me the feed line to translate into French.
"Ou est le patisserie". I quoted back from the book of schoolboy howlers. Having got that chestnut off our minds, we moved on. We continued an aimless stroll through the streets of Arras savouring the foreignness... the foreignness of the sights, sounds and the smells and particularly the pungent smell the French cigarettes, which filled the cinema where we sat that Saturday afternoon, enthralled at Marlene Dietrich asking in French what the boys in the back room would have.
Later, with mustered courage, we set out like pilgrims seeking the Holy Grail, to find our first brothel, too shy to speak to anyone. French civilian or uniformed English, we walked on until despair gave Norman the determination to ask the way. To our complete consternation he swaggered up to red-capped British Military Policeman, "Which way to the nearest Brothel mate?" he asked, affecting nonchalance. We waited for the denunciation from the corporal. None came, only the equally nonchalant reply and a wave of the hand to the left, "Just keep following the crowd", he advised. So follow the crowd we did. The brothel had a plain and nondescript frontage, which belied the Edwardian Grandeur of the interior. The red plush-lined walls with massive gilt framed mirrors, lined a salon some 30 feet long by 20 feet wide. Upholstered bench seats ran round all the walls and every seat was filled by soldiers of different nationalities. The centre of the salon too, was quite packed with groups of eager soldiers surrounding individual girls of the establishment. At the centre of one of the groups was an attractive brunette dressed in brief pants and an undersized bra standing with her legs slightly parted hands on hips, talking over the heads of the surrounding crowd to an elderly woman, perhaps the Madame, who was on some stairs about ten feet away. But the bizarre sight that held the three of us spellbound with disbelief was that of the five pairs of eager exploratory male hands that were carrying out an intimate inspection of the brunette's body while she carried on with her conversation completely unperturbed.
We bought some beers at the bar and sat at a table. One long line of silent, non-drinking soldiers took our attention and as we watched, a pretty girl in a skimpy blue and white check outfit appeared at the foot of a flight of stairs. A ripple of anticipation went along the silent waiting line. The girl walked across to the bar where the elderly barmaid handed her a small clean towel, neatly folded, on which was placed a packet containing a condom. The girl turned to the head of the waiting line with a brief nod and led the way. Followed by the next customer, up the stairs. Everyone shuffled up a place and continued their wait, as the gap created at the other end of the line was quickly filled. Our reverie was broken by a call in heavily French accented English: "Exhibition starting in next room in five minutes! We joined the scramble. The next room was a fair size, with simple wooden tiered seats along one wall, and a large bed on the opposite side. We waited while the organiser, a thin sallow faced man came round to collect the money and after deciding that our promised return to the patisserie would have to be made another day. We paid up and the 'exhibition' commenced.
Although we were twenty-year olds, we were all still very innocent. Our studies and spare time sporting recreations had left little time for association with girls, apart from the occasional brief flirtation at somebody's birthday party or other, thus, physically and mentally unprepared, we sat on the rough wooden seats and waited for the exhibition to begin, without the slightest idea of what to expect. Within less than a minute, all our Sir Galahad preconceptions of the purity of womanhood and the politeness' we had had drummed into us over the years.... 'Stand up when a lady enters the room'; . . . 'raise your hat when you meet a lady in the street' ... 'always offer a lady your seat'... were swept away forever, as a small, attractive and completely nude blonde girl walked into the room. Followed by a brunette of more ample but equally nude proportions. We sat stunned, as the brunette strapped on an enormous dildo and with the blonde commenced a series of cameos of the sexual act, accompanied by an off-stage commentary in English. "How a soldier would do it against a lamp post", said the Voice, as the two went at their vertical exercise vigorously against a post. "Then an officer passes by", the voice went on and the brunette continued to pump away at the little blonde, at the same time saluting an imaginary officer.
The demonstration then moved to the bed, where every possible permutation of the sexual act was performed and where the show almost came to a riotous end, as a more intrepid spectator crept up behind the brunette who was now on top of the blonde and inserted an exploratory finger into the crevice covered by the dildo. With an almighty shriek, the brunette leapt into the air and turned to scream what we took to be French obscenities at the culprit.
Subdued, he went back to his seat and the act continued. "And now to end the show." said the voice, "this is an old man in the street who asks a young girl he meets to oblige him with her hand!" A situation, we thought, unlikely to get a response in a Birmingham street. The blonde proceeded to masturbate the dildo furiously, pointing it at the first row, and as the brunette simulated a male climax and ejaculation the blonde, with a broad grin, squeezed the rubber testicles beneath the dildo and sprayed the spellbound spectators with a jet of white fluid, causing panic as everyone scrambled away to avoid the mess. We emerged into the twilight of the Arras Street. Silent, embarrassed and unable to look each other in the eye. I think we felt both sorry and ashamed. Was this then, the Fall of Man? Our innocence had evaporated forever.
