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The village of Plouvain was a single rough road that struck off at right angles from a more major road and ended after about half a mile at a lake surrounded by trees. When we first arrived we three were billeted in a small and filthy tin-roofed lean-to at the back of the Maire's house, it had an earth floor, and a low roof that made it difficult to stand upright, and the conditions made it impossible to keep our belongings clean. Simple souls that we were, we accepted the billet as one of the vagaries of war and made no protest. No doubt our leaders were enduring similar conditions, so who were we to complain?

M. Bruneau, a cheerful red-faced one-eyed farmer who lived opposite our billet thought otherwise. He reproached the Maire for allowing such a hovel to be used for accommodation and turned his criticism on to the Army to such effect, that in no time, we, and two others were installed comfortably in his spare front room. The room, after our shed, was paradise. It had a tiled floor, a large freestanding stove with a stovepipe that travelled across the room for about a yard, giving out extra heat before disappearing up a chimney. The window, which looked on to the street, was covered at night by a wooden roll-down shutter operated by a winding handle inside the room so we were able to disobey all the times of 'Lights Out' undetected.

The part of the house used by M. Bruneau, his wife and two small children were separated from our room by a corridor. While his invalid father-in-law was bedridden in a room next to ours. As we became firmly acquainted and supplied M. Bruneau from time to time with a 'soupçon' of petrol for his ancient little Citroen and helped to put father-in-law back into bed when he fell out. A great friendship grew between us. His command of English was limited to the two words "Come on" as, after knocking politely on our door, he would poke his cheerful face around and call us to a surprise supper of roast cockerel with a massive china bowl of chips in the centre of the table. Bowls of coffee would follow, laced liberally, but illegally as far as we 'other ranks' were concerned, with cognac poured straight from the beak of a decorative porcelain cockerel stopper on a large bottle.

Such times were not to last. To the distress and dismay of the Bruneau family, our farmer friend, despite his one eye, was called up as a reservist in the French Army, and his wife was left to look after the two children and father-in-law, and also run the dairy farm with the sole assistance of a very old labourer. We helped out as best we could from time to time, by operating the turnip chopping machine to feed the cows and my country origins gave me an opportunity to show off my ability to milk a cow, much to Madame Bruneau's surprise.

Plouvain had about 50 houses, one estaminet (pub) and the Café des Pecheurs run by the family Boisleux. Papa B. invariably, served behind the bar each evening, Massive and intimidating, his thick forearms sticking out of his rolled-up shirtsleeves. Mama sometimes helped, but the joy of our evenings was Eglantine. Their smiling, attractive, brunette of a daughter.

Eglantine was the perpetual focus of dozens of pairs of moonstruck eyes as she wandered amongst us, clearing the tables of glasses. Always ready to let us practice our schoolboy French and joke with everyone. She somehow managed to maintain an aloofness that brooked of no over familiarity. This, I think was part of her charm to us, since despite our initiation in the Arras brothel, we still cherished the illusion of female purity and she, it seemed, was it's epitome.

Papa was on constant watch as she moved through the crowd. If he felt that too serious an overture was being made to his daughter he would catch our eye, give a grin and break into song: "Après le guerre finis, soldat Anglais parties ...," and we, hammering the hint home, in chorus completed the song: "Mademoiselle in the family way,. . Après le guerre finis" Fred and I made particular friends with the family Boisleux and one Saturday when we had stayed in the village on our day off a parcel arrived from my Mother. Her parcels were a perpetual delight to receive and open and packed in a biscuit tin, neatly sewn into a thin canvas cover.

This particular parcel, apart from the usual bars of chocolate and homemade potato bread, (a fondness acquired in my days in Ireland), there was a large tin of pineapple chunks which must have meant a considerable sacrifice at home. It was teatime and feeling generous, we thought that we would go to the cafe and share our good fortune with Eglantine and her Mother. We handed the tin to Eglantine. She smiled and with raised surprised eyebrows said, "Pour nous?" Now "Pour nous", in our book, meant "for us" and "us" meant Fred me. Eglantine and her Mother, but Eglantine spoke a different French to our schoolbooks and "us" meant them the family Boisleux and she put our precious tin of pineapple in the kitchen cupboard and smilingly poured us a free cup of coffee in exchange for our gift. Our French was of the simpler kind and I tried to improve by reading the available newspapers and as I was allowed the privilege of drinking my Sunday morning coffee in the cafe kitchen by the stove. I sat trying to read Paris Soir while Eglantine busied herself with cooking. A half-page cartoon intrigued me; it was of a French soldier on his hands and knees in a field gathering some leaves. An onlooker leaning on the gate asked: "Camouflage?" "Non", replied the soldier; "Pis-en-lit." The point was lost on me. I called to Eglantine and asked what pis-en-lit was. She blushed and seemed embarrassed. Then raised the lid of a saucepan that was on the stove, lifted up a forkful of green stuff. "Voila, pis-en-lit" she said. They were dandelion leaves. I wondered for a long time about the blushing response to my question and it was only much later that I recalled my country days when we picked dandelions for homemade wine and the childhood chant was: "Dandelion, piss-the-bed! "

The French had a much more sanguine approach to the basic bodily functions than we had, demonstrated each morning as we walked the length of the village to our mess for breakfast when one of the sights guaranteed to put us off our food was an old man who regularly emptied his night chamber from his doorstep as we passed. An Anglophobe, we thought, as we dodged the splashes. The male French habit of relieving oneself against a wall, wherever and whenever the fancy took them, was a custom we found hard to adopt, although when driving long distances the need often became urgent, so we had to resort to the shy expedient of getting into the back of our lorry, lifting the floorboard and discharging our bursting bladder on to the road, even then self-consciously feeling that all the eyes of passers-by were on the steaming stream emerging from beneath the lorry.

Such was the minutiae of life in Plouvain during what was now truly, 'the phoney war'. Life had settled into a routine of drills, parades, vehicle maintenance and little else. We got rid of our surplus energy by cross-country running: 'country' being the wide-open expanses of tilled farmland that had been the dreadful battlefields of the Great War.

Here and there as we ran, were the sorrowful war cemeteries, with their rows of white markers stretching into an eternity across the well-kept grass. Occasionally we paused to rest and once as we sat by a cemetery, we gave a polite "Bon jour" to a little Frenchman wearing a black beret and wheeling his bicycle through the entrance. "No need to 'bon jour' me mates", he said with a friendly grin at our surprised looks. " I'm as English as you are but I decided to stop here and look after this lot when the War ended. A lot of friends of mine there too." In more sombre mood, we went on with our exercise.

The year had moved into late spring. The miseries of the winter now seemed far behind us and life in Plouvain had little relevance to a war. We felt that a stalemate had been reached between the opposing armies. Infrequent report of small attacks and skirmishes reached us in the manner of rumours and besides; there was the impregnable Maginot line between us and the enemy. "Ils ne passeront pas!" read the much envied shoulder flashes of the French soldiers who manned the line. "They shall not pass" ....... Instead, the Germans went round the back. While we had merely waited, the Germans had prepared. The eight months from the start of the war had been a time of intense rebuilding of massive tank divisions by Germany, after conquering Poland. The BEF did not have a single tank in France. Whispers of German activity grew, and quite suddenly, early in May, we were ordered to sleep fully dressed throughout each nigh, with our kit loaded on our lorries and petrol tanks full. This 'standby' only lasted twenty-four hours. By daylight on the third morning we were ordered to board our vehicles and move off in convoy, towards Arras and Lille and then eastwards toward the Belgian border. Until that moment, we had never realised that we had made so many friends in that tiny village of Plouvain, but at every door and gate were waving men with their call of "Bon chance" and weeping women, no doubt apprehensive of the second war that would soon sweep into their lives. As we moved slowly past the Café des Pecheurs, Mama, Papa and Eglantine were waving farewell, we waved back and saw that Eglantine was in tears. I remember wondering if our pineapple chunks were still in their cupboard.