Traffic movement to the west became a nightmare. Refugees fleeing from the advancing German army were blocking all the roads and when their meagre supply of petrol ran out, the car was abandoned where it stood creating worse confusion. We were inching our way at only a few miles a day and we found that the problem of obtaining daily rations was with us once more. The local water supplies were suspect and as we did not want to risk dysentery to add to our problems we went for long intervals without a drink of any sort, until on the one day we paused for a mid day break in a village where one stalwart old lady of over seventy had remained steadfastly in her cottage refusing to flee with the rest. As we sat by her front gate she came up the path with a large jug. "Would you like a drink of milk?" she asked in English. She filled our mugs and we drank deeply. It was thin skimmed buttermilk, turning slightly sour but we swallowed what we could stomach and quietly tipped most of the unpalatable stuff into the hedge. Iron rations were our standby; tinned corned beef and very hard biscuits in packets of five. We were young and our teeth were good.

Although no one knew what was going on there was a general withdrawal of troops all along the front, in the retreat we were now carrying civilian passengers against orders but the plight of many of their wounded moved us to help. They travelled with us for a few miles and then asked to be dropped off near some recognisable village and we saw them no more.

When we approached Tournai we were shocked at last to the consequences of war as it was to become to so many cities later on. Shattered buildings with piled rubble and rescue workers trying to dig out the dead were on every side as we drove slowly through the dust-laden town.

A lot of the refugees had turned southwards away from the coast and the roads were much more open. Our daily mileage improved and we now split up once again into sub-sections of five vehicles. This always suited us, as we were virtually free-lance drivers with no NCO's to bother us except an occasional one who scrounged a lift for one reason or another.

We were given our maps and a rendezvous point some thirty miles away for the next day, and set off. The journey went without incident and after a trouble-free sleep and a bread and jam breakfast, we duly arrived at our map reference and awaited further Orders. For an hour or so we sat in the hot sun. A Humber staff car was creating a cloud of dust further up the road and in moments with his customary flourish, Captain Broderick pulled up. Out he got, with brown boots and Sam Browne gleaming. He raised his Army-issue binoculars to his eyes and peered back the way he had come. "Well chaps," he confided, "German tanks should just about be appearing over those fields in a few minutes". He paused. "So I suppose, its every man for himself!" he concluded, getting into the Humber engaging gear and accelerating away at high speed in a cloud of dust. He had just coined another "classic remark of the war" for our collection.

We looked at each other and then at the horizon. No German tanks were in sight and we wondered if it was just Captain Broderick's theatrical style to disappear with a remark like that.

Prudence suggested that we gave his style the benefit of the doubt so we climbed aboard our own vehicles and followed him down the road. He had a head start and we never ever saw him again although we heard later reports that he had commandeered small motorboat at pistol point and made his way back to England. By such we were led.

We headed northwards now towards the coast. The weather was fine and warm with clear skies and as we drove along a typical French road, absolutely straight for several miles and lined with poplars, we saw high in the air a single piece of paper floating earthwards with the erratic dipping and swooping of a falling leaf. It was going to fall into a field about 50 yards from the road and Norman pulled UP to let me run across and collect the curiosity. I brought it back for all to read. It was a map of the area, showing with the usual big black arrows, the positions of surrounding German forces and our predicament, trapped in an encircling pocket of German armour. The small sheet, obviously carried by a freak wind from a leaflet raid elsewhere, carried a message in English and French: "Soldiers of the Allied Armies, lay down your arms. Your position is hopeless. If YOU surrender now, you will be well treated."

"You'd better give me that.," said a voice from behind me "It's an offence to be in possession of enemy propaganda." I had forgotten that we had been carrying a Lance Corporal Onions as a passenger and he was now throwing his weight about and he took the leaflet from me. I heard he sold it later in a pub in Kendal for five pounds.

We were uncertain how to take the news in the leaflet. Certainly something was happening on the northern horizon where a large plume of black smoke grew into the sky from what we found later to be from the oil storage tanks at Dunkirk docks. The smoke was almost like a beacon as we continued towards the coast. With about fifteen miles to go the traffic got heavier and moved very slowly along a raised road above flooded fields. A smartly dressed Brigadier, with the red hatband of a staff officer, and his cane tucked under his arm was walking down the road towards us and waved us to a stop. He spoke quietly and politely, with a friendly manner. This, to us, was a new sort of officer, and we regarded him with some respect: "Get your lorries off the road as soon as you can," he said. "Pull off into a farmyard where they won't cause an obstruction, and carry on to the coast on foot." "Take as much food with you as possible." he added, and waved us on. We realised now that this was a serious war. We had to walk!

After driving on for a mile or so, we found an entrance to a small farm and the five lorries pulled in. The yard was already crowded with some abandoned vehicles that had belonged to a unit of Royal Engineers and we explored the contents curiously. We had always held our equipment sacrosanct, particularly our rifles, under penalty of court martial. We were amazed at the amount of stuff that the RE's had left lying around. Many rifles in good order and loaded, were piled in the trucks, as was a great quantity of guncotton, detonators and electrical generators. I had always regarded the Short Lee Enfield rifle a clumsy weapon to handle with it's thick wooden casing surrounding the barrel so I set about modifying one of the discarded RE rifles to a more sporting profile by cutting away all the heavy wood, leaving only a carved hand grip for the left hand. This was now a much easier rifle to handle and I tested it on some distant chimneys, to my great satisfaction and the alarm of the others. The square white blocks of explosive intrigued us. In a distant field was a tree, which we thought, would be suitable to test the effect of a few blocks. Detonators were plentiful but a length of wire to keep us at a safe distance was not. But a collection of inspection lamp cables from the abandoned lorries soon provided enough. Coupling to the generator was a matter of minutes and shortly afterwards the tree sailed satisfyingly into the air.

I suppose that the unexpected freedom Conferred by Captain Broderick led us to behave like schoolboys but the euphoria soon faded as we set about preparing to retreat in some sort of disciplined order, with all our personal equipment intact. I abandoned the modified rifle with some regret but loaded my pockets with explosive and detonators in case they might prove useful. We also realised that we would not see food of any sort for an unspecified time ahead, so we packed our haversacks with what little we could find and made a massive pot of stew from tins in the RE's store wagon, then stuffed to bursting and fortified, we twelve set out, marching in step, on the road to the coast.

Our map showed that we would have to cover some 25 kilometres. This was not too daunting a distance, although the weather was hot and we were in full battledress, with backpack, haversack, water bottle and rifle. We were also wearing our steel helmets that seemed to concentrate the heat on to the head and after the first 10 kilometres signs of fatigue began to show, usually heralded by the sound of a splash as some piece of equipment deemed unnecessary to survival was hurled far into the flooded fields at the side of the road.

Many prized personal possessions went this way. I was carrying a leather writing case that I treasured but eventually that too was thrown into the water as we all gradually discarded anything we could to reduce the weight we were carrying. So we marched, until we came to a canal where the bridge had been blown and there was no way across.

We had arrived at the small town of Hondschoote on the Colme Canal, and the bridge had been destroyed. German bombing was blamed but the rumour spread and partly believed that an over-zealous company of Royal Engineers had blown it UP to prevent the Germans crossing. It was now late afternoon and many hundreds of troops were gathering around the remnants of the bridge and wondering how to cross the wide and deep water. Engineers were working to throw a makeshift catwalk of planks across, supported by ropes from either side. An officer in charge announced that none of us would be able to cross for several hours, until the work was finished and made safe. He then organised us in groups, to come back at specified times to take our turn at crossing. Our time was 1 o'clock the next morning! We looked at the narrow planks and hoped that they would be wider by dark. We searched around the nearby houses, some still occupied, for somewhere to rest until we had to cross. An outhouse served our purpose, and we fixed a rota for someone to stay awake so that we wouldn't miss our turn on the crossing at one o'clock.

Sleep was fitful in the crowded shed but finally we were woken up to go. Some of us decided to jettison any other unwanted items from our kit to lessen the load and I stacked the explosive and detonators in a corner of the shed and followed the others out into the pitch black night.

The faintest glimmer of light showed on the surface of the water as we neared the canal to join the shuffling queue to step onto the plank bridge in the dark, hands steadied us as we took the first tentative steps. The planks felt only about 18 inches wide and as we approached the centre they developed an alarming springy bounce. We paused to let the movement subside and crept cautiously forward only to be startled by a loud splash as something fell into the blackness of the canal many feet below. "Its all right chaps " yelled a cheerful voice. "It's only my rifle." The crossing over, we continued towards the coast at Bray Dunes, now only 12 kilometres away, and made good progress in the cool of the early morning.

Bray Dunes, a seaside resort was crowded with troops both French and English, with plenty of French civilians thronging around bartering for bargains. One British despatch rider was in the process of selling his now unwanted motorcycle to a Frenchman who thought that it would be of use in escaping from the advancing Germans. "Ou est le decompresseur?" he queried. A brief conference amongst ourselves decided that he was looking for the valve-lifter, so a demonstration was given and with the transaction settled, he kicked the bike into life and roared off, back the way we had come. "Bon chance!" we called as he rode towards the unseen but advancing Panzers.

By mid May the German armies were advancing towards France. Invading Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, Countries who had relied overlong on the hope that international law and their neutrality would be sufficient defence against attack. While we of the British Expeditionary Force, part of the First Army Group under the command of the French General Billotte, were an army stretched in the task of closing the gap from where the Belgian frontier began at the sea southwards to where the Maginot Line began near Longwy. We knew little of the disposition of any of the armies of either side. Our daily concern was simply to move in convoy as and when we were told and all that we knew of our position was by reference to the daily route instructions and the maps we carried. It was just as well for our peace of mind that the maps were not marked with the German positions. Our lorries each carried three tons of one sort of ammunition or another. Norman and I were still on the 6-wheeled Karrier that we had when we landed at Le Havre and our load of 25-pounder shells was packed in wooden boxes. Others carried rifle ammunition. Hand grenades and mortar bombs and the necessity of always travelling 100 yards apart became more and more apparent as we advanced into Belgium, as any one vehicle hit by Stuka dive-bombers would have had a devastating effect on vehicles travelling close together.

Because of the constant danger of bombing attacks on our ammunition convoy we invariably travelled at night and slept as best we could during the day in makeshift beds in the back of our lorries in a recess behind the drivers cab formed from stacked boxes of ammunition.

We were now headed for Halle, a small town about 15 kilometres south west of Brussels and still at that time, travelling in full convoy of some 20 or 30 vehicles. At the first stop after leaving Plouvain, we based ourselves on an abandoned farm some way off the main roads where we parked our lorries randomly dispersed and well camouflaged against the curious eyes of a German reconnaissance Storch that flew over very early each morning with the regularity of a railway timetable. We had a small sand bagged Bren gun pit as our only air defence and there was a scramble to man it whenever the Storch was heard approaching.

Whether we were hopeless shots, or he was armour plated we never knew but he always flew off unharmed. It was just our luck a few days later that the Bren gun was stripped for cleaning and lying dismantled on some bales of straw in the farmyard, when with a paralysing roar four German heavy bombers followed each other in single file across the open field less than 100 feet up and a hundred yards from where we sat frozen with shock. As we struggled furiously to reassemble the Bren gun, in case there were other planes following, the pilots gave us a cheeky grin and a wave as they passed.

The German Luftwaffe greatly outnumbered the few British squadrons based in France and their superiority began to show, as they seemed to cruise nonchalantly overhead, holding formation against desultory anti-aircraft fire from the ground, with little or no interception in the air. Our immediate and direct personal experience of this growing impudent nonchalance occurred when Fred and I sat on a grass bank in the sun one afternoon leaning against an outer wall of the farm and at peace with the world. In the distance there were three tiny specks in the sky that grew larger as we watched and in a matter of seconds the specks became three Stuka dive bombers heading in a direct line for us but fairly high. So far we had remained interested spectators of someone else's war but when the leading Stuka broke off from the rest and started a steep dive towards us we realised that we were no longer spectators but targets! Not just targets of two mere soldiers basking in the warm sunshine but two mere soldiers basking in the sun with their backs against a wall behind which was parked a camouflaged group of five lorries loaded with a total of 15 tons of high explosive. It took very little time for this realisation to sink into our petrified consciousness and we froze in absolute shock. The familiar high-pitched scream of the Stuka's dive increased as it became closer and larger, diving straight at us until we could clearly see the pilot's grinning face. He waved and was over our heads and gone. We sat very still, leaning against the wall for a long and silent time, hardly breathing and hearts beating faster. No bomb, no strafing, nothing but a pilot's idea of a joke. Probably returning empty from an earlier raid. I think that while we were always aware of the danger of the explosive load we carried and when we were bombed our one aim was to distance ourselves as far away as possible from the lorry and preferably find something solid like a farm roller to hide behind but we had got so used to regarding our cargo as so many wooden boxes that we had long since ceased to let it worry us.

The apparent vulnerability of our farmhouse to bombing resulted in a division of the Company into sub-sections where each group of five lorries was dispersed over the countryside. Our sub-section hid up in a wood by day on the outskirts of a very small town and we slept in our usual way on the hard and uncomfortable ammunition boxes in the back of the lorry. Nearby was a deserted farmhouse, and we decided, after investigation, that the bare bed frames, the mattresses having disappeared with their owners, would make for a more comfortable rest, so we climbed through a ground floor window and moved in. We felt like intruders on someone's privacy. I used a small bedroom that had belonged to a young girl called Olga. Who clearly was a music lover from the bust of Beethoven on the dressing table and the many concert programmes in a drawer and all the time we were there, we seemed to feel unease as though the original occupants would walk in at any time. For the first day or so we laboriously entered and left the building by the window, until someone tried the front door handle and found it unlocked! With the lorries now well hidden in the small wood, we settled into the farmhouse and began to wonder if we had been totally forgotten, as we had no communication with our unit and no food at all.

By the second day in the farmhouse we were becoming extremely hungry and as we were not far from a small and totally deserted town with looted shops we decided to go and find anything that was eatable.

Our first find was a bar with pressurised beer taps still working. Dirty glasses were everywhere, so fastidiously we used our tin mugs. Every trace of food seemed to have disappeared from the town with the exception of great mounds of dried peas and beans spilled across the floor of a grocers shop. On the shelves were the unwanted leftovers from the looting; a large tin of the thin vanilla flavoured biscuits used for ice-cream wafers and some small cartons of strawberry jam and these, in layers of three or four wafers at a time with strawberry jam in between was breakfast, dinner, tea and supper for the next two days.

We continued to search for food the following day without any success. The eerie feeling of intrusion was always with us as we went into houses in our search. Here and there were pans still on the stove and dishes on the table, so hurried had been the departure of the frightened owners. In the cellar of one house we found several dozen bottles of some Tarragona Wine, which we used to supplement our strawberry wafers, which were extremely difficult to swallow in the dry state. Some measure of desperation began to set in. We had to remain where we were otherwise our unit would never find us and we in turn didn't know where they were. One driver in the sub-section was a butcher from Wolverhampton, Ralph Draper and he had noticed that in a distant field a number of cattle had been turned loose by the farmers to fend for themselves. So began the great round up! Before long we had a herd of eight milk-bound cows and a calf. Within an hour we had only eight cows and veal roasting on a fire. Some foolhardy chickens appeared, and were duly chased and despatched with bayonets, the first and last time our side arms were used in battle. Our hunger assuaged, we settled down to the bucolic life, the milk-bound cows were relieved of their suffering by those of us able to milk and on the second days milking we had some splendid bowls of cream cooling on the slab in the dairy and after visiting another better equipped farm and borrowing a separator and churn, we soon had more butter than we needed. It was here that Fred gave us a moment of light relief by discovering that by taking a short cut that the midden In the centre of the farmyard and the storage pit for all the manure raked out from the cow byres was not solid but merely a thin crust over a fluid sea. We cheered as he sank, then helped him out and held our noses as we swilled him down.

The war woke up with the arrival of a Company despatch rider with the news that we were to move on the next morning towards Halle. That night we slept aboard our lorries back on the hard boards. At dawn I awoke to find the lorry moving along a country road and sleepily thought that Norman had got up to make an early start. I turned over, only to meet his startled face alongside. We both sat up, "I reckon we've been captured by a German patrol" said Norman, there was nothing left to do, but wait in apprehension for the outcome. Eventually the lorry stopped and after a moments delay, the grinning face of one of the unit's corporals appeared at the parted canvas curtain at the tailboard. "They sent me to fetch you," he said. "But I thought I'd let you sleep on. And drive it myself"

So we rejoined the unit, and went on towards Halle. Our 6-wheeled Karrier was a large forward drive lorry, with an open plan design of cab. That is, the driver and co-driver were completely exposed to the elements, as there was no windscreen, only a canvas apron that came UP to the chin. A heavy canvas pram-like hood pulled forward over our heads when required. The side 'doors' were canvas sheets that clipped across the door opening on springs.

Stuka attacks had taught us to adapt the cab to circumstances, with the hood folded right back to allow maximum visibility skywards and the 'doors' rolled back to give a clear emergency exit. At the first alarm, the gear lever was put into neutral, the ignition switched off, the handbrake pulled on and before the lorry had slowed to 15 miles an hour we had leapt through the side gaps and were running fast for the open fields. There we lay as flat as we could short of burrowing into the ground and I recall the dreadful feeling of nakedness there was on the nape of my neck as the attack went on, quite sure that the bristling hairs were full in the Stuka pilot's Sights, and then they would go away and we would walk back to the truck only to find some 10 or 15 refugees crouching under it for shelter!

Refugees caused many problems, preventing free movement on the roads. One of our leaders, losing his temper at our slow progress at one stage, ordered us to "drive on regardless and run them over if you have to."

We realised why the farmhouse mattresses had gone, when the refugee's cars came along the road towards us, each with a mattress on the roof to act as some slight protection against the strafing of the roads by low flying German aircraft. Others were escaping on foot, pushing handcarts laden with a few household goods and often with an elderly relative as a passenger.

We were now in full convoy and heading towards Brussels. Our route so far had taken us from Arras north eastwards skirting Tournai and then east through Enghien heading for Halle. The flow of refugees towards us increased to the point that made forward movement almost impossible and any German aircraft flying low over the roads was enough in itself to start a scrambling panic without the need for a shot to be fired. Carts and cars were abandoned as people fled into the fields and we were left to make our way as best we could through the chaotic melee left on the road. Our final point in the advance into Belgium was a small wood a few kilometres from Halle where the density of the trees was enough to give us protective cover in daylight. It seemed that this was going to be a battle line as we were told to start digging slit trenches and prepare for a stay. We were still living a mobile life eating when we could and sleeping in our makeshift beds in the backs of the lorries. It was at dawn on our second day beneath the trees that a speculative German bomber decided to flush out the wood on the off chance of there being a worthwhile target in hiding. Our usual nightwear was a singlet and underpants and we were torn between modesty and self-preservation as we scrambled in near panic over the tailboard of our lorries to dash for the nearest slit trench as the bombs started to explode around us. In the first trench I came to, I looked down with a sense of shock at one of our drivers who was crouching in a curled up ball and sobbing with fright. In embarrassment I went away to find another trench but the bombing ceased as quickly as it had begun and we returned to the lorries to get dressed. No one had been injured and all the lorries undamaged but we walked around and looked with awe at the massive holes that large pieces of shrapnel had torn through thick tree trunks and realised that a similar piece would have made a mess of our heads. The convoy re-formed and as we continued east to Halle the oncoming stream of refugees was joined by more and more of our own BEF vehicles heading west. Gradually the sheer crush of traffic caused a massive jam and as we sat and exchanged news and rumour with the occupants of the lorries going westwards it became clear that the whole of the mobile BEF was being turned back on it's route. Ah! We thought, back behind the Maginot line. "Ils ne passeront pas!" The jam started to clear, and we came to a Military Police staging point where a solitary redcap on point duty was directing the convoys to turn around and go back! A slow and tortuous business but finally, we turned and headed west with the others. The retreat to Dunkirk had begun.