Still in the Army 1945 - 1946

Most accounts of life in Britain in the years immediately following World War II describe them as years of deprivation, of continued rationing and shortages amid an atmosphere of discontent and gloom.

Well, Heather and I lived through them and that is certainly not how we saw them. To us they were years of happiness and hope for the future. The war, which had brought us together but had blighted six years of our lives, was over. We both considered ourselves to be democratic socialists and we both voted Labour in that first exciting post-war election. Although I was twenty-four, it was my very first opportunity to vote and I was proud to be one of the returning ex-servicemen who had cast out the old and brought in a new government. It was, we fondly imagined, a government that would be taking the first steps towards building ‘Jerusalem, in England’s green and pleasant land’, working towards a narrowing of the gap between rich and poor at home, and towards a world in which, as Alfred Lord Tennyson had prophesied a century earlier:

‘The war-drum throbs no more and the battle flags are furled,
In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World’

How innocent, how naïve, how idealistic we were! Sixty-five years after that election Britain is engaged in two un-winnable wars, the gap between the rich and poor is wider than it has ever been, and the mere idea of a Federal Europe, never mind a Federal World, evokes shock and horror! And that is after over ten years of government by politicians who consider themselves to be the heirs of Keir Hardie, George Lansbury, Clem Attlee, and Nye Bevan!

But to begin at the beginning. I arrived at my home in Ipswich’s Kensington Road sometime after 10.00 p.m. on 18th May 1945 – my 24th birthday! I had walked all the way from Ipswich Station. This was long before the days of mobile or even of the large scale installation of terrestrial phones. However I had managed to phone a message to a friendly local shop keeper. He had passed on to my mother the news that I was safe and back in England.

She had no idea when I would be home but had stayed up beyond her usual bedtime ‘just in case’. She would have been 57 at the time and had been a widow since November 1939. She had good friends and neighbours but no relatives closer than London. It is only now, as a widower myself, that I appreciate how lonely she must have been throughout the war years. Worrying about my fate in the turmoil at the end of the war (there wouldn’t have been any letters from Germany for a couple of months) she had completely lost her voice – but had recovered it when she had heard that I was safe and on my way home.

It was a Friday evening. The following morning I caught the train to Ilford ‘to bring Heather back to Ipswich for a few days’. I can’t remember whether I had been able to let her know that I was safely back in England, but she certainly didn’t know that I was home and on my way to met her. I knew her address of course – 29 Woodville Gardens, Barkingside, Ilford. I had been there a few times too – but always I had met Heather at either Liverpool Street or Ilford Station and she had taken me there. The last time had been at least four years earlier and I couldn’t remember the bus, where we had caught it, or where we had got off.

I made my way from the train into the busy street. The area round Ilford Station was not, I imagine, quite so busy then as it is now – but there was much more of a bustle than I had experienced for several years! I spotted several bus stops and made my way towards them. I would have to ask someone which was the right bus. There though, waiting at one of the bus stops were Heather and her Mum. They had been on a shopping expedition and were on their way home! If I had read about such a coincidence in a novel I’d have dismissed it as unbelievable.

I can’t remember much detail about the next few days. I know that Heather and I – despite the way in which we had both ‘grown up’ during the past four years of separation – felt about each other as we had before. The magic was still there. I bought an engagement ring, a solitary diamond in a square setting and slipped it onto her finger. No – I don’t remember asking her to marry me. I think that we had both taken it for granted.

I took her back with me to Ipswich. She and my mother had corresponded during the war years and she had paid one or two visits to Ipswich. We all three went to 11.00 a.m. Choral Eucharist at St. Thomas’ Church on the Sunday. It was a new vicar whom I didn’t know. I had lost the faith of my childhood and youth though I was still prepared to ‘go through the motions’. I don’t think that I went to St Thomas more than another once or twice before my mother’s funeral in 1978.

I had a pass for six weeks leave with a ration book giving me double rations. Heather and I took a fortnight’s holiday in Gloucestershire, with the folk to whom Heather had been finally evacuated in 1940. No – we didn’t share a bedroom. We each had our own bedroom – and stayed in it! This was 1945, not 2008. ‘Nice girls’ didn’t do that sort of thing even when engaged, and ‘decent chaps’ didn’t expect them to!

I have never been the most observant of people (I should never have been a public health inspector!) but it was at about that time that I realized that there was a certain tension between my mother and Heather. They got on well enough together but each was beginning to resent the time that I spent with the other. It was a difficult situation for me and I hope that I coped with it as well as possible. Nowadays I think – I hope – that I’m pretty sensitive towards other people’s feelings but I have an idea that I may not have been then.

Atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As had been agreed between Churchill, Truman and Stalin, exactly three months after VE Day the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and the Red Army advanced into Japanese occupied Manchuria. Japan surrendered and World War II came to an end. The return of POWs of the Japanese with their horrifying stories made me realize how fortunate I had been to have served in North Africa and been imprisoned by Europeans. Even my very worst experiences in that large prison camp in northern Italy were far better than those of prisoners of the Japanese.

I learned too, for the first time, of Nazi Germany’s death camps. Auschwitz was in Poland but not all that far from Zittau. How easy it would have been for that huge shower chamber at Stalag IVb (see ‘Arbeitskommando’) to have been converted into a gas chamber!

My six weeks leave was extended for a further six weeks. Surely they would discharge me now. They wouldn’t call me up again after all that time.

But they did. One morning there was an OHMS envelope on my mother’s front doormat. It contained a railway warrant and orders for me to report to Billingshurst in Sussex within 48 hours.

Here the army did its best to turn us returned prisoners into British soldiers again. POWs returned from the Far East were given an immediate discharge. They deserved and thoroughly needed it. We ex-European POWs were given a thorough medical examination. Those graded below A1 were given an immediate discharge. The rest of us had to ‘soldier on’. I was found to be physically fitter than I had ever been. I made a half-hearted attempt to ‘work my ticket’ (out of the Army) on my nerves which, I assured the Medical Officer, ‘were in a terrible state’. He looked me up and down, slapped me on the back and said ‘You’re a young man. You’ll soon grow out of that’.

We were shown propaganda war films to teach us ‘how we won the war’. In those days it was still acceptable to acknowledge the enormous contribution that the people of the Soviet Union had made to that victory. I’d bet that today there are thousands of Brits who don’t even realize that ‘the Russians’ were ‘on our side’. I remember being particularly impressed with a film, made at the time, of the siege and eventual relief of Leningrad. Now, of course, it has reverted to its Tsarist name of St. Petersburg.

We did drills and had fitness tests – running a mile, jumping, hauling oneself up on parallel bars and so on. These were all things that I had never been any good at. Despite having, as a POW only a couple of months earlier, been doing the very heaviest physical work, I had the greatest difficulty passing that ‘fitness’ test!

We also had a general knowledge, ‘intelligence’, and manual skills test. I found the general knowledge and the ‘intelligence’ tests very easy, but I failed dismally to reassemble a bicycle pump that had been taken to pieces and placed in front of me!

Eventually we were pronounced to be ‘soldiers again’ and were despatched to Woolwich RA Depot, that great ‘human warehouse’ for the Royal Artillery. During the next few weeks I discovered how relatively easy it was to get to Ilford from Woolwich and to see Heather when I had some time off; through the pedestrian tunnel under the Thames and then on a 101 bus into Ilford and another bus (I had learnt which one by that time) to take me to Barkingside.

We began to plan our wedding. It was to be immediately I was discharged from the Army. We had all been given a ‘Demob Group Number’ that depended upon the length of wartime service and the age of the serviceman. I had the maximum amount of service – from 2nd September 1939 – but was still only 24 years old. My Demob Group was therefore No. 28 and, at the speed that releases were taking place it looked as though my group would be dealt with about mid-March 1946.

We decided to play safe and fix the date for late April. Heather’s Mum’s birthday was on 27th April which in 1946 was the Saturday after Easter. So that was the date on which we decided. The wedding was to be at the local Methodist Church, where Heather had been a Sunday School teacher and active member, with a (strictly teetotal!) reception in the church hall afterwards. I was happy enough with whatever made Heather happy. Someone Heather’s mum knew was going to make her wedding dress.

Then came a bombshell! On parade one morning it was announced that we were all being posted to Catterick – a bleak RA Depot in Yorkshire about which we had heard nothing good. There was however one local posting, for just two men. Men whose homes were local were asked to step forward. Well, my fiancées home was almost local so I joined the twenty or so who came forward? Who had had office experience and could use a typewriter? My typing was strictly of the ‘hunt and peck’ school but that didn’t stop me from being one of the six remaining. Finally – who had had any first aid, medical or nursing experience? Well, as I explained, I had worked in a large public health department with school, TB and Child Welfare Clinics, and was training for a post in the field of public health. I didn’t stress that I had really just been the office boy!

That did the trick. One other chap and myself were appointed medical orderlies to ‘K’ Battery (a reserve battery) RA and to the Boys’ Battery. We had to get our kit and move into a medical centre, just up the road from the depot, forthwith.

It was a little bungalow building, near the headquarters of the Boys’ Battery RA – a unit composed of 14 to 18 year-olds destined for a military career who, at 14, had ‘signed on’ to serve seven years as regular soldiers after they had been ‘mustered’ into the adult army at 18. ‘K’ Battery RA was nearby.

Our purpose was really diagnostic, the dispensing of pills and carrying out treatments for minor ailments, and the issue of ‘sick notes’. Any hint of anything really serious and the patient was bustled away promptly to ‘The Royal Herbert’ Military Hospital.

It was the kids of the Boys’ Battery that I remember best. Some were from very posh ‘army families’ – the sons of Majors and Colonels who wanted them to experience life at the bottom of the pile, though later on they would no doubt give them a helping hand to get to the top. Others came from the very poorest of poor backgrounds. They all had to address us lowly medical orderlies as ‘sir’, a novel and somewhat disquieting experience for me.

Most of them were as tough as old boots and it was easy to forget that they were very young and that some of them were homesick, frightened and vulnerable. I remember very well one kid who had a blister on his heel that I had to put a plaster on. When he took his boot and sock off I said, possibly a little crossly, ‘You might have tried washing your feet before you came here!’ and he burst into tears. Another, from a well-to-do family, was afraid that he had caught something unpleasant after an experimental evening out with a less-than-virtuous local girl. ‘What will Mum and Dad say, and Barbara (the approved girl friend and captain of the hockey team in a good girls’ school) will never speak to me again’. We packed him off to the Royal Herbert for diagnosis and, as our Medical Officer had thought, he was suffering from nothing worse than a guilty conscience.

All the boys had to learn to blow the trumpet – and it must be said that they got to be very good at it. From time to time they developed cracked, swollen or damaged lips and one of the most common medical certificates issued was ‘excused sounding, seven days’.

The other orderly and I thought highly of our Medical Officer who, as a British Army officer, was very unusual indeed. His name was Captain Boomla and he was a Parsee. His sister, so he told us, was a member of the Indian National Congress and he himself was a fervent Indian Nationalist with very left-wing views. He also had a sense of humour

I remember once a gunner from ‘K’ Battery, clearly hoping for a day or two off duty, reported sick with a bad cold. ‘You know Smith’, said Captain Boomla, ‘If I had been your doctor in civvy street, you wouldn’t have come to see me with this, would you?’ ‘Too right I wouldn’t have sir,’ came the reply. ‘I’d have stayed in bed and sent for you!’

With any other medical officer such an ‘insolent’ reply would have evoked an explosion of wrath. Captain Boomla simply smiled and said ‘Yes, I believe you would’ adding to me ‘write out a chit for two days light duty and give him enough aspirin for a couple of days’. Light Duty, which could include such tedious chores as potato peeling was not what had been hoped for.

Captain Boomla usually read ‘The Daily Worker’, the Communist Party’s daily paper and would come into the medical centre with it ostentatiously tucked under his arm. One morning he turned up with ‘The Times’ instead. ‘You haven’t changed your political allegiance have you sir?’ we asked him rather anxiously. ‘No, no, nothing like that’, he replied, ‘It is just that I have an interview with the Colonel this morning – and one must always try to impress the natives!’

It was at about that time that I too was summoned to an interview with the Colonel. I did my best to make myself ‘look soldierly’. I tapped on the door of his office in some trepidation. What could possibly have brought me to his august attention? ‘How long have you been in the army?’ he asked. ‘Since the beginning sir; since 2nd September 1939’. ‘Well’, he went on, ‘there’s now a splendid opportunity for you. As a result of those tests you had back in Billingshurst it has been decided that you are potential officer material. Captain Boomla agrees and I can send you off to an officer training unit within a week. You would, of course, have to sign on for another three years army service first’.

Was it, I wondered, my success with the general knowledge and ‘intelligence’ tests that had marked me as ‘a potential officer’ – or my total inability to perform a simple practical task? Four or five years earlier it would have been an opportunity I would have seized with both hands. Now though, it was too late. ‘Thank you sir – but no thank you’, I replied. ‘I am due for release in another three or four months and I have a civilian career planned.’ It was, I am inclined to think, the reply that he had expected. He simply wished me well and dismissed me.

Did I make a wrong choice on that occasion? I have wondered that from time to time. I don’t think so. I have always hated either giving orders or taking them and I couldn’t imagine myself at ease in an officers’ mess – or Heather worrying about what was, and what was not, the right course of action for an ‘officer’s lady’. There was always the real risk (I had seen it happen to other young hopefuls) of being rejected by the final selection board and, as they used to put it; being ‘RTU’d from WOSB, LMF’ (Returned to Unit from War Office Selection Board, lack of moral fibre) – and, I would have already signed on for another three years!

Always the threat of a distant posting threatened us. I had dropped into a routine of regular visits to London or to Ilford to see Heather – and occasional ones to Ipswich. I didn’t want to see any changes in that comfortable routine. I should, I now realize, have made the effort to visit my mother more frequently but the young are thoughtless and selfish – and I was still young.

‘Operation Python’ reared its ugly head. This was an army scheme in which returned POWs in high numbered ‘demob groups’ were posted to Palestine to reinforce the troops who were already there, attempting to keep the peace between Arabs and Jews and to stem the flow of Jewish immigrants. My group was 28, just low enough to escape ‘Python’ but it wasn’t till after Christmas that I felt really safe from its threat.

Our medical centre closed down for several days over Christmas. I think that the ‘Royal Herbert’ Hospital provided emergency cover. The Woolwich Garrison was severely depleted. All the boys from the Boys Battery who had homes to go to (a few hadn’t) were granted leave. So were most of ‘K’ Battery and the other troops in the garrison.

I spent the holiday in Ilford and my mother came up from Ipswich and stayed with Heather’s parents over the holiday. My mother had my usual room and bed and I slept on the settee in the sitting room. It was the first Christmas that I had been able to spend ‘at home’ since 1939 and I had slept in many worse places during the intervening years!

I have very vague memories of a happy time. One afternoon – on Boxing Day perhaps – we all went to see Judy Garland in ‘The Wizard of Oz’. Everybody else thoroughly enjoyed it but it left me depressed. It seemed to me that its final message was that everything is an illusion. At that time I had lost my formerly strong religious faith and was inclined to agree.

In the New Year I and the other medical orderly were posted away from Woolwich – but not far away. ‘K’ Battery was sent to Sunningdale, near Aldershot and we went with them. We had quite comfortable accommodation in a Nissen Hut at one end of which was our medical treatment room and at the other our living and sleeping quarters.

Our days (but not, I hasten to add, our nights!) were sometimes enlivened by the presence of two young ATS (or had they become WRAC by that time?) ambulance drivers. They were stationed at Aldershot where Princess Elizabeth had joined the FANY (Field Ambulance Nursing Yeomanry) and was learning the ropes. All the young subalterns were, so they said, competing for the privilege of helping her learn to drive an ambulance. They also amused us with their accounts of women’s army dress and discipline. It appears that they were required at all times to wear two pairs of underpants – fairly brief white knickers underneath and voluminous khaki ‘passion killers’ over them. The latter were universally hated and from time to time the NCOs would order girls to raise their uniform skirts to check that they had them on! Anyone not wearing the khaki over-pants was charged with ‘being indecently dressed’!

Captain Boomla stayed with the Boys’ Battery in Woolwich. Our new medical officer was a Captain Charles de Gruchy whose home, I believe, was in Chelmsford. He wasn’t quite as exciting as Captain Boomla but was friendly and approachable. Most of our casualties were ‘flu and feverish colds (‘bed rest and aspirin’), scabies (‘apply gentian violet to affected areas’), cuts and grazes (acriflavine dressing) and wax in the ears. For this we used to drip hydrogen peroxide into the affected ear. There would be a furious fizzing – and hearing would be miraculously restored. Nurses today are horrified when I tell them of that treatment. I can only say that it worked and that there seemed to be no ill-effects – but perhaps we were lucky.

We also had a few cases of VD or suspected VD. I think that, in this euphemism obsessed age, they are called ‘social diseases’ but in those days we preferred to call a spade a spade. This was, of course, before the age of antibiotics. Such cases were whisked off to military hospital from which we received horrifying reports of the treatment they were given there.

I still managed to get to London and to Ilford regularly. Sometimes I would be able to meet Heather at her office near the British museum and go home with her. Our wedding plans were maturing. The wedding dress was ready for fitting. My fourteen year old cousin Sheila, and Heather’s twelve year old sister Margaret were to be bridesmaids. My nearest friend, whom I would have liked to be best man, was still serving in India. Alex Innes, a young sanitary inspector from Ipswich, who had been with me in that prison camp in Northern Italy, stood in for him. He was a member of the Salvation Army, one of my few acquaintances who could be depended upon to behave himself at a ‘dry’ wedding reception. We would spend the first night of our married life in London’s Cumberland Hotel and then have a fortnight’s honeymoon in Dawlish, Devon.

A last minute hitch! – the speed with which the Demob Groups were dealt with slowed down. Would I be out of the army before 27th April? My originally expected discharge date in mid-March came and went. I made an appointment to see the Army Welfare Officer. He wanted to know why we were in a hurry? ‘Is your fiancée expecting?’ he asked. I explained that we had been waiting to get married for seven years and yes, she was expecting – she was expecting to get married on 27th April! He promised to do what he could but didn’t leave me feeling very hopeful.

Perhaps though, he was more helpful than I had imagined. I was discharged on the very first day of Group 28 releases – 23rd April (St. George’s Day) 1946. A party of those of us to be discharged were driven down to the ‘Demob Centre’ in Guildford. Here I was issued with my ‘demob suit’ – a choice between a chalk-stripe suit or a sports jacket and grey flannel slacks. I chose the latter. We kept the army uniform we were wearing and were allowed to retain our army great-coats for £1. It was a bargain at that price and I wore mine in cold weather for many years!

I think that there must also have been another medical to check that we were fit at the time of discharge and a lot of form filling and name signing, but I don’t remember any of it. I was just eager to get out.

We were, I remember, given a railway warrant to any town that we chose. I was, of course, going home to Ipswich but I remembered that I was going on my honeymoon to Dawlish in less than a week. I had the Warrant made out to Dawlish and paid my own fare home from Liverpool Street to Ipswich!

It was just four days from my wedding day! The time passed in a daze. Once again I feel sure that I didn’t appreciate what a stressful and difficult time it must have been for my mother. She had got me back only to lose me again almost at once. I was to be married in uniform but I went, in civvies, to a posh outfitter in Ipswich and bought a khaki silk shirt and tie clearly labelled, ‘For sale only to Officers of HM Forces’. Our wedding might not be ‘toppers and tails’ but I did want to look my best for my bride.

Alex Innes, my best man, had a car and had promised to pick me up to catch an early train to Ilford. He and my mother would come up separately on a later train. He didn’t turn up exactly when he had promised and, as usual in such circumstances, I panicked! I started out to walk to the station and was three quarters of the way there before he overtook me, picked me up and got me to the station in plenty of time to catch the train!

Heather’s Uncle George and Aunt Daisy met me at Ilford Station and drove me to their home in Wanstead. I have an idea that later, on our way to the church, we looked in at 21 Woodville Gardens, Ilford, to make sure all was well there. I wasn’t of course allowed to see the bride.

At the church I had a brief and friendly word with the Minister. I noticed that he didn’t seem keen to get too close to me – and then I realized, Heather’s Uncle George had given me a large scotch ‘to steady my nerves’ and the Methodist Minister Rev. David Parton was a life-long teetotaller! My best man was already in place. I settled at his side after making sure that he had the ring safely in his possession.

At last, the murmur of conversation in the church ceased, the organist launched into the Wedding March and the bride, on her father’s arm and with her bridesmaids in train came down the aisle to us. Heather was all that I had dreamed of, and more. She had a most beautiful snowy-white wedding dress with head-dress and veil held in place by a diamante tiara. She carried an enormous bouquet of fragrant natural flowers.

I don’t remember much about the service, the photographs and the reception afterwards. I do remember Heather slipping away to the church vestry to change from her wedding dress into a no-less-becoming going-away outfit. I remember too the arrival of the taxi that was speed us away from an event for which we had patiently waited for seven years, towards the beginning of our life together in a marriage that was to endure for sixty years.

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