大象传媒

The year was 1944, the month of June, and I was with my unit en route to the Dday beaches, having left Tilbury cheered by Ford workers from the Dagenham factory. I was then 21 years old, the youngest in my unit.

I had signed up in 1942, having opted out of the Commandos for what I imagined to be a more interesting time in the Intelligence Corps. My entree into the Intelligence Corps was on the (fraudulent) basis that I was a linguist.
Prior to the time of this story I had been in Rothesay, Bute, on bouncing bomb exercises on Loch Striven and on floating tank exercises off Bute.

Mid-channel, in the middle of the night, we were disturbed by a horrendous crash and thought we'd hit a mine. But it was a collision with another boat, and no-one was hurt. My enduring memory of this incident is the sight of Alan Pratt's unlaced motorcycle boots clanging on the metal companionway ahead of me as he fled on deck wearing only the aforesaid boots and his underpants.

After a wet landing at Gold Beach we recovered briefly behind the dunes, but swiftly exited led by the most proficient French speaker, Jacques Green. In the dark we settled down in a field for a few hours; in the morning we awoke to see little yellow flags decorated with skull and crossbones. The field was mined!

I remember it being a very hot June, I recall the white dust on the roads. Eventually, we moved on to Caen with forward troops. The town was razed and everywhere were massive potholes. The smell of dead bodies was all-pervading. During heavy shelling three of us took refuge in the cellar of a house which had obviously belonged to a doctor. We were there a couple of days during which time we discovered his wine cellar and nothing much bothered us after that!

I returned to Caen in 1980, searching for the house, and was surprised to find how small it was.
After Normandy, I went to Ghent, then Nijmegen, where I had my closest scrape with death. Information sources suggested that the Germans were aiming to float downriver to Nijmegen a device to blow up the bridge. I was on duty at night and one of our own soldiers crept up on me from behind and held a knife to my back. My shouts convinced him he had the wrong target.

Following this, we spent time on the German-Dutch border at Enschede, vetting the flood of refugees leaving Germany.

I was demobbed in 1946, returning to the depot at Wentworth Woodhouse, Yorks, where I spoke with Eastern European linguists who had been occupied during the war -- cleaning latrines.

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