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The youngest in my unit

The year was 1944, the month June, and I was with my unit en route to the D-Day beaches. I’d left Tilbury, cheered by Ford workers from the Dagenham factory. I was 21 years old, the youngest in my unit.

I had signed up in 1942, having opted out of the Commandos for what I imagined would be a more interesting time in the Intelligence Corps. My entree 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 floating-tank exercises off Bute.

Fleeing in boots and underpants

Mid-channel, in the middle of the night, we were disturbed by a horrendous crash. We thought we'd hit a mine. Instead we’d collided with another boat. Fortunately, 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.

Little yellow flags

After a wet landing at Gold Beach, Normandy, we recovered briefly behind the dunes then swiftly exited, led by our 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. There was white dust on the roads. We moved on to Caen eventually with the forward troops. The town was razed, pitted with massive potholes everywhere. The smell of dead bodies was all pervasive.

The wine cellar

During heavy shelling, three of us took refuge in the cellar of a house that had obviously once belonged to a doctor. We were there for a couple of days, during which time we discovered the wine cellar. Nothing much bothered us after that.

In 1980 I returned to Caen to search for the house and was surprised to find how small it was.

My closest scrape with death

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 down river, 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.

Cleaning latrines

I was demobbed in 1946. Returning to the depot at Wentworth Woodhouse, near Rotherham in Yorkshire, I spoke with Eastern European linguists who had been occupied during the war – cleaning latrines.

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