大象传媒

The following is an excerpt from the memoir my grandfather, Joseph Knott, wrote many years after returning from the war. The initial chapter of the memoir covers the years 1934 to 1937, when he served with 37 Company RASC as T/56547. During this time, he received the Military Medal for gallant services in the field of conflict. The second chapter begins in 1937 with his return to Lincolnshire.

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Back in Lincoln, every street was not so good as one thought in those days, but I found employment as a driver with RAF Waddington which turned out to be a good and interesting job. Wages were better as a civil servant, and there was always the super-annuation to look forward to later in life. However, on the situation of the trouble arising in Germany meant that people like me who had been a regular soldier and now on the L reserve, were the first to be notified of re-enlistment. So, on Friday 1st Sept. '39, I was told to get a clearance from the RAF and report to the army garrison at Aldershot to be there as soon as possible. I arrived late on Friday night, collected my blankets and sheets, allotted a bed in a barrack block, and got down to army discipline again. Sat 2 Sept got kitted out for active service which came sooner than we'd all excpected.

Sat, Sun and Monday, after hearing that we had declared war on Germany and its allies, were spent organising ourselves for overseas service. The following few days we took over vehicles and was soon on our way to newport in Wales, where we boarded a ship and set sail for France and we were to be known as an ammunition Company in the BEF.

We went into the Bay of Biscay and down the River Loire to "Mantes" where for a few days we were checking our vehicles and the ammo we were carrying before moving up north to Douai where we spent several months idling our time. Christmas came and went, and it wasn't long before we had to move up into Belgium to try and stem Hitler's advance. But, by the middle of Jan 1940, it became clear that we were not able to hold his advance, hence the long trek back into France where we regrouped just outside Lille, which was the busiest time our ammunition company had had, but alas, it was not the happiest as we had been at Lille a matter of 12 weeks when suddenly, one Saturday morning, instructions were give to the NCOs that we were to destroy everything that would be advantageous to the enemy, and so a day of destruction lay before us and by late evening we were told that it was every man for himself and that the nearest port was Dunkirk which was all of 80 miles away.

That was the start of the long walk to the coast. We arrived at Dunkirk and for a further week I busied myself going around with a padre, collecting identification discs from the fallen comrades on and around the beach.

On the following Friday, after carrying several wounded lads on stretchers to the naval vessel Wakefield, I decided enough was enough and with a little encouragement from the naval staff on board who told me it would be the last ship to get to the jetty because of bomb damage, that if I wanted to leave the beach, now was the time. I didn't need a second telling. I jumped aboard and finally landed at Dover, and was smartly whipped on a train for London but it finished up back in newport in Wales where we were well cared for. There was only eight men from my old company there, and as we had not been paid for over three months, it was arraned to pay us 10 s per person, so we were in business again.
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When I asked my Grandmother, Maud Knott, if she would mind me posting this excerpt from his memoir, she said she would be pleased to see it posted. She told me, however, that the memoir told only the barest of facts. He had told her many other stories. The only ones she could relate to me in the time we had together had to do with his time on the beach at Dunkirk. She said that the reason he remained on the beach for a week was because he had become separated from his company, and therefore "no one wanted anything to do with him." Whenever planes flew overhead, she said the men buried themselves in the sand. My grandfather did this many times, and once a bullet struck him on the wrist. It ricocheted off his watch, shattering the watch. This was most distressing to him, as the watch had been his 21st birthday present, but it did save his hand.

My grandfather almost never spoke about the war to his grandchildren, and although two of his children - my mother and uncle - both joined the royal navy in the 1960s, he rarely told them stories about his service. He told my mother that he didn't wish to tell his grandchildren about the war because "he'd fought it so that we wouldn't have to know such things." I am not certain what prompted him to write his memoir after so many years of silence.

As a child, I remember sitting on his lap or watching him work in his garden and being fascinated - not to mention a little repulsed - by the faded and blurred blue tattoo of a bird on his forearm. All he would tell me was that he got it in the war. For years, I thought that was my only understanding of war: it was a place where you got ugly tattoos that marked you forever but could be easily hidden by rolling down your sleeves.

Sara Beck, Ontario, Canada

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