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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Roger Marsh of the ‘Action Desk — Sheffield’ Team on behalf of Reg Reid, and has been added to the site with the authors permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

The Lighter Side of War

By
Don Alexander

CHAPTER 27: Itzehoe to Essdorf tank barracks to Hamburg
March to May 1946

Back at Itzehoe, 133 were split up and men were detailed to different units. Butch was only there a few days before he was ordered to get his kit bag packed and along with a few others, including a sergeant, `Tiny' Watson, `Wardy', and Harry Marks, was posted to Essdorf tank barracks to await demob.

`Tiny' Watson was a very tall lad with feet so big, his boots had to be specially made. He wore shoes and put his boots in his kit bag and there was barely room for anything else. Harry Marks was the Brummie Union man and `Wardy' was the lad who had fallen in love with a Dutch girl who worked at the Phillips radio factory.

As usual, the posting happened so fast, Butch had no time to say goodbye to the other 1st class mechanics, Ritchie, O'Toole and McLeod, or to any stray ex133 personnel who might have been around. He didn't say goodbye either to the German lads who'd followed them to Berlin and back. These subsequently helped to form the nucleus of a new German army trained by the British. In view of their service in British Army uniforms, they were made NCO's immediately. All the lads sent to Essdorf tank barracks were twenty-six years old and so number twenty-six was their demob, group number. Or perhaps this was a coincidence.

Anyway Butch had done longer service than most, having signed on in 1938, so he was due out before most. Even so, he was to be in Hamburg several months before his papers came through. He didn't do much work. Some civilian German mechanics had been set on under his supervision. They were older men who hadn't been called up because of their age, and they were very good mechanics. One set himself up as the team leader and offered Butch the chance to stay in a flat in Hamburg owned by his aunty and adjacent to her flat. She was widowed and ill fed so payment would be welcomed in NAAFI food!

Butch jumped at this chance to be in the big city rather than miles out as they were in the rather dreary tank barracks.

He took her first of all a big jar of coffee - no, not taken from NAAFI or cookhouse stock, O ye of little faith! It had been posted to him by his mother from stock in her little grocery shop on Winter Street.

Everyone seemed nice to each other in those far off days, after such a vicious war. Even the MSM had been kind, back in Berlin, to our Butch, lending him his Warrant Officer jacket to get him in a club for officers and non commissioned officers only.

Butch was kind to the bull-necked, bolshie Brummie Harry Marks, buying him a posh meal in a posh Hamburg restaurant. Despite telling Harry that he'd never join a union if it was "full of thick obstreperous buggers like thee and thi mates in 'Midlands motor trade'," Butch liked the man. Trading insults came naturally to them both but even a straightforward barbed comment delivered in a broad Brummie accent seemed hilarious to Butch.

With his accumulated wealth, he had access to restaurants and nightspots that normally mere privates, corporals, sergeants and even second lieutenants couldn't aspire to.

In this particular restaurant the two of them were at a table for four on a balcony overlooking a cheaper cafeteria on the ground floor. The tables next to theirs were occupied by top brass with their wives or girlfriends, all wondering how privates could afford to eat there.

In spite of his socialist tendencies, Harry didn't object to eating well and lording it over others. He was quite rude about the fare on offer down below. Two lovely girls were eating at plain wooden tables, talking earnestly with each other and ignoring comments from troops at adjacent tables.

Harry peered at the food on their plates and remarked in a loud Brummie accent:
"Look at that crap they're eating down there!"

He got glacial looks from the top brass and one muttered to the effect that it was "damned bad form." The girls didn't ignore Harry's comment and both looked up sharply, one giving as good as she got in perfect English:

"If you know of better crap perhaps you'll be kind enough to let us know ". Harry, far from being embarrassed, was delighted at the response and insisted that they came up to make a foursome. The girls had a brief discussion with each other, then agreed! All got on well together; the girls were flirtatious, perhaps, Butch thought, hiding some sadness in their lives.

She who'd made the quick rejoinder, a brunette, got into playful banter with Harry, while the other girl, a blonde, quizzed Butch on army life. She seemed especially interested that he'd visited a Russian Army Camp in Berlin and asked his opinion of the Russians. Butch made some facetious remark about them being all right once they'd wiped the snow from their boots - then asked her if she knew Shelley and Keats. "Of course I know of them - but I have only read one or two of Keats' poems. `Ode to a Nightingale' I remember was one. Why do you ask?"

Butch told her about the Russian corporal but he was diplomatic and didn't mention the Russians' hatred of the Germans and desire for revenge. Then the reason for her interest in the Russians surfaced: their previous boyfriends had been pilots in the Luftwaffe on the Eastern Front. Her friend's boyfriend got killed and her own boyfriend was somewhere in Russia, in a prisoner of war camp. She had had one letter from him and he spoke of a train journey lasting several days. She feared he was in Siberia and that she would never see him again.

This put a bit of a damper on things but they met on several more occasions and the girls, only in their mid twenties, seemed to be determined to put the past behind them and enjoy themselves. They usually gravitated towards the St. Pauli area with many of its fine old buildings, still standing, including those along its most famous street, the Reeperbahn, home to night clubs, bars, restaurants and brothels.

One night, standing in a long queue outside a nightclub, Erika (yes, Butch remembers her name!) suggested that he hold up a few fags in the air to get the doorman's attention. He did and they were signalled through a back entrance, through the kitchen and up into the club on an upper floor.

There was a stage down below and a cabaret with a chanteuse singing melancholic, romantic German songs. When she sang "Unter den roten Laterne von Saint Pauli", fixing her gaze up at Butch he was captivated by her, the song and the atmosphere and shouted "wunderbar". The chanteuse extended her arms out to him in acknowledgement.

Erika had a word with a waiter asking him to tell the chanteuse how much Butch had enjoyed the song about St. Pauli, and requesting she sang it every time they came in.

She was the resident artiste, and thereafter, whenever she spotted Butch enter with his friends, she spoke with the pianist and launched into the St. Pauli song just to please him.
Harry Marks smoked like a chimney; as you know, Butch didn't, and his army issue fags were used to open doors for him, to barter for goods, or to give away to friends. Some men even bought sex with them - but to Butch, that would really have been `bad form'.

He did slip a few to his landlady, the German mechanic's Aunt, though, to smooth over any objections she might have should he bring Erika back to the flat.

Their relationship was getting serious even after only a few evenings out. Harry was getting on well, too, with her friend, leading Erika to invite the three of them to her flat. Butch felt he was beginning to fall in love with his woman, and he couldn't get her out of his mind. It was pleasing that women in general seemed to find him attractive but he wondered whether he should improve his confidence and social graces by drinking more. He had a few tots of whisky before setting out for her flat and took quite a lot of bottles of whisky, wine and beer.
He should have read about Cassio's downfall in Shakespeare's Othello.

He didn't. He drank far too much and when Erika invited him into her bedroom, he was almost immediately violently sick.

`Reputation. Reputation. Reputation. I have lost my reputation and what remains is base'.
(Shakespeare's words, not ours)

Harry kept seeing his girl but classy Erika never wanted to see Butch again.

Pr-BR

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