大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War website by Sutton Coldfield Library on behalf of John Twigger and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the sites terms and conditions.

I was born in Sutton Coldfield and attended Victoria Road Boys' School. In 1939 I was a messenger in Birmingham Fire Service. I would put my bicycle on the back of a Fire Engine at Hollyfield Road Fire Station (where Hollyfield Drive is now) and would be taken into Birmingham and Coventry night after night during the blitz. My job was to take messages on my bicycle from fire engine to fire engine telling them which job they had to do next. I remember one night of heavy bombing being with the fire engines, which were stored under a bridge at Snow Hill station. I was so frightened I got under one of the engines and spent the night there. In the morning, after the bombing they thought I had been killed until someone spotted my boots under the fire engine.

I joined the RAF in 1941. I wanted to fight the people who were doing the bombing and I wanted to serve my country in the RAF. I started off as a drill and PT instructor alongside comedian Max Wall and footballer Stanley Matthews. I transferred to the RAF police.

Before D-Day the troops were building a sealed road at Dover. No one was allowed in or out, but the lads wanted to write home to their wives and girlfriends. The plan was that I would take the mail out stuffed down my shirt. I had a motorbike and they put sugar in the tank so that I had to take it out for repair. It was a Harley Davidson and the garage kept it and gave me a BSA as a replacement. I was not pleased, but the letters got out.

I went to France on D-Day plus one, landing on the Averanches beaches. From France I was moved on to Belgium. Here my life changed completely as I met my wife, Connie. She was in Antwerp, gunlaying (the precursor to radar) on the ack-ack guns, telling them where to fire - angles etc. She spent time in Field Marshal Montgomery's echelon and has a letter of thanks from him.

Towards the end of the war Connie was working on the Brussels telephone exchange. One day a call came through from one of the lads who had been robbed by a prostitute and needed a policeman. Connie put him through and I was that policeman. She listened in because she wanted to hear the gory details! I later asked her out. We have been married now for 60 years.

We both saw Arnhem. Connie watched the parachutes come in and I saw the grisly aftermath. It was the worst job of my life. I was guarding the hospital and as the ambulances came in I had to turn away those where the injured had little chance of survival. There were too many for the hospital to cope with.

With a Heroes Return grant in August 2004 my wife and I returned to the bridge at Nijmegen where we were able to say goodbye to our old comrades. We decided not to visit cemeteries, we have done enough over the years, and as Connie says, we are too close to our own expiry date to want to do them now.

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