大象传媒

This story was submitted by Garry Lloyd, a CSV volunteer, on behalf of May Butcher, who has given her permission to put her story on the website and understands the terms and conditions.

My fortnight鈥檚 holiday at Brighton in 1939, just weeks before war broke out, was a fateful one. As a l9 year-old nanny, to the children of an eminent surgeon in Wimbledon, I had five pounds to spend on modest bed-and-breakfast lodgings in the Sussex seaside resort.

Fateful because there I met the landlady鈥檚 son, Joe. He was 20 and it was love at first sight. Two months later he was called up into the Royal Sussex Regiment for the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). We had Easter together in 1940 before he was dispatched to France and Belgium as a staff car driver.

On the Belgian border he was behind a convoy of wounded troops when it was shelled by the Germans. Abandoning the car, in which he was alone, he took refuge in the cellar of a deserted farmhouse when he heard the tread of boots, and gutteral voices. The cellar door opened with the order: 鈥淐ome out!鈥� He emerged into a ring of German uniforms, the first he had ever seen. A soldier raised his rifle to hit him, but an officer intervened.

Joe was taken to Stalag 20B at Gdansk in Poland. I had been evacuated, with the surgeon鈥檚 children, to Brockham Green near Dorking, Surrey to avoid the bombing. For three months Joe was posted as 鈥渕issing, believed killed.鈥� But then word reached us that he was a Prisoner-of-War (PoW). Weeks later I received a heavily-censored letter from him. Without disclosing the camp鈥檚 location he said it was鈥漥olly cold,鈥� and they lived in huts. Defiantly he added: 鈥淭hese so-and-sos are not going to get me down.鈥�

In 1941, as the war worsened, I left the surgeon鈥檚 employment to become an inspector at an aircraft factory in Wimbledon, making spare parts for Lancaster bombers. There I remained for the duration, including three years working nights. Though I wrote regularly to Joe he received only a handful of my letters. I got one or two from him, in pencil on an open letter-card.

My only breaks from the factory were living in tents doing fruit-picking. Joe was held in Stalag 20B for five years, until the westward advancing Russians were within reach. The Germans abandoned the camp, marching a thousand prisoners onto the road. Without food, or supplies, and with a nervous armed escort, they lived off the land, ferreting up turnips and potatoes, sleeping in fields, ditches and sheds.

Though the prisoners greatly outnumbered their guards they realized their salvation lay in sticking together, rather than trying to escape. Not least because during their 1,000 mile march, they encountered a squad of SS officers who took four of the PoWs away and shot them. Joe helped to dig their graves.

By the end of their footsore pilgrimage to they-knew-not-where, many of their guards 鈥� realizing the game was up 鈥� had disappeared. As the exhausted prisoners reached an intersection on the road, tanks suddenly appeared with guns leveled at them. They were the Americans, who made as much fuss as they could of the ragged column of men.

In the lawless confusion of the war鈥檚 closing stages, in Germany, Joe found a motorbike. Without petrol he utilised his survival skills. Spotting a parked aircraft in a field he wheeled his motorcycle alongside and was stealthily siphoning fuel into its tank when the cockpit hood slid back and a Yankee voice barked: 鈥淲hat do you think you鈥檙e doing, Bud!?鈥�

Eventually Joe hitched a ride back to England in a Lancaster bomber and, days later, we were reunited at his home in Brighton. He was a little harder, tougher, and shorter-tempered. After five years we had to get to know each other again. But the magic was still there, and I had waited for him.

The army was less sentimental about his reappearance. They put him on embarkation leave with orders to return to war. He was sent to Yorkshire to rejoin his Regiment. But two months after his escape from German internment we were married in Brighton. We had a wonderful life for 47 years, with a daughter and son before Joe died in l992. Among millions of tragedies and wasted lives of World War Two, our romance seemed like a beacon.

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