大象传媒

The following morning everybody was awake with radios switched on waiting for the news when it was announced that the allies had started the invasion of Europe via the beaches of Normandy. It was D Day, the 6th June 1944. During the middle of that first morning and for the next few days ambulance trains passed through Porton station taking the wounded troops to the hospitals in southern England. and those of us that saw them were once more reminded of the horror of war.
The new year of 1945 was ushered in with a dance at the Garrison Theatre, where there was a tremendous atmosphere with every one convinced that there would be peace by the end of the year. I had already been home with Doris to meet her parents and to Liverpool, for Doris to meet my mother. Towards the end of February I took a weekend leave commencing on a Friday night to join Doris and her sister Kathleen, also an ATS, who were both on leave together.
Kathleen was due to get married in a month and her fianc茅e, a young naval rating who lived locally and who had also managed to get a weekend leave was there so naturally the talk was of the wedding. Suddenly events took on a drastic turn. I found myself agreeing for a number of practical reasons that as Doris and I intended to get married it would be a good idea that we should all do it together and have a double wedding!. A proposition to which everybody present agreed. For me it turned to be a shortest leave I ever had. Early next morning, the Saturday, we visited the vicar who agreed to marry us providing I could get my banns called on time. This meant the next day! I caught the afternoon train back to Porton where, with good luck, I found the padre and arranged for my banns to be read out next morning.
Everything was now fixed up for the great event, a day where nothing could go wrong, or could it? Doris had already gone home on marriage leave and my leave was fixed to start the day before the wedding when, without warning, the day before I was due to start my leave all army leave was cancelled!
Bubbly Bennett was away from camp and the only person I could turn to was the commander of the depot battery, Hooky Walker, from whom I expected no help at all. Contrary to all my fears he turned up trumps. He was not able to give me overnight passes but he could give me a number of separately dated 12-hour passes. These, he maintained, were not strictly leave because they did not allow me out of camp after lights out, but to this he was prepared to turn a blind eye, but it would be up to me to avoid the military police during these hours. Getting carried away with his own enthusiasm and swearing me to secrecy he then lent me a complete set of civilian clothes, which largely overcame the problem of my being picked up and I got home in time to kiss the bride and go and sleep in the house of a relative.
The army had now modified our uniforms so that we could wear a collar and tie. but on the morning of the wedding, the 31st March 1945, when I laid out my clothes my collar and tie were missing, Doug and I must be the only bridegrooms participating in a double wedding who have spent the morning of their wedding dashing around London on a tandem bicycle trying to buy a khaki collar and tie. Having sorted out these minor difficulties the wedding itself was a huge success and I returned to camp in time for lights out on Monday evening a 24 year old married man with a marriage certificate which showed our age as 22, the age of the other bride and bridegroom, Doug and Kath. I suppose confusion is infectious and effects Registrars and Vicars as well as mortal man!
Apart from our theatre Salisbury also had its own excellent Garrison Theatre which we patronised whenever we could. Arriving early for a performance one dark, winter evening Doris and I, wrapped up in our overcoats, were sitting and chatting on one of the seats provided on the concrete promenade that controlled the flow of one of the rivers that pass through the town. Doris, whose sense of direction was not her strongest point, suddenly realised that time was getting on and suggested that we went. Before I could stop her she got up from the seat and walked straight out and over the edge of the promenade into the river that flowed below!
I had no idea where she had landed but directed by her calls, I took a chance and jumped in to find her struggling in the water. Fortunately it was not deep but she had twisted her ankle and not being able to stand, was in a sorry plight. It was quite a struggle to free her from her overcoat, which was immediately swept away, and it was hard work to lift her to the promenade and climb up there myself. When we got on dry land there was not a soul about that we could ask for help, although while we had been struggling in the water a couple had walked past and completely ignored our plight. It was now very cold and as we were both shivering there was no alternative but to pick Doris up and carry her to where we could get help, fortunately there was a small service women's hostel quite close.
The ladies at the hostel were extremely helpful and Doris was rushed off for a bath and bed and I was given a cup of cocoa and shooed out of the door. Hatless and with my clothes almost freezing on me I was picked up by a military police patrol for being improperly dressed but good sense prevailed and they believed my story and feeling like a hero, they escorted me to the bus station where I caught a bus to camp.
The next morning I received a message to report to the medical centre where Black Jack, the medical officer, asked me in a very solemn manner why things had gone so wrong between my wife and I that I had found it necessary to push her in the river! Then his face broke into a smile when he asked if I would care to go in the ambulance to pick her up and bring her back to the camp. This was Black Jack at his best, a very human man.
Among the research that Porton was concerned in was the production of smoke. Over the years a great deal of research had been carried in this field, including producing the prototypes of numerous smoke generators such as those dropped off the back of battleships to produce smoke screens, or fitted under the wings of aircraft for the same purpose. It was quite normal to see aeroplanes flying extremely low over the camp on their run in to lay dense streams of smoke across the firing range. It was on one of these runs in a Westland Lysander, the aeroplane with spats that was used to ferry undercover agents to occupied France, that I had my first flight.
Examples of the smoke generators produced at Porton were stored in a building known as the progress store. That was until the night when, with a loud bang the roof blew off! When we, the intrepid firemen, arrived upon the scene the building was generating a fantastic multi-coloured smoke screen, which we later learned, caused some panic as it travelled for many miles and through many of the villages on Salisbury Plain.
I spent the next hour or so on the top of a ladder with a hosepipe over my shoulder, encouraged by shouts from the sergeant at its foot, and poured gallons of water into the fire below. About a month later I discovered that the sergeant who had his foot on the ladder was mentioned in dispatches. Ah well, as they say "If you can't take the heat you shouldn't have joined"!
As the war in Europe progressed and the crossing of the Rhine became imminent, a demonstration of laying smoke was put on for senior military officers which Lord Louis Mountbatten attended. On the night before this demonstration a group of about thirty Colonels and Brigadiers slept overnight in temporary accommodation provided by the unflappable Bubbly Bennett. He introduced me to them as Lofty and at a drop of a hat made me their collective batman; a job which mainly consisted of showing them the way to the Officers Mess and providing shaving water and early morning tea. I must have been the only private soldier in the annals of the British army who had Brigadiers calling him Lofty and trying to wheedle more tea from him.
Within six weeks of our wedding the war in Europe ended with the German surrender, a day where it seemed that half the British army, including my new wife and I, had boarded trains to London to help celebrate the day that the lights came on again all over the country. It was six years after we had opened up the mobilising stores at Blackdown Camp. It was a marvellous occasion and four months later we were celebrating the Japanese surrender and the end of the war. A war which had cost many families the lives or health of their loved ones. My own family having suffered the loss of my eldest brother and my cousin's loosing his sight.
Things had been happening at a rapid pace. Since the end of the war in Europe all married women in the forces had been offered their discharge. Doris took advantage and went home to her parents. Also, during this period, a general election had been called.
There was a great air of change and expectancy in the country. Many of the men I had served with in the army had suffered in the depression of the thirties and were quite determined that they did not want to go back to that kind of situation and were equally determined that they were not putting back into power the party that they believed had caused their problems. It was quite remarkable when the electioneering actually started, to go into Salisbury, where a Brigadier, standing as a prospective Member of Parliament, held public meetings surrounded by troops whom he was entreating to vote labour and form a new government. There certainly was a spirit of revolution in the air with the result that, to the joy of most of my comrades, the Conservatives were ousted and the Labour Party, with a large majority, was swept into power.
The end of my service as a soldier was now in sight and was speeded up when, at Porton, there was an accident when some gas was released resulting in reactivating my old chest condition. Next morning I woke up in hospital to find a priest, in all his regalia, standing at the foot of my bed and shortly afterwards a white faced Doris, who had been sent for, walked into the ward.
Leaving hospital, at the end of that unforgettable and momentous year, I found myself in a demobilising centre in the west country, one of the many thousands passing from military to civilian life in the course of less than a day.
Demobilisation was a simple but slick operation. It started with a meal that was served on an all day basis. The new Army Catering Corps were now in occupation and for the first time since I joined the army I saw a menu displayed in the dinning hall and could actually choose what I wanted from a large selection of dishes. My last meal as a soldier was excellent and served in civil surroundings without regard to rank.
From the dinning room the next step was to an officer sitting at a table who took your pay book and in return issued you with a civilian ration card, a leave pass, a month's pay and a railway travel warrant. With a final salute the formalities were over and it was just a few steps into the clothing store, which occupied most of the mobilising centre.
The army had used some imagination to make parting from them easy and had laid out the clothing store exactly like the men's department of a large departmental shop. There was a huge variety of civilian clothes laid out for easy choice. They ranged from a wide selection of three-piece suits to sports jackets and trousers, shoes, shirts, hats, ties, socks, overcoats, mackintoshes and collar studs. The choice seemed endless, but unlike the quiet restraint of a departmental store their customers were boisterous and noisy, walking around in various stages of undress as they selected their new attire.
Many of the people passing through the system seemed to be in a mild form of shock, as if unable to accept that the day they had dreamt of was actually becoming a reality and that they were finally on the threshold of a reunion with their families and freedom from the military discipline and the privations of war that they had been subjected to for so many years of their lives.
A great luxury of the clothing centre was the number of polite and patient civilian gentlemen, with tape measures around their necks, who were there to help and advise you on your choice and to ensure that you got the right sized collar and your clothes were a reasonable fit. My choice, a grey, pin stripped suit, a belted Macintosh and a trilby hat, the kind of outfit favoured by most film detectives, was packed into a neat box fitted with a carrying handle.
With my box of new clothes in one hand and my military kit stuffed into my kit bag and slung over my shoulder I walked away from the army, six years and ninety days after I had joined it. A much more experienced, better educated and wiser man and, like most of those I had shared the day with, grateful that I was alive and living in a free country.

(final part) Entered by Petersfield Library

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