大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by a volunteer from CSV Berkshire on behalf of Frederick Payne and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr Payne fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I was 20 years of age when the war broke out; I went to the Labour Exchange to sign up. I wanted to be in the Navy, but they were full so I joined the Royal Fusiliers.

I was in France when we were retreating towards Dunkirk in 1940. We didn鈥檛 know where we were going, thousands of civilians, women and children were caught up in the troop movements, and we just went with the rest towards the coast. Although we didn鈥檛 know where we were going, I suggested to my mate that we should take a shortcut through a field. As we went through the field we heard a woman crying. We knew that there was not a lot that we could do, but we decided to find the source of the crying and see if there was anything that we could do, though we doubted it.

We found the woman in the field having just given birth to a baby. We knew we couldn鈥檛 leave them both like that. We looked at the umbilical cord and although we knew very little about delivering babies, we knew that the umbilical cord should be cut. All we had for the job was my dirty jack knife. We cut the cord and threw what was left away. I asked my friend what we should do next and he said he thought we should tie a knot in the cord attached to the baby which we did.

The whole area was being bombarded with machine gun fire, we couldn鈥檛 leave the baby like that so I took my shirt off and my friend his vest and we wrapped the baby in our clothes. We made them both as comfortable as we could in a shelter and then continued on our way to Dunkirk, minus shirt and vest.

When we got near the beach all we could see were tins of peaches in boxes by the side of the road. We were ushered along the road with the other soldiers. Once on the beach things became much more orderly, and we waded to a small boat. The small boat took us out to a bigger boat A Welsh Lance Corporal pushed me towards the rope of the bigger boat and helped me climb up the rope on to the top of the ship.

We sat on the deck and in the midst of all the firing, shouting and bawling someone took out a ukulele and started to play. His singing helped to kill the noise of everything else as we set off across the sea to England.

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