Chewing the Cud (4 page)

More important, it turned out that she bred budgerigars, which interested me since I also did in an aviary where I kept different-colored birds all together, breeding quite indiscriminately — greens, yellows, various sort of blues, resulting in some very odd shades. Whereas this girl, so she gave me to understand, kept the various colors in separate flights, so that each bred true.

Her name, I found out, was Myrle England. Myrle's mother's family had lived in India at some time, and the unusual spelling of her name (to rhyme with “girl”) had been found on a gravestone at Naini Tal.

We seemed to have quite a lot of things in common, especially a liking for animals. I had rabbits and tortoises and guinea pigs and mice and rats, but at that time I didn't have a dog of my own. Myrle did, a bullterrier called Sally, whom she had trained to do some clever things. If a door was left open, Sally would shut it on command by jumping up and pushing at it with her forefeet. She would also use those feet to “play” the piano, sitting up on the stool and producing loud crashing discords.

Over the next year or so, Myrle and I met a number of times, in the kind of uncomplicated relationship that children of that age have, and once the two families went on holiday at the same time to the same place. We played golf too, where I could show off by driving the ball twice
as far as she could (though seldom in the right direction). One thing annoyed me, though. We had a competition, throwing stones from the bank into the big pond that fed water to the paper mills, and I was very miffed to find that she could throw farther than I could.

I can't remember being heartbroken when Myrle's father changed his job and the England family moved away up into the Midlands. But I told myself that there was no girl I liked better.

We did not actually meet again until I had left Marlborough and was working on that Wiltshire farm. In the summer of 1940, when I was eighteen and she nearly so, I had a letter from her. I wrote back, hoping that perhaps we could meet again, and I suppose our respective mothers must have liaised about this. I had lodgings in Sutton Veny, and if Myrle were to come all the way from London to visit, then patently she would have to stay a night or two, and equally patently, the parents considered, she must be properly chaperoned. They were confident that my landlady, Mary Elliott, was just the person for such a job, and so very soon I found myself taking the bus into Warminster and then standing, waiting, outside the railway station.

Shall I recognize her? I thought. She will have changed, after all it's been two years or more. Then out through the
station doors she came. Once we had been much the same in height, but now I was a head taller. Her fair hair had been worn short, but now it hung in a blond pageboy style. Her big brown eyes were the same, but her face — what had happened to it? Much, much later she told me that she was worried about blushing — on just such an occasion as that reunion, perhaps — and someone (well-meaning — who knows?) had recommended that she use a certain kind of face powder, formulated to conceal blushes. It was a greenish powder. So there was I, confronted by this glamorous green-faced girl wearing a rather striking white-belted mackintosh with large lapels and epaulets.

I imagine we shook hands. I suppose that in due course I offered to carry her suitcase to the bus. I know that we talked all the way back to Sutton Veny — so much had happened to each of us since our last meeting — and during her stay we went for long walks and talked a lot more and laughed at the same sort of jokes and generally got on very well together. A great deal of the talk was about animals: our dogs and other pets, the farm animals, wild animals. When the visit was over and I had left her at the railway station, I rang Mother and told her roundly that I was going to marry Myrle one day.

There was to be one more meeting before we were both in uniform. This was in Devon, where her mother
and sister, Pam, had taken a holiday cottage. This meeting, like the other, ended at a railway station — Taunton, in fact — where I took a train north to Bristol and she went east to London. And for each of us it was this time a painful parting, neither wanting to leave the other.

In the summer of 1941, having decided that it was high time I joined up (I didn't want to wait to be conscripted, I wanted to volunteer), I said goodbye to family and friends and took the bus to Bath and thence the train to Devizes, where the Wiltshire Regimental Depot was. I reported myself at the gates to a sergeant who was everything that sergeants should be — full-chested, straight-backed, mustached, fierce-eyed, loud-mouthed. Then occurred the following conversation:

Self: “Please. I've come to join up.”

Sergeant: “Five and seven, or nine and eleven?”

Self (thinking, Heavens, does he mean years?): “I just want to join up for the duration of the war.”

Sergeant (scornfully): “We don't take duration soldiers in this regiment, sonny. You have to sign for a regular term.”

Self: “Oh, well, thanks. Goodbye.”

And off I marched back to Devizes Station and caught the next train for Bath and thence the next bus home. There was no one about as I walked up the drive. My younger brother, Tony, was away at school and Mother
and Father were not as yet sitting with their evening drinks under the big horse chestnut outside the drawing-room window. I climbed to the top of the tree and waited. Not long afterwards, they came out of the house and sat down in their chairs, Mother with a gin and tonic, Father with a pink gin. He lit his pipe, and she took from a case the first of many cigarettes, and they began to wonder aloud about their elder son, gone that day to take the King's shilling. Then, at some noise in the chestnut's leafy top, they looked up to see him climbing down.

Later that summer, I found out that the Brigade of Guards would accept duration enlistment (provided the volunteer was not too short), and I enlisted, as a recruit, in the Grenadier Guards and was sent off to the Guards' Depot at Caterham.

Myrle enlisted in the WAAF some months before I joined the army and was, in due course, commissioned before I was. She ended up at Fighter Command at Stanmore as a filterer, and once I took a train from Windsor to meet her. I don't remember that the guards-man saluted the pilot officer as he should have done, but I do recall that because of my lowly rank, I was not allowed into the officers' mess at Stanmore, and we had to say goodbye outside the gates of Fighter Command.

Looking back, it seems that at that time, the autumn of
1942, each of us had privately decided that we should get married, though this was never voiced. In fact, I never proposed to Myrle in formal fashion. One day she had come down from Stanmore to visit me at Windsor (I too was now commissioned), and we walked beside the Thames and then went to a riverside pub. There I said, “I suppose it would be a good idea to be married, wouldn't it?” And she said, “Yes.” So plans began.

Both of us were underage — twenty-one was the start of adulthood in those days — and so we needed, each of us, parental consent. Mother, Father, and Myrle's mother were all agreeable, despite our youth. After all, we'd known each other such a time that there was little point in a long engagement, and before long I was sure to be posted abroad, so the sooner the wedding could be arranged the better. Though each of them — Father especially — must have considered the chances of our marriage being a short one. Many young frontline infantry soldiers did not live — as Father had only just managed to do — to tell the tale.

Myrle's father was a slightly different proposition, for he was abroad, a group captain in the RAF, stationed in Egypt. Though he knew me, of course — as a boy at any rate — he was less enthusiastic about the need for haste and said that he thought we should have an engagement of at least six months. Thankfully, one way or another, he
was overridden, and we were married from my parents' house on 6 February 1943.

Because we were so young, we had not yet made many friends, so the guests were mainly composed of relations — mostly mine — and old friends of my mother's and father's. Three of my brother officers in the Grenadiers were there, and Jamie, onetime second-in-command of the Red Hand Gang, stood best man to me.

Father had somehow laid in ample supplies of wine — a difficult thing to do in those wartime days — and everyone drank to what some of them must have thought of as “those two children marrying.” So much so that two women, who had taken an instant dislike to one another, sat opposite at a table and let rip like fishwives.

Brother Tony, just turned fifteen, lay under the table (he'd had his share of wine) and listened as the names of various members of the animal kingdom were bandied above him: “Stupid cow!” “Making a pig of yourself!” “How catty can you be?” Next there was a thump, and Tony, lifting the edge of the tablecloth, was treated to the sight of the two women wrestling on the floor.

Then at last the local taxi took us away to Bath, where for the first time in our joint experience of railway stations, we rode off together on the puffer train. To Warminster, in fact, and then by taxi to Sutton Veny and Home Farm once
more and our kind ex-chaperone Mary and her husband, Ted, though this time we were not put in separate bedrooms. It wasn't a very long honeymoon — forty-eight hours was all each of us could get — but a little later we managed nine days' leave, which was spent at the Anchor at Porlock Weir on the Somerset coast, and we walked on Exmoor.

But time was fleeting, and before long I was on embarkation leave, to be posted overseas with a number of Grenadier officers. Myrle was given compassionate leave to come down to Windsor and stay, at the Castle Hotel.

Then at last came yet another railway-station scene. I remember, with the most painful clarity, leaning out of the window of a compartment filled with friends all excited to some degree at the prospect before them — as young men are before they learn what war's all about — and kissing my new wife goodbye and seeing this small solitary figure walking away down the platform of Windsor Station and not looking back, resolutely not looking back. I must have thought, Will I ever see her again?

It was to be eighteen months before I did.

First there was a long troopship voyage round the Cape of Good Hope and up the Red Sea to Egypt. Then a long drive westwards along the Mediterranean shore of Africa, to Tripoli, a journey that was to end with saying goodbye to a large number of chameleons that I'd collected en route — I didn't think they'd be too keen to accompany me on the invasion of Italy, which is what we were about to do.

We landed at Salerno, south of Naples, in early September of 1943 and slowly fought our way northwards. There were a lot of casualties, of course. Many men in my platoon were killed or wounded, and among the young officers of the battalion, I lost many friends. But apart from being frightened stiff a lot of the time, I was unscathed, even managing to miss one particular battle at Monte Camino, or Murder Mountain as it became known, where the casualties were terribly high. I was tucked up in bed in a Naples hospital with jaundice.

We fought slowly on northwards, the Germans defending each position bravely, so that in the mountainous terrain there was never any chance of a breakthrough. Then, at last, after eleven months of active service, I met my Waterloo (just south of Florence).

We were dug in among the trees of a hilltop wood, my platoon and that of my friend Charlie. Charlie was sent off on a patrol, leaving me supposedly looking after both
platoons. At around 5
A.M.
the Germans suddenly put down a heavy barrage on us, so that there seemed to be shells bursting everywhere around us as we huddled in our slit trenches. Suddenly the stonk was over and in came the German attack, mounted, I learned much later, by men of the Storm Battalion of the Hermann Goering Division, very violent men armed with small rocket guns and a flamethrower.

The flamethrower was the first thing I saw, about ten yards in front of me. Luckily it misfired, spilling out a pitiable flame not six feet long, and before its operator could repair the thing, one of my Bren gunners shot him dead. I was by now standing behind a tree, shooting at the enemy with my German pistol, when suddenly I saw clearly that the hand grenade that had just been lobbed at me was a British one, a thirty-six grenade, what used to be called a Mills bomb. I had this split second of seeing the thing clearly, as at cricket a fielder might see a skied ball on its way to him. I've always supposed that when Charlie went off on his patrol that night, his men had left some grenades ready primed and the men of the Storm Battalion of course made use of them.

This one would certainly have killed me had it not been for my good old tree, which must have taken a lot of the blast, but anyway the grenade still did me a good deal
of damage — leg, bottom, tummy. And though strangely I don't remember feeling much pain, no doubt because of shock, I do recall being very frightened that I would be left, lying helpless, to the tender mercies of those violent Germans. I cried out, as loudly as I could, “This position will be defended to the last man and the last round!” just like something out of a
Boys' Own
story.