Shattered Dreams (20 page)

He snuck into the billet where Mick, who liked to catch up with his rest when he was able to, was lying fast asleep. He placed the pretty model into the bed beside him and tiptoed out again, sorely regretting that he couldn’t be there to check out his friend’s reaction.

In months to come he met up with a soldier who had been in the billet when Mick awoke. His first question had been, “Has that Eddie Dockerty’s company been through?”

The billet had been in an uproar, as Mick had put the model in another sleeper’s bed, who happened to be a sergeant, then the sergeant awoke and put it into another sleeper’s bed. In this way the model travelled around the billet, until a grumpy man put his boot under her and she was tossed into the bushes.

Deep into the Dutch countryside, Mick and the town were left far behind as the company marched on. Although still very flat, the area was thickly wooded. Many areas could only be described as thickets, where vast stretches of un-penetrable slender saplings all reached up to the sky for a place to live.

They were nearing a river, where the woods were giving way to farmer’s fields and a big black mill stood sentinel at the side of the road. In the distance there was the outline of a small town. At this point the company was halted and a reconnaissance party sent out. Eddie was one of them.

An earlier recce had reported that there were snipers in the area and another factor was the sandy soil around there. Vehicles couldn’t operate on the sandy tracks, so everything had to be brought along by hand.

Slipping through the streets of the quiet town of Cuyk, situated as it was on the West bank of the Dutch Meuse, Eddie came upon a convent. A nun was outside getting water from a copper boiler and looked up in alarm when Eddie spoke to her. She backed away, spilling the water from her flowing bucket in her haste. He spoke gently and, although she was afraid, she pointed to the convent and motioned him to stay. She returned a little later with a priest.

Eddie was not much better placed with a priest as he didn’t speak English either and kept talking away in French. When he made no headway, he too went away. He came back accompanied by a tall, thin girl in her early twenties. She looked sternly at Eddie through her steel-rimmed spectacles before she spoke to him in perfect English.

“Who are you and what do you want?” Her voice sounded quite chilly.

“I want some information,” Eddie answered simply.

He explained to the girl that he was an English soldier who had been sent to find out the enemy’s position. Where they still in the town or had they evacuated? The girl looked at him with a blank expression on her face.

“Where are the Germans?” he asked urgently. “Are there snipers in the town? If so where are they placed? Please tell me if you know, the information is vital to us!”

The girl turned to the priest and spoke to him quickly in Dutch, translating what the soldier had said to her. She waited for his reply, then turned again to Eddie.

“The priest said that if we give you the information and the Germans come back, then they will take reprisals. They have already shot two Americans who came here asking questions.”

“I am here with a regiment which has never been pushed back since we invaded the Normandy beaches,” said Eddie proudly. The priest listened carefully as the girl translated. He looked at Eddie standing there. He saw a thin, dark, weary man, but he sensed the determination that would brook no refusal. He heaved a great sigh and spoke in Dutch to the girl again.

“Give him the information he wants… but first we must tell him about our refugees.”

They took Eddie down to a dimly lit cellar. He saw about a dozen people, mostly the elderly and small children lying around on rough bedding.

“These people are here for sanctuary. We are putting them as well as ourselves at risk in telling you what you want to know. Tell me again what it is you want.”

They started to talk. The girl gave him all the information he needed. “There are snipers in the church steeple, in houses all around the town. Some have already gone across the river and they shoot at the people if they walk down the lane to buy food from the farms.”

She spoke rapidly, telling him everything he needed to know.

Eddie thanked her and the priest, smiled gently at the nervous-looking onlookers, then left the convent, hoping that he wouldn’t be seen by the enemy. He used great caution and what cover he could find, bearing in mind what the girl had said about the Germans being in the town.

Back at camp, he found his sergeant who listened attentively, then the man sent a runner with a message for the C.O. The message came back that they should all take cover as they were going to shell.

The platoon fled to the nearest shelter and as he ran Eddie’s thoughts were on the church steeple, glad he wasn’t up there when the guns started up.

The enemy retreated over the Meuse and at last the town was clear again. There were more troops moving in before Eddie saw the Dutch girl again. He found that her name was Anny and she had learned to speak her excellent English when she had been at college.

He went back to the convent as often as he could and on his first visit there he had found a young novice lying unconscious by a heap of fuel at the rear of the building. He summoned help, then carried her into her cell. She was very frail and Eddie thought that she may well be suffering from malnutrition, so he went back to the billet and collected all the chocolate rations from the men who would part with them. He went back and inquired how the young novice was doing and took the chocolate with him as a present for her. From then on he was made very welcome, even allowed to work in the kitchen where he found it was a hive of industry. The sisters were quiet as they worked on their various tasks of cooking and cleaning for the convent residents.

It was actually quite a large community and Anny, only too happy to practice her English, was often there.

One day, a small accordion was being played by a young boy in a corner of the kitchen. Anny invited Eddie to try the Dutch style of dancing and gave him a pair of clogs to dance in. He found it much faster than the ballroom dancing that he was used to, but it was bouncy and exhilarating and he found himself out of breath when the music stopped.

The convent washing hung down from a pulley suspended from the ceiling and Eddie and Anny had brushed it several times as they had danced around the kitchen. Finally a pair of stockings fell off the pulley and into a pan of soup that was bubbling away on the stove. Eddie glanced around the kitchen apprehensively, but as no one was looking, Anny fished the stockings out of the soup, wrung them out in the nearest sink, then placed them back on the pulley.

Eddie remarked that the soup may taste a little different than usual. Anny just smiled, it was not going to be her supper.

When more troops moved in and occupied the town, Eddie’s platoon was billeted in the hospital wing of the convent. Eddie was really out of order, when he asked in a jocular tone, that the young novice he had brought the chocolate to should give him a kiss. The young girl blanched, dropped the cleaning bucket she was holding and fled.

She must have complained to Anny, who came posthaste to give him a lecture on his bad behaviour. He didn’t appear to be very repentant, as when she had finished, he asked her to give him a kiss instead. He came as near to having his face slapped as he ever did!

She forgave him later when she got to know him a little better, becoming good friends. There was no language barrier, so he could talk freely and she came to understand the kind of man he was.

The people in the convent were the only Dutch folk that Eddie had met at first. He supposed there must have been others, but he never met them. After the troops had conducted house to house searches in the town, more people started to appear. Eddie never found out where they had been to, whether they had been evacuated by the Germans, or gone into hiding, he never knew.

By the time that Eddie’s company moved out, the town had come back to near normality, or as near as possible in war time. The Canadians were the next troops in, but by that time Eddie’s regiment were some miles south of Cuyk. When they had made camp, the Major asked Eddie to give him a haircut.

The Major sat on an upturned jerry can by a slit trench, while Eddie snipped away at his hair. A shell came out of the blue sky and buried its nose in the soil some yards away, but it didn’t explode. Eddie had thrown himself into the trench in two seconds flat! The Major, with the towel still around his neck and the comb in his hair, looked down at him from above.

“My word, Dockerty,” he said mildly. “Your nerves must be in a terrible state, we will have to do something about them.”

Eddie expected to be given leave, or at least be sent to the M.O., but instead the Major, not given to running a one man welfare state and convinced that therapy was the best thing, sent Eddie to cut hair in a place called St. Anthonis. He was instructed to open up one of the empty shops there, but he was only to cut the hair of his own ‘A’ company men.

It was night time when Eddie arrived in St. Anthonis. He was hungry, thirsty and very tired, having had to walk fifteen miles to get there. He could hear a cook’s blower going as he passed a building, so he tapped on the door and, after explaining his mission and how far he had travelled, asked for food and drink. The cook, who was a surly man, refused him saying that his rations were up the line and there’d be nothing for him there.

Eddie went to bed in an empty shop that night feeling very hungry, but in the morning, after he had folded his blanket, had a wash, dressed himself, then opened the shop, putting a sign outside which said he was the ‘A Company Barber’; the door opened and in came his very first customer. He sat down in the chair provided and waited to have his hair cut.

“You can get out of that chair and clear off,” Eddie said when he came in from the privy out back and saw the cook had come for a haircut.

“I want my haircut!” The cook said angrily.

“Can’t you read? My sign says ‘A Company Barber’. So clear off, you’re not from ‘A’ Company.”

The cook fussed and fumed, but he had to leave without a haircut.

Eddie cut the hair of everyone available in the company and when he had finished he asked the sergeant in charge if he could go to visit friends in Cuyk. Anny had extended an invitation to him as he was leaving, that he should go and meet her parents if he was ever that way again.

The sergeant said that he could, but he was unable to give him a pass. There was also no transport available, as the vehicles were all engaged in taking supplies up to the front line. He had to make his own way back again and found it hard going, as tracks had been made in the soft sand by heavy tanks and trucks and, as there had been a recent downpour, there were lots of pools of rain. He had to take all his possessions with him, as the hairdressing tools were too precious to be left behind.

Eddie walked through miles of the flat Dutch country with its long flat roads. Had he been at home, there would have been shortcuts he could follow, but in this foreign country it was safer to stick to the roads. He changed his mind, though, as he got nearer to the town and the area became more familiar.

He walked some way down a dark high-hedged lane, looking forward to seeing his friends at the convent, especially Anny, but suddenly the hairs on the back of his neck stiffened. He stopped in his tracks. Was that a row of gun barrels poking out through the hedge to the right of him further along the lane?

After a few frozen minutes, he noticed that all was silent, no one had moved or spoken. He forced himself to move forward and investigate.

He moved himself up to the first of the gun barrels, only to find on closer inspection, that it was just a big bluff. Slim tree trunks had been trimmed and shaped exactly like guns, then placed in position in the hedges. Eddie had experienced tricks like this before, but this one was clever and had really scared him. He continued along the lane walking on the vehicle tracks, in case there was an unexploded land mine.

It was getting really dark when Eddie finally reached his destination. He only had verbal permission to be there by the sergeant, so as the Canadians were occupying the town by then, he was nervous of encountering their Military police or any English ones for that matter. He had sped silently through the deserted streets towards the convent, which was the only place he knew.

His heart sank, as he knocked on the thick oak of the convent, when he realised that it was possible that Anny had gone back home for the night, making conversation impossible with the convent dwellers and he didn’t know where she lived.

After a short interval the door was opened by a nun and, without speaking, she beckoned Eddie to go inside, then ran quickly to fetch the priest to see him. Eddie managed to convey to the priest that he wanted to speak with Anny and the small boy on the bicycle was dispatched with a message.

Anny came quickly once the priest’s message had been given to her. She had many calls on her services as a linguist now that the Canadians were billeted in the town. She was surprised to see Eddie in the courtyard, possibly because he had taken up her invitation so quickly, but now his duties as a barber were over, he had been left to cool his heels.

He was made very welcome by her parents, though they couldn’t speak a word of English, but with Anny interpreting, they were able to communicate.

Anny also had other brothers and sisters who had learnt to speak English at school, so they were really happy to practice the language too. He never found out, though, why Anny had introduced him as “Jimmy” but he was happy to be called just that.

When the meal was over, a simple meal, but enjoyed by all as they had only recently been reunited as a family, the daughters got up to clear the table and Eddie offered to help with the washing up. They were horrified. It wasn’t done for a man to do a woman’s job, he was to sit with the father, a small grey-haired man, whom Eddie had been told was a businessman, but if he hadn’t known that, thought he looked like a professor. The matter was settled and Eddie sat with Father who had produced a stone bottle containing schnapps to share. Eddie, who was used to drinking brandy, found the spirit very palatable and he settled back quite comfortably with his new found friends.