The Day Gone By (57 page)

I never, I may say, patronized any of these ladies. In liberated Copenhagen it was not merely unnecessary: if you were a British soldier you had virtually to ward off the girls with both hands. Otherwise it was hard to get any work done.

The reaction of the Danes to the departing Germans was noteworthy. The Germans had been ordered to lay down their arms, surrender their transport and then to proceed home on foot. As they marched along the streets, the Danes on the pavements stood still, fell silent, turned towards them and stared. Mile by mile, as they went on, the silence continued. The ‘buses and taxis switched off their engines, the cyclists dismounted and stood waiting while they passed. This the Germans found demoralizing. Here and there a group might try to sing, but it soon petered out and all that could be heard was the clump of boots - those boots which had stamped all over the faces of Europe. I hope they wore out well before the German frontier.

Lilac time along the western shore of Øresund, the blue sea stretching away to Sweden. Not too much work to do and friends everywhere. For the first time for more than five years, there was no need to take thought for the enemy. Walking on the battlements at Helsingør (Elsinore); looking across to Helsingborg and watching, midway, the German ships at their appointed task of clearing the narrow strait of mines. Every now and then would come a satisfying explosion, suggesting that a mine had gone up before being swept.

At the Royal Opera House there was a production of
Porgy and Bess,
and most of us went to see it. It was, of course, unavoidably under-rehearsed, but since it was so opportune — an opera by a Jew about negroes - nobody was concerned to find fault. Indeed, no one was concerned to find fault with anything much.

One night, coming out of a theatre, I found myself dancing arm-in-arm with a tubby, middle-aged Danish gentleman in a straw boater. Round and round: we grew very merry. I took off his hat, wrote ‘FRIJ DANMARK' all round it and put it on. We attracted quite a little crowd. In the end I became a shade nervous in case some senior officer might pass by (we had all been adjured to maintain soldierly behaviour and remain correctly dressed at all times) so I bowed out, shaking his hand; but not before he had given me the hat. I'm afraid I didn't offer him my red beret in exchange, though. It was much too precious to me: and of that more anon.

Despite the jollification we all knew very well - all save the older veterans - that for us this was nothing but a respite, a breathing-space. Hitler had ceased from troubling, Europe lay in ruins and someone was no doubt going to be detailed to pick them up. It wouldn't be us, though. Far away, east of India, stood the still-unconquered Mikado. He might be groggy, he might be on the ropes, but he was still undefeated and he had an appalling reputation for fighting to the last man and taking no prisoners if he could possibly help it. The Americans, as well as our own poor men in Burma, had suffered untold horrors at the hands of the Japanese. And this enemy still remained against us in the field. If the experience of the Australians in New Guinea and of the Americans in Okinawa and Iwojima was anything to go by, there seemed likely to be a very bad time ahead.

The Japanese had no airborne forces. We had been told that they had said that they did not recognize airborne troops as soldiers and that their stated policy was to kill all whom they might encounter. I myself felt deeply, horribly afraid of the coming campaign and it was only pressure of group morale which prevented me from showing it.

I already knew that I didn't qualify for demobilization. The criteria were simple and fair. Only two things counted; your age and the length of time you had been in the service. These, coinciding on a sliding scale, produced your ‘demob.' number. The lower it was, the quicker you were due for release. Mine turned out to be 32. To be demobbed forthwith, I would have to have rated a number of 26 or lower: I'd only done five years.

So in due course I found myself again on Kastrop airfield, technically in command of ‘a hundred men' - some due for demobilization, some in the same boat as myself. We were just a scratch lot: most were strangers to me. When we reached England an amusing incident occurred. The R.A.F. immigration control officer, armed in the usual way with a load of papers, came up to me where I stood at the head of my ‘hundred men' and said ‘These chaps of yours aren't carrying any goods liable to import duty,
are
they?' ‘Well,' I replied, slow in the uptake as usual, ‘I really don't know: you see, I was only put in charge of them -' ‘But they're
not
carrying any imported tobacco, spirits, dutiable porcelain goods, jewels or similar precious articles' - he thrust the papers, on a clipboard, under my nose - ‘
are
they,
are
they? You sign here, by the way.
There
!' It said ‘Captain Adams and a hundred men.'

I signed, and the hundred men, staggering slightly under the contraband loads, hoisted their bulging kit-bags, right-turned and marched into the adjacent hangar for a cup of tea.

I had a fortnight's leave before reporting to - yes - to Bulford. I spent it at home, fishing on the Kennet, for it was the mayfly season. I fished wherever I would, for the riparian owners were mostly themselves away at the war, and the keepers, if not also away, were either in the local or readily amenable to a five-pound note. I kept thinking ‘What does it matter, anyway? I doubt whether all that many of us will be coming back.' The state of mind of most people during the months between the defeat of Germany and the capitulation of Japan must, for those who did not experience it, be hard to imagine. The whole country was sick, sick to death of the war. Apart from our casualties and our orphaned children, our cities were all dismally dilapidated. There were shortages of everything - meat, eggs, milk, coal, clothes, sweets, petrol, even bread. Apart from these deprivations, everywhere marriages lay in ruins; and friends, sweethearts, sons, daughters, business partners - all those archetypal companions who make life worth living - were separated far, far apart. For most people, life had grown increasingly wearisome and had few or no pleasures. And this state of affairs was believed likely to continue, possibly even to get worse; no one knew for how long. In the Far East, thousands of our soldiers were dying of starvation and ill-treatment at the hands of a cruel enemy who did not recognize the Red Cross and who allowed his prisoners no medicines and no letters to or from home. Many of us were convinced that these evil men would probably take a long time to defeat, for each one of them was readier to die than to surrender. For example, when forced by the Australians to retreat to the northern beaches of New Guinea, they had constructed defence trench walls from the rotting bodies of their own dead before being literally driven into the water. Their air force had no lack of volunteer kamikaze pilots, and these, we reckoned, could not but cost us very dear.

One fine evening in mid-June I caught, downstream of the little plank bridge which crosses the Kennet at Halfway, the best trout I had ever yet taken from that happy river. I had no business there, of course: that made it all the more delightful. It was early dusk: I was using a Coachman and was standing on the gravel in the water and my gumboots. I had let my fly drift down to right angles of me, under the overhanging boughs of, I think, a weeping willow, though it may have been a horse chestnut, and was about to recover it when the trout rose. He ran upstream like blazes. When he leapt I did not for a few moments realize that it was my fish, for he seemed so far away. When I did realize it, I became excited by the size. He leapt two or three times, falling back each time into a bed of reeds. I fully expected to lose him, but at length he came out. Then he ran downstream, gaining any amount of slack line which I couldn't take in fast enough and finally swimming between the legs of my boots before turning upstream yet again. I pulled one boot off, put my foot back in the water and freed my leader. The trout was still there and a minute or two later I had him on the bank. I remember thinking that while this would probably be the last trout I'd ever be likely to catch, nevertheless that evening couldn't, now, be taken away. Like all the best things - the begonias, for example, or Jennifer - the adventure was illicit; but it couldn't very well catch up with me. I was bound for the Far East. This was the best parenthesis I have ever known.

Then off to Bulford. So I've soldiered at Aldershot and at Bulford, though never at Catterick. John Smith and I reported together to H.Q. 5th Independent Parachute Brigade; he still Brigade Signals officer, I still a Brasco.

5th Para. Brigade, paradoxically, turned out to be a lot more enjoyable than 1st. This, to me, was unexpected, for the brigade were part of 6th Airborne Division and veterans of Normandy and the Rhine crossing (where they had had a lot of casualties). Yet no one treated us as anything but friends. The brigadier was Nigel Poett (now General Sir Nigel). Poett was, of course, a regular, and had commanded the newly formed 5th Brigade in the Normandy landings. He was a very courageous commander, who liked to show a lot of dash and personal example. For instance, he had been firm that on the night of 5-6 June 1944 he himself was going to be the first member of his brigade to land on Norman soil. During the brigade's subsequent action east of the Orne, he had shown most gallant leadership; and had done so again in the so-called ‘Operation Varsity' - the Rhine crossing operation - which began on 24 March 1945. (The casualties there were awful.) He was now taking 5th Brigade to India as the spearhead of the larger airborne force which was to follow. We were going to attack the Japanese as part of an amphibious invasion of the Malay peninsula.

Poett and I were, of course, not at all compatible types. (Later, after I'd been demobilized from the brigade, I learned from my friend Denis Rendell that one day Poett had recollected me, in the mess, as ‘that quite awful ass'.) Yet you couldn't dislike him. He was polite to you. He wasn't frigid, like Lathbury. Nor was his entourage made up of people from the
Tatler.
He may not have liked me personally, but he was always friendly, pleasant and what Roy Emberson used to call ‘genuine'. When I was in hospital in Poona, having had a minor operation, he came to see me. I didn't forget that. I found his mess much jollier and fuller of likeable people than 1st Brigade's: but then, of course, they weren't brooding on the after-effects of Arnhem.

Names mean little or nothing except to the memoirist himself: but all the same I'd like to put down a few. Jim Webber, M.C., commanding the H.Q. Defence Platoon; an exceptionally kindly, gentle man; Denis Rendell, his second-in-command, one of Colonel Frost's original officers in Tunisia. Denis, a true Mercutio, came of a military family. He had been awarded the M.C. after having escaped in Italy and proceeded to organize and maintain an Allied escape route through the Italian lines. He told me that he had stayed to do this on account of an Italian girl whom he didn't want to part from. His M.C. cut little ice at home, for his father was a V.C. and his brother a D.S.O. John Reidy, Denis's subaltern, was perhaps the most amusing person I have ever known; he made you howl and roll about. (‘Twarn't what he said, ‘twas the way that he said it.) Tommy Farr, the G.3 Ops., (who had been wounded in Normandy), became a good friend; an even closer friend was Tommy Hanley, the Brigade H.Q. medical officer, with whom I was to share a billet in Singapore. I also, of course, made various friends among the officers (my ‘customers') in the battalions, and of these I recall with particular warmth a certain John Awdry. Thirty years later I put him into
The Plague Dogs
as the parachute officer who refuses to shoot Snitter and Rowf on the orders of the time-serving Secretary of State. We met again recently and he was much the same.

The Brigade flew out to Karachi via Corsica and Alam Haifa: and it was at Alam Haifa that an incident occurred which still hurts in memory after more than forty years. The ‘plane had landed at mid-day and I was one of a group of officers invited to lunch in the R.A.F. officers' mess. Of course, like all ‘ports of passage' messes, it was accustomed to entertaining heterogeneous bunches of people - anything from royalty to civilian journalists.

Naturally, I had become very fond of my red beret. It was the one which I had been dished out with on my first night with 250 Company at Lincoln; the one Paddy Kavanagh had told me that we ‘didn't quite' tuck under our shoulder epaulettes. By now it and I had seen a lot together, and I had done it proud. There was a place in London where you could buy hand-embroidered regimental cap badges and have them stitched on. They cost a bit, of course, but they were worth it. John Gifford had encouraged his officers to wear them. Nearly all of us did, including myself. I had hung that beret up in innumerable messes, pubs., estaminets and hospitable homes in France, Belgium, Holland and Denmark. It had never occurred to me that it might be stolen. Before going in to lunch at Alam Haifa, I left it on a table in the ante-room in the usual way. When I came out it had been stolen. It was irreplaceable, of course: no embroidered cap badges in India. For my remaining six months in the Army I wore a plain brass cap badge, and felt the loss every day. I feel it still.

At Bahrein it was so hot that you couldn't sleep and had no need to dry yourself when you stepped out of the shower. European camp personnel rose at first light, worked until about eight or nine a.m. and then went under cover. Work resumed at about five p.m. and continued until early dark. Only the natives could bear middle-of-the-day conditions. I have to say that from what I saw they seemed to work well enough.

Having reached Karachi from England in three days, we then took a week to travel by train to Bombay via Delhi. It was during this journey that Tommy Hanley taught me to play ‘Five Letter Words', while I taught him to play piquet. These pastimes whiled away many wearisome, clanking hours.