Open Writing

Films we watched in 1944 included ‘The Way Ahead’ with David Niven, ‘Arsenic and Old Lace’ with Cary Grant, ‘This Happy Breed’ with Celia Johnson, Laurence Olivier’s stirring ‘Henry the Fifth’, and American films we enjoyed for pure escapism, Judy Garland’s ‘Meet me in St.Louis’, and Carmen Miranda in films when she wore fabulous fruity headdresses decorated with bananas and pineapples.

Anne Shelton sang ‘I’ll be seeing you’, and Gracie Fields entertained troops from 1939 in Europe, to Burma in October 1945. Vera Lynn was the Forces Sweetheart singing ‘We’ll Meet Again’, and George Formby played his ukulele and sang the famous Army song ‘Bless ‘Em All’, and ‘Run rabbit, Run’ which was Flanagan and Allen’s Palladium hit. Marlene Dietrich an American citizen from 1939, was a frontline entertainer and had a huge success singing ‘Lili Marlene’, a song ‘pinched’ from the Germans.

The Second Front started in August of ‘44, when down south in Sussex people watched Spitfires and German planes in dog fights over the English Channel.

In September the Allied forces landed in the south of France. The plan devised by Field Marshal Montgomery was to push north to join up with an airborne force kept in reserve since D day of 30,000 troops, to be dropped behind enemy lines, in Operation Market Garden. They were to capture nine Dutch and German canal and river bridges. As the sky over the channel filled with an Armada of planes in what was to be the largest air drop in military history, bombers loaded with troops flew over Arnhem and Nijmegen. The plan failed. The bridge at Arnhem was not taken. The lightly-armed airborne troops were soon running out of ammunition and food. At Keevil planes were loaded with supplies to drop over France, and men from Les’s airfield volunteered to go in the planes to push out the supplies. Twenty four planes went out, but only 12 came back.
In 1977 a star-studded film was made of this epic – ‘A Bridge Too Far’ with Dirk Bogarde, James Caan, Michael Caine, Robert Redford and Sean Connery. The music was written by John Addison, a soldier with the British XXX Corps.

In December 1944 the silent V2 rocket bombs arrived unannounced over South-east England. Only when an explosion went off would we know it had landed. A direct hit on a New Cross Woolworth store killed 160. The last V2 came over in March 1945.

On the 15th news came that U.S.Army Airforce’s bandsman Glen Miller had lost his life in a plane crash over the Channel. He is long remembered for his ‘Moonlight Serenade’.
On December 23rd Les was twenty-one. There was a party at his home, and there I met his ‘shipmate’ Tom Snook, who had worked alongside him on the airfield at Keevil.
It was then that Les and I were engaged to be married.

Next year On April 12th 1945 Franklin Roosevelt died.
In April U.S. ships were suffering kamikaze attacks and being destroyed by suicide dive-bombing Japanese planes at Okinawa.
On April the 26th we heard that Mussolini,with his mistress, had been shot by Italian partisans and their bodies hung upside down from scaffolding outside a petrol station.

On April 30th Hitler and his mistress retired from a meeting and went to their apartments in a bunker below the Reichstag. There they committed suicide by taking cyanide. The war in Europe ended seven days later and we celebrated on May 8th.

On V.E.Day (victory in Europe) on May 8th 1945 I met my old school friend Joan at Piccadilly. We went down the Haymarket to Admiralty Arch and walked along the Mall to Buckingham Palace. Hundreds were there in the bright sunshine, strangers to each other, their arms linked - four or five or eight abreast walking and singing and calling out, with the servicemen stopping to kiss the girls they met going in the other direction.
Although experiencing food shortage, dreaded air raids, separation and loss of friends and family we had both been lucky to escape having to face the worst horrors of war, which for us, looking back, we agreed had been good in parts, especially the bonding and feeling of togetherness between neighbours and even strangers, being friendly and helping one another.

But then, little did we know of the horrors the end of the war in Japan would bring.

Mine and Leslie’s wedding day was set for July 10th 1945 at All Saints church, Little Stanmore, at Canons Park, and famous for the organ that Handel once played. The night before the wedding, Les was travelling down from an airfield at Drem, near Edinburgh. I went up to meet him at Kings Cross station, but missed him. He had gone to his own home. So upset, with tears streaming down my face, a friendly porter comforted me, but when he asked me what was the matter, must have been puzzled when I replied “I’m getting married tomorrow.”
Joan Reynolds was one of my bridesmaids. My other schoolfriend, Louie Gibbons could not get away from duties, which I now know were at Bletchley Park, working on the Enigma code. Another P.L.A. girl, Joan Dumble was my second bridesmaid.
At the wedding breakfast in my parents’ house we had quite a party. On the 10th Les and my Dad went to the local church hall and borrowed the Scouts’ cart and brought home trestle tables to set up in our front room. Our wedding cake was made by a neighbour along our road who was a baker. Friends and family helped with ingredients.

Les’s mother arrived with a suitcase full of homemade meat patties and a couple of spare sheets for tablecloths. His young sister Lorna was my third bridesmaid. I wore a dress borrowed from the niece of my godmother, and carried red carnations. It was a rainy day, but all went well at the church.
I still remember that when the vicar asked Les to repeat the words –‘with all my wordly goods I thee endow’, I thought to myself ‘that means I’ve a half-share in his bike.’
After the wedding breakfast in our front room, two of the sailors, Tom Snook and Harry Scott went next door to borrow the piano. They pushed it up the front path and into our house for the traditional sing song. Then we left to get a tube train to Paddington, to stay overnight in a small hotel, and next morning caught a G.W.R. train down to Taunton where we changed for Ross-on-Wye in Herefordshire.

Some time that summer I went back with Les to Scotland by a train packed with service personnel. We stayed in a guest house in North Berwick, and I remember having salt, not sugar on my morning porridge.

Les worked most days on the airfield but had some time off and we went swimming from the dunes at North Berwick opposite the Bass Rock. There was a whale jawbone set up on the highest point of Berwick Law.

We went by bus into Edinburgh and went over the castle, in which great hall the walls were hung with shields, swords and two-handed claymores.

After our few days together we travelled back to London, and then out to Queensbury to my parents’ house in Tiverton Road, where we had the front bay-windowed bedroom. This house was to be our home for the next four years.