Apple Blossom Time (24 page)

The tide was a long way out and we paddled across firm, rippled sand to the pontoon footbridge that connected the beach to the land. We were just beyond the western edge of the landing beaches codenamed Gold. The beach was littered with the debris of invasion. Massive poles, once angled into the sand and armed with anti-landing mines, Rommel’s asparagus, had been disarmed, dug up and shoved aside by tractor. Barbed wire had been cut and torn apart like hopelessly tangled knitting. There were burnt-out vehicles, abandoned hulks, their smell dissipated by the seasidy scents of salt water and seaweed. The pleasant little family resort was shattered, fought through street by street, its houses roofless, windowless, fought through room by room.

The massive bulk of the Mulberry harbour, with its protecting sunken blockships and its floating quays, stretched back out to sea behind us in a pattern that must have made sense to someone. A complicated network of pontoons allowed vehicles to roll right up to the ships for offloading. There were lighters and barges hurrying backwards and forwards through the shallows. Cranes rose and dipped. The heavy swell made the whole harbour pitch and roll giddily. It looked dangerously unstable, yet it had survived the storms of 18–22 June that had destroyed the other Mulberry harbour off St Laurent.

The sand was scored with deep tyre-tread patterns that filled with water, were washed away every tide and churned up again. Everything an army could need to sustain it was being landed on the shores of France, a monstrous shopping list. Vehicles. Tanks. Guns. Ammunition. Spades and pickaxes. Bridging equipment. Demolition equipment. Signalling equipment. Food. Cookers. Tents. Medical supplies. Men. And women.

It was a scene that would have been impossible if the
Luftwaffe
had been any sort of danger. We controlled the air and with it we held the sea and the land. The earth was ours and the dominion thereof. So many people were doing so many things, I couldn’t tell whether this was the most efficient invasion since William the Conqueror went the other way or whether it was complete chaos. A regiment of tanks was being landed, diesel engines growling, tracks squealing like pigs on the way to slaughter. They heaved up on to the cobbled street and headed inland, leaving only their smell.

The street was lined with lorries, picking up parties of soldiers. It echoed with revving engines and slamming doors. The air was acrid with engine fumes. Up and down the street, in and out of the vehicles, played the children of Arromanches. Bad luck, kids. If this had been the American sector, you’d have been showered with gum and Hershey bars.

If we’d had any sense, we should have been able to recognize our own tac sign painted on the lorry that was going our way, but we stood about, wondering what to do next, as military as a party of Girl Guides in search of a handy campfire.

‘Going our way, girls?’ asked a driver with a cheeky grin. ‘Next stop Berlin.’

A whole truckload of Highlanders hung out and whistled at us as we passed.

‘You women – what’re you doing there? Over here at the double.’

We were scooped up and sent on our way by a harassed MTO. Our lorry crunched and ground over shell-pitted roads. A feeling of desolation persisted throughout our short journey along Norman lanes to a camp outside Bayeux.

It was high summer. There should have been crops ripening in fields bordered by ancient hedges. There should have been trees, burdened by little unripe cider apples, shading red and white spotted cattle. There should have been dog roses and honeysuckle and poppies in verges powdered with chalky dust.

But the verges were churned to slurry by tracked vehicles. The ditches were filled and obliterated, the hedges holed. Tanks had torn their own muddy roadways through fields that wouldn’t be harvested this year. Ansty Parva might have looked like this. Sometimes there’d be a cow, legs in the air, stiff as fenceposts above a bloated body. Scattered along the roadside were hastily erected crosses, marking bodies awaiting collection and decent reburial. British, Germans, Canadians – who were they? How easy to miss one. How easy to lose a husband, father, son.

There wasn’t much giggling amongst the girls in the lorry. In England, we’d have been chattering and laughing, weighing each other up. New faces – will we get on together, who will be the clown, who will be the natural leader, who the rebel, the good soldier, the toady, the bully, the misfit? Instead we were silent. Some of these girls had worked gun sites throughout the Blitz, some had carried messages through bombed streets or manned telephone exchanges throughout air raids. Some were conscripts, who never wanted to be in uniform at all and would do anything rather than be a soldier. They would be trouble one day, I thought, but not today. None of us had been anywhere near the front line before. It was different, somehow, frightening and exciting at the same time. We were awed into silence.

*   *   *

Home was a camouflaged tent in a field. The stormy summer and hundreds of army boots had destroyed whatever had been growing there. The farmyard ought to have been deserted. Its barns were roofless and the cattle sheds looked as though they had been used as machine-gun nests. A neatly walled little farm like this, properly organized with overlapping fields of fire, could hold up a battalion for hours, maybe a day or two. In the end, someone had popped a grenade into each stall and blown the machine-gunners apart. They wouldn’t have been able to sort out who was who after that.

Yet there were still a few straggly chickens picking about the yard. A thin woman milked a thin cow, her head tucked into the hollow in its flank. The beast’s hip-bones were like coat hangers. The farmhouse chimney had gone, but a wisp of smoke rose from a hole in the roof.

Now that I had my third (still very new) stripe up, I was living in a bit more comfort. Instead of having to sleep with the junior ranks in the huge marquee dormitory, there were only eight of us in a bell tent, although the women’s ablutions were in another tent half a field away. We ATS senior NCOs were allowed by the men to share (with a welcome half gallant, half resentful) the sergeants’ mess, but our quarters were as segregated as though we were a ravening pack of man-eating maenads.

Heavens, we were far too busy to bother about sex!

We were well behind the front line, but the war wasn’t far away. Stubborn German resistance and the difficulties of fighting tank battles in hedge-and-ditch
bocage
country meant that Allied armies had made nothing like the strides across France that had been planned and hoped for. There was still a pocket of the enemy at Falaise, only a few miles away, like a big bite out of our advancing line.

Straddling a ditch at the far end of the field, just beyond the canvas screens of the DTLs, the deep trench latrines, was a brewed-up German tank. The trees around it were scorched and scarred by antitank fire. You could squat in the latrines, primly peeping over the top of screens that were never quite high enough, feeling like Aunt Sally at the fair, and look at the peeling black-and-white cross that still marked the tangled metal. Anything movable had been stripped off for souvenirs. In the salty air, the tank was beginning to rust already.

Morning and evening, the line of ambulances rolled in, carrying the wounded from casualty clearing stations to the field hospital. For the first few days I stopped whenever they appeared, unable to work until they had gone by. How many this time? Who were they? What would happen to them?

Soon I didn’t even look up.

Dear Mother

I am snatching a moment before going out to inspect the guard to thank you for the parcels, which arrived, more or less intact, yesterday. The fruit cake and cigarettes have gone into mess stores (a tin box suspended from the ceiling, out of reach of the rats – we hope). It’s share and share alike here. We all do pretty well out of each other’s parcels. However, I have been rather selfish and kept the soap for myself. One day, I may actually have a bath and the opportunity to use it. We are all so caked with mud that even our mothers would be hard pressed to recognize us. I was especially glad of the extra socks. It’s impossible to have them washed or dried properly here. We just wear them until they dissolve. It’s a schoolboy’s idea of paradise. No-one checks whether we have washed our necks or behind our ears. Imagine, or try not to imagine, the atmosphere in the dugout. After a walk down the trench on a frosty night, the smell of socks, gumboots, cheese, paraffin, tobacco, whisky, wet wool and badly cured sheepskin waistcoats hits one like a sledgehammer.

You’d be amazed at the practical ideas we have for getting round shortages. If we are short of wood and there are no handy ammunition boxes to break up, a dozen or so army biscuits make a reasonable fire. If there are no biscuits, the men boil water for tea by firing off a few belts of machine-gun ammunition in the general direction of the enemy. The guns are water cooled and by the time they’ve been fired, there is enough boiling water to make a decent brew.

I am getting on tolerably well. We went through rather a sticky patch a fortnight ago, but things have quietened down now. We seem to have reached an agreement with the Hun not to bother each other. The front line trenches are so close that we can hear each other snoring. We stand-to like good little soldier boys at every dawn and dusk, ready for an attack, but nothing happens. A few starshells go up, just to remind us that there is an enemy out there, but that’s all.

Even their artillery is silent. They sent so much over a week or two ago that they probably have to save up for the next big strafe. All their shells have their own sounds, a sort of signature tune that we learn to recognize pretty quickly – or else. Their 77mm whiz-bangs spark like giant fire crackers. The 5.9s bark out the shells that whine and growl their way across the lines. If there is a roar like an express train speeding through a station, then we know that some poor devil behind us is being pounded by heavy artillery. Minenwerfers give a cough and spit out a black ball that wobbles over to us in a visible curve, giving us time to duck, and gas shells land with a soft plop. Everything is quiet at the moment, however. A sensible fellow, Jerry. He doesn’t make trouble and neither do we.

The CO is not at all happy about this state of affairs. He has a bee in his bonnet about taking the offensive. Have you seen the cartoon that shows a subaltern in a frightful state of dress, hair too long, trousers too short, hat on the back of his head and a golf club in his hand? The caption is: Questions a Platoon Commander should ask himself – Am I as offensive as I might be? We all had a jolly good laugh over that one. The old man takes offensiveness very seriously, however.

The divisional commander has presented a handsome cup, to be awarded each month to the battalion with the most points – just like house points at school – one point for enemy identification by articles taken from dead bodies, two points for each live prisoner (three for an NCO, four for an officer), three points for each enemy trench mortar or machine gun captured and so on. I suppose anyone who captured Crown Prince Willie would win it outright. Our colonel is determined to have the battalion’s name on that cup, every month, if possible. He tries to drive us over the top on any pretext: wiring patrols, mapping patrols, trench raids, bombing parties, prisoner-catching patrols, any excuse for a spot of offensiveness. I think that if he ever met a Hun, he would probably tear the poor fellow apart with his teeth. Life has been much quieter since he went on leave. He’ll be back soon and I suppose things will start humming again, but, fortunately, by then we ought to be back in reserve. We’re overdue a spell.

Tom tells me that he will write as soon as he is able to thank you for his parcel. He never normally gets one, as he has no people to speak of, so he was jolly pleased with yours. It was a kind thought, Mother. Could you possibly do it again some time? I know you are very busy with all your committees and everything, but spare a thought for two old soldiers!

Tom has been having rather a rough time. For some reason, he has got on the wrong side of the CO, which is jolly bad luck for him. I think it all began on the day that the colonel decided to open up a listening post that had been closed down by the last battalion because it was too bloody dangerous (sorry for the language – but it was). Tom was the unlucky chap selected for the honour of spending a day in a hole that was well marked out by an enemy sniper – one twitch and he spots you, two twitches and he aims, three twitches and you’re dead. Tom crawled out in the darkness just before dawn. He got there, all right, although it was a bit dicey when a flare went up just as he was ducking under our wire. We all held our breath for him and he just froze, hoping to look like a corpse. A couple of hours after daybreak, Tom came back – crawled back in broad daylight, if you please, though he was damned lucky it was too foggy to see the end of your nose – saying that he couldn’t hear a thing because the post was just too far from the German lines. The CO didn’t believe him, accused him of being in a funk. It was probably true, but so would I have been, stuck out alone for hours in that Godforsaken hole, and so would anyone with an ounce of common sense. The mist lifted about an hour later and, if he’d still been there, he’d have given the sniper a decent spot of target practice.

Since then, Tom has been put in charge of every single party sent out to do stupid things in sight of the enemy. He never gets a night’s sleep. Poor blighter. I don’t know how he bears it. I know I couldn’t. The company commander tries to stand up for him, but it’s like trying to stand up in a blizzard when the CO gets in one of his bates. I don’t see any way out of it for Tom, except to get himself killed – or hope the CO gets bagged first.

I don’t suppose it would be possible to send out some records? Probably not. I can’t imagine how you would pack them. We are badly in need of some variety in the mess. I think that if I hear ‘In a Monastery Garden’ (the MO’s favourite) just once more, I shall throw it on the ground and jump on it – or him. Something jolly would be nice, but not too patriotic or we shall all be sick!