Otherwise (15 page)

”The little piss-pot
needs
riding. Toughen him up! Make a man of him!”

Perhaps this really was his motive. On the other hand, he may have guessed who had tagged him with the sobriquet by which he became known both within and beyond the regiment: Lord Jesus Hyphen Christ.

His antipathy seemed to embrace the whole of the I Section, both as to its functions and its personnel. In our hearing he would fulminate about us. ”Lazy as cut bitches … useless as tits on a bloody bull!” were typical assessments.

We were neither lazy nor completely useless but there may have been a grain of truth in his criticisms. None of my men was what might be considered an average soldier. In truth, most had gravitated to or had been banished to the section because they did not fit the army pattern. One of my best men had been a commercial artist in civilian life and was an accomplished and vitriolic cartoonist whose savage caricatures of certain senior officers (printed on jelly pads and anonymously distributed) delighted the troops as much as
they infuriated their subjects. Another of my men was a self-confessed anarchist who would rather talk than eat, and much rather fight than talk. His concept of an ideal society was one in which the officers dug and maintained the latrine pits, peeled the potatoes, and in general acted as servants for private soldiers. A third was a sometime lecturer in classics reputed to have been a Rhodes scholar, something he vehemently denied except when drunk, as he often was. My chief sniper was a homicidal maniac with a passion for the poetry of Robert Service and the reputation of being able to put a .303 bullet through the eye of a squirrel at two hundred yards.

My batman (who had been assigned to me at Witley by someone who probably thought he was playing a practical joke) fitted into the I section perfectly. Doc Macdonald appeared to be bashful, awkward, and ineffectual, someone forever destined to be a victim of the system, military or civilian. This was protective camouflage. Inside his bumbling, innocuous outer self lived a shrewd and talented manipulator. What Doc set out to get, sooner or later Doc got.

He and I had been together at Witley less than a week when one evening I missed the bus to Godalming and began fulminating about how much I wished I had a car. Some hours later Doc came to my room and, ducking his head humbly, reported that ”my car” was ready.

I didn’t know what he was talking about but I followed him outside, where he proudly led me to a regal-looking Bentley parked in front of our Nissen hut, its engine purring invitingly.

Doc accepted my vehement order to return the bloody thing to wherever he had ”liberated” it, but I had disappointed him.

A
s winter lengthened and the mud at Possingworth deepened, a surly mood afflicted officers and other ranks alike. The troops of First Canadian Division were fed up with waiting, so we were greatly excited when in early December we were suddenly ordered to proceed to the very secret Allied Forces Combined Operations Centre on Scotland’s Loch Fyne, for sea-borne invasion training.

December was hardly the best month to visit Scotland’s western coast. Fierce Atlantic gales blew up and down the lochs; bitter rain and sleet storms lashed the training areas and sprawling encampments (consisting mostly of the ubiquitous Nissen huts); snow fell on the slopes and crests of the surrounding hills, turned to slush in daytime, and froze again at night.

Nevertheless, for two exhausting weeks we enthusiastically practised the techniques of landing troops and weapons on a defended coast. By day we scurried up and down scramble nets dizzyingly suspended from the sides of troopships,
loading ourselves into and out of heaving little cockleshells called
LCA
s (Landing Craft Assault). By night, under the lash of the winter rain, we pitched through the darkness and heaving seas in
LCA
s to stumble ashore through freezing surf onto beaches that crackled with simulated machine-gun fire and glared palely under the light of flares.

There were lighter moments. In the middle of one particularly miserable landing exercise, an unidentified voice came on the regimental radio net to announce that ”Blue Beach has been taken and we have captured six polar bears, three walrus, and four Eskimos.” This was followed by another voice complaining plaintively that his
LCA
was sinking ”after collision with an iceberg.”

There were even some pleasant interludes. Our camp stood on the edge of the Duke of Argyll’s estate, and the duke’s jealously guarded herds of red deer proved an irresistible temptation to my scouts and snipers who several times invited me to dine on fresh venison steaks and marvellous stews unsmilingly identified as beef. Some, who were trout fishermen but possessed no rods, substituted percussion grenades.

Did we feel any sense of guilt at despoiling the aristocratic duke? As my section anarchist put it, ”If that fat-assed old son of a bitch gets himself into a private’s uniform and slogs along with me on the next exercise, I just
might
leave his fucking deer alone.”

On arrival at Inveraray, I had been issued an ancient and asthmatic Norton motorcycle on which I spent a good deal of time trying to locate far-flung fragments of the regiment that had become lost during landing exercises. One afternoon in a sleet storm, I was cautiously descending a steep
side road leading to the camp when I saw a cluster of uniformed Wrens waiting for a bus. I opened the throttle and my poor old machine managed to work herself up to forty miles an hour, at which speed I attempted a flashy skid turn onto the main road. And found myself on my belly in a deep ditch with the Norton sprawled on top of me. The sweet cooings of concern from the Wrens as they pulled me free was little solace for having made such a fool of myself.

Worse still, my rescue was observed by our signals officer – a loathsome type who was notorious for sucking up to his seniors. He made such a yarn out of it that night in the mess that Lord Jesus Hyphen Christ was moved to strike again.

”So, Mowat … you can’t handle four wheels, and you can’t handle two. A tricycle ought to be about your style. We’ll order one from Harrods toy department for your exclusive use!”

A bone-weary regiment arrived back at Possingworth early in the first week of 1943. We were not, however, discontented. Indeed, we felt sure our moment of glory must now be close upon us and guessed it would be an invasion of Norway. Our good spirits were reinforced when our miracle-working quartermaster, Captain Hepburn, having finagled several quarters of prime beef and vast quantities of whisky and beer, gave the whole regiment a stupendous Christmas blowout. It was held on January 6, the Old Christmas Day of the Russian Orthodox Faith. The choice of that date made Sergeant Richmond unusually thoughtful.

”Don’t figure it’s going to be Norway at all,” he told me confidentially. ”You mark my words … Churchill’s sending us off to Russia to restore the Czar.”

When time passed and nothing further happened, we began to think the Inveraray experience had been just one more false alarm. Winter dragged on, wet, cold, and dreary. Training languished and even O’Brian-Bennett seemed to have lost some of his blood-and-guts attitude. Instead of going off to battle, we found ourselves sending squads of men to the south coast to demolish defences that had been feverishly erected against invasion in 1941. We took this as an evil omen, perhaps presaging the regiment’s demotion from a front-line fighting unit to some kind of work battalion.

Then, war came to us. Early in February the Luftwaffe tried to seize the initiative in English skies by mounting hit-and-run bombing raids by day and night on London and on industrial targets in the Midlands. But the
RAF
defence intercepted most German planes en route forcing them to jettison their bombs and streak for home.

Since Possingworth lay under one of the Luftwaffe’s major flight paths, we got our share of unexpected presents. This kept me busy for I was now also the Bomb Reporting Officer for the district. Whenever an ”incident” occurred, it was my job to rush to the scene, identify the type and weight of bomb, and assess the damages if any. If the bomb was a dud or I suspected it to be of the delayed-action variety, I arranged for a bomb disposal squad to deal with it.

I welcomed this new role for it provided me with my own Jeep. It also gave me the opportunity to meet civilians at many social levels.

I particularly remember an elderly lady who lived alone in a small cottage, supporting herself on a minuscule pension and by the sale of eggs from her dozen or so hens. One afternoon a two-hundred-kilo bomb from a fleeing Messerschmitt
fell close to her cottage, broke all her windows, blew most of the tiles off her roof, killed her hens, and turned her garden into a muddy pool fed by a broken water main. By the time I arrived, she had just finished tacking brown paper over the broken windows and was calmly making a pot of tea, which she warmly invited me to share. After examining the still-smoking crater, I took a cup from her and, in what was probably a rather patronizing manner, tried to soothe and sympathize. She would have none of it.

”Tish and tush, my dear young man! What’s this little bit of nonsense amount to when you think of what our brave chaps at sea and in the air and in North Africa are putting up with? Now this is the way
I
see it … if those nasty Germans drop their bombs on the likes of me, well then they won’t have so many to drop on our Armed Forces, will they now?”

It was logic of a peculiarly English kind.

One night in February hundreds of one-kilo (two-pound) incendiary bombs intended for the London docks were dumped over our district. Falling into soft and sodden fields, many failed to detonate. I brought several of the ”duds” back to camp, where out of simple curiosity Sergeant Richmond and I proceeded to take the sinister metallic tubes apart on the floor of the Nissen hut the Intelligence Section shared with the Catholic chaplain. This padre, a kindly older man, was accustomed to our odd ways but when we accidentally triggered an incendiary and it spouted a white-hot geyser of molten thermite through the flimsy partition separating his part of the room from ours, he lost his cool.

”Damn your eyes!” he cried as he stumbled through the thick white smoke toward the door. ”It isn’t
me
that’s supposed to roast in the fires of hell! It’s heathen dolts
like you
!”

A few nights later I was having a drink with the padre in the mess when the tin building shuddered under a tremendous concussion. After a stunned moment, the padre raised his gaze to mine and spoke in the tone of one who is sorely tried:

”Well, I suppose I must forgive you again. God would expect me to.”

This time, however, it was not my fault. Earlier on this foggy evening we had heard German bombers overhead and one of them had jettisoned a one-ton delayed-action land mine. It had swayed to earth under its enormous parachute unseen by anyone. When its timing mechanism detonated this monster, it blew a crater more than fifty feet broad in a plowed field just outside the camp perimeter. It was a close call.

I was examining the crater by flashlight when Sergeant Richmond hailed me from the far side of the field. I made my way over and found him standing as if hypnotized in front of a large grey cylinder draped by a grass-green parachute.

My somewhat frenzied call to Divisional
HQ
brought two polite young Englishmen in civilian clothes who quietly suggested we evacuate the western portion of the camp. The young men then set to work ”debollocksing” this second land mine, using nothing much more sophisticated than a crescent wrench and a set of screwdrivers.

A tense twenty minutes later, they rather shyly reported that all was well. When we took them into the mess and
plied them with Canadian whisky, they admitted that the time fuse on the bomb had had only a few minutes left to run and, moreover, that the fuse had been booby-trapped to explode if handled the wrong way.

Several days later we learned that both men were already recipients of the George Cross – the highest award for valour that can be bestowed on a British civilian. The incident was a salutary way for us to learn that there are many unsung ways to fight a war.

Leaves of absence were being granted very sparingly during this time, but I was lucky enough to wrangle one to London in company with a close buddy, Lieutenant Frank Hammond. Franky was small like me but sported a bushy
RAF
-type moustache and a dashing manner, both of which I greatly envied.

Franky used his swagger to get us a hotel suite normally reserved for generals, then he acquired tickets to some of the most popular London shows, including a box at the Windmill Theatre, famous for nude strippers so thickly coated with metallic bronze or silver dust that they resembled statues in a fountain.

On our third night Franky met a ”smasher” in a Kensington bar and vanished from my ken. I mooched moodily about at the Overseas League Club until I met a friendly girl named Hughie – a corporal in the
ATS
. Alas, Hughie was happily married and made it clear from the outset that though her husband was safely distant driving a tank in Libya there would be no hanky-panky between us. During the next few days Hughie and I chastely visited bars, restaurants, and shows.

By the final day of my leave, my mood was singularly gloomy. I took the tube to Waterloo to catch the midnight train back to Possingworth to discover that the previous night’s bombing had disrupted the schedule and there would be no train to my destination until sometime next day.

I was staring morosely at the departure board when a young, handsome, if rather rakish-looking
RAF
flying officer appeared beside me.

”Missed your train, old chap?” he asked sympathetically in a cultivated public school accent.

Mournfully I admitted that I had.

”Well, not to worry! I’ve a little key flat a few streets away. Come along for a drink and I’ll give you a kip for the night.”

The invitation seemed so marvellously fortuitous that I accepted without second thought. The flat consisted of a bed-sitting room and a tiny kitchen. We had two or three drinks of very good scotch as we chatted in desultory fashion. My host was wearing the ribbon of the Distinguished Service Order. He was a fighter pilot – one of the Battle of Britain boys – but did not seem inclined to talk about his exploits. Instead, he yawned largely and suggested we turn in.