Dolly's War

by Dorothy Scannell

  Chas was now out of North Africa and we had been apart for nearly three years. He tried to be amusing in his letters, but a serious man by nature, I know he was trying to make the best of things. Always a bad sailor, he would have been sea-sick in a rowing-boat on glass; the journey away from England must have been sheer torture. Loaded to capacity with British and American soldiers, the diet was stew, or as one G.I. remarked, ‘Bloody boiled sheep again.’ The Americans would shoot crap, or play cards, and in the enclosed conditions knife-fights often took place. Chas said no one was ever hurt, it was just a show of strength. Nerves were frayed to breaking-point. To get to meals or even to the lavatory, meant hours of endless queuing. Then something went wrong with the steering and they couldn’t keep up with the convoy, a sitting-duck for a German submarine. Chas was working night and day in North Africa and Italy. At least he had air to breathe. He was in charge of troop-movement schedules and many famous names passed through the R.A.T.D. Depot, among them Harry Secombe. I think he was ‘resting’ after having been wounded. He was very popular, always a fine chap, and used to entertain the men with farmyard imitations, ‘Here comes Farmer Brown with his dog.’ I suppose with a passing population his act was always fresh!

  Since he received his black eye on initial training Chas had always been a unit clerk and not called upon to bear arms or shoot, but at one time it was ‘everybody out’, for German parachutists were landing in a nearby corn-field where the corn really was ‘as high as an elephant’s eye’. Chas said he was very relieved not to meet a German parachutist in the corn-field. Word went round that the Germans were disguised as nuns! I wondered, if Chas would be quick enough to gain the initiative, or if he would give a ‘nun’ too much time to prove that she was a lady, for I couldn’t imagine him shooting in cold blood.

  Chas had a fine officer, a Captain Derek Attwood, a wonderful cricketer and footballer, from Bromley in Kent, my father’s old stamping-ground. This officer nearly lost his life swimming miles out to sea to rescue one of his men who had got into difficulties. The sea was so rough that the boat the men tried to launch capsized and was tossed up and down like a cockleshell. He ordered all his men to stay on the shore and dragging the boat he swam out to sea, somehow got the man in the boat and swam back with it. He was all-in, and the man he rescued was black with having been in the water so long. It was a miracle they both recovered. But to Chas’s amazement after this life-and-death struggle with the elements the Captain still emerged wearing his peaked cap and with his gun still in its holster.

  The men would long for and wait anxiously for the water-waggon when they were stationed in the desert. When the mobile bath unit arrived, a huge marquee would be set up, its monster of an engine coughing and spluttering. The men would undress, leave their clothes in a heap and then march through the shower. The marquee echoed with the shouts, yells, tortured screams and the cries of the men, for the engine would cough freezing water and boiling water alternately, but never the right temperature of water, so that although the shower was a longed-for ‘must’ it was also a time to be dreaded. When they tottered from the marquee they were handed freshly laundered clothes. It was a lucky dip, to say the least of it, for the bundles were not separated as to size, or condition of the garments. A large soldier would be handed the underclothes of a dwarf, or vice versa. A soldier who had conscientiously mended his clothes and darned his socks could be handed socks with great ‘potatoes’ in them and garments with the buttons hanging off. There was much swopping and changing after the bath, but no one would part with any item in a good condition if it could, possibly be made to fit so the conscientious ones were always very indignant after bath-time, feeling very hard done by if they saw a careless compatriot lording it about in what they suspected were their good socks.

  Sometimes, whilst troops were on the move, letters home were delayed. At one time as I had not heard from Chas for weeks and weeks, and as he always wrote regularly, I wondered whether I should write to the War Office. Before my father beat his hurried retreat to Forest Gate I asked his advice about this. Soldiering being a part of his life, he would be ‘in the know’. He decided I was being a weak little woman and would waste the time of the War Office with my enquiry. ‘Let ’em get on with the job they’re doing,’ was his attitude. My letter would not bring my darling back ‘if he’d gone’. Then one day I received a parcel from abroad. Great excitement in the family, ‘Open it quickly, Dolly, it’s a present from Chas.’ The label was printed, but we assumed it was from him. I took off the wrapping to reveal an urn-shaped tin and on opening this was startled and mystified to find it contained an amount of dark ashy metallic-like powder. ‘Whatever could it be?’ My father sniffed it, then took a pinch between his fingers, then to our horror, lightly licked it. As he spat it out, he said darkly, ‘Something’s got dehydrated here.’ Because I had a sick feeling about this dark powdery substance I was loth to dispose of it, but at my father’s insistence, ‘You never know what the children might catch,’ I washed it down the drain. I warned the family not to mention the parcel to my ma-in-law, for she was frantic at not having heard from Chas for so long.

  This wretched ash was in my dreams with me, until the day I received a letter from Chas. Under separate cover he had sent some of the ‘dust’ from Vesuvius. The volcano had erupted, covering their tent and even breaking the tent-poles. He said it was an unnerving experience and he would tell me all about it on his return. It had been an unnerving experience for me too, but I could hardly tell him why.

  Chapter 10

  Loving Couples

  The one thing which really bothered me about life in rural England was the primitive outdoor sanitation. When the men came to ‘collect’ in the dead of night, I wondered what fate had decreed that they should follow this depressing way of life. Only a huge remuneration could have recompensed them, yet it was probably ‘the poorer the job the poorer the pay’ and I never knew the identity of these men. Dark shadowy figures, muffled thumping, eerie sucking and gurgling noises from their giant soup-ladles, these were the Night Soil Men.

  The cottages to the left of us had their own fenced-off gardens, but we shared a ‘privy’ with another cottage which adjoined a side lane, therefore we had no garden but a large dirt area at the bottom of which was the sanitary building. Between the cottages was an alleyway so that our convenience could be approached by the public, which added to its inconvenience. We had to watch little Richard for he took great joy in throwing things down the rough hewn hole in the wooden seat in the privy platform and neither Marjorie nor I would have been brave enough to rescue anything, however precious. The people with whom we shared our ‘mod. cons’ had a large number of evacuees with them from time to time and at night in the pitch darkness one could observe waving lanterns, like giant glow-worms, in the vicinity of the privy. Marjorie and I, however, disciplined ourselves and only visited this outside building during the hours of daylight, the whole family making a hurried last visit before the country night fell with its velvet blackness and untownlike sounds.

  The cottage stairs wound round the cottage like a jointed arm, and at the bottom possessed a door with a Suffolk latch, leading directly into the kitchen and a door at the top with the same Suffolk latch leading to the bedrooms, so these narrow dangerous stairs were self-contained when both doors were closed. On the bend of the stairs at night-time we would place a white enamel pail for emergencies for neither Marjorie nor I would face the terrors we were sure would roam by night, and cross the dark yard. These stairs were over the coal-hole and water running into the pail made weird sounding noises in the quiet little cottage, the hollow coal cellar carrying the sound, but as Marjorie and I were the only listeners we suffered no embarrassment, that is, of course, until the evening of the Vicar’s visit.

  He did not call on a routine visit to his parishioners for our visits to church were rare, we were so busy. He had recently come to the village from Australia, where he and his wife, an officer in the Wrens, had
met our older sister Winifred. They had become friends with her, being on the same social scale down under and were on first-name terms. Winifred’s grammar-school education had given her a higher-class social status than Marjorie and I aspired to. Just after she and Sydney were married they’d emigrated to Australia. Winifred said that sometimes on their farm in the Australian bush she almost heard the grass growing, so homesick did she become for the sounds of London. They had a ram on the farm which Winnie had nicknamed ‘Sam’. A friendly name, I felt, for what was obviously such a vicious creature. I had no idea that a sheep could be so wicked. This Sam was an enormous beast with vicious horns. It was his aim in life to ‘get’ a human. It was their aim he should not.

  Winnie was one day in a very narrow passageway between animal pens, singing away, unaware that Sydney had let Sam out of his pen at the other end of the passageway behind her. Whether Syd was in a temper with Win for some reason or other, or whether he was just being absent-minded, I don’t know, but this ram came tearing along the passageway like a mad bull, the dream of his little sheepy life was to be realised. As he gathered momentum a shout of ‘Look out, missus, it’s Sam,’ came from the old bush man, who adored the ‘missus’, and Winnie, because she was so agile, just managed to leap in with some cows in the nick of time.

  To hear Winnie talk later one would assume that W.A., as she called Western Australia, was the best place on earth, paradise in fact. Yet they toiled for years to obtain a bumper wheat harvest and then when they did there was a wheat slump and wheat was dumped into the sea. Then Syd was taken suddenly ill. Winnie was at that time alone on the farm with him. She got out the horse and waggon and drove him many miles to the railway-siding to send him to hospital. She returned to the farm, lost her way in the bush, and the wretched horse would not budge. She didn’t like the idea of spending the night in the bush without protection (I would have died instantly) so she let the horse have its head and he turned round and found his own way home! But when she arrived, disaster had struck again. Her house was burnt to the ground. She waited until morning, then went to Perth and obtained a job working for the Archbishop there until her husband left hospital. It was while she was working for the Archbishop that she’d met our vicar.

  I was occupying our emergency ‘loo’ when the vicar entered our cottage. Startled by the mysterious ‘noises off’ which he obviously took to be whirring and crunching sounds on the gravel road, he enquired of Marjorie in his bright clergyman’s tone of voice, ‘Someone enjoying an evening’s bicycling?’ ‘Yes,’ replied Marjorie, acutely embarrassed, ‘my sister Dorothy.’ Unaware of all this I entered the room and said, ‘Oh, good evening, Vicar.’ ‘I hope you enjoyed your bicycling in the dark?’ he enquired of me, with warm interest. ‘Bicycling?’ I queried, having difficulty in pronouncing the word in my best speech, Marjorie’s gestures and contortions failing utterly to put me in the picture. ‘I have never been able to ride a bicycle, although I would very much like to learn.’ Sadly I added, ‘I’ve never possessed one.’

  Marjorie quickly offered the vicar some tea, but with a strange look at us both he departed, saying it was only a flying visit just to tell us all about dear Winifred, a great friend of theirs. He hoped he’d see us in church and the safety of our husbands would be requested in his prayers. He left very quickly. As the door closed Marjorie exploded and then said to me, ‘Oh, Dee, you really must be more careful.’

  Care was a difficult, if not impossible thing to exercise, for the cottages were only made of lath and plaster. We always knew what Fred next door was up to. He was in the Home Guard and in the privacy of his bedroom not only cleaned his rifle, but also drilled with it. We often heard his tired wife call plaintively, ‘Fred, do stop playing with your gun, bor,’ which always brought an infuriated shout from Fred for he knew how important was the Home Guard. In any case Fred always made it plain to his wife that he was not ‘playing’ with his gun, which indeed, according to Fred, ‘was not a bloody gun, mor, but a rifle,’ but his wife was always insulting his wand of office.

  However, the Vicar’s untimely query had aroused in me again my lifelong desire to learn to ride a bicycle. Nancy, Charlie’s young cousin, very generously offered me the loan of her bicycle and Marjorie and her friend Pat decided to teach me. They had ridden bicycles all their lives, to them it was a simple matter and they insisted it would take only a short time to make me proficient. But of course I was over thirty, awkward and extremely nervous of this two-wheeled machine and the country lanes were now busy with wartime traffic -army lorries, jeeps and great oil-tankers which tore non-stop through the country villages. I was the only member of the Chegwidden family unable to ride a bicycle, with the exception of my parents, of course. I could never visualise my mother on a penny-farthing, and my father hated everything on two wheels. ‘I’ll stick to Shank’s pony,’ he would say, forgetting that all his life he had said to us, ‘We must move with the times.’ He had never got over the time when he had been browbeaten into taking a ride in my brother Arthur’s car. It was the first car in the family, indeed the only one amongst all our friends, neighbours and acquaintances. It had cost Arthur, second-hand, £5. It was a huge vehicle open to the elements. Arthur had taken Father for just a little ride round the streets, Father becoming increasingly terrified at Arthur’s chatting away to him. Sitting solitarily in the back seat, which was like a long plank, he was entreating Arthur not to talk when the back seat collapsed and a sprawling Father screamed from the floor, ‘Don’t turn round, I’m all right, just you keep your eyes on the bloody road.’ Father came home tottery and swearing while Arthur arrived back in hysterics.

  The first hour of my lesson was excruciatingly painful, taking place in a somewhat dangerous spot, down a lane, beside which ran a river leading to a weir. Pat and Marjorie were in hysterics when I ran off the road, up a steep incline of a bank to the hedge, and returned more quickly backwards still seated. I was sure that the mighty bump I sustained on reaching the level of the lane again would alter not only my future stance, but possibly even my future behaviour. When I hovered perilously near the weir they suggested finding a safer training-ground, and advised that on the way to this safe area I should cycle along the main road of the village to ‘give me confidence’. I commenced without too much wobbling, but the girls had forgotten the evening petrol-tankers on their furious journey to the Air Force Base. ‘Don’t look at them,’ screamed Marjorie, for it appeared the tankers were mesmerising me. ‘Turn right!’ yelled Pat when we came to a narrow turning. I was, of course, ‘leading the way’, my teachers were there merely to pick up the pieces. I wobbled ‘right’, up a slope off the main road and without seeming volition on my part, then turned left. I now found myself in an extremely dark lane, very narrow, on the right of which was another river, or was it the same one which I had come to escape from, winding itself about and following my progress like a monstrous snake. On the left was the back of a dark Satanic mill and hanging from the wall were the wheels and tackle which hoisted the sacks of flour up and down from a pit beneath.

  The roadway adjoining the mill at this spot was extremely narrow, therefore very dangerous for me to negotiate as I could so easily cycle down the bank into the river on the right, but at this spot, although the river was unfenced, it had widened out and was on the shallow side. Now yells from Pat and Marjorie for me to be careful, to look straight ahead, to brake, for they saw simultaneously, a different sort of hazard which faced me on the narrow roadway. By my unguided wobbling into unexplored places I had brought the three of us into a situation beyond our ken. On the narrow roadway in front of me were three motionless people, not in the formation of a chatting group, or even three abreast. The group comprised two American airmen and a woman. The first man was facing the woman and she had her back to the front of the other man. Both had their arms tight round her.

  As if in a dream they turned their heads to face me as I rode slowly and relentlessly towards them. They could have had no idea I was
not in command of my vehicle, or even my senses, at that point. They may have expected me to stop, beg their pardon, turn round and ride away into the night with my companions, pretending I had seen nothing, for they seemed to ‘close ranks’ if that were possible. Suddenly from the depths of my subconscious I realised I had come unwittingly upon some tableau of ‘love’, and as if to escape automatically, I pressed harder on my pedals, unfortunately increasing my forward momentum. The glazed look on the face of the ‘serviceman’ on the right, turned to horror. ‘Jesus, for crissake,’ he screamed, and leapt backwards into the millstream, and as I flew through the centre of this unholy trinity, the remaining two participants, still locked in each other’s arms, staggered forward and tumbled into the flour-pit.

  I shot on at speed (suddenly an efficient cyclist) over a white-fenced bridge, through a field and into a haystack where I fell off the bicycle, bruised, shaken and breathless. A panting Marjorie and Pat soon caught me up and Marjorie conducted a hurried conclave. ‘Do you think we should tell the police what we have seen?’ she asked. Pat and I looked blankly at Marjorie. ‘Suppose a little Brownie should come round the corner?’ she continued. What had fairies to do with it? We looked more stupid at Marjorie’s continued questions, and impatiently she explained it was the night for the Brownies and Guides to meet, and some of them walked home past the Old Mill. ‘What we have seen,’ said Marjorie dramatically, really not knowing what we had witnessed, I knew, ‘would not be suitable for a Brownie.’ ‘Nor even a Brown Owl,’ I added. ‘It’s no laughing matter, Dee,’ complained Marjorie. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘we’ve come to no harm and we have accidentally punished the unrighteous. What on earth would you say to the village sergeant, especially as those three are dusting and drying themselves off somewhere far away from here?’