One of our prides was to play a form of quoits with hand-grenades. I encouraged the game in the evening, after training. The meat and vegetable army issue stew came in cans ten inches high, eight inches across the mouth. We would stand a can about sixty feet away; threepence a throw, and the nearest to the can takes all the threepences. To be certain to win the money, your grenade had to land inside the can. Alf Milner made a modest income from the game – at a distance of sixty feet he could put a grenade inside the tin four times out of six.
It was Thursday evening, and though the lads had been told nothing, they knew this weekend we’d be moving out of the camp. We ended training about half-past five, and I went into my billet, took a lengthy shower and used up the last of my Coal Tar soap. From now on it would be army issue carbolic; and not too much of that. I shaved with a brush, conscious that I wouldn’t be having many more brush shaves before I got back from this job. It was one of those evenings, cold but clear, clean and crisp as only on the Yorkshire Moors they can be. I felt in perfect form. My civilian batman brought me a supper of soup, stewed chicken with powdered potatoes, and a hunk of army cheese. The simple foods suited me fine. However, I did open a half bottle of a white wine, and finished the cheese with the last of a bottle of port and a slice of apple pie. I could hear the normal sounds of the camp all about me; sounds that one by one I could recognise, as the lads emerged from the bath-houses, dressed, went to the mess for supper, then came out and either crossed to the Naafi hut for a beer, or settled down on someone’s Nissen hut step for a smoke and a gab. Then I heard the clink of the tin as the first grenade hit it. I put on my beret and went outside. The men were playing along a stretch of sanded grass behind two of the Nissen huts. The two huts had been built up on short stilts and stood three feet above the ground at the back end. Don’t ask me why the Engineers who built the camp had chosen the only bit of sloping ground on which to put the Nissens – the ways of Engineers have always been a closed book to me! Ben was there, and Joe Stanhope, Harry Landon, Willie Garside and Taffy Andrews. As yet there was no sign of Alf Milner. Whenever he appeared, the groan could be heard throughout the camp.
Ben lobbed one, a beauty landing eight inches from the can. The grenade thudded into the ground, stayed still without a bounce. Taffy’s was six inches away. Willy threw one, but it was a couple of feet away. Harry’s was fifteen inches and then it was Joe Stanhope’s turn. He pulled a grenade out of his pocket and without seeming to take aim tossed it quickly from behind. It rose on a perfect parabola, its angle about sixty degrees from the horizontal, in the sky over his head. Then it started to fall. It was a good ’un, already I could feel that. It accelerated downwards, and there was a tremendous clank as it went straight into the can. It bounced in there, jingled around against the sides, and finally settled. Joe grinned, and held out his hand. They all counted coppers into it – Ben had no change and gave him a shilling and took nine pennies in change. Each win meant a pint in the Naafi!
They were using ordinary issue grenades, already primed and fused. The first thing we always did on training, against the regulations of ‘that other Army’, was to prime and fuse two grenades which went with each man everywhere. I insisted the men live with live grenades, sleep with them, eat with them. This way they got the feel of them, grew to know and respect them as a man will a pocket knife he constantly hones to keep perfectly sharp. I’ve saved my life with a grenade, more times than I care to name.
Arthur Sywell came from his quarters, and Sam Levine. I stepped forward into the game. Now we were so many, the threepences went into another M and V can at the throwing line. I put mine in. Joe Stanhope had the first throw, since he won the last hand, but deferentially he waved me forward. I smiled and shook my head. I needed a sighting shot before I could do my best, and this was keen competition with two and threepence in the can! Joe stood on the line, his left foot near the tin, then turned to face his left side down the ‘range’. He held the grenade in his right hand then suddenly, again without seeming to take any form of aim, he chucked. It was a good one, but it landed about four inches from the can and skeetered a foot or so past. I took my turn next – a lousy throw, eighteen inches too far, though the line was straight. As the lads threw them, one after the other, I said goodbye to my threepence. Two landed in the can, thrown by Arthur Sywell and Ben. They shared the money between them.
This time I was determined not to be beaten. I stayed at the back end of the firing line, watching each throw. Ben in the can, neat as a whistle. Good old Ben, two out of three. Arthur Sywell wild, at least two foot off. Sam Levine – a good one, but a few inches beyond the rim. Taffy wide, Harry short, Willie close, but not close enough! And now Joe Stanhope; left arm down the range, right hand by his side, up, and chuck. The grenade seemed to falter at his hand, went away on a bad parabola.
‘Down!’ Joe yelled. ‘For Christ’s sake, the pin’s out.’ He’d pulled out the bloody pin! We all hit the ground as one, faces grinding into the sand. There was a loud clunk as the grenade landed on another grenade in the sand around the can, then a skittering noise, and then that awesome silence before the blast. We were all counting.
On the count of four I lifted my head and looked quickly about me. No one was in sight, thank God! Five, and I pressed my gut even further into the ground. You can hear a thousand grenades explode, but every new one is an eardrum banger, every new one knocks the air out of your body without pity. Six, another quick glance around – when it goes up, if it’s anywhere near another grenade that’ll go up too, and there’ll be a holocaust of grenade case splinters bansheeing through the air. Seven seconds can take an awful long time to pass but here was the seventh, wait for it, press down your gut, and pray with that incoherent jumble of words that means only one thing – don’t let one of the fragments hit me. Seven. Silence. Absolute bloody silence. Two men coming out of the dining hut! Eight and Nine and Ten. I raised my head. ‘Everybody stay down,’ I shouted. ‘You two men by the dining hut stand perfectly still,’ I yelled across the huts. They heard me, stood still, holding back the men behind them.
Quickly I counted the grenades I could see on the pitch. One for Ben, two for Arthur Sywell, three for Sam Levine, four, five, six, seven – where the hell was the seventh? It hadn’t gone into the tin, I was certain of that. Where the hell was it? I looked slowly from side to side, in every pocket of ground around the target area. No sign of it. Damn! It must have hit one of the six grenades lying there, and have bounced! Where the hell had it bounced to? I saw the grenade; and the window of the Nissen hut above it opened. In the window opening was Alf Milner.
‘Stand absolutely still, Alf,’ I yelled.
He heard me, and froze.
The grenade was sitting on a ledge; a piece of timber nailed across the piles on which the Nissen hut was standing. At the back end of each hut was a latrine, separated from the hole beneath only by a piece of sacking. Thus the latrines could be emptied without carrying the stinking pail through the men’s quarters. The grenade was lodged precariously on that shelf; any movement, the slightest vibration, was certain to shake it off. Although the detonator had failed to explode it, if the grenade should drop, it was odds on it would explode. With only that canvas, two planks and a bucket of shit between him and the grenade fragments, Alf Milner didn’t stand a chance.
The two men waiting at the door of the dining hall were Royal Engineers maintenance men.
‘You two Engineers – I want you to make absolutely certain no one moves within fifty yards of this Nissen hut. Understood?’
‘Yes sir,’ their voices came back to me.
‘Arthur?’
‘Yes, Major.’
‘Get the men back out of this – take it steady, one at a time!’
‘Wilco,’ he said, using the army slang to keep his manner calm.
Ben Bolding and Joe Stanhope stayed. Ben because instinctively he knew I’d want him to stay – Joe for reasons I would never know.
‘What’s the end of those huts like, Ben?’
‘Ropey, Major; the shit bin’s only balanced on two planks.’
‘You’ve seen the grenade?’
‘I’ve seen the sodding thing,’ he said. ‘Why the hell did you pull the sodding pin, Joe?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know, Sergeant Major, I just don’t know.’
I knew all right. It was Pavlov’s dogs, all over again. That was the way I trained them, to behave instinctively. These were the dangers. Instinct said you held a grenade in your throwing hand, pulled out the pin with the index finger of the other hand, and you threw. One two three. Instinct. Who was I to complain when the system itself took over?
‘Save the explanations for later, Joe,’ I said. ‘No one’s blaming you.’
My big problem was this – what the hell could I do? Removing the grenade was a comparatively simple matter. I should call in the Royal Engineers bomb disposal officer, and he would deal with the explosive. But what about Alf? That grenade could fall at any time, and certainly it wasn’t going to make a point of waiting for the arrival of the Royal Engineers. Someone would have to crawl in there, and get that grenade out of there. But who? Leadership, all those fine phrases the Army hands out, said I should do it. But we were leaving on a job for which I’d trained myself and a group of men, and the life of one soldier, Alf Milner, was less important than the life of the officer trained to lead that force on the job. Stars and Stripes, Land of Hope and Glory, and Over the Sodding Waves. I couldn’t leave Alf Milner there, waiting for the grenade to drop. And it was a certain fact he daren’t move as much as a toe.
Joe was ten yards further forward than when I had last looked at him. ‘Come back, Joe,’ I shouted. He took no notice.
I started to crawl forward. I hadn’t gone more than five yards when I felt Ben’s hand on my puttee.
‘Leave him go, Major,’ he said quietly. ‘Anyway, you’ll never catch him in time.’ He was right. I couldn’t catch Joe.
‘Take care, Joe,’ I shouted, feeling absolutely useless. Do you know what to do?’
He paused. ‘When I get close enough, Major, I’ll pick the grenade off the ledge and carry it away from the Nissen hut, trying not to shake it. Is that okay?’
What a ludicrous bloody situation!
‘That’s all you can do,’ I said.
Sixty feet isn’t a long way to crawl, but it seemed to take him fifteen thousand years. When he got there, he squatted up on his hunkers and looked at the grenade. ‘Hang on, Joe,’ I shouted.
I scrambled backwards, then rose to my feet and in a crouching run headed for my quarters. I came back out again with my field glasses, walked carefully forwards to where Ben was squatting on the ground, then sat down again, ready to drop to the ground should the grenade slip, and focused the field glasses on the grenade. It was about a third of the way on the ledge. The lever had sprung clear; the firing pin would be down, somewhere inside the grenade. Possibly the firing pin had stuck on its way down into the detonator. It happens sometimes; a batch of grenades has too much thick grease on them and if that channel isn’t properly cleaned, the pin can stick. But not for ever. The pressure of the spring overcomes the restraint of the grease in time, and the pin snaps into the detonator. That can happen at any time – after one second, one hour, or one year. I searched the ground Joe would have to cross with that grenade in his hands. It was flat, with no sign of obstacles. I focused on Joe. His face was wet. ‘Wipe your hands, Joe,’ I shouted. They too would be wet. ‘Now move one hand near to the ledge below the grenade, so that if it drops you can catch it.’ I watched him move his hand. Through the glasses I could see his hand was still wet. ‘No, Joe, that’s no good, you’ll have to dry your hand.’ He withdrew his hand and wiped it on his jumping jacket. Then he rubbed it in the sand and wiped it again. When he extended it, the hand was dry, crumbs of sand clinging between his fingers. I lifted the glasses and looked up at Alf Milner. He had frozen, absolutely still. His face was wet too.
‘Right, Joe, now move the other hand forward, and pick it up, as slowly as you possibly can.’
I watched his right hand going slowly forward, and then, poised above the grenade, it stopped. ‘That’s right, lad, take your time,’ I said silently. When I looked again through the glasses, I saw the knuckles of his hand were white with tension. ‘For Christ’s sake, relax,’ I prayed silently. I swept the glasses across to his face.
He had set, rigid with fear. He was incapable of movement. I’d seen that look a hundred times, on the faces of normally brave men when asked to deal with explosives. Joe was temporarily paralysed.
Damn blast sod and bloody well shit.
Two of them. Squatting on a grenade. One with his trousers down, one stiff with fear!
I started to get to my feet, trying to keep the glasses trained on Joe’s face.
‘Come back, Fred,’ Ben said, loudly. His voice hit my ears with a shock, so intent had I been on Joe’s face. I took the glasses from my eyes. Fred Pike had come out of the back of the Nissen hut to our left, and was walking slowly across the intervening space. He must have seen everything that went on. He ignored the sergeant major; walked slowly to where Joe was squatting, absolutely rigid. Fred bent forward and gently but deftly picked the grenade off the ledge. Holding the grenade in both hands he turned, slowly, and walked across the sandy throwing pitch, past the tin target, and out to the side of the camp. Slowly, a step at a time, moving gracefully, barely lifting his feet from the ground, gliding along. About a hundred yards from where we were squatting he held the grenade in front of himself, then in a slow arc but accelerating, he swung the grenade down, twisting it along the parabola so the centrifugal force would help to keep the pin up. He let go. The grenade rose in an arc of forty-five degrees for a maximum distance throw. It landed on the ground in a shallow trough forty yards from him. He turned and walked towards us. I was counting with him. On a count of five he lowered himself rapidly to the ground. On a count of seven, the grenade exploded, whamming its fragments in the air, spending its explosive substance away from the camp.
The boys went wild.
‘What made Joe go forward?’ later I asked Ben.
‘I told him to.’
‘Come off it, you never said a word. I would have heard you.’
Ben smiled at me. ‘I gave him one of my looks!’ he said. ‘And that was enough.’
It was enough for Joe, certainly, but what about Fred? He hadn’t seen ‘one of Ben’s looks’.
‘What about Fred?’
‘That was Dodger,’ Ben said. ‘He was in the Nissen with Fred. Apparently they were watching the whole thing. When they ducked down, apparently, Dodger said to Fred – ‘You bloody convicts’ll be the death of all of us.’ That got Fred where it hurt, right in the middle of his pride. He’d have gone for that grenade if it had landed in the shit bucket!’
Alf Milner was thirty when he married in 1938. He didn’t see the war was coming. In 1938 he also bought a Morgan motor car, his first suit of golf clothes with trousers that buckled round the leg just below the knee, a new set of hickory shafted irons, a gold wrist watch, a gold cigarette case, and a book on etiquette.
Alf Milner meant to go places.
So he should. He’d just come into money. Twelve thousand pounds and a house to be exact. His benefactor had been a widow when he met her, aged forty-five. God bless her, she had a weak heart. Of course, they’d been sleeping together on and off for about six months, but Alf had a lady in Stamford Bridge and it was proving difficult to break with her without returning the money and the presents she’d lavished on him. Finally he ‘disengaged’ himself by a slow campaign of pretended impotence, and was free to devote himself to the much more promising widow he’d met in the golf club in Virginia Water.
‘I adore you,’ she used to say to him in bed. ‘You’re so gorgeously uncouth!’ It rankled, and on those nights he would make a point of leaving her just before her moment of satisfaction. She got the message.
Finally, as it turned out to be, she persuaded him to go away with her to Bournemouth. ‘Just the two of us, for a week, on our own.’ He played hard to get, insisted he had business to attend to, but finally gave in. That was one of the secrets of his method! When they got to the hotel, he suddenly yielded to desire, and put her across the bed the minute the porter had left with the luggage. She was flattered and delighted. That first instantaneous action seemed to set the pattern for the rest of the gay, careless, carefree week and by the end of it she was practically exhausted, sexually more satisfied than she had ever known she could be. The following Monday she died of a sudden heart attack, and he discovered she had left him everything, twelve thousand pounds and a house in Wimbledon. He moved in and shortly afterwards got married to keep himself out of mischief.
With the better part of his windfall he bought a half share in a prosperous garage in Wimbledon, and settled down to a life of business. The money he put in the company was used to expand the stock of reliable second-hand motor cars; he proved to be pretty good on the sales side and the business did well. He was sitting on a little gold mine that, with careful handling, would make him a very rich man. His wife was a small girl, attractive, rather shy, but very exciting when she was roused. Awakening the latent desires of women had been one of his professions in the ‘bad old’ days. She was delightful. They made a lot of friends in Wimbledon, where a man’s income was of more account than his background, and he did a lot of business around the golf course at Virginia Water. He looked every inch a golfer in his buckled knee-breeches and spiked shoes; he was generous to a fault in the club house after a game, and never heard the few members who called him ‘uncouth’. Early in 1939 he was put up for the committee – ‘Just the sort of younger member we should have to get things moving a bit’ – but the secret ballot was disappointing and he didn’t get in. Only the club secretary knew the voting had been six for, fifty-two against. He was a kindly man, and even thought of writing an anonymous note to Alf, to tell him he’d be more popular if he didn’t monopolise the bar, didn’t buttonhole the older members with his long and not always very funny stories. He’d also be more than popular if he’d stop looking at the lady members with undressing eyes. However, he couldn’t bring himself to pen a poison letter, and Alf retained and fostered many of the habits his book on etiquette could have told him no gentleman ever had.
The outbreak of war came as a complete surprise to Alf; petrol rationing brought about the end of his garage business overnight. He joined the Army more from boredom than from any single patriotic motive. He had a vision of himself in the uniform of an officer in the Fleet Air Arm, or the RAF He could see himself flying away on brief sorties, returning to a glamorous niche in the club at Virginia Water as ‘One of our War Heroes’.
It didn’t work out quite that way. The War Office Selection Board turned him down for a commission. He just wasn’t the type, not even in those days when anyone who could express himself in the King’s English was deemed to have those powers of leadership the country so desperately required.
Alf volunteered for pilot training with the RAF At least, if he couldn’t get a commission, he’d get the wings – after all, he could always say in Virginia Water he’d preferred to serve his King in a humble capacity away from the limelight. They’d respect him for that. ‘I don’t want the easy life of an officer,’ he could imagine himself saying. ‘I want to get into the thick of it with the lads. Take last night when I took my Lincoln up to knock hell out of Dortmund etc, etc.’ It would be all the more impressive if he was merely a sergeant.
They turned him down for air crew training, offered him a job on the ground in motor transport.
One day he was in a pub in Marylebone. In those days, as soon as you guessed the landlord was opening the once a week bottle of whisky, you fought and kicked your way, if necessary, to the bar to get your ration of one double. Alf was in the RASC – though he never wore the flashes on his shoulder away from camp. He started to claw his way to the bar as soon as he saw the first glass of whisky passed backwards. There was a general melee, but suddenly the crowd fell back. Standing at the bar was a big man wearing a green beret. An enormous soldier from the Pioneer Corps, Irish by the sound of him, had just challenged the man in the green beret to come outside. The Irishman’s companions were pulling his arm. ‘Come away, Paddy, he’ll bloody kill you. Can’t you see what he is, bejesus, wid the green hat an all.’ The Irishman was too far gone. The man in the green beret smiled. ‘Let him be,’ he said softly. ‘Give him a whisky, landlord, on me.’ The landlord passed one over, smiling that the head-on collision had been averted. Alf eyed the man in the green beret with respect. He’d heard about such men, of course, but this was the first one he’d ever seen. On the arm of the commando, for such he was, hung a gorgeous girl who obviously swelled with pride in him. An old soldier wearing the ribbons of the First World War and several other wars besides came to the bar and tapped the commando on the shoulder. ‘Bless you lad,’ was all he said.
The following morning without a word to any of his mates Alf put in his application to join the Commandos. When the selection psychiatrist asked him why, the answer came out of him before he had time to think. ‘I’ve always been a self-centred sort of chap,’ he said, ‘and just for once I’d like to volunteer to do something without being selfish about it.’ The psychiatrist was a very friendly man. ‘Will you mind if I give you a piece of advice?’ he said. Alf nodded his agreement.
‘You’ll go through hell in the next six months,’ the psychiatrist said. ‘I can see you’re smoking too much and drinking too much and not taking enough exercise generally, but stick at it! Go through the training if they’ll have you, and come out at the other end with pride. You’re the first man who’s come in here and given me a perfectly acceptable reason for wanting to volunteer. And, do you know something, I don’t think you yourself have quite realised why you are doing it.’
Alf got through the training. The psychiatrist had been right – he’d gone through torture to get his body back into shape. But once that had been done, when burly sergeants had harried him round the Scottish mountains long past the moment when he wanted to die, when he had been plunged into ice cold lochs, had been forced to climb sick as a dog down ropes hanging from the cliff faces of St Ives, when he had been pushed, white faced and vomiting, out of an aircraft with only a parachute between him and perdition, he was able to forget the physical side of things. Then the rest of the training came naturally to him. He had two subsequent moments of great pride. He was on leave in London and a couple of drunken louts were kicking another man in an alleyway off the Euston Road. He ran into the alley. The two drunken louts took one look at his beret, and scarpered.
The other came when his golf club, depleted of regular players but still struggling on, made him an ex-officio member of the committee. He was notified by post and hastened home at the first opportunity. His house was empty, had been ransacked and appallingly vandalised. There remained, however, a note from his wife, posted on with nothing more than a compliments slip from his solicitor, in which she announced, with sickening brevity, her decision to go and live elsewhere with their child, and an officer in the RAF. ‘Don’t look for me,’ the note concluded. ‘I don’t want to see you again.’
Alf came to terms with himself very rapidly, wrote two short letters, one to the garage, one to the golf club. Then, thinking better of that, he destroyed the letters, waited until dark, then rigged a slow fuse to the gas-filled kitchen. The insurance company paid out on his house, his wife, his child, his possessions, converting them, and his feelings for them, into hard cash.
He was never seen in Wimbledon again.