Well, I did get back in, in a manner of speaking The Norfolks ended up with about seventeen battalions, and I stayed in Norwich and got hooked into setting up the local LDV, that turned into the Home Guard, and we had a little book called the Home Guard Manual, and it had information about how to turn a shotgun into a musket by taking the shot out and putting a ball there instead, and you could get moulds for making the ball, and it was accurate to about eighty yards, which was just about perfect for nobbling deer. Put it this way, during all those times in Thetford Forest, my platoon didn’t go short of venison.
When they wound us up because Adolf was losing, I went up to Hexham because Miss Gaskell and Miss Christabel had a flipping great estate with no workers, but dozens of evacuee tiddlers, and Miss Sophie and Fairhead were there too, and it was a right jungle, so we had plenty of venison there too, and enough bunnies to make you sick, and I was out on a tractor a lot of the time, and we even planted a couple of acres of taters. I got just about as brown as I was in Mespot, and I got whopping great muscles in my forearms.
It was just as well I didn’t get back in the 2nd Battalion. In 1940 they got captured by the 1st Battalion, 2nd SS Totenkopf Regiment, and marched into a field in column of threes, where there were two heavy machine guns, and not one single Holy Boy marched out again, but there were two men who crawled out, and it was thanks to them that the news got known, and that Kraut officer who did it was hanged after the war. It was a place called Le Paradis. Well, that’s a funny one.
Still, the Norfolks got more VCs in that war than any other regiment. Those are my boys.
I was in Norwich when the Huns bombed it, and it brought tears to my eyes to see what they did. It was about thirty raids in all. On the first one they got five girls from Colman’s Mustard, wheeling their bikes up a hill, including Gladys Sampson who I happened to know, and was a sweetheart. After that, the attacks were regular. We set up shelters and feeding centres, and went round telling people how to pour sand on incendiaries, and we arranged a swapping system so that you had a house to go to if yours was wrecked. Then there were the two Baedeker raids in 1942, when Caley’s chocolate factory went up in flames, and after that we dug a lot of spare graves in Earlham Road Cemetery, just in case. On the second raid they got the synagogue, and I bet Adolf would have been proud of that. Some people reckoned that Norwich had it almost as bad as Coventry, and we had trekkers, who were people who left the town in the evening, and came back in the morning, and quite a lot of them were camping in tents in fields or kipping in barns and whatnot. You could hear the raids going on in faraway parts. It was like the distant rolling of drums all night.
But I didn’t have too bad a time of it in the second war. I’ve got fond memories, like gallons of sweet hot chocolate, when it was available, and bloody great wedges of bread covered in golden syrup, nights out under the stars, and those lovely bossy girls from the WVS bustling about, and the searchlights criss-crossing the sky, and those little bints on the anti-aircraft guns with their blonde curls escaping from under their tin hats, and the Duke of Kent coming up to visit and strolling about being interested with his hands behind his back. Mrs McCosh would’ve been impressed.
After the war I began to think about Baldhart again, and I couldn’t get her out of my head. It was like being haunted.