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When Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938 everything changed overnight. The disarmament programme of previous years suddenly went into reverse, while the Government played for time to re-arm for war. Every fit young man was urged to join their local T.A. regiment, which most of my contemporaries did, namely The Queens Own Royal West Kent Regiment, the 50th of Foot, known as the Dirty Half-Hundred, never having been on the winning side in any particular battle during many previous wars. I was rather reluctant, but was put under pressure by my employers with the inducement of an extra week’s holiday to make up for the fact that we had to spend a fortnight in the training camp near Hythe.

There was another young man of my age in my department from Roydon in Essex. He hesitated even longer and was actually given white feather by one of the women. At that time there was no females in the Branch Offices of my employer, except the large city offices where they were entitled to a shorthand typist. Most of the women in Head Office were unmarried as their boy friends had been killed in 1914/1918 and they still bore the scars.

As it turned out I never got my extra week’s holiday as we single men had to take our holiday between October and March as we did not have young families. We did our fortnight in August 1939 and on return we were called up a week later. I had only one week back at work, our office having been evacuated to a large house on Wimbledon Common. I was given a spade and spent that week digging trenches for an air-raid shelter.

On the Friday afternoon at 4.00pm the Principal came out to tell me that a radio broadcast had ordered all the T.A. to report immediately to their H.Q. So I went home, changed into uniform, reported to the Sergeant Major. We were examined by our Medical Officer who simply applied his stethoscope to our chests, tapped it and pronounced us fit. We were then transported to the Drill Hall in Tonbridge where we spent the night on the floor with just one blanket and nothing to eat or drink.

Having a bit of a perverse nature I had volunteered to join the Pioneer Platoon as a complete change of occupation. I was given another shovel to dig more trenches. One day I was summoned from my trench digging by the CO Colonel, as usual expecting trouble, but he, being a T.A. relic from 1918, and a very nice man, said he had been perusing the civil occupations of his troops and was appalled that someone with my education should be digging trenches, especially as he was short of staff to man his orderly room office, so that was my second war-time occupation. We were then sent home for most of September, because no one knew what to do with us. Then in October we were called back again to travel down to Axminster in Devon, where we remained until the invasion of Norway in April 1940.

At the end of our first day back in Tonbridge we were woken up in the middle of the night and herded on to requisitioned lorries as we had no transport. I spent the first night in Axminster on the concrete floor of a roofless skittle alley at the back of a pub, once again with only a groundsheet and one blanket, equipment we always carried on our back on top of a rucksack.

It was a long, long freezing winter, and we had our meals from a make-shift open-air field kitchen, with the result that any cooked food was cold before we could eat it. We were then moved into the requisitioned local cinema, again sleeping on the floor.

By the time we got to Axminster our C.O. had been retired and replaced by a very nasty Regular Army C.O. He had spent most of his career up on the Khyber Pass shooting Afghan tribesmen, and he considered that Germans were no different. Once again I was called into his office and he wanted to know why I had not applied for a commission as most of my school contemporaries had done.

I replied that while I was not a conscientious objector I was a complete fatalist, que sera sera, and all that. While I was prepared to be shot on being ordered at ‘go over the top’ as in 1914-18, I was not prepared to give the orders for the troops to commit suicide. After a near apoplectic fit, he transferred me out of his sight to the orderly room of a rifle company down in the Uplyme near Lyme Regis. I was received and welcomed by its junior officers, mostly of my age.

The whole winter of 1939/40 was bitterly cold, the whole area covered in snow and frost. The locals assured that it was beautiful place, normally, but we never even saw the grass, even in the early spring.

In January our crazy C.O. ordered the entire battalion out on to snow-bound wastes of the featureless Salisbury Plain on a 72 hours, 3 day toughening up exercise. I was expected to produce a stream of Roneo copies to the various companies throughout that time, in the open air, day and night, with no food apart from what we had in our small mess tins, and water from our frozen water bottles. The aftermath of all that was that 80% of the battalion went down with German Measles. Everything came to a standstill for a week.

Early in April 1940, with the snow still on the ground we were again woken up in the middle of the night, put on trucks, transported from Southampton to Cherbourg on a small ship, a thousand men and their equipment, lying on top of each other as there was not room to move. This must have been the day Norway was invaded.

On landing, in a bitterly cold thick mist, we were transported south to Lyons, then back up north to Lille. Again I was lucky in that I then got an office in a farmhouse outside Bailleul, close to the Belgian frontier.

I worked and slept there in some comfort while the troops had to doss down in the barn, and sheds with the cattle. We were not welcomed by the farmer and his wife, and two teenage daughters, who were obviously anti-British and maybe even pro-German.

As far as I remember we were at this farm for about five weeks until the Germans invaded France and Belgium, when we were ordered to cross the unmarked and unmanned border just up the road. We went through a gate on to a footpath across a field, and to our amazement were confronted with two lines of women and children who pelted us with stones and clods of earth, which had little effect as they only bounced off our tin hats and the equipment piled on our backs and shoulders.

The Belgians did not like us either. They blamed us for the invasion of what was, up until then, a neutral country. Whilst on the trek into Belgium I had three narrow escapes. We were holed up in a wood, and I was chatting to the driver of a truck who was sitting with a foot dangling down on the top step. I was standing below him when a bullet came from nowhere and embedded itself in the step in front of my right eye. I asked the driver if it was his or mine. He said it must have been mine as my head was in front of his foot. Who fired the shot is a mystery as the Germans were probably still in Brussels.

A day or so later the troops were resting, sprawled along a river bank, and as part of my duties, I was doling out their individual rations of cigarettes and chocolate which I had picked up at N.A.A.F.I. HQ. Suddenly a trio of German Stuka dive-bombers came screaming down the river, almost skimming the water. They were firing machine guns, waving and laughing. Although I was standing on the bank I did not feel any bullets going past and nobody was wounded. I can only think they fired high, taking pity on sitting ducks. The third incident came a few days later.

We then went into another farm and I have never seen such carnage. There were no human beings around, but the entire farmyard was strewn with the corpses of dead animals and poultry. In the large kitchen was a long table loaded with roasted meat and vegetables, including a complete pig’s head. All around the table were plates piled with food, apparently untouched.

We discovered later that a contingent of the Black Watch had been billeted there and were ordered to leave at a moment’s notice. They must all have been raving drunk to do what they did. Years later we learnt that the whole Highland Division had retreated to Cherbourg, leaving us to face the music. At Cherbourg they were all taken prisoner, thousands of men. No armada of small boats to take them off, as at Dunkirk.

My company commander then drove up in his 8 cwt truck and ordered me to take seven men and block the main road bridge over the river Scheldt at Audenade and stop the German advance. All seven men were semi non-combatants as they were cooks and batmen, although armed with rifles and bayonets and were expected to stop Rommel’s Panzer tanks. The Captain and the Battalion C.O. got safely back to England from Dunkirk, although we knew nothing of the evacuation until we got home in 1945.

My small contingent went to the deserted bridge and all was quiet. Then a stream of Belgian soldiers came over the bridge, dashed into the deserted houses and came out dressed as civilians and disappeared. After a while an endless column of civilian refugees from Brussels poured over the bridge all through the day and night.

I vaguely noticed that an inordinate number of the refugees were dressed in the long, black robes of Roman Catholic Priests, and it occurred to me that they were German soldiers using the simple strategy of taking over the country without firing a shot.

Then followed another quiet period and then a few artillery guns appeared firing backwards as they went by. After another lull I decided it was pointless staying where we were and set off back the way we had come. We stopped the night amongst some trees alongside a field. Suddenly machine guns and mortar opened fire, so we hid in a ditch full of water.

The shells gradually got nearer as they extended the range so I thought the best thing to do was to move forward inside where the last salvo had landed. I had been taught of the methodical workings of the German mind of probing forwards, then backwards. No sooner had we moved well forward they reversed, having reached the limit of their range. So we went back into the ditch.

By morning they had given up. So we moved out of the ditch and resumed our wanderings. Our rifles by this time were getting rusty and useless. We reached a village where the only sign of life was an old man, walking down the street. With blank staring eyes, obviously totally in shock, I don’t think he even saw us as he passed by.

We spent the night in a beautiful house, sleeping in beds, which had obviously been hastily abandoned, but there was no food. We hadn’t eaten for days. We then resumed our travels and amazingly found ourselves at the farm from which we had started out, back over the French border - homing pigeons in human form, after covering about 60 kilometres. The farmer was amazed, but in spite of his fears he let us doss down in his barn with straw to keep us warm.

In the early morning he came dashing out, he told us to get out quickly as a column of tanks was coming down the road. On the other side of the road there was a small river with a low metal railing on which I perched. I told the others to get behind the hedge opposite and keep their heads down. Soon the seemingly endless column appeared, followed by trucks full of infantry.

At the front there was a German officer in a jeep. He stopped the procession, got out, smiling broadly, and shook hands. In perfect English he informed me that the war for me was over, and asked me where I was from in England. I just gave him a tired smile, as he was well aware that I couldn’t tell him. He knew where we were from and our regiment.

He then asked me if I knew a Mrs. X who lived in Otford. He had spent three months the previous Summer as her guest, during which time he had travelled around, listing all the airfields, army camps, coastline etc. He ignored the fact that my rifle was propped up beside me, and that there was a bandolier of bullets draped around my chest, and a bayonet in its scabbard.

After advising him that there were a few others behind the hedge, who were politely asked to come forward, he left us with just one guard. He apologised for having to leave us for a while as he had to get his troops down into the village to settle in, but he would send someone to fetch us later.

It was another blazing hot day and whilst the others dozed under the hedge, the young guard and I sat on the railing beside the riverbank, side by side in companionable silence. He did not speak English.

During a long day we had one visit from a German soldier bearing one slice of toast covered in scrambled egg. My guard got out a small knife, cut the toast meticulously in half and offered one half to me, and he must have been hungry. There are those who have said we were eight to one and should have killed him. Fortunately the others left it to me. They were probably too tired and scared to do anything stupid.

Shortly before arriving back to the farm, after leaving our ditch, we came across a single line railway track, at a small clearing at the edge of a wood, and a tiny railway station, with a couple of benches on the platform. We fell asleep on the benches and were woken in the early morning by the sound and sight of a small old bi-plane flying low down above the line of the railway track.

After circling round it disappeared. I was barely conscious by now, but thought we ought to move on again. We had only gone about a hundred yards when a bomber came down the track and dropped its bombs on the seats we had been sitting on a few minutes earlier.

That was actually the fourth time in as many days they had missed the target, but it hardly registered at the time. Perhaps it was the luck of the Irish, although that is not always good.

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