Tea love and war, p.13
Tea, Love and War, page 13
That night there was a fancy dress dance at the Ordnance Depot, decorated as a Paris underworld club. Stuart braved the damp heat of a woollen balaclava, quickly cast aside, and noted that imagination was not the strongest suit of the men. Cloth caps, scarves half covering the face, tweed jackets with the collar turned up – more the flavour of a football terrace than of a seedy nightclub.
Across the concrete of the arena Stuart spotted the wondrous sight of rouged faces and slashed skirts. In an instant he was weaving his way through the crowd towards a trio of girls standing uncertainly by the entrance.
‘Ladies! Allow me to find you a seat and a drink! My name is Stuart …’
‘Otherwise Poyser – one of the new trainees, and far too insignificant for you to be talking to,’ said Major Connor, the corps adjutant, as he cut Stuart out of the conversation, taking the elbow of the tallest of the girls and encouraging the others to follow him to a roped-off section of the hall where the officers were gathered. Two junior officers fell behind him, blocking pursuit.
‘The answer to your unspoken question is that they are nurses from the military hospital,’ said Hamilton, one of the training instructors, as he steered Stuart back to the trestle table of the bar and put a bottle of Kingfisher beer into his hands.
‘Seems the nice girls love a sapper as much as a sailor – and rumour has it that, like sappers, they’re pretty good at finding ways of demolishing erections. Trouble is, your progress over the next six months is dependent on Connor, so seducing his bit of stuff may not be wise.’
‘Proper quarters’ were promised. Others of their number had been moved into the brick-built barracks which offered bathrooms in each corridor and ceiling fans to stir the burning air. The six Assam cadets were left until last.
The intensity of the training was relieved by occasional nights out in Poona, barely five miles away and a truck was usually available for transportation. Stuart was well used to the ordered chaos of an Indian town, and Poona matched his expectations with a heaving mass of people amidst an uncontrolled and uncontrollable mix of bicycles, carts, rickshaws, animals and traffic. There were a number of eating places catering for the visiting military. A mixed grill was the common target of those off duty – not that the meat was always identifiable or ever had much flesh on it, but when washed down with a few bottles of local beer it was palatable.
The constant discussion menu was the progress of the war. Whilst Stuart had joined up six months after war was declared in September 1939 it had been many months before their training had commenced. Thereafter they had all followed the traumatic news of Hitler’s progress through Europe and Chamberlain’s attempt to stem the tide. Then came the invasion of Norway and Denmark closely followed by that of Holland and Belgium. Stuart in particular had rejoiced to hear in May 1940 that Churchill had come to power but then further days had passed, the German advance had continued and they had listened to the devastating announcements of defeat in France and the evacuation from Dunkirk. Now they had the news of Italy coming into the war.
Every evening in the mess, after the meal and the formal toasts, the duty officer would put on the wireless and there would be total silence whilst the measured delivery of the newsreader filled every corner of the room. As he finished there was an instant cacophony of fierce argument. Most were determined to express an opinion though a minority were withdrawn and pensive, perhaps thinking of what was happening to the families from whom they had been parted for so long.
‘Maybe the defeat at Dunkirk will prove to be a good thing?’
‘Why, oh why can’t we be sent to Europe to help?’
‘We also serve – old chap.’
‘Fat lot of use our service is going to be unless Japan comes into the war!’
‘Italy may be in – but we’re safe as a rock, sitting on the biggest arsenal in the East.’
‘Shall we all end up posted to the Libyan Desert?’
Stuart was desperate to fight. With hindsight he felt he should have resisted the natural progress from the tea estate to the training camp. Should he have obtained a passage back to England and joined up there? He decided to put in an application to see whether, even now, he could force the issue.
‘So, you want to just abandon this training and go home?’ Major Steele was sitting behind a huge mahogany desk as Stuart stood to attention in front of him.
‘I accept there would be a cost involved – I’m prepared to pay for the passage out of a suitable replacement if that would be acceptable?’
‘No, it bloody well would not be acceptable. You are being trained at great cost to be an officer in the King George Vth’s Own Bengal Sappers and Miners – “God’s Own” as we’re generally known – and you, Cadet Officer Stuart Vernon Poyser, have taken upon yourself to decide that you rather fancy swanning off to fight the war in Europe. You are bloody well going to stay here – and pass out – and be posted where you are chosen to be posted – and you are bloody well going to look happy about it! Dismiss.’
The next morning, immediately after morning assembly on the parade ground, Major Steele made an announcement:
‘For the avoidance of any doubt whatsoever, you are all members of the Indian army. You cannot leave the Indian army. Some of you may be posted to the Balkans, some may go to Libya, some may go to Malaya. Wherever you go you will remain in the Indian army. If you are injured, then you will be returned as a casualty to India. There is not, repeat not, an opportunity for you to choose where you wish to fight this war. DisMISS.’
Stuart, Teasdel and Bekhtawar Singh, the latter also training as a full officer rather than as the usual Viceroy Commissioned Officer, were sitting together in the lecture hall later that day.
‘It’s all very well for you, Beggar, you were born in ruddy India, being shipped back here as a casualty is fine – but not for the rest of us.’
‘Poyser Sahib, if we remain in Asia and if Japan doesn’t fight there will be no opportunity for you to be injured, and if you are not injured you will not be a casualty and if you are not a casualty you will not be shipped back, always assuming you are sent anywhere in the first place.’
Stuart saw little point in answering his Sikh friend’s usual stolid logic and turned his concentration back to the droning lecture on the evils of gas warfare.
‘The odour of gas may be unnoticeable due to the smell of corpses … if your eyes are affected, scrubbing your eyeballs with a nailbrush may bring relief …’
Stuart wrote home at the end of June 1940:
It seems there is no holding Germany – it will be a long and bitter war. I cannot believe that France has packed up, now it is Britain against the world. Still no news from you all at home. The news over here of air raids simply talks of coastal towns and ‘the Midlands’. No names of towns or cities are given. I fear for your safety but have no means of knowing but to wait for your letters. I am not able to say anything in my letters to you, I can only tell you that I played hockey against a famous ‘British Regiment’ last week. Also that I am the Sappers ping-pong champion! There is a huge amount of work – explosives and demolition, continuously blowing things up. But how I wish I was home to join the fight.
I am not the same person that I was four months ago.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The wedding was duly arranged for 2nd August 1940. My trousseau was collected together, my wedding dress made by a local dressmaker, veil and shoes purchased and the invitations sent out. I broke up from school just two days beforehand and as Arthur was working every day including Saturday mornings we planned that he would take just Friday and Saturday off, marry on Friday, honeymoon on Saturday and Sunday and have him back at work on Monday morning.
Arthur believed he was now close to being called up and he completed the formal registration process in Coventry, but he heard that the specialist work on which he was engaged might block his recruitment. His fire officer work escalated with the expectation that air raids would now commence in earnest. On 17th June he wrote in his diary:
France ceases hostilities, a fact which causes some thought and rather upsets the day’s work. I wonder if the raids will start tonight?
History books tell us that Hitler had thought that Britain might sue for peace but by early July 1940 realized this would not happen and so had issued instructions for Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of England, to move forward. The invading force was assembled in France but it was first essential that the Luftwaffe destroy the RAF to gain control of the Channel. This was to be the beginning of what would later be termed the Battle of Britain. It seems there were to be four phases of the Luftwaffe’s battle plan: from mid-July to mid- August they were to win superiority over the Channel and southern England; from mid-August to early September they were to destroy the RAF and its airbases as a fighting force; during the rest of September they were to attack London to force any remnants of the RAF into the air in defence, where they could be destroyed; and in the final October phase they were to concentrate on night bombing of London and other major cities.
Not that we were aware of any of this – we just continued with our preparations for the wedding. But as we moved into July there were constant reports of the air battles taking place over the south of England and we all kept in touch with what was happening through newspapers and radio. Inevitably the news given out in those desperate times was more optimistic than the reality but in consequence we saw no reason why our wedding plans should not move into top gear.
On 1st August Arthur left work at 5.30 p.m. to catch a bus to Leicester and after an evening at Morland Avenue he retired to the Bell Hotel in the city centre for his last night as a bachelor. The actual wedding day dawned and was beautiful. The weather was magnificent, my mother had organized everything marvellously and many friends came from far and near. The one great disappointment was that Stuart was not able to be present. Instead of Stuart being best man, as would have been certain had he been there, Arthur’s great friend and short- time business partner Keith Neal stood in.
The Leicester Mercury newspaper must have been rather short on news that day judging by the detail of the wedding that was recorded:
The bride is the granddaughter of Mr A W Poyser of Leicester, who is the only surviving member of the staff of the opening of the Wyggeston Boys School. He was later headmaster of Wisbech Grammar School. Mr and Mrs Poyser celebrated their diamond wedding in December 1938. The bride was given away by her father Dr A V Poyser and wore a gown of cream slipper satin trimmed with heirloom Limerick lace. Her tulle veil was secured with orange blossoms, and she carried roses and stephanotis.
Of course there were no wedding bells at the church. By now we all knew that in the event of an invasion church bells would be sounded right across the country – in every parish bell-ringers were ready to give the alarm in this way – so bells at our wedding might have alarmed the entire nation!
After a short reception we set off on our brief honeymoon, staying at a hotel called the Cotswold Gateway in Burford in the Cotswolds. The weather was good and we put the world out of our minds and enjoyed each other. It was not unusual for both bride and bridegroom to be virgins, and despite the ‘heavy petting’ of our courtship Arthur and I were no exception. I am happy to report that all went well on the night: we were both very much in love.
All too soon came Monday morning with Arthur back at work in Coventry and me on my way to my first class of the day in Derby.
Stuart had written expressing his concerns about our air raids but the few bombing attacks that had taken place were to prove minor in comparison with what was to come in the latter months of 1940. As I started life as a ‘married woman’ the so-called ‘Battle of Britain’ in the air was just beginning and our lives were to be dominated by its progress from the beginning of July to the end of October 1940.
As a family we seemed to be glued to the radio set, my father by turns elated and depressed – usually the latter. His forebodings were fortified by news that by mid-August over three hundred RAF fighters had been destroyed. Still, as the continuous hot weather of that summer advanced into autumn it seemed that this crucial phase of the war in Europe was coming to an end and a new phase – the Blitz – was about to begin.
We found later that before the war began there had been a survey of the country to establish those areas that would be at high risk of attack from the air. Whether or not Birmingham was a vulnerable target was open to some discussion because on the one hand it was at the farthest range of German bombers, whilst on the other hand the wide variety of engineering production made it an obvious place to attack. In the event it proved to have been earmarked for attention when the first raid on Birmingham occurred on 9th August. There was then another larger raid on 13th August when Castle Bromwich aircraft factory was hit. Right across the country further bombing raids, still mainly on airfields and radar installations, intensified during the days after our wedding. On 12th August Portsmouth docks and town were heavily bombed. Another major attack took place along the south coast on 13th August and then on 15th August there were massive raids along nearly six hundred miles of the British coast from Newcastle in the north-east to Weymouth in the south.
Obviously I was desperately worried about Arthur. Now that we knew that Birmingham was capable of being reached by the bombers, nearby Coventry was clearly at risk. I was acutely conscious that when raids happened he was bound to be in the thick of the action, and vulnerable to further bombs whilst others sheltered as best they could. The small consolation was that as far as we could tell these raids were all on military and some factory installations – we did not know that they would be regarded as modest compared with what was to come.
The procedure in those days was carefully laid down. There were Air Raid Warden’s posts in most streets and wardens had received appropriate training. If a bomb fell or a fire started the nearest warden reported it by telephone, on foot or by messenger to the control centre, usually based in the local town hall. Fires were reported to the Fire Control or local fire brigade and decisions were then made on how to deal with the incident. The fire service had the most dangerous task. With hoses and water as their main weapons they often had to force their way through crater-torn and rubble-filled streets amid collapsing buildings in order to give precedence to fires in factories with inflammable stock. During all this, incendiaries and high-explosive bombs rained around them.
There were specialist rescue teams, first aid parties, and ambulance and police services, and in addition voluntary organizations, in particular the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS). The WVS was good at helping victims on the spot by way of organizing rest centres, street kitchens and canteens, some of them mobile. They helped and comforted people who had been made homeless and were suffering from shock.
So there in all this was my new and much-beloved husband, right in the front line – no wonder I listened with such fear and trepidation to news of air raids, desperately trying to work out which areas were affected, and I so treasured the telephone calls or messages from Arthur telling me he was all right. We still had weekends together but they were very often disrupted or even cancelled by circumstances beyond our control.
Ironically, the first major incident to involve us directly was in Leicester itself. At 10 a.m. on Wednesday 21st August a single Dornier bomber broke through the morning cloud and released eight high- explosive bombs over the gasworks on Aylestone Road. Six people were killed and twenty-four injured. Although my parents’ house was a couple of miles from the site of the bombing and Arthur was in Coventry, whilst I was in Derby, we both felt almost violated in that Leicester seemed suddenly to have been singled out. In reality a number of raids had occurred in the Midlands that day employing only one or two aircraft and it seems that Leicester was not seen as a primary target. It was not until November that Leicester was to witness the impact of a more major raid. However, that August incident still shook us up.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
On 29th July 1940 Stuart passed out as a Second Lieutenant. He had come fourth out of eighteeen cadets and four VCOs. Great were the celebrations with a riotous night in the mess and then a day off with a trip to Bombay. Much was the beer consumed and it was with pounding heads and uncertain stomachs that the new officers headed north the following morning. Fortunately the length of the journey necessitated a break in Delhi, with an opportunity for sightseeing. Stuart found the Red Fort the most fascinating of the extraordinary mix of buildings in the ancient part of a city now strangely juxtaposed with the modern architecture of the new Lutyens designs, completed only ten years earlier after seventeen years of controversial work.
Stuart somehow felt his stature had been increased by the sense of order and tradition surrounding him. Whilst proud of his qualification, up to that point he could not avoid believing that engineers in the army were both undervalued and underrated. Not that the situation was much different from the tea estates where engineers were seen as inferior to planters, he thought wryly. His frustration stemmed from the realization that the skills needed demanded a higher level of intelligence than he had witnessed in many other areas of the armed forces.
In that vein Stuart wrote proudly to his father:
I am now 2nd Lieutenant S V Poyser R.E!
I passed out 4th out of 18 Cadets and 4 VCO’s (Indians). They are I.E’s and we are R.E’s. Sixteen of us are to be commissioned in the British Army from 1st September.
It is recognized that of those of us of intelligence in the Army: the Best Brains are – Sappers; the next Best Brains are – Gunners; and the rest – go into Signals! I am off to Roorkee (15 miles east of Simla) soon and my address will be the King George’s Own Bengal Sappers and Miners (God’s Own!). For short: KGVO. B Sapper and Miners, Roorkee.
Stuart was instantly impressed by his new spiritual home, the headquarters of the Bengal Sappers and Miners in Roorkee. The gleaming white-pillared façade of the colonial-style mess building with its single-storey wings stretching out on each side was flanked by the Ganges canal and an accompanying gridlock of ordered roadways leading to accommodation blocks and other buildings. It spoke of power and tradition, with its turbaned and richly uniformed staff ensuring unobtrusive service. Stuart and his colleagues were to be there for a week before travelling on to the Sappers’ northern base at Nowshara on the North-West Frontier for further manoeuvres.
