Braver Men Walk Away Read online

  In my case, a preoccupation with bombs and rockets was an inevitable consequence of growing up in Netheravon. Safety procedures, though learned by heart by everyone on the camp, were rarely observed: unused ammunition was frequently left behind after training in the weapons pits. To a small boy the discovery of abandoned .303 cartridges was akin to finding El Dorado; I would break them open, extract the cordite, and use this to manufacture bangers, crackers and rockets.

  More useful skills were also acquired, including the accurate recognition of ‘blind’ 2-inch mortar illuminating bombs (a blind is the term for any filled projectile – that is, one containing high explosive, smoke or illuminating composition – which has failed to function as intended on impact or arrival at the target). The mortar illuminating bombs contained a flare attached to a parachute; when functioning correctly, the flare would ignite and was ejected at the apex of the bomb’s trajectory. Suspended from the parachute, the flare would then descend gently to earth. The parachutes were much sought after by camp children for their high barter value; even adults found uses for the cotton fabric.

  But this type of munition had a high failure rate: bombs frequently fell back to earth with flare and parachute still intact because of malfunctions of the ignition and ejection system. If you knew where to look you could soon find them, for although the bombs usually buried themselves in the ground, their tail units remained visible. To a child this was a valuable but potentially deadly harvest: many hours of careful study were needed to learn the difference between useless smoke bombs, the much-prized illuminating bombs, and the lethal unexploded HE (high explosive) bombs.

  As time went by I progressed to larger and deadlier bombs and became adept at removing the safety mechanisms from the fuzes of various projectiles so that they would explode when dropped on to hard ground (usually by suspending a prepared bomb from a piece of rope and then arranging for the rope to burn through).

  My confidence grew, but others, particularly my mother, were not so sanguine: relaxing quietly one evening at home, she heard a heavy thump from my bedroom, hastened to investigate, and discovered me sitting on my bed practising catches with a Mills hand grenade.

  ‘Peter! What on earth d’you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Me?’ I stared blankly. ‘I’m not doing anything. I was just throwing this up and down.’

  ‘But it’s a hand grenade!’

  ‘I know.’ Realization dawned belatedly. ‘Oh. Sorry about the noise. I just dropped it.’

  ‘You just dropped it?’

  ‘It’s all right, it’s not dangerous or anything.’ I smiled the smile that children display to reassure adults ignorant of the finer points of modern technology. ‘Look, you can see it’s empty …’

  By way of confirmation, I began to unscrew the bottom of the grenade, certain that this informative demonstration would calm as well as clarify.

  ‘Stop it!’ Mother moved nearer, angry now. ‘Get this thing out of here right now! I am not having a hand grenade going off in my married quarters.’

  I took the grenade away and reflected, not for the first time, that though parents were all right, they were not a lot of fun.

  Fun, of course, was what life was all about, and explosions were caused for the sheer joy of it; it was not our intention to harm either people or property. This meant we couldn’t risk hurting Farmer Bowker, and we decided to concentrate our attention on his bicycle.

  But theory was one thing and practice another. As the senior explosives expert in the group, it fell to me to construct several home-made rockets and attach them to a bicycle generously loaned by Jimmy. But though the rockets fired satisfactorily, the bicycle refused to move: we simply hadn’t enough motive power to shift its mass.

  This was particularly irritating because the girls had finished target reconnaissance: they reported that Farmer Bowker, who worked a section of land between the camp and the Larkhill firing range, regularly at the same time on the same day of each week cycled out to the edge of the range, left his machine behind, and went off shooting with his twelve-bore.

  The operation had now taken on a painful urgency. Not only was it necessary to redeem our honour; there was the imminent prospect of being humiliated by a gang of girls. Problems were compounded because there was no guarantee that you would find what you needed when scavenging around the base.

  But then we discovered a large cylindrical device out on the ranges: 4 feet 6 inches long and 3 inches in diameter, it was marked TAIL PROPELLING U3 ROCKET. It was fitted with a replica concrete warhead and appeared to be electrically initiated: two wires trailed from the venturi. Although at first sight this looked a little daunting, we’d all seen smoke generators with their attendant wires and had watched them being set off; we trusted that the rocket’s ignition system would function in similar fashion.

  We repatriated the U3 and lugged it across five miles of undulating downs. We hid it as near to the target location as possible, covered it with loose earth and leaves, then trudged back home on aching legs.

  The day of the attack dawned like any other summer’s morning, the sun climbing lazily up from the horizon, limning the dense stands of beech and horse chestnut cradling the camp. We were already in position when Farmer Bowker arrived. I peered out from between strands of meadow grass, feeling the hardness of the ground, listening to the drumming of my pulse, thinking that at any moment Bowker would hear the same tattoo and come to investigate. But after setting his bicycle down he merely hefted the shotgun and strode off towards the ranges.

  One minute. Two minutes. And then we sprang from cover, dragged the U3 from its hiding place and carried it over to the bicycle. Eager hands steadied the frame while the rocket was attached, nose pointing out beyond the handlebars and wicker carrier basket, tail unit resting on the rear carrier tray. Within seconds it was lashed into place front and back; extra cable that had earlier been connected to the original venturi wires was run out, snaking back across the grass to a firing position we’d established behind a nearby concrete pillbox.

  The original plan – to launch the rocket at the moment when Farmer Bowker reappeared on the scene – had had to be scrapped because none of us were sure whether we’d mastered the technique of electric ignition. If the thing didn’t go off, then we’d either have to run away and abandon our prized weapon or retrieve it but risk being shot at in the process. We therefore thought it best to push the ends of the cable into the sockets of our army radio battery and see what would happen.

  I don’t know what we were expecting, but the explosion wasn’t like anything we could have imagined. The rocket ignited in a great gout of flame, made the most appalling – and frightening – noise, and then screamed off into the sky, taking the bike with it. Thrown completely off balance by the unorthodox load, the U3’s flight path abruptly degenerated into a series of agonized bounds. It managed to clear about 200 yards before smacking into the earth, shedding large chunks of the bicycle on impact, then took off into space at breathtaking speed only to screech back down and shed a few bits more. Again it bounced up, and again it crashed down, until like some strange incandescent kangaroo it finally disappeared from sight in the heart of the ranges, pieces of bicycle spraying out in its wake.

  There was a moment of dumbstruck silence – I think it was silence, we were all so deafened we couldn’t have heard anything anyway. Then slowly, hesitantly, we came out from behind the pillbox to survey the launch site. Where the bicycle had stood only moments before there was now just a patch of dark scorched earth. Wisps of smoke hung languidly in the air.

  Later, I confessed to my father. There was no alternative: there were bound to be questions about a low-flying bicycle suddenly exploding across the Larkhill firing range. Someone would have to carry the can and, as I was the ringleader, it was me.

  To my surprise, my father literally fell about laughing. He went on laughing for what seemed like a very long time. And then he gave me an Almighty Bollocking, Grade I, concluding it by
saying he would visit Farmer Bowker and offer both explanation and financial compensation.

  I was amazed. ‘You’re going to pay for it?’

  ‘No. You are.’

  So my father regaled Farmer Bowker with a lengthy and apologetic tale of a mishap during manoeuvres; and I found myself having to meet the cost of restitution by lifting sugar beet for countless days and weekends afterwards.

  According to my Birth Certificate, I was born on 12 December 1931 in Greenwich. According to my grandmother, I was born on 12 December 1931 in Limehouse. There was a world of difference between the two boroughs: trim, leafy Greenwich, a respectable suburb on the south bank of the Thames; noisy, dilapidated Limehouse, almost directly opposite on the river’s north bank: a teeming outpost of London’s East End. My mother registered my place of birth at her parents’ address: in an era when respectability was all, Greenwich clearly made for a superior pedigree.

  I remember neither Greenwich nor Limehouse from my earliest years. What I do remember are the camps, the succession of married quarters we inhabited as we followed my father’s regiment from one barracks to another.

  Father was an infantry soldier with the Royal Hampshire Regiment. Slim, athletic, and of average height, he had dark brown wavy hair and a moustache as trim and as rakish as Douglas Fairbanks Junior’s. He called my mother ‘kid’; she called him ‘Ed’. She seemed to me to be tall in comparison to other mothers, full-figured, very upright of carriage and bearing. She always walked with head held high, her movements imbued with a dignified gracefulness.

  Despite its unsettled nature, family life in the different camps and barracks was probably as good as anywhere else in 1930s England, especially as Father was only away for short periods. Even one of the furthest duties, Palestine, did not seem to require a prolonged absence.

  Our nomadic existence eventually ended when we moved to our tin hut at Netheravon. The army proclaimed them to be the latest thing in corrugated iron, but they were ugly and flimsy. Thankfully, in time we progressed to better things: first a bigger tin hut with three bedrooms, and finally to a house in one of the brick-built terraces.

  In its early years Netheravon was the army’s Machine Gun School and, later, the Support Weapons Wing of the Small Arms School Corps. Finally it became the Infantry Heavy Weapons Wing, a centre of specialist activity and a tight-knit community itself.

  Once we had settled into Netheravon I was sent to Figheldean Infants, a two-roomed schoolhouse ruled by a small and bespectacled lady called Miss Berlin. She had a presence that belied her size and a speed that denied her age. Her energy did wonders for one’s concentration; the camp children and the village children were united in absorbing the four Rs of reading, ’riting, ’rithmetic and retribution. The school lay two miles from the camp; we walked there through field and woodland and over the three bridges that spanned the River Avon and two of its tributaries.

  Spring gave new impetus to what we called the Big River, the Small River and the Stream. The Avon quickened its pace, racing with us as we sped along the riverbank in search of new adventures.

  In summer we chased each other round narrow grassy verges of wheat-filled fields then flopped breathlessly down, air rifle in hand, to wait for rabbits to pop their disbelieving heads from their burrows. We swaggered home with our treasure for ‘the pot’ much to the delight of our mothers.

  By autumn the rabbits had learned to keep their heads down. Instead we turned our attention, and our rifles, to vermin: rats and grey squirrels whose tails brought us a one penny bounty.

  Winter had little impact on our carefree lives. We cheered when snow fell hoping only that it would fall long and fast enough to leave a worthy toboggan run. It crunched underfoot as we tramped to school with light hearts and snowballs flying past our ears. Christmas came, and Christmas went, and the seasons unfolded around Figheldean, a picture-book village in an enchanted landscape.

  Eventually I transferred to senior school at Netheravon, a brief and featureless sojourn that ended when I passed the entrance exam to Bishop Wordsworth’s School, Salisbury. This, because it was on the register of public schools, greatly pleased my mother; it demonstrated the kind of scholastic progress to be expected of a child of Greenwich.

  Salisbury was almost fifteen miles from Netheravon. Unfortunately the only means of getting there was the eight o’clock bus, a public transport renowned more for the attractiveness of its rural route than the accuracy of its time-keeping. I so often missed morning service in the school chapel that Mother began to wonder if the Wilts & Dorset Omnibus Company was seriously intent upon turning her son into a heretic.

  Classes at Bishops ran only from 9.10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Such was the intensity of the teaching regime that to be even a few minutes late was to be left like a runner at the starting block while the rest of the field forged far ahead. The school day was so severely truncated because Bishops had to accommodate both its own intake and another from Portsmouth, boys who slipped into our desks in the afternoons (what they did in the mornings was and remains a mystery to me). Displaced pupils from a city under attack from the Luftwaffe, they learned in one shift and we in the other.

  For war now raged, a war that was changing everything, yet which at its outbreak had meant surprisingly little to the children of the camp. The summer of ’39 had been like all other summers; the world of the adult and the world of the child had continued to maintain their separate orbits. There was much to do, even on wet days, for that was when we gathered together to discuss future projects that usually never amounted to anything or to plan tree houses that most impressively did.

  With the rain beating down outside it was a good time to resort to conventional pursuits, to barter carefully hoarded copies of comics such as the Hotspur and the Rover, to entertain each other with silly impressions of Tommy Handley and Dick Barton. When the sun shone again we were back outdoors, playing football according to rules that were few and simple: stay within the lines and don’t hit anybody.

  Though outdoor life was preferable to indoor life, of all the pleasures of that era, one was arguably supreme: going to the pictures, either at the camp or at RAF Netheravon, a three-mile walk away. The RAF had a plush and proper affair with pull-down seats, a projector that always worked and a twice-weekly programme change. By contrast our cinema existed more in spirit than substance; a giant Nissen hut normally used for lectures and training sessions, it offered but one film a week on one day a week, though disconcertingly rarely on the same day each week because screenings were scheduled around camp exercises. The screen flickered and shimmered and frequently managed to do no more than depict grainy white blobs against an uncertain background to the accompaniment of an equally shaky soundtrack. Intervals were frequent due to the primitive projection equipment: when a reel had to be changed, the film was stopped and the lights turned on while the projectionist frantically struggled with the spools and cogs. The film would frequently break and the ‘cinema’ erupt in a chorus of booing and catcalls.

  The giant hut was cold, too, in spite of the two coal-fired stoves. A seat near either was to be desired, except on the occasion when someone threw a handful of 9mm cartridges into the fire and the things started popping and banging all over the place.

  That summer slowly turned to autumn, and shadows lengthened early across the fields. My father was not in the British Expeditionary Force and thus remained at home; my sister Maureen, born in July 1936, had at last become interesting after what seemed an unending period of babyhood. Even the anticipated arrival of another baby sister or brother – I couldn’t have cared either way; all they did was make a lot of noise and demand a lot of attention – did nothing to undermine the serenity of family life. Days of laughter were followed by nights of content, and I slept unaware of faraway death. And then, one quiet afternoon, death was no longer so distant.

  The purpose of the Small Arms School was to teach infantry men to use weapons other than the traditional rifle and bayonet. Because of the wa
r everything was now geared to getting the maximum number trained in the shortest time possible.

  Speed was all: out went the practised rituals of drill parades and kit inspections, in came a new urgency, an acceleration of tempo that achieved more yet overlooked much. Safety was no longer given the attention it required; though rules were not deliberately waived, the pressure on training schedules was such as to narrow the margin between discretion and disaster. That afternoon the margin narrowed fatally.

  I was going to get some flour for my mother from the NAAFI, yet another of Netheravon’s ubiquitous tin huts with a canteen at one end and a shop at the other. The canteen was frequented by soldiers who could purchase everything they needed – beer, Blanco, shoelaces, cigarettes; the shop was more of a general store with a long counter, old-fashioned till and goods stocked on ceiling-high shelves. The place was popular with the thirty or so families quartered on the camp because prices were low, stock was reasonably comprehensive, and it saved you a two-mile hike to the nearest village shop.

  That afternoon there was no reason to hasten, not with the sunlight still warm on the grass and the soldiers unwittingly providing an outdoor entertainment – a training session featuring the 29mm Spigot mortar, the unconventional ‘Blacker Bombard’.

  A conventional weapon is aimed by sighting its barrel and firing. The propellant charge ignites and pushes against the base of the projectile which then travels up the barrel and flies away in the direction of the target. Unusually, the Blacker Bombard had a spigot instead of a barrel, a machined steel rod inserted into the end of the projectile’s tail tube. The propellant – a cordite charge – was contained in a cartridge at the inner end of the tube; on firing, a striker on the spigot would hit a percussion cap on the cartridge and ignite the propellant. Gases generated by the burning cordite would then force the projectile off the spigot and send it towards its intended destination. Lacking the heavy barrel and recoil mechanism of conventional weapons, the spigot type was much lighter and therefore much cheaper to manufacture. Although it also lacked range, it could accurately lob a 20-pound bomb containing 8 pounds of high explosive over a distance of around 450 yards.