In June 1940 the British Army was evacuated from Dunkirk, and for the first time the war began to touch us. We were told to expect troops and refugees, and prepared beds and mattresses in halls, gymnasiums and every large building where there was room. After a couple of weeks the emergency passed; the army had retreated in surprisingly good order and it survived. A cloud lifted. Our beds were not needed, the evacuees went elsewhere.
The war then made another stealthy, silent leap in our direction, like a storm threatening to come in off the sea. It was feared that the Germans would follow up their advantage and invade, catching the exhausted troops who were the core of our army at their weakest. That summer, I spent a lot of nights on a little platform at the top of a very high wooden tower, with orders to keep watch for enemy parachute landings. I forced myself to stay awake, looking up at the fields of stars and hoping that I wouldn’t be the one to see drifting silk crossing them. But once again the war stayed away, withdrew beyond the coast; nothing happened.
In fact, the worst that happened to me on this marvellous course was pulling an extra drill for my entire class by attempting to poison the company commander. Captain Knowles was a stickler for inspections, and liked to check things in turn; bootlaces, rifle barrels, the insides of hats. One day, he decided to inspect the No. 13 Course’s kit. There we were, shaved and washed, loaded with rifles, gas-masks, haversacks and water-bottles, and he ordered us to present the bottles as we would our firearms. He pulled the cork out of mine and took a deep whiff, and staggered backwards into the arms of the company sergeant-major, who was unfortunately an exceptionally small warrant officer. Dignity was not maintained.
It was not a happy situation, and it resulted from my desire not to leave anything behind that could be useful, a habit that I would have unlearnt then and there if I had known what it could bring down on me. On an exercise out on the moors, I had been appointed cook and at the close of the exercise I had not wanted to waste the leftover milk, so I poured it into my water-bottle. I strongly recommend stale milk, fermented for three weeks in a British Army canteen, as a harmless substitute for gas.
Weathermen talk about an area of low pressure, the cold air pushing out the warm, the threat of rain and winds of enormous force. I was living all the time now on the edge of such an area. The war kept coming closer, and not content with knowing it was out there, I went out to meet it. Towards the end of 1940, a notice appeared in Daily Orders, inviting volunteers for service in India.
I volunteered, not without thought, but I broke the old soldiers’ rule for a second time, and have wondered about it since.
The anny can be inscrutable and it was to be some time before I learned whether I was going to India. Meanwhile, the pace quickened. Late in December 1940 there was an urgent demand for more signals officers, apparently even including young and inexperienced ones. No. 13 Course was brought to a swift close, lopping off the last two weeks. We got into our new uniforms and kit and were sent into the world as officers. I was now Second-Lieutenant Eric Lomax, No. 165340, allocated for the time being to a base at Great Leighs in Essex. We were taken to Darlington Railway Station, climbed into blacked-out trains and were dispersed throughout Britain.
After a few weeks in a unit of Scottish Divisional Signals, under a vigorous Glasgow businessman turned colonel, who was an excellent commanding officer, I felt that I was becoming a real soldier, helping to protect the east coast of England immediately north of the Thames; but the War Office unfortunately hadn’t forgotten my rash enthusiasm and I was soon sent to a holding battalion in Scarborough – the first step in the long journey to India taking me back up to the north of England. Such are the ways of armies.
Our battalion was responsible for the defence of this vulnerable seaside town, and while I was on duty one evening the war finally made its leap across the coast and put out a finger for me. I was speaking to a policeman on the edge of a public park, and the familiar air raid warning and drone of aircraft engines – which always turned out to be ours – was suddenly augmented by a high whistling sound I had never heard before. The policeman and I were equally quick, and when the bombs dropped around us we were flat on the road. Not quite: I was flopped across a sandbag, my bottom a few inches in the air. And that was enough for the lethal blast of air, travelling just above the earth, to give my behind a blow that felt like a whack from a giant oar. The policeman had to inspect my rear, which he did with great kindness, before I would believe I was not seriously damaged.
I was lucky, probably saved by a couple of inches and some quirk of air-pressure. The people in a large block of flats nearby were buried under the rubble of their building. The storm was no longer a report on the radio now, it was filthy weather all around me.
My parents came down to Scarborough, and we could so easily have died together. They had taken a room in a house run by a Miss Pickup, and I took meals with them when I could. One evening, the three of us were sitting in Miss Pickup’s lounge when we heard a loud rattling, like a box of tools falling over in the attic two storeys up, and then a crash. The ceiling over our heads burst open and a small cylinder fizzing viciously with flames and giving off frightening heat fell on to the landlady’s carpet. I knew enough to recognize that it was a magnesium incendiary bomb, and that it would bum the house down and us with it. I dashed out into the back garden, found a large spade, ran back inside and scooped the bomb up and ran for the garden again. In those few seconds, just as I got outside, the incendiary burned through the steel blade of the shovel and fell near my feet.
This devilish firecracker tossed carelessly into a harmless parlour was a new twist. I can still hear the dry rattle it made as it hit the roof and worked its way through the thin ceilings towards me and my parents. Luck, perhaps some fault in the bomb, saved us. A neighbouring house received the same kind of hit and was ablaze, so fiercely that when two or three other men and myself tried to put out the fire we had to retreat, with minor shocks from wet electrical fittings.
Plans for the movement of the battalion to India began to take proper shape. Perhaps inevitably, I was put in charge of the baggage arrangements, which consisted of working out how many covered goods vans we would need when we pulled out of Scarborough for the port from which we would embark. We were not told the name of the port; I simply made my calculations and hoped we would get the wagons we needed.
In the middle of March 1941, we finally assembled late at night in this blacked-out Yorkshire resort. The battalion filled a street in front of silent hotels and the boarded-up shops. An army trying to be quiet, we made a hushed rumble around the war memorial, young men in heavy boots, laden with canvas and metal, glancing seriously at the monument to the dead of the last war.
The movement was supposed to be secret, but in the dark streets crowds of townspeople had come out, as well as parents who had come from all over England, mine among them. They stood smiling, even laughing, but doing it with the tense hilarity of people who are determined to be remembered well and know that they are now playing against firightening odds with their love for their children. My mother stood there in the crowd, and I suppose she waved. She looked distraught. I never saw her again.
We marched to the station through the darkness, the NCOs barking orders in stage whispers. A special train had steam up, exhaling its gases carefully, the distinctive sooty smell of steam-raising Welsh coal penetrating as it burned with the smoke into our nostrils and uniforms. The carriages had black blinds drawn over the windows; in front of the carriages, the three goods vans I had ordered were drawn up.