Chapter XII: Broadway
In 1941 the British forces under Wavell had captured Cyrenaica in N. Africa and advanced towards Tripoli, but they were later made to retreat towards Cairo, and so at the beginning of 1942 there were rumours among us that the 13th Anti-tank Regiment would be sent to N. Africa to stem Rommel’s advance. In February 1942 a contingent of us was sent from Church Stretton to join the regular 13th Anti-Tank Regiment, now preparing to be moved overseas.
February 1942 was a period of severe wintry weather, snow and hard frost. It was in such conditions that we were transported in Army trucks to the Regiment’s station in Broadway, from a beautiful area on the Welsh border to an equally beautiful area in the Cotswolds. But in such cold weather we were hardly in the mood to appreciate the beauty of Broadway.
Not only did we have to undergo the rigours of an uncomfortable journey in frosty weather, but on arrival we found that we would have to undergo much worse rigours. We arrived in Broadway in complete darkness without adequate preparation for reception having been made. We were stopped at the outskirts of the village and driven into a farmyard.
I forget whether we had a proper meal, either hot or cold, but I well remember that we were billeted for the night in a cold, unheated, draughty loft over a stable or a cowshed. We had no palliasses on which to lie down; we just had to lie in our uniforms, covered by our greatcoats, on bare boards that had between half-inch gaps through which penetrated a numbing cold draught. For pillows we used kitbags that were hard and knobbly as if you were lying on a bag of different sized pebbles. This was one of the two most uncomfortable and indeed tortuous nights that I spent during the whole of my Army service.
Of course, I did not sleep a wink, and was glad to be ordered to get up at reveille, six o’clock on a dark wintry morning! But more torture was to come! We had to break the ice to have shaving water. Again I cannot remember what food, if any, we had, but I do remember that lavatory facilities consisted of squatting on a long pole overhanging a running stream.
On the day after our arrival we settled in with the rest of the Regiment in a huge farm complex, with the buildings adapted by the Army to accommodate the various needs of a comparatively large unit. So from now on there were no more complaints about the treatment we received. We had adequate food and fairly comfortable billets. After a day of training we could spend the evening in a centre run by the local W.V.S., a band of rather aristocratic but pleasant and welcoming ladies. But in those days of scarcity of provisions, the fare that they could provide was hardly comparable with what today’s ladies’ insititutions like the W.I. can provide. What I can remember was that the food provided was almost always Betox sandwiches and a cup of some drink like Bovril.
The days were devoted to the usual Army training - marching, short route-marches, physical training, map-reading, driving lorries, night guards, kit inspections, rifle-drill and so on. But, in my case, there came a very dramatic change from this routine.
Suddenly and unexpectedly I was summoned to attend an Army medical tribunal in Stow-on-the-Wold; a consequence, I suppose, of the fact that your medical history followed you from unit to unit. This was the moment when my odd bifurcated big toe literally saved my life as I was made to realise later. The Medical tribunal down-graded me from A2 to B7 - a downgrading which really meant that I was moved from A to B, the 7 being just one of the categories of the B grade. The result of this was that I was immediately put on what they called ‘Home Details’. This really meant that I was not to be sent abroad along with the 13th Anti-Tank Regiment.
Not only was I saved from the perils of active service overseas, but the attitude towards me of the officers, both non-commissioned and commissioned, was changed. Indeed I was made to feel as if I was a cowardly malingerer. Instead of joining the rest of the gunners and the drivers in their training, I was given menial jobs in the office under the supervision of a surly, unpleasant Regular Army sergeant-major. To keep me occupied I was dumped in a smallish room in what is now Broadway’s White Swan Hotel. The job I had to do was to sort out hundreds of Army O.S. maps into matching sets. It was a boring and untaxing job, but it had its compensations. Being an introvert, I was able, as it were, to relapse into a world of my own, allowing my thoughts and imagination to wander without inhibition.
This kind of ostracism gave me another not unpleasant duty. Instead of sharing guard-duties with the gunners I was sent to guard a kind of warehouse holding Army stores. But this was a job that had no such unpleasant routine of stepping out into the cold at two-hour intervals to guard the many entrances to the buildings of the regular camp. I was able to spend a completely undisturbed night lying on a proper bed, the best I could choose in the warehouse. There was no worry about any equipment being stolen as I could have the doors and windows locked. In the morning I made my own way down to the army canteen for breakfast and then reported to the office in the White Swan Hotel - no parading and no marching to the orders of the NCOs!
There were two rude interruptions to this rather cosy routine. As one of the final preparations for active service overseas a night exercise was arranged. Troops were to be transported to different rural locations in the Cotswolds in order to carry out certain manoeuvres for a period of three days. Somehow or other, they were short of one driver, and so I was commandeered to take charge of one of the lorries, accompanied by a young officer. It was a prospect that I did not anticipate with any pleasure as it meant driving an unusually large vehicle along narrow country lanes in the darkness of night.
Every kind of preparation had to be made for the feeding of the soldiers and for the resting and sleeping accommodation. My sleeping quarters was the bare floor-boards of the lorry- a very uncomfortable experience! The experience was in no way improved by the presence of the surly and irritable officer. But this moaning of mine is far from being justifiable when one thinks of the horrors suffered by most soldiers in actual warfare.
The other rude interruption was the result of an order from High Command that every gunner and driver should have fired three hundred rounds of .303 ammunition before moving overseas. It was a senseless panicky order as it had to be acted upon immediately and it was obvious that the Commanding Officer of the Regiment was able to make arrangements for those who had not fired three hundred rounds in such a hurry that no proper instruction could be given and so no benefit derived from the exercise. But the C.O. had to satisfy H.Q. by signing a document that the order had been carried out.
It was even more of a senseless exercise for me as I was included in the shooting party even though I had been put on Home Details. Some twenty or thirty of us had to undertake a lorry journey of thirty miles or more to the hills above Malvern, where there was an Army Rifle Range where shots could be fired at a range of three hundred yards. Without any preparation and without any instruction we lay on the ground with legs straddled and proceeded to shoot a hundred rounds at a hundred yards range, the next hundred at two hundred yards and the final hundred at three hundred yards. The shooting even at a hundred yards was often abysmally off-target, but at the three hundred yards range the bullets were fired without any hope at all of even marking the target-card.
The time was fast approaching when the whole Regiment would have to move from Broadway, and it was not until then that I decided to attend an evening service in the Methodist Chapel. I should have done this much earlier as I was given a right royal welcome by one or two of the families and immediately invited to their homes. I found the company of one of these families particularly pleasant and interesting. This welcome was indeed the more pleasant when compared with the welcome that Christopher Fry and I had had with the stiff-necked churchgoers of Church Stretton.
From now on, in whatever place I was stationed I was fortunate enough to find pleasant and amenable civilian company, and that mainly through attending church or chapel services. This was also Carrie’s and my experience in later life. Each time we moved, when we went along to the local chapel we met people whose interests were similar to ours.