The trouble was, of course, that I didn’t know how far they had succeeded and I was reluctant to fabricate anything. Nevertheless, I began to make notes.
Then, in the late seventies, we had just finished a recording of Looks Familiar and the audience were filing out, when I noticed that one of them was lingering behind, trying to catch my eye. I recognised that jaw immediately. It was Smithy. With much hand-shaking and shoulder-gripping he joined me for a drink in Hospitality. Here, by ourselves at a small table, I plied him with questions, hoping for details that might provide me with a climax for my story, even perhaps a denouement.
His response was discouraging. He told me that no more than a week after I left the ward, an examining board had come round to evaluate the trio’s medical condition. Telling Smithy that they would defer a verdict on him until a psychiatrist could join them, they concentrated on Olly and Ted, the bogus hearing loss and the sham stomach disorder. In both cases their claims were accepted without a moment’s quibble and in no time at all the two of them had departed, vanishing immediately into deepest Civvy Street, whence Smithy had not heard a word from either of them since.
‘So much for dramatic conflict then,’ I remember thinking. ‘Not even any irony.’ Grasping at straws, I asked him, ‘How about you? How did you get on?’
Sensing my anticipation, he looked apologetic. ‘I didn’t. I never did go in front of them.’ He then explained that after the other two left, he became so bored that he began having second thoughts about the whole venture. On the house doctor’s next round he declared himself suddenly free of all his troubling symptoms and assured him he was feeling so much better, he would like to be returned to his unit. With visible relief they granted his request and by the end of that week he was back in training.
That was the point where I decided to place the putative screenplay into the Discarded File. However, noticing my downcast reaction, Smithy ventured, ‘But I did have another go at it.’
I brightened. Smithy was far the most appealing character of the three, his air of gentle melancholy lending him an extra dimension. Perhaps the screenplay might still be salvageable. ‘When?’ I asked. ‘Where?’
He went on to recount how he had had, by any standards, an eventful War. Posted to the Western Desert, he moved on to Sicily and thence to Northern Europe where, after VE Day, with the rank of Sergeant, he became part of the Occupying Forces in Germany.
‘That was when the boredom set in again,’ he recalled. ‘It was bitterly cold and all we were really doing was just hanging around waiting for our demob number to come up. I got so fed up that when a couple of blokes in my mob got out ahead of time on what I knew were faked compassionate grounds, I decided I’d have another go at taking a short cut.’
So, once again, he reported sick with violent headaches and bouts of uncontrollable weeping. As these symptoms were by now greeted with a greater degree of understanding and sympathy, in no time at all Smithy was put on a plane bound for a specially adapted psychiatric hospital in Norfolk.
And here chance decreed that his case was assigned to a particularly caring doctor, an elderly refugee whose unstinting concern for his patients was a byword. Having tut-tutted over Smithy’s symptoms, he confided that his own family had all been killed by the Nazis, including a son who would have been about Smithy’s age had he lived. ‘So I know how your family would feel if I sent you back to them in that condition.’ And, ignoring Smithy’s protestations, the saintly old man solemnly promised that under no circumstances would he allow Smithy home until his recovery was complete.
‘Result?’ Smithy said, his voice betraying only a slight trace of bitterness. ‘I didn’t get out till at least six months later than if I’d waited for my demob number to come up.’
Mentally I sent the notes for my escape story back into the Discarded File. True it might be, but who would believe it?
To gain my Wireless Operator badge, I had to pass an Aldis lamp test. This entailed standing on top of a hill and writing down a Morse message as it was blinked on and off at me from the top of a neighbouring hill.
There was absolutely no chance I would be able to decipher it. My Morse was adequate, but my eyesight was such that the dots and dashes of light merged into an undifferentiated blur.
My only recourse was to have a chum, skilled in the Aldis arts, conceal himself in a bush a yard or so away with a long stick. This he jabbed into my leg as the flashes were being transmitted, a hard jab indicating a dash, a soft one a dit.
Luckily, we were only required to reach a fairly modest speed at Aldis reading, so I managed a pass. To this day, I don’t know why my crouching accomplice didn’t just call the letters out to me. Possibly it was because the painful jabs I had to endure in some way made it seem less like cheating.
Anyway, I paid my respects to Samuel Morse years later when I suggested he could have entitled his autobiography, I Dit-Dit My Way.
During my time moving round Britain with the RAF, a popular trick for saving money on the obligatory telephone call home to let them know you were safe was to make it a personal call to your own name. That way your family knew it was you putting in a call and in reply to the operator’s ‘I have a personal call for Mr D. Norden’, they would simply deny you were there and the call would cost nothing. It worked several times for me, though I gave it up after my mother answered the call and said to the operator, ‘No, I’m sorry he’s not here but please tell him he should wear his overcoat in this weather.’
My mother never really mastered communication aids. Long after the War, when my parents were living in one of the ground-floor flats in a large four-flat converted house, they became worried about a spate of local burglaries, so my sister Doreen and I persuaded the landlord to install an entry-phone system.
I spent some time explaining to my mother how to make the best use of it. ‘When the front-door buzzer goes, pick up that phone and ask “Who is it?” And only when they’ve stated who they are do you press the button to let them in. Never,’ I emphasised, ‘never ever press that button till whoever’s outside has told you exactly who they are.’
My mother followed these instructions unfailingly. The trouble was that whenever she asked ‘Who is it?’ just as unfailingly the people who came calling on her would answer, ‘Me’, whereupon my mother would press the button that opened the door.
Prior to landing in Normandy on D-Day, my unit (554B Mobile Signal Unit 83 Group 2nd Tactical Air Force) was confined to a vast military encampment on the coast somewhere between Portsmouth and Southampton. Thousands of troops, of all types and nationalities, were assembled there, in preparation for the imminent invasion.
I have never known boredom like it. Under strict orders to keep ourselves in readiness to move at any moment, we were not allowed to stray further than five yards from our tents and the whole site was surrounded by barbed wire bearing starkly worded signs, ‘If you go any further, you will be shot.’ With no wireless sets or newspapers permitted, we could only sit around outside the tent all day, with occasional trips to the latrines or mess tent.
On the third morning I took a chance and went for a little wander. Within a few yards, I found myself in the middle of a group of large unoccupied tents emblazoned with the American stars and stripes. It looked to be some kind of supply point, so I nosed around a bit.
And that was when I chanced on my most unforgettable discovery of World War Two. At the far end of one of the empty tents, I saw a wooden crate marked