I hurried back to where the rest of my unit was dawdling about and, within moments, the books were nestling at the back of our tent under some RAF greatcoats. We spent the next couple of days lying on the grass in sunlit content, reading the best America had to offer. When our embarkation order came, we divvied up the books between us and they went with us on the landing-craft.
They accompanied us all the way through France, Belgium, Holland and into Germany, functioning as a kind of mobile lending library for the various other units we became associated with. I still treasure a tattered half dozen of them.
My family took a somewhat guarded view of my Uncle Jack, partly because he smoked a pipe and was headmaster of a notoriously rough and tumble ‘elementary’ school in Islington, but also because he was given to agnostic opinions and spent his holidays taking solitary walking tours across Europe.
He was always one of my favourite relatives and I think I may have been one of his, because when I was on leave in 1944 and went to see him, he presented me with a souvenir of his walking trips, a small blue volume entitled Baedeker’s Guide to Northern France. ‘This might possibly come in handy,’ he said and quoted me that line about War being a brutal way to learn geography.
No more than a few weeks later, it was D-Day and Dick Organ and I were in the cab of a water bowser about to land on the beach in Normandy. After a beach-head had been established, it wasn’t long before we found ourselves in more settled conditions, a tented encampment among the Normandy apple trees.
As I was lolling outside our tent, immersed in a Robert Benchley pocket book and contentedly enjoying what seemed to be the continuous sunshine of that summer, a visit from Flying Officer Brown, our Squadron CO, had me scrambling to my feet.
‘You’re always reading,’ he said. ‘So I’m volunteering you to get a wall newspaper started while we’re here.’
My response was instinctive. ‘Will it get me off guard duties, sir?’
A deal was agreed and I set to. The contents of the paper, typed on a large oblong arrangement of blank message pads pinned to an improvised easel, were confined to gossipy items about the personnel on the camp, because nothing of the remotest military significance could be included in case the Germans launched a counter-attack and the newspaper fell into enemy hands. So I operated under a rigorous censorship.
In fact, I was beginning to doubt that I could rustle up sufficient material to fill the space available when I suddenly remembered that Uncle Jack’s Baedeker was still at the bottom of my kitbag. Having learned that we were only a few miles away from the town of Bayeux, I looked it up. And, sure enough, there it was.
Within a few hours, the wall newspaper was completed. Its centrepiece was an article on the Bayeux Tapestry. It was a descriptive essay, so detailed in its command of dates and names that F/O Brown came over with a confidential message. His superiors had instructed him to find out how an ordinary AC2 came to be so well up on French cultural history.
I was aware that at the beginning of the War everybody had been asked to hand in their copies of Baedeker so, not wishing to drop Uncle Jack in it, I merely confessed that ‘One of my family used to go on walking holidays round here.’
Although I felt sure this didn’t satisfy them, they still suggested I apply for a transfer to Military Intelligence.
‘He’s always been a vivacious reader,’ an aunt of mine used to say. Eric Sykes mentions in his autobiography that when we were first together in the RAF, stationed at Swaffham in Norfolk, I would read a book while marching the mile and a half from the barracks to the Mess Hall every morning for breakfast. I managed it, as I recall, by falling in behind a cooperative fellow airman of suitable height and on the command ‘Forward march’, I would tuck an opened book between the straps of the haversack on his back and, for the rest of the journey, tread his footsteps well.
While we were making our way across Holland and Germany, we had occasional visits from the mobile cinemas sent out by AKS.These film shows were always welcome, although there seemed to be a somewhat tactless preponderance of those patriotically gung-ho military adventures Hollywood was churning out at the time.
However, the sceptical chi-iking with which our lads received such posturings more than made up for their heavy-handed heroics. One I remember with particular pleasure had a scene in its final reel where the gallant GI hero was sent back from the front-line to have his wounds treated in his Mid-West home town. After undergoing a tense time in the operating theatre and a spell in a wheelchair, comes the day when he must face a special medical examination to determine whether or not he is fit enough to return to the battlefield.
We saw his hopeful face as he disappeared into the doctor’s consulting room, his college sweetheart anxiously waiting outside. After a while, the door opened again and there he stood, the very picture of dejection and dismay.
As he sagged miserably against the doorway, almost with one voice the RAF audience exclaimed, ‘He’s passed!’
When Bill Fraser made his West End debut in 1940, he was acclaimed as the most talented new revue comedian for years. The show was New Faces, the one that introduced Eric Maschwitz’s ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’, and I can remember being enthralled by its wit and sophistication. Before Bill had time to take advantage of, let alone revel in, his new-found fame, he was called into the RAF. By the time he came out five years later, New Faces had been forgotten and he had to start the painful clamber to the top from the beginning again. Indeed, the next time I saw him on the professional stage, he was part of a concert party at Westgate-on-Sea.
In the interim, we had become well acquainted. Not long after D-Day, while my Signals Unit were bedded down for a while in Normandy, a notice went up on the Orderly Room board, calling for volunteers willing to help form an RAF entertainment unit. When I went along to offer my services, I found that the CO of the unit was Pilot Officer Bill Fraser. After I showed him a few lyrics and sketches I had written, very much under the influence of New Faces, he appointed me a sort of unofficial PA and we conducted the auditions together.
One of the first to turn up was a Sergeant in the RAF Regiment who told us he had an act that would ‘knock ’em out of their seats’. He then took a razor blade from his tunic pocket, popped it in his mouth and began chewing. After bringing the microphone nearer to his face, so that we could hear the metallic crunching sounds more clearly, he beckoned Bill closer. Motioning him to put his hand out, he opened his mouth and dribbled a mixture of metal fragments and saliva into his outstretched palm.
At his expectant look, Bill said apologetically, his eyes seeking somewhere to wipe his hand, ‘I think it’s more cabaret than revue.’
Fortunately, the next group of hopefuls included a gleam of pure gold by the name of LAC Eric Sykes. In his warm-hearted autobiography, If I Don’t Write It, Nobody Will, Eric has given such an engaging account of the shows we did, the places we toured and the people we met over the ensuing fifteen months, I find it hard to recall any incident he failed to cover.
Come to think of it, there was one. After celebrating VE Day on Lüneburg Heath, then hearing the proclamation of VJ Day, most of us became preoccupied with speculations about how soon our demob numbers would come up. In a bid to sustain unit morale, Bill organised a totally unauthorised trip into Denmark. We were stationed in Schleswig-Holstein