The British army’s attitude to the enemy appeared to be as much a worry to the top brass, even after the Germans had been defeated in Africa and the Sicily landings completed. Maybe the official view was that the soldiers’ achievements might go to their heads. My dad’s company was called together in the almond grove where they were camped near Syracuse and, in line with a War Office directive, bawled out for their apparent misconceptions about Rommel. Not that they took a great deal of notice; there had to be some lone symbol of decency even in the worst of worlds.
All in all, my father said, he was lucky. His brother Reg was sent to Burma. At Kohima the British were besieged for weeks, separated by the width of the High Commissioner’s tennis court from the Japanese screaming at them on the other side. My uncle had injured mates pleading with him to shoot them and put them out of their misery. He was lying wounded in a makeshift hospital himself when the Japanese stormed it at one door and caught up with him after he’d got out the other. Injured by a bayonet thrust, he feigned death in the long grass.
In comparison, the Royal Signals was a doddle. My father had to master Morse Code and spent much of the day tapping it out. He’d applied for the Royal Engineers, thinking it wanted people from the building industry. In relief, when that came to nothing, his dad explained he’d have been constructing Bailey bridges across rivers and repairing phone lines in no man’s land, under what the army liked to refer to as ‘hot fire’.
But events had a way of springing themselves upon you, pulling you suddenly in. You had to beware of the unguarded moment. The German attack on Bari harbour in December 1943 came when we had got ‘too cocky’ and confident of victory. Everyone saw the single German spotter plane circling very high and watched the anti-aircraft fire chase it away. They thought no more about it till at night the aerial assault came in. The harbour was floodlit; the twenty-boat convoy, recently arrived was being unloaded. Two ammunition carriers went up and took fourteen other ships with them. One explosion, like the crack of a large whip, threw my dad 15 feet across his room, door and windows with him; this was 6 miles away along the coast in Santo Spirito. A chance hit,’ wrote Churchill, ‘30,000 tons of cargo lost.’ He didn’t mention the thousand killed among the Italian dockyard workers, merchant seamen and Allied military personnel. In the yard next morning victims, dead and alive, had turned yellow. The medics had no idea for days what they were dealing with, till word went around that General Eisenhower had ordered a consignment of mustard gas. Not that we’d have used it without cause, mind you. We just had it in case the Germans used it first.
During a plague of typhus in Caserta, north of Naples, my dad’s unit was billeted in the abandoned royal palace, with its water cascades and hanging gardens, while for several weeks the Allied advance was held up by the battles for the monastery at Montecassino. Driving through the streets in a truck, he saw an old man fall over and die. Some soldiers who ventured out on the town in their free time suffered the same fate. Sometimes there was nothing to be done, except withdraw, observe and wonder what it was that made such things go on in the world. A degree of separation, if there was a choice, afforded a perspective that was lost on the unthinking crowd. On Piazzale Loretto in Milan, he saw the bodies of Mussolini and his mistress hanging from their heels and urinated on by an angry mob. Weeks before, the same crowd might have been cheering them.
After the war, soldiers rarely volunteered their recollections. They only came out over the years. Experiences had either been too awful, mundane or similar to those of many others to merit earlier mention. Besides, the cities at home had had the bombs. Even Sandy High Street was machine-gunned by a German fighter, my nan having to launch herself into a shop doorway with baby and pram. Anyone who went on about moments they had endured abroad in face of the enemy, or how many of them they’d injured or killed, would have been a suspect personality. Few, too, were asked. Until prompted, my dad said little more than he had seen the eruption of Vesuvius, from Caserta, filling the sky with black smoke for three weeks in March 1944. As in the time of Pompeii, the prior impression had been that it was extinct. Further north in Siena he began to learn Italian by walking out from the city’s fort and reciting door numbers. He came home speaking the language well, one among very few of the quarter of a million Allied soldiers in Italy to do so.
Talking about the football, rather than the war, was easier. Games were played between stages of the Allied advance up the Italian leg. My father played in goal for 15th Army Group HQ and was nicknamed ‘Flash’, though only, he insisted, after his white blond hair. You changed in barracks or tents and, if playing away, went by army truck. Match locations ranged from the landing strip in Syracuse, to Rome’s Dei Marmi stadium, encircled by statues of emperors and gods. In the Comunale stadium in Florence, England were to draw 1–1 some seven years later and maintain their unbeaten record against Italy. In Bologna, my dad occupied the goal where David Platt volleyed the last-minute winner past Preud’homme of Belgium in the 1990 World Cup. His reports of the games he played in suggest he’d have probably saved it.
As for the spectacular moments, the most memorable was reserved for when the army had moved far north to the Yugoslav border to fend off Tito’s claim to Trieste. It was made in the small stadium in Monfalcone, on a baked-earth goalmouth full of large stones. A brisk advance by the opposition down the right-wing forced him to cover his front post. But the ball swung over to the fast-advancing centre-forward, who volleyed it hard towards the far corner. A Liverpudlian, naturally vocal, the centre-forward was shouting for a goal from the moment he hit it. My dad made it across the full 8 yards of his goal, diving to push the ball away with his right hand. The save was unique in anyone’s recollection, though others may have emulated it since.
Immediate thoughts of self-congratulation were tempered by the impact of the goalmouth surface on his knees. As my dad pulled himself up in pain, his opponent – driven by a fit of frustrated expectation and Adriatic sun – rushed in, yelling and hammering him with his fists around the shoulders and head. This incident was ‘comical’, which left me with the impression goalkeepers were not averse to gaining pleasure from the annoyance of others. But they also performed an important public service. Contrary to a common prejudice that it was keepers who, by virtue of their role and isolation, were insane, they showed that it was out there, in the wider, collective world, where madness was to be found.
At the start of the war, Frank Swift had signed up as a special constable in Manchester. He was put to directing city traffic, an ill-advised move, since his presence was more likely to attract a crowd than clear it. One congested day on Market Street, with his efforts achieving nothing, he waved a cheery ‘bugger this’ and went home. Like many top footballers, he became a trainer to younger soldiers who were about to be shipped abroad. My dad was trained by Roy Goodall, the Huddersfield Town and England half-back, and passed out as a PT instructor. This qualified him for a comfortable home assignment in one military gym or another but before one arose he was en route for Africa. Again, he said, he was fortunate. Many of the younger trainers who were at first kept back from service abroad, found themselves later pitched on to the beaches at Normandy.
Football at home ticked over, with teams raised from whoever was on hand on any given Saturday. Sam Bartram played in two successive wartime Cup Finals, one for Charlton, the other as a guest for Millwall. As the war moved towards conclusion, opportunity arose to put on exhibition matches for the troops abroad. Victory in Europe was on the point of being declared as my dad’s unit progressed to Florence, when it was announced Frank Swift was due in town. He was to play for a team led by Joe Mercer, the Everton half-back, against that of Wolves captain, Stan Cullis. It was to be an occasion for great celebration, till on the morning of the game, my dad and fellow signalmen were told to pack their kit and advance up country to Bologna. VE Day was an anti-climax. Each soldier was issued two bottles of beer, which he and his mates poured over their heads: ‘Bloody stupid, really.’
Full international games were under way at home more than a year later. It was obvious to many that the choice