One morning Joe upped and left without telling anyone; and the next we heard from him was from a training camp on Salisbury Plain. He wrote Mum a card. He’d be off to France soon, he said, and sent lots of love to all of us. He came home on leave once, but I was away, playing football. Mum told me he looked really grand in his uniform, that I should be proud of him. Deep down I was too, but I just could not bring myself to say it or tell him. I never wrote to him. He never wrote to me.
In the dark days of 1940 we listened to all the news broadcasts we could. Everyone did. The news from France was worse every day. The army was surrounded and being driven back to Dunkirk. There were thousands and thousands of men on the beaches, all the army we had, and a whole armada of little boats was going over to pick up as many as they could. There were pictures in the newspapers of the soldiers being helped off the ships, wounded, bedraggled, beaten. After that it looked like invasion was a dead certainty.
Then the telegram came. Joe had been killed at Dunkirk. Only Emmy cried. The rest of us just sat there in the kitchen with the clock ticking, Ossie with his arm round Mum, each of us all alone with our sadness. I went out after a while and sat in the park on this very same bench and wept like a baby. I joined up the next day, I couldn’t stay out of it, not now, not any more.
The squirrels here are as tame as you like. I’ve had them right up on the bench with me before now. They don’t come for love, just food – I know that. There’s one sitting by my boot right now, but he’s not having any of my sausage roll, no matter how much he makes eyes at me. There were squirrels about the day I joined up, chasing each other up the trunk of that oak tree by the park gates. A branch came off that one last winter. Smashed the bench below into little pieces. He’s washing his nose now. I like it when he does that. All right, have a bit of sausage roll, just a little bit. Greedy little beggar.
Chelsea tried to stop me. Mr Knighton told me I had a great future in football and that football would go on somehow, war or no war. But Mum didn’t even try to talk me out of it, nor did Ossie. They understood. I joined the Royal Army Medical Corps. I’d be driving ambulances, working in field hospitals. This way at least I’d be doing something for Joe – that’s what I thought, that’s what I told myself.
So I found myself in khaki, and running up hills in full battle order, and learning how to march, and turn left, and turn right and about turn, and swing my arms in time with everyone else. I learnt to shoot a .303 rifle and a Bren gun, and how to bayonet a stuffed dummy. I learnt how to polish boots too, army boots this time, not football boots. Then we ran up more hills, lots more, until we’d completed our basic training.
Before they sent me off to war six months later they’d taught me how to drive an ambulance, how to dress wounds, put on splints for broken bones, take temperatures, carry stretchers. I never had much time to play football; but I did think of it, and I missed it too, the excitement, the roar of the crowds, all of it. The boys knew who I was of course, and ribbed me a bit to begin with, but they soon forgot all about that. And so did I. I was Billy again, not Billy the Kid. The football part of my life was over. I tried to put it out of my mind. I’d pick it up again where I’d left off when the war was finished and done with. I only had one leave before I was sent overseas, and in a way I wished I’d never gone home. Joe was a photo on the mantelpiece now, and Mum was tearful every time she looked at me. “She’s frightened of losing you as well,” Ossie told me just before I left.
Emmy gave me her little gold cross to keep me safe, and hugged me as if she’d never let go. I walked away from her, from all of them, and took the train down to Southampton to join the troop ship. We knew we were going to the North African desert, but we didn’t know where, not exactly. It was my first time on a ship and, to begin with, I hated it. I kept thinking of the submarines lurking under the sea – I couldn’t swim either.
But I soon forgot about the submarines. Someone had made a football out of rags, and word had got about the ship that I was ‘Billy the Kid’ from Chelsea. For a few hours every day we’d play football up on deck, a kind of football anyway, and I could forget about where I was, and what I was going to. But in the evenings alone on deck with just the sea and the sky, I’d talk to Joe. I talked to him a lot. I’ve always talked to Joe ever since, specially when I need him, mostly when I’m very sad or very happy.
We landed at Tobruk in pitch darkness, and drove the convoy of ambulances off into the desert. We could hear the rumble of the guns, see the whole night sky lit up ahead of us – like a terrific thunderstorm it was, but with no rain. Then the sun came up over the desert, big and red, and we saw what sort of place we’d come to. Nothing but rocks and sand as far as the eye could see, and hundreds of our soldiers streaming past us, retreating back towards Tobruk, on foot, in lorries. We set up our field hospital right beside the road where the wounded were waiting, sitting on the sand in their hundreds. Only a stone’s throw away from them, the dead were lying in rows waiting to be buried. They lay so still. It was my first day of war – and my last, as it turned out.
We spent that morning burying the dead. None of us spoke. We just dug and cursed the flies that wouldn’t leave us alone. I was sick a good few times – and it wasn’t on account of the heat. It was hot by now, burning hot, hot enough someone said to fry an egg on your helmet. More and more wounded were being brought in all the time. The sound of the guns was coming closer all the while now, and then we heard the chattering of machine gun fire.
That same evening we got the order to pull back. We were stretchering the wounded into the ambulances when a German armoured column came roaring and clanking towards us out of the desert. They never even bothered to stop, but just waved and rattled on by. The infantry came behind them. There was a bit of shouting, but no shooting. They just rounded us all up and marched us off. No one marched in step now. We didn’t swing our arms together either. All that had been for nothing. I was a prisoner-of-war.
There were thousands of us POWs, maybe thirty, forty thousand, all sat around in the desert, guards wherever you looked. Not that anyone was going to run off. Where to? Tobruk had fallen to the Germans, and there were hundreds of miles of empty desert on one side and the sea on the other. For three days we sat there, no food, no water. I’d never been so thirsty in all my life. At night we froze, in the day we roasted. Then they marched us back into Tobruk – which was full of very happy-looking Germans. From there they shipped us off to Italy.
It was on the ship that I first bumped into Robbie, who turned out to be a lifetime Chelsea supporter. Once he recognised me he looked after me like I was his little brother. All the way up Italy in that stifling train, packed in like cattle – four days it took – he saw to it that I had enough water and food to keep me going. And when at last we found ourselves marched into a prisoner-of-war camp, somewhere north of Venice, he was there right beside me, almost as if he was protecting me from the guards. And Robbie was a big man, about as broad as he was high. I felt well protected. We slept in the same hut too, and as the months passed we became the best of mates. And we stayed that way.
We didn’t get our first letters for months, and some of us got very down about that. Robbie, always the chirpy one – he reminded me of Joe sometimes – did his best to keep my pecker up, but I took it hard. It was the wire all around us closing me in, the lousy food they gave us, the cold in the winter, just the endless days that dragged on with no news, and no hope of any news.
When I was alone I’d talk a lot to Joe and tell him my troubles – that helped. I kept thinking how stupid I’d been, how I’d just walked off the troop ship and into captivity, how I’d let everyone down.
I used to have this dream that I was back home and the crowd was doing their chanting: “Billy, Billy the Kid! Billy, Billy the Kid!” And I’d score a goal and Joe would come running onto the pitch from the Shed End and clap me on the back and I could see in his face that he was so proud of me. Then I’d wake and I’d know I was in the hut. I
knew it by the smell of it: wet clothes, wood smoke and unwashed men. I’d lie there in the dark of the hut, and think of home, of Joe, of football.
Once the letters came I felt much better, for a while. Lots of them came at once – we never knew why. But it was good just to hear that Mum and Ossie and Emmy were all right, that they were still there, and I wasn’t alone in the world. There’d been some bombing in London, so they’d sent Emmy down to Aunty Mary’s in Broadstairs for a while. She sounded very different in her letter, very grown up somehow. She told me how she wanted to go back home, but that Mum wouldn’t let her, how Aunty Mary fussed over her and how she was fed up with her. She told me she had decided she was going to be a nurse when she was older. I read the letters over and over again, and wrote home whenever I could. Those letters were my lifeline. The next best thing in the world were the Red Cross parcels. How I looked forward to them – marmalade, chocolate, biscuits, cigarettes. We did a lot of swapping and bartering after they came. I’d swap my cigarettes for Robbie’s chocolate – never did like smoking, just not my vice – I did my best to end up with mostly chocolate. It lasted longer, if I didn’t get too greedy.
As for the Italians guarding us – there were two sorts. You had the kind ones, and that was most of them, who’d pass the time of day, have a joke with you; and then the others, the nasty ones, the real fascists who strutted about the place like peacocks and treated us like dirt. But what really got me down was the boredom, the sameness of every day. I had so much time to think and it was thinking that always dragged me down, and then I wouldn’t feel like doing anything. I wouldn’t even kick a football about.
It was partly to perk me up, I reckon, that Robbie came up with the idea of an F.A. Cup competition. He organised the whole thing. Soon we had a dozen league sides – all mad keen supporters only too willing to turn out for ‘their’ club back home. I trained the Chelsea team, and played centre forward. Robbie was at left back, solid as a rock. For weeks on end the camp was a buzz of excitement. Everyone trained like crazy. Suddenly we all had something to do, something to work for. What some of us might have been lacking in skill and fitness, we made up for in enthusiasm. The Italians laughed at us a bit to start with, but as we all got better they began to take a real interest in it. In the end they even volunteered to provide the referees.
I was a marked man of course, but I was used to that. I got up to all my old tricks, and the crowd loved it. Robbie was thunderous in his tackling. Chelsea got through to the final, against Newcastle.
So in April 1943, under Italian sunshine and behind the barbed wire, we had our very own F.A. Cup Final. The whole camp was there to watch, over two thousand men, and hundreds of Italians too, including the Commandatore himself. It was quite a match. They were all over us to start with, and had me marked so close I could hardly move. Paulo – one of the Italian guards we all liked – turned out to be a lousy ref, or maybe he was a secret Newcastle supporter, because every decision went against us. At half time we were a goal down. Luckily they ran out of puff in the second half and I squeezed in a couple of cheeky goals. Half the crowd went wild when I scored the winner, and when it was all over someone started singing ‘Abide With Me’. We fairly belted it out, and when we’d finished we all clapped and cheered, and to be fair, the Italians did too. They were all right – most of them.
Next day came the big surprise. Paulo came up to me as I was sitting outside the hut writing a letter. “Before the war I see England play against Italia in Roma,” he said. “Why we not play Italia against England, here, in this camp?”
So there we were a couple of weeks later on the camp football field facing each other, the best of us against the best of them. We all had white shirts and they had blue – like the real thing. Paulo captained them, I captained us. They were good too, tricky and quick. They ran circles round us. I found myself defending with the back four, marshalling the middle and trying to score goals all at the same time. It didn’t work. They went one goal up soon after half time and were well on top too for most of the second half. We really had our backs to the wall. The crowd had all gone very quiet. We were all bunched – when the ball landed at my feet. I was exhausted. All I wanted to do was boot it up field, just to get it clear. But I had four Italians coming at me and that fired me up. I beat one and another, then another, and leaving Paulo sprawling, made for their goal. I had just the goalie to beat. I feinted this way, that way and stroked it in. It was the best goal I ever scored. The whistle blew for full time. I was hoisted up and carried in triumph round the camp. We hadn’t won, but we hadn’t lost. Honours even. Just as well, I’ve always thought. Both sides could laugh about it afterwards. Important that.
Some months later, we could all see that the Italians were becoming more and more twitchy. The nasty ones were getting even nastier. Something was up, but we didn’t know what, not really. Paulo did try to warn us.
“Things no good,” he told me one day. “We Italians, we no want this war. Is no good.”
I thought he was just being friendly, but it turned out to be more than that. One morning we woke up and the guards had just vanished, leaving the gates wide open behind them. Some of us thought it was a trap, but then an Italian farmer came up to the camp gates in his horse and cart and told us. Italy was out of the war. “We are friends now,” he said. “Go, go quick. Soon Germans come. Go quick.”
So two thousand of us just ran for it into the countryside of Northern Italy. None of us had any idea where to go, not to start with. We just wanted to get out while we had the chance. Robbie and I made for the mountains. We thought we’d be safer up there.
We had a week of wonderful, almost carefree freedom. The country people were kind to us wherever we went and fed us. We couldn’t make ourselves understood, nor understand much of what they said, but we got by. One old bloke gave us a map of Italy, and seemed to be saying we’d be better off going south because the Americans and British had landed in the south, and that the Germans would be coming down from the north any day. He was right about that. The very next day we saw a German column winding its way down the valley. We were already cut off from the south. It was Robbie’s idea to head for France, that maybe we could link up with the French Resistance and find our way back home through neutral Spain, over the Pyrenees. So we began our long trek west, through the hills of Italy, walking by night, and resting up by day.
The swallows are back. I saw my first one only the other day, dipping down in the puddle in the vegetable garden. He’s building in the woodshed, just like he did last year. I suppose he’s the same one. Swallows always come back to the place they were born – that’s what they say. Come to think of it, that’s what I did too, in a roundabout sort of a way.
There were swallows overhead that day too, hundreds of them skimming the river. We’d been on the run for a couple of months by now, maybe more, and we were tired, tired right out, and hungry, and thirsty too. We’d been hiding up in the woods all day and had just come down to the river for a drink, when this old woman came along the river bank carrying a basket of washing. She took very little notice of us at first, but when she’d finished her washing she beckoned us over. She never said a word, but led us up a track through the woods, and out onto the open hillside beyond. The farmhouse looked more like a hut from the outside, but on the inside it was spotless. She sat us down and fed us – soup, hot soup. Lovely. Best soup I ever had. Nothing was said, except our thankyous.
That same evening we heard the jangle of cow bells outside, and a girl’s voice calling. Then she came in. She looked surprised, but not frightened. She looked at us and then at her mother, and as the two of them spoke her eyes never left us. And I couldn’t stop looking at her either. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever set eyes on. Lucia. I’ve only got to think her name and her face comes back, a face I’ll never forget, not as long as I live. In all the time we knew each other we scarcely said a word, but she’d smile and I’d smile. We held hands, that’s all. I remember sh
e had rough hands, rougher than I thought they’d be. And she laughed at my sticking up hair. They looked after us for weeks, until we were strong again and rested and ready to go on. We’d sleep in the house at night and go into the woods by day, just in case the Germans came.
Then one evening they did come. We heard them from the woods. There was shouting. Robbie and I crouched down at the edge of the wood. We saw it all. One of the soldiers was waving my battle dress jacket in their faces and screaming at them and slapping them. They stood side by side and said nothing, arms linked, Lucia hiding her head in her mother’s shoulder.
The soldiers just shot them up against the barn wall, and the sound of it echoed around the mountains. It was my jacket that did it, my jacket that killed them.
We reached France in the end, more by luck than by judgement. We hadn’t a clue where we were going, not really. We kept to the wild country, the high country, sleeping rough, always going west, living off the land, begging what food we could, stealing it sometimes when we had to. But we were always hungry. The people were kind, and brave too. Nine times out of ten they’d give us something to eat, and we knew now what terrible risks they were taking.
All this time Robbie looked out for me as best he could. He’d never let me take chances. It was always him who went knocking on doors for food, while I waited out of sight until he was quite sure it was safe. He was brimful of kindness, that man. I’d never have made it without him.
One night, lying there under the stars, we were asking each other what we most looked forward to. “Toad in the hole,” I told him. “What about you?”