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 USO. It was crammed to the top with books, pocket-size editions of what seemed to be all that was best in current American writing. These editions were specially printed for the American forces and really were pocket size, measuring no more than half the vertical length of our Penguins. When I picked up a few to glance at the names, there they all were. Steinbeck, dos Passos, Benchley, Wolfe, Ferber, Dreiser, Woollcott, Perelman … One hundred and thirty in all.
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
