Jack of Diamonds (53 page)

He grinned, holding up a restraining hand. ‘No, no, not so fast, Jack.’

‘What, sir?’ I asked anxiously.

‘She’ll only agree if you give your permission.’

‘Done, sir!’ I said, grinning like an ape, then I stretched over the desk and shook his hand, perhaps more vigorously than I should.

‘Not
sir
. In private you must call me Nick. After all, I’m soon to become your stepfather!’ He laughed.

‘When, sir? Er, Nick.’

‘As soon as we can arrange it. Of course I’ll need the CO’s permission and I’ll have to arrange for the Anglican chaplain to marry us here at the barracks. But there’s no time to waste. Never know when we’re going to embark for overseas now we’ve been informed. I don’t want to give some other guy a chance, do I! You’ll be required to give her away, of course. Just a quiet affair, no fuss.’

But of course when Miss Frostbite heard about it that was the end of the quiet affair with no fuss. Nick’s mom, Jean, a widow, came down from Vancouver and proved to be as nice as her son. We had a Saturday afternoon wedding reception with the whole band in attendance at the Jazz Warehouse. There was a proper wedding cake and everything else thrown in by Joe and Miss Frostbite. Mom and Nick invited only good friends: the twins, Mac of course (without Dolly), and the rest of the gang, Joe, Miss Frostbite, Mrs Hodgson and Mrs Sopworth, with the boys in the band and some of the kitchen staff who’d worked with my mom when she was trying to compensate Miss Frostbite for paying for my piano lessons, also five of her team who’d worked as office cleaners with her. All seemed to love her and I could see how truly happy she was. Captain Reed, now to become not only sir but Nick and stepfather, was an only child like me, so apart from his mom he had only a couple of buddies from the army and medical school. He made a speech at the reception saying he couldn’t believe his luck finding someone like Gertrude. I agreed with him, although I knew they were both lucky to have found each other.

Later, when they were about to depart for a three-day honeymoon at Windermere House, a grand hotel on the lake at Muskoka (wedding gift from the twins), my mom hugged me. ‘Oh, Jack, I’m so happy, I do love him so,’ she whispered, close to tears.

‘Don’t cry!’ I laughed. ‘You’ll spoil your nice make-up and make that beautiful new nose all sniffy and red!’

They were leaving in a military staff car with a driver (a gift from the CO), and as it drove off my mom and Nick turned and waved to us from the back window. They were both beaming.

In early June 1942, the Royals Regiment boarded a troop train to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and arrived two days later, a train journey that normally takes half that time, but our train seemed to be shunted into every siding on the way to let everything else pass. Tired and fed up we embarked on the pre-war Cunard liner
Queen Mary
, now turned troopship and destined for Southampton in England. All we wanted to do was stow our kitbags and find a spot below decks before the grand old lady sailed down the harbour. Less than an hour out to sea the war proper started for me.

With fifteen thousand officers and men on board from various Canadian regiments, the medics were busy almost from the moment we left port. The men were weary and dehydrated from the long train journey and while the sea was no more than choppy, some of the men started almost immediately to feel seasick.

Seasickness is no joke in such crowded conditions. The men and their equipment were crammed below decks, each man allocated a bunk eighteen inches wide as his only personal space, each bunk stacked four high. The officers, of course, were given the use of the decks and billeted in the first-class and second-class cabins with the dining rooms now turned into messes. To add to our misery the ship had all its woodwork covered in leather to protect it. Perhaps it hadn’t been properly cured because a strange, nauseating smell pervaded below decks even before the first guy threw up. By the time we were two days out to sea, it had become a stinking miasma.

The medics and orderlies, together with the doctors, worked twelve-hour shifts as a matter of course, but when we hit truly bad seas four days out, I think we worked sixteen hours straight from then on. During this worst period of turbulence I received a message to report to the bandmaster, Sergeant Major Leo Leader, an NCO of the bristling moustache type who demanded perfection. Earlier, I had managed to rehydrate him sufficiently so that he was able to stand on his own two feet, but only just. When I arrived I was surprised when he apologised for keeping me from my work, apologies being contrary to his nature. He then handed me a note. ‘Read it, Lance Corporal Spayd,’ he ordered. ‘It came to me because they assume all musicians are in the band.’

Dear Sergeant Major Leader,

As you may imagine in these rough seas things are pretty miserable in the officers’ quarters. It may help to cheer them up if you’d direct Jack Spayd to report to the main mess at 1700 hrs to play the piano while we have our dinner.

He will return below decks no later than 1900 hrs. Have him report directly to me.

Thank you,

Capt. John ‘Bull’ Fuller

Officer Entertainment

I was barely able to contain my surprise when Sergeant Major Leader grinned. ‘They don’t call that miserable
sonofabitch
“Fuller Bull” for nothing. Don’t worry, lad, I’ve sent the captain a message to say that you are seasick and too weak to rise from your bunk. Never put your trust in an officer until you’ve fought at his side in battle. You’re doing good work, lad, we’re all proud of you.’

The
Queen Mary
had a distinctive slow roll in the heavy Atlantic seas that added greatly to the general sense of misery. Underlying all this was the pervading fear of German U-boats. We knew the North Atlantic was infested with them and we were following a zigzag course supposedly designed to frustrate these scavengers of the sea. Fear of being torpedoed pervaded every moment of that seemingly endless voyage as we lay there like sardines in a can.

Added to all this was the fact that because the
Queen Mary
travelled at high speed to avoid U-boats, she left the slower warships, a cruiser and a destroyer, too far behind to have any hope of defending us against attack, so we were sitting ducks.

When I think back on the horrible threat of being torpedoed during that single voyage across the Atlantic my admiration for the navy and the merchant marine, who were almost constantly at sea during the war years, knows no bounds. In fact one of the few times I’ve grabbed a man by his shirtfront and threatened to punch him was several years later when he called the merchant navy a bunch of combat dodgers. I later learned that, although he’d been in the Canadian armed forces, he’d never left Canada’s shores.

Bruised, battered and almost broken in spirit we eventually reached safe harbour in Southampton. I know I was on the verge of collapse even though I hadn’t suffered from seasickness. It was probably the best practice I could have had before going into combat. One thing was certain, if I ever became as accustomed to the sight and smell of blood as I had become to vomit I knew I would have earned my stripes, both of them, as I was made a full corporal shortly after arriving in England.

We were accommodated with the other Canadian troops in temporary barracks and billets near the town of Crawley in West Sussex, just twenty-eight miles out of London. We now had five divisions in the United Kingdom. We were there to fill the gaps in the First Battalion as men were rotated into other units and special tasks.

Upon our arrival the battalion was abuzz with rumours of an imminent raid on some part of the French coast. The battalion had been training for some weeks culminating in a disastrous mock exercise that had our battalion and other Canadian forces assaulting beaches on West Bay on the English south coast near the town of Bridport. We were to learn that the practice landing had been a total shambles with the landing craft dumping troops late and miles from their true objectives.

This, we were told, was not an isolated incident. The First Battalion, along with other Canadian troops, had been landed at the French port of Brest after the mass evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk, to prop up the French army in the surrounding area. Upon arrival they discovered what the British War Office
must
have known, that the French army was on the verge of collapse and well beyond propping up. Three days later the Canadian landing force was evacuated only just before the French surrender.

While no men were killed, they lost all their equipment, their transport and most of their artillery. This was not because of undue German harassment but because of mismanagement in the panic to get them onto ships and away from France.

As a consequence the men felt humiliated being forced to scuttle back to England with their tails between their legs, knowing the entire operation had been pointless and that they were the victims of bad planning and administrative stupidity.

Now, the botched landing exercise at West Bay did little to boost our confidence in those responsible for planning the upcoming raid on France. I had accepted I might die in battle, but I didn’t want to think that my demise might be due to incompetence, my life thrown away because of someone’s crass stupidity. But that’s war, I guess; you have no say in how they decide to dispose of you.

We had barely found our land legs when our first and the battalion’s second practice at West Bay took place. While pretty iffy in parts, generally speaking it wasn’t too bad and so we waited anxiously, hoping that the top brass would get it right when the call came to embark on the real thing. We told ourselves that maybe things had changed and that in the ensuing two years since Brest those responsible for our lives may have learned a bit. I’ve talked about self-deception on a personal scale but this was self-deception on a grand scale.

Finally, after further weeks of training on the Isle of Wight, on 19th of August 1942, six days after my nineteenth birthday, the order came for what would become known as Operation Jubilee, the infamous raid on the French port of Dieppe. The operation was to be a practice run for the future invasion of Europe. We were to seize the port and surroundings for twenty-four hours, destroy the enemy defences and then be evacuated back to England pretty well intact with German prisoners in tow and lots of useful intelligence.

We left Southampton after dark on the transport
Queen Emma
and arrived ten miles off the French coast still in darkness, the plan being to hit the beaches before dawn to catch the enemy napping. But we should have known the best laid plans of mice and men seldom come together and the business of getting the men into the landing craft meant that it was close to dawn before most of us set out.

To make matters worse for the hundred or so men in our landing craft we developed engine trouble soon after leaving the mother ship. We bobbed around for an hour while the cursing sailors attempted to repair the engine.

The rest of the battalion was headed for a narrow shingle beach fronting a headland named Puys to the east of the main landing point with daylight approaching rapidly. Capturing this headland was considered critical, as German artillery and anti-aircraft guns sited there commanded the main landing beaches in front of the town.

By the time they reached the narrow beach fronting the headland it was already broad daylight. The enemy were ready and waiting for us, well protected in their pillboxes and block houses perched on a ten-foot high seawall and further protected by barbed wire. By 8.30 a.m. it was all over. Not a single man of the 554 who reached the beach got back, most were killed while some few were taken prisoner.

As it turned out those who commanded the operation offshore were oblivious to the total destruction of the first landing on the beach at Puys and sent in a second wave of troops, presumably to consolidate the victory. They too were all but destroyed. The failure to eliminate the German gun batteries was disastrous; they were able to fire on our troops on the main landing beaches, mowing down men until a partial evacuation was hurriedly organised. Once again we had been thoroughly beaten in combat.

That’s the problem with military operations – they always look so plausible in theory. ‘Gentlemen, when we reach our objective, the men will come ashore in landing craft and take the beach before moving on to . . . blah, blah, blah.’

Allow me for a moment to describe a landing craft. Officially termed a ‘Landing Craft Mechanised’, or LCM for short, it is a steel box fifty feet long with a ramp at the bow. They are large enough to carry vehicles and are equipped with machine-guns. The sides are sufficiently high to protect the men inside from everything except a direct artillery hit and each is meant to carry a hundred men together with the required officers jammed in with their equipment like a can of sardines. The theory (always the theory!) is that the steel box pushes up onto the beach and the ramp opens onto a gentle wash over sand or beach pebbles. In practice it is more often a case of jumping from the landing craft into waist-high or even deeper water. If it is deep enough, a man laden with heavy equipment sinks like a stone, drowning being just one of the hazards of any beach landing.

Bobbing around offshore we were unaware of the slaughter on the beach at Puys and when an hour later we set off in our repaired landing craft, the coastline was veiled by clouds of artillery smoke and the general fog of battle. Real life sometimes is stranger than fiction and, unbeknownst to me, Captain John ‘Bull’ Fuller, the guy who had sent the note to Sergeant Major Leader demanding I play piano on board, was in command of our LCM. I’d never seen him before, and had I known, I probably would have panicked even more than I did.