by Brian Vallee
8
Love and War
Not long after the foray into France, Boyd’s regiment moved from Aldershot to an encampment on the outskirts of Reigate, south of London. It was a largely residential town with many parks and an ancient Norman church.
On a rainy November night in 1940, Boyd had delivered a dispatch and was returning to the Reigate base. He stopped for a cup of coffee and a sweet roll at the military canteen just off the town’s main square. As he was walking back to his motorcycle, he noticed a young woman standing on the street corner. She was dark-haired and pretty but, in the rain, “kind of bedraggled, as if she was lost or something.” He approached her, introduced himself, and invited her to a small movie theatre around the corner to get out of the rain. Then they went to a restaurant.
“It’s getting late, I have to leave now,” she said after their meal.
“Where do you live?”
“Oh, I’m staying at the canteen.”
“The canteen?”
“They let me sleep in the back room at night.”
“Is that safe?”
“Oh yes.”
“Do you want me to walk with you?”
“Oh no, I know my way.”
The woman was Dorreen Mary Thompson, from York in the north of England, and she was twenty years old. Her father was a gunner in the present war, as he had been in the First World War. Between the wars he had worked as a coal miner near Newcastle. Dorreen had been raised by her maternal grandparents. She had a twin sister; at the time of their birth, their mother was gravely ill and didn’t feel strong enough to raise both girls. The grandparents, Kate and John Hunter, had agreed to take one of them.
“They’re both so much alike, which one will we take?” asked Kate.
“Take the first one that smiles at you,” said John.
Dorreen had smiled first, and was taken by her grandparents when she was seven days old. She loved her grandparents and was deeply saddened when her grandfather died of cancer when she was ten. John, a railway engineer, was a tall and slim and for years had driven trains between the north and south of England.
Dorreen’s eyes still mist over when she remembers the years before her grandfather died. They lived at 69½ Goodramgate in York, and on Saturdays, from the age of six until John Hunter died, she would take an empty white china jug to the local pub and have it filled with beer, “half a pint of mild, and half a pint of bitter – mixed.”
She couldn’t see the top of the bar, but would reach up and plunk down the empty jug. It became a game for the bartender. He would lean forward and look down at her.
“Oh, I wondered who that was.”
“It’s just me,” the tiny girl would respond.
“I knew the jug came from somewhere,” he smiled.
“No froth, please,” she said, following her grandfather’s instructions.
Next, Dorreen would go to the butcher shop for six-penny worth of cooked ham and one small meat pie. The last stop was for ginger ale at another shop. “And that’s what we’d have. I’d have the meat pie with HP sauce, my grandparents would have the ham, and we’d all have a shandy – made with the beer and the ginger ale.”
She remembers John Hunter smoking five-pack Woodbine cigarettes, which came in colourful paper envelopes. “So the men could put the five in their shirt pocket without the tobacco making a mess.”
Her grandfather’s cancer started as a pea-sized tumour in his neck but grew to the extent that “it just looked like somebody had shoved their fist from inside right out there.”
Kate was a tall woman, sturdy, strong-willed, and kindly. After her husband died she was able to provide for herself and Dorreen, aided by John’s railway pension. Kate was an accomplished “tailoress” and earned a modest income making red huntsman jackets and the black velvet jockey caps that went with them. Dorreen could ride the railway for half-fare, and her grandmother took her to the seaside for a week in the summers, renting a cottage near Scarborough.
Her grandparents were church-going Catholics, and she went to a Catholic elementary school. When her father gave up coal mining for bricklaying, the family moved to York and Dorreen was able to go to school with her siblings. Besides her twin, Joan, there was a brother and a younger sister. Dorreen often visited the family on Sundays.
Dorreen completed elementary school when she was thirteen. She loved animals and wanted to become a veterinarian, but her grandmother didn’t have the resources to pay for the necessary apprentice period as a “kennel maid.” Instead, at fourteen, she went to work at the Rowntree chocolate factory.
Her grandparents had never adopted her, and as soon as she began to earn an income her parents wanted her to move home with the rest of the family. Neither Dorreen nor her grandmother wanted her to leave, and there was a nasty confrontation when Dorreen’s father, spurred on by her mother, came to the house.
“We want her home right now,” he demanded.
“You want her home, do you?” said Kate sharply.
“Yes we do.”
“Then pay me for fourteen years of maintenance.”
Dorreen says her grandmother was extremely upset. “She brought me up out of the goodness in her heart. But it went on and on, and my mother became very spiteful. She couldn’t have me, and didn’t want her mother to have me. It was awful.”
The upshot was that her mother went to the courts, had Dorreen declared “incorrigible,” and had her confined to a Catholic convent for delinquent girls. She would remain there for four years. “I’ll never forgive my mother – to this day – because she hurt me and she hurt my granny so much.”
The convent was on the outskirts of Leeds, a substantial distance for Kate Thompson, who visited once a month. It was run by nuns of the Good Shepherd order, who wore cream-coloured habits and starched white wimples. When Boyd visited the convent many years later, it reminded him strongly of a prison: barred windows, locked doors, and nuns walking around with large rings of keys dangling from their waists. They reminded him of the keepers in the penitentiary.
“I remember, if you broke the slightest rule, you had to go and knock on the Mother Superior’s door and say ‘blessed be God’,” says Dorreen. “Then you’d open the door and kneel and kiss the floor – kneel and kiss the floor … oh, I hated it. It was four years of hell.” Dorreen was put off religion from then on, although she still considers herself a Roman Catholic.
When the war began, most of the girls were transferred from the convent to work for government agencies. Another of the Boyd Gang myths is that Dorreen once worked as a parlour maid for Lord Louis Mountbatten. She says it isn’t true. She ended up in London as maid and cleaner at a house, behind the Parliament buildings, for government employees – mostly young attorneys. “Then the bombs started falling and I was sent back to my gran in York.”
After their first meeting in Reigate, Ed and Dorreen dated four or five times over the next week. He asked her to marry him, and she agreed, and on November 21, before a Justice of the Peace at the local courthouse, with Ed in his uniform and Dorreen in a pink dress, they became husband and wife. They would have been married sooner, but because Dorreen wasn’t twenty-one she had to get written permission from her father, who was with the British Army in Africa.
After the wedding they spent a week in London on their honeymoon. Before they married, Boyd found a large bright front room on the ground floor of a house in Red Hill, “spitting distance from Reigate.” It was perfect for him. He was riding dispatch for the RCR’s headquarters company, and the major in charge lived in a house about two blocks from the Boyds’ place. “I let him know where I was and he could find me whenever he wanted me. They liked me, and they liked the way I worked.”
He had to be at headquarters every morning, but instead of sleeping in a tent at the Reigate camp, he spent most nights in his cozy room with Dorreen. “There was a little wall at the front of the house where the room was, and I always kept the motorcycle parked inside there, rea
dy to go. If they wanted me at night, they sent a messenger down to get me.”
On a typical day Boyd would run a message from headquarters down to Brighton on the Channel; wait for a response; deliver it to headquarters; check in with his unit at the Reigate camp; and return to Dorreen in Red Hill. “I was quite contented that I finally found someone I could love,” he says.
Dorreen had a short, attractive girlfriend, Rose Marie, who shared their room for a while. Boyd didn’t mind at all. “I jumped into bed with them, but Dorreen made sure that she was always between me and the other girl.” Rose Marie and Dorreen also shared a dark secret, as Boyd would soon discover.
The room at Red Hill was considered temporary, and Dorreen soon found a proper apartment in a building on the main street of Red Hill. Rose Marie had moved away. The Boyds had been living in their new apartment for several weeks when Boyd returned one morning after riding dispatch all night. He walked into the apartment to find Dorreen sitting on the couch holding a baby, about six months old.
“Gee, where’d you get the nice baby?” he asked.
Dorreen burst into tears.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“You’re going to hate me,” she sobbed.
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s my baby.”
Boyd was in shock. “I nearly fell off the stairway.”
While in London, before moving back to York to live with her grandmother, Dorreen had often gone to Buckingham Palace on her days off. It was there she had caught the eye of tall, handsome, Billy Reardon, a member of the Coldstream Guards, standing proudly in his red uniform and tall black busby. They dated a few times and Dorreen got pregnant. She returned to York with the baby, and after a few weeks left it with her grandmother. Reardon was later killed in the war.
Dorreen couldn’t bring herself to tell Ed about the baby, fearing she would lose him. Afterwards she reasoned, “If he loves me, he will love my son.” She had reasoned correctly. Boyd was disappointed that Dorreen hadn’t told him about the baby – in effect, she had lied to him – but when the army paymaster told Boyd he could get the marriage annulled, he demurred: “I wouldn’t want to hurt the baby – it’s not his fault – and I love the girl I’m married to, so I’ll just raise him as mine.” He later adopted Anthony, and except for the paymaster, the other soldiers accepted that he was the father.
“He turned out to be quite a nice kid,” says Boyd. “I never kept it a secret. And when he was old enough to understand, I told him that I wasn’t his father. It didn’t seem to bother him.”
On August 20, 1941, almost nine months to the day after Ed and Dorreen married, she gave birth to a son, Edwin Alonzo Boyd, Jr. The baby was born in hospital in York, with Dorreen’s grandmother present. Ed was granted a week’s leave and was there the day of the birth.
The baby was two days old when the air raid sirens sounded. A nurse gathered up six babies from the nursery – three under each arm – and headed for the hospital shelter. As she whisked through the doorway, baby Edwin’s head hit the door jamb.
“It was a beautiful baby,” says Dorreen. “And after the all-clear, I kept asking for him. It wasn’t until my gran got after them that they finally brought him to me. He was all black and blue down one side of his head. It was a cerebral haemorrhage. If he had lived he would have been a vegetable. They didn’t want to say what happened, but one of the nurses finally told me.”
The baby died a few days later and was buried in a York cemetery on August 30. The usual hospital stay after a delivery was two weeks, but with her baby dead, Dorreen wanted out of there. “I left about the sixth or seventh day. My gran was upset with me because I wanted to walk along the river.”
Fifty-six years later, Boyd doesn’t have much to say about the death of his son. When asked about it, his words are matter-of-fact, but his jaw tightens and his intense blue eyes stare wistfully into the distance.
But not long after the baby’s death, responding to a letter from Dorreen, he wrote: “… Your words tell me of your precious love for me and all about the heartbreak of having our baby son snatched away. However, darling, it was better that we hadn’t a chance to get to know him as we know Anthony, because it would have been harder that way. We still have our very deep love for each other.”9
Dorreen had wanted desperately to join the army and drive trucks. In early 1941 she returned to York and joined the Army Territorial Service (ATS), but at five feet, two-and-a-half inches she was too short to drive trucks – she could barely see over the dash. But she wasn’t too short for motorcycles. In York the ATS had decided to start training women as motorcycle dispatch riders. “That suited me to a T,” she says. “Thirty-six of us went into training and twelve finished. I was one of the dirty dozen.”
Dorreen drove Nortons, Triumphs, and Indians, but couldn’t manage the Harleys, which were too big and heavy. Now there were two dispatch riders in the family. After once riding behind Dorreen on the same motorcycle, Ed decided, “Never again – I was hanging on for dear life.”
About a year after they were married, Ed and Dorreen went to York to get married again – this time in the vestry of the Roman Catholic church. Dorreen’s mother wasn’t invited.
Kate Hunter liked Boyd, but didn’t like the idea of her granddaughter being married in a registry office and felt strongly that Anthony should be brought up Roman Catholic.
Boyd had no objection to getting married again. But he believed it was all meaningless. “So far as her family was concerned, we were properly married, but it didn’t matter to me or Dorreen. She was a Catholic by birth, but she wasn’t a Catholic by actions.”
In March 1942, on another visit to Kate Hunter’s in York, Dorreen convinced Ed to stay an extra couple of days before returning to Reigate. He thought it wouldn’t be a problem because he got along well with his senior officers, sometimes delivering messages to their girlfriends or wives. His immediate superior, Colonel Snow, often borrowed his motorcycle for his own use. “And he’d send me all over the blasted country with messages for this girlfriend or that girlfriend.”
But when Boyd’s sergeant-major reported to Snow that he had overstayed his leave, the colonel wasn’t pleased, and summoned him to his office. Boyd stood silently during the ensuing harangue, which was mostly about him leaving his post in time of war. “He said he was going to make an example of me, and he put me on latrine duty for a while – digging holes for the shit.” He was also docked twenty-two days’ pay.
9
The Home Front
A few weeks after Boyd was disciplined for being absent without leave, he read a notice that the army was looking for volunteers for the Provost Corps – the military police. Boyd was unhappy with the RCR and decided to apply. His application was approved, and he transferred to the Provosts on July 27, 1942.
At five-foot-seven and 150 pounds, Boyd was one of the smallest men in his unit. Even so, he excelled at self-defence and unarmed combat. He was noticed yet again and was soon teaching others. He completed a ten-week training course that involved a lot of drilling as well as classes in law and law enforcement. Now he and his father had something in common – they were both policemen.
As a member of the Provost Corps, Boyd was automatically promoted to lance-corporal, but six months later, in February 1943, the unexpected happened. His sergeant-major, a career army man, approached him on the drill square. “I want you to take the guys out there and show me what you can do.”
Boyd was stunned, but he didn’t hesitate. In a booming voice, he shouted commands across the square, and to his amazement the men responded in unison. Perhaps he was releasing pent-up resentment from all the years that he had been on the receiving end of orders – at home, in school, in the penitentiary, in the RCR.… Now, as if born to it, he was giving the orders.
“Have you done this before?” asked the sergeant-major when the drill was over.
“No, I haven’t.”
“Well, where d
id you learn to do that?”
“I don’t know.”
Several times over the next days and weeks, Boyd was called on to drill the men. He performed flawlessly each time.
“You’re all right,” said the sergeant-major. “You’re doing well. I’m going to put in a recommendation for you.”
Boyd thought he might get a minor promotion. “But a week later I had two stripes, and the week after that I had three stripes.” Now he was a sergeant. It all happened in a flash, and he was so excited he invited Dorreen down to watch him perform. Dorreen shakes her head at the memory. “His voice was like thunder. He sure could yell – you wouldn’t think it was him at all.”
With his new job and increased pay, Ed and Dorreen were able to move into a large, two-storey house in Aldershot. And in the spring of 1943, Dorreen discovered she was pregnant again. This time it was twins, a boy and a girl, born December 21 – “Christmas babies,” she called them. Dorreen didn’t want to go near a hospital, and the twins were born at home with the aid of a midwife and Kate Hunter, who came down from York. The bed was moved down from upstairs, and the front room was set up for the delivery.
It was an emotional time for Ed Boyd. About a week before the twins were born, he had been admonished under Section 15(1) of the Army Act, demoted from sergeant to private, fined two days’ pay, and kicked out of the Provosts. His crime – getting drunk and failing to report for duty. If he had been in any unit other than the Provosts, it would have been treated as a minor offence, but he was a policeman and was expected to set a good example. “It was my own fault. Because you’re a sergeant doesn’t mean you can overstay your leave two or three days. If I had a couple of drinks, I would almost forget I had to be back in camp. I shouldn’t have put myself in that position. I lost everything I had – no more stripes or anything.”