by S C Worrall
To repeat this information: 2/Lt Preston took a patrol out at 11.30 on the night of May 27th. An hour later some of them returned and said they had been fired on & Lt. Preston had shouted to them to disperse. He never returned and as far as I know was never seen again, and though I questioned his men, they could not say whether he had been hit or not.
A postscript contains this note:
The following men of the 1st bucks battalion died in my dressing station, and may not have been traced. Sergeant Johnson; Private Grimmer; Private Weedon.
Trevor Gibbens manned his dressing station in the cellar until the bitter end, when the Bucks Battalion surrendered in the early evening of 28 May 1940, approximately seventeen hours after Martin was killed. The adjutant, Captain James Ritchie, died the next day, courageously manning a Bren gun outside the orphanage. The commanding officer, Major Brian Heyworth, was shot in the head by a sniper a few hours before the surrender. One account says he was crossing the street to the Institut St Jacques, opposite. Another says he was hit while throwing a grenade at a tank from an upstairs window in the orphanage. Elliott Viney immediately assumed command.
By then, what remained of the orphanage was surrounded by tanks. The building was on fire and being continuously shelled and bombed from the air. Most of the upper floors had been destroyed. The last men were huddled in the basement. Medicine and food were almost exhausted. A German mortar had blown up the ammunition. When the roof collapsed, Viney led the men into the walled garden behind the orphanage. German soldiers in the black uniforms of the tank corps swarmed into the cellars. At 5 p.m. Viney surrendered. A German radio broadcast praised the fighting spirit of the British soldiers as ‘magnificent’. A Wehrmacht report notes that General von Kleist had been seriously held up at Hazebrouck. Mission accomplished.
Not without a cost. Of the six hundred men in the battalion who left England in January 1940, only about a hundred survived. Most were killed at Hazebrouck. Others died trying to escape or on patrol in surrounding villages. Some of the men, who were in the cellar when the roof collapsed, were never identified. Some made it back to England. Most spent the rest of the war in a POW camp at Laufen, near Salzburg, Austria. Others were sent to the fortress town of Thorn.
Trevor Gibbens was awarded the MBE for his medical service at Hazebrouck. He went on to become the leading academic forensic psychiatrist of his generation, specializing in battlefield and prison psychoses. He died in 1983. Private Jenkins was also imprisoned at Laufen but I have not been able to trace him or his family.
Elliott Viney returned to lead the family printing business in Aylesbury. Though he brokered the surrender of the Keep, he was awarded the DSO and later became High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire. He met my mother soon after the war, fell in love with her, and proposed. For obvious reasons, she declined.
Hugh Saunders escaped with most of his men from D Company in the middle of the night, shortly before Martin went missing, after their position on the edge of Hazebrouck was overrun by the Germans. He made his way back across France to England, where he debriefed many of the battalion’s soldiers and wrote the Battalion’s War Diary, which gives the hour-by-hour details of the campaign I used to reconstruct Martin’s time in France. Later, Saunders served with the SOE in the Balkans.
Topper Hopkins returned to England in 1945, and resumed his career as a jazz trombonist in the Aylesbury area. According to his wife, Hilda, he never got over his wartime experiences. He was haunted for the rest of his life by the smell of the wounded and dying in the orphanage cellar. His trombone was waiting for him when he got home.
In September 1944, after the liberation of northern France in Operation Overlord, one of the band’s musicians, Sergeant Fowler, was sent back to Wahagnies to try to recover the instruments hidden there in May 1940.
His French landlady had been true to her word. When the battalion marched out of the village, she and her husband had taken the trumpets and bugles, drums, trombones, and the rest of the instruments out of their boxes and hidden them under the floorboards in their house. When the Germans took over the village, they found the empty boxes and demanded the contents. The elderly couple denied all knowledge of them. They were charged with collaboration with the British, starved and ill-treated for the rest of the war, but they never yielded their secret. The instruments were formally returned to Sergeant Fowler in September 1944, at a large party thrown by the mayor in honour of the battalion. They were slightly tarnished but otherwise intact. Relations between descendants of the battalion and the village continue to this day.
Joe Cripps was badly wounded on the afternoon of 28 May when he was hit in the legs by machine-gun fire outside the orphanage. He was rescued and dragged into the orphanage cellar by his nephew, Harry Knight. Just before the roof collapsed, his nephew leaned over his bed to light a cigarette for him. They were covered in plaster and rubble but Joe claimed this saved both their lives. After having a leg amputated in a German hospital, he served in a POW camp until he was repatriated in 1943. He returned to Waddesden to continue working as a master carpenter, cheerfully clambering up ladders with a wooden leg. He never spoke about the war.
Martin’s sister, Roseen, returned from Egypt after the war and continued to work for the Foreign Office. Her husband, Andrew Freeth, became a well-respected portrait artist and a member of the Royal Academy. She died in Buckinghamshire in 1991.
My mother remained close to her and the rest of the Preston family until after the war. Indeed, one of the many surprises I discovered researching this story was that she lived at Whichert House for eighteen months, from March 1942 to September 1943. It was clearly not an easy time. Writing to Roseen, in Cairo, Aunt Dorothy complains that she can be ‘selfish’ and that she is going to have to ask her to leave, though ‘I will miss her’.
LJ and Peg moved from Beaconsfield to Woburn Square, in London, where they narrowly escaped death after the house next door was struck by a V1 rocket. By then, Pat, the little evacuee girl, had returned to live with her parents in Stepney. After the war, they moved several times more until LJ retired from the Inland Revenue and set up his own business, as a tax consultant, in Haslemere, Surrey. The tiny, crooked-ceilinged Elizabethan cottage they bought and so loved would eventually be their, literal, downfall, when, aged almost eighty, they tumbled head over heels down the corkscrew stairs with a tray full of food. Peg was killed instantly, but LJ survived, and happily spent the rest of his life at a hotel in Buckinghamshire.
Slowly, but surely, Nancy patched the shattered fragments of her heart together. ‘Next weekend, I am going to a dance,’ she writes to Roseen in Egypt, three years after Martin’s death, ‘in a fine old-fashioned evening dress I haven’t worn since 1940.’ But she never forgot Martin. Just how much he remained part of the emotional landscape of her life became even clearer as I was in the final stages of finishing this book.
Sorting through a storage locker full of household effects from my parents’ last home in Bourne End, Buckinghamshire, I found a cardboard box, swollen with damp, full of Nancy’s papers. Most were not worth keeping: old recipes, binders full of faded newspaper clippings, bundles of Christmas cards, and postcards.
I was about to toss everything out when, at the bottom of the box, I spotted a blue ring binder marked ‘Poems: 1939–45’. Inside were more than twenty poems, neatly typed on her Baby Hermes, recording key moments in her relationship with Martin (and the years after he disappeared).
She clearly worked on these poems, on and off, for the rest of her life because two more recent files in the box contained alternate versions of the poems, as well as others written in the Sixties and Seventies. These poems helped fill in some of the gaps in their relationship that I had never known.
This one was written in that golden September of 1938 when she and Martin first met:
I see
Plums reddening on the branch,
A mist-grey sky; it is the hour
When music-rounded air
C
urves to the moon’s
Hollow and golden shell
And in my heart
The harmony of a latening year
Has brought our love to flower.
I do not long now for the spring,
Nor dread winter;
Now all seasons,
In time and pattern
Do agree.
Thirty years later, in 1968, she recalled in verse that fatal moment when Martin’s death was finally confirmed by the War Office.
I remember how the edge of grief
Like a honed knife
Bit into me; and how I lay
That morning, in rustling wood,
Where we’d so often met,
Crying in bitterest loneliness
That you were dead.
A cousin found me;
And with what guile
I faced him with a smile,
Though my whole body
And my shaking mind
Cried out in soundless words
So loud, and in such deep despair,
God must have heard.
In the back of one of her notebooks from the Seventies I also found another poem titled ‘Mousehole, 1940’: the tiny Cornish village where she and Martin spent a week during his gas course at Fort Tregantle, a month before he died. I used some of the language and images for the chapter ‘Mousehole, Cornwall’. The poem ends:
Remembering minutiae of sand
Beneath surging waves
That scoured the Cornish bay
Where we sucked daily love
Out of the dancing air
And a foreboding sun
Marked each hour upon the dial.
Opposite the poem, scrawled in an angry script, she railed against ‘the false morality of the times’ that had prevented her and Martin from consummating their love before he went back to France.
For the rest of her life, the only times she stepped inside a church were at Christmas, for the carols, and for christenings and funerals. But, though Martin’s death shattered her belief in God, she was determined not to let his death destroy her love of life. She knew it would not have been what he wanted – as this letter to Martin’s sister, written in September 1941, shortly after she returned from Thurlestone Sands, fifteen months after Martin’s death, makes clear.
My dearest Roseen, your first letter since the news came today and I was so thankful to have it. I know how much you loved Martin and feel deeply how much in common our loves had. For we were both of his generation and understood more nearly all that he loved and believed in and, so often, I have longed more than anything to talk with you because of that.
I was so touched to read of your plans for the four of us when the war was over – Roseen, darling, whatever happens we will still be together sometimes and though it must be without Martin we will still be happy and brave for him, because he meant so much that is beautiful in this world which we must never forget.
Often it still seems unbelievable that I can laugh and talk almost as though nothing were really lost – I sometimes think I must be without feeling. But it is, isn’t it, just because it can be stronger than death that one is able to go on? Because we who love him are alive and will carry on his essential spirit so far as is humanly possible. I learned so much from him of beauty and peace and sanity and vision and could have learned so much more.
I know your mother is mystified that the War Office says the last that was seen of Martin was when he was manning a machine gun in the streets of Hazebrouck. Roseen, I am positive they are at least four hours behind. I am positive Trevor Gibbens would not have told me – you remember – that he was last to see Martin if it was not so. The machine gun incident did occur – and a man called Leeson-Earle gave Martin that Bren gun about 6 o’clock in the evening – but that was much earlier.
I’m very busy at the moment, which is good as it doesn’t leave me too much time to think painful thoughts. When I have finished at the office, there is the gardening and housework, mending, washing and the ridiculous mechanics of domesticity. Our gardener is spasmodic as he is on full-time fire-watching duty, and these last weeks there has been jam-making and the precious fruit bottling for the winter. Then there is Pat, our nice small evacuee, and now fire-watching at the office. I try never to stop and always fill the weekend, too, with London or walking – it is the sense of living that must be kept and made real again. I try to sing, too – some of the Schumann songs Martin loved.
I want to get a new job, away from Insurance, which is a most deadly subject. But my parents need me here: three pairs of hands are better than two. It is such a shame their generation has had to live through two wars. I do hope our children will not have to live through it – if only the will to work together for peace can be made as dynamic as this astonishing will to organize for war.
One day soon, dearest Roseen, there will be holidays by the sea and sand between the toes and absurdly cold English, exciting bathing and the sea changing colour with the wind. I just got back from Thurlestone Beach, in Devon. One day, in the morning, the bay was deserted except for myself and Pat and the gulls: not a sign of life could we see in the cliffs, so off came our bathing costumes and for the first time in my life I floated about like a water lily and felt happier than I thought possible! I became quite brazen afterwards, prancing about on the shore and not wanting to see my clothes at all. I’ve never done it before – not even in Guernsey – so Thurlestone has a very sweet place in my heart now.
I must finish my scribble for it is late and Mummy is beginning to yawn and nod over the paper. Whatever happens I know I can never stop loving Martin. I do not have to tell you that, or how much I want to go on finding kindness and beauty in life and loving it for his sake. We were so happy and there was so much of our happiness that I am certain, as though he told me, it would be wrong to see through tears. Tears were never any part of him and we must not let them be part of us now.
I promise I will try to make those words true. Nancy.
Martin Preston, aged 20
Nancy Whelan, aged 17
Acknowledgements
This book could not have been written without my partner and fellow writer, Heather Dune Macadam, who urged me to devote myself to it, supported me throughout the process and acted as my first reader and editor. I also owe a particular debt of gratitude to Ingram Murray, historian of the Ox and Bucks, who unstintingly shared his time and extensive knowledge, acting as my guide to the battlefield sites of northern France and providing me with copious research material. Martin’s nephew, Martin Freeth, and his wife Averil, generously shared their memories of Aunt Dorothy at Whichert House, as well as numerous photographs and documents, including letters between my mother and Roseen and other members of the Preston family. Kathleen Furey diligently transcribed dozens of Nancy and Martin’s letters for me. Hilda Hopkins shared memories of her late husband, Jim ‘Topper’ Hopkins. Chris Inward and his wife, Doris, daughter of Sergeant Joe Cripps, shared his wartime diary and their memories of Joe. Charlie Ryrie of the Real Cut Flower Garden, Dorset, made a beautiful wreath for me to take to Martin’s grave.
I consulted numerous books and archives during my research into Martin’s wartime experiences. The War Diary, compiled by Hugh Saunders, a close friend and comrade-in-arms of Martin, gave me the basic framework of the battalion’s movements through May 1940. In France, Gerard Hugot acted as my guide to Wahagnies and shared a copy of his book, Wahagnies et Attiches:Au Rendez-Vous De L’Histoire. Gabriel Bautiers gave me a tour of the Escaut Canal and a copy of his book, Destination Le Haut-Escaut. Sister Elaine, historian of the St Charles Convent at Wez-Valvain, shared with me a diary written by a nun, who was at the convent when the battalion stopped to rest and recuperate.
Other books I found especially helpful include Massacre on the Road to Dunkirk, by Leslie Aitken; Baggage To The Enemy, by Edward Ardizzone; Private Words: Letters and Diaries from the Second World War by Ronald Blythe; Reaping The Whirlwind, by Nigel Cawthorn
e; Finest Hour, by Tim Clayton and Phil Craig; Invasion 1940, by Peter Fleming; Blitz Diary, by Carol Harris; All Hell Let Loose, by Max Hastings; My War Gone By, I Miss It So, by Anthony Loyd; Dunkirk, by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore; and The Wet Flanders Plain by Henry Williamson.
Ian Watson’s MA thesis on the experiences of the Bucks battalion in France gave me valuable insights into the psychology of warfare; Trevor Gibbens’ memoir, Captivity, provided rich source material for the Wahagnies and Hazebrouck sections; as did Michael Heyworth’s Hazebrouck 1940 and short memoirs by soldiers Bill Bailey, George Davies, and Robert Mathews, held in the Bucks County Archives, in Aylesbury. Websites I frequently consulted include: BBC WW2 People’s War;World War 2 Day By Day; and the Met Office’s archive of historic weather reports.
Last, but not least, I would like to thank my agents, Caspian Dennis of the Abner Stein agency in London and Lukas Ortiz of the Philip Spitzer Agency in New York, for all their hard work on my behalf. I would also like to offer my heartfelt thanks to Lisa Milton, Executive Publisher at Harlequin, who believed in the book and saw its potential; and my editor, Charlotte Mursell, whose passion for the story, and tireless editing, helped make it what it is.
My mother, Nancy, and I, Christmas 2000
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