Lily didn’t run away in horror when she saw me. She rushed towards me and we fell into each other’s arms. We hugged and kissed and that was it. She said nothing about how awful I looked or how thin I was. She didn’t say that she didn’t love me any more and didn’t want to marry me because she had met somebody else. She just said, ‘Oh, Charlie,’ and looked at me with her big brown eyes and smiled her lovely smile, ‘I’ve missed you so much.’
Three weeks later I took her to a branch of Herbert Wolf, the jewellers, in Oxford Street and bought her the biggest engagement ring I could afford. Buying Lily a ring meant a lot to me. I had always felt guilty about the gold signet ring my mother had given me, which I had exchanged for half of loaf of bread with a German guard. A ring is a powerful symbol of love. Once I put the ring on Lily’s finger, I hoped she would never take it off.
I have the receipt in front of me dated 13 June: ‘Diamond cluster ring (18ct) £38/10/-.’ That was a tidy sum back in 1945 (£1000 in today’s money) but only the best for my dear Lily who had waited so long for me. Thanks to my army pay being paid into my bank all those years, and my mother returning the money I had transferred to her account from the camp, I didn’t have to borrow money from anybody.
And that was how it was to be all our married life, our 63 years together. Lily and I made our way in the world together without help from anybody.
When the family turned their backs on me – well, you know what families can be like, I had to look after myself. What is it that most families fall out over? Money. And my family was no different. I had been promised various things by my parents such as a car when I came home, but more importantly, to take over the family business. In the end I got neither and was pushed out. Completely. I did feel it was wrong. I had been away for five years and missed out on everything. Everybody else had jobs and their own houses and families; I was starting from scratch and had to make my own way. Left behind again.
When my parents died a few years later, my brothers and sisters suggested we took it in turns to have Elsie, our invalid sister, to stay for two or three weeks at a time. I told them that I wasn’t willing to take my turn. Lily and I hadn’t been married long and we wanted to be on our own with our young son Brian. We agreed that I would offer one of my brothers a sum of money to take my turn, quite a substantial amount it was. He said ‘Yes’ to begin with. Unfortunately he was pressured by the others not to accept it even though he could have done with the money. So the family stopped speaking to me. How about that!
The funny thing is that Elsie would probably have been better off if we had all chipped in to support her in a little flat on her own somewhere to give her some independence. Years later some agreed that it would have been a better idea. Although in the end she did hold down a job as an auxiliary nurse and she married when she was fifty to a widower. Sadly she died a few years later.
No point in dwelling on these things. Water under the bridge. Pity that everybody takes sides in family disputes and goes along with the majority. All the hardships I faced on my return made me a stronger person and made Lily and I determined to do things our way and make up for lost time.
We got married on 25 June 1945 in a registry office and my eldest sister Marjorie and her husband Stan Wood were our witnesses. We walked from the registry office in Stratford East along Broadway to Lyons Corner House where we had tea and cakes. That was our wedding reception. Then we went back home which was Lily’s parents’ flat in a tenement block in West Ham. It had stone steps all the way up and a lift which smelt of urine and rarely worked.
It was a quiet ceremony for obvious reasons. I told Lily that I couldn’t face a church wedding with everybody there. I was a bundle of nerves and just wanted to hide away, not stand up in front of a whole church full of people. Lily understood. ‘If that’s what you want then that’s fine by me.’ She was wonderful over that.
I’ll tell you something fantastic. After we had posed for our wedding photograph, the chap came up to me and said, ‘It’s entirely up to you but I can make you look better.’ I didn’t understand what he meant. ‘I can fill you out, improve your appearance. Leave it to me.’ And so I did. He was being polite because I looked a fright with my sunken eyes and hollow cheeks. I don’t know how he re-touched the photo but he did. He puffed up my face so you wouldn’t know that I had lost 2 stone and was suffering from malnutrition. So there I am, looking healthy and happy in my wedding photo.
I was looking forward to my first Christmas at home for five years and enjoying it with my new wife. Even though I had been automatically transferred to the Army Reserves, I was surprised to receive a letter from the War Office instructing me to report to Portsmouth Station for postal duties. How could they do this to me? It would mean being away from home again for months including Christmas. There was nothing I could do about it but go.
I went down by train and met other chaps like me on the way there. We talked about how unfair it was to be called up again; how nobody knew or cared about us and what we had been through. We were all quite angry. There were about forty of us in the end and we got more and more angry about the situation as we waited to report for duty.
By the time the Post Office officials arrived, we had decided that we wouldn’t do the work. We agreed that it had to be all or nothing. It was no good one man saying, ‘OK, I’ll do it’; that would spoil it. So we all refused. The PO officials were worried and didn’t know what to do. They told us that we had to stay there while they went away to contact their superiors, presumably at the War Office. A while later they returned and told us we had to remain in the station until somebody came down from London the next day. There didn’t seem anything else to do but wait and see what they said. We were all used to hanging around like this and kipping down in odd spaces and corners and we did as we were told. I slept on a bench in one of the waiting rooms with my kit bag under my head as a pillow.
The next day when an officer arrived and spoke to us, we were still determined not to work and we refused again. The fellow just said, ‘OK’ and we went back home. And we got away with it. So I spent Christmas at home after all. However, come the New Year, January 1946, blow me, if I didn’t receive call-up papers again. God knows what they thought I was fit for! Well, I found out a few weeks later when I reported to Gravesend Barracks.
You only had to take a look at me to see I wasn’t A1. I couldn’t walk properly as I had problems with one of my legs and I was still underweight, and a puff of wind would have blown me away. I had a medical and was classified B2 which was ‘not fit for normal army duties’. So what duties did the CO order me to do? I had to go around the barracks picking up litter with a stick with a spike on the end. I had to clean windows (only on the ground floor as I couldn’t climb a ladder) and wash floors. Not only was it unnecessary as the place was always spotless but it was dreadfully boring and a waste of my time. I had no education, no training or anything during that time. I slept in a dormitory with a load of other men who were as bored as I was and I only went out of the barracks when I had a weekend pass to go home to see Lily. There were other POWs in there who felt like me: this was another prison sentence. Six months I spent there. Totally wrong.
After I got married, I was doing odd jobs for my family, mostly driving around fetching and carrying for the business. I worked for a while for my mother’s brother who was a farmer. He didn’t own any land but he bought the field crops and employed people to pick them and then take the vegetables to market. Does this sound familiar to you? I helped him with a bit of everything including picking and driving vans full of vegetables to Stratford Market to be sold. It looked as though I had come full circle – back where I started.