Americans and flown back to England. From East Prussia, north along the Baltic Coast, across Germany, huge empty landscapes and bombed-out towns, sometimes going in circles and coming back to where we started. Across the frozen river Elbe, south and then north, finally to Berlin.
No plan and no preparation for our evacuation. We left early one morning. ‘Get your kit, we’re moving.’ We grabbed what we could: the remains of our last Red Cross parcel, clothes and our precious letters and photos if we could manage to carry them on us. The Russians were advancing so we had them to worry about them as well as the Germans and the Allied bombers above our heads. We were caught in the middle of it all. Nobody cared about us. We were still the abandoned, the left behind, the forgotten. I felt the same sense of fear and loneliness as I did on my surrender to the German Army five years before.
But I survived. Many did not. Men died of cold, exhaustion and starvation on The Long March. I remember helping to bury fellow men in shallow graves, those desperate enough to eat the black biscuits we found in an overturned railway truck and then died a horrible death. When I got back I couldn’t tell anybody about what had happened during my years of labour in the camp. I was ashamed. I hadn’t done any valuable war work or won any medals; I had no stories to tell of brave deeds; I just did my time.
How could I be proud of breaking rocks in a quarry 12 hours day or walking along miles and miles of rows of cabbages growing in muddy or frozen ground, cutting them off their stalks while watched by armed guards? Would my family have wanted to hear that I had seen a man beaten to death or a woman shot in the head while her baby was kicked along a railway line? They wouldn’t have believed me and, anyway, everybody wanted to forget the war and get on with rebuilding their lives. So I kept silent about all this for nearly seventy years.
I know I am one of the lucky ones. I have always thought that throughout my life. Why didn’t I die when we were under German attack on that road near Abbeville or as a prisoner of war under sentence of death for Incitement to Mutiny? Why didn’t I simply lie down one night in the snow during the Long March and never get up again? Was it just luck?
Would life have been different if I hadn’t passed my driving test at seventeen and there hadn’t been a shortage of drivers in the Army? Would I have been fighting on the beaches of Dunkirk? I know that if I had reached there on that day in 1940, I wouldn’t be here now. I am absolutely certain I would have been shot to pieces or drowned. It was a hot summer but we were wearing our heavy army greatcoats and big boots and had our rifles to carry. I never learned to swim so I would have just gone under the water and never have come up again.
So I was lucky not to be near the place. There were 8000 of our own troops killed, not counting the Belgian and French soldiers. A hell of a lot of people died in that area alone and this was just the beginning of it all. Nothing can really prepare you for something like this. When I think of it now, there must have been something about me, and how I was brought up, that made me a survivor. More than just luck, perhaps.
My name is Charles Henry Waite, Charlie to family and friends, Chas to army pals – although only one of them is still alive. I was born in 1919, still in the shadow of the First World War, and named after my uncle. He was my mother’s younger brother, a corporal in the Royal Horse Guards, killed in action in May 1915. We had a big framed photograph of him hanging in the kitchen in our small terraced house in Harpour Road in Barking, Essex. Uncle Charles looked grand in his smart uniform, holding his plumed hat in his hand, staring down at us as we sat at the kitchen table.
There were nine children and I was the youngest but one. When I was born Alfred, the eldest, was nearly thirteen, Marjorie, ten, Reginald, eight, Doris nearly seven, Leonard five, Winifred, four, and Muriel, nearly two. So by the time I came along my parents, William and Alice, already had their hands full with the other children as well as working to pay the rent and put food on the table. They had married young and family responsibilities followed quickly with the arrival of us lot.
Life was hard and finding and keeping a job wasn’t always easy for my father. He worked for a local grocer but later, when he lost his job, became a bookie’s runner. He wasn’t unkind to any of us but he was never really close. With a large family and work problems he didn’t take an awful lot of interest in me, and my mother just left me to get on with things too. She had a lot of extra work when Elsie was born in July 1920, because she needed special care. Elsie suffered from a condition known as St Vitus’ Dance which meant she had fits and couldn’t stop her arms and legs from jerking about. She didn’t go to school and the symptoms disappeared when she was about fourteen. Unfortunately she went on to catch scarlet fever which left her with a weak heart.
So there was a lot going on at home. Half the time nobody noticed whether I was there or not. I loved going out in the morning to play in the park or ride my bicycle round town and I stayed out all day. When I got in late, often after teatime, nobody would ask me where I had been or what I had been doing. Maybe a hello, but they weren’t bothered. Children were safe anyway in those days and I was happy exploring places and having fun on my own.
We lived in a three bed-roomed terraced house. Alfred and Reg, the two oldest boys, slept downstairs on mattresses on the floor and we all had to go to bed before they could settle down. My parents had the big front bedroom, the five girls were in another bedroom, which Leonard and I had to go through in order to get to our own little room. Eventually we moved up in the world – or so it felt like it to me. The change in our circumstances was brought about by a rather unfortunate incident to do with Alfred.
I was very fond of my big brother Alfred and he was more like a father to me than my own father. I looked up to him and he always looked out for me. I remember once going over to see Alfred and his family who lived 12 miles away in Grays. I was about 10 years old and I was meant to be going to Sunday School. On the spur of the moment, I borrowed sixpence from Muriel and walked all the way, turning up on their doorstep well after teatime. Alfred thought we ought to let the family know where I was so he went down the road to the telephone box to call father. Nobody at home had missed me and, as it was the school holidays, I stayed on there for a week. I had a wonderful time ‘baby-sitting’ my little nephew Roy. I would take him out in his pushchair to the park and round the town on little adventures.
I was very upset when Alfred lost an eye in an accident at work. He had been canteen manager for a few years at Dagenite Batteries Ltd which operated within the Ford Dagenham site and had been promoted to the production side when he was twenty-one. One of his men came to him one day and reported a faulty machine. Alfred went outside to check it and, as he was inspecting the machine which was attached to a wall, part of the mechanism, a sort of brush attachment, fell from the wall and hit him in the eye. He was taken to the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel Road but they couldn’t save his eye. He was eventually fitted with a glass one which was a very good match. I used to watch him, with a mixture of horror and fascination, popping the eye out to clean it and then popping it back in again.
So it was thanks to Alfred’s compensation money from the accident, that my father was able to start a business in 1928: W. Waite & Sons, fruiterers, 99 Movers Lane. He rented a converted cottage next door to my mother’s sister and her husband who ran a butcher’ shop, and we, that is my parents, myself and the four youngest moved in. The older ones had married and moved out but came back to help in the business. I remember that Alfred was pretty good with his hands, working with wood and metal, and he constructed a nice front extension to the shop which opened out onto the forecourt.
The shop was open from 8am until 8pm six days a week with an earlier start if it was market day. Winnie and Marjorie helped in the shop and Alf and Reg worked on the delivery rounds. My father did the buying and went two or three times a week by horse and cart to Stratford Market in East London to collect the fruit and vegetables. He usually took one of my brothers with him and they left around 5.30am. Sometimes I went with them which I liked as it meant I got back too late to go to school.
The market was a huge place, rows of stalls on either side going on for ever, full of every variety of flowers, fruit and vegetables. The colours, the smells and the sounds were wonderful to a little chap like me. Some of the market traders were real Cockney characters, very funny. They used filthy language but they were honest and treated you well. We always gave sixpence to the porters who brought the goods out on huge barrows to the area known as The Island and loaded them on our vehicle. They weren’t well paid by the stall owners so made up for it with tips.
As I got older I started helping out in the shop on Saturdays and in the school holidays. I didn’t mind doing that because I was saving up for a bike and I got five shillings pocket money. And when I was fourteen I left school to work there full time. I didn’t really have any choice about that.
The best days of your life, so they say, are your schooldays but not for me. I went up the road to Westbury
