the penny dropped and she just stood with her mouth open, speechless.
‘Yes, it is me, Auntie Elsie. It’s Charlie,’ I stood outside holding my kit bag.
‘Who is it?’ Joe called out from the back.
Elsie still hadn’t spoken to me but shouted back, ‘It’s Charlie. Alice’s boy, come home.’
‘Well, don’t leave him standing on the doorstep, woman,’ Joe shouted from the back. ‘Bring him in.’ He appeared in the hall in his shirt sleeves and no collar. ‘Come on in, lad. Come on in,’ and he put his hand out and shook mine so hard I felt my poor bones cracking.
I followed them into the back parlour where three of my girl cousins were sitting at the table. Of course they had changed a bit since I had last seen them, as had I.
‘Look who’s here, girls. It’s your cousin Charlie.’ Gwen and Joyce, the older ones, got up and came round to give me a hug. Little Jean followed; she’d been just a toddler when I had last seen her.
‘When will they be back?’ I said, indicating next door.
‘Your parents. Didn’t you know? They moved out to Leigh-on-Sea,’ Joe said.
‘Bought a house. Your dad still works in the shop,’ said Elsie.
I told them I hadn’t received any letters for at least six months so was out of touch with the family.
‘Never mind that. What about something to eat?’ Joe rubbed his hands together. ‘You look as though you could do with a good square meal inside you.’
I nodded. ‘I could eat a horse,’ I said.
Joe laughed. ‘Sorry, no horse but I could do a nice rump steak or some tasty sausages. What you fancy for your tea?’
My mouth was watering. ‘A pork chop, please. That would go down a treat,’ I said and Joe went off next door.
Elsie put the kettle on in the kitchen and the girls kept me company. It was lovely to hear their girlish chatter and giggles. Joe went into his cold storage room to check what he had and came back with two enormous pork chops, lovely and pink with a thick ribbon of fat on the side of each one. Sadly, I only managed to eat a couple of mouthfuls. I wasn’t used to eating meat or anything much really, and my poor stomach couldn’t take it – or my teeth. I had to be careful what I ate for a very long time.
What happened next was that Joe rang one of my brothers with the good news of my safe arrival home and asked him to come round and pick me up and take me to Leigh. All I remember is that on the way there I was looking out of the window taking in everything. We stopped at some crossroads and right on the corner was a big dairy company shop and I could see the window display with a huge cheese on a stand in the middle.
I said, ‘Cor, look at that! There’s us been crying out for food all this time and you’ve got cheeses the size of a house.’ But you know what, it was a dummy and there wasn’t much real cheese around anywhere. Everybody at home was struggling with a ration of 50gms per week, and there I was one night, 1000 miles away, stuffing my face with huge chunks of cheese stolen from the railway truck and a load of horrible rats eating the rest.
We reached my parents’ home which was a fine mid-terraced house in what was known as ‘the good part’ of town. When my mother opened the door and saw me she was lost for words. She wrapped me in her arms and held me tight for a very long time. My father shook my hand, patted me on the back and took me into the front parlour. When my sister Elsie saw me she burst into tears and ran out of the room.
Lily and I were reunited on the platform at Leigh-on-Sea railway station. I nearly missed her getting off the train as I didn’t recognise her in uniform. She was given compassionate leave and had come straight from Slough where she was stationed. She was about to be made a sergeant in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS). Her third stripe was waiting in the office for her to collect and sew on her uniform, when I re-appeared.
Lily made a life of her own while I was away, working to support herself and be independent. She wrote to me and told me about what she was up to so I knew a bit about her work. She was always a hard worker and a year or so after the war broke out she left her job as a seamstress and applied for war work. She was a fitter at a Spitfire factory out somewhere in Hertfordshire, fixing fire guards (special protective windscreens) to cockpits. They were designed to help protect pilots from the serious burns which many suffered when their planes were shot down. That was a good thing to do. Always clever with her hands, my Lily.
She joined the ATS in May 1943 and soon after was promoted to Corporal and put in charge of a whole hut of women. She was involved in training girls for their various jobs in supporting the work of the army. She learned to drive on a little Austin motor and became a staff driver. She took officers out to meetings just like me in France. She was so well thought of that one of the officers said that she could come and work for her after the war. And now I had come back to spoil everything.
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
