I was detailed with about half a dozen other fellows to take this gun, a 6 inch Howitzer from the 1914/18 war, to Tattenhall . I think the towing vehicle was a Schamel, so we all piled into the back of the vehicle, and headed for the Mersey Tunnel with the steel rimmed wheels of the gun rumbling through the cobbled streets . The noise was even worse when we entered the tunnel because that was a steel roadway! On getting to the bottom of the tunnel the truck broke down . We were stuck there for a couple of hours, breathing in the fumes of passing vehicles, before a motor mechanic arrived and sorted out the fault and we were once more on our travels.

This was the start of nearly seven years in the Army .

THE WAR YEARS

After the episode in the Mersey Tunnel, we trundled our way to Tattenhall, a little village in Cheshire . The regiment was to be billeted in houses in the village, and we were detailed to go to a rather posh house, ' Millbank ' . The house itself was to be occupied by the Officers, and the other ranks were billeted in the stables and the loft above the stables . The date we arrived at Tattenhall was 2nd September 1939 and my 18th birthday had been on the 26th June.

The entrance to our quarters was up a little country lane which led to a cobbled stable yard and the back of the house where the stables were. The two horses belonging to the house were left to roam around in a field at the side of the lane . Our first job was to empty the loft of bales of hay and straw, but first we had to fill our palliases from the straw bales . A palliase is a long canvas bag, which when filled with straw becomes a crude mattress . There was about twenty men to occupy this loft and they lay with their heads up to the outside wall on either side of the loft . At one end of the loft was a wall and at the opposite end was a wall that had a horizontally split door in the centre, this door would be opened to haul in the bales of straw which were pulled up from the stable yard by rope over a pulley which was attached to a wooden beam above the split door.
See previous pageTree20next page