A TALE OF FIVE LADS

by

CROMBIE CORDINER

I was raised in a hamlet consisting of seven houses and a small farm. I lived in the second house, Ian in the sixth, which was also the village shop, and Willie lived at the farm. A few hundred yards beyond the farm were two houses directly overlooking the sea. In one lived Sandy. In a small village of some twenty houses a quarter of a mile from us lived Bill. We all knew each other well, as did our families. It was a very close Scottish community.

The hill behind us and the acres between us and the sea, was a vast uncultivated area of heather, pools, rocks, rough paths, and an abundance of wildlife – the perfect playground for the few young people living there.

Our fathers mainly worked in the granite industry. The family was the stable unit in all our lives, and the relative poverty of us all was of no importance. Few of us had ever enjoyed a holiday from home , but we had all we needed.

During the summer of 1939 we were occupied as usual helping our parents in home and garden, and most of us earned a few pennies doing odd jobs in shops and at the local farm. Well I remember the days spent at Willie’s farm helping the adults at the threshing. While men fed the giant machine and others looked after the separated corn and straw we lads had to spend hours under the machine gathering chaff which fell like a snowstorm to the ground. It was dusty and dirty work, which clogged our lungs, but we slaved happily because for a day we were treated as men, and were paid sixpence for our labours.

The nearest big village, Boddam, with 1000 people, had a good cricket team. From early teens I had been their scorer, while learning the game. Bill was my self appointed coach. Tuesday and Thursday practice evenings were the highlights of my week with Bill coaching me at every opportunity. Saturday matches were something out of dreamland, to witness all my heroes in action. Bill was an adventurous batter and a wonder spinner of the ball. In England he surely would have made a county side.

Since coming to the village as a young man Ian had become another inseparable friend. He loved nothing more than to explore the workings of my mother’s organ, and sitting alone in an unheated room in winter, he taught himself by sheer determination to play it. Ian’s home was always open to me. His father, a university don, whose life had been near to ruin through alcohol, was a delight to listen to and to learn from.

Each school morning Sandy would set out along the road, picking up Willie and then me, before we started the long walk to Boddam school. Bill and Ian being older than us went to Peterhead Academy, three miles away. Willie has reminded me that I would often meet them with one ginger snap biscuit in my hand, which I would solemnly break and share. With us seldom having money for sweets that was a real treat. They were very special friends, though Sandy was very, very special – a delightful boy.

We had heard talk throughout that summer of 1939 about the political troubles at home and abroad, the villain of it all being one Adolf Hitler and his Germany. But we saw no threat to our closseted existence. None of us had ever been in England, and all these other countries were just faraway places in a geography book. Even when war was declared on 3^rd September and Ian, a Territorial Army soldier, was called up, it didn’t seem too threatening. Our parents kept quiet about the horrors of World War 1, in which many of them had suffered greatly. Life went on.

The following year saw the rout of France, Britain and their allies, with France surrendering and a vast army of British and others trapped around Dunkirk in France. Surely the world knows the miracle of Dunkirk, when over 300,000 of our lads were plucked to safety by an armada of ships. Ian was not one of them. His Gordon Highlanders fought a rearguard action and those who survived were captured and force marched eastwards into captivity.

Ian, an only child, was posted Missing. Some time later that was altered to Missing Believed Killed. As time passed only his tiny, bespeckled mother grimly held on to the belief that her boy was alive.

Bill had followed Ian into infantry, and three years later, almost together, Sandy, Willie, and I joined up. Came the invasion of Normandy and about the same time we received news that Ian was a Prisoner Of War in Germany.

Standing half out of my Churchill tank one summer’s day in 1944 I noted that the long, single filed column of infantry we were passing were Gordon Highlanders. I gazed intently on each dust encrusted face and I was thrilled to find myself looking down on Willie. Fortunately, we paused for a break soon after, and as was often the case when we were reasonably safe from the fighting area, we offered the infantry lads free rides. I was able to accommodate Willie and have a real blether, as we Scots call it.

Real news was often scarce in war, but when we were reaching the final stages of our show I learned to my horror that both Bill and Sandy, who was also in tanks, had been killed. They are buried in the area of Nijmegan, Holland, where after the war I was to visit the graves and bring back photographs to the families.

Nothing more was known about Ian, other than camp details, but he was speedily repatriated after the war ended. He told an amazing story. While on the forced march after Dunkirk he had slinked off the end of the long march, and with a few others had escaped through a wood. They separated, and Ian managed to get shelter and support from friendly French. He already spoke good French and was soon able to improve it and, with civilian clothes, was able to do work on a farm. His luck held for several months, but he was eventually caught. Once again, he managed to escape while in transit, jumping out of a moving truck.

This time he decided to move south, by-passing Paris, and entering an area known as Vichy France, which was still controlled by a puppet French government. Again, he obtained safe and secure accommodation on a farm, where he passed off as one of the workers. At a later date the Germans became more prominent in the region, often visiting the farms to make checks and obtain supplies. On a number of occasions, Ian told , he had sat at table with the French family with Germans eating alongside them. His French was by then native, and with a high confidence he was not detected. It was well over three years after Dunkirk before the Germans got on to him, and he was captured for the third time. He explained ruefully that they only got him because his over confidence became his undoing. This time, he confessed, there was no way he was going to be able to escape .

Willie and I came home in 1947 to a very different scene. There was no Sandy, no Bill, and many others in the area and in Peterhead town had not come back. From very early in the war Peterhead and nearby Fraserburgh had been mercilessly bombed, apparently more than any places outside London of similar population. We lived at the nearest point in mainland Britain to Norway, and German bombers there were constantly seeking the convoys which passed along our coast, inside the minefields which stretched from Peterhead to the Thames estuary. When they failed to find convoys they dropped their bombs on shore targets – us. Many were the casualties to add to those of local servicemen. Gone was the tranquil existence of pre war days. Never again would we be a happily isolated community.

Ian continued to be the success story. He had married a London girl and had started a family. Living on the edge of the towering cliffs in a tiny converted coach house he travelled 60 miles daily to Aberdeen University by bus, studying at home against a background of crying children and half choked with the steam of drying clothes. He graduated – Ian could do no else. Though a man of few words he had rugged determination.

He became a school teacher, then a head master locally. Though we would miss him we rejoiced when he received another promotion, in the south of Scotland. Then came the shock news that he had died, still in his thirties. It seemed that the stresses of the war and his fight for survival had proved too much for him.

This is a brief story of duty done, of much suffering, of lives lost and others damaged – a story typical of almost every community in our land and through a large part of the world.

Let us never forget the sufferings inflicted on those caught up in war and on those who survived to remember and mourn the loss of so many cut off in the prime of their lives. Sometimes I feel guilty to have survived, and to have survived relatively unscathed when so many were maimed. We owe them a great debt. May we never forget them.