My father, Charles Bernard Roper, who died in 1994, was 38 when World War II began. He was living with us, his wife and son, in Endlebury Road, Chingford, and worked with his father and brothers at Ink’s Green Farm and social club in Higham’s Park. Although he would probably have been called up, he volunteered for service in the army in 1940 and chose to remain as a private, though I am sure he was capable of gaining a higher rank – he just wanted to be an ordinary foot-soldier. He also said he wanted to join the infantry, and he was in an infantry regiment training in Britain until he was 40, when he was moved out of front-line duties and was posted abroad. He did not keep a diary and his letters home are currently lost, so what I have written here is based on what he told us after the war.
He began his training in the army training area in Kirkcudbrightshire in south-west Scotland where, among other things, he used to help a local farmer, when circumstances permitted, to milk his cows. The training was quite hardcore with long forced marches and river crossings on a single rope. He was later moved to Mayfield on the Staffordshire – Derbyshire border, where he again helped local farmers when he could. Although he got on well with his fellow soldiers, he was not a very gregarious person and preferred walking in the countryside to going down the pub with the boys. One of his treasured possessions, which he took with him throughout his soldiering, was an omnibus edition of the works of William Shakespeare.
I saw him in army uniform for the only time when he was based in Mayfield in 1940. My mother and I had moved to The Green Walk in Chingford to be with her parents. We were sitting together one evening when an army lorry pulled up outside. My father, in his khaki uniform, was the driver and he took me outside to see the lorry. He was with a fellow soldier and they had to leave again after a very short visit on whatever mission they were part of, and I did not see my father again until 1945.
We next heard of him when he was on a troop ship, the requisitioned P&O liner Stratheden. His voyage on a crowded wartime ship was in poignant contrast to my mother and grandparents’ experience cruising round the Mediterranean on the same vessel in the 1930s. How quickly the world can change from general calm to all-out war. I also travelled on the Stratheden when I returned from Australia aged 20. The troop ship was bound for South Africa, far from any action, and it had to weave a cautious route far out in the Atlantic to avoid German U-boats. As far as I know, my father disembarked at Durban rather than Cape Town and was billeted there for a while. He travelled about in trucks with some of the native Bantus, but I don’t know why.
Eventually he was shipped across the Arabian Sea to India where he was also based for a while. I know he was in a transport regiment, possibly the Royal Army Ordnance Corps (RAOC), and he remained a driver of heavy lorries and other vehicles. It seems that the reason he was taken to India was to be able to drive in convoy to Egypt to contribute to the Allied offensive in North Africa. The route taken was not the easiest and must have involved enormous planning, but I can find no account of how it fitted into the Allied strategy. The convoy started by crossing the Khyber Pass, then went across Afghanistan and Iran to Baghdad in Iraq, then into Palestine and down and across the Suez Canal to Egypt. It must have been an extraordinary experience for an untravelled farmer from Essex.
Once in Egypt he was employed mainly in driving duties and travelled backwards and forwards across north-east Africa from Cairo through Benghazi and Tripoli in Libya, a journey of some 2,000 km. He must have been carrying supplies to the Allied armies fighting across North Africa but, despite his military duties, he had time to enjoy Egypt. He climbed the Great Pyramid and had a red kite (locally known as a shite hawk) that used to perch on his shoulder. He went bird watching and sent me a book entitled ‘Birds of the Nile Delta’, which was interesting but not exactly of relevance to the avian fauna of Bruton in Somerset where I was living when the book arrived. Nevertheless, it remains a treasured item in my library.
In 1944, towards the end of his army career in Egypt, he was very ill, with a form of meningitis I think, and was hospitalised. Being in the army, he was used as a guinea pig, no doubt with many others, in the trial of a new drug called penicillin, and he recovered. He was participating in what is now seen as a flagship moment in the history of medicine.
Despite his travels he never saw action and, ironically, my mother and I were more at risk from enemy bombs than he was in the Middle East. He told me once that a military policeman pulled up his truck and said, “German paratroopers half an hour ahead,” and instead of saying “Turn back” he said, “Carry on.” My father carried on with a turmoil of thoughts but later learnt that all the Germans had been rounded up before he got to the drop zone.
When the war ended in 1945 my father was shipped to Marseilles in southern France then made the long journey by train and ship to a demobilisation centre in south-east England. He was issued with ‘civvy’ clothes and made his own way home to The Green Walk, still carrying his kit bag. As Wikipedia says, “Britain had undergone six years of bombardment and blockade, and there was a shortage of many of the basic essentials of living, including food, clothing, and housing. Husbands and wives also had to adjust to living together again after many years apart.”
At The Green Walk we had learnt that my father would be arriving home in the evening on a certain date. We were all waiting with something like trepidation in the sitting room. The doorbell rang. My father came in, sun-bronzed and cheerful. My mother and I had not seen him for five years. I was 2 when he left and 7 when he returned, my mother 29 and 34 but, as far as I was aware, the family came together again really well. My father had no job but was helped through the postwar period by my grandfather.
My happiest memory of the reunion evening was that my father (of whom I was slightly afraid) had bought me a wooden camel and a real scarab beetle from Egypt.
