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By Root 188 0

and I are off duty; to shelter from the unending rain we hole up in the back of someone’s three-tonner. We chat about anything, we sing songs together, we like doing vocal arrangements. I play the trumpet part and Harry does the Bass accompaniment. We scrounge tea from Spike Deans. Lt. Joe Mostyn is passing by. I could see his Jewish soul burning with loathing of the war, not so much against the Germans, but the fact he was only on a Second Lieutenant’s pay, when he really wanted to be in his schmutter shop in Whitechapel, doing mass-produced suits that all the Spivs would buy off the peg at five quid a go. I could see his gaze a long way from this muddy pit we were in, he was in the workroom, watching the girls on their machines, and fancying the one with the big boobs who was doing the padding in the shoulders. The times he had said to me, “Whoever designed the battle dress was a Schmock, the first thing to do when you dress a soldier is to make him look, or think he looks, attractive to the opposite sex, but look at this—” he would indicate my battle dress, “—no wonder the Yanks get all the women, what do you look like? A cripple! We all look like cripples! When we march past a saluting base, the natives think we’re all going into a home for the deformed.”

Yet, although he was never very good at Gunnery, or, as we used to call it, Goonery, he still was the man who kept the officers’ mess topped up with little luxuries. I remember Lt. Walker coming to the Command Post, his eyes shining with orange sauce.

“Where in God’s name did he get a duck in this wilderness?” At the Apple Orchard position, Mostyn detailed three Gunners who spent all day collecting sacks of apples, he gets the cookhouse to stew them, and for several weeks there was apple puree on the table. Mind you, he was suffering; his family were all Kosher, and he had started off following the Kosher diet, but as the war entered its second year he gradually became ‘christianised’, the great temptation was upon him. At the rest camp at Amalfi, he was offered a plate of shellfish. Strained to breaking point, he said (according to Lt. Walker), “Why should I go on being hated by Hitler for being Jewish? I’m going to take the pressure off.” So saying, he plunged into the dish, beating his breast and shouting, “Mother! Forgive me, but eat, Joe, EAT.”

Yes, Joe Mostyn was an unforgettable character. I last saw him in the foyer of the Cumberland Hotel at Marble Arch in 1952. He was a bit offish with me, and seemed loath to talk, but he did impart the info that he was ‘Teaching the Israeli Army Gunnery’. If so, but for him the Six Day War would have been over in two.

The war is gradually having its effect on the officers. Bdr. Sherwood is at the foot of a hill on which our OP is sited. He is in his little bivvy by his bren carrier when the link phone buzzes. In Sherwood’s own words this is what transpired.

SHERWOOD:

OP. Link Answering.

LT. BUDDEN:

Ah, Sherwood?

SHERWOOD:

Yes, sir.

LT. BUDDEN:

I’m bored.

SHERWOOD:

What you want me to do, sir?

A PAUSE, SLIGHT BREATHING, THEN

LT. BUDDEN:

Sing.

SHERWOOD:

(Singing) Lay that Pistol down Babe, Lay that Pistol Down, Pistol Packin’ Momma, lay that pistol down. (He continues thus till the song is finished.)

LT. BUDDEN:

Thank you.

Above: Lt. Cecil Budden, taken just before the asbestos roof behind nearly decapitated him. Today he is alive and well and living in Essex.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 1943

Because of the OP’s field of view, and a thousand feet height added to the guns’ range, the targets are never ending. Despite the cold the gunners are actually sweating. A casualty! my boots are leaking. I examine them seated in the back of G truck. White passes by sipping tea.

He stops. “What’s on?”

“My boots are leaking.”

“Oh? Outwards?”

“Outwards my arse, the bloody water’s getting in, Jerry’s got the right idea. Jack Boots, no lace holes. Great.”

“Have you tasted the apples here?”

“Not yet.”

“They’re bloody marvellous, better than English ones, full of juice.”

Army conversations were unique, from