Harry Cocque

Colin Baines

Description

Harry Cocque is a quick-witted young lad living in rural Dorset at the outbreak of World War Two. Determined to do his bit for King and country, he joins the army and is selected for 'special duties' with S.W.E.A.T. (Secret Weapon Experiments And Testing), based at an old lunatic asylum. While the villagers struggle to cope with the threat of invasion, rationing, blimps and Morris Dancers, Harry's somewhat unconventional military career gets him involved in all kinds of peculiar projects, from bouncing bombs and vegetable promotion to a strange incident with a rubber rabbit. Everything changes with the arrival of thousands of American troops in Dorset, when Harry is called upon to assist in training and helps arrange a showpiece baseball game between the GIs and the villagers. Desperate to meet the enemy face to face but denied transfer to a combat unit, a frustrated Harry devises a plan to join the GIs for the D-Day landings. What could possibly go wrong?

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781784629304
• Langue: English

Extrait

Harry Cocque
Dung and Doodlebugs
Colin Baines

Copyright © 2015 Colin Baines
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Contents

Cover


INTRODUCTION


1939


IT BEGINS


DEAR ADOLF


1940


OFF I GO


CHOSEN MEN


SIX TO ONE


STRIPE


HOME FRONT


ATLAS


ROCKET


BLIMP


PROPAGANDA


1941


RATIONING


THEATRE


RADISH


WHOOPS


1942


ICE


CINEMA


PUZZLE


FIVE ALBERTS


1943


BOUNCE


MILLIE


DUNG


HUSH-HUSH


DIB


OVER HERE


MOVE


TEST


1944


GOOD


BAD


UGLY


TALLY HO


STRIKE ONE


IMMINENT


THE LONGEST DAY


SURPRISE SURPRISE


RECOVERY POSITION


MURDER


DOODLEBUGS


RENT


1945


BOMBER


VICTORY


AFTERTHOUGHT


ALFIE MILLER


NOTES
INTRODUCTION

My name is Harry Cocque and I was born in 1920, the same year as Rupert Bear. Not that there’s any connection of course. At least I don’t think there is, although I’ll admit I’ve always rather admired his trousers and the fact that he never seems to get any older. Unlike me: I seem to be shrinking and shrivelling by the minute. And I do tend to be a bit forgetful. In fact, these days I very often begin a sentence without
Anyways, I’ve been asked to tell you a few more tales about what life was like in a quiet little Dorset village back in old days; the days before all these modern miracles like quilted toilet tissue, fondue sets and Lycra; the days when you could entertain yourself for hours on end with a ball of wool and a stuffed animal; the days when there always seemed to be time to stand up, hitch your breeches and look at what you’d done.
If you’ve read the stories about my early life then you’ll already know some of the places and characters you’ll come across here, and if you haven’t you’ll soon pick them up. This time though, the tales are about my experiences through the war years or, as we called them back then, ‘The War.’ I do hope you enjoy them, and as my mate Tommy’s grandma used to say, ‘A giddy hen can hear Big Ben.’
No, me neither.

Oh, and there are a few notes at the end which may or may not put your mind to rest on a few things.
1939
IT BEGINS

“This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note stating that, unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.”

I listened to Mr Chamberlain’s famous words as they crackled from a battered Bakelite wireless perched on the bar of my favourite inn, the Twitching Pig, on the morning of Sunday 3 September 1939. Usually I’d have been in church, but I’d lost my job as a plasterer’s mate over what was, to my mind at least, a simple misunderstanding a couple of days earlier and the landlord, Fats Tanner, had been good enough to offer me a few hours’ work. I was washing tankards and still smarting from being sacked. My former boss had asked me to go and inspect some badly maintained walls in the local nuns’ dormitory, which I’d done in timely fashion, although in hindsight my cheery greeting of, ‘Howdo ladies, care to show me your cracks?’ may have been ill-judged.
‘So it’s war then,’ said Fats, ‘can’t say I’m surprised, what with everything that’s been going on.’
‘D’you think we’ll have to fight the Germans?’ I asked.
‘Dunno lad, hopefully sense will prevail before things get out of hand. It’s only twenty-odd years since the last mess; surely the powers that be must have learned their lessons by now.’
Nope.
***
For the first few weeks after the declaration of war, life in our tucked-away corner of rural Dorset went on as if nothing had happened: grass still grew, cows still mooed, and official regulations from government departments were still completely ignored, including the order to black-out the village. As you know, the black-out was brought in to try to make it harder for enemy bombers to find their targets when flying at night by the extinguishing or covering of all bright lights after sundown. It was a sensible measure that wasn’t implemented in the village for two reasons: firstly, because nobody wanted to spend good money on black-out material and, secondly, because no-one actually had any good money. To be fair, the village wasn’t exactly lit up like the Blackpool illuminations in any case; there was only one street lamp in the Square, and my mate Charlie had helpfully destroyed the bulb by hurling a hardened conker through it. A twenty-fiver, no less.
I don’t suppose anything would have changed if Mr Rubus, the church organist and provider of occasional village ‘entertainment,’ hadn’t decided to test his entire collection of magic lanterns one moonless night. Having lined them all up in the graveyard, on the time-worn tomb that, according to local legend, contained the earthly remains of Ethelric the Fierce, a great Saxon chieftain who’d once seen off a griffin by shouting at it, Mr Rubus lit his lanterns and bathed one whole side of the church in an eerie greenish light. He then fiddled about in front of the beams making shadow animals. His repertoire consisted of a pathetic hare and a misshapen ostrich, his attempts to do a yapping dog hampered by a middle finger that wouldn’t bend properly. Regrettably for our community, Mr Rubus’ performance was witnessed from several miles away by a government messenger who’d been caught short and had stopped his car on a hillside. He’d been searching in the dark at the side of the road for soft wide leaves, having forgotten to pack his squares of newspaper, and not being quite desperate enough to ruin the tail of his monogrammed shirt. He picked a few nettles by mistake and had an extremely uncomfortable ride home, putting in a formal complaint about our village in general and Mr Rubus in particular the very next day. Shortly afterwards, a stack of leaflets threatening fines and suchlike was reluctantly delivered by the postman and work finally began on darkening the village. Various solutions were found, ranging from the very simple (old blankets and clout nails) to the somewhat extreme (bricks). Silas Nimrod, the verger, had all his windows painted out with sixteen coats of distemper so no-one could possibly detect a chink of light from outside, or indeed see what he might be getting up to inside. Mind you, I’m pretty sure he did it before the war even started.
And then there was the gas mask fiasco. Our village didn’t receive any until months after the rest of the country for some reason, and when they did arrive no-one was particularly interested in them. Most folk believed that, if you could survive high summer standing downwind of our resident tramp Old Albert, you’d find a gas attack about as inconvenient as a mole’s guff.
One dull afternoon a pasty-faced woman and a weedy bloke arrived in a ministry van packed solid with cardboard boxes of gas masks. Leaving the van next to the Green, they innocently approached the first person they met and asked to be taken to the mayor to arrange distribution. It just so happened that that person was Barnaby Pea.
Barnaby was a well-built but simple chap who’d moved to the village after the good folk of Abbot’s Magma finally tired of him staring through their windows, sleeping in their flower beds and eating a number of their pets, including two guinea pigs and a llama. They’d driven him off with sticks and cudgels, several of them miffed that the eviction couldn’t wait until dusk, when they’d have been justified in using flaming brands. Now Barnaby may not have been the pinkest teat on the udder, but he had enough nous to know that we didn’t have a mayor. He scratched his big head and decided the best thing to do would be to ask his friend Dooley for advice. Setting off at a brisk pace the official couple happily trailed behind him, little suspecting that Dooley was a rooster that lived in an overgrown back yard about three miles cross country to the west.
On their return a couple of hours later, plastered in mud from the fields and scratched up from the hedges they’d had to clamber through, the officials discovered that they’d rather naively left the back of their van unlocked. Empty boxes littered the Green, and village children were happily trying on gas masks, filling them with dirt, throwing them into the pond and wandering off with armfuls of them. The only adult to have taken one was Doc Grimm, who thought it would come in handy next time he had to scrape Mr Mungo’s corns. The pasty-faced woman was furious. She stamped her foot and screeched at the children to bring the masks back and be shown how to use them properly. None of them took the slightest bit of notice, so she pulled her little instruction booklet out of her pock