“There’s a pub in that village called The Five Bells,” my father said. “It’s a nice little place, Eastry,” he went on. “I was billeted there for a few weeks just before D-Day. There’s an old Church and a vicarage, and we were bivouacked down the lane”
The next time I was down in east Kent, I went to Eastry and reconnoitred the whole territory. My dad was right on all counts, church, vicarage, and pub. So this was my dad’s last taste of England before he went to France and the beaches of Normandy. It was exactly like the poster that they put out during the war, to recruit soldiers. A picture of village England, set in the fold of green fields, with a church and a pub, where English life was gathered. This was what we were urged to defend. Keep the home fires burning.
Dad had just got married up in Manchester, and the very next day he was sent down to this corner of Kent. He was an old soldier by this time, having done six years regular army up to 1939. Then, just as he was about to leave, Mr Hitler started causing trouble, and my dad, instead of coming home from India to sign for Arsenal, (my proud boast as a boy, and ever since) found himself doing another shift of soldiering that lasted for another six years.
He came up through the Persian Gulf, he told me. “Very hot, there, Brian,” he said. “A hundred and thirty in the shade.” He came into Palestine, and visited the Garden of Gethsemane. We had a button thing at home, a sort of plastic see-through button, and in it was a leaf from an olive tree. “Souvenir of Gethsemane”. How very appropriate, I thought years later. My dad had his fair share of suffering, and not all of it the war.
He spent the next two years in North Africa, fighting Rommel, of whom he spoke with great respect. Then he got leave, met mum and married. Now he was back in barracks, having to go again. “Why don’t you get some other people,” he asked the sergeant, “instead of us? We’ve done our bit.” “We need experienced men,” was the reply he was given.
So here he was in Eastry, beside The Five Bells, billeted with a group he didn’t know, the Buckinghamshire Yeomanry. Dad was Royal Artillery. “I asked if I could get a game of football with them, but they were a bit cliquey and didn’t take me on. So I went down the road to a place called Betteshanger Colliery, told them I was an ex-miner, and they gave me a game.”
The fun was that they played against the army team and beat them. My dad was a good centre half. “What are you doing, playing for them,” the army crowd moaned at him. “Well, I asked you lot, but you didn’t want to know,” Dad replied. He always chucked at the memory.
Betteshanger is gone now, closed down after the miners’ strike of the 1980s. That was a war as well. And that’s how it came up in conversation. My Dad, an old miner, was watching the news on television, and heard mention of the Kent coalfield. And down memory lane we went.
I lived in Kent at that time, and I find it a lovely part of the world, apple orchards and hop fields, and little villages and country churches. They fought the Battle of Britain over its skies. But I remember it most for my Dad, in the early summer of 1944, for the village of Eastry, and the football match at Betteshanger. And for that long look in his eye when he sat back in his chair, and looked out of the window at home, and said to me, “There’s a lovely little pub in Eastry, Brian. Called The Five Bells.”
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Erris Poetry 