Blitz Boy by Alf Townsend

Author:Alf Townsend
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750959063
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2013-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

SIX

OUR FINAL MOVE

This final move was akin to moving to another town. We had started off in the centre of Newquay by the harbour, then moved to the southernmost point. Now we were back on the northern edge. Everything was new to me – there were new beaches to discover, new cliffs to climb, an RAF aerodrome to check out and a boating pond behind the station by the old viaduct. There were still plenty of Yanks in town after the front-line troops had departed and the Great Western Hotel – just a stone’s throw away from our hotel Cliff Close – housed the American officers. I think it was every Thursday evening that they had a motion-picture show in the big ballroom that looked out on to the garden. So, I would arrive in their hotel garden every Thursday evening, find a gap in the heavy curtains that had been drawn across the opened French windows and enjoy a free film! Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour in all their famous ‘Road’ movies. I saw them all, long before they were released in Britain. I did this Thursday ‘visit’ for many weeks and not once did any of the American officers rumble me. They just sat there in the dark puffing away at their ciggies and enjoying the film. Whether they even saw me in the dark is another matter. With hindsight, I suppose they were lucky I wasn’t a German spy with a suitcase full of grenades!

I remember once playing in the private gardens of the Great Western Hotel. God only knows how I got in there past the guards. Suddenly I tripped and fell on a great lump of jagged glass that pierced the flesh on the left side of my knee. I went down as if I had been pole-axed, screaming in agony, with blood splattering all over the place. The next thing I remembered was this wonderful smell in my nostrils. I looked up and saw a beautiful, blond-haired woman wearing an American officer’s uniform, smiling down at me with the most perfect teeth I had ever seen. ‘Let’s have a look and see what you’ve done to yourself honey,’ she said in soft, Southern drawl. ‘Oh, that’s not nice at all,’ she said, wiping the gaping wound, ‘I guess if you’re a brave enough soldier, I can stitch it up.’ I just lay there in absolute agony, looking up at this beautiful creature with the sweet smell and thinking, am I dead? Is she an angel? No way was I going to let this lovely lady think I was a coward, so I said in a wobbly, nervous voice ‘Do what you have to do, missus, I ain’t scared.’ I often wish on reflection that I’d kept my big mouth shut and waited for an ambulance, because what followed was so painful, it made me feel sick. Two other lady officers held me down while my ‘angel’ proceeded to sew me up like an old pin cushion.

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