Clydesiders at War by Margaret Thomson Davis

Author:Margaret Thomson Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781845028039
Publisher: Black & White Publishing
Published: 2014-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

18

‘Talk about lucky?’ one of the sailors told them. Malcy and the others had been rescued a second time, hauled once more onto the heaving deck of a destroyer. But this time they were wounded. Malcy had copped it down one side—his face, his shoulder and his arm. Joe and Pete had taken some shrapnel in the legs. Now they were in Dover, all bandaged up and grateful to be alive. Women were handing out sandwiches and big mugs of steaming hot tea. They’d never tasted tea or sandwiches like it.

Afterwards, they were led onto a train, with no idea where they were going. All was confusion, around them a teeming mass of unshaven, oil-streaked, filthy, humanity. The news that greeted them was worse than they had expected. Hitler was winning the war. Most of western Europe had fallen to his storm-troopers. Churchill’s marvellous rhetoric didn’t change the fact that they were getting beaten.

Now Churchill was saying that the RAF was going to blow the Luftwaffe out of the sky and save Britain. Knights of the air, he’d called the pilots. Well, Malcy and his pals agreed, they hadn’t seen much of them so far. Certainly not at Dunkirk.

Malcy, Joe and Pete found themselves delivered to a hospital. There they had various pieces of metal cut out of shoulders, face and legs. Malcy had trouble sleeping—he suspected it was much the same for Joe and Pete and the rest of the survivors, although none of them admitted it. When he did eventually fall asleep, Malcy had nightmares. He was always back in the life raft with Joe and Pete, with the fighters diving down on them and the bullets tearing across the water towards them. He remembered becoming sleepy then as he bled into the sea. In his mind, everything became mixed up. Planes shooting at ships, ships shooting at planes, the endless queues of men on the beaches, dead bodies floating, machine gun bullets spluttering and boiling the water. He couldn’t clear his head of it all. He suspected that he’d never again enjoy a peaceful, dream-free sleep. Not like he used to—it seemed so long ago now. In another life. And what a fool he’d been in that life, how he’d wasted it.

Malcy, Pete and Joe were eventually transferred to the nearest barracks, en route to a short survival leave. It wasn’t even long enough for them to make the journey home to Scotland and back. Nor did they feel fit enough. They wrote home, however, and told their families that they were all right. Malcy wrote to Erchie and Teresa Gourlay. In the local pub where they spent most of their few days of freedom, they found LDVs masterminding the defence of the country. They seemed to have a wonderful faith in the Navy. The Navy and Winston Churchill.

The three survivors weren’t all that sure of either, but they kept their thoughts to themselves. During the day, they often lay on the grass outside the pub and

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