The Very White of Love: the heartbreaking love story that everyone is talking about!

6 AUGUST 1939

High Wycombe Railway Station

The station is packed with soldiers, getting ready to embark for the battalion’s training camp in Sussex. There’s a festive atmosphere. Union Jacks and bunting hang from the wrought iron fences and pillars. The battalion’s band plays a rousing marching song. Wives and children huddle proudly around their loved ones, as the August sun floods the station with light.

For many of the men, this is the first time they will have left the county. There’s a mood both of excitement and fear. Words of comfort and encouragement are exchanged. Babies dandled. Kisses planted.

Martin looks on, anxiously. Nancy promised she would try to get here to say goodbye. But there’s only twenty minutes till the train leaves. He knows if she doesn’t make it that there will be a good reason. He’s not a child, who needs someone to see him off at the station. But, as he watches a young soldier run towards a woman and child on the platform, and fold them in his arms, he can’t help feeling a pang of loneliness.

He glances at his watch. Two soldiers almost run into him as they push a trolley full of baggage along the platform. The band strikes up a new tune. Martin darts another look at the crowd milling around by the entrance then hurries along the platform to where his platoon of sixteen men is assembling.

‘Everyone here, Sarge?’ Martin asks his platoon sergeant, Joe Cripps, a short, muscular man, built like a fireplug.

‘All present and correct, sir.’

Martin is still getting used to his new role as an officer. Like most of the men in the platoon, Cripps is nearly twice as old as Martin; married and with children. As a twenty-year-old student, who has not even graduated, Martin feels awkward giving him orders. By rights, the sergeant should be telling him what to do.

‘Your family here to see you off?’ Martin asks his sergeant.

‘We’re from the north of the county, sir.’ Cripps lifts a huge canvas bag full of equipment and throws it into the train. ‘It’s too far, what with all the kids.’

‘How many have you got?’ Martin grins.

‘Just the two, sir.’ Cripps spots one of the platoon members swigging from a bottle of beer. ‘Hoy! You! Get rid of that bottle, or I’ll break it over your head!’ He turns back to Martin. ‘You, sir?’

Martin is miles away, peering fretfully around the station, looking for the most beautiful redhead in the world. ‘Sorry?’

‘Are you married, sir?’

‘Not yet, Sarge,’ Martin replies. ‘Soon, I hope.’

‘Better hurry then,’ the sergeant says. ‘We’ll probably be in France before Christmas.’

A deafening hiss of steam escapes from the locomotive, followed by a whistle. Martin glances anxiously towards the entrance.

‘Carry on here for a moment, will you, Sarge?’

Martin doesn’t even wait for the answer but turns and hurries down the platform, bumping into other soldiers and almost tripping over a pile of sacks. Another whistle sounds. Orders are barked. The last men start to board. A young wife, with a blonde baby on her arm, clings to her corporal husband, sobbing. Another whistle pierces the air.

As he approaches the entrance gates, Martin spots a woman with red hair. A blast of steam from the locomotive’s pistons obscures her in a swirling cloud.

‘Nancy!’ He breaks into a run, weaving through the knots of women and children, who now stand waving through the windows of the train to their loves ones.

The cloud of steam clears. The woman turns. Martin’s heart sinks.

Six days later, Martin opens his eyes to see an orderly dressed in khaki standing next to his camp bed.

‘Cup of tea, sir?’

‘Thank you, Jenkins.’ He yawns. ‘What time is it?’

‘Just before six, sir.’

Martin swings his legs over the edge of the camp bed and sits hunched over, sipping his tea. Their training camp is near the village of Lavant, in Sussex. In the distance, the South Downs stretch away to the north. To the south lie Chichester and the coast. Nancy’s absence is like a dull ache in his side. Luckily, he has his hands full. The men are unfit, badly equipped and homesick. They need constant chivvying along and training. Every day brings new frustrations – and challenges.

As the youngest officer in the battalion, Martin is already the butt of a few jokes from some of his mess mates; and the general dogsbody. Yesterday, he was just about to sit down and write to Nancy, after a day spent practising marching in pouring rain, when the second-in-command, Major Brian Heyworth, made him drive twenty miles into Chichester to fetch some rope.

‘Sleep well?’ Saunders greets him as Martin walks into the mess tent.

‘Fine.’ Martin yawns. ‘Just not enough. How about you?’

‘I’ve had better nights’ sleep.’

Martin twists his torso to the right. ‘My back is killing me after that route march yesterday. Twenty miles! I really think it’s a bit unnecessary.’

‘Apparently, one platoon got lost and ended up marching halfway to Reading!’

‘One of ours?’ Martin tips back his cup.

Saunders shakes his head. ‘Bloody 4th Battalion, of course.’

Gibbens, the battalion’s medical officer, comes and joins them. He is older than Martin, a twenty-seven-year-old Scot with a pale face; dark, crinkly hair that is already beginning to recede; gentle, dark eyes; and a wry sense of humour, who was working at St Thomas’ Hospital when the war broke out. His family are related to the Hartley jam family. Since they first met at the beginning of camp, Martin, Saunders, and he have become regular mess companions.

‘Any more cases of flu?’ Martin bites into a piece of cold toast. The mess tent is packed, so that he has to shout to make himself heard.

‘Still just the six.’ Gibbens taps his head. ‘Touch wood.’ An orderly comes and pours him some tea. ‘But it’s ridiculous to work the men so hard. They can hardly keep their eyes open – let alone move their feet.’

After breakfast, Martin assembles his platoon for trenching practice. The generals are convinced that this war will be like the last one: static forces dug in within shouting distance of each other. It’s his platoon of sixteen’s job to dig the trenches; erect roadblocks, put up barbed wire, do carpentry or construction jobs, dig latrines – and bury the dead.

To transport their gear – picks and shovels, fence posts, sledgehammers, nails and screws, band saws, wood – they have a huge Guy ‘Vixen’ removals van, donated by a furniture manufacturer in High Wycombe and repainted camouflage green and brown. Martin calls it the ‘Panopticon’, a play on the word Pantechnicon, the term commonly used for furniture removal vans. A Panopticon is the name given to an imaginary penal colony by the philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, in which the guards can observe the prisoners from a circular watchtower without the prisoners being aware that they are being watched. In other words, a bit like Army life. The name stuck and the Panopticon has now become the pride of the battalion. On the radiator is the Guy Motors logo: a metal badge with an Indian chief in a feather war bonnet surrounded by a wreath of bay leaves. Their lucky talisman.

After they have unloaded shovels and picks, Martin and his men begin to dig in unison, throwing the soil over their shoulders. ‘What did you do on civvy street, Cripps?’ Martin asks the sergeant, in between shovelling.

‘I was a master carpenter, sir.’ Cripps throws a shovel full of earth up over the lip of the trench, his pale, bony shoulders glistening with sweat. Though he is only five feet eight, with a long, thin face and ears that stick out from the sides of his head, he works harder and more efficiently than anyone else in the platoon.

Like many of the non-commissioned men, Cripps comes from north Buckinghamshire, around the light industrial centre of Aylesbury. By far the biggest provider of men in the battalion is the printing works of Hazell, Watson & Viney, in Aylesbury, one of the largest in Britain. Martin thinks it ironic that men who previously set type for Penguin paperbacks are now learning to dig trench latrines or clean a rifle.

‘Spent most of my life in and around Waddesdon.’ Cripps pulls a packet of tobacco from his pocket and some papers, and begins to roll a cigarette.

‘Where the Rothschilds live?’ Martin slams the shovel into the dark earth.

Cripps licks the paper and rolls the cigarette between his fingers. ‘That’s it.’ He takes a deep drag of smoke. ‘I do odd jobs at Waddesdon Manor, as a matter of fact.’ He pulls his pick out of the ground. ‘I feel more like a miner these days.’

‘Or a bloody mole,’ a voice calls out from further along the trench.

‘A mole’d shift more earth in a day than you, Topper.’

Topper is the nickname of Jim Hopkins, Private; lead trombonist in the battalion band; stretcher-bearer; resident joker. He starts to sing ‘Underneath the Arches’, waving an imaginary top hat, after which he is nicknamed, above his thinning blond hair.

Soon they are all singing along at the bottom of the trench, their pickaxes and shovels striking the earth in time to the tune.

Topper does a soft shoe shuffle, waves his imaginary hat once more, then takes a theatrical bow. The platoon clap and cheer.

In the evening Martin slips away to the mess tent to write to her. A group of officers are playing bridge. He waves to Hugh Saunders. Less than a week ago, he was wearing tennis whites and had a tennis racquet in his hand. Now, he is in khaki and packing a Colt 45. Other officers were solicitors, bank managers or doctors. From a leather armchair at the back of the tent, the commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Burnett-Brown MC, BB for short, a stocky, barrel-chested man with a bristling moustache and bullish head, is digressing on the French tactics at the Battle of Austerlitz, his polished breeches kicked out in front of him, as though he were at his Pall Mall club. His nickname among the officers is ‘The Little King.’

Martin remembers his conversation with Uncle Charles about pals battalions. Apart from the second-in-command, Major Brian Heyworth, a tall, plain-speaking barrister from Manchester, who only joined the battalion after moving to Beaconsfield, and is regarded by some as an outsider, Martin has known most of these men and their families since boyhood. Over there are the Viney brothers, scions of the Aylesbury printworks, now officers in the battalion: Lawrence with his bald pate and narrow-set eyes, Martin’s current tent-mate; and his elder brother, Elliott, a ruggedly handsome captain with a pencil-thin moustache and the same chiselled jawline as his brother. Their family has been linked with the battalion for several generations. Oscar Viney, the brothers’ father, commanded a Company on the Somme in 1916; their mother is an old friend of Aunt D.; and Martin has known the brothers since boyhood.

The young man next to them is David Stebbings, the battalion’s intelligence officer or IO. Stebbings’ small features and narrow eyes, which give his face a compact, slightly inscrutable look, added to his keen mind, make him perfect as an intelligence officer, one of the key roles in the battalion, responsible for the collection and distribution of all intelligence as it affects the battalion, observing and making maps of enemy positions, as well as distributing the latest news of the campaign.

His mother, Anne, has known Aunt D. since the 1920s and in the summer holidays Martin spent many happy days with David, riding their bikes through the woods or climbing trees.

Martin’s sense of the battalion being like an extended family is enhanced by the fact that, unlike in regular army units, officers address each other by their Christian names, whatever their rank. Captain Viney is not ‘sir’ to Martin, he’s Elliott. Captain Ritchie is simply James. The fact that, in the year since Nancy came into his life, many of them, like Hugh Saunders, have also become familiar to her, makes Martin’s affection for them even greater.

Martin collects a gin and tonic and a sheaf of writing paper and finds a quiet corner of the tent. In the background, the sound of a Tommy Dorsey song, ‘All I Remember Is You’, drifts across the tent. It’s true, thinks Martin, smiling.

He arranges the paper, takes out his pen, removes the cap and begins to write. But the ink has run out. He crosses the tent and asks the orderly if there is any more. The orderly hands him a bottle of Parker’s permanent black ink. Martin returns to his perch at the back of the tent, unscrews the barrel of the pen, dips the nib into the bottle, then lightly squeezes the filler between his forefinger and thumb, watching as the rubber sac is engorged with ink. Like his heart, he thinks. Bursting with love.

Carissima mia,

I am a little shy of writing to you after reading that marvellous letter which you sent me. This will be neither as long nor as picturesque as yours but it may give you a glimpse of the life I’m leading now while you are basking in the sun lying on the heather, dreaming and criticizing the skies.

I wish you had been to see me off at Wycombe – all the men’s sweethearts came, so I felt a bit lonely. I’ve been put in command of No. 5 platoon of HQ Company, a platoon that call themselves Pioneers and spend their time digging trenches, putting up barbed wire, etc. I have been busy supervising the digging of a long zigzag trench on the edge of the parade ground to be used in case of air raids. It isn’t likely that we will be raided, but it keeps the men occupied.

This being England, it has rained almost constantly. The weather is helped by the multitudes of motor vehicles of all kinds, which are driven furiously all over the camp by terribly keen young territorials on most unimportant duties. But the men are keeping well and dry, thank goodness – only one member of our platoon has been reported sick and been detained in the hospital tent. They are cheerful and keen. The brighter soldiers among them are already beginning to show themselves.

I share a tent in the officers’ lines (the opposite side of the battalion parade ground from the men’s lines) with Lawrence Viney, who is a pleasant tent companion. I have a batman, a man of about thirty from Beaconsfield, from the Old Town I think, called Jenkins. He’s also the driver. We have to get up soon after six o’clock having been woken up by the orderly with tea and hot water. Breakfast at eight o’clock. Chief parade of the day at nine o’clock from which we should, if the weather allows, march or ‘proceed’ to training areas or routes for our route marches. I walk about with a sword. For patrols I have a shining, silver, studded cross belt. On our return there is lunch, then another lecture or instruction from the brigadier or someone at two o’clock until 3.15 p.m. This afternoon we learned about map reading and how to set a compass. We only had one compass to learn with so I hope I remember something. I take notes of everything in the most copious Oxford way.

The brick-red canvas behind him glows in the setting sun. A gust of wind blows under the tent. Raindrops start to spatter the canvas. Martin lifts the pen and looks around. Major Heyworth snores in an armchair with a book open on his chest. The rain pitter-patters above his head.

The other officers are very friendly and pleasant. There are about six I’ve got to know quite well. Sometimes I feel rather younger than usual because many of them are about twenty-eight and quite a few married. After the formalities of dinner are over (we can’t smoke or move off until the colonel has done so) we drift into the antechamber, so to speak – the first of two hospital tents which are used as the mess – and talk, read, write letters, or sing songs. Then I usually go to bed about eleven o’clock but by the time I have found the lantern (it works very discreetly and efficiently), taken off my uniform, tidied everything off the bed and got into the bed, it is 11.45 so I get to sleep about 11.50 and I lie in a deep slumber except when the cold gets through my blankets on the more stormy nights until six o’clock.