At least once a week, Jeannie makes sure she has lunch with her 97 year-old father, the Hull poet Maurice Rutherford. I often accompany them and we usually go to his favourite restaurant at Minnis Bay, near his home in Westgate-on-Sea. However, yesterday was different because we went to Folkestone, a significant place for him, as this was where he disembarked when returning from Italy on leave during the The Second World War, prior to his final return and demob at Dover Castle some months later. Although we didn't know this until after we had been there ourselves.
She told him about our visit as they chatted during his regular 6.00 evening call and he suddenly said, "Oh, I think I disembarked there after I came back from Italy." This wasn't a holiday, of course, he had just spent most of 1944 and 1945 fighting his way up through Italy and this arrival on the troop ship was his penultimate homecoming.
Warlike activities notwithstanding, his time in Italy left him with an abiding love for the country and its musical language, but this time, he was on leave and on his way up to Hull where he would ultimately meet Olive, the love of his life and Jeannie's mum.
He doesn’t often reminisce about his army days but on this particular day I persuaded him to talk about his homecoming and his part in the Italian campaign, about which he has written a number of poems. He says, on reflection, that he had hoped that writing these poems would prove cathartic and purge his guilt about human behaviour. One poem I repeatedly return to is about Heinz Großmeyer, a dead German he encountered one day following an attack in the Po valley area. Although he wasn’t aware of it at the time, the operation in which he took part was codenamed Operation Olive, the name of his future bride. For some reason he tried unsuccessfully to pull off the German’s boots and removed Großmeyer's service book to learn the identity of his foe. The sudden realisation struck him that this was not his foe at all, it was just another young man that could just as easily have been himself, caught up in the tide of war, who had stopped a bullet long before his time was up.
All of forty years later he recalled the event in his poem Heinz Gropsmeyer, a couple of extracts of which I include here, the German surname misspelt because at the time he wasn't aware of the German letter ß:
"Almost forty years and your name still moves,shrapnel under the skin, on reflective days.You were not much older then than in the Wehrmachtphotograph above your name, twenty to my twenty-two.
...though you had not lain long enough to grow death's beard.
More the lad down someone's street than hated Hun or Boch
the jackboots made of you.
I tried to pull off the boots, not to easeyour stiff feet but perhaps to please mineor strip the camouflage from common fundamentals."
The reason I write this now is because after a good lunch at Marley's restaurant - an excellent place to eat if you’re ever in Folkestone, half way down (or up) the Old High Street - we made our way down towards the old station where the boat trains from France used to arrive. Over coffee in what was formerly the old signal box now restored to its former glory but transformed into a cosy cafe, I asked Maurice, or Gee (for Grandad) as we know him, about the circumstances under which he encountered Heinz Großmeyer. He then launched into a good half-hours worth of remembrances that I wish one of us had recorded, brought on perhaps by the location but maybe also because, although he may not like to, he can't help recalling the events himself and as we know, even at 97, loves a willing audience, of which he knows I am always one.
Maurice remembered arriving at Dover at the end of the war with certain items of contraband about his person, most notably an expensive Leica camera, obtained from a German prisoner, possibly for some cigarettes, he couldn't remember, although he did remember that you weren't supposed to bring back 'looted' goods. He writes of the boot incident in Heinz Gropsmeyer and explained to me that if discipline was lax in some regiments, many British soldiers would remove and wear items of German equipment such as boots and the rather coveted belts inscribed with "Gott mit uns", which also appears in the poem. As does the wounded German who lifted his head to show he was still alive so Maurice’s tank could drive round instead of over him:
"And what of your comrades, he of your own ageunable to rise from his roadside splint, liftingonly his head, inches from my advancing tank,lest the last bone of blood-let youth be crushed?"
And:
"The belt I later gave away with other spoils of warbut not your name, Heinz Gropsmeyer; it stayed on.I think of us now, there where you took your Abscheid,green grapes under the searing mezzogiorno sun;shrapnel shifting in a distant vineyard's tilth."
There are more stories, many of them enshrined in poems, some of which describe the utter boredom of army life at the end of the war, at a loose end in Italy waiting to go home. In ‘Interlude’, with faint echoes of Henry Reed’s “Naming of Parts”, a poem he likes and which I also remember from schooldays, he writes of soldiers…
“…assigned to mount guard
over a dump of coal
on the docks at Trieste
anything to “keep up morale”
Then:
Military procedures, duty orders
The signing of inventories
Give way to talk of prices,
going rates and market trends.
Hybrids flourish on the ashes of war:
Mercato nero, barter one currency
For twice its value in another;
Chocolate for a child’s birthday;
chastity for a perfumed bath;
cigarettes for a dying man with asthma
The sentry sings ad nauseum, in his box
a squaddie’s version of ‘Sorrento’
against the date of his demob.
The episodes he recounts sometimes seem to be tales of extraordinary luck, such as the time at the end of the war and still in uniform, he overstayed his leave by three days, having just met Olive up in Hull.
As he tells it, so that the army could keep track of soldiers returning to their regiments from leave, they were all given numbers that detailed how long they were allowed to spend with their families and loved ones and Maurice’s pass was now three days out of date. He managed to get to Victoria Station in London without incident but as he stood in the queue, waiting to get ticked off the list of returning soldiers, he was expecting to have some explaining to do to the RTO (Rail Transport Officer). Luckily, as it got to his turn, the RTO, who was very busy, noticed the three stripes on his arm and simply waved him on saying “All right sergeant, off you go.” He describes it in his poem “Epithalamium”:
I overstayed my leave then back
to barracks; a last few tedious months
and every day our letters,
each repeating a love
that neither knew the measure of.
There was also a story about the time he was convalescing in a military hospital in southern Italy following a bout of jaundice. Fully recovered but bored and frustrated with waiting in the transit camp to be transported back up to the front line to re-join his regiment, he and a mate decided to take off on their own initiative. They managed to get half way up Italy in one day, hitching rides in the back of army trucks, which was a feat in itself. Meanwhile, having absconded without permission, they were reported AWOL. Luckily, by the time the notification arrived at the camp, they had already been welcomed back and written up as present. Their independent action could have resulted in a charge and Gee now believes that what saved his bacon was that they were travelling in the direction of the action rather than away from it. As it was, the CO simply said; “No he’s not AWOL, he’s here.” And that was that.
He remembers being demobilised at Dover Castle and being given his ‘demob suit’ as well as other items of clothing such as a hat and a raincoat. All of this was packed in a brown cardboard box. Unsurprisingly, at that time, there was a thriving black market for all these goods due to wartime shortages and Gee remembers ‘spivs’ or ‘wide boys’ lurking outside the castle gates offering as much as £10 for the government’s largesse to returning servicemen.
Gee didn’t succumb and like many others, returned home in full uniform and boots. Many soldiers also managed to smuggle souvenirs of their war past the authorities, who as it turned out, weren’t that vigilant in any case. Gee’s only extravagance in that direction, having rid himself of his ‘Gott mit Uns’ belt, was his Leica camera that he later had valued and discovered it was a very expensive piece of equipment, costing around £95, which in those days was a lot of money. His demob also gets a mention in “Epithalamium”:
Late summer and I came home
to stay, to shake out a future
from the given cardboard box –
gabardine, double-breasted
grey pinstripe suit and all.
Reflecting on what was a very enjoyable day in Folkestone, it occurred to me that there was something symbolic in visiting the disembarkation site. Back then, arriving on a train full of returning troops it represented the end of one life-phase; that of growing up while going to war, then the journey home and the start of a new life with Jeannie’s mum in Hull.
Now, 64 years later, it could be interpreted both as a reconnection with a point of departure and also as a homecoming, the wheel having turned full-circle on Platform 2 of Folkestone Old Station. I don’t know for certain, but I’m sure many thoughts were going through his head as he took photographs along the platform, which may or may not result in a series of haikus, which is what he mostly writes these days. Maybe the next time we talk, this will come up during the conversation.
This was originally written in August 2019. Maurice is now 102 and two years ago was awarded an honorary doctorate from Hull University.
