Sadly, my father Dennis Gutteridge was no different to many others who found they couldn't talk about what happened to them during the war with those who hadn't gone through the experience. And now I have useful questions to ask, he's long gone.
I have some notebooks and various other memories of what he told me - enough to piece together a rough outline of his wartime story:
He enlisted at Kidmore End into 4th OBLI on 24th April 1939, just 6 days after his 24th birthday and his engagement to my mother, who also shared the same birth date (she was 18). They married in November 1939, and in January 1940 he was sent to France. He served as batman to a Lieutenant 'Whinney' (?sp) in Belgium and was notorious for riding his bicycle everywhere even on route marches. After a brief sojourn back in UK, he returned to France and took part in the rearguard action to hinder the German advance on Dunkirk - one of the forgotten army which was sacrificed. As a member of B commpany he defended Cassel, and retreated through the woods at Watou (Wateau St Jean), where the Germans encircled them and took them prisoner on May 30th 1940. He was lucky not to have been captured by one of the units/commanders who massacred British POWS after surrender/capture, and was transported to Lamsdorf, where he arrived on June 25th 1940 - so this journey took a month!
He never spoke about this part of the war, and the next I know was he was assigned to a work camp - E114, in a stone quarry.
Not unusually, his notesbooks are not a chronicle of how hard conditions were, but a collection of stories, songs, jokes, poems, articles, thoughts, comments, memoirs of pre-war days, and a list of POWs in camp E114. He demonstrated a trenchant wit which got him in a bit of hot water with his fellow POWs from time to time, and at every turn you can see his wry humour. There is one rather sad story about his early life, and another regaling the reader with his encounters as a young man with women.
The final story is his description of being on a German farm in Bavaria and his thoughts and comments about the life of the small German farmer.
He left Germany for home in 1945 and that is all he says.....whether he took part on one of the Death or Long Marches I can only guess, but as he was in Bavaria, he must have. Not a word did he write about this.
The only stories I can remember from when I was a child is how he was hiding in a wood and the Germans were calling to the British soldiers in English, to give themselves up. Fellow POWs who I know he kept in touch with after the war were 2 sappers serving in the Royal Engineers: Douglas (Duggie) Lawrence, and Rupert Sugden, who kept an offlicence after the war in Henley on Thames and was married to Molly Sugden the TV actress.
