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Cooking For The Royal Berk’s Wasn’t
Always Fun!
by
Sgt. Bertram King 14254119
Page 6
.....What
we did, we got the men up in the morning, gave them breakfast, and they picked
up their other set rations, then they went out to do their fighting. We joined them,
and then we had in the evening’s, what we call ‘Tiffin’,
plus the twelve o’clock Tiffin, if that was possible, because we’d
run the grub forward in the jeep’s and trailers, give them their meals,
get back and make an evening meal. They were given, bully beef stew at night,
and raisin muffins as well, made up with all sorts of stuff we had. When we
used to slaughter anything, we got the fat off that, render it down. It was
a lot of work, hard work.
When we used to cook the evening meal, nine times out of ten it was a bully
beef stew. Now what you did, you cooked your veg up, we got fresh veg if we
could, and that was done up and then the bread was cooked, and then you’d
put your corned beef into it, with some curry and your herbs and everything,
and your dumplings on the top, that could all be done in an open dixey, so
when you took it forward in dixey’s, on jeeps and trailers, it was not
without it’s hazards, we used to get shot up. We lost all the bloody
gravy quite a few times with the Jap’s who put bullets through the blinking
dixey’s, no end of times.
I always had the cooks dressed smart, and I was bloody asking for it, I put
a white apron on one day, to serve the breakfast up, and no sooner I’d
put my apron on, the bloody Jap O.P. saw me, so the next thing that was heard
coming in was the sound, buzzer, buzzer, buzzer, bonk. The shell landed about,
what, twelve foot in front of me, so I did a quick dash, I said to the bloke’s,
get down that bloody river a bit quick, so we all jumped down the river. The
next one came up, it went straight through the frying pan.
One of my cooks, Harris, ‘Happy’ Harris we called him. You can
visualise the scenario. The five cooks are there getting the breakfast ready
for headquarter company, eighty men, and they got it all done and their just
cooking the eggs off, and their putting them on the plate’s with us,
to go out to the blokes with their bacon, and whatever they got, we would try
and do them a British breakfast wherever we went.
.....Harris, said to me, Christ he said, there was a bloody great bang went
up, he’d got a bomb in his fire, he’d lit this bloody fire over
a mortar bomb that had been left about. So he got a shovel and put the bomb
on it and he ran like hell into the bloody jungle, and then ran back just as
it went up, he saved all them bloody blokes, and never even got a deco.
.....A three-inch mortar bomb, that’s about six-inches long and three-inches
round, at the bottom of it, is what you call the propellant charge, and when
that strikes the bottom of the mortar, it ignites, and propels it out of the
tube, and that’s what the bang was that he had heard, and of course he
had the bloody good sense to get rid of the bloody bomb as fast as he could,
and he had shot into the jungle with it, and I say it would have gone up within
about, you could say, ten-seconds, but it was always fraught with danger out
there.
The last officer I saw, post war, in Reading, was a chap called ‘xxxx
xxxx’, Captain xxxx, well he got wounded severely. He was in a jeep,
up in the front line there, he got shot where he sat, right in the jeep, and
the bullets went right through his body and the jeep itself, and he was flown
out after he’d been on a jeep-stretcher, and I never saw him again.
.....At the end of the war in Reading, on the River Kennet; low-and-behold
theirs big xxxx xxxx there strolling around. You know the machine-gun bullets
went right through his body, the jeep and everything, he was shot to pieces,
and he made it.
P 1 :: P
2 :: P 3 :: P
4 :: P 5 :: P
6 :: P 7
Sgt. Bertram King