Rebecca Brown's Interview with
Pauline Hayton
Author of
A Corporal's War:
World War II Adventures of a Royal Engineer.

Rebecca:
Being a war baby & listening to so many war stories as child, then hearing my older brothers' tales of their National Service in an era when girls were not yet allowed to serve, I am always interested in the ordinary soldier's stories. Your father's, Norman Wickman, stretched from the Phoney War of 1939, to the rout of the British Expeditionary Forces in France & the rescue at Dunkirk, to setting sail in 1940 for the Far East, around the Cape of Good Hope to Durban & on to Bombay, India, across that subcontinent into the jungles of Burma until the end in 1945.

So Pauline my first question must be: Had you always wanted to write? How did you gather your father's war stories?

Pauline:
I never had dreams of being a writer. I seem to have fallen into it by accident. I started by wanting to write down the family's stories for my sister's grandchildren, who are growing up in Australia with her, & also my grandchildren who were going to immigrate to Florida to live near me.

I didn't want the stories to be lost. So I started talking to my parents about their lives. Then my father started telling me his war stories. I found them so fascinating I put the memoir to one side & focused on his adventures. I thought it would be good for the grandchildren to know that their doddery, old grandfather was once young, dashing, & adventurous. It was only going to be a small project for the family. But when I realized I could flesh out his tales with information from official records, the project grew & grew & seemed to take on a life of its own.

Every time I went to visit the family in England, which was once a year, I'd take my tape recorder & sit down with my parents & ask them to tell me about the war while I also scribbled notes. Before flying back to America, I'd spend three days in London to research the archives at the Public Records Office & the Imperial War Museum. This allowed me to put my dad's stories in the correct chronological order & fit them into the larger scheme of things, as well as adding details of, for example, the name of a person or place he could not remember, or the date of an earthquake. It was a thrill to see his name written in the records even if it was only for being in hospital with dysentery.

Rebecca:
You wrote in your press release: “People often say that nothing good ever comes from war ... [I] believe ... that war can offer opportunities for an enormous amount of personal growth and unity.” Could your father tell us a little of what he learnt during his seven years as a Sapper in wartime?

Pauline:
My dad says he learned how to drive & dodge German bullets. More seriously, he learned that there is a time to hate, & he certainly hated the enemy he was fighting, & there's a time to let go of the hate & start to heal. He carries no animosity towards either Germans or Japanese.

Rebecca:
You decided this biography would contain photos & maps of your father's journeys as a Sapper in the 62 (Chemical Warfare) Company. Some must have been in your parents' possession, how did you obtain the others?

Pauline:
My father lost his camera at Dunkirk, so I had to go to the Imperial War Museum's archives for photos of Dunkirk. I also found other photos that would illustrate some of his experiences in India & Burma. All but one of the photographs of the Bombay explosion came from the American National Archives Administration, Maryland.

There's quite a story to tell of the Bombay explosion. When my dad told me of his involvement in that event, I was having difficulty finding any official information about it. When my pest control guy, Mike, came to the house, he saw the papers all over my table & asked what I was doing. I told him about my book & about my father being in Bombay. Mike said, “I read an interesting book about something that happened in Bombay during WWII.” & I replied, “It was the Bombay explosion, wasn't it?” Mike was dumbfounded because when he had talked to people about this event nobody had ever heard of it. I was amazed because someone had written a book about it, so the information had to be available. Mike had another surprise for me. He still had the book, which was published in 1960, in a box in his garage, & I was able to use the information it contained for background to my father's story.

Rebecca:
The name Dunkirk reverberates with failure & yet, this is perhaps the turning point in your father's military career. In what ways did this disaster change your father's perception of war?

Pauline:
There was no real change in his perception of war. He knew it wasn't glamorous. He trusted his army training about how to behave & look after himself in danger. His biggest perception was that he was a lucky man, & he felt someone was looking after him all through the war.

Rebecca:
It sure seemed that way! & then your father arrived in India when the people there were determined to gain independence from the British Empire, & had put it aside to fight against Japan. How were the British servicemen treated at that time? What, about that storied land, did your father love the most?

Pauline:
Many British servicemen looked down on the Indian people & were rude to them, but my dad has never had a superiority complex. He found if he talked with Indians as equals, they were friendly & respectful in return & he learned a lot about their lives. There were a few Indians who were hostile & rude to the soldiers because they wanted independence, but they were in the minority. My father loved the heat, but not the monsoon; he loved the friendly people, & he enjoyed bargaining in the bazaars, plus seeing all the strange, elaborate ceremonies & processions that were always taking place.

Rebecca:
Burma, now known as Myanmar, must have been a strange mixture of paradise & hell for a young man born & raised in the soot-begrimed industrial heartland of England. What does he remember as the most difficult & delicious things about that fabled land?

Pauline:
Burma was a completely different experience for my father compared to India. In India he remained in one place for two years building airfields & roads, but in Burma they spent only a few weeks marching from one place to another in terrible mud, rain & boiling heat, searching for enemy soldiers. He found nothing delicious in Burma. However, he was impressed by the Ledo road, which he drove along into Burma. It was a great feat of engineering in that hostile climate & terrain.

Rebecca:
After so many years away in climates & cultures so unlike England's, how did your father adjust to post-War civvy life?

Pauline:
My dad says he adjusted to civvy life like a duck takes to water. He wanted work & he found it, although it irked him to have a young man in one company who had seen no fighting, looking down his nose at returning soldiers & saying he might be able to find a brush & shovel for the job seekers. My dad wanted to throttle him. Also, it was hard for him to buy cigarettes from the corner shop as the shopkeeper tended to put the cigarettes away for men who had been regular customers all through the war years because they had not been away fighting for King & country. He didn't like these injustices.

Rebecca:
In this time of war, what would you say to the children of Veterans, about gathering their stories & publishing them? What did you learn that you hadn't already known?

Pauline:
I already knew my dad was special, but I became more proud of him as I realized he was really an unassuming hero. He says he was just doing what the army told him to do. As I wrote the book I've also grown to love India & its people, having seen it through his eyes. I've not yet been there, but I have promised myself to make the same train journey into Assam that he made, to explore the areas where he lived & to see if Dinjan airfield is still there.

To the children of Veterans I would say talk to your parents, learn how their experiences shaped them, learn to see the world through their eyes. Some of the stories will be amazing, others will be more modest, but all are important in capturing the flavor of the times from the experiences of clerks in the army to hardened battleground soldiers. As for the WWII Vets, if their stories are not captured now they will be lost. It's not necessary to publish them, but I believe they should all be placed on record in the custody of a museum. When I was researching, it was the personal stories that really gave me a feel for events & situations, much more than most official records, (although some rare officers did keep colourful, descriptive records.) Also personal stories can reveal a huge rift between official versions of situations & actual experiences on the ground.

Rebecca:
Thank you, Pauline, for all the effort it took to get your father's years of service & his exciting adventures into print. Is there anything else you'd like to say?

Pauline:
I had a wonderful, stimulating time writing A Corporal's War. I only decided to publish the book because I thought other people would find his stories captivating too. Even if I never sold one copy of the book, it would all have been worth it. As it is, I have just finished the first draft of my second book, Naga Queen, about the war time experiences of a remarkable woman I discovered during my research, & I have ideas for several more books in the Burma/India theatre of war. Wanting to tell my dad's story has set me on a whole new, exciting & fulfilling path.

Rebecca:
Do catch my review of Pauline Hayton's biography A Corporal's War: World War II Adventures of a Royal Engineer, I hope it entices you to go out & get yourself a copy. Rebecca Brown
Published DATE