L/Cpl. Douglas Paul Greening
British Army 1st Battalions Bedford and Hertfordshire Regiment
from:Leighton Buzzard
My Dad joined the Beds & Herts as a Boy Soldier in 1932; he was fifteen! After basic training he was sent to India for four years - he told us he was 4'10" tall when he left and 5'8" when he came home. In 1937 he lined the route for the coronation of King George V.
He remained in the UK until the outbreak of war and then mobilised with the BEF and then was evacuated from the beaches in Dunkirk. He lost the thumb on his left hand during the evacuation - dived into a ditch while he was being shelled and it was taken of by a piece of shrapnel - and left the army. He went to work at the local RAF station in Leighton Buzzard where he met Ruth who was to become my mum; I was born in Nov 1944 and have a younger brother, Pat and sister, Cath. When I went to school some of the other kids used to tell me 'You do your shoe-laces up funny!"; it wasn't until later years that I realised I had been taught by a man with only one thumb!
We loved my dad's stories of India. He played hokey, ran cross-country and boxed for the regiment. He told us one day that he came face to face with a leopard when he was out running and the leopard just padded off back into the bush. The 'boys' who were 'put on a charge' used to be given the strap; he told us on one of his first nights in the barracks one of the boys was being punished and crying 'me mother I want me mother' to which the 'enforcer' replied "It's no used crying for your mother she's four thousand miles away" and there was my fifteen year-old dad sobbing into his pillow. My dad was already in the boxing team when he was first 'put on a charge'. Lofty Shotbolt (I think that was his name) was the heavyweight champion and found out about this; he told the 'enforcer' "Touch Boy Greening and you are in trouble". When my dad went for his punishment in the room at the end of the barrack he was told to scram while the enforcer hit the table with his strap "I never shouted so loud" my dad told us.
My dad died of a sudden heart attack and died in 1994 aged 77. Until then he was as fit as a 'butcher's dog' and we thought he'd live to 100, but we'll never know how the war affected the boys. He was in the RAOB as an older man and with a photo of him in India, my dad is on the left; on the back is a note 'some of the boys' - still makes me cry.
