Nellie Carbis Looks Back

In 1978, a book called "Nellie Carbis looks back - Recollections of a childhood spent in Newton-le-Willows." Chapter 12 was called "The Great War".

I was at my Grandfather's in the beginning of August 1914. I was ten then, and not inclined to bother my head about the news, which of course was only available through the papers. So when my mother arrived without notice, to take me home, I was bewildered. I felt sure that the grown-ups were talking about 'war' but I didn't like to ask about this because I thought that wars happened only in history books. But when we arrived home I found that it was true enough. It meant the end of my mother's hopes of better times. She was just beginning to feel a little easing of the financial strain. Tom had finished his apprenticeship as a printer and had gone off to a job in Cardiff. She didn't expect any money from him, but it was one mouth less to feed. Ben was coming 'out of his time' at the Vulcan Foundry and would be entitled to an Engine Erector's wage. But Ben and Tom were both Territorials in the Prince of Wales' Volunteers and had received their calling-up summons. Tom came up from Cardiff on an overnight fish-train, to make sure that he and Ben would be together. Most of the lads of the village were called up with them. We all went to Warrington to see them march off to the railway station, keeping up with them on the pavement as the band played, 'God Bless the Prince of Wales'. We tried not to break down and cry until we had waved the train out of sight, but that was the first break in our little circle. We missed them terribly.

They were sent to Dunfermline for the first few weeks, and I have a photograph of Ben taken there -a fresh complexioned fair lad, full of fun -so different from the silent, introspective man who came back from the horrors of war. We were lucky to get that photograph -the man who took it was arrested a week later. Everyone had spy mania then, and it was rumoured that he was signalling from the skylight of his studio to German fishing boats in the Firth of Forth. At home the shop-windows of the local pork-butcher were stoned -the 'logic' of this being that pork-butchers were probably Germans and therefore pork-butchers were spies.

Every morning we ran to meet the postman, hoping for a letter from the lads. My mother kept all these letters and I have recently handed them over to the County Record Office. They begin with enthusiastic descriptions of training sessions. By October 9th they were in Tunbridge Wells, where a party of mothers went down to visit them. The local schoolmaster, Mr. Gee, made arrangements for the visit, and Mother did what no previous emergency had been able to induce her to do -borrowed the money from Great Uncle Frost and repaid it by instalments. Their next letter came from Appledore, five miles from Dungeness, where they were digging trenches to fortify the coast. Ben said that the trenches ran along the side of a canal that had been dug out to impede the progress of Napoleon's expected invasion. What seemed to impress Ben most was that he was billeted with the churchwarden and his wife and had a lovely feather bed with a spring mattress!

Next door there was a little company of eleven Belgian refugees, whose sad stories reduced my tender-hearted brother to tears. Later letters from Flanders describe the first of the winter snow and rain and the first casualties among their own friends. My two brothers had made an allotment of sixpence a day from their pay to my mother, but this and much more went into the supply of parcels of food and sweets and cigarettes that meant so much to the lads as reminders of home.

All the neighbours helped to provide something to fill the corners, and Ben describes how they shared out whatever arrived -'20 of us up in the attic of the house covered with straw, and biscuit tins, and rags of all sorts kicking about (and running about also). We get all sorts of places for billets and therefore meet many strangers who immediately became bosom friends.' There are frequent references to this problem of lice. When Ben came home on leave he had to go through the compulsory de-lousing at the Base Camp, but in spite of that, my mother rolled up his clothes and put them in the fireside oven while we sat round and listened to the 'popping' as the lice exploded.

As the summer of 1915 came on, the letters told of the fight against disease and the awful stench of dead horses and cattle and human victims. Cavalry were still being used. The gun carriages were drawn by horses and Ben could never accustom himself to the shrieks of wounded horses. He experienced the first gas attacks and Zeppelin raid. And still the stream of civilian refugees poured past, 'making away with whatever they can carry, some wheeling all sorts of vehicles and prams and barrows with screaming children in -the women falling in dead faints. Last night a family slept outside our billet against the stable and the poor little things couldn't speak for cold and refused our food when we offered it them'.

One letter tells of the thrill of visiting the Bengal Lancers, billeted in a nearby field. 'One of a group who were squatting down among their lances and harness and horses motioned to me and said "Come, sahib, and sit down". So I went and it did seem a dream sat down with all the dark faces around you. Sergts. and Sergt. Majors and a Lieut. were all squat together round a tin of jam and a tin lid full of something like Christmas pudding and a lid full of figs. I had to dine with them -we just dipped our fingers in it and licked them, they were delighted and said "You are our brother".' He visited them several times until they were moved forward to Ypres.

By May 5th, 1915, Hill 60 was lost. 'Even while I write this the guns are belching out shells upon it and shake the box I'm writing on. It is a beautiful morning, and what with the sound of the larks and the call of the cuckoo, which are heard between the report of the guns, it is like seeing two, and living in, two worlds. The lovely blossoms and wild flowers -and yet at night there is the smell of decaying flesh that through the day has been charred by the heat of the sun.' 'Each night I have come out to say my prayers -I see a lovely black cat pass me by and it still keeps to the place -I only hope it. brings us luck.' We in our turn prayed for their safety. In churches on Sunday night the last hymn was always 'For Absent Friends' and I cannot sing it now without tears filling my eyes:

Holy Father, in Thy mercy
Hear our anxious prayer
Keep our loved ones, now far distant
'Neath Thy care.

I was still at St. Peter's School and on an afternoon in May, 1915, I was called to the Headmaster's desk and he broke the news to me that Tom had been wounded in action. I couldn't take it in at first, and it was not until half an hour later that I put my head down and sobbed bitterly. Ben wrote and told us how he heard the news over the trench telephone -he was a Signaller -and was allowed to go to the dressing station where Tom lay, a strip of copper-banding from a shell embedded in the side of his thigh. He was given morphia and had dropped off into a doze when an officer of the H.A.C. stepping over the stretcher to look at the photographs of some actresses on the wall, lost his balance and sat down heavily on Tom's leg. Probably that aggravated the injury and the nerve of the leg was severed. Tom rejected all attempts to persuade him to have the leg off and he spent the rest of the war in progress from one hospital to another. However, at 85 he still has two legs.

Ben was desolate at parting with him -he wrote -'Dear Mother, I didn't know how I loved him till then. He was my best pal out here and every chance I got, I was with him.'

In Tom's pocket was a letter from our Aunt at Cardiff, so Tom was put on a hospital train and found himself in bed in an emergency hospital housed in a secondary school in Roath -only a few hundred yards from my aunt's house, from which he had set out to join up with Ben. The news soon spread round the neighbourhood and he had plenty of friends to visit him.

Ben's letters continued to tell of gas attacks and the loss of many of his friends and of the little Belgian children, 'playing in their childish way quite unconscious of the cruel bombardment of their homes from the unseen German guns, who take a delight in shelling homesteads and innocent little children'.

I was always pleased when Ben mentioned me by name, and in September 1915 he says, 'My word, wouldn't our Nellie bustle round at home before she set off with Ma for the Grammar School. I hope she is quite settled there and will like her schooling,' and characteristically, he goes on to speculate on how my mother found the money to provide for my school uniform.

In March 1916 Ben came home, time expired. He had a nasty crop of boils and looked thin and worn, but as soon as he could make arrangements went back to his old job at the Vulcan Foundry. Fred, who had tried to enlist at intervals from the time he was fifteen, finally managed to get into the Manchester Regiment in time to see the end of the war and to serve in Cologne in the Army of Occupation. At home my mother had had to cope with shortages of all commodities in turn. I had done my share of queuing at the Maypole where in spite of rationing, supplies often ran out before we were served.

We all took on various bits of 'war work'. A part of the Winwick Mental Hospital was turned into a Military Hospital. To relieve the boredom of convalescence a weekly moving picture show was provided in the ballroom. It was of course a silent performance and one of the Girl Guide Officers volunteered to play a piano accompaniment during the showing. It meant a three mile walk each way through the dark lanes in all weathers and my sister Clara was taken along for company. Great-uncle Frost used to invite groups of soldiers to tea. One of them, who was recovering from blindness caused by a gas-attack, met my sister Clara who at that time was working with Uncle in the Estate Office, and he eventually became my brother-in-law.

As the war dragged on, more and more of the houses in the village displayed little red paper stickers in the fanlight. These were in the form of a shield and bore the words, 'This House has Sent a Soldier.' Some houses had four or five of these and sooner or later one or more would have a black band across it. In the Spring of 1918 when our position was desperate, older men had to go. Barney Frost was called up and was stationed at Tenby. There he met a beautiful Carmarthenshire girl. On his first leave from France they were married and he brought her up to Newton-le-Willows and left her with his father and sisters. The dreadful 'flu epidemic was raging and somewhere Maud had picked up a germ. Three weeks after her wedding she was dead. Augusta, who nursed her, caught it from her and she died a week later.

There were no more rowdy sessions round the piano with Barney when he came home from the war. The world in which we had grown up had come to an end, and there was no going back. There had been poverty before 1914 but everyone seemed to have a place somewhere in the social order. When the war was over and the survivors came back they had to face a society that didn't seem to want to know them any more.

Fred had been unsettled by his war service in Germany, where conquered and conquerors alike were desperately short of food especially in the bitter winter months. When he came home he didn't want to go back to finish his apprenticeship in engineering at the Vulcan Foundry. Instead he made applications to various police-forces and was finally accepted for the A Division of the Manchester City Police, where he served for twenty-seven years. Now, a widower seventy-seven years old, he lives with me, together with his black cat, Susannah.