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When Tom reported to Normanton Barracks in July 1939 for six months conscripted training with the 1st Battalion Sherwood Foresters, he little realised that he would still be in uniform almost seven years later. War came within two months and he was off to France with the British Expeditionary Force, to be marched up and down from southern France to Belgium and back again with no apparent battle plan, in the confusion of which his commanding officer managed to get himself captured by the German army. Even the boat that evacuated them from Le Havre inexplicably put in at Brest and Cherbourg as if unsure where to go. Back in England at last, he must have been looking forward to a spell of relative peace and quiet in a Sheffield billet when hell returned by way of the Blitz. And the Lufwaffe even followed him on leave to Youlgrave where, as the firebombs rained down, he carried his grandmother from her Conksbury Lane bungalow to the comparative safety of his sister’s cellar at Church Corner. However, misfortune was not all bad news: when he was granted agricultural leave to help out on his sick father’s farm, he missed the draft that landed comrades Jim Ardern and Raymond Brassington in Burma and a Japanese prison camp respectively. However, an extra six months was tacked on to his ‘demob group’ to make up for the time on agricultural leave.

This story was donated by Norman Wilson and Andrew McCloy, and was submitted to the site by Alison Tebbutt, Derby CSV Action Desk. The author has given his permission and fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

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