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"This story was submitted to the site by the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s Peoples War Team in the East Midlands with Raymond Kemps permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions"

I joined the air force at the end of 1941. I couldn’t fly as my eyes weren’t up to scratch. In 1943 I worked as an air plane fitter and sent to India. It was the convoys that I can remember most — I think we were the last convoy to go past the Cape of Good Hope. Part of the convoy went to North Africa — we went all the way round, into Free Town, Cape Town eventually across the India Ocean into Bombay. It was quite something. The size of the convoy strikes me today — I think we had more escorts then we have in the entire navy now. We had a stormy time around the cape around September, we had seven days in Durban and I heard the white lady sing on the docks — a very famous white lady who used to sing to the troops — they treated us very well and we had 8 weeks in Bombay waiting for a posting — I was then posted to Lahore where I worked as a fitter on large scale maintenance. I was out there for 3 years and we came back in 1946. You can well imagine coming back was strange. You’d got used to the warm weather and the heat but when you came back into Liverpool it was dark, drizzling and very cold — it sort of felt like home.

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