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This is one of the stories collected on the 25th October 2003 at the CSV's Make a Difference Day held at ´óÏó´«Ã½ Manchester. The story was typed and entered on to the site by a CSV volunteer with kind permission of Jim Dearden.

When the war broke out I was on my holidays in the Isle of Man with my parents, when we got home, the school I went to had closed down and moved out to Altrincham, so I had no option to finish my schooling, other than to be evacuated to Timperly. This seems strange really as it’s only down the road from here. It was at Altrincham Grammar School; the Grammar School children did mornings and we did afternoons, this was in the time of what they called ‘the phoney war’, from what I can remember I went back to my own school in about the Easter time of 1940. I then worked in engineering until about 1943 when I went into the Navy.
I served on a destroyer called HMS Wizard which was being built as part of a flotilla to go to the Far East war, but she had an accident with depth charges. We were paid off. Then I was join a landing ship tank and sent out to the war in the Far East. While we were going through the Mediterranean there was a mix up and we had a message to say that war in Europe ended, in fact it hadn’t but it was only a few more days until it officially was.
We then went out Bombay, the idea, as far as I know, was to invade Malaya. But while we were in Bombay they dropped the Atom Bomb, which was a tragedy and a disaster for lots of people, but from the point of view of people like myself, meant we didn’t have to go ahead with the planned invasion. While we were in the Far East, the landing ship tank that I was on paid off and I joined a mine sweeper, the idea was to clear the shipping lanes to resume normal shipping channels.
I came home in about 1946, so my naval experience was fairly short lived. I was lucky in the respect that the worst of the war at sea as over when I joined, but it strikes me as rather strange that I started the war as an evacuee and finished it in the Far East.
The dangerous part had ended, you could say I enjoyed it to a large degree, it was an interesting experience. I should have gone to sea after that but I never got round to it, on reflection I regret that I didn’t join the merchant service but my life took a different coarse.

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