大象传媒

My father, known as Les Brown was born at a small village called Spaxton in Somerset he was one of six children. They were Mabel, Joan, Beatrice, Margaret, Dennis and finally Les, my dad. He was very good at mathematics but due to financial reasons further education was not an option. It may be due to this reason that he chose to join the army as a career. He joined the army at the age of 19 on 6th May 1931. He joined the Royal Army Service Corps in the Dorsetshire Regiment, his army number was 5724123. When joining he had to take examinations in English, army and empire, map reading and mathematics. These exams were held at Salisbury in Wessex.

My dad did a lot of service abroad, especially in Burma, India. Whilst driving accross the desert his regiment were attacked by the enemy and my father was hit by shrapnel. It caught him in the hip and caused much pain, however, he still had to drive back to the army base, which was a long journey. By the time he reached the base, his leg had swelled up to 3x its normal size and gangreen had set in but the injury was too high to have his leg amputated, he was in dire straights as there was no one available to operate on him. The base had a POW camp and a German doctor who was a prisoner of war offered to operate on my dad. He cut the shrapnel out and my dad was left with a very neat scar, the German doctor saved his life, my dad was left with only a slight limp.

So it was thanks to this German doctor, (I would love to find out his name) that the twinkle in my dads eye, became a reality when a few years later, he became dad to me.......

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