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After writing my story ‘The Boy and the Kitten’ a pen friend of mine who enjoys checking out any of the stories I tell him, sent me the following which needs to be read in conjunction with ‘The Boy and the Kitten’

EAST ANGLIA 1939

Along the East Coast, the war was a grim reality from the earliest days of September. A lot of shipping regularly used these coastal waters; on almost any day there were over three hundred small vessels of between 500 and 2,000 tons, and few of them had been fitted with weapons. The first victim, however, was a much larger vessel, the 8,641 tons Brocklebank merchantman Magdapur. On 10th September hundreds of holiday-makers watched her sink off the coast of Suffolk. They heard a loud explosion, which rocked the buildings around them, saw a column of water shoot into the air, and then watched her go down by the bow. The Aldeburgh lifeboat Abdy Beauclerk arrived to find the vessel's back broken, and returned, covered in oil and blood, with seventy survivors, eight on stretchers, and one crewman who had been killed. It was the first war service by any lifeboat in the British Isles, but after that all lifeboats along this coast were frequently called out.

Needless to say the Holiday Makers mentioned were in fact us evacuees on a day at the sea side.

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