大象传媒

I was born in 1935 and was therefore four and a half on the day after the War was declared. My father who was a regular soldier in the Indian Army was recalled and sailed for India from Liverpool on 3rd September, leaving myself with my mother and elder sister behind. At that time we lived in Farnborough, Hampshire, very close to the Royal Aircraft Establishment and opposite Star Hill which was I think an establishment of the Tank Corps.Because of fear of bombing (which in fact never happened, only one bomb and one V2 landing in the neighbourhood during the whole of the war) we moved to live near my grandmother in Penarth, Glamorgan. Subsequently Cardiff and the surrounding area was heavily bombed and we spent the night of my fifth birthday under the stairs, while Holy Trinity Church and a lot of the surrounding buildings were bombed. We were without water, gas and electricity for a while and I remember cooking being done on the open fire which had a back boiler. I remember being told how my mother battled home from Cardiff with a dolls cot for Christmas, through the air raids. I still have the cot.

In the summer of l941 we were told that we were able to join my father in India and had berths on a ship called the City of Simla, which sailed from Gurroch on 20th September 1941. This was one week after the City Of Benares, carrying a great number of children to Canada, was torpedoed with considerable loss of life. The day after sailing in convoy from Gurroch our ship was hit by torpedoes. Only two people, who had been sleeping near the point where the torpedoes hit, were killed, the rest of the passengers and crew were put into lifeboats. For some reason the lifeboat into which our family were placed was separated from all the others which were subsequently picked up by a Royal Navy vessel. Our boat was rescued by a Norweigan fishing trawler fed lovely fresh fried fish and hot sweet tea,and taken to Fleetwood .The City of Simla stood up with all its lights blazing, for 24 hours. I remember dropping my new doll over the side, also seeing the crew sliding down ropes to the lifeboats. As the attack had taken pla ce during the night, or early evening, we had nothing but our night clothes. I was carried down the ladder by a seaman and thrown towards the lifeboat, but unfortunately he missed and I landed in the water, to be fished out pretty quickly, no harm done. My sister was in charge of the Aldis lamp and signalled SOS, but it came out as OSO! When we landed in Fleetwood the WVS ladies provided us with clothes - and presumably food and shelter.My own green dressing gown survived for many years, but I was given a navy gym slip and a pair or frilly knickers, of which I was immensely proud.

We returned to my grandmother in Penarth. She was very excited at the return of my mother鈥檚 golf clubs, which had been left behind on the quay at Gurroch, as she was quite convinced that all our luggage would turn up too. Unfortunately this was not the case and it ispresumably still at the bottom of the Irish Sea. A few months later my mother was offered another passage, but felt she could not go through the whole business again and opted to stay in England. That ship made the passage successfully.

We spent the rest of the war in Southern England and did not get another chance to join my father until l946. We had got our tickets and had all our innoculations when Partition and all the riots started and we received a cable frrom my father telling us not to come. He had been home on leave for a brief spell after the end of the war but left the Army in 1947 bering too old and too senior to be included in the British Army.

During the war he had raised a battalion in Coorg in Southern India, with all Indian commissioned officers with the exception of himself and his second ion command, Hugh Wylie,( who subsequently took part in the successful expedition to Everest in 1953.)Several of the Indian officers in the battalion later achieved high rank in their army.

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