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I was six when war was declared and I was living in Egypt at the time. I was living with my parents and my father was in the Army and was working in Iraq and deserts of that area. Just after war was declared we were evacuated from Egypt to Palestine and we lived in a convent. We travelled with virtually a suitcase, everything else having been left behind. We had just clothes, no toys, and it was just my mother and I. We lived in a huge dormitory with twenty other families. I remember we had a bed and a space but that was it. We had to wait there until a ship became available to take us somewhere else.

At that time there were soldiers from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa coming over to the deserts. Once all the troops were disembarked the empty ships then took the families back to their original countries — Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. It was the luck of the draw where you ended up. It all depended on where the ship was going. I went to South Africa where I spent the rest of the war. Our real contact with the UK was with the soldiers passing through Cape Town and Durban on their way to the Japanese war. As you can imagine there was no hardship in South Africa. Once a week we had to eat fish or whale blubber as part of the war effort, but apart from the presence of the soldiers passing through we had very little effect from the war. I think our greatest excitement was the surrender of a German submarine, which appeared off the harbour in Durban and was escorted into the harbour where it spent most of the war.

On the declaration of peace in the UK, we were shipped home in 1945 to meet my father who I had not seen since 1939. My father was captured and ended up in a prisoner of war camp and he was released by the Americans in 1945. The camp was on the Polish border in a place called Braunchweg. My father went to Egypt just after I was born and we joined him in 1938 when I was about five. I had just begun school when I was taken out to go to Egypt.

I was aware that the war was going on as me and my South African friends could see the soldiers in local harbours stopping for a break from travelling. For entertainment I swam and can remember all the creepy crawlies in my bathroom in South Africa. I also used to try and hit the sharks with stones when they were coming in to the bay. I also used to go up country to my mother’s friend to go canoeing where I remember seeing water lizards four feet long. I never went swimming there. My friends and I used to come home from school and put on old clothes and go down to the beach where we used to spend the day swimming. My everlasting memory of school was the morning assembly because my head master used to line up the naughty boys who used to get the cane in front of the whole school. You used to get the cane if you did not do well in the weekly tests. Cricket and rugby were taught at school and were very popular in South Africa. I was a bit upset to leave South Africa, as it had been sunny and funny. In England my accent was not accepted so I used to get ribbed in the playground. After leaving school I joined the Army, following in my father’s footsteps and I travelled the world. In the 1950s my desk turned up at home after having been put in storage in Egypt.

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