大象传媒

St the time of D-Day in June 1944, I was not far off my 17th birthday and nearing the end of a "gap year" working in a medical laboratory before going to university. This was in my native city of Leeds, where we knew virtually nothing of what was going on in the South until some time after D-Day. The blood transfusion service was in the same building in which I was working and there was soon much activity taking van-loads of glass bottles of blood to the local aerodrome (now Leeds and Bradford Airport) to be flown direct to France. The planes must have brought-back wounded soldiers (including German prisoners) because I occasionally had to go on the wards of the adjacent hospital to collect specimens or deliver reports and one day I was amazed to see a young German prisoner in a bed being guarded by a rather scruffy British soldier sitting on a chair with his rifle between his knees. Until then the war had been a long way from the North of England and here was a German in our midst!

When I went to Leeds University in September 1944 one was obliged to join the Army Cadet Corps, which was a unit of the Home Guard, and what seems incredible now, I actually kept a .303 Lee Enfield rifle in my bedroom at home! Studying pure science (unlike agriculture or engineering) did not reserve one from military service and at the age of 18 I became liable to call-up. My call-up papers into the army came at Christmas 1945 during my second year at university.

I belonged to the forgotten group that served after the war had ended, but before National Service began in 1947. To put myself in a wider group - I got my first gas mask at the age of 11 in 1938, had my schooling disrupted by evacuation during the war, and was not "demobbed" (demobilised) from the army until the spring of 1948. My excellent experience in the army is another story, but it did mean that I lost four years (with pension rights) from my career since it was autumn 1948 before I could return to university and I had to repeat the first year, finally graduating in 1951.

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