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My brother and I were orphaned a year before WWII began in 1939. We therefore had no constraint placed on us by alarmed parents when we both joined the armed services immediately. My brother at 14yrs. joined the Royal Navy as a ‘boy’ seaman and after a short period of training found himself aboard a series of British Battleships. I remember that in the D-Day landings he was on HMS Revenge which took a German bomb penetrating and exiting the overhand of the foredeck. Before that was in Alexandria harbour on duty when Italian submarine men sank the two battleships there. He served the full term of the war in the Royal Navy.
I too joined the Army in 1939 at age 16 and had to pencil in my moustache before I could convince the recruiting officers that I was 22yrs. My unit was the Natal Mounted Rifles, one of the oldest regiments in the land but I had been a Cadet in my years at school armed with Boer War carbines. The Natal Mounted Rifles had turned out to quell the Zulu rebellion in 1879 and had participated in WWI against German forces in Namibia and East Africa. Within a year our regiment reached Northern Kenya to fight Italian invaders and fought asinfantry in Egype and Libya and finally in Sheram tanks in Italy.

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