大象传媒

I was in the Officers' Training Corps at school, but later I became a conscientious objector influenced by Dick Shepherd, the vicar of St Martin in the Fields. So I joined the Royal Army Medical Corps when war broke out.

At the beginning of 1944 I embarked aboard "Stirling Castle" at Liverpool.The ship was not in a convoy: we took a zigzag course in the Atlantic and as we approached the Straits of Gibraltar we were followed by a submarine, but sank or drove it off with depth charges. Training as a Boy Scout on "The Discovery" came in useful later when I heard tapping and recognized it as morse code, tracking it eventually to a R.A.F. officer who had accidentally been locked in the area where baggage was stored. He might have remained there for days, or had a terrible end if the ship had been sunk.

We disembarked at Port Said and went by train to Cairo, where we slept on the paved floor of the stables in a cavalry barracks before moving into the RAMC Base Depot. After a few days I was told to go to a flat together with several others. The door was opened by a Greek in civilian clothes who asked us in; then a charming woman took us into a room with comfortable armchairs, something I had not experienced since leaving home several weeks earlier. I was introduced to an officer in the uniform of the Royal Navy who explained that my name had been suggested for special duties but he could not tell me more except that it would mean going to Palestine for parachute training. I was so impressed by the way I was treated that I volunteered at once and was asked to report back the next morning. (I don't know why my name was put forward apart from the fact that I had been to the Continent three times before the war visiting Brussels, Paris and Berlin, which perhaps was not usual at that time.) We were told only what was really necessary about the work, but I did realize it was concerned with the medical needs of our men and women in enemy-occupied Balkan countries as far apart as Greece and Hungary and that it involved caiques, though I did not know what they were then.

After ten weeks experience in HQ, I went to the South of Italy with the U.S. Air Force. When a Liberty ship loaded with bombs was blown up by limpet mines in Bari harbour I was nearby and helped with the casualties: I still remember the girl whose face was terribly injured by a shattered plate-glass window.

Yugoslavia, like most of Europe, was occupied by the Germans. I flew there in a Dakota with the South African Air Force. As well as the pilot and co-pilot there were just a R.N. officer and me. Most of the aircraft was occupied by a Jeep trailer loaded with drums of petrol and there was a tense moment when an enemy plane was seen approaching, but it passed ahead of us without opening fire, presumably because the pilot assumed we were German, which was fortunate as being attacked with tracer bullets did not bear thinking about. On another occasion I set off, again with the S.A.A.F., to bring back a pilot with a fractured spine from Hungary. I carried a large amount of Hungarian currency, too much to put in my pockets; so I stuffed it inside the blouse of my battle-dress. Perhaps it was to pay for his care, but we never got there.

We did not talk about our work to anyone not directly concerned.
Rank did not count for much. As a corporal I shared a room and desk with a major at HQ SO(M). Although we wore uniform there were no badges. (In the 1st Armoured Division I had worn a badge with a white rhino on a black background)

Towards the end of the war in Europe I was sent to Arezzo; then Klagenfurt, where we were to occupy that part of Austria before the troops of the U.S.S.R. could. I was unaware of when the war ended, or celebrations. In fact there were not even any proper meals because we were moving so quickly. I opened my emergency ration which was like a bar of chocolate but too hard to bite. We took over an S.S. barracks as a hospital. I gained an S.S. officer's sword, an Iron Cross and a pair of skis in exchange for cigarettes. There were few patients and in the summer of 1946 I went back to Italy to study in Perugia before being released to the Territorial Army Reserve on 19 August, after over six years service. When I got home my son opened the door and called out "Mummy, there's a man at the door"! Later he became a Lieutenant Commander, R.N . I was finally discharged on 26 August 1953.

SOE was not heard of until long after the war although I had postal addresses such as Force 133, Force 266 and SO(M). In his book "The Special Operations Executive" M.R.D.Foot writes "One of the delights of SOE - and it had delights, to make up for the apprehension, the loneliness and the boredom - was that one was frequently one's own master, could do what one chose in the way that one chose to do it...." This suited me as I was never keen on regimentation. For me the delights were a few days in Naples and Rome, also a luxury hotel in the mountains overlooking L'Aquila; then there was the opportunity for unusual experiences: among mine were meeting the Pope in the Vatican, working with Tito's Partisans, going into the Great Pyramid in Egypt and also Etruscan tombs in Italy. Real beds with sheets were another luxury, when I was in hospital for nearly three weeks with malaria etc. The worst was not knowing what was happening to those left in England, even whether they were alive, injured or dead. (Early in the war shrapnel had entered my wife's bedroom through a window and penetrated the opposite wall. Towards the end the front door and windows of our house were blown in by a rocket and the ceiling collapsed on my grandmother, who was in her nineties, when a flying bomb came down near her home, but they were not injured, thank God.)

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