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Mine is an unheroic war. First of all they weren’t sure what to do with me. I had been to RADA in ’37 for eighteen months, (including ballet training), and I had done a few jobs as an actor in ’39 and ’40. I was against the war—basically a conscientious objector, but not a serious one, so I went along with it.

There were not many conscientious objectors. It was a serious thing and I went through the whole motions. I went up in front of a judge who was a complete idiot. He said ‘what would you do if a German was attacking your sister?’ and I said I would try to fight him off as I would anyone. He asked me what I thought of the war and I said ‘I think it is wrong to kill people, but with Hitler there’s no alternative’. He said he didn’t think I was a serious objector and ordered me to be called up. Once the court had said ‘no’ to me objecting, I had to go through the normal route—the alternative was being locked up. It may have been cowardice.

I had basic training in Aldershot. Once I was there, I got interested in it. I was fairly athletic, partly because of my ballet training, and from the age of twelve I had done gymnastics in my local village. The army gym instructors tried to get me to join but I didn’t want to. I was quite a good soldier. We had route marches and trained to fire guns, and I was good at it.

But after that they didn’t know what to do with me and I was sent off to strange outposts. They put me in an office where there wasn’t much to do. Luckily the London District Theatre Group found me—they sent a memo around looking for actors and theatrical people. The HQ was just off Park Lane. I was living at home, which was in Regent’s Park, with my wife. We had a poodle dog who I was very fond of. My wife was called Dido Whalley, and we met at the Players’ Theatre where I was playing the double bass. We were introduced and ended up working on a script together in a studio in Chelsea during the blitz.

For the main part I was in the London District Theatre Group, touring round the country. We did RC Sherriff's ‘Journey’s End’. I played the German prisoner because I spoke German. After an enjoyable tour of Scotland, we went down south at the time the troops were massing prior to D-day. At that point we were disbanded and I was given the choice to transfer to army radio or the army film unit, and I chose radio. We were trained by the ´óÏó´«Ã½. It comprised four units—one Canadian, three British. There were five or six trucks, one for the aerial studio, another was a library. At first we were training and testing above Kenwood. It seemed to work alright!

A couple of months after the invasion we started moving and were sent to Flushing in Holland, which had been liberated. We moved slowly from place to place pumping out home service programmes with people from ENSA (Entertainments National Service Association), where we could get them to join. This was a safe distance from the war, but I came close to the Ardennes conflict. All the traffic was coming the other way and we were told the Germans had broken out, and we were in retreat. The next day the trouble was over. I saw a crashed German aircraft smouldering with the pilot still inside. The local peasants had built up a fire around it, to make sure he was properly dead.

Then we moved up to Nordeney in the extreme north in the Baltic, which was the site of a large German transmitter. We took it over and it gave us a very much wider range for our broadcasts. Nearby was a paddock with an enormous number of racehorses, which the Germans had ‘liberated’. They needed riders and I could ride as my first wife’s family had a stable in Somerset, with two or three horses. I enjoyed having some exercise in my spare time. From there we went to Hamburg and the unit helped to start the British Forces Network.

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