- Contributed byÌý
- audlemhistory
- Location of story:Ìý
- Western Desert and Liverpool
- Background to story:Ìý
- Army
- Article ID:Ìý
- A5815343
- Contributed on:Ìý
- 19 September 2005
WARTIME MEMORIES—WAR AND LOVE
My family was from Cheshire but moved to Liverpool for work reasons and I was born there in 1919 and spent my early years in the Broad Green District of the City going to the same school as Ken Dodd. I joined the 3rd GHQ Signals Corps in Cairo and was sent to the Western Desert in 1940. I was having difficulty with the large differences between daytime and night time temperatures. We were issued with woollens but they irritated my skin so I wrote to my mother to ask if she could knit a khaki long sleeved pullover. Some six months later she replied that a young lady was making it for me and that I should receive it soon. It arrived and was a perfect fit and I wrote and thanked Alma, the girl who made it, very much and I received another letter from her. This started correspondence between us that continued for some time and developed into romance and we decided to get engaged. On the day we got engaged in 1941 I had just made it into Tobruk and an hour later the Germans closed the exit route. It was a very difficult time and none of us knew if we would get out because of the very heavy bombing and machine gun fire.
It was on the 23rd October 1942 that the Battle of El Alamain commenced and I was there from the start. I did not return home until May 1945 and it was then Alma and I met each other for the first time — she was even nicer than her letters that had provided me with wonderful support and love during those long wartime years! Three years later on the 23rd October 1948 we were married in Liverpool and so I have very different but special memories of those two 23rd of October days.
We have had a very happy and enjoyable fifty-six and a half years together, ups and downs like everyone but we have always shared the good and bad times . I have thought throughout my life the way we met and the happiness we have enjoyed in each other’s company for nearly sixty years, that our meeting must have been planned by someone on high above!
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