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My first experience of evacuation was going to Northallerton in 1939, and after a week I wrote a letter to my mother saying ‘send me my train fare home or I will walk’.

I went to Bede’s School in Sunderland, but only for half days. Heard about the overseas evacuations while there and decided that I would like to try to go to South Africa. We went in August 1940 from Liverpool, on board the Llanstephan Castle, when I was 13 ½ years old. We stopped at Freetown, in Sierra Leone, and went on from there to Cape Town.

We stayed in a Jewish orphanage — I don’t know why — in Cape Town, because there had been some illness on-board and we were quarantined. We stayed there until November 1940, and then moved to Johannesburg, which is about 1,000 from Cape Town. It took us two days on the train.

I then met the people who were going to look after me — their name was Seale. We went to stay in Kensington, Johannesburg. They apparently chose me because my name was Stanley and they had lost a son named Stanley in 1938. He was supposed to have been a player for the Springboks and had been on a train for Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He had eaten some meat on the train, which had stuck, in his throat and he contracted peritonitis. This was as a result of when he was young, they had lived in a little village called Bethal where there was no electricity and he drank some caustic soda (which they used to clean old lamps). He recovered from this, but it left his gullet weak and the meat, which stuck, caused the peritonitis, which killed him.

His father was very hard — they brought their son’s body home from Johannesburg to Bethal and he found this difficult, as it was a long trip.

By the time I went to stay with them, they had had a general motors business in Bethal, he had sold the garage and bought a mine dump — like a pit heap — and he worked this with a stamping machine. He would get about 30 ounces of gold per month, which was worth about £240 and this was quite a lot at the time.

I went to Jappe High School in Kensington, where I picked up Afrikaans during lessons — although the other children had started to learn when they were 6 years old.

I stayed in South Africa for 5 ½ years. I went to Park Town High School after the family moved to a 20-acre pig farm near Johannesburg — in Bryanston.

In 1942, I came home from school and the British High Commissioner wanted to speak to me. He told me that my father was in Durban, as he was in the Army. Mr and Mrs Seale would take me down in their car to meet him, and we got two punctures on the way during the night and couldn’t get hem repaired — so I went on the train to Durban on my own. I met my father on the Saturday night in Durban. He was stationed at Kingsmead Cricket Ground, and we stayed with a Jewish family. My father was in Durban for about ten days, and I became very homesick after seeing him — but I recovered!

I went back to school and matriculated in 1944 when I decided to join the Air Force. I wanted to be an observer, and my chief navigation instructor was Sandy Greig, the father of Tony Greig. I passed out as a navigator in 1945, and was then stationed at Petersburg where I did 5 trips to the Middle East to bring back South African troops. It was quite a trip at 19 hours long.

When the war finished, I had to be demobbed, as I had to leave South Africa and return to England. I left in December 1945, and came back to Sunderland. I have never been back to South Africa since I came home in 1945, although I would like to.

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