大象传媒

Edward and I met in 1940, more or less watching a cricked match, having just left Brighton Grammar School and I was helping a friend with a Nursery School.

The young awaiting "call up," as we were, were expected to keep busy. Ted, three evenings in The Home Guard and I did two evenings in the Girls Training Corps, so time together was limited.

Despite this we became engaged in 1940 when Ted joined the Royal Sussex and was sent to Scotland. Then to a signals course in Meeanee barracks in Colchester and after that to Officer training and was commissioned into the Royal Artillery.

I was teaching at a Boys Prep School which was evacuated to Lindfield.

Our wedding was to be at the end of March 1944 but Ted's leave was brought forward (because of D day, unknown to us) and our Wedding Day was the 14th March 1944, with Ted having to rush to the Bishop of Chichester because we were both under 21 and the banns hadn't been called.

Ted left after ten days for an unknown destination, which proved to be Kenya, East Africa, where he spent eighteen months teaching African troops to fire twenty-five pounders and drive trucks. (After he himself had learnt Swahili).

He then took one hundred of his East African troops to Ceylon (the ocean a mystery to them) for jungle training there. Ten days were spent on a train, northwards through India to the Burma border ready to engage with the Japanese in August 1946 (sic).

The atomic bomb was dropped on my husbands 23rd birthday.

During these years at home in Sussex there were V1 and V2's. Our pupils at prep school had both measles and whooping cough and spent nights brought down from their dormitories to sleep on mats on the floor for safety. Daytime classes were upstairs and one day I saw a V2 coming towards us and we dived under our classroom table.

My husband then had a lucky break. Some younger men were allowed a month in UK. Names out of a hat and Ted drew one. He arrived home for our second wedding anniversary in March 1946, very late one night. Seeing me in daylight the following morning he asked what had happened to my face. I had mumps! Ted did not catch it!

Ted did not return to India as he expected to do. He was sent to Dorset to train Dutch troops until de-mob in 1947, in time for the birth of our elder son.

Now after 61 years of a very happy married life, we enjoy family, our two sons and a daughter, and now we have five grandsons, aged 11, 10, 9, 6 and 2 to keep us up to date.

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