大象传媒

I was in the Field Artillery, trained as a telephonist and radio operator at Sunnyvale (former holiday camp) in Rhyl. I was travelling to Bombay on the ship (ex-liner) Caernavon Castle, from Liverpool, we sailed out at the end of 1944 to crys of "Fall in facing the boat"! They took your kit bags on board but you had to carry everything else on. When we saw the chaps returning up the Suez Canal they shouted "Get your knees brown"!
We arrived in Bombay and the smell was horrible! Mostly of cooking. We got on an electric train to Deolali. All the chicos (children) ran up to the train to see what we might throw them - we gave them tinned food, or whatever we'd got. At Deolali - the charwallah would come round shouting 'charwallah' and poured a hot cup of tea from his tank, no milk, no sugar. He had a little brazier to heat it - a couple of annas. There were also other wallahs - dhobiwallah did the laundry. After a few weeks we set off across India on a steam train. We stopped several times for relief stops and made tea from engine water. Most railway people seemed to be Anglo-Indians. We never knew where we ended up - either the Ganges or Brahmaputra. We were flown onwards on US planes (possibly not a Dakota) to Burma about 40 miles south of Mandalay (near Kioxi).

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