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During the war I was living in Barnes near Richmond and I was working for an Insurance Company and I was evacuated to Derby, I didn’t like it, my mother wasn’t there and so I came back. I had to either go into the forces or into a war department do so I applied for the Ministry of Shipping which is in Berkley Square. And I got the job. I was working with Civil Servants and the Baltic Exchange people. One of my jobs was to keep a list everyday of casualties and also to keep a graph of every ship — where it was going and what it was carrying. It was quite a job. Mostly it was petrol tankers, but all kinds of shipping. One day, I went on the bus from Barnes to Hammersmith, then on the tube to Green Park and then walk to Green Park to Berkley Square, right across town in the bombing raids. In the tubes was where all the people were sleeping during the raids. You had to tread over them. When the siren went, the trains stopped and everyone looked as if they couldn’t get their breath — it was horrible.

Anyhow one day I arrived at the office and all the Baltic Exchange people were looking very down. I said ‘Whatever is the matter?’ They said ‘Wait till you see the lists’ (of dead and injured). It turned out that the Ishmael, carrying troops, men and women to Burma, was hit both ends and it sank with nearly everyone on board in the Indian Ocean. Only two hundred were saved I think. They reckon it was the third worst disaster of the war. They managed to get them to Ceylon, refit them out and then they went on to Burma.

One day when the war finished my brother was home from Burma and he went into an absolute trance telling about things that had happened. He said ‘You know, one of the worst things was when the ship I was on was hit’. I pricked my ears up at that and asked him ‘What ship was that?’ ‘The Ishmael’ he said, and I had no idea he was on it, but he one of the ones they saved. I knew nothing about him being on the ship. He was saved by his underwater swimming — he could go down so deep. He spent the rest of the war in Burma which wasn’t easy — dreadful, dreadful. When I saw him again he was yellow with malaria and he was never the same again.

But one of the good things I would say about the war, was the comradeship. That is one thing I will never forget.

In the blitz, the windows of our house were blown out. My father and I did not like to be in during air raids, so we used to take our tin hats and our gas masks and go and fire-watch on the common. We couldn’t bear to be indoors, but the rest of the family went in the shelter.

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