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This story was submitted to the People’s War web site by a volunteer on behalf of Reg Ascott and has been added to the site with his permission. He fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

As two retired members of Lakey Hill Golf Club, who have played together each week over the past three years during which time we have fished many of each others wayward golf balls out of the Lakey Hill ponds, we have just discovered that one of us helped to fish the other out of a much bigger pond forty two years ago. Cliff Bruckshaw and I were talking over holiday adventures a short while ago and Cliff asked me if I had ever been to Crete. I told him that I had been on the way but never actually landed there as the Germans had dropped a couple of thousand paratroopers before my party could land, and we made for other more friendly shores.

Later we set off again from Haifa to Castelrossa in the Dodecanese Islands, the convoy consisted of two LCT’s one with Basuto Gunners, one with English Gunners and a small French gunboat on which were 2 or 3 Officers and a couple of Sergeants, one of whom was me. En route we were shadowed by a spotter plane which gave us forebodings about a possible attack. This duly took place a couple of hours later when a flight of Stuka dive bombers appeared and began to screech down towards us. They dropped their bombs around the Gunboat but fortunately they all missed, the LCT with the Basuto Gunners also seemed to have been avoided, but the other LCT on which the English Gunners were sitting on deck playing cards, received a direct hit with the bomb going straight down through the craft. At this point Cliff took up the story quickly to say, “I was thrown into the water badly injured and but for the Gunboat, which turned back to rescue me, I should not be here today. They took me on to one of the islands and I was flown back by Sunderland to hospital in Alexandria.

Whilst reminiscing about those times, we discovered that when we both had played in the Lakey Hill Whitbread Team it had not been their first effort together. Whilst in Haifa, my Captain, a Capt. Faraleigh had asked me to play in a water polo team against the Oil Refinery side and that he had asked the Gunners for men to make up the team for the Army. Cliff had been amongst the volunteers.

Although we had come from opposite ends of the country we had both become attached to the 153 Battery, 81st Regiment from 1940 onwards, but with one being in transport and the other on the guns we did not know one another.

The rhodedendrons and the lakes of Lakey Hill are a far cry from the battles of Middle East in the Second World war, but when the tanks from Bovington are firing on the ranges it does bring back memories of a ‘Monty’ barrage opening up at Alamein, and the desert — was that so far away when the ´óÏó´«Ã½ were filming for Beau Geste and the Foreign Legion were in the gravel pits across the road and the other horrors of war were being filmed for the first instalments of the prison camps of Tenko in a little Dorset wood a couple of miles down the road. Quite a coincidence!

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