大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Lesley Carrick of the Norfolk Learning Partnership on behalf of Henry Ponting and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

My service Number was 14854789, and I was in the Northampton Regiment. In 1944 I was nineteen and in the army. I went into a billet off Cliff Road. We鈥檇 do our training down in the streets and went down to the Burlington Hotel for our meals. Sometimes we trained on the golf course. I should just have trained for six weeks before embarking to go overseas but when I was on the train going to Liverpool the Sergeant called out three names to cover sickness and absence back at barracks. My name was one of them. We were taken off the train and back to our billets.

Three tines I was taken off the train. The last time, I met a nice young lady on the seafront, and things went well between us. I was called back to the train to Liverpool, but said to her: 鈥淚鈥檒l probably be back in half an hour鈥�. I鈥檇 left half my kit in my billet, but this time I was not called off the train. I was on my way to Burma.

When I got to Burma I put into the 2nd Welsh and transferred into catering. I stayed for two years in Kaloor. It was very hot and you spent all day in shorts, but by four o鈥檆lock there was two inches of frost and you needed full battledress. Conditions were uncomfortable. I caught malaria and got prickly heat. I went out to Burma on the Dunbar Castle, and came back the first time on the Queen of Bermuda. I had three months extended leave and then went back for a second time on the Nevasa to Singapore, then caught the empress of Scotland. I remember the boat journeys out to Burma taking about six weeks. As I couldn鈥檛 swim I slept on the top deck tied to a life raft. We dangled bottles of beer out of port holes to keep them cool.

I didn鈥檛 think I鈥檇 end up in Catering. I was stationed first at Ketford in Nottinghamshire for ten weeks, billeted in a house with a race course at the bottom of the garden. Part of the training was three practice shots with a pier gun, but I didn鈥檛 hold it tight enough and it blew me back off my feet, so I was sent to Colchester for PE training.

It was a challenge cooking in Burma. I had a tarpaulin kitchen and cooked for hundreds. My oven was an old oil drum with a door cut in one end, a fire underneath and a sheet of metal on top to cook on. The men ate in a canteen which was made from a bamboo frame with rolls of felt and asbestos based sheeting. I had to cook in the officer鈥檚 Mess too, and one day Field Marshall Slim visited. I loaned my knife, fork and spoon for the occasion, and they vanished 鈥� I never got them back.

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.