大象传媒

After the North African Campaign in the Western Desert was over, I went to Italy, where I was attached to a South African Spitfire Reconnaissance squadron station outside Rome.

One evening in April 1944 a Lysander swooped low over the airstrip and a package plummeted to the ground. One of the Spitfire pilots, returning to the mess after de-briefing, spotted the incident, ran onto the airstrip and recovered it. He found it had had a label attached to it, addressed to me.

I left the de-briefing room ten minutes later and the South African, who had been waiting for me in the mess, handed me the package. Mystified, I turned it over in my hands, my companions in the bar waiting impatiently for me to open it.

I took off the outer wrapping and revealed a stone around which was a piece of paper secured by a rubber band. I opened the paper. From my wife in Alexandria, the message read:

'Congratulations. You are the father of a beautiful baby girl. She is, as we agreed, our Annie! Your loving wife.'

It was wonderful news for me and it raised my morale enormously and I could not help reflecting that life goes on in spite of Hitler. We won the war and its cost was well worth it, because today Annie is married, a university lecturer in Classics at the University of Wales, and breeds pedigree Highland cattle in the beautiful mountains of Wales.

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