大象传媒

This story has been added by CSV volunteer, Louise Evans, on behalf of the author, Winifred Chapman, who is aware of the site's terms and conditions.

In the summer of 1940 I was 16 years old and living at home with my parents while my older brother Roy was away serving with the RAF in France. The first we knew that anything had happened to him was when he turned up one day with John, the butler from Lanhydrock House, wearing some clothes that didn't belong to him, deaf in one ear and with a flash burn down one side of his face.

It turned out that he had been being evacuated from France on board a passenger ship called the Lancastria when it was attacked and split in half by a bomb dropped down the ship's funnel. Roy said that at the time of the bombing he had been out on deck with a friend, telling him, "I wouldn't like to be in the water tonight" when the next thing he knew they were both blown into the sea.

Roy couldn't swim and had lost his clothes in the blast but luckily another survivor saw him struggling in the water and helped him onto a piece of wreckage that he clung to for the next two hours until a rescue boat picked him up. He was in a bad way when he was rescued after spending so many hours in the freezing sea so when he was pulled from the water he had to be revived and wrapped in a blanket.

When Roy arrived back in Plymouth he was given some chef's trousers and a duffel coat to replace the clothes he had lost and then he and the other survivors were all detained for two hours in a lecture about what they could and couldn't tell people about what had happened to them. The Lancastria had been Britain's worst ever naval disaster so Churchill decided to keep the tragedy secret in case it destroyed the public's morale.

When Roy was allowed to go home he was still very ill so when the train taking him home arrived at Bodmin Road Station he walked to Lanhydrock House, where he'd been a footman before the war and John the butler put some salve on the burn on his face and walked with him up to our house.

My mother put Roy to bed straight away and almost as soon as he was in bed a telegram arrived to say that he had gone missing in action and that a letter would follow shortly. Although thousands of people did die that night, thankfully Roy wasn't among them and was put on indefinate leave to give him a chance to recover. However, just a few days later he was called up and sent out to Iceland where he complained bitterly about the cold, which I always felt he hated after spending so long in the sea waiting to be rescued.

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