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This story has been submitted to the People’s War website by Anne Wareing of the Lancashire Home Guard on behalf of John Cecil Larkin and has been added to the site with his permission…

I was twenty years of age at the outbreak of war in 1939 and I joined up in 1940 with the Grenadier Guards at Brigade headquarters.

I was captured with the Eighth Army on the Marath Line in Egypt and taken as a prisoner of war.

I was in a prisoner in a camp in Italy where I had to work for a small pittance. Eventually I managed to escape, hiding in hedgerows and fields until I managed to find the British and American lines at Siena.

I came back to Britain and went next to Stone Castle in Scotland then to Windsor.

One ironic note though, before I was finally released I was in the Infantry and on release I was paid £48, less the amount they calculated, I would have earned in the work camp.

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