I was a scholarship boy from Morehall School, Folkestone to the Harvey Grammar School in 1932. As soon as I matriculated in 1936 I got a job in the Borough Treasurer鈥檚 Department, so my formal education ended when I was 15. I took my last WEA philosophy course just a few years ago!
I find it hard to recapture the feelings I had that led to my joining the Territorial Army in 1939. War, sometime in the near future, had seemed inevitable for many months. My father had joined the army within three months of the outbreak of the first world and though he did not encourage me he would have found trying to discourage me hard to justify. Along with the whole of his generation, he himself faced a second horrifying disruption to normal life. I think I ignorantly looked forward to an exciting change from a career in an office.
A few years ago I started to look into my family history. For the first 14 years of my life my grandfather lived with us; how I wish now that I had talked to him about his life. All I ever remember knowing about him was that he was a bookbinder and that he was born in Cambridge. Finding out more took a lot if time.
My own grandchildren don鈥檛 ask me questions about 鈥漌hat was it like when... ?鈥 but maybe at least one of them will wish in later years that they had. Just in case they do I have written quite a bit about my life.
What I write for the 大象传媒 archive is based on those writings.
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