Here, there and almost everywhere - The memoirs of David and Elizabeth Ronald

Here There & Almost Everywhere

The Memoirs of David and Elizabeth Ronald

Here There & Almost Everywhere

Here There & Almost Everywhere

The Memoirs of David and Elizabeth Ronald

MEMOIRS Cirencester

Published by Memoirs

Memoirs Books 25 Market Place, Cirencester, Gloucestershire, GL7 2NX email: info@memoirsbooks.co.uk www.memoirsbooks.co.uk

Copyright ŠD. Ronald 1998 First published March 1999 ISBN 978 1908 223 029

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of Memoirs.

Printed in England

CONT ENT S C HAPTER O NE • O UR C HILDHOOD Y EARS page 1 C HAPTER T WO • I NDEPENDENCE page 16 CHAPTER THREE • THE WEDDING AND FAMILY MATTERS page 35 C HAPTER F OUR • M ARRIED L IFE page 41 CHAPTER FIVE • THE WAR IN THE FAR EAST page 51 C HAPTER S IX • PAKISTAN page 61

AND

C HAPTER S EVEN • A FTER page 74

THE

H OME WAR

C HAPTER E IGHT • N OWSHERA page 92 C HAPTER N INE • E NGLAND page 97

AND

S COTLAND

C HAPTER T EN • M ADRID page 108 C HAPTER E LEVEN • N APLES page 112 C HAPTER T WELVE • B ACK page 128

TO

E NGLAND

C HAPTER T HIRTEEN • V ERNHAM page 138 C HAPTER F OURTEEN • H APLY page 155

Foreward, Acknowledgements and Dedication Conscious some two years ago that my parents’ diamond wedding anniversary was imminent and that their sixty years together had spanned a way of life that cannot nowadays be repeated, I felt I should have their experiences recorded for posterity.

I had been aware that some thirty years ago my grandfather, the Reverend Alan Ronald, had reminisced about his early life around the turn of the century. That together with the realisation that the written word outlives memories, prompted me to approach my parents accordingly.

They entered into the project with their usual enthusiasm and the chapters that follow, incorporating family photographs obtained from numerous sources reflect the outcome. As the final pages imply the book, covering the memories of solely a married couple will be of limited interest to those outside the family. Yet it contains comments and anecdotes on a way of life that cannot be without interest to those of an historical and social science leaning. Each reader will be the best judge of this.

The book has taken two years to complete. I do thank Kathryn Ronald enormously for all the many hours she spent with my parents in recording and writing up the information so freely given. Without her I doubt the memoirs would have seen the light of day.

My husband, Gerald, and I have proof read numerous drafts, I thank him too. The results of everyone’s input is for all to see.

I therefore conclude by dedicating this book to my parents, David and Elizabeth Ronald to mark the diamond anniversary of their wedding held on 26th March 1936. Theirs has been a fascinating life borne of the affection that exists between them. The varied lives that I and my sister and brother, Felicity and Douglas, have led have contributed to our parents’ fulfilment and longevity. It now remains for the new generation of their grandchildren, Rupert, Philippa, Clare and Alex to take the family forward.

Sheila Garnett December 1998

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Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE - Our Childhood Years -

The date is 9 May 1913. The place is Spring Lake, Saskatchewan. In England, the trees would be in full leaf and summer would be on its way. Here, out on the prairies of central Canada, however, the snow lies two feet thick on the ground, and the weather conditions are so severe that my mother is unable to travel to the hospital to give birth to me. I am born, therefore, at home.

At the time of my birth, my father, Alan Bruce Ronald, was a missionary with the Church Missionary Society. The beneficiary of a private income and considered to be a wealthy young Edwardian gentleman, my father received no remuneration for his work. In May 1913, when I was born, he had already been working in Canada without pay for over six years, and had even built his own log-cabin church. He may, perhaps, have been contemplating staying in Canada still longer. If he had, the story of my life might have been different. But by 1914, the world had changed. The assassination in Sarajevo of the heir to the Austrian Empire had propelled Europe to the brink of war, and what had been viewed in the early summer as a Balkan skirmish had escalated dangerously by autumn. Even so, there were hopes - and expectations - that there would be peace by Christmas. But it was not to be. In January 1915, my father’s elder brother, Byron Ronald, wrote from England suggesting that we return home by ship as soon as possible. German submarines were already patrolling the Atlantic waters, and the menace was worsening by the day. My own birth and that of my sister Rachel just over a year later had brought family responsibilities. The idealism and pioneering spirit that had led my parents to Canada all those years ago had to be tempered now there were two small children to consider. My parents decided to take Uncle Byron’s advice and, that same year, we sailed from Canada to England to settle in my father’s home county of Kent.

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Chapter 1 My mother, Rachel and I settled. My father did not. There was a war raging just across the Channel, and he was not content to sit back and live a rural idyll. He promptly volunteered as a chaplain with the British forces in France where he ministered to the troops until he was invalided back to Britain shortly before the war ended in 1918. Upon his return from France, he became vicar of Small Hythe, a village two miles from Tenterden in Kent. My three younger sisters were born during our time in Small Hythe, Mary in 1916, Elizabeth (Zizza) in 1919 and Sarah in 1921.

Small Hythe, as its name implies, was tiny. It had no shops, no Post Office and no public house, but it did have a church built in Tudor times, and it was here that my father was vicar. In the 16th century, Small Hythe was not the inland village it is today, but a seaside community. Hythe, its larger counterpart on the Kent coast near Folkestone, was one of the Cinque Ports, comprising Dover, Hastings, Romney, Hythe and Sandwich, which were given responsibility by the Tudor monarchs for raising defensive forces for the service of the crown in wartime. In the early twentieth century, Small Hythe was a peaceful, rural community. There wasn’t even any electricity. I went to bed by candlelight and remember being very frightened by the shadows playing across my bedroom walls as I tried to get to sleep.

We rarely saw a car in the village, and the only means of transport my family had was a pony and trap, which my mother drove.

Unfortunately, the Rectory was at the top of a steep hill and the church was at the bottom, so a journey in either direction was equally tedious. When we ventured down the hill to church, we all had to get out and act as a brake on the pony. When we wanted to return home after the service, we were all required to push. It was often therefore simpler just to walk.

In fact, my earliest childhood recollection was walking into Tenterden with my father. I now know that the date was 11 November 1918, the day the war that had brought my family to England finally ended. My father and I were passing one of the big farms near Small Hythe, and the manager rushed out and told my father the momentous news that the Armistice had been signed. It meant nothing to me, but I realised it was extremely significant because of the pleasure it gave the two adults.

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Chapter 1 Another very early memory of Small Hythe was that of visiting Ellen Terry, the well-known actress. Dame Ellen lived near the church in a house that has now been turned into a museum. My father called on her as part of his parish duties and I frequently accompanied him.

She would have been around seventy when I visited her - and I was a bashful six year old. She often asked me to recite for her, which I did not enjoy very much, although I did come to appreciate poetry very much as I grew older. Perhaps she was an early influence.

After five years at Small Hythe, the family had outgrown the vicarage and we moved to Smeeth on the other side of Ashford in Kent. Small Hythe Rectory was later bought by a Colonel and Mrs Wilson of the Royal Artillery. While Small Hythe Rectory was a substantial property, by any standards, Smeeth Rectory really was extensive.

The house had both an east wing and a west wing, and there was an enormous walled kitchen garden complete with fig, apricot and peach trees.

My father took over from the previous rector, a rather celebrated character called Mr Timmins, who went about in a cape, hunted two or three days a week in the winter, and spent the summer driving a coach and four to all the Kent county cricket matches. Eventually, Mr Timmins was summoned for an interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury and given the ultimatum: either move somewhere else or cease driving around Kent in your coach and four. Of course, it was not the time he took off from his holy duties that worried the Archbishop, but the married lady with whom he spent it, a certain Mrs X who was highly visible on the seat beside him on the coach and whom he met every time he went hunting. As tongues were wagging in rural Kent, Reverend Timmins took himself off to Westonbirt in Gloucestershire where he was able to hunt fifty-four days a year with the Beaufort, thus vacating Smeeth for my father.

Smeeth was a different ‘kettle of fish’ from Small Hythe as it was a much bigger parish with a large number of people living in and around the village. This meant that there was more for me to do in the way of the outdoor activities that I loved. One of my favourite pastimes was to follow the fox hounds on a bicycle - or on my two

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Chapter 1 flat feet in winter when the ground was soggy. I went beagling, and during the Easter holidays I went birds’ nesting. In the summer I bicycled for miles just for the pure enjoyment of it. Kent county cricket matches at Canterbury, Dover and Folkestone were another goal, and I also played tennis two or three times a week. Another of my pursuits was otter hunting - not something that is encouraged these days. The otter has become rare now, not because it was hunted but because the rivers on which it depended for food became polluted. Back in the 1920s, however, there were too many otters and they were a nuisance to farmers. Otter hounds were used to hunt them, but we seldom, if ever, made a kill.

The summer of 1921 was a memorable one. Not only was the weather so hot and dry that the tennis court at Smeeth ‘crack’d from side to side’, but my parents made a momentous decision concerning my future. They had been coming to the conclusion throughout 1921 that governesses in rural East Kent were not going to teach me a great deal about life. At the end of that hot summer, therefore, at the tender age of eight and a quarter, I was packed off to St Andrew’s Preparatory School near East Grinstead.

My godmother and her sister, who lived at the Manor House in East Grinstead - a property that was subsequently sold to Lord Beeching who reorganised the British railway system in the 1950s - kept an eye on me for my parents. St Andrews, however, was not a great success as I was not a noteworthy scholar, nor was I very good at games. My father spent a great deal of time in the holidays, I seem to remember, coaching me to be a bowler on the lawn at Smeeth rectory. The only other enjoyable activity at the school, apart from cricket and football, was being a Boy Scout for two terms during the winter. This was quite good fun, for we did venture into Ashdown Forest and learned how to light a fire, build a wigwam and various other scouting activities.

I was at St Andrew’s for just over four years. The headmaster was an Old Harrovian and his elder son, who had won a Military Cross during the war, had also been at Harrow. Parents were therefore assumed to be sufficiently well off to send their sons on automatically

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Chapter 1 to Harrow. My father began to realise that school fees were going up. As he had four daughters to educate as well as me, he wondered if I might be able to win a scholarship for sons of the clergy to Marlborough College in Wiltshire. He decided to take me away from St Andrew’s, where I was not distinguishing myself, and send me as a private pupil to a former Housemaster from Harrow who lived in St Jean-de-Luz, south of Biarritz and not far from the Spanish/French border. The theory was that I would learn French, benefit from private tutoring and win the much needed scholarship to Marlborough.

I went out to St Jean-de-Luz in 1926 at the age of twelve and a half.

Unfortunately for my education, however, the other boys were either Spanish aristocrats from the other side of the border who wanted to learn English, or they were English and American boys who had been “sent away” because, I suppose in retrospect, they had misbehaved at school in their respective home countries. Certainly, one of the American boys tried to teach me how to shoplift at one of the big stores in St Jean-de-Luz, but I was too shy to give it a try! What I did enjoy doing was biking out into the foothills of the Pyrenees on expeditions of exploration, but that developed my calf muscles rather than my French linguistic skills.

In May 1926, there was a General Strike in Britain. My father, in common with many other people at the time, thought this was the beginning of another Red Revolution, similar to that in Russia in 1917. He therefore journeyed all the way out to St Jean-de-Luz, picked me up and brought me back to England. I went back to St Andrew’s School and took my Common Entrance examination to Marlborough. I failed the scholarship.

By now, money was getting short in my family. Until 1926, my father had been receiving an income from the Australian Mercantile Land and Finance Company which his father had founded seventy-five years previously, but the Australian Government had expropriated much of the leasehold land of the company for soldiers returning from the war, and this had brought about a reduction in our own family income. There had, in fact, been quite a turnaround in our family fortunes over the last few years.

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Chapter 1 My grandfather had made the family money. He had been an entrepreneur who, in one of his most notable deals, bought an Australian outback property, sight unseen, in the bar of a Melbourne club, only to resell it for a £1,000 profit an hour later at the other end of the bar. In mid-Victorian times, £1,000 was a very considerable sum indeed.

My grandfather had bought a fine house, Pembury Grange, just outside Tunbridge Wells where he lived with his wife and twelve children. From here, he would take the 10 o’clock train to Cannon Street, returning home from London by the 3 o’clock train.

Periodically, he would sail out to Australia via the Cape to give his company the once-over and to see how the various properties it owned were faring. In both good times and bad in Australia, he bought properties, often unseen, and then travelled into the outback to see if he liked what he had bought. If a property passed muster, he would establish one of his sons on it. Hence, Uncle Wilson, his eldest son and my father’s eldest brother, came to live at Nap Nap on the banks of the Murrumbidgee River, while Uncle Angus was placed at Quirindi in northern New South Wales and Uncle Douglas went to live at another property in New South Wales.

My uncles, Wilson, Angus and Arthur had been sent to school at Rugby. Uncle Douglas had started at Rugby and was a very keen games player, but not at all academic. In fact, he was so unacademic that he failed to pass School Certificate at 16 and was invited to leave the school. At the time, my grandfather was out in Australia on business and felt obliged to hurry back to England to sort out Uncle Douglas’ schooling. The fact that the Suez Canal had been opened in 1869 probably vastly facilitated his journey.

The nearest school to Pembury was Tonbridge School, and the Headmaster said that he would accept Uncle Douglas for two years provided that my grandfather donated a bursary of £1,000. This he did. I suppose that the treatment the family had received at the hands of Rugby slightly rattled him, for he declared that he would not send any more of his sons there. All the remaining would go to Harrow, which was how my own father came to attend Harrow. As for Uncle Douglas, he played rugger for Kent at the age of 17 only to wreck his

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Chapter 1 knee which effectively curtailed his activity, not only in England but also later on when he was out in Australia.

Perhaps I have dwelt on Uncle Douglas’ misfortunes to show that not all members of my family were academically gifted and to excuse the fact that I myself did not win a scholarship. I did pass Common Entrance, but as a result of my side trip to France, I did not take this examination until November 1926 and therefore did not go to Marlborough until January 1927.

I well remember my arrival in Marlborough. In those days, the town had a railway station - Dr Beeching had not yet rationalised the railway system - and my father and I were able to travel there by train. When we arrived, there were two inches of snow on the ground and not a taxi in sight. I do not remember having a trunk or tuck box with me - they probably arrived later - so my introduction to Marlborough was a brisk walk down the High Street. I had been assigned to one of the Houses outside the main school precincts, and here I was to live for four terms before moving to B2, a House inside the main complex, for the rest of my time at Marlborough.

Presumably, after settling me in, my father went back to Kent the same day.

My first two years at Marlborough were not an outstanding success, but my last two years, when I was in the army class, were very much more enjoyable. I had volunteered for the army class at the age of 16 after passing School Certificate. At the beginning of my teens, I had wanted to go into farming, but I had recently changed my mind. We were now into the Depression years. Economies around the world had slumped and the life of a gentleman farmer was no longer a profitable occupation. Still, there was no denying how much I enjoyed physical activity and the outdoor life. It was while at Marlborough College that I first acquired an interest in racing. The town of Marlborough was a racing centre and there were well-known stables at nearby Beckhampton and at Manton, which was one of the destinations of school cross-country events. It was also at Marlborough that I started boxing. The Manton trainer used to arrange boxing matches between the boys at Marlborough and his

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Chapter 1 stable lads, and I was one of the individuals who volunteered to take part.

My mother had failed to interest me in going into the church like her father, brother and husband. She now envisaged me going into the Bank of England and living in a leafy London suburb. My father arranged with the local squire of the village, Lord Brabourne, for me to have an interview with the Director of the Bank of England. I was cross-questioned for about ten minutes by this venerable gentleman who then leaned back in his chair, surveyed me for a few moments and asked: “Do you really want to go into the Bank of England?”

“No, Sir, “ I replied, “I do not.” He was alleged to be extremely impressed by his own perceptiveness and used the incident at numerous dinner parties to illustrate how clever he was to have discovered from a teenager in ten minutes flat that he did not want to go into the Bank of England. During the latter part of the war, Lord Brabourne had been in the Royal Artillery and suggested, with considerably more insight than either my parents or I myself had shown, that I might like to go into the army. I jumped at the opportunity because, as far as I was concerned, it made for an adventure away from the confines of rural East Kent and the downs of Wiltshire. It was my chance to get out into the big wide world.

When my father learned that I was keen to go into the army, he wrote to the Commanding Officer of the Buffs, the East Kent regiment in which his brother, Uncle Jim Ronald, had once served. Uncle Jim had been killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915 and his name appears on the Menin Gate. The Colonel of the Buffs wrote back and said I would need a private income of £300 a year - a very considerable sum in those days. In a smart regiment, you needed a private income of that size to finance hunting, hunt balls and the like. The figure quoted by the Colonel of the Buffs was, by the way, precisely half the amount of money that my father was receiving as a parson’s stipend at Smeeth.

I was fortunate that a friend of mine in B2 at Marlborough was proposing to go into the Royal Artillery. I asked him whether he would need a private income for that. He told me that he would not

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Chapter 1 be receiving a private income and, very interesting to me, that his father had joined the Royal Artillery and lived on his pay and allowances all his service life. In other words, as well as being a great adventure, the Royal Artillery was well paid. What other incentive did I need?

In 1929, I passed into the army class at Marlborough. The masters knew exactly what was required for boys wanting to go into the Royal Navy, Army and Royal Air Force, and tuition could be made available on more of an individual basis. For instance, the master who taught us Mathematics took one look at my School Certificate results and said that he could not get me into the Royal Engineers because the standard required for that regiment was too high for me.

“However,” he continued, “if you do exactly what I say for the next two years, I can get you 40 per cent in Mathematics which will qualify you for the Royal Artillery.” My other subjects, English, History, French and Geography, were good enough for me to pass on merit, so for the next two years - in statistics, dynamics, kinetic energy and algebra - I did exactly what he told me to do, and when I opened up the exam paper I could not believe that the questions were exactly what I had been studying in great detail for the last few months. I passed half way up. The top entries went to the Royal Engineers and the rest to the Royal Artillery and Signals. The Mathematics master at Marlborough had been right. I easily got the requisite 40 per cent and in 1931, I passed into the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich.

- Elizabeth It was often said during my childhood that our family was descended from Scandinavians who, centuries ago, had come across the North Sea and settled along the coast and in the hill country of what is now County Durham. Certainly, the Scandinavian influence could be seen in many of my family members, and in my own auburn hair.

My mother, Martha Robinson, was born in County Durham, in the village of Egglestone. Her mother, one of eight brothers and sisters, was a Hetherington. I cannot remember all their names. Those I

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Chapter 1 remember most clearly are Aunt Mary Ann, Aunt Hannah and Uncle Jack, my mother’s youngest brother. Uncle Jack was a great big, fieryhaired man. He never married, but continued to live with his mother and stayed with her till the end of her life. When she became very ill, he was so devoted to her that he slept in the same room on a camp bed. He always used to say: “She looked after me from the time I was born and I’ll look after her till she dies.”

By the time I was born on 6 July 1907, my immediate family was living in Ayr on Scotland’s south-west coast, my mother having married William Sloan, an Ayrshire man. My father had trained as a parson. He never finished his training, so became a lay preacher instead, working during the week for an insurance company that had an office in Ayr. We went to church every Sunday. In those days, you had your own pew which you had to pay for the privilege of using.

There was competition for seats! Our pew was seventh from the back and, as was the practice in the Church of Scotland, it bore our own name card.

My father’s brother, Uncle Robert, also preached in various churches in the area. When you qualified as a preacher, you were allowed to preach only in churches for which you were ordained. Robert went on to become a fully fledged parson and ended his days in London.

Uncle Robert’s son, Tom Sloan, was an interviewer on television in its infancy. He was sent abroad to America to see all the latest developments in broadcasting, and it was said he would become head of the BBC. His potential was never fulfilled, however. He was a hockey player and during a match a hockey ball hit him in the stomach and killed him.

My family first lived in Fort Street, Ayr, moving to Barnes Street as our numbers grew. My sister Annie was the oldest child, followed by Robbie, then another boy, Fred, who died young. Then there was me and my younger brother, Charles Edward or Charlie. In Barnes Street, we lived in a large three-storied terraced house. As Ayr was a seaside town with lots of restaurants and other attractions, my mother was able to let rooms out to provide a family income. My eldest brother, who expected to inherit the house, was good with his

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Chapter 1 hands and worked hard to convert all the outbuildings into bedrooms. Of course, we only had outside lavatories, but that was quite usual in those days.

Probably my earliest recollection was during the 1914-1918 war, when I was not yet a teenager. Across the bay from Ayr, we heard a monumental explosion in the Ardeer Works. The munitions factory there had been sabotaged and the subsequent fire and pyrotechnics had to be seen to be believed.

Another of my earliest recollections was visiting my mother’s family on their farm in County Durham. This involved a complicated crosscountry train journey from Ayr via Kilmarnock, Carlisle and Penrith to Barnard Castle. It took four changes of train to travel from the west coast of Scotland to the east coast of England! At Barnard Castle we were always met by my Uncle Jack with a pony and trap for the last leg of the journey across the moors to the farm at Egglestone.

Initially, I did the journey accompanied by my elder brother, Robbie, and later I went alone. When I was a little older, I was able to take the train to go shopping in Glasgow, and when I was grown up, I would take the train down to London - sometimes with my mother, but more often by myself. In the 1920s, the trip from Ayr to London involved an overnight train journey, but I was still ready for a full day of shopping in London even after a sleepless night, and was easily able to withstand another overnight journey back to Ayr with all my purchases. With all this practice, it is easy to see why I became such a dedicated shopper in later life.

Barnes Street was a back road and one of its claims to fame was that it was also the address of the Royal Scots Fusiliers’ barracks. When the war started, they used to march the soldiers across town by night for embarkation at Ayr Harbour. So as not to disturb people, they would march the men along the back roads, and one of the roads they used was ours. On those nights, we would wake to the sound of the endless tramp, tramp, tramp of soldiers’ feet, and I would be held up at the window to watch them go by while the rest of the town slept on peacefully. They knew nothing about these manoeuvres which must have started right back in 1914 when I was just seven

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Chapter 1 years old. It’s such a tragedy to think about it now, because I cannot believe that very many of the men I watched when I was a little girl would have been able to survive through those long years of war.

It must have been at that time that my sister, Annie, who was ten years older than me, decided she was going to join up. She promptly did so on her eighteenth birthday in 1915 and was posted first to Dunfermline and then to Colchester. I was still quite young, about eight, when Annie went off to Colchester. She joined the Queen Mary Army Auxiliary Corps which later became known as the Women’s Royal Army Corps (the WRACs) and was awarded an OBE for her work during the war. When the OBE was announced, a local parson distinguished himself by storming unannounced into the family home in Barnes Street and demanding: “What has your daughter done to deserve a decoration? I deserve a decoration just as much as she does.” Whereupon he stormed out again! My parents were absolutely flabbergasted and although they had been ardent church goers and supporters for many a long year, they never again attended his church.

Annie was a very flirtatious person and always had lots of boyfriends. She had fair hair like me, but whereas I was always very thin, she was plump. After the war, she married Bobby Wright who worked in the same shipping office as she did. He came from the Smith family, a very good Ayr family.

My schooling was not a success story. I started out at Kindergarten, followed by Ayr Grammar School, from which I went on to Ayr Academy. One of my closest friends at school was a girl called May Wylie the eldest of the four daughters of Wallace Wylie, a well known racehorse trainer based in Ayr. When I visited them, Wallace and his friends used to sit round the room drinking and discussing nothing else but racing, horses, other trainers, owners and jockeys.

May Wylie’s job was to cater to their alcoholic needs by serving the drinks.

While I was no good at school, I was good at anything involving using my hands. I wanted to go and work for a good costumier in

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Chapter 1 Ayr who had an exclusive shop in Wellington Buildings. It was a fiveyear training with very little pay and I could not afford to do it. First you had to learn how to do buttonholes, then how to cut out - and it would all take too long. For instance, it might take you several months just to master the art of buttonholing.

Next, I started work as a secretary. My heart was not in shorthand and typing, however, and I did not make a good secretary. Then my luck changed. After Annie and Bobby married, they went to live in Castle Hill Road next to some people, the Morgenthalers, who had two hairdressing salons. When the owner heard I was so unhappy, she asked me if I would like to come and work for her. She would show me, she said, how to do people’s hair and make wigs. I learned all about wigs and how to make them. In many ways, making a wig was just like making a rug. You had to knot the hair into its backing with an implement like a crochet hook and then ruche the hair up at the front to style it. You were using real hair, which was often very fine, and it all had to be matched up and teased into place on a wire frame. The pay, however, was very bad and I became disenchanted with the whole thing. I managed to finish my hairdressing apprenticeship which, on bad days, seemed to consist mainly of handing things to the hairdresser rather than doing any creative work myself. I then decided to open a business of my own, and set up a salon at home.

My mother was keen for me to do well and would always ensure I woke on time. I worked hard and would get up very early in the morning, sometimes starting at 7am doing people’s hair and faces. I was by now making money and as the family did not need financial support of any kind, I was able to use the proceeds of my business to go on several cruises to North Africa and the Canary Islands. I even stayed at the famous Reid’s Hotel in Madeira.

While I was doing well, the economic outlook generally was very bad at that time. My younger brother, Charlie, had a job at Andrew Muir and Sons, who were accountants in Ayr, but many were not so lucky. The Depression was in full swing and unemployment was rife.

Many of those lucky enough to have a job felt as if they were just marking time. Among them were Annie and Bobby, who were not

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Chapter 1 long married and wanted to improve their lot in life. So it was that Annie answered an advertisement in the newspaper for people to sell stocks and shares in Australia. At the interview, she was asked if she could paint a pretty picture, meaning could she sell shares in a depressed market. She obviously convinced them she could as she got the job, and she and Bobby moved to Melbourne.

A short time afterwards, my father went off to Australia to see if he too could get a job, with the hope that my mother and the rest of the family might join him later. He hoped to get into insurance through Annie. I do not know what happened, or whether he found work.

All I do know is that he did not stay there long. I think he simply realised that my mother did not want to move to Australia, so he came back. He never worked again. He quite simply gave up. To be honest, my father was defeated by my mother. All he wanted to do was sit back and smoke his pipe, but she was always so bustling and wanting to do things that my father never got the chance to play head of the house. It was rather sad when you think that my mother literally worked herself to death taking in lodgers.

After Annie left, my mother gave up, too. She just seemed gradually to lose interest in everything. She had never been happy in Scotland and had never liked the Scots. She also did not have very much time for me for she had much preferred Annie. They were like two friends and used to go everywhere together. Eventually, she seemed to lose all will to live. She took to her bed and just decided to die. When I tried to comfort her, she just told me to go away. I was not, she said, good company for her. It was then that I decided, when I had children of my own, never to favour one over the other.

After my mother’s death, Charles gave up his job at Andrew Muir and Sons and went off to do what he really wanted to do, which was to work on a newspaper. He worked first in South Ayrshire and then in Northamptonshire. After that, he had a number of jobs abroad, first in Malta, then in Australia, then in New Zealand where he met his wife-to-be, Dolores. He farmed at Biggin Hill in Kent for a short period in the 1960s before emigrating to Rhodesia, where he settled down. Charlie did end his life in Britain, however. He and Dolores

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Chapter 1 came back to live in Brighton in the early 1970s, after Rhodesia became Zimbabwe and black majority rule took effect.

After my mother’s death, my Aunt Anne Hetherington, my mother’s sister, came to keep house for us. I think she hoped father would marry her. We all wanted it, but when my brother Robbie saw how friendly she was with my father, he was unpleasant to her and would have nothing to do with her, and she went away back to Durham.

Robbie was six or seven years older than me, and he thought that when my father died he should have the house. He was probably worried my father would marry again and the house would pass to his new wife, and that was what made him so rude to my Aunt Anne.

It was true that she was an old maid, but she was nice, and she made my life more pleasant because it was hard for me to have fun when father was so miserable. In fact, father became so lonely after Aunt Anne’s departure that eventually Aunt Hannah came to look after us.

My father died three or so years after my mother of Bright’s Disease, which affects the kidneys. The house, it transpired, was to be shared equally among us. My brothers and sisters wanted to sell the house but it was still my home. My sister Annie wrote to me, urging me to come out to Australia, saying what a wonderful country it was. I didn’t want there to be any ill feeling in the family, so I decided to go.

There was another reason to leave, too. I had had a few boyfriends over the years - Duncan Lawson, with whom there was no romance, and then Tim Connell who was very definitely keen on me. Tim’s mother, however, said that he could not get married until his sisters had married. Eventually, of course, they did, but I had become tired of waiting by that time, and could see myself waiting for ever, so I decided that I really must leave Ayr and strike out on my own.

It was now early 1935. I had a very lucrative business, but I couldn’t even sell it because I had built it up on my own reputation and knew of no-one who could carry it on after I left. So I quite literally left everything behind, apart from my personal possessions which I packed up into a black trunk and sent ahead to Australia. Then, I closed the front door of the house and simply walked away - to what turned out to be a very interesting future!

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Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO - Independence - David The Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, where I began in 1931 at the age of eighteen, was an eye opener for me. I was independent at last. Weekends - unless we were playing games or doing athletics were our own affair, so I used to venture up to London whenever I could afford it and very nervously dip my toe into the delights of the Metropolis. This mainly consisted of going to cinemas and visiting restaurants. There was one particular restaurant outside Victoria Station that I used to patronise quite frequently, not because of the gourmet cooking but because it theoretically offered “value for money”!

At the RMA, we rode a horse once a day, and I also participated in athletics. Having once won the quarter mile at Marlborough College in my last year, I ran in the quarter mile cadets individual and relay, representing the RMA against Sandhurst infantry and cavalry, RAF Cranwell and a club called the Milocarians composed of officers who had previously been at the Academies and were there to set a standard.

I took a half share in an Austin Seven with a friend of mine for £5.

We had an arrangement whereby I had it one weekend and he had it another, but unfortunately, neither of us could afford the petrol so it was not actually in constant use.

It was a very active life at the Royal Military Academy. We were up extremely early in the morning and the daily regime was tough: PT, followed by breakfast, followed by drill, then classes in Maths, Languages, History and Current Affairs. Of course, we were being perpetually inspected to see that we were smart and tidy. We were

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Chapter 2 also taught speed in carrying out orders. For instance, we had just fifteen minutes flat to change out of uniform, put on our physical training kit and get to the gym. We were similarly given fifteen minutes after gym to change back again. We had a parade before lunch at one o’clock where we were inspected and then we were lined up for lunch and each given a plate. I, in common with practically everyone else, was extremely hungry by this time and used to pile the food so high that you couldn’t see the plate for the food. I haven’t changed! Then, in the afternoon, we either had riding instruction again or map-reading exercises which entailed bicycling out into the Woolwich hinterland, drawing a map of the area and bicycling back again.

On arrival at Woolwich, we were all weighed and then automatically entered for a boxing competition. The first competitor I drew was an Indian who had never boxed in his life. As I advanced into the centre of the ring, he took one look at me, retreated into his corner and called it a day. I then got into the second round where I was drawn against an Old Harrovian who was exceptionally tall. We fought each other, he waving his arms above my head because he was so tall and I having a free run at hitting him in the midriff. I won! In the final, I found myself matched against Mike Calvert, who later became a brigadier in the Chindit Expedition with General Wingate. He was a very experienced boxer and I was not. He hit me on one side of the head, and as I was falling over, hit me on other side. I managed to survive three rounds of this routine and was eventually awarded a medal as best loser. I’ve never boxed since. I did win something major at Woolwich, however. On passing out, I was awarded the military history prize for tactics and strategy, and my name was published in The Times, much to the surprise of friends and relatives.

On passing out of Woolwich, it was down to the real business of life at last. On 2 February 1933, in deep snow, I joined the Young Officers’ Course at the School of Artillery, Larkhill, Salisbury. I was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant and was paid £15 per month.

I paid income tax of £4 a month and board and lodging at the Mess of £4 a month. I was thus left with £7 per month or the equivalent of £1.75 a week, and yet I was well off in the so-called hungry Thirties.

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Chapter 2 On the course at Larkhill, it was 50 per cent indoor work: Maths, Gunnery, English, French, History and Geography, and 50 per cent out-of doors, learning every aspect of life and work in all ranks of the Royal Artillery. This mostly involved riding a horse. As a Second Lieutenant, I was put in charge either of an eight-pounder gun or a “layer� or of an ammunition number. We would carry out simulation firing, as well as real-life firing on the ranges. All of this was very energetic, interesting and stimulating for a young man like me.

Halfway through the six-month course, when the instructors had assessed whether the majority would make the grade, we were told that at the end of the course, we had three options. The first was a posting in the United Kingdom, but possibly only for three years.

The second was an overseas posting working on coastal or antiaircraft artillery or some other not very exciting posting that did not involve the use of horses. The third was a six-year posting to India with a horse-drawn unit - this guaranteed a stay with the same unit for 6 years. I quite naturally chose option number three.

To be allowed to go to India, I had to pass in the top twelve of the course. I worked very hard because I thought that an overseas posting to India would be such an adventure and managed to finish twelfth. Not long after I had passed the course, a fellow young officer by the name of Archie Brown who used to frequent the pubs in Salisbury, asked me if I were prepared to do a swap and allow him to take my place abroad because he was sure he had put a girlfriend in Salisbury in the family way and wanted to escape. I said sorry, but no. I never heard what happened to Archie - or to his girlfriend.

I then found that my troop ship to India was not due to sail until September, so I and another friend who had also opted for India were temporarily posted to a horse-drawn regiment on Salisbury Plain. Here again, I found a completely different way of life from anything I had ever experienced before. The junior officers, aged 23 to 30, all owned private horses, mostly geared to hunting in the winter and to point-to-pointing during the spring. The more affluent, however, also owned polo ponies and went show jumping in the summer. I soon found that horses were not just a hobby, but their entire way of life. They were totally absorbed in buying suitable

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Chapter 2 horses, training them and selling them at a profit or, if need be, disposing of them at a loss.

The senior officers, all aged 30 years plus, had at least a six-year or longer foreign tour behind them in India, Egypt or West Africa and they were all really hard-bitten, living life to the full. They attended early morning parades and after breakfast, more parades. Then they repaired for elevenses to the officers’ mess to partake of sherry, Madeira and gins and tonics. This was followed by work in the office or inspections, followed by lunch which was also washed down by the appropriate alcoholic beverages. Then followed a quiet afternoon also based on horses. For dinner five days a week, it was full mess kit with the ritual that one arrived at the appropriate hour for dinner and spoke only if one were spoken to. Two nights a week, we had more relaxed dining and were allowed to appear in a dinner jacket!

It was while here that I was assigned by my battery commander to a senior subaltern called Len Livingstone-Learmouth. He was a celebrated character who was a contemporary at the Royal Military Academy of the Maharajah of Jaipur. One of their escapades while still cadets at Woolwich was to take fast cars up to London on a Saturday night, then line them up at Piccadilly Circus at midnight and race each other down the Old Kent Road to Woolwich.

Len Livingstone-Learmouth’s routine was to be ‘up with the lark’ and organise battery exercise with all the horses for two hours before breakfast, then to carry out gun drill before lunch. After lunch in the summer - and summer, of course, was the time I was assigned to him - he would play polo, then drive up to London three times a week in his fast car. In London reputedly, he attended cocktail parties and dinner parties, and danced at night clubs until the early hours of morning. He would then jump into his car and drive back to Salisbury Plain in time for a change of clothes and parade at six. Two other afternoons a week, he usually attended race meetings in the Wiltshire and Berkshire area and he certainly took me to a race meeting at Salisbury and introduced me to all his cavalry friends.

The life he was leading was noticed by the powers that be, and he

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Chapter 2 was duly summoned to the War Office and told he would be posted to Gibraltar. He said he very much regretted that he would have to decline this posting as it did not offer any of the activities in which he was interested. He promptly resigned his commission and went back to the south of Ireland where he had been born and where his family had property, and he took over the mastership of some pack of hounds for three years. On the outbreak of war in 1939, he was recalled and served in the desert where he was awarded a DSO and bar.

In September 1933, I joined the troop ship SS Nevasa at Southampton to embark on the three-week voyage to Bombay. My parents were delighted to find that the battery commander under whom I had served on Salisbury Plain for two months had also been posted to India with his wife, and I was put under their care. I was still only twenty years old!

The Nevasa was an experience in its own right. There wasn’t an empty space anywhere, filled as it was to the hilt with officers and other ranks. When we got out into the Bay of Biscay, we had the inevitable autumn storm and the number of individuals on board ship suffering sea sickness had to be seen - and smelt - to be believed.

The officers’ accommodation was fine. Anyone unlucky enough to be orderly officer, however, was forced to go down into the “bowels” of the ship and inspect the individuals serving below decks, the vast majority of whom had been violently seasick. We did eventually sail into the calmer waters of the Mediterranean as far as Port Said, where we were all disembarked and marched through the streets to show the flag. At Port Said, I had my first view of Lascars (foreign workers) carrying sackloads of coal on their shoulders to load up the ship for the rest of its journey to India. When we arrived at Bombay, we were invited to supervise the coolies on the docks who were unloading our ship and arranging for the cargo to be dispersed to its various destinations throughout India. I then had to undergo another two nights and a day in the train that would take me on the final leg of my journey across India to Cawnpore on the south bank of the Ganges. Cawnpore was a large industrial town with a small military garrison down river from the city. Though Cawnpore was in United

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Chapter 2 Provinces, bordering Nepal, the town itself was situated in the middle of a vast plain and, of course, got very, very hot in the summer months.

I wanted to look my best when I arrived in Cawnpore, so I dressed myself up in my full uniform boots and breeches. When I stepped off the train at midnight in all my finery, the first thing I noticed was that the entire population of India seemed to be asleep on the station platform. Although I had been informed that I would be met, it appeared that I had been forgotten about, so I carefully stepped over the sleeping bodies and made my way to the station exit. Outside, I was thankful to hear myself hailed by the driver of the battery car, a Hindu, who was waiting to conduct me to the officers’ mess.

It was the tail end of the hot weather in Cawnpore, and just like the people at the railway station, the senior subaltern at the officers’ mess seemed rather the worse for wear. When I arrived on the veranda of the officers’ mess, he emerged in a comatose state from under a mosquito net and, without a word of welcome, simply pointed to the bed I had been allotted on the veranda. With the help of the bearer, I undressed and went straight off to sleep. Just under six hours later, I was awoken and I gazed out from the veranda across what appeared at first sight to be an inland sea, stretching into infinity. In fact, it turned out to be the Ganges in full flood from the monsoon rains and the snows melting in the Himalayas where the river rises.

So swollen was the river that it was impossible to see the opposite bank.

There was no transition period or time to get used to the new way of life. I was instructed immediately on the routine I was expected to adopt, which was their routine - up with the dawn and down to the parade ground by bike to be met by a horse-holder and a readysaddled horse. Battery exercises followed in the early morning before the onset of the heat, and this was followed by breakfast in the mess and then parades until approximately midday, when it became too hot to do almost anything, except, of course, in the cooler weather from October to March. In spring 1934, the hot weather caught Cawnpore early and unexpectedly, and the temperature rose during

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Chapter 2 the course of one inspection in the second week of April to a temperature I had never before experienced: 1120 Fahrenheit. Not surprisingly in heat of that kind, the senior officers took the decision to abandon all activities after mid-morning and sit out the inspection in the cool of their messes.

Following lunch every day, irrespective of the time of year, there was a two-hour siesta. This was followed by polo three days a week or shikar or hunting. In winter, hunting consisted of shooting duck and snipe, and on Sundays in the hot weather, pig-sticking. Everyone adopted the procedure more or less automatically. As far as polo was concerned, I was at a slight disadvantage because I had been posted to this battery to replace Lord William Beresford, who was not exactly impoverished. He owned eight polo ponies and I owned none! Lord William had gone on leave to England and resigned his commission on health grounds leaving his eight polo ponies to be sold off. I had no money at all except the £100 left to me by my Aunt Mary, my father’s sister, when she died in 1931. I think I was sufficiently shrewd not to spend that £100 on buying polo ponies, particularly as Lord William had been a very ill-tempered polo player and his ponies often declined even to be ridden in the direction of the polo ground.

Pig-sticking also took some getting used to. The form was to set out the Saturday night before the hunt and camp on the banks of Ganges.

We would then rise before dawn and ride our horses through the tall grass while the beaters beat the grass to stir up the wild boar. When an animal was flushed out, we would pursue it remorselessly!

Cawnpore was one of the premier pig-sticking regions of India and we were therefore often invited to entertain visitors from the expensive cavalry regiments in Lucknow. I found myself one Sunday in the heat with officers of the 10th Hussars, including such illustrious men as Willoughby Norry, who later commanded a corps in the western North African desert, and the celebrated Captain Rosco Harvey, who later became Brigadier Harvey, twice won the DSO and later became Secretary of Stewards at the Jockey Club. On this occasion, we did indeed corner a nice-looking pig and everyone shouted at me to spear it. I was only twenty-one, and had never

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Chapter 2 killed a wild boar before, so all I could do was prick it lightly like a sausage. In the end, the others had to come and finish it off for me.

We had been joined in the battery by John Hawkins, a Cambridge University graduate who was as blind as a bat. How he had managed to pass the medical was the subject of endless debate. On one occasion, my battery captain, having killed a boar, was standing with his foot on the animal and his spear aloft about to be photographed.

Seeing the dead boar, John Hawkins dismounted from his horse and ran up to it waving his spear which he then proceeded to thrust, not into the boar but into the foot of the battery captain. There we were, in the middle of nowhere, miles from the military hospital, with the battery captain in agony. Someone at least managed to pull the spear out of his foot and get him on to a dhooli, the Indian equivalent of a Sedan chair. But then he had to be transported back to the campsite through the bush before he could be placed in a battery car and taken to the hospital. John Hawkins was a pest in another way, too. He used to answer advertisements for horses for sale and then tell the vendor to deliver the horse to our officers’ mess. Meanwhile, he would go on leave, leaving us to finance the horse from mess funds - not only its purchase, but its feed and general care as well.

Come the beginning of the hot weather in May and June 1934, I discovered I was going to be invited to take two months’ leave. I had no idea what to do or where to spend my time, so I took the advice of one of the subalterns to go to the Kulu Valley, which was 5000 feet up in the Himalayan foothills and had good fishing and trekking. I made a booking and travelled by rail and bus up into the minor foothills. Here, the buses were driven by very experienced and dashing Sikh drivers who used to take all the corners on the wrong side and at speed. In the Kulu Valley, I was fortunate enough to meet a married couple from Kent who instructed me on how to gear myself up to go fishing, either for rainbow trout, which had been introduced to the Kulu Valley River, or for mahseer which were native to the area but much bigger and more exciting to catch and land. I was no good at catching trout. When I went out on picnics with various people, I was always described as the idle mouth, in the sense that I didn’t contribute anything to the feast.

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Chapter 2 One day, I went out fishing for mahseer from a pleasant sandy beach I had discovered along the river. I was having very little luck and spotted another sandy beach further up the river, from which I thought I might be more successful. The only problem was a large rock lying on my path which I would have to climb over. Off I set, only to find that the rock was an enormous snake coiled in the sand sunning itself. I should have known better, I suppose, than to write home about the snake, for back came the now famous reply from my mother that I must be careful when fishing to make sure I was not attacked by a tiger. She need not have worried. I did not find fishing all that interesting. I did, however, quite enjoy the climbing, and accompanied one couple on a trek above the snow line.

However interesting fishing and climbing may have been, they were still not my idea of adventure. On the way back from Kulu Valley to Cawnpore, I determined I would spend my next leave in Australia with which the family had a multiplicity of connections. I did not know at this time, however, the drama that awaited me back in Cawnpore.

The battery captain who had been speared in the foot had to spend time in hospital and he was replaced by another captain at short notice, Robert Carr. Captain Carr’s face was badly disfigured due to a tumble he had taken while practising show jumping at Woolwich.

No-one had been aware of the accident until the groom had gone to feed the horses at night and found the captain’s still-saddled horse back at the stables. After a hue and cry , they found Captain Carr in between two jumps with one side of his face kicked in. Presumably in the 1930s the surgeons were unable to do anything about restoring his cheek and face, so the man was left with one side of his face severely disfigured and the other quite normal and handsome.

After I returned from my holiday, I settled myself back into my quarters, and the following morning, got on my horse as usual and was riding up to the first parade when I found myself being hotly pursued by a bearer on a bicycle. “The Captain Sahib has shot himself!” the bearer excitedly told the battery Sergeant-Major and me. Stunned, we went back to the bungalow to Captain Carr’s room,

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Chapter 2 which just happened to be next to my own. The battery SergeantMajor reckoned I was a bit too young to go in and face the full horror of the suicide although I did venture in after a bit and saw Captain Carr slumped over his writing table. He had apparently spent the whole night writing farewell letters to his wife in England, his children at school, his parents, his doctor and other members of the regiment. Very thoughtfully, he had deliberately waited until I got on my horse and he heard me clattering away, before taking his revolver and doing the deed. Details of why he committed suicide were never vouchsafed to me because I was comparatively young, but the general consensus was that his debts had overwhelmed him.

His disfigurement would also probably have drastically reduced his chances of gaining promotion which meant that he would be retired from the army at a relatively young age. He had obviously concluded that, under such pressures, life was no longer worth living.

As I was only 21, the powers-that-be hastily recalled an officer senior to me to hold the fort and I was despatched north to take charge at Naini Tal, a hill station in the foothills of the Himalayas, where the soldiers were sent for a month at a time to escape the hot weather on the plains. I played out the rest of the hot weather in Naini Tal, while the senior officer held the fort at Cawnpore and another officer was found at short notice to take over from Captain Carr. That officer was Major Montague (Monty) Cleeve. My mother was always hoping that Monty would marry one of my sisters when he came on leave to England. What she was not to know was that he had been badly wounded in the war and, as a result, this was not to be. In his own way, Monty, though from a famous military family, was quite a character and dissimilar from the hearty, outdoors types one usually met in India in that he played the violin and was also an expert pianist.

After I had been several months in Cawnpore, the battery was ordered to rejoin the rest of the regiment in Lucknow over eighty miles away. We rode our horses to Lucknow, camping out every night en route, and it was on this trip that I had my initial experience of Indian corruption. It had been decided some years previously to have

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Chapter 2 the main road from Cawnpore to Lucknow metalled, and this was put out to contract. No-one thought to stipulate to the Indian who had won the contract that it was the whole of the road surface that had to be metalled, so he metalled only every alternate mile, leaving mile-long stretches of dust in between.

Soon after joining the regiment at Lucknow, we went out on manoeuvres and I found myself kneeling behind my guns one afternoon when the rain started coming down in torrents. I was only in my shirt sleeves and, having just become acclimatised to the heat, found myself shivering. I caught a bad chill and, a couple of days later, I was admitted to Lucknow Hospital with a temperature. As I lay on my back on my bed gazing at the ceiling, I noticed the ceiling fans rocking from side to side. At the age of twenty-one, I thought to myself: “This is the end of me; I’ve got a deadly disease and I’ll never recover.” Later in the afternoon, a couple of other subalterns came in and asked: “How did you get on in the earthquake?” I immediately felt 50 per cent better and the next day I was discharged.

Lucknow was a very sociable centre as it had two cavalry regiments stationed there as well as two top class infantry battalions. The senior subalterns in the officers’ mess reckoned it was a poor night if they didn’t have invitations to two different cocktail parties. We went back to Cawnpore in time for Christmas where, of course, as the latest-joined second lieutenant, I discovered that I was orderly officer over the Christmas period. One or other of the subalterns who was going away tiger shooting or the equivalent in the Central Provinces over the holidays gave me a valuable piece of advice: “Don’t go to the warrant officers and sergeants’ mess at midday on 25th December.” He added that when he had first come out to India, he had done precisely this and, as he put it, lost one entire day of his life. In all innocence, he had gone along and found himself plied with drink. He was carried out of their mess at 3pm on Christmas Day and did not surface until dawn on December 27th, thereby losing Boxing Day. I thus gracefully declined the invitation to the mess on some specious excuse! On Christmas Day, the tradition was for junior soldiers to sit down for a mammoth meal, waited on by the

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Chapter 2 officers and senior NCO's, and frankly, I preferred to have a jolly good meal, rather than to spend the day in a deep sleep.

That winter, I started playing polo in rather more exalted company than the previous winter because it was discovered that, although not an expert horseman or polo player, I could be entered into high handicap teams. My low handicap brought the average down, so that there was a good chance of winning a handicap tournament.

During the winter in Lucknow I found myself playing in a team with three officers in 10th Royal Hussars one of whom was Lord George Douglas Montague-Scott, whose elder sister was out in Lucknow with what was called “the fishing fleet”. She ultimately landed an excellent catch in the shape of the Duke of Gloucester. Another member of the team was Chinless Charrington of Charrington’s Beer and another was Morley of Morley’s Underwear. The 10th Hussars were the Prince of Wales' Own and consisted mostly of the sons of second-generation industrialists who were loathe to go into industry and found being cavalry officers in a smart regiment far more congenial. Whether we won the tournament or not I cannot remember.

It was now 1935 and I was in my second year in India. There was some debate as to whether I was entitled to a long leave. After much humming and haahing, it was decided that I was entitled only to short leave, but that did not deter me from carrying out the plan I had formed after my fishing trip to the Himalayas. I duly booked myself a passage to Australia.

In fact, I booked a tourist-class ticket from Bombay to Sydney on the Nakunda, politely informing my parents in England of my plans.

They, however, took it upon themselves to add a new dimension to the arrangements, and their intervention turned out to have a marked effect on my future. Aunt Jen, my father’s elder sister, who lived in Australia, had been in England for the King and Queen’s Silver Jubilee, and everyone decided it would be a marvellous idea to book her a passage home on the same ship as me so that she and I could meet up in Bombay and travel on to Australia together. The plan was that the long sea voyage would provide a perfect

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Chapter 2 opportunity for Aunt Jen and me to get to know each other. Though she and I had never met before, my Aunt very kindly paid the difference between my modest tourist-class ticket and a first-class passage, and it was here that fate came into play and Aunt Jen’s plans for companionship went desperately astray.

They seemed doomed from the start. In May 1935, just out of Bombay, our ship met the full force of the south-west monsoon and I fell violently ill. From Bombay to Colombo, I was poor company indeed, but I did recover sufficiently to accompany Aunt Jen on sightseeing and shopping expeditions during the short time we spent in Colombo. As we re-embarked on the Nakunda, Aunt Jen was now probably delighted at the prospect of finally having her nephew to herself on the voyage across the Indian Ocean. What she did not know was that Elizabeth, travelling out to Australia after the death of her father, had also booked a first-class passage on the same ship and that our paths were about to cross.

- Elizabeth As my brother Charlie was working in Malta, I decided to stop off on my voyage to Australia to visit him. He was working as a journalist on a newspaper owned by an English woman who had inherited the business from her father. It was still winter and the weather was very bad. For five weeks, no shipping whatever could get in or out of the harbour at Valletta, but Spring was starting, the guest house where I was staying was very pleasant, and I was happy to be out in the world and free at last.

I finally managed to tear myself away from Malta and took the boat to Ceylon. It must have been a P & O vessel, as this was the only line that served Malta. On the boat, I met some very friendly planters and their wives who were returning and I received invitations from some of them to come and stay. I stayed in Ceylon all told about three months. When I arrived in Colombo, I stayed first at the famous hotel, the Galle Face, which proved so expensive that I very quickly went into the “other” hotel in Colombo, the GOH (the General

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Chapter 2 Oriental Hotel) and from there went up-country to stay with the different tea and rubber planters. My hosts included an elderly man, an elderly couple and a single middle-aged man.

The middle-aged man invited me to stay with him right at the top of the island. It may have seemed foolhardy for a young woman to stay with a man in this way, but I was confident that I knew how to take care of myself and I was also confident that this was a well meant and kind invitation with no strings attached. What I found particularly interesting was being conscious, the whole time I was there, of being under surveillance by a local woman who lived in one of the godowns outside the bungalow. It was only after going back down to Colombo that I realised the significance of this. She had been the man’s mistress and concerned that I might be coming to marry him.

As I was by now very tired, I decided I really must continue my journey to Australia and booked a first class berth on the next boat to Melbourne, the Nakunda.

I heard David’s voice before I saw his face. I was sitting on a sofa in one of the salons. It was back-to-back with another sofa, and a young man and elderly woman came and sat down on the other sofa to talk.

David had a wonderful voice. That was why I was first attracted to him. When I was introduced to him, I was wearing a lovely pale blue frock which I had had made - at enormous cost - in Colombo. He was very definitely attracted to me, too, in my pale blue frock. I would have liked to keep it as a memento but I dragged it into some black oil while I was standing on the top deck during the voyage, and ruined it.

David was travelling with his Aunt Jen. He had booked himself into economy class, but she had paid the difference so that he could travel with her in first class, otherwise we might never have met. I’m afraid Aunt Jen did not see much of David after we were introduced, and instead of going to stay with her later in Australia, he travelled to Melbourne to see me, and spent three weeks there.

The Nakunda duly docked at Sydney Harbour. In those days,

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Chapter 2 journalists used to come and interview people arriving by boat who looked young and glamorous. I was considered young and glamorous enough to have my photograph taken and it did actually appear in the newspaper. Perhaps I would have been even more of a celebrity, but I was travelling on the same boat as Sir John Birdwood, the Governor-General of Australia and he naturally had to take pride of place over me.

I then parted from David and travelled down to Melbourne where my sister and her husband were still living. It was only later that she and Bobby moved to Adelaide to run a private hotel. They had one child, a son, Robert William Frederick Wright, known to us as Fred.

Anne and Bobby helped me orientate myself in Melbourne and I decided I had better find myself a job double quick to support myself after these months roving the world. One interview I attended was with a lady who was setting up a salon in Sydney for Cyclax, a brand of cosmetics used by our present Queen. My interviewer asked me if I would go and work for Cyclax at the prestigious Farmers Trading Company in Sydney and I accepted. After all, David was in the Sydney area - he had relatives he wanted to go and see, and as they were up-country from Sydney, so it all fitted in rather well. I moved into the Cheverills private hotel at the Point in Sydney, which had beautiful grounds going right down to the harbour’s edge.

David went back to India and I carried on working. I loved everything about Australia right from the start. I enjoyed my work - apart from the fact that I did not get on with the woman in charge of the perfumery department at the Farmers - and I have always said I would like to go back to Australia, but I gather it became very Americanised during the war. My brother, Charles, eventually came to live in Sydney and worked for the Sydney Morning Herald, and he, too, lived out at the Point.

David was due for six months’ leave in 1936 and I moved out of the hotel into a flat for his leave. We decided to marry.

The decision was made so quickly that my engagement ring and wedding ring were both bought at the same time from Hardy Brothers in Sydney.

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Chapter 2 We were married on March 26th, 1936 at the Church of Scotland in Sydney. There were just five of us at the wedding, David, myself, two bridesmaids and a priest whose name I cannot remember. Under the rules of his regiment, David was forbidden from getting married before the age of twenty-five, which was still a couple of years away.

I was not married in a traditional white wedding dress. I made the dress myself from very expensive pink and black patterned silk material. David, contravening regimental rules, did not wear an army uniform, but a suit!

My bridesmaids were two New Zealand friends of mine, both of whom were very wealthy and lived in the same private hotel as I did.

One of the sisters worked with me at Cyclax and her sister worked for another cosmetics company. We were unable to give either of them a gift as we were so broke. David had no money and I had only what I was earning and a little left over from what I had inherited.

My wedding present to David was therefore quite modest, but we have it still, a miniature of me in an oval frame. The story of how I acquired it is quite interesting. As I said previously, my photograph had been taken when I arrived at Sydney Harbour and had appeared in a newspaper. Someone had obviously seen the photograph and liked it so much that they had taken the trouble to have it framed.

Quite by chance, I saw this miniature in a shop window and I was able to buy it for David.

Then, of course, David sadly had to go back to India after his leave, and no-one in the regiment even knew about his secret marriage!

- David Soon after my return from Australia, the battery was instructed to move to Lucknow permanently. On arrival there we became involved both in army manoeuvres and more polo tournaments. The army manoeuvres took place near Delhi and were carried out in response to Hitler’s invasion of the Rhineland and more importantly, as far as India was concerned, Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. Because of the developments in Europe and North Africa, more officers were required in Egypt and Malta. At one time, my name was on the shortlist to go to Malta, but luckily I was just too senior and I also

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Chapter 2 had three more years to serve in India.

It was while on one of these manoeuvres that I witnessed my entire worldly possessions vanishing into the dark. As we were now on the move, I had packed everything I owned in the world into a succession of trunks and boxes and these were loaded on to an army wagon which was pulled from place to place by four mules.

Suddenly, in the middle of one night, we were ordered to move.

Someone should have held the mules but, being somewhat sleepy, did not hold on tight enough. The mules took fright at all the movement going on around them and, to my horror, galloped off into the night. Luckily for me, the mules crashed into a tree before they were able to go too far, and I was able to recover my possessions.

While in Delhi, I was invited to play in two polo tournaments, without notable success, I should add, as the standards were very high in the capital of India. As a result of Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, all leave for 1937 was restricted to the Indian subcontinent.

Luckily, that included Ceylon as Sri Lanka was then called. So Elizabeth and I arranged that she should come by boat from Australia to Colombo where I would arrange to meet her. For my part, I travelled by train from Lucknow to Colombo which involved a journey half way across the length of India and took four days.

Without something to do, the journey was going to be very boring, so I took T.H. Lawrence’s book, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, out of the library and read that on the train.

Elizabeth and I met in Colombo but found the hotels in the city to be very expensive. So we moved out to Mount Lavinia and stayed, still at vast expense, in a tourist hotel there beside the ocean. I practised surfing in the monsoon breakers but without much success. This was an immensely enjoyable time. We did not move very far from the hotel which was frequented by tea and rubber planters who were also restricted from going back to Britain because of the turmoil in the Mediterranean. At the end of our time in Ceylon, Elizabeth returned by sea to Australia and I travelled by train back to Lucknow.

After the luxury of the holiday, I had rather lost track of expenses.

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Chapter 2 The first day and night I travelled on the train first class, but then calculated that my cash was short, so the next night and day I travelled second class, but then realised that I had to eat and food was going to “eat up” my vital cash supplies, however frugal I was.

To complete the journey, therefore, I travelled the last day third class and arrived back in Lucknow in the very early hours of the morning with just 4 annas in my pockets - a few pence. Luckily, I had arranged for the battery car to meet me to complete my journey to the Officers Mess, otherwise I would have been stranded!

My Colonel, of course, did not know that I had disobeyed orders and married. I therefore asked his permission to get married when I went back on leave to England in 1938. He agreed. I arranged with Elizabeth that she should travel back to England for the wedding via Bombay and over the 1937 to 1938 Christmas and New Year holidays, I was lucky enough to get a short leave which I took in Bombay.

By 1938, the battery was moved to Mhow in the central Indian province of Indore. It was that much closer to Bombay if the unit were called upon to embark at short notice to fight in the Middle East.

By a coincidence, the Governor of Bombay was Lord Brabourne, who had originally interviewed me for the Bank of England, had found me less than enthusiastic, and had suggested I join the army. My mother wrote to the Brabournes at Government House in Bombay and told them I was stationed in Mhow. She also dropped a broad hint that I might like to be invited down for a long weekend at Government House. They took the hint and I travelled down to Bombay and spent the weekend with them. Lord Brabourne was exceptionally nice to me but Lady Doreen was not all that affable and friendly. Whether they were looking me over as a potential aide-decamp I do not know, but I was not invited to apply and wouldn’t have accepted the job anyway. The sort of jobs ADC's were expected to do on a slack morning was to take the Governor’s wife’s Pekinese dog to the vet in a large car with an escort and then to sit for half an hour in the surgery, while the dog received treatment. I had not joined the British army to carry out domestic duties such as those!

Again Elizabeth came back by sea from Australia. Her three years in Australia were now at an end. She resigned her job in Sydney and

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Chapter 2 said goodbye to her sister, Anne, who had now moved from Melbourne to Adelaide. I travelled down from Mhow to meet Elizabeth and we had a ten-day holiday at a small private hotel not very far away from the very grand Taj Mahal hotel in Bombay. We visited the Taj Mahal from time to time in order to dance but not to have their large and expensive meals. After the ten days were up, I travelled back to Mhow to await my leave and Elizabeth travelled on to England through the Suez Canal and via Malta where she again stayed with her brother Charlie, who was still working on the newspaper. Mussolini by this time had had no success in Ethiopia and the crisis in the Mediterranean had diminished.

In London, Elizabeth was met by my mother and father who took her to lunch at the Charing Cross Hotel. My parents had already received favourable reports of Elizabeth from my Aunt Veronica and Uncle Wilson who had met her at the Manly Hotel in Manly, New South Wales and been most impressed with her. My parents asked Elizabeth what she would like for lunch and she immediately said Dover sole, the one dish she had not been able to savour and enjoy all the time she had been in Australia, Colombo, Bombay and Malta.

It was then that she looked across from the Charing Cross Hotel window and spotted a Barclays Bank on the other side of The Strand.

As she had family connections with Barclays, she went over and opened an account there. The branch has moved several times from The Strand to 25 Charing Cross Road to 5 Henrietta Street and is now in Regent Street. The family connections have been retained. Both our daughters Sheila and Felicity still have accounts at the Regent Street branch - and all because Elizabeth had lunch with my parents at the Charing Cross Hotel in 1938.

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Chapter 3

CHAPTER THREE - The Wedding and Family Matters -ElizabethWe had kept the secret of our marriage in Australia for almost two and a half years. Our official wedding was planned to take place in England in August 1938. By that time, David’s father was Rector at Biddenden in Kent. They brought me back to Biddenden Rectory to stay with them in advance of the occasion. I remember my arrival vividly. I was older than David’s sisters and had a bun which made me look mature as, at that time in England, it was the fashion to have your hair bobbed. The sisters carefully scrutinised me as I walked down the drive and they drew their own conclusions. As I walked into Biddenden Rectory, Sarah, the youngest, leaned over the banisters, looked down and said: “Oh, she’s really old!”

We had always intended to tell David’s mother and father that we were already married, but when we came home to England, they wanted to give us a proper wedding and we did not have the heart to break the news to them.

- David In 1938, there were to be two weddings, that of my sister Zizza, then aged 19, to Walter Vanrenen and our own. Zizza married Walter in the early summer of 1938 when he was on leave from his regiment in India. They had met originally when Walter was staying with his mother at her golfing holiday home near Rye in Sussex. He and Zizza had met from time to time at local social events.

It was a busy time with two marriages in the family and under the stress of it all, Elizabeth blurted out that we were already married to

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Chapter 3 my mother, who was dumbfounded. There was no going back now, however. My mother told my father and they both managed to keep their mouths firmly shut and did not divulge a word to anyone, especially to the parson.

We were married “officially” in August 1938 at St Columba’s in Pont Street, Knightsbridge, in south-west London. The reception was held at the Cadogan Hotel, Cadogan Square, where Oscar Wilde was arrested. That was not the reason the Cadogan Hotel was chosen, of course. The real reason was that it was the closest decent hotel to the church, which was itself chosen because it was the premier Church of Scotland for the west of London. There were fifty guests, of which seven were parsons. The rest were relations or friends of my father’s from Trinity College, Cambridge.

One of these Trinity College guests was “Uncle” Phil Armitage, a friend of my father’s and not a member of the family. He was very keen for us to get married in the church where he regularly worshipped, which was Holy Trinity, Brompton. He even said he would pay for the reception if we were married there, but Elizabeth wanted to be married in the Church of Scotland, so his generous offer was declined.

Phil Armitage was one of a group of half a dozen undergraduates, which included my father, who were the sons of very wealthy parents. After World War I, Phil Armitage decided to devote his life to left-wing politics, just as Major Attlee, also the son of wealthy parents, had decided to do. These young men at Trinity had no need to earn an income and were influenced into going into the Church Missionary Society to spread the Gospel. Phil went to Allahabad in India, and my father went to the Prairies. That explains, of course, why I was born in Canada.

Another of the young men, Henry Holland, went to Pakistan and later became Sir Henry Holland for his good work in curing Pakistanis suffering from cataracts and glaucoma. He was so expert that he was able to travel from village to village in the Punjab and North-West Frontier Province carrying out a hundred operations before lunch and a hundred before dinner. His secret was to wait

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Chapter 3 until the unfortunate patient had his eye completely blocked with hard film and then, without anaesthetic, remove the film with a deft flick of his finger nail. Interestingly enough, this way of curing blindness has been put forward as an explanation for Christ’s miracle of making the blind see.

Back to Phil Armitage, who was exceptionally good looking and married Betty, the sister of one of the young men. My father was also alleged to have been enamoured with Betty, but when he discovered Betty was out of circulation married my mother, Eirene Wood, the sister of Uncle Reggie Wood whom he also met at Cambridge. Uncle Reggie, I hasten to add, was not one of the rich men’s clique. More about him later.

Uncle Phil was very go-ahead and in the 1920s, after he came back from India, bought a very expensive and powerful motor cycle and used to cruise around Oxford on it until one day he had a ‘father and mother’ of an accident and was taken to the hospital. The doctors pronounced him so badly injured that they were unable to do anything for him, and he was left a cripple for life. At this point, Betty separated from him, but they never divorced. Uncle Phil’s will to live carried him through, even though whenever he came to stay at Biddenden, he was so disabled he had to sleep in my father’s study on the ground floor. Eventually, he took up residence in Nettlebed in Oxfordshire, one of his previous parishes, where he became very friendly with Lord Morris, of Morris cars fame.

Lady Morris had never been used to having servants and she was incapable of running a household with servants. Probably as an escape mechanism from his wife’s incompetence, Lord Morris became very friendly with Phil Armitage. I suppose this was also because Phil was sufficiently wealthy in his own right not to wish to cadge from him. Basically, there was no ulterior motive for the friendship. Eventually, even living in Nettlebed was too difficult for Uncle Phil, so he removed himself to Central London where he had a New Zealand woman housekeeper. Actually, he had a succession of women looking after him, including my sister Mary who used to accompany him to cricket matches.

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Chapter 3

Uncle Phil worshipped at Holy Trinity, Brompton, for the simple reason that it was easy to get his wheelchair inside. The fact that he was willing to pay the costs of the wedding reception if Elizabeth and I married at Holy Trinity shows the extent of his wealth. In fact, I would say that Uncle Phil was extremely well off. So much so that in spite of later giving away vast sums of money to his children, he still ended up better off than when he started giving it away. Uncle Phil had two sons and a daughter. The daughter married well. Her husband, Sir Eric Speed, was Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the War Office. The elder son, Selby, because his father had left him so much money, became a playboy. During the course of one meeting with Uncle Phil, my father asked: “And what is Selby doing now?” “He’s studying for the bar,” came the reply. “And where is he studying?” asked my father, imagining an expensive barristers’ chambers. “Oh,” said Uncle Phil, “out on the lawn.” The bar in question was obviously the type that dispensed alcoholic drinks!

Uncle Phil’s younger son wanted to be an actor and a great deal of money was spent to allow him to pursue his vocation at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He eventually became engaged. “To whom is he getting married?” asked my father. “Oh,” said Uncle Phil, “to a tobacconist’s daughter, but we don’t talk about that very much, Alan.”

Uncle Phil was renowned for his generosity. After looking after him for several months, my sister Mary had gone out to Saint Jean-deLuz as an au pair to a Mrs Perrier to look after her offspring. The family all went on a winter sports holiday in Switzerland and it was while there that Mary had a bad accident to her knee. The Swiss doctors took one look at Mary’s knee and reckoned they couldn’t do anything with it, so they just sewed it up. As a result, Mary was almost completely incapacitated. Uncle Phil, one of whose beneficiaries was the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, arranged for Mary to be admitted and taken under the wing of a famous surgeon.

Under normal circumstances, this man would not have dealt with her, but he was under obligation to Phil who had made a donation to the hospital as a result of his accident. The specialist at the Radcliffe

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Chapter 3 Hospital opened up Mary’s leg and carried out various operations and my sister became mobile enough to play tennis and golf.

As mentioned previously, my father, had been disappointed in love

by Betty. He now met and proposed to my mother, then Eirene Wood.

My mother’s eldest brother, Uncle Reggie, had also been at Trinity, but had not been part of the inner circle to which my father belonged.

Uncle Reggie had always wanted to follow family naval tradition and go into the Royal Navy and, as he was ordained, his particular wish was to go into the naval chaplain’s department. Captain Wood, his grandfather, had distinguished himself at Waterloo and later in the Mediterranean, but his mother, my grandmother, was the second wife of her husband and she had no pension and no home. She said to Uncle Reggie: “I can’t let you go off. I need you to house me in a rectory or in a village and you have to provide me with income from your stipend as a parson.” So Uncle Reggie was thwarted from doing what he wanted. His younger brother, Percy, could not abide the situation, took off to Canada and was never heard of again. My mother tried to establish contact with Percy when she went to Canada with my father, but he had by this time emigrated from Vancouver and gone south of the border. He was last heard of in California.

Reggie had an aura of genteel poverty. Parishioners felt sorry for him going around in a cassock and sandals all the time. When he died, a member of the parish went to open up his house and found nineteen pairs of brand new shoes in the cupboard. He had accepted shoes as a gift out of politeness, but had never worn them. In fact, he was alleged to be so impoverished at the time of his death that my mother and father agreed to pay his funeral expenses. The irony was that, when his affairs were settled up, he was found to have three bank accounts, one financed by some benevolent widow, one which received his stipend and the other a building society account.

At the funeral, my mother’s half brother, the son by the first wife, told my mother and father that as he lived locally, he would deal with Reggie’s affairs. He was a parson himself, above reproach, and intimated that he had quite a lot of experience of sorting out the affairs of elderly parishioners.

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Chapter 3 That item of news, in itself, should have alerted my mother and father but they did not give it much thought until they received a communication from a solicitor in Melton Mowbray saying that one of his clients, Reverend Wood, had written that he was prepared to act as executor of his dead brother’s estate. Fortunately, my mother and father twigged that something odd was going on here as he had introduced himself as “brother” and not “half brother”.

It was the late 1950s and I was back in England. Stirred on by me, my father wrote to Sir Cullum Welch of our family solicitors, Wedlake Bell. The result was that the country solicitors in Melton Mowbray unexpectedly received a fairly stringent letter from Sir Cullum, who had just finished his term as Lord Mayor of London. They disengaged themselves from Reverend Wood and subsequently handed over several thousand pounds to Wedlake Bell.

Some years later, someone read in the newspaper of the will of this particular Reverend Wood. He had died worth £27,000. One had to conclude that he was obviously well practised in the art of siphoning off a high proportion of the assets of relatively well-to-do parishioners who had died leaving no valid heirs.

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Chapter 4

CHAPTER FOUR - Early Married Life - India - David After celebrating our second wedding, Elizabeth and I went out together in November 1938 to rejoin the 6th Field Brigade at Mhow in Central India, where we set up our first home and acquired our first dog, a black-and-tan spaniel called Bunty. The Regiment was in the process of being broken up and the officers had the option of either returning to the United Kingdom or being posted to other stations in India. I asked to be posted to Bangalore because it was an all year round station and Elizabeth would not have to be sent off to a hill station in the hot weather. In other words, we could stay together.

War had broken out in Europe by now, and we wanted to make the most of our time together. At the moment there was no question of my having to fight, but who knew what the future held? In December 1939, we set off to travel from Mhow to Bangalore by train taking Bunty with us in the carriage. This was a considerable journey, even by today’s standards, Mhow being right in the middle of India roughly on a line with Calcutta, while Bangalore is in the south on a line with Madras. Travelling with Bunty made things even more tricky, as we needed to take into account that she would need to “answer the call of nature” on a fairly regular basis!

On the way, the train stopped at a big railway junction. Glad to give Bunty the chance to get some fresh air, I very foolishly opened the carriage door and let Bunty out on to the platform without putting

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Chapter 4 her on the lead first. I had not seen there were some pie dogs - wild dogs that roamed the Indian countryside of the Indian sub-continent scavenging for food - out on the platform. A confrontation was inevitable. Bunty took a look at one of the dogs and her hackles went up. She squared up to it. It squared up to her. The next thing I knew was that I was trying to separate them. When we arrived in Bangalore, I reported the incident as a matter of course to the military hospital. They told me that one couldn’t be too careful in situations like this and that even though I had not been bitten, I should still have a course of fourteen injections for rabies. As Elizabeth had been present and witnessed the scene, it was suggested that she should have a course of seven!

Elizabeth had her seven injections, one a day for a week, then did just what the doctor ordered, which was to rest and recuperate without any energetic exercise. As far as I was concerned, as Adjutant of the Regiment, I just didn’t have time to give the injections much thought and continued to bicycle back and forth from home to the parade ground and to the Mess and to ride my horse. I don’t think the seriousness of the situation really sank in until the time came to have my fourteenth injection on Christmas Eve. The doctor’s hands were shaking like mad from a surfeit of Christmas festivities, as he prepared to inject me, and he announced to me that, as I had had thirteen previous injections in my stomach, he was unable to find a suitable place for the fourteenth!

From the domestic point of view, we were in a slightly better position in Bangalore than in Mhow. There, I had been a junior officer who had married young, and this was held against me by some of the other officers. In Bangalore, however, I became a more senior officer and most of my contemporaries and peers were also married.

Frankly, we had a whale of a time in Bangalore. The Garden City had an excellent climate and the social life was good. Elizabeth was readily accepted by the other wives and I got on well with my fellow officers. We lived in Cambridge Road, Bangalore, in a large bungalow divided into three. We had two thirds of the building and a fellow officer called Donald Adams lived in the other third. The accommodation was completely separate and we hardly knew he was there.

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Chapter 4 - Elizabeth It was in Bangalore that the other wives showed me how to run an Indian household. I learned to call the cook in after breakfast, tell him what we would be eating that day and take a note of what he had spent the day before. I would give the cook a lump sum to buy provisions, but I always had to add up the bills to see what had been spent and how much was remaining to make sure I wasn’t cheated.

The Mem Sahib did not go to the market.

- David Bangalore had a race-course and I was invited by one of my senior officers, Major Barlow as he then was, to ride in amateur races, something I had never contemplated doing before. Major Barlow had trained racehorses himself when he was stationed in Singapore and Malaya for three years and he was very keen on the idea. I was also encouraged to take part by the colonel of the regiment, Meade Dennis, who had been a celebrated gentleman amateur rider before the war in England. With two such “sponsors�, the whole thing had to be taken rather seriously and that entailed getting my weight down to ten stone.

The opportunity for a slimming regime soon presented itself, for it was suggested that Elizabeth and I might like to visit a place on the outskirts of Bangalore called Nandi Droog. This was an isolated rocky outcrop rising out of the plains to a height of 3,000 feet above sea level. At the time of the Indian Mutiny, Nandi Droog had been occupied by the celebrated Tippoo Sahib, a cruel Maharajah whose favourite sport was to force prisoners to walk to the cliff edge and throw themselves off. He always took care to position himself strategically on a nearby rock so he could watch the horrified look on the faces of his victims as they dropped into eternity. There seemed no better way to shed a few pounds than by tackling Nandi Droog myself on foot.

At this point, it is worth mentioning that Elizabeth for once was not trying to lose weight, so for her we hired a dhooli. I walked and Elizabeth was carried by four coolies. Though it was understood in Bangalore why I personally might be undertaking such an

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Chapter 4 expedition, no-one comprehended why Elizabeth was accompanying me. “Elizabeth! What on earth are you doing going to Nandi Droog?” demanded our Battery Captain’s wife, one of our more outspoken friends. The fact was that we hadn’t been long married and Elizabeth was too shy to tell Patricia that we were thinking of having a second honeymoon there.

- Elizabeth David actually ran up - and he still had energy when he got to the top!

- David At the top, there was accommodation for us, a dak bungalow, dak being the Indian word for post or mail. As it was quite respectable, we took it. We had brought a cook and servants with us, but they didn’t exactly hurry along. In fact, they trailed rather reluctantly behind the dhooli but they did to some extent keep Elizabeth company.

When I got back to Bangalore, I was lean and fit and ready to enter my first race. My horse, Gold Dust, had been left to me by the previous Commanding Officer when he went back to England. The horse was a valuable Australian polo pony, and had been beautifully schooled by the owner’s wife, so as he didn’t want to sell it to any Tom, Dick or Harry, he gave it to me. I had never ridden properly in a race before, so was relatively inexperienced. When we got down to the start, Gold Dust suddenly remembered its palmy days as a race horse in Australia and bolted all the way round the course. Back we came to the start. That, I thought to myself, was the end of Gold Dust, at least on this outing. We lined up, the flag dropped and off we galloped. The bolt round the course, however, had just been a warm-up for the redoubtable Gold Dust. There was no stopping him.

To the amazement of myself, the other riders and all the spectators, we won.

Naturally, everyone thought it was a put-up job, because after Gold

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Chapter 4 Dust bolted, it was judged to be a complete outsider and was given the quite astronomical starting price of 285 to 5. The Stewards instantly ran a security check on the betting to discover that only one person had backed the horse: an unidentified Anglo-Indian gentleman in a pork pie hat who had left the course and hadn’t been seen since. Even our closest friends refused to believe that we didn’t know how good the horse was, and the incident even merited a write-up in the newspaper. I did race Gold Dust again, but not at such attractive odds, as I was virtually handicapped out of the race.

Nevertheless, racing in Bangalore was very enjoyable, for it was not just a racing event, but also a social one.

In addition to race meetings, which were well and truly social functions, I also played in polo tournaments. I played polo quite seriously and began to distinguish myself here, too. In one tournament, our garrison team defeated the Mysore Lancers from the neighbouring Indian state of Mysore.

1940 Bangalore Newspaper Cutting Bangalore Tournament (FROM OUR STAFF CORRESPONDENT) In the Bangalore Subsidiary Polo Handicap Tournament - confined to teams which were eliminated in the first round of the Junior Handicap Polo Tournament - to-day on the Cambridge Road Polo ground, the Enthusiasts and the Mysore Lancers “B” qualified for the final which will be played on the Palace Polo ground on Sunday evening.

In the first match, the Enthusiasts beat the Mysore Lancers “C” by 7 goals to 2, the Lancers receiving one goal on handicap. The Lancers played better than the score indicates. Their weakness lay in their inability to finish.

Kumaramangalam and Ronald played a great game for the winners. The only goal scored by the Lancers was claimed by Ganesh Rao. The seven goals for Enthusiasts were scored by Kumaramangalam (4), Horsfield, Yousuf and Ronald.

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Chapter 4 This completed a double, for in Mhow, I had played in a regimental side defeating the Indore Lancers from the central Indian state of Indore.

But the highlight of my polo career was in Bangalore being on the winning team in the Golconda Cup, a high-handicap tournament, and playing alongside such celebrities as the Maharaja of Cooch Behar, whose father had been at Harrow with my father. The Golconda Cup team was sponsored by the Nizam of Hyderabad, reputed to be one of the richest men in the world. The cup we won was almost as high as the ruler’s son with whom we were all photographed.

- Elizabeth It was in Bangalore that we were both introduced to Mahjong. We both became fans and played as often as possible. I played in the mornings with the other wives and both of us played in the evenings.

Bangalore was also a good shopping centre with plenty of clothes and material in the shops. The material could be made up by the local durzi or dress maker.

- DavidBangalore was one of our best ever postings. When war was declared, a number of officers being posted off to the Middle East or Singapore, did not wish to sell their polo ponies on the open market, so they left them with us. At one time we had nine race horses and polo ponies in our stables under the care of our groom, Juggli.

- Elizabeth It was my job to go out three or four times a day to supervise our “string� of horses and make sure they were being fed - I who had never ridden a horse and never wanted to!

- David -

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Chapter 4 In 1940, while we were in Bangalore, certain units of the Sikh regiment mutinied. They had been “got at” politically and didn’t want to embark overseas to fight. The German agitators had told them that the Germans would come to India and liberate the country from British rule. India would be free. As Adjutant of our regiment, I had to turn out to thwart the mutineers, but this meant leaving Elizabeth alone in the bungalow. We then decided on a very unusual and untraditional course of action, bringing Juggli, our diminutive groom or syce to work in the house as a bearer and as protection for Elizabeth while I was away. Having made the arrangements, I set forth to quell the mutiny, leaving this four foot high man guarding Elizabeth with a seven foot long hogspear left over from my pigsticking days. It was not for long, however. By the time we arrived the mutiny was well and truly over.

We also heard from Walter Vanrenen, who had married my sister Zizza in 1938 and was an officer with the Central India Horse, that the Sikh Squadron of the Central India Horse was refusing to follow orders to embark at Bombay to fight in the Middle East. Walter’s regiment, Central India Horse, regarded themselves as the elite of the Indian cavalry and they therefore arranged through Viceregal patronage that they were always stationed either in Delhi or at Meerut which was forty miles away. This meant that the officers of the Central India Horse could continue to be invited to Viceregal Lodge to attend all the social functions in Delhi as well as playing their polo. Many of the officers were Old Marlburians. I knew a lot of them but through Walter and Zizza, rather than from my school days.

Elizabeth was by now pregnant and was due to have the baby in September 1940. The existing School of Artillery Regiment in Deolali was sent to fight in the Middle East and our regiment, still horse drawn, was due to replace them. Our march was scheduled to begin in September 1940 around the time Elizabeth was due to give birth.

Not only was I exceptionally busy as Adjutant preparing all the administrative arrangements for this march, which was to last for the best part of ten days to a fortnight, but I also had the additional worry of Elizabeth having the baby.

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Chapter 4 Before I left, Elizabeth had gone to stay with the Colonel’s wife and when Elizabeth went into labour, she took Elizabeth into the hospital.

Elizabeth had been admitted in the normal way, but by the greatest of ill luck, Colonel Oxley, the gynaecologist supervising Elizabeth’s health all the time she was pregnant, was out riding that very morning, was kicked by a horse and broke his leg. As a result of this, he was incapacitated and unavailable for any urgent gynaecology procedures, with the result that Elizabeth was in labour for three days. I had set off with the regiment, but after two days was urgently recalled to Bangalore.

- Elizabeth It was so different in those days. I’ve always tried to push what happened out of my mind, but after all that time being pregnant, not to have a baby was heart breaking. The gynaecologist was confined to bed and was not able to come and examine me in detail. They sent an urgent message to the hospital in Poona and summoned another gynaecologist to come and take his place. He was very young and was virtually untrained. I was in the most intense pain. David was recalled. The baby was a girl. I have no clear recollection of seeing her. Technically, she was stillborn. David went to the burial service.

The baby is buried in the military cemetery in Bangalore.

- David In my mind I called the child Angela. I saw her put in the ground.

She was buried in Bangalore but we were now going to be stationed hundreds of miles to the north at Deolali and could not go and visit the grave or put flowers on it. Elizabeth and I still talk about her and often say to each other that Angela might now be a grandmother.

- Elizabeth It may be difficult for some people to realise that, having lost a baby, how much comfort our dog, Bunty, was to me. David was often not there and I used to talk to her for company.

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Chapter 4 - David When we were posted from Bangalore to Deolali, I travelled up with Elizabeth by train and, of course, we had to take Bunty with us. We were so impoverished, however, that we couldn’t afford to pay to have the dog in the carriage with us because that would cost a child’s fare. We therefore put her in the open-air dog box in the back of the train. We were quite worried that she would get dusty so when we came to the first big station, we got out of our carriage and walked down along the platform to see how she was getting on. She looked at us in absolute disgust, then turned her back on us. Our consciences were so pricked that we went through our pockets and paid out our last few rupees for a ticket so Bunty could spend the rest of the journey with us in the carriage.

This was not the only time the dog was angry with us. In early 1941, Elizabeth was pregnant for the second time. We always used to go for a walk at sundown and take Bunty with us. One night, however, the local cinema was showing Gone With The Wind and this was a treat not to be missed. What we had not appreciated, however, was how lengthy the film was, so there was no time for a walk when we got home. When we arrived back, Bunty took one look at us, then turned her back and slumped down in a corner in a huff.

In the early summer of 1941 to get away from the heat, Elizabeth went to stay at Bickley House in Mussoorie, a forty-eight hour train ride away from Deolali, with Mrs Welchman, the wife of Brigadier Welchman, who was shortly to be my brigadier in Burma. This was the first time Elizabeth had been to Mussoorie, which was 9,000 feet above sea level, and as bad luck would have it, there was a cholera scare and so everybody was invited to be vaccinated. This was a normal routine procedure, so the injections were carried out not by an experienced commissioned officer but by a medical assistant who neglected to ask Elizabeth if she was pregnant. The net result was that the injection caused a miscarriage.

Elizabeth was put into the hospital for a short time at Mussoorie, then we decided to rent Bickley House ourselves for three months to allow her to convalesce. It was the last house in Mussoorie and had a

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Chapter 4 fantastic view of the Himalayas. The servants lived in quarters which were about a quarter of a mile away, and when they returned at night, we used to watch them swinging their hurricane lamps from side to side to ward off panthers as they threaded their way back home through the jungle. As Mussoorie was so far from Deolali, after the initial fortnight of compassionate leave I spent with her, we didn’t see each other at all for the remaining two and a half months.

It was to be several years before Elizabeth became pregnant again.

Neither of us could understand why Elizabeth failed to become pregnant, both before I went to Burma and after I came back from Burma. We were later to discover, however, that the gynaecologist who treated Elizabeth after her miscarriage was far too inexperienced for the job and had sewed her up too tightly after the operation. It was to be as simple - and as depressing - as that.

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Chapter 5

CHAPTER FIVE - The War in the Far East - David War with Japan was now imminent. Everyone had hoped war in our part of the world might be averted, but after bombing the American Fleet at Pearl Harbour in December 1941, the Japanese pressed on remorselessly westwards, sinking two British ships off Malaya, and invading the Philippines, Sarawak and Hong Kong. It was only a matter of time, I knew, before I myself would be called upon to contribute to the war effort.

The immediate threat, as far as we were concerned, was to the Britishheld territories of Singapore, Malaya and Burma and, if those fell, to India and Pakistan, the real jewels in the crown. Japanese air-raids began on Rangoon, the capital of Burma, in December 1941 and their ground troops started to advance into the south of the country during early 1942. In February 1942, we got our marching orders - or rather our sailing orders - for Burma.

- Elizabeth David left for Burma in February 1942. I gave him a small volume of poetry to take with him to read in any spare moments he had. To keep myself occupied and not dwelling on morbid thoughts, I had decided to keep a diary while he was away of the troop movements and battles of the campaign. I intended to cut out all the extracts from the Civil and Military Gazette and paste them into a book. I even bought a book which had 365 blank pages in it, but in the end there was nothing to paste, because no-one knew what was happening.

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Chapter 5 - David After receiving our orders for Burma, the Regiment boarded a Dutch ship in Madras, with the intention of sailing to Rangoon. We were not even out to sea when our Dutch captain got cold feet about the journey, refused to continue and diverted back to Madras. We found another ship, a British India ship with a British skipper, but it was, by now, the middle of the night and we were faced with transhipping all our personnel, guns and equipment. It was hardly a fortuitous start to our war.

Once aboard the British ship, we set off for Rangoon and sailed across the Bay of Bengal, then up the estuary of the Irrawaddy to dock in Rangoon itself. While travelling up the Irrawaddy river, I looked over the side of the ship to see lots of little river craft or sampans manned by people who, I naively assumed, were Burmese going about their business up and down the river. They certainly didn’t appear to be interested in us.

When we arrived at the docks, we discovered to our surprise that all the dockyard workers had vanished, and that we had been left to unload our own guns and heavy equipment from the ship on to the quayside. This we did as best we could with the help of anybody who had stayed behind and not vanished into the hinterland. It was only then that we discovered that those unidentified Orientals in the sampans were Japanese soldiers and that the only reason they hadn’t taken much notice of us was that they had more serious business: a bald-headed attack on British Army Headquarters in Rangoon.

Talking of bald heads, our departure from India had been so hurried that I had not even had time to get myself a hair cut so I simply arranged on the crossing from Calcutta to Rangoon, to have my head shaved. Whereas, previously, I had been blond, when my hair grew back months later, it turned out to be anything but! I had also not had time to have the requisite vaccinations against tropical diseases, so decided to rely on my strong constitution to ward off sickness. My optimism was justified. Not once was I ill during my four months in Burma.

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Chapter 5 Commanding the British troops in Burma in 1942 was General Alexander, later to become Field Marshal, Earl Alexander of Tunis.

He was later to have a supremely successful war career in North Africa and the Mediterranean, but in Burma his main claim to fame was that he led a masterly retreat, of which I formed part! General Alexander took command in Burma in early March 1942. His orders were to hold Rangoon if possible and failing that, to withdraw northwards to defend Upper Burma. Within days of taking command, he saw that Rangoon was doomed and decided that our only option was to abandon the city and retreat northwards to Prome with all our transport and artillery. Luckily, the Japanese needed to reorganise after the fighting at Rangoon, giving us a little breathing space to make our retreat. But the loss of Rangoon meant, effectively, the loss of Burma and all we could do now was try to stay alive.

We had two major disadvantages on our northward trek. The first was that all our vehicles and heavy equipment were painted what one might term “Sahara Yellow”. It was only due to a last-minute change of orders that we had been sent to Burma rather than to the North African desert, and there had been no time to paint our vehicles and equipment the more appropriate shade of “Jungle Green”. The second problem was the maps - or rather the lack of maps.

Having no maps was rather disabling to a strategist like me and it caused me quite a headache. Early in the Burma campaign, I received an order from one of Alexander’s staff officers to send four of my guns to Wanetchenung. Like the rest of us, this staff officer did not have any maps. After receiving the order, I got hold of Bob Manson who was troop commander and told him the news. “Where the hell is Wanetchenung?” demanded Bob. I could not enlighten him.

Nevertheless Bob, a Lloyds broker and extremely well off, was a resourceful man, and in spite of having no maps, he got his guns as per orders to Wanetchenung.

In the meantime, I had somehow acquired a map. It was in Burmese script and in spite of my map-reading prowess learned at Woolwich, I found it almost completely useless. Eventually I did decipher

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Chapter 5 exactly where Wanetchenung actually was, and I quickly saw that there was no exit to the north and that Bob’s troops were effectively up a cul-de-sac. I quickly communicated to Bob to get the hell out and on to the main road, which he did, overruling the staff officer’s original orders.

My actions, of course, led to the threat of court-martial. I had disobeyed orders. I instantly reported to Brigadier Welchman’s HQ and told him that one of the officers on General Alexander’s staff, a man without maps, had given me ridiculous orders to move guns into unsafe territory, and was going to have me court-martialled for disobedience. When I recounted the incident to Brigadier Welchman, he said that was one of the most stupid orders he’d ever heard any staff officer make. “The British have only got twenty-four guns in the whole of Burma, “ he roared, “and to risk four of them in a place he didn’t even know was possible to get into or out of is ridiculous!

When I see him, I will have him court-martialled!” Sadly this was typical of the atmosphere in which we fought the first Burma campaign. No-one really knew what was going on.

- Elizabeth I was in the dark, too. I was living in Poona at the time and, one day much to my surprise, I received a letter from David post-marked Calcutta. My hopes were raised that he had come out of Burma. I decided to go and see if I could find him in Calcutta, so I crossed the whole of India, a journey of three days and two nights.

I stayed in a big hotel in Calcutta where many of the people who had been evacuated from Burma were billeted. With the advance of the Japanese, these people had left in a hurry, often being allowed to bring with them only what they could carry. Many of the British in Burma - timber and mining people - had expected to live their whole lives there. With the Japanese advance, they had been forced to abandon all their worldly goods. They had lost everything in Burma, property, personal possessions and money, and some of them just couldn’t take it. Many of them just threw themselves off hotel balconies in Calcutta. The atmosphere was dreadful. My own

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Chapter 5 disappointment was also intense, for I soon discovered that David was not in Calcutta.

- David The fact that I sent Elizabeth a letter with a Calcutta postmark was quite fortuitous and was due to the fact that the Dutch skipper we originally embarked with for Rangoon lost his nerve and diverted back to Madras. After transferring all our equipment to the British India ship, we had been allowed to write letters and telegrams and after we sailed, these were sent off from Calcutta to various destinations. No-one realised, of course, that the letters, which arrived at their destinations weeks after we set sail, would raise false hopes among our loved ones.

- Elizabeth I was in Calcutta, I had not found David and I was terribly disappointed. Yet I suppose I am also a very practical Scot, and as Calcutta was the largest and most important city in India at that time, I decided to get some medical treatment. I was still unable to conceive. I had been badly torn during my pregnancy and I decided I might as well go into a nursing home in Calcutta and have the damage repaired. The Garrison Commander in Calcutta was Brigadier Barlow - of Gold Dust fame - who had been David’s Battery Commander in Bangalore three years previously, so he took me under his wing. I spent three weeks in the nursing home, which was run by a Scottish couple, then Brigadier Barlow advised me to return to Poona immediately because the Japanese were supposed to be about to bomb Calcutta.

- David Unfortunately, Elizabeth had no money to go back to Poona so she went to the local branch of Lloyds Bank in Calcutta where she was a total stranger and on the strength of her air of honesty and good faith, the manager advanced her a large sum of money without any security whatsoever!

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Chapter 5 - Elizabeth The Japanese never did bomb Calcutta, neither then or at any time during the war, but the threat was enough and I fled, before I was really well enough to travel.

The journey back to Poona took me another three days and two nights and I was in absolute agony, as I was not fully recovered from the operation. I had to change trains, too, which added to my problems. I was so ill I couldn’t talk to anyone or even ask for help.

- David The reason I was never able to communicate with Elizabeth during my time in Burma was that, as a Battery Commander, I was always on the move. We had eight guns in my battery, in other words, one third of the British guns in Burma. These were twenty-five pounder howitzers which we moved along on wheels hitched to the back of American trucks. As mentioned, all our equipment was brightly painted in yellow and there we were, towing these very visible weapons through the very green jungle. We fired them at the Japanese whenever we got the opportunity, but the trouble was that we were always being outflanked. The Japanese used to march at night through the jungle and infiltrate our rear headquarters. It was then a question of either withdrawing or being taken prisoner. We were always on the defensive.

For instance, in April 1942, my battery was ordered up-country and we were told to dig ourselves in facing east, which we did, and camouflage ourselves, which was rather difficult in view of the colour of our vehicles. We had not been dug in facing east for more than a few hours when we were suddenly ordered to remove ourselves from that area, go up-country and dig ourselves in facing north. Nobody knew why.

This had been going on since our arrival in Burma. After the episode at Wanetchenung, for instance, I was ordered with the battery to move to Pegu and to form a defensive position facing south. We had

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Chapter 5 not been there very long before we found ourselves outflanked for the second time and had to withdraw further north along the Irrawaddy to the area of Prome. Here, we were reinforced by a very experienced armoured brigade under General Slim with plenty of experience of fighting in the western desert. General Slim decided to counter-attack the Japanese next time they emerged from the south, but the plan had to be abandoned as, by this time, the Japanese were in a lower valley and advancing on the valuable oil fields at Yennen Yeung.

With the counter- attack plan abandoned, we had to fall back once again to make a front with the Chinese division that had been sent down the Burma Road by General Chiang Kai-shek to help support the Burma army against the Japanese. There had been Japanese hostilities against China throughout the 1930s, mainly to gain economic advantage. With most of Indo-China and south-east Asia having fallen to the Japanese, China was vulnerable, especially as China and Burma had a common border. There were six divisions of Chinese soldiers in Burma at that time, and they were placed under the command of the American General Stilwell. I saw the Chinese soldiers with my own eyes only on one occasion. It was the middle of the night and, from my vehicle, I caught sight of men in uniforms I did not recognise in a camp lit only by hurricane lamps.

Who were these mysterious people, I asked? The Chinese in Burma were exceedingly brave. They had no air cover for their tactics, and as soon as the Japanese appeared, they advanced and engaged in hand-to-hand conflict. In this type of fighting, they were every bit the equal of the Japanese, but, just like the British troops, they had no answer to being bombed from the air.

After a few weeks of suffering aerial strafing by the Japanese, I began to discern an interesting pattern. When we were deployed on the side of the main road, we would often see retreating Burmese refugees accompanied by their monks in their yellow saffron robes. It seemed more than a coincidence that about half an hour after they passed us, the inevitable Japanese aircraft would emerge from the southern sky and start flying up the main road strafing on either side to their hearts’ content. It dawned on us eventually that the monks were

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Chapter 5 actually Japanese spies and that they had short-range communication equipment back to their airfields. I remember lying on one side of the road once with junior officers as an aircraft came in at low level, firing indiscriminately. We wondered how quickly the bullets would kill us, but fortunately, all the firing seemed to be focused on the other side of the road and not on our patch.

Until April 1942, at least we had some air cover for our operations, but we were soon to be deprived even of that. On Good Friday, 3 April 1942, the RAF decided to surprise the Japanese by flying from their main airfield and launching an air offensive on the Japanese advanced air bases. The Japanese, it was reasoned, would not expect an attack on Good Friday from a good Christian air force. The mission was a success and the British pilots were back at base celebrating on Easter Sunday when to their surprise and horror, the Japanese counter-attacked and caught all the British aircraft on the ground. They destroyed everything and we never saw another allied plane for the rest of the Burma campaign.

I now found myself with my battery, not for the first time, bringing up the extreme rear guard of the retreating army. It is no exaggeration to say that, on many occasions, I attribute the fact that my life was saved only to constant prayers to the Almighty. On one occasion, however, it was due to brute force. In April 1942, for the first and, unfortunately, the only time in the campaign, the troops I was supporting - the 48th Ghurka Brigade - and the guns we were firing in their support were able to give the Japanese a bloody nose.

Finding ourselves completely surrounded by the Japanese, I got on the blower and told the officers with the guns to stay where they were, as we were going to fight it out. I said to one of the officers: “If I am killed, you are to take command “ Well, we fought and we won.

When I got back to Ghurka Headquarters, I asked where the Brigadier was only to be told that he had taken his orderly down to the front line with a couple of Tommy guns in order to “shoot as many Japanese as he can.” As a result of my actions, I was recommended for a Military Cross by the Ghurka Brigadier under whom I was serving.

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Chapter 5 One of the drills I learned at the School of Artillery at Larkhill came in very handy in Burma. This particular drill covered what to do when the guns were moving across country and came under fire from the enemy. The drill was for the senior officer to draw his sword and wave it about his head to indicate to the rest of the battery to spread out as wide and far as possible. On one occasion, I was leading the battery in single file across a paddy field when we came under fire from Japanese guns. I did exactly as I had been taught, except that I was then in a vehicle and also had no sword. I therefore simply stood up in the vehicle and waved my arms in the correct manner; the battery then spread out and we set off in good order without suffering any casualties.

The Japanese, as seen, constantly dictated our movements, and in the end did little more than chase us the length of Burma for 600 miles from Rangoon to the Chindwin River. There was no chance of reinforcements because there was no port at which our ships could land, and for the same reason, there was no chance of escape except on foot. By the end of April, the Japanese stood before Mandalay. The Chinese withdrew into China or across the mountain ranges into India. Alexander, with the British marched north-west to Kalewa on the Chindwin River. This was the only way in which we could defend the eastern frontier of India which was already threatened by a Japanese column.

We had to march through the night and along jungle paths until we reached a staging post where there were ferries to transport us across the river into Assam. On the other side we were met by lorries which took us on still further to the border of Assam and India. We abandoned all our guns, all our transport and our few surviving tanks. It was a terrible defeat, but we had achieved one very important objective. We had barred the Japanese road to India. That, together with the monsoon rains that began within days of our withdrawal, managed to keep the Japanese out of India for good.

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Chapter 5 - Elizabeth The first news I heard of David was after the campaign was over in June 1942 when Brigadier Welchman contacted me to say David was all right. I still didn’t know when I would see him again, because the Brigadier told me they were walking out of Burma across the Chindwin River into Assam.

- David After almost five months of jungle warfare, the Regiment was debilitated. We came back to India in the late summer of 1942. From here, we were posted to the cooler climate of Peshawar in the Northwest Frontier Province to take the place of a mountain regiment which was posted to Burma.

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Chapter 6

CHAPTER SIX - Pakistan and Home -David We were stationed in Peshawar for a very short, but very enjoyable four to five months during the 1942 to 1943 cold season.

At that time, there was a considerable threat to British citizens in India and Pakistan from a powerful movement in India, led by Mahatma Gandhi, to sever links between India and Britain. As the Japanese advanced westwards, India was directly threatened, but Gandhi firmly believed that India, to survive, should declare its neutrality, and that this was possible only by ending British colonial rule.

Because of the Quit India campaign, measures to protect British subjects had to be taken. Thus the old city of Peshawar was placed out of bounds. Elizabeth, however, being an inveterate shopper, did not take in the full significance of this, so invited one of the subalterns to take her shopping there. The Commanding Officer discovered what had happened and summoned me to his presence. He said I had allowed Elizabeth to disobey standing orders and he cancelled my leave - all ten days of it!

Orders such as these meant that our entire social life revolved around the Club. We lived at a bungalow on The Mall in Peshawar and would walk down The Mall to the Club. I was on parade each day from 7am till 5pm. We had roll call at 7am, then I would jump on my bicycle for the ten-minute journey home for breakfast which consisted of porridge, scrambled eggs and bacon. Both eggs and bacon were local and freely available and as we had an Indian cook, not a Pakistani Muslim, there were no problems about cooking pork.

After breakfast, it was back on parade where we carried out exercises

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Chapter 6 such as gun drill, inspections and map reading. Lunch at 12.30, not the main meal of the day, was followed by an hour’s siesta. We did not play polo in the afternoons in Peshawar. Having just returned from Burma we were completely mechanised and had nothing to ride.

- Elizabeth It was while we were living in Peshawar that we acquired another dog. Bunty had just died from intestinal troubles after eating chicken bones. The officer we were sharing a bungalow with visited me one night after dark while David was in Peshawar and asked me if we would look after his yellow Labrador while he was away. I thought in all innocence that this was a temporary arrangement, but in fact, his regiment had been ordered overseas and we hadn’t realised this.

I also did not know at the time that he had heard about Bunty’s death and that we would be lonely and in exactly the right frame of mind to accept his dog. And so, we inherited a Labrador bitch who would eventually travel back to England with us. Her name was Jill.

- David During this time, I was sent on a course to the School of Artillery at Deolali. Here, I impressed the Commandant because I claimed in a discussion in open court that, as far as possible, the battery I had commanded in Burma had followed drills and procedures laid down in the classic artillery training provided at Woolwich and Larkhill. I used the example of the time we had come under fire from the Japanese while moving in single file across a paddy field. I told how I had waved my arms around so everyone would disperse, and how we had suffered no casualties as a result.

After the course, we returned to Peshawar where we saw out the winter, but in the Spring of 1943, out of the blue, we were posted as a regiment to Quetta. On the train journey from Peshawar to Quetta, the train stopped at a small station in the early morning. We climbed out of our carriage to see water lapping up against the side of the platform. The Station Master came out to greet us and we

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Chapter 6 congratulated him on having had all this rain. He looked at us as if we were dotty and said: “We haven’t had rain here for the last two years.” It was a mirage, but nonetheless a miraculous sight, for it looked just like tiny wavelets glinting in the sun.

In the meantime, we had decided to breed from Jill and had chosen her partner carefully, an Indian yellow Labrador registered with the Kennel Club. We had not been long in Quetta before I was, again unexpectedly, called back to the School of Artillery in Deolali as an instructor in gunnery. Again, we travelled by train, a journey of two days and two nights, and as the dog was by now pregnant, we took her in the carriage with us. Of course, we had not realised how close to giving birth she was. On setting out, we had paid for three tickets, two adults and one dog, but every time the train stopped at a major station, Jill gave birth to another pup. The local grapevine was on top form. Well-wishers met us at each station with milk. When we eventually arrived at Deolali, we were faced with a moral dilemma.

Should we pay up for the extra five fares? I seem to remember we were excused, which was just as well. Although we sold the puppies to other officers, for a while we were stuck with the runt of the litter which was very sickly and cost us a fortune in vet bills!

After a year as an Instructor at the School of Artillery, I was posted to the Staff College at Quetta in July 1944 and, most memorably, we had to sleep in a huge tent for the entire six months for fear of an earthquake.

It was at this time that I went to see the son of Sir Henry Holland, whose father who had been at Cambridge with my father. The son was one of the resident Indian Medical Service senior doctors in Quetta. I asked him with a certain amount of diffidence if I could be tested to see if it was my fault that we had not yet produced a family.

He said that he didn’t think it very likely to be me, even though I had recently returned from Burma. At the very most he thought I might have picked up an infection and, if so, this would pass. He sent me home with no more ado.

In December 1944, I was posted to Army HQ and we went to live

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Chapter 6 with Sir Patrick, Lord Chief Justice of India, and Lady Spens at 19 Akbar Road in Delhi. Elizabeth was still not pregnant and it was suggested to her that she should get a special examination and sort things out once and for all. Her gynaecologist was an Austrian Jew who had fled from the Nazis, escaping through Hungary, Turkey and Iran to India. He spotted that Elizabeth had been sewn up too tightly by the inexperienced doctor in Mussoorie after her miscarriage and carried out a course of treatment which would ultimately result in “success at last” in producing the family we both so hoped for.

Lady Spens, the acme of rectitude and highly religious, was, of course, deeply sympathetic with Elizabeth because of the loss of the first baby in Bangalore and also with the inefficiency of the doctor in Mussoorie. Lady Spens had an altar or shrine in her bedroom, and people can believe this or not - I had the very strong feeling that she used to get down on her knees in front of her altar every night and pray that Elizabeth would have a healthy, live baby. Her prayers worked.

- The Family At the beginning of 1945, we discovered that Elizabeth was pregnant again. After the loss of babies one and two due to the vagaries of Indian life, I was determined to get Elizabeth back to England for the birth of number three. As I was serving in Army HQ in Delhi, I was able to discover the procedure for getting priority air passage back to England. I filled in the requisite form and someone tipped me off as to which office I should visit in the palatial and bewildering Indian Government HQ. When I arrived, I was shown into the office of an Indian Civil Service official, who was sitting behind an enormous table piled high with files left, right and centre. I was a comparatively junior officer and stammered out my apologies for disturbing such an obviously busy man. He said not to worry and asked what could he do for me. I said I wanted to get my pregnant wife back to Biddenden in Kent so she could be under the care of Dr Cole and he said: “Don’t worry ,I come from Frittenden,” which was about two to three miles away

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Chapter 6 from Biddenden. I handed the form to him and he scrawled across it, “Low mental and physical state - priority ticket.” I was delighted.

It was just one of those instances where being in the right place at the right time paid off. Had I been a junior officer in the south of India, the application would have got stuck in all sorts of civil and military channels and Elizabeth would not have got out in time. But because I was on the spot and had inside information plus the connections with Kent, it was passed within five minutes.

I flew with Elizabeth from Delhi to Karachi on the first leg of her journey home to see how she reacted to travelling by aeroplane. The idea was that if she fell ill, I would be able to bring her back from Karachi. The temperature was 1120 and I consumed vast quantities of lemonade prior to take-off with the result that I was violently ill all through the trip to Karachi. Elizabeth, of course, was as sound as a bell.

- Elizabeth Having proved to David that I was fit enough to travel, the next phase of my own journey was from Karachi to Basra, aboard a military aircraft. Basra is now in Qatar, a peninsula jutting out from the desert into the Gulf. In Basra, I spent the night in makeshift sleeping accommodation at an aerodrome which was open on two sides. It was a memorable experience as, the whole night while we were lying there, men in flowing white robes were walking about, even between the beds. The next morning, a woman next to me missed her alarm clock and actually said to me: “Did you take my clock?” I was very offended.

- David The rest of Elizabeth’s journey to England was by Sunderland flying boat. The flying boat was designed for Imperial Airways in the 1930s to fly to the far flung outposts of the Empire, such as South Africa, India, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. As its name suggests, it was able to land on the sea. The route taken by Elizabeth from India to England by flying boat had been a recognised air service

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Chapter 6 for some time since the Germans had been defeated in North Africa and the Italians in Sicily.

- Elizabeth We took the Sunderland flying boat to Cairo then crossed the Mediterranean to Sicily where I landed at Syracuse. From Syracuse came the longest trip of all, a ten hour flight to Poole in Dorset. By this time, my body was aching all over and I felt so ill that I just lay down on the hard floor of the aircraft. The seats were padded, but there were no other comforts. The interior of the flying boat was completely stripped down and there was nothing to soften the noise of the engines, so it was doubly exhausting. Even when I arrived at Poole, it was not the end of my journey. I then had to travel by train to London and then go on to Biddenden. I was in a terrible state when I arrived.

- David Elizabeth arrived back in April 1945 approximately three weeks before VE (Victory in Europe) Day. She stayed with my parents at Biddenden and was placed under the care of Dr Cole who arranged for her to have the baby at his private nursing home, Kench Hill, Tenterden, the following autumn. The war was nearly over, but one of Elizabeth’s most vivid memories while staying at Biddenden Rectory were the fleets of American and British bombers flying against the clear blue sky across the Weald of Kent on their way to bomb German cities and troop concentrations in central Europe.

I had completed my 12 years in India in August 1945 and returned to the UK by troop ship to coincide with VJ (Victory over Japan) Day and the end of the war. I had left all our wedding presents marooned in crates in Deolali because I had no experience of how to get china, crockery and glass packed up. When I put the problem to the Commandant of the School of Artillery whom we knew quite well, he said, “Oh that’s no problem, David. All you’ve got to do is to get packing cases from the QM stores and pack everything in sawdust. That’s precisely what I did. I packed everything in sawdust”. and when the removal men came to lift the cases, they were too heavy to transport. So all our wedding presents had to be sold. There was nothing we could do about it.

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Chapter 6

In celebration of VJ day, my parents gave a garden party at Biddenden Rectory to which all and sundry were invited. Elizabeth was photographed at the garden party with the Union Jack wound round her.

- Elizabeth David’s mother, who was quite a character, had been saving the flag for this day in a big oak trunk she had. I was wrapped in the flag by two fifteen year old school boys, Allenby from Eton and the Freer boy who was at Harrow.

- David I had a mere 28 days leave after 12 years in the foreign service, and we spent much of the time motoring around the Weald of Kent in a hired Austin Seven. We were lucky to get that in view of the petrol rationing. I did motor Elizabeth down to Dymchurch in September and I thought that the sea looked so wonderfully warm, bright and blue that I went and bathed and caught a chill. On our way back, we went into an antiques shop in Tenterden and Elizabeth, only a month away from giving birth to Sheila, tried to squeeze past a very narrow gap and an expensive antique came crashing to the floor. We didn’t have to pay for it. We were so embarrassed and the owner was so afraid Elizabeth was going to give birth on the spot that we all called it a day as fast as we could.

Sheila should have been born at the beginning of November, but in the event, the decision was taken to deliver her prematurely in October. By then, I had been posted to Western Command HQ at Chester under Brigadier Brunker. Dr Cole had arranged for Mr Arthur Grey, his consultant surgeon-gynaecologist from Liverpool, who had a house in the country near Dr Cole and a share in the nursing home, to perform a Caesarean on Sunday 14 October so everything would be “cut and dried”. This may not be a good choice of words, but with the birth due to take place on a specific day, it did mean I could organise myself. I was lucky enough to get leave because the officer whom I was relieving had had his course postponed by a month. He was therefore able to come back to Chester and fill in for me either side of the birth.

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Chapter 6 I was not at the bedside - not in those days. It just wasn’t the done thing. The nursing home was surrounded by a large number of trees.

Magpies had nested there in the spring and by the middle of October, the young ones were just testing their flying abilities. While Elizabeth was under the anaesthetic, I paced up and down the road outside the nursing home counting all the magpies - one for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl and four for a boy. Though there were more than three, it was a girl.

I was the first person to see the baby with her golden reddish hair when Matron brought her to me. I think relief was the overriding emotion at the time. There was relief all round that I had got Elizabeth safely back to England, relief that she had come through the operation safely and relief that we now had a healthy child, weighing 9lb 5oz. We had not chosen a name beforehand. Elizabeth wanted to call her Ailsa, but my mother said that no grandchild of hers was going to be called after a rock. She was referring, of course, to Ailsa Craig, which Elizabeth knew well from her childhood and is a rugged island ten miles off the Ayrshire coast in the Firth of Clyde! We took the point, and in deference to my mother, chose instead the name Sheila, because it was Scottish and sounded nice with Ronald. As the daughter of a Nottinghamshire parson, the sister of a parson, the afore-mentioned Uncle Reggie Woods, and the wife of a parson, my mother’s entire life revolved round the church and church services. When we decided to give Sheila the middle name of Mary, mother of Jesus, my mother approved. It probably undid a little of the disappointment she felt that I had not gone into the church myself and become a bishop, something she had always hoped for.

Sheila’s godparents were a friend of mine, Colonel Barry Walker, Lady Spens with whom we had stayed in Delhi and my sister, Sarah.

I was already godfather to Barry’s son, Michael Walker. “Taking in each other’s washing” was what we affectionately called the process of being godfather to each other’s children!

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Chapter 6 - Elizabeth Lady Spens was chosen because she had been very good to me when David and I were staying with her in Delhi. She had lost a son in the war. His ship was bombed and he was ship-wrecked. She was terribly upset about this and, I think, decided to take me under her wing.

- David Elizabeth stayed in the nursing home for three weeks. Sheila was christened soon after birth at Biddenden by my father. It was just a family affair and none of the godparents attended. The weather was very cold indeed, and Elizabeth was photographed on this happy occasion dressed in an enormous fox cape from which protruded the little head of Sheila Mary Ronald. When both Elizabeth and Sheila were fit to travel, they joined me in Chester at Mrs Rogers’ boarding house on the outskirts of Chester where I had taken root. Sheila was such a hungry child that she woke up and had to be fed at two o’clock every morning. Sometimes Elizabeth fed her and sometimes I did. It was hard living in this way and I was absolutely exhausted after a disturbed night.

After I’d been working for Brigadier Brunker for a few months, I discovered that he was as tired as I was. We were both so tired that when he and I came into Western Command HQ at Chester Castle in the morning, neither of us spoke to each other until we’d had morning coffee at 11am, after which we felt human enough to resume our military duties. I was shattered after helping to feed Sheila, including mixing the feed. He was worn out, I discovered, because he had to get up every morning at 2am to inject his wife with insulin.

Being a brigadier, however, he lived in the Grosvenor Hotel while I, an impecunious major, was reduced to Mrs Rogers’ boarding house.

After a month or so of this, we decided we’d have to get a nanny.

Elizabeth advertised and we took on Nanny Brookes who was Norland-trained. This meant, of course, that we had to take another room in the boarding house to accommodate us, the nanny and

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Chapter 5 Sheila. I was there for about six months, Elizabeth and Sheila for four months and Nanny Brookes for three months.

Elizabeth spent the day struggling with Sheila until the nanny took over. She didn’t make any friends as she was still recovering from the operation. The only compensation was that the shops were lively in Chester and Elizabeth was able to do a lot of shopping. In fact, going from rural Kent where nothing happened to Chester with all its shops and activity was a real eye-opener. We did a fair amount of pram pushing and I whipped in to the Cheshire Beagles on Saturday afternoons on a bicycle.

I was then given two months’ notice of a posting to a gunnery staff course back at the School of Artillery at Larkhill on Salisbury Plain.

This was just about the time we realised that our second child, Felicity, was on the way. In anticipation of going on the course, which would last for the best part of a year, we moved back to Kent.

Elizabeth did not want to be marooned on Salisbury Plain as she knew she would have to go back into the nursing home for the birth of Felicity in October 1946. While on leave in the May, we rented a bungalow in High Halden. I then went down to Salisbury Plain on my own and lived in the Officers’ Mess at the School of Artillery, trying to come back at weekends. By this time Jill, our Labrador, had been brought back from India at army expense and lodged in the army quarantine kennels at Stockbridge in Hampshire. I bicycled once or twice from Salisbury Plain to Stockbridge and back to see how Jill was faring. I decided she was faring extremely well and looked in the picture of health and had, I noted, put on a fair amount of weight.

- Elizabeth From May to October 1946, I had my hands full looking after Sheila.

We brought Nanny Brookes down from Chester. She was highly trained and had quite grand ideas of her position in life. She was a nanny who “didn’t do nappies”, and deposited them in a bucket for the daily help to do. She often used to go off at weekends, then arrive at Headcorn station on the main line after the last bus had departed

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Chapter 6 and ring up David’s mother at Biddenden rectory. David’s mother then had to hire a taxi to collect her from High Halden. She was always extremely well turned out and smart and people used to stop her in the street to tell her how beautiful the child was and to ask who its parents were.

- David My mother tried to help out by getting in touch with her old cook, Miss Butcher, who came to look after Elizabeth, Sheila and the nanny.

Food rationing was fairly tight at the time and there are two good “Sunday joint” stories dating from this time.

On one occasion, Elizabeth had saved her coupons and bought a large joint for Miss Butcher to cook. Miss Butcher had not cooked a joint or eaten from a joint in months, if not years, as a result of the war. The result was that she over-ate, had the most enormous bilious attack and retired to bed with Elizabeth and the nanny looking after her.

On yet another occasion, my mother got into touch with someone who consented to come and do a little bit of light dusting. She brought her dog and the dog was in the kitchen when another joint was on the table. Just like Miss Butcher, the dog had also not eaten a joint for many years, so it jumped on the table and consumed Elizabeth’s. That was the end of the joint, the end of the dog and the end of the new home help!

At that time there was food and clothes rationing. You could not buy anything like coats or skirts, suits or jackets without coupons which you collected from a local government office. Similarly with food rationing. Food rationing was the reason Elizabeth gave up having sugar with tea and coffee. I did the same soon afterwards. We wanted to save the small amount of sugar we were entitled to for the childrens’ puddings.

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Chapter 6 - Elizabeth Food was adequate but that’s about all. If you were in a farming community you could get plenty of eggs. Zizza, David’s sister, had sent packets of tea to her parents all through the war from India and after the war when she and Walter were living in Rhodesia. This enabled David’s father, who visited parishioners in Biddenden as part of his parish work, to go armed with quarter pound packets of tea which he traded with farmers for eggs. You could also get freerange chickens and if you lived close to the base, like Chester, you could get fish. In Kent, we were not badly off for meat. The local butcher respected David’s mother enormously and, as she had to entertain a great many people, for instance service people around Biddenden, he gave anything he could spare to her.

- David In October 1946, Elizabeth went to the nursing home for the birth of Felicity. The same specialist, Mr Grey, performed the same operation and I paced the same quarter deck outside, counting the same magpies. Like Sheila, Felicity was born in the middle of the day on 13 October 1946, a Sunday, to suit Mr Grey’s travel arrangements.

Felicity was an extremely good baby, unlike her sister, Sheila. We had no name ready for her - but she was a happy baby, hence Felicity. To be fair, Sheila was, in fact, comparatively premature and soon after she was born went yellow with jaundice. Felicity was also a bigger baby than Sheila, probably because she was not premature and Mr Grey and Dr Cole had got their timing right. She weighed a substantial 10lbs 2oz. Felicity’s godparents were Uncle Walter Vanrenen and Cousin Rose, who both lived in America and Aunt Anne in Australia. In fact, Felicity was given the middle name of Anne in honour of Elizabeth’s sister. She was christened at Biddenden church by my father and with all three godparents residing abroad, it was only a family affair with the notable addition of a nanny.

In the summer of 1946, my father had had quite an interesting experience while officiating at another church service. That was the

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Chapter 6 year in which Lord Brabourne, the son of Lord Brabourne of the Bank of England and Bombay fame, married the eldest daughter of Lord Louis Mountbatten. My father being the local vicar, had been asked to officiate at the wedding at Westminster Abbey, alongside the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Dean. My father’s party piece was to read the prayers and, having accomplished this task, he was a little slow to move out of the way to allow the Archbishop to retake centre stage. The Archbishop, obviously under stress, gave my father a notso-gentle shove to move him out of the way, and this was witnessed

by King George VI who was seated in the congregation. After the wedding, the King gave the Archbishop a very severe rocket for treating my father in such an undignified manner!

After the birth of Felicity, Nanny Brookes reckoned she was going to be in for twice as much work as before, so she packed in her job, and we then took on Nanny Broad whom we had found to be one of the nicest members of the staff at the nursing home where Sheila and Felicity were born. She no longer wished to be bossed around by the matron and felt she would be more at ease working privately.

I was still on Salisbury Plain, and thinking that I was going to be there for two to three years more. Each weekend, I would “commute” back to Kent, travelling by army bus to Tidworth, followed by train to Waterloo, train from Waterloo to Ashford and then bus from Ashford to High Halden. It was a heroic feat of endurance, not least because of the weather conditions. The summer of 1946, before Felicity’s birth, had been the wettest summer England had had for years with farmers in Kent still trying to make hay in July instead of in the more usual May or June. That summer was followed by the coldest winter on record, which was when I was doing all my travelling, followed by the hottest summer on record, the summer of 1947.

When I made the return journey on the Sunday night, I used to insist on Elizabeth travelling with me by cold draughty bus for forty-five minutes from High Halden to Ashford Railway Station in order to see me off at Ashford Station. Then poor Elizabeth had to retrace her steps in the cold and draughty bus back to High Halden while I slogged back to Waterloo. She could do this, of course, because she had a nanny she could leave the children with.

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Chapter 7

SEVEN - After the War - David My two remaining unmarried sisters decided to tie the knot in 1947.

Rachel married Leo Lee in 1947 while she was working for the Foreign Office at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire. She had met Leo while lodging with his family at Bletchley. My sister Mary also married Mervyn Williams whom she had met in Kashmir while he was on hot-weather leave. She was staying with Walter Vanrenen’s mother at the time, who was on a golfing holiday there.

Round about the same time, in the summer of 1947, my course finished and I was given the option of where I would like to be posted so I opted to go back to Chester, but in a different capacity.

The north of England was, of course, foreign territory for Nanny Broad and she did not want to come with us. We then got hold of Nanny Burt from Romney Marsh and she accompanied us to Chester.

She was the best of the three B's (Brookes, Broad, Burt) by a long chalk.

The first thing we decided was “no more boarding houses”, so I went to see what we could rent and we came up with the Old Glass House, Chrystelton, on the outskirts of Chester. The contrast between boarding house life and the Old Glass House was stark. We were now in a three-story house with seven bedrooms, two drawing rooms, one on the ground floor and one on first floor, and two dining rooms. It cost 5 guineas a month - a guinea was one pound and one shilling, so in modern money that came to £5.25 per month - very expensive!

The house had been used as an officers’ convalescent home during and just after the war. Everything was so shabby we had to have all the chair covers recovered.

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Chapter 6 Nanny Burt used to push Sheila and Felicity in their coach-built pram every day from Chrystelton to Chester. The girls were immaculately dressed when they left; however, on arrival in Chester, they always somehow managed to get themselves into a state of advanced disarray, and ended up upside down with their legs in the air. Sheila had twigged that by rubbing her feet together, she could remove her socks, so in her case, she arrived in Chester with her bare legs in the air.

One day, nanny was off, and Elizabeth and I dressed the girls up to take them out, Sheila first, then Felicity. When Felicity was ready, we looked around for Sheila, but she had disappeared. Sheila, being impatient and independent, had solemnly collected her own little dolls’ pram and, dressed in her miniature fur coat, had set off alone to Chester, crossing the busy road into the bargain. She must have been all of three at the time - and it just had to be the day when nanny was off!

With two little girls under three, we soon realised that we would have to have a daily help from the village. This woman used to take buckets of nappies home with her every day! There were no disposable nappies in those days. We also found to our surprise that we had inherited a gardener, something we had not realised on signing the lease. We therefore had to pay insurance stamps for both Nanny Burt and the gardener and this cost a lot of money, in addition to the five guineas rent.

After we had been at the Old Glass House for a year, we reckoned we were getting more into debt and we should cut our overheads, so we scratched around and found a semi-detached house at Park Gate in the Wirral. We told the owner of the Old Glass House that the overheads were too heavy. She replied that if we had only told her of our problems she would accommodated us on the price. We were disappointed in a way because the house had really suited us, but it was too late and we moved out of the Old Glass House in July 1948.

The move helped us cut out the daily help and the gardener, thus

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Chapter 7 reducing the National Insurance stamps we had to pay, and the rent was also smaller. It wasn’t so nice as the Old Glass House, of course, but at least we had a dining room where Nanny and the children could have tea, as there was nothing quite so splendid in our new semi as a nursery.

At the time, I was working some nights in Liverpool in the Territorial Army. So after having done a full day’s work at Western Command Headquarters in Chester, I would come home, change and go up to Liverpool for drill night with the TA. After we had lived at Park Gate for only seven months, I came back from Western Command Headquarters to get dressed for TA drill when Elizabeth handed me a small brown envelope which had arrived that morning, bearing the initials OHMS. “You open it, Elizabeth,” I said to her, “It’ll be income tax.”

Elizabeth opened it and it said I was posted to Fortress Headquarters, Gibraltar, at a month’s notice. It was now February 1949 and I was due to go at the end of March. I was furious at having been moved for the umpteenth time. At this point, the Army was, I think, overplaying its hand in terms of moving people around. People just couldn’t take it and many left at this time and took private jobs. To make a point, I decided to postpone the posting for three weeks.

The Army, of course, exacted its revenge. We were made to pay our own fare to Gibraltar.

-GibraltarWe waved good-bye to Nanny Burt and, to our eternal regret, never took her home address to write to her as our departure was all so turbulent. We also had to quickly cast around to find a new owner for our dog, Jill, who had already endured quarantine after our return from India and, we reckoned, would be too old to go through it a second time when we came back from Gibraltar. My sister, Rachel, in Northamptonshire, very kindly offered to have her, and Jill went off to a much more interesting life on a farm.

We travelled out to Gibraltar by boat, and our journey was not much

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Chapter 7 better than our departure itself. Elizabeth found herself in sole charge of two little girls as I wasn’t even in the same cabin, having to doss down with eight or nine other men. The stewardess on the boat, observing Elizabeth’s difficulties, said the now famous words: “If you don’t rule these two children, they’ll rule you.”

When we arrived in Gibraltar, there was no accommodation for us and at first we had to go and live at vast expense in a hotel where my main memory is of our two little golden-haired girls continually being patted on the heads by waiters. There were not that many places to go to on the Rock, just up the main street and down the other side. We had a car, but Elizabeth didn’t drive, so was confined to the house. I went to Fortress HQ every day and after work, we would all migrate off to one of the beaches to give the children fresh air and exercise before going back to the hotel for the evening meal at 9pm.

After we had been in the hotel in Gibraltar for a few months, we were lucky enough to be able to rent the harbour master’s house, Bruce’s Farm, while he was on inter-tour leave in England; and eventually after some more months we fell heir to the army quarter on Bomb House Lane. To celebrate, we duly invited my brigadier to dinner and, in true Indian tradition, Elizabeth produced a four-course meal of soup, fish, meat and pudding and he was completely flummoxed by the extra fish course. I did not get on with this brigadier, who was luckily soon posted elsewhere, but apart from this clash of personalities, the family had a good time in Gibraltar from every point of view - work, social and tourist.

By the time we moved to Bomb House Lane, Sheila and Felicity, coming up for four and three respectively, were ready to go to preprep school. There was just one such establishment in Gibraltar, run by a Mrs Harris and her daughter, and it was very near our house.

With the girls at school, Elizabeth was completely on her own. I used to go down in the car every morning to the office and sometimes I came back for lunch, but most of the time I didn’t come back till 5pm.

Elizabeth was often marooned with two children with nowhere to go and nothing to do, except stare at the lovely view.

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Chapter 7 For this reason, we made sure we got off the Rock as much as possible. The chief charm of Gibraltar was being able to get away into Southern Spain on day trips, picnics and weekends. I had now acquired a new-look car, a brand new Standard Vanguard. There was no problem about petrol rationing in Gibraltar, although you did have to be careful you didn’t get caught without petrol in Spain. One weekend, Elizabeth and I decided to treat ourselves to a long weekend at La Reina Cristina in Algeciras - the sort of luxury hotel where Ali Khan used to go for a long weekends with Ava Gardener.

We left the children in Gibraltar with the two servants - Maria and our cook, Anna.

- Elizabeth Gibraltar was a good base for visiting interesting places in Spain.

Apart from going to places like La Reina, we used to go to Malaga and Jerez for weekends and we went to Seville for an even longer weekend. David used to go and watch the bull fights, but I didn’t go with him. I went shopping instead. The shopping was excellent in such places as Malaga, Jerez and Seville. Despite there never being very much money to go round, I did buy ornaments in Malaga which are still in circulation. Furniture that I bought in Gibraltar is still in use, as well as pictures of hunting scenes which are still on the walls.

- David It was on a tram in Seville that Elizabeth had her bag pick-pocketed.

Sheila and Felicity were with us at the time, and Sheila actually saw it happen.

There were some good beaches out on the Spanish coast, such as Tarifa beach on the Atlantic side facing out towards Trafalgar. It wasn’t a very popular beach because of the breeze that came in from the Atlantic. You got windburn as well as sunburn. On one notable occasion, while on our way to Jerez, we stopped for a picnic at the far end of a deserted beach. We had just settled ourselves down and started to eat our sandwiches when a car drove up. Out got the people and they sat right down beside us. They were Spaniards and

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Chapter 7 they realised after a bit, from the GBZ registration on the car I suppose, that we were English and they moved on. We found it quite uncanny that they should have chosen to sit right by us when there was that lovely expanse of unoccupied beach to sit on.

Going into Spain meant we needed pesetas. Everyone in Gibraltar at that time exchanged pesetas on the black market and I queried this with Sam Ward with whom I shared an office in Army HQ. He said not to worry, as even the Governor himself, General Anderson, had been seen getting his pesetas on the black market prior to a trip to Spain.

In Jerez we also visited all the bodegas, to watch sherry such as Harvey’s Bristol Cream and Sandeman’s port being made. I once got involved in taking a round trip to include Jerez and Seville with a director of Crawfords Biscuits who was out in Andalucia drumming up business for his company. I had worked with General Crawford when at Western Command HQ in Chester and the connection had been made through him.

One time, Elizabeth and I decided to drive to Malaga along the coast road. This was long before the coast had been developed, as it is today. In fact, there was no real ‘tourism’ at all. There were two tunnels underneath the cliffs and after going through the first tunnel, we found a nice quiet spot to have our picnic lunch looking out over the Mediterranean. After a while we were surprised to see the Spanish Civil Guard coming in our direction. It turned out that the officers had been watching our car as it travelled along the coast road, had seen it go into one tunnel and waited for it to emerge from the second tunnel, which of course it did not do as we had decided to picnic. When we didn’t appear, they assumed we were up to no good, possibly taking photographs or studying the military situation on the coast. We were able - thankfully - to reassure them.

Another visit we made was to Granada to see the Moorish remains dating from the time when Granada was the capital of the Moorish civilisation of southern Spain.

Douglas was by now on the way, and Elizabeth had to fly back to England from Gibraltar in April 1950 ready for his birth, which was

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Chapter 7 also to take place at the Kench Hill Nursing Home, Tenterden. My youngest sister, Sarah, came out from England to look after me and the two girls. She was still unmarried, but Gibraltar in those days was not a station where any bachelors were posted, so unfortunately for Sarah, all the men in Gibraltar were taken.

Leaving Sarah to look after Felicity, I managed to wangle a free trip to England on leave-cum-duty, so that I could be with Elizabeth for the birth, and I undertook to take Sheila back with me. Meanwhile, as I thought a car would prove very useful for getting around in England, I managed to get a temporary import permit and shipped the car to England from Gibraltar to Portsmouth as deck cargo on a mine sweeper. Sheila and I went by aeroplane and on the journey, Sheila was violently ill all over her lovely dress which Elizabeth had specially smocked for her with an intricate pattern on the front. I, of course, didn’t know what to do with the dress, so put it in a carrier bag and left it in a rubbish bin at the airport in England only to receive an enormous amount of stick from Elizabeth as to where this valuable dress had vanished to.

By this time, my father had ceased to be the rector at Biddenden and my parents were living in a three-bedroomed, semi-detached house in Tonbridge. Once I arrived in England, I left Sheila with her grandparents, and Elizabeth settled in at Kench Hill for the birth.

Douglas was also born on a Sunday, 11 June 1950, again to accommodate Mr Arthur Grey who was still working on Sundays in the country.

As Douglas was born in June, there were no magpies to be counted because all the magpies were still eggs!

- Elizabeth I was delighted when a boy arrived, and so were Dr Cole and Mr Grey. They were all so pleased for us. When Dr Cole told me that the baby was a boy, for one dreadful minute, I wondered whether he was pulling my leg to see what my reaction would be.

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Chapter 7 - David When Felicity was born, Dr Cole did tell me that the baby was a boy and very hastily corrected himself. I have often wondered if he wasn’t a bit jealous as he only had the one child and the child was a girl.

- Elizabeth We wanted to give the baby a Scottish name.

- David We decided to call him after Uncle Douglas who, in spite of his chequered school career, had been one of the most popular men about town and was invited out to a dinner party every night.

Having been sent down from Rugby made no difference to his reputation. People just laughed at that. Uncle Douglas was also very good looking.

- Elizabeth We had no names ready for Douglas. We did not think the baby would be a boy. The Arthur was after Mr Grey and Uncle Arthur.

The other middle name, Bruce, was chosen for Douglas because his great-grandfather was Robert Bruce, his grandfather was Alan Bruce and his father was David Bruce.

- David Great friends of ours in Gibraltar, Sam and Patricia Ward with whom we often used to go out ‘Dutch’ for a meal in Gibraltar or Southern Spain also had two daughters, both of them slightly younger than Sheila and Felicity. When Elizabeth returned to Gibraltar with Douglas, Patricia went out of her way to congratulate Elizabeth, but she more or less admitted to me in a roundabout fashion at some later stage that her attitude was that if Elizabeth could have two daughters and a boy why shouldn’t she? So to her delight she found herself

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Chapter 7 pregnant and to her even greater delight, she had a boy.

Douglas’ godparents were Uncle Mervyn Williams and Mrs Cole. We owed so much to the Coles and Mervyn was one of the few remaining members of the family who hadn’t been allotted a godchild.

- Elizabeth The place where the children were born is no longer a nursing home.

It is now a private home. When it was a nursing home, though it was owned by Dr Cole and Mr Grey, it was actually run by three people, the matron, the cook and the gardener! The matron and cook were sisters. The gardener was married to the matron, but they were not on speaking terms. However, it was very well run. I had no complaints. I was very well looked after and so were the babies. After Douglas’ birth, Dr Cole approached David and asked whether in fact we planned to have any more children.

- David Dr Cole took me for a walk and asked me whether we intended to have any more children. This was before he broached the subject with Elizabeth! Elizabeth had had three enormous babies, he said, (Douglas was 10lb 2 oz at birth) and he felt it might be a good idea if she had a hysterectomy at this point. This she decided to have.

- David The Coles were delighted with the success of Elizabeth’s third time motherhood and the fact that Mrs Cole was a godmother. In fact, they were so delighted that when the time came for Elizabeth to fly back to Gibraltar with Douglas, Dr and Mrs Cole collected them from Kench Hill and drove them up to London to spend the night at great expense at the Dorchester Hotel before taking them out to the airport the next day. Thus, the first hotel Douglas ever stayed in was the Dorchester!

After Douglas was born, I motored back to Gibraltar with my sister

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Chapter 7 Mary in the car. Around Bordeaux, the water pump started to go awry and it gradually got worse and worse, so half the trip was spoiled by fact we had to stop every 50 to 100 kilometres to fill up the tank with water. Water was often in short supply in those days in the south of France and central Spain, so one could not even be sure of finding any. Sheila, who had been staying with her grandparents, came back to Gibraltar on her own, accompanied only by an air stewardess.

Soon after the arrival of Elizabeth and Douglas back in Gibraltar, we made arrangements to have Douglas christened. The obvious choice was the Church of England Chaplain to the forces in Gibraltar, but he was a real time-serving smoothie, who was endlessly ingratiating himself with the Governor and the Commanding Officer in Gibraltar.

The Church of Scotland Presbyterian Chaplain was a much nicer cup of tea and we decided to ask him if he would christen Douglas, which he agreed to do with alacrity.

We were still living at Bomb House Lane, and an incident was soon to occur which proved how aptly named the lane was. On fine, warm days, after Sheila and Felicity had left for school in the morning, Elizabeth would feed Douglas and put him out on the terrace behind our house in his pram for a sleep. One morning, a munitions ship, moored in Gibraltar Harbour, went up with a bang.

The explosion was ear-splitting and threw everyone into a panic. The first thing I did was to jump in the car and rush back home from Fortress HQ to see if everyone was all right. Our first preoccupation was with Douglas. He had soon woken up, according to Elizabeth!

We had several windows shattered by the blast, but Douglas had not been hit by any flying splinters and seemed unaffected by the blast, even though the force of the explosion had catapulted his pram across the terrace. It was a wonder he had not been thrown out. Once we had satisfied ourselves that Douglas was fine, Elizabeth and I dashed across to reassure ourselves as to the safety of Sheila and Felicity, who were at school. Mrs Harris said the children had been quite unmoved by the explosion and that it was only after a while that they had realised something was amiss.

Maria, our maid of all works, had been much more worried and had

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Chapter 7 walked all the way from La Linea on the Spanish side of the frontier where she lived, to see if we were all right, effectively giving up her day off. No-one in Gibraltar was injured, but there was much property damage. Other windows had been blown in, too. Perhaps the most spectacular example was the damage done to a fellow gunner’s house. Dick and Anna Patrick lived near us on Bomb House Lane and the explosion quite literally lifted their house roof up from the walls and dropped it back down again. In the split seconds that this occurred, their upstairs curtains blew out and were trapped between the roof and the top of the walls. Another casualty of the blast was a statue of a huntsman that Elizabeth had recently bought for me in Seville. Sheila got it repaired for us by a friend of hers in 1996 in Berkshire - 45 years later!

My time at Fortress HQ came to an end in the spring of 1951, but I was not due to take up my next posting - to Newport in South Wales - until the following July. I had a meeting at the Treasury about overseas allowances and therefore took Sheila back with me to stay with Granny and Grandpa in Tonbridge. By early summer 1951, only Sheila had a home. When I returned to Gibraltar, Elizabeth, Felicity, Douglas and I had nowhere to go, so it was decided that we might as well spend a couple of months in southern Spain where the cost of living was fairly cheap. By the good auspices of the British Consul in Cadiz, a city on the Atlantic south-west coast of Spain, a job was arranged for me in a Spanish shipping office with the idea that I would improve my Spanish to try and upgrade myself from second to first class interpreter. We therefore packed up at Bomb House Lane, shipped our household possessions back to storage in England, and prepared for a two month stay in Cadiz.

-CadizWe stayed in a hotel for the entire two months we were in Cadiz. We had two rooms. In one room, we put Felicity in a bed and Douglas in a cot. Elizabeth and I had the other room. One night, we woke up with a jolt. There had been an enormous thud next door. Four and a half year old Felicity had fallen out of the bed head first into the pot which we had placed beside the bed in case she wanted to use it in the night. We rushed in to her to find her upside down in the pot

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Chapter 7 with her head covered in blood. We simply did not know what to do until we remembered that a very nice Spanish doctor was also living in the hotel. I invaded his bedroom, asking for help. He came and had a look at Felicity, then sent me off with a prescription in middle of night to the local Spanish farmacia. I returned with it and he then did something about putting clips into the wound at the back of Felicity’s head.

Cadiz was within motoring distance of Gibraltar - about 130 miles away - and we wondered, the next day, if it wouldn’t be a good idea for me to take Felicity to the military hospital in Gibraltar for a second opinion. The doctor, who had never been to Gibraltar, decided to accompany us. At the hospital, they patched Felicity up and declared she was safe to travel, and the doctor, Felicity and I duly set off back to Cadiz. It was later than we had intended and, as it was a four hour drive, I decided, en route, I had better ring Elizabeth to say we were very delayed.

My Spanish simply did not extend to using the Spanish telephone system. The doctor undertook to ring up the exchange in Spanish from a wayside inn outside which we had stopped. Before he went into the restaurant to use the phone, however, he took off his watch and rings, took out his wallet and gave them all to me, a foreigner, to look after. He was quite simply afraid that he, as a stranger going into the restaurant, would be assaulted and robbed by his fellow countrymen.

Apart from practising Spanish in Cadiz, I undertook a little amateur undercover work for the British Government. In the afternoons, it was quite hot and Elizabeth used to rest after lunch while the children were taking their siestas. It was then that I used to go out for afternoon strolls along the sea shore and have a good look at what the local defences were like. I had collected quite a bit of data on Cadiz harbour, and had even paced back and forth, “measuring” the quayside. When I went back to Gibraltar with Felicity, I took the data in to Fortress HQ and handed it in to the Intelligence Department.

Without any more ado, they thanked me and then asked me to wait.

To my immense surprise, I was then given “hard cash” for the information I

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Chapter 7 had provided, something I certainly had not expected. I was now a paid “spy” of HM Government. Perhaps the Spanish Civil Guard had been right not to trust me in those tunnels on the south coast of Spain.

Indeed, the Spanish authorities in Cadiz were rather suspicious of me. There I was, a British army officer who had plumped himself down in their town, for no apparent reason, with his family. What on earth was he up to? They arranged that their Chief of Staff and I should get to know each other better, organising Spanish and English conversation lessons for us, with each giving the other half an hour’s instruction in his own language per session. It took some time for the Chief of Staff to come to the conclusion that I was a bona fide tourist and not trying to glean military information. Little did he know!

We did find out quite a bit about each other during our weekly session. He had served in North Africa with the Spanish army at the same time as I had been serving in India with the British army. We also discovered that we had both played polo, that we had both taken part in horse shows, and that he had gone out shooting sand grouse and partridge in North Africa, as I had done in India.

The time soon came for us to leave Cadiz. We had to arrange to arrive back in Dover two years and one day after I had originally bought our Standard Vanguard in Gibraltar. At that time, if a brand new car had been in the possession of its owner for two years plus, there was no purchase tax to pay. This tax would have amounted to 25% of the value of the car which was about £250, and that, in those days, was the equivalent of a month’s pay for me, so well worth saving.

In all good faith, therefore, we set out from Cadiz with spare tyres, water cans, baby food for Douglas and the car choc-a-bloc with all our possessions on the back seat. Felicity managed to squeeze herself into a corner of the back seat with her knees under her chin. Douglas sat in his baby chair between the two of us on the front seat.

Every morning when we left our hotel, Elizabeth washed through Douglas’ nappies and we carried them wet into the car. Then, when we were safely out of the town and on to the highway, Elizabeth would open up a wet nappy and hold it outside the window on her

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Chapter 7 side of the car to dry. Before we sat down to lunch, we would spread all the other nappies out on the nearest convenient bush to dry in the hot sun.

It was mid-July and the time came for us to cross the border into France. As long as we were in Spain, we kept control of our pesetas because we knew the cost of living in Spain was fairly cheap. What we did not bargain for was going across into France just ahead of Bastille Day, 14 July, and suddenly being forced to start dealing in francs.

I had been at school in St Jean-de-Luz and I knew we could not afford to stay either there or Biarritz. I did, however, know of a hotel at the foot of the Pyrenees which I had visited on my bicycle aged twelve.

We duly checked in, but I had not reckoned with the fact that, since 1926, the hotel had evolved into a major tourist hotel and was now fabulously expensive. It was Friday the 13th, and I suppose things were destined to go wrong. We changed what pesetas we had for francs, but because we were now the day before Bastille day, we got a very poor rate of exchange and, what was more, the hotel was very reluctant to take travellers’ cheques. So off I had to go to some hotel in Biarritz and exchange my travellers cheques for francs at an equally poor, if not even worse rate of exchange.

We then set off across the rest of France, knowing that we were unable to cross the Channel until the two years and one day had expired. Our money was running short and we had to have enough money to buy petrol, otherwise the car would not be able to carry us.

We also had to make sure we had enough food for Douglas and this was also running short. I realised that the closer we came to the Channel, the more expensive the hotels would be, thus the standard of the hotels we stayed in dropped progressively night by night. On our last night, we went off the beaten track and I pulled into a village where we found the equivalent of bed and breakfast accommodation.

Fortunately, the husband was an Anglophile, who had escaped from the Nazis to England from northern France. He welcomed us with open arms, and although we paid for our bedrooms, he gave us a free meal that night and a free breakfast which vastly helped our

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Chapter 7 cash-flow situation. On the next day, which brought us into our third year of ownership of the car and therefore made it tax-free, we motored to the Channel port and drove with some relief on to the ferry.

In Dover, we had to go through the paraphernalia of all the documentation I had kept so that the car could come through Customs free of purchase tax. The Customs people were a bit dilatory and quite frankly, after a while, Elizabeth could bear it no longer.

She grabbed hold of Douglas, settled him down on the Customs shed table and started to feed him! Without more ado, the Customs and Excise passed us and the car through in a matter of minutes.

-WalesWe still had nowhere to go, as there was no accommodation for us in Newport. We redeemed Sheila from my parents in Kent, then went down to the depths of Monmouthshire where we found a country club in which we would be able to park ourselves for the foreseeable future. For the next couple of months, we resided in the country club at vast expense waiting for some accommodation to turn up.

Eventually, we found a place near Pontypool, half an hour’s drive to the north of Newport, and established ourselves in rented accommodation belonging to a bank manager, sending Sheila and Felicity to the local school. As Sheila and Felicity did not speak Welsh and, compounding this, they spoke English with a posh accent, this was not a successful enterprise. Felicity actually got her teeth bashed in by one child.

We then decided that we would put Sheila into part-time boarding at Chepstow, a small town back on the border of England and Wales.

This meant that I had to get up very early with Sheila on a Monday morning to drop her off at school and that I also had to collect her on Friday night. It was quite a round trip and as Sheila was only five she did not like it one bit. We therefore moved both Sheila and Felicity as full boarders to Netherwood near Saundersfoot, a pleasant seaside town a few miles out of Tenby, with a sandy beach and a picturesque harbour. It did not take Sheila and Felicity very long to

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Chapter 7 settle in at Netherwood. Meanwhile, Elizabeth and Douglas were still marooned out at Pontypool with no transport.Finding somewhere to live in the early Fifties was simply desperate. The army was still going strong after the war; numbers had not been run down. There were married quarters in the barracks at Newport, but these were already occupied, and Newport did not have a great deal of rental accommodation.

After a great deal of searching, we finally found a basement flat in Newport, which was a much bigger and more interesting place than Pontypool. At least, here, I felt Elizabeth and Douglas would be less isolated and not so lonely. With great to-do, we moved in. As she was unpacking, Elizabeth saw me pacing the pavement outside in earnest conversation with a fellow officer. This officer was Percy Denman, an ex-Indian army officer like me and, though neither of us knew it at the time, destined with his wife Winnie to become longtime friends of our family. The relationship did not start under the best auspices, however. What Elizabeth saw, as she put away the last cup and saucer and patted the final cushion into place, was Percy telling me how dissatisfied he was with his Battery Commander at Pembroke Dock. The chap was so unreliable, in fact, said Percy, that he had decided to replace him with me. He had also decided that this should be effective from next month. Suffice to say that it was a black day for Elizabeth. The basement flat had been a last resort. Now we had to move again.

Pembroke Dock was in the far west of Wales. We did go down there with the promise of an army quarter which, of course, as luck would have it, was some considerable distance outside the town. Elizabeth was therefore cut off once more without adequate transport.

Halfway through our time in Pembroke Dock, an army quarter did become available at the barracks and we were able to move into that in February 1952.

Pembroke Dock had one advantage in that it was a stone’s throw from our two daughters at Saundersfoot, and they were sometimes allowed to come home for the day on Sunday. One Sunday morning, we motored down to Saundersfoot from Pembroke Dock to bring

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Chapter 7 Sheila and Felicity back for the day and after lunch, Elizabeth went to the kitchen to start to make a delicious tea. In the hall, she found the two little girls had already dressed themselves in their school uniform and made their preparations for returning to Saundersfoot.

We had to face it. There were more interesting things to do at school than at home.

In February 1953, I suddenly got a telephone call from the War Office.

The message, as usual, was short and to the point: “Do you wish to be considered for an appointment to the School of Artillery in Pakistan? The meeting is tomorrow. You have twenty four hours to make up your mind.”

“May I discuss it with my wife?” I asked.

“You may,” came the reply. “As long as you both say yes.”

At the time, I was a major, so this was a promotion.

I was posted from April 1953, the start of the hot season. Sheila and Felicity were due to come home for their Easter holidays, but our army quarter was needed for the next Major, so Elizabeth and Douglas had to move out. Elizabeth scouted around in Pembroke Dock with a friend of hers and found what can only be described as a “hut”, a prefabricated building dating from World War One. Its one redeeming feature was that it was situated close to the shops, so she was not entirely cut off. It was also partitioned into “rooms” so had a modicum of privacy. This was the “home” Sheila and Felicity came back to for their Easter holidays in 1953.

At this point, Aunt Anne, Elizabeth’s sister, who had come back from Australia for the Queen’s coronation came to stay with Elizabeth. She had expected the wife of a British officer in post-war England to be doing rather better than living in a hut. She had been toying with the idea of returning from Australia to live to Britain, but this rather destroyed her illusions.

Meanwhile, through the good offices of a friend who lived in Milford Haven, where she and husband were keen sailors, Elizabeth was introduced to an end of terrace cottage - with an outdoor toilet no

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Chapter 7 less - overlooking the Milford Haven. Elizabeth rented it from the son of the owner, installed our possessions there, and had Sheila and Felicity there for the summer holidays, before they went back to boarding school. Arrangements were also made for Sheila and Felicity to be looked after while we were in Pakistan. We did not want to take them with us, because they were pretty little golden-haired girls, and we did not want them kidnapped as future wives for the nomadic tribesmen of the Hindu Kush. In the event, they stayed with Mary and Mervyn in the Christmas holidays 1953 and remained at school for Easter 1954.

After the summer holidays Elizabeth and Douglas set out from Pembroke Dock by train across rural Wales and embarked on a Polish ship from Liverpool bound for Karachi.

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CHAPTER EIGHT - Nowshera - Elizabeth Everything was fine on the voyage out to Pakistan until we reached Aden on the tip of the Arabian Peninsula. We were almost halfway through our journey having come through the Bay of Biscay, the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal. When we arrived at Aden, I had a real fright. When ships pulled into Aden, all the little Arab boys used to swim round them and dive for coins thrown by the passengers into the sea. I was watching this spectacle like everybody else, and took my eyes off Douglas for a few minutes. When I looked around for him, he had disappeared and the feeling was indescribable. I ran round the ship in absolute panic. He was only just over three years old, and in my mind anything could have happened to him. Eventually I found him, also watching the Arab boys and - I am horrified to add - sitting confidently astride the ship’s rail up on the top deck. Just a slight lapse in concentration and he would have been over the side.

- David Elizabeth was naturally enough in a real panic and spoke her mind very forcefully to Douglas for running off. In fact, she gave him a good smack, but what perturbed her equally was the fact that there were other passengers within yards of Douglas. They were taking no notice of a small child who could have pitched himself over the rail and into the Arabian Sea. I had not seen Elizabeth and Douglas for months, so I was very excited as I went down from Nowshera to Karachi to meet them and escort them back to Nowshera. Here we took up residence as a family in October 1953 at 54, The Mall. They had missed the summer heat. The lovely cold weather was starting in Pakistan, and there was frost in the mornings, but no snow.

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While Elizabeth had been struggling in the hut, I was living in style in Nowshera, in an enormous bungalow specially designed for General Alexander in the 1930s, and being looked after by seven servants. First, there was the Kinsama or cook, who was Goanese.

Then there was an orderly, a Muslim with a long white beard and of most stately appearance who thought himself very grand because he carried with him an endorsement saying that at one time he had been orderly to the Commander-in-Chief. Our bottle washer was a Musulchi and our sweeper an Untouchable. The gardener and the assistant gardener were Hindu. We had a very cosmopolitan household.

One of our first experiences in Nowshera, after the arrival of Elizabeth and Douglas, was waking up one night and hearing incredible noises outside the bungalow. We went to the window and were treated to the sight of a whole tribe, with their camels and animals, on the move from Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass to the Northwest Frontier Province to spend the winter in the warmer weather of Pakistan. Douglas, then aged three and a half, used to enjoy playing in the garden making roads in the dust for his Dinky cars. Unfortunately, the night the tribes passed the bungalow, he had left his cars in the garden after going to bed. When he went to resume his game the next morning, the cars had disappeared, down a real road - the Grand Trunk Road - with the migrating tribes.

On one occasion, we decided to travel up the Khyber Pass and we took the orderly with us for protection. The Khyber Pass was not, theoretically, friendly territory in those days. One of the warlike people inhabiting those regions was the Pashto, alleged to be the lost tribe of Israel. Pashto tribesmen could often be seen swinging down the main street of Peshawar; they were tall and dark, often with green or blue eyes, which was unusual in that part of the world, and they were always armed to the teeth with rifles and bullets. I was very suspicious that we would be ambushed once word got about that an English couple and their infant son - relatively fair game - were out and about in this most inhospitable of areas. The orderly, therefore was on the alert throughout the journey. The car had a sunshine roof

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Chapter 8 and he knelt in the front with his rifle pushed defiantly through the roof so that if anyone attacked, he was ready to defend us. We made it through unscathed, travelling over the famous Attock Bridge right up to the border with Afghanistan. Here we did not cross, but contented ourselves with putting the traditional foot from Pakistan across the border. Then we came home. I must have been quite nervous because, as we came round one bend in the Khyber Pass, sure enough the most enormous bush you have ever seen came tumbling down the side of the mountain. I imagined then - and I still believe now - that it was pushed down by hostile tribesmen to block the route.

In 1954, we decided to motor to Swat, in the foothills of the Himalayas. This was much more civilised country. The ruler was the Wali of Swat and he used to come down to Peshawar to play in polo tournaments, with his entourage - in other words his harem - borne along with him in sleek limousines with darkened windows. Our own travelling arrangements were more modest. There were five of us on this journey: the Kinsama, the orderly, Elizabeth, Douglas and me, all crammed into one car. When we arrived in Swat, we were booked into a forest bungalow, which was built on a concrete platform with no guard rail. I parked the car in the driveway in front of the bungalow and while we were negotiating with the permanent servants there and our servants were getting the suitcases out of the car, Douglas climbed up on to the veranda, stumbled and took a header off the concrete platform on to the paving stones below.

When Elizabeth picked him up, he was green, although he did not actually pass out. There we were in Swat, miles away from Nowshera, which was itself hundreds of miles away from any hospital, and we simply did not know what to do. We did the best we could and, luckily, he recovered.

One of Elizabeth’s most enjoyable pastimes while we were living in Nowshera was shopping in the Bazaar in Peshawar. I used to go up to Peshawar every Friday to play polo and took Elizabeth with me, dropping her off in the bazaar for two to three hours, and picking her up again after the polo was over. There were plenty of exotic things for Elizabeth to buy in the bazaar, including copper ornaments

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Chapter 8 and baskets. She bought a set of brightly painted stool legs and had a stool made which we brought back to England with us.

Douglas started accompanying me to the polo when I felt he was old enough, but before that, he was left with the Kinsama. On one occasion, I took Douglas to a polo tournament, leaving Elizabeth at home instead of taking her shopping in Peshawar, as I did not know how long the game would last. Halfway between Nowshera and Peshawar, we came to the cross roads at Pubbhi, which had always been notorious for bandits, dacoits, muggers and robbers. As we drove across the cross roads, the car suddenly swerved for no reason at all. I thought I had a puncture and was very nervous about being stranded in a place like this, but the car seemed to right itself and we got back to Nowshera in one piece. In fact, it was Elizabeth back at home, who had the key to the drama, for as we pulled up, she said: “What happened to you in the earthquake?” “What earthquake?” I asked. Then I suddenly realised that it was an earthquake that had caused to car to swerve. Elizabeth had been in the bungalow at the time and had to run out into the garden in case the entire edifice collapsed around her.

Halfway through our time in Pakistan I was entitled to two months’ leave, all expenses paid. In those days, people were very concerned about the dangers of air travel, and for the sake of Sheila and Felicity back in England, I said I would take Douglas in the aeroplane and Elizabeth could travel by sea. We duly arrived for an overnight stopover in Cairo, and were looking forward to a peaceful evening, when the stewardess came up and asked me if I would look after a little boy who was travelling alone. She had apparently been invited to see the Pyramids by moonlight with the pilot. I could hardly refuse although I must say I was extremely reluctant to agree; but it opened my eyes. You think you have put your child in the tender care of a stewardess and in the middle of the flight, when you would expect the child to be looked after particularly carefully, the said stewardess decides to go gallivanting off.

When we arrived back in England, we in fact resumed occupation of the cottage on the Milford Haven. The holiday coincided with the

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Chapter 8 summer holidays of the girls, whom we had not seen for a year. I went back in the August to Pakistan by myself on the aeroplane, while Elizabeth returned with Douglas by ship.

We had had our personal possessions flown out to Pakistan at the great expense of the Pakistani Government. In 1955, at the end of our time in Pakistan, Elizabeth could not face packing up so we sold off the crockery, china and glass to the wife of the deputy commandant, who then went around the place saying that we had overcharged her.

An Australian friend of Zizza’s, Mary Effendi, said to Elizabeth: “I wish you’d let me know you were selling up. I would have bought everything, no questions asked.” Mary Effendi had married as her second husband an Afghan prince, Brigadier Hassan Effendi, with whom I had played polo in Peshawar and Lahore. Elizabeth, Douglas and I all travelled back by sea from Karachi and landed in Liverpool en route to my parents in Kent. As their house was too small for the three of us, we had to find alternative accommodation and we used the time to travel the west country including going to call on Diana Giles, now a widow, in Rodmarton, Gloucestershire.

We had both known the Giles’s in India, first at Deolali when I was Adjutant at the School of Artillery and later when I was a battery commander. In 1942, Norman Giles and I went off to Burma where Norman was wounded. Elizabeth and Diana always kept in touch, even when Elizabeth was far away in Peshawar and Quetta. After visiting Diana, we called on Major and Mrs Daubeney at Dockem House, two villages away. Mrs Daubeney was a Miss Jennings of Kent and we knew her through my mother.

I had been posted to Salisbury Plain and I had discovered that my newly appointed regiment was equipped with the very latest American guns. I therefore feared that we might be sent off to Germany at a moment’s notice, in which case, I wanted Elizabeth and the family to have a semi-permanent base in the UK. The Daubeneys offered to lease us the Glebe House, a property which stood next to Dockem House, for seven years with a break at four. We accepted and that was how, ultimately at least, we came to live in Gloucestershire.

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CHAPTER NINE - England and Scotland On Salisbury Plain, we took over Cachy House at Perham Down. My predecessor’s wife, Mrs Pallot, warned Elizabeth that the house was so exposed in winter that she was often reduced to cooking in the kitchen in a fur coat and fur-lined boots. Colonel Pallot was posted to Northern Ireland in the troubles and Mrs Pallot went off to stay with her relations. The relations did not want the yellow Labrador owned by the Pallots to stay with them, so the Pallots asked if we would take her on. This was how we came to acquire the famous Tessa. With a new dog and three children who all wanted to live at home, we decided we needed someone to live in and help Elizabeth.

We therefore got in touch with a local staff agency who offered us a Spanish girl called Pila.

I thought this was a marvellous idea because I still fancied myself as a Spanish speaker. Unfortunately, Elizabeth and I had forgotten most of our Spanish and when I came home at lunchtime, Elizabeth used to get me to write down instructions in my best Spanish for her to read out to Pila. Although Pila very rarely complained, we knew she was horrified at the way we lived our lives. With the children going in to Andover every day to school, leaving at eight in the morning, we had so many meal times, that life was something of a farce. There were two breakfasts, one lunch, one tea, one high tea and then an evening meal.

When we were posted to Perham Down, it was arranged that all three children should go as day children to Rookwood in Andover, travelling by bus. Sheila particularly asked if they could go as day children as she had already experienced two schools as a boarder.

Halfway through our time on Salisbury Plain, in 1956, the Prime Minister of Egypt, Nasser, nationalised the Suez Canal Company.

This effectively meant the end of lucrative British and French interests in the Suez Canal, prompting an invasion by British and French troops of Egypt. It was such a crisis that I had no idea

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Chapter 9 whether I would have to fight. There were many children of service families at Rookwood but the Suez crisis was very dramatic, and many of us thought that World War III was round the corner. We therefore had to arrange for Sheila, then 10 years old, to board at Rookwood. Should the worst happen, Elizabeth would only have to worry about Douglas, who was too young to board, and Felicity.

In fact, Felicity and Douglas continued as day children until our move to Coates, when Felicity went as a boarder to Rookwood and Douglas went to Oakley Hall as a day boy.

At the time of Suez, we had three gunner regiments on alert, one for Tobruk, one for Benghazi and another for Tunis. On the night before I was due to go off, my brigadier appeared with a revolver and half a dozen rounds of ammunition saying: “When you get to Benghazi, David, this is the name of the man you have to execute.”

Fortunately, the Suez operation was called off at twenty four hours’ notice, but not before we had two other major dramas.

First, the police rang up from the west country saying they had arrested a gunner who was in possession of an unauthorised revolver. The night before we were due to go to North Africa, revolvers had been issued to all officers, including a Second Lieutenant who handed his weapon to his National Service orderly to clean. We had all been given a twenty-four hour pass to visit our nearest and dearest and the orderly, who had taken his revolver with him to show his parents, started waving it around in a pub in remote rural Devon. He was promptly apprehended. Next day Brigadier Cole who later became General Sir George Cole and lived in West Byfleet, came to visit me to see how we were getting on after cancellation. In the gents’ lavatory spending pennies, I thought the best thing was to confess about the revolver as fast as I could. Cole took the sympathetic view. “Let’s forget all about it,” he said.

Another problem was that the night before we were due to go to Suez, those individuals who had not been granted twenty four hours’ leave thought they had a golden opportunity to get their own back on anyone they disliked. Half a dozen National Service thugs about whom I, as Commanding Officer, knew nothing, had gone to the local

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Chapter 9 pub and bullied and beaten up the publican at closing time. Everyone was highly indignant because the publican had a gammy leg. The men were caught because, instead of walking back, which they could have done, they very stupidly caught the last bus back to the camp and the bombardier on guard duty was clever enough to spot the guilty parties. He later gave evidence against them. The three suspected ringleaders were arraigned and the case was investigated by the Adjutant. As a matter of fact, the men confessed and went off for trial in the civil courts; we heard nothing more about it.

It was during our time at Cachy House that Elizabeth’s sister, Anne, made another visit to England and stayed with us. She was greatly impressed by the change in Elizabeth’s circumstances, from the hut three years ago in Pembroke Dock to the seven-bedroom mansion we now occupied. Dr and Mrs Cole also came to stay with us and Dr Cole, who had previously seen us living in a little bungalow at High Halden, immediately saw the difference!

The prestigious accommodation was another victim of the Suez crisis.

It was agreed that Cachy House was too large and isolated for Elizabeth to live in by herself, should I be called upon to take up arms, so we moved a quarter of a mile away to a very large semidetached house, Bourlon House. I also still had the caravan in Saundersfoot in South Wales, as a pied-a-terre or holiday home, so for a dizzy period had three “homes”, the caravan, the semi-detached house on Salisbury Plain and a leased house in Gloucestershire.

At the end of my posting to Salisbury Plain, I took Elizabeth across to Gloucestershire for a spot of leave at Glebe House. The first thing I heard was that I had been posted in ten days time to the War Office at Chessington.

“Where is Chessington? Is it near the Zoo?” I asked.

“Yes,” came the reply,. “Got anywhere to live?” “ Gloucestershire.” I said, somewhat tentatively.

“Fine,” was the answer. “See you in ten days’ time, then.”

I decided to ‘PG’ from Monday to Friday in Ashstead, returning to

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Chapter 9 the Glebe House after work on Friday and travelling back up to Chessington on Monday morning. In those days, travelling was not quite as streamlined as it is now and my routine was quite hectic. I would leave Coates at the crack of dawn on Monday morning and motor to Andover, where I left the car in a garage, before catching the fast train from Andover to Waterloo. I would arrive in London by midday. I always tried to arrange a central London meeting on Friday, so I could get a head start home for the weekend.

I found myself a nice billet with Brigadier McClaren, formerly of the Black Watch Regiment, and Mrs McClaren. I then duly presented myself at Chessington where I found my brigadier to be a tall and distinguished bachelor from the Howard clan. I told him of my worries about getting in at the right time on Monday mornings and he said, much to my surprise: “Don’t give it a second thought. I also live in Gloucestershire.”

- Elizabeth The Glebe House was very nice. It had a very large kitchen and a large pantry where you kept all the china and glass and washed the dishes. The kitchen was exceptionally large and faced out towards Dockem House. It had five bedrooms. I loved that house. The windows were high and I had to make curtains for downstairs. We bought the furniture for it at different shops in Cheltenham and Cirencester. I bought odds and ends of chairs and tables, dining chairs and bedroom chairs. We wanted to buy the house, but Mrs Daubeney would not sell it to us.

I also undertook to do some redecorating. One day, the children shouted to me and I thought some drama had happened. I turned to hurry down the stepladder the wrong way and fell off. I was very lucky I didn’t break my leg.

- David There was no central heating whatsoever at the Glebe House and we especially needed help with the fires. We had a woman called Mary

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My other recollection was of a peer of the realm who used to come and use our stables at the Glebe House. My beef about him was that, wealthy and well connected as he was, he still had the nerve to steal our buckets. They were lovely buckets, too!

Douglas, too old now for Rookwood, started to attend Oakley Hall in Cirencester. Elizabeth undertook to take him to school until she felt that he was old and sensible enough to catch the bus on his own to Cirencester. Douglas would duly travel by bus to the big roundabout at the outskirts of Cirencester. He would then walk down the road which led past the Council estate to the school. In those days, Oakley Hall boys wore red caps, and the denizens of the Council estate would jeer at Douglas as he walked by, shouting: “Jam tart! Jam tart!”

In the meantime, of course, Sheila and Felicity were boarders at Rookwood because there was still an uncertainty as to what the future of my regiment might be. One of the charms of living in Gloucestershire for us and for Sheila and Felicity was that the girls could travel backwards and forwards between school in Andover and Cirencester by rail along as pretty a rural railway line as any we have ever seen. The line, however, was soon to be closed under the Beeching axe.

Of his own volition, Douglas asked if he could become a boarder at Oakley Hall. It was a little early for him, and Major Letts, who was then Headmaster, had to create a special place for him. That was why his number at Oakley Hall was 101.

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Meanwhile, Sheila and Felicity were distinguishing themselves at Rookwood, particularly in athletics where they were almost always in the school athletics team which travelled the south of England, taking part in various athletics meetings. This was despite the fact that Felicity had to go into hospital for an appendix operation. On one Rookwood sports day, with such talented daughters, I had come back from abroad and ordered a brand new suit to attend the function so that I would be a credit to them. To my dismay, however, in the fathers and daughters relay race, I had to get down on all fours and carry Sheila on my back. My brand new trousers never ever recovered!

Sheila and Felicity were also having adventures during their holidays in Gloucestershire. On one occasion, we had Penny Bingham, Sheila’s friend from Rookwood, to stay with us at the Glebe House. Sheila, Felicity and Penny were walking down the road from the Glebe House when suddenly, they came upon a lone figure on a bicycle wearing a mackintosh. As they approached him sufficiently closely, he opened his mackintosh and revealed himself to be a ‘flasher’. The three of them ran home and he jumped on his bicycle and disappeared. We rang up the police. They informed us, however, that there was nothing they could do about it, that the man would not come back and that they assumed he would merely give a repeat performance in some other Cotswold village.

Ruth Daubeney introduced us to Mrs Dorothea Grimshaw, who lived in the White House in Coates. We already had some very remote connection with her, through a Mrs Ramsay in Canterbury to whom Dorothea Grimshaw had been a companion in the post-war years.

Mrs Ramsay’s husband had been killed in World War I and her son was killed in World War II, both while serving with the Buffs. We became very friendly with Dorothea and her daughter Cathy.

After a year in Chessington, I was summoned to a meeting with another brigadier in the Royal Artillery Directorate, who asked me if I knew anything about guided missiles.

“No,” I replied.

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“Well, “ he said, “you’d better bloody well learn.”

There was a plan at the time to have a guided weapons range at Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides. This island’s main claim to fame was that Bonnie Prince Charlie and Flora MacDonald sailed from here “over the sea to Skye”. The Royal Navy had pulled out of the plan because they wanted to put their fire power into the Mediterranean. The RAF wanted to protect the Welsh coast, presumably against an Irish invasion, and the army therefore got Scotland, because there was nowhere else to go. For some reason at that time, everyone connected with these schemes seemed to be taking a ‘golden bowler’. I, however, had three children at boarding school, and could not even contemplate giving up work, so within a matter of weeks, I was transferred to the main War Office in London.

The original guided weapons range project, which was costed at £20 million, was cancelled by Duncan Sandys, Winston Churchill’s sonin-law and Minister of Defence under the Conservative Government of Harold Macmillan. In 1958, the Treasury told the Prime Minister that the MOD was costing a fortune in equipment and projects. We heard later that Duncan Sandys had asked that all projects over a million pounds should be placed into three categories in terms of priority. He then tore up Categories B and C without looking at them and threw them in the waste paper basket, saying: We can only afford List A. List A just happened to include the guided missile range at Benbecula. Colonel Wigg, a Labour MP, had asked Jack Profumo, the War Minister, in the House of Commons whether or not there would be a range at Benbecula. He wanted to know this, he said, because he was advising Harold Wilson, then Leader of the Opposition, on defence policy. Everyone heard Jack Profumo say quite distinctly in the House of Commons that there would be a range in the Outer Hebrides, and thus the commitment was made. That was why the missile range at Benbecula was included on List A. No-one could back out of it.

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Meetings were held at the Treasury, usually late at night and after Parliament had risen for the weekend. We army officers had to attend all these very inconveniently timed meetings. I might add that there was always the understanding that the missile range was going to be cheap. It couldn’t be otherwise with the Treasury officials always in on our meetings and breathing down our necks.

The range was supposed to fire Corporal missiles out to sea with a sixty mile range. When the range was finally set up, we decided we should have a trial run. We duly fired the missile and sure enough, sixty miles out to sea, it disappeared. Confidently, we invited Christopher Soames, Secretary of State for War, to come and see the next missile fired. He came up, we fired, the missile wobbled on takeoff and we all waited with baited breath. It disappeared just six miles out to sea. Christopher Soames turned to the assembled officers and said: “Thank God that the Americans were paying for that missile and not us!”

We eventually felt confident enough to take the press up to the Outer Hebrides. The trip was organised by the Chief Press Officer and we all took off with great éclat from London Airport. After refuelling at Renfrew, we flew on to the Hebrides only to find that a Scotch mist had descended and there was nothing to see. The pilot flew back to London and, in some ways, it was a blessing that the press did not want a repeat trip.

Being involved in the project gave me an opportunity to visit the Outer Hebrides officially paid for by the War Office. With my fare accounted for, I was able (almost) to afford to take the family at the same time. We all travelled up to Glasgow on the night sleeper, flew out to Benbecula and spent ten days at Lochboisdale Hotel. Douglas was growing up, and this was probably the first time I had acknowledged it. Coming down to the hotel foyer one morning, I found my son waiting in a queue at the telephone booth. I still to this day don’t know why and to whom he needed to make a telephone call from the Outer Hebrides and I did not ask. But, leaving this aside, I was fascinated to hear one of the waitresses make a telephone

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Chapter 9 call in Gaelic, and so was Douglas. This was first time he realised that not all British people speak English as their mother tongue.

We also witnessed the phenomenon of local cattle men transporting cattle from the outer isles to the mainland. One or all of the children complained about the brutal way in which the men were belabouring the cattle to get them to go down the gangplank on to the ferry. I now discovered I had three animal lovers on my hands! At the end of our time on Benbecula, we decided to come back another way. We therefore took the overnight ferry from Lochboisdale to Oban. On arrival in Oban, we discovered to our surprise that the Oban Highland Games were on that very afternoon. We managed to find our way to the natural amphitheatre on the outskirts of the town where the games were being held, and actually saw the games in full swing. We then caught the night sleeper back to London.

The following year, I managed to arrange another trip for myself which involved going out to St Kilda, which had never before been visited by any army officer above the rank of major. I suppose to that extent I was making military history. St Kilda is an archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean, roughly 40 miles northwest of Benbecula. I took Douglas with me as far as Benbecula, travelling up by the Flying Scotsman to Oban. En route, I was lucky enough to meet a family who lived in Avenue Road, Rushden, Northamptonshire, and were very friendly with my sister Rachel at Rushden Lodge. The husband was going to Scotland for the sea trout fishing and, for the two days and two nights I had to go to St Kilda, they undertook to look after Douglas.

I went across on an official army amphibious boat, having been told St Kilda was “ungettatable� but it was brilliantly fine all the way over with blue sky and sea and not a ripple on the water. Believe it or not, it was the same on way back. The trip was a show of goodwill. St Kilda had a very large Marconi radar station at the top of the hill and other technical and ancillary equipment I wanted to check. The equipment was used for spotting where the missiles that we so confidently launched actually went to. It also helped in identifying craft that might be in the target area. I also took time to examine the living quarters and conditions of the soldiers who were

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St Kilda is very rugged. Hirta, which I visited, was the last inhabited island of the group. It was evacuated in 1930 at the islanders’ own request. The population was down to twelve and it was not regarded as a feasible proposition to have twelve St Kildarites living there marooned off the west coast of Scotland with no medical or educational facilities.

When I returned, Douglas and I took a boat trip to the island of Eriskay, just off South Uist, with a view to observing the golden eagles. It was off the coast of Eriskay that the SS Politician and its cargo of 24,000 cases of whisky sank on its way from Liverpool to Jamaica in 1941, prompting Compton Mackenzie’s book Whisky Galore! We didn’t find any whisky and we only theoretically saw an eagle when, halfway between Lochboisdale and Eriskay, the crew pointed to some large unidentified object on the edge of a distant mountain and assured us it was a golden eagle. When we got to Eriskay, we landed in a bay that was so calm and warm that Douglas and I rather forgot about golden eagles and jumped into the water and swam across the bay. A wonderful natural sight we did see was a group of seals basking in the warm shallow water on the other side of the bay.

While Douglas and I were there, Elizabeth decided that the only thing she could afford to do with Sheila and Felicity was to take them back to Pembrokeshire and have a week at the seaside in the caravan at Saundersfoot. Later Douglas and I joined them. This was the celebrated occasion when Felicity cut her foot on a piece of glass on the beach.

One day while at Saundersfoot, I saw Felicity lying on her stomach on the beach, gazing attentively at something and I wondered what had so taken her fancy. I approached her and discovered that she was watching, with the greatest fascination, a mouse which had been caught by a cat. The cat was letting the mouse escape then chasing it, catching it and letting it escape again. I thought to myself - aren’t we all interested in animals? I also thought how amusing it was that

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Chapter 9 the only reason I had been able to afford the holiday the previous year was because I had sold one of my polo ponies for £175. The irony was that I was paying £3 a week in Ashstead for my board and lodging and £5 a week for my pony - and somehow that seemed poor economics.

We travelled home to Gloucestershire. It was now 1959 and a move was in the air. Indeed, it had been quite a time since I’d received one of those buff envelopes marked OHMS. Soon, one arrived through the letter box. I opened it up and found that I’d been posted as Colonel to Operations and Plans and Deputy Director HQ AFSE. AFSE meant nothing to me. I had to go and ask someone what it meant and where the hell it was. Back came the reply that it was Allied Forces Southern Europe and the posting was Naples, Italy. For once, we were overjoyed.

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CHAPTER TEN - Madrid We had been posted to Naples but, of course, it was not going to be quite as simple and straightforward as that. Just as I was relishing the thought of southern Italian sun, beaches and pizzas, I was suddenly invited to go at 24 hours’ notice to a senior officers’ course at the Senior Officers’ School in Madrid. I had apparently been selected for this on the strength of having become a second class interpreter in Spanish while in Gibraltar.

We were three and a half years now into our lease with the Daubeneys on the Glebe House in Coates. With Spain and then Naples ahead of us, it looked very much as if we would not be returning to Gloucestershire, at least not in the near future, so we went to the Daubeneys and asked if we could break the lease and sublet. This they agreed to.

I went out to Madrid almost immediately, and was put up in the Officers’ Mess. We were offered army quarters in West Byfleet at 1 Wey Close, and Elizabeth moved in, coming out to join me in Madrid either side of the children’s Easter holidays, which fell in April that year, and staying in a nearby hotel at vast expense.

The majority of the Spanish officers on the course had fought in the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939. The officers were, naturally, supporters of General Franco to a man. When we went out on exercises in and around Madrid, they used to proudly show me the defensive positions occupied by their troops when they were attacked by tanks that the Russians provided for the Republicans.

Their view of me was that I was a wealthy English gentleman and that I would soon be named Military Attaché to my cousin, Nigel Bruce Ronald, who had been British Ambassador to Portugal.

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Chapter 10 We had a rigid military routine each day, as will be appreciated from the following short digest, probably the right word, of our daily menu, also probably the right word! We started with coffee at 9am at the bar. After that, we used to get into vehicles and travel out into the countryside. This was followed by elevenses, which turned into twelveses, and consisted of an enormous ham sandwich which would last a family of four for a week, washed down by a bottle of wine each. Yes, a bottle of wine each.

Suitably fortified, we proceeded with discussions as to how we would attack, defend, outflank or retreat in certain circumstances depending on what the enemy’s moves were. This would last until about 2 o’clock, when we would repair to the local ristorante to solemnly work our way through a five-course meal with accompanying vino. We would then return to Madrid very much the worse for wear at six at night. After these self-indulgences, we were expected somehow to write up the solutions to the problems we had discussed during the day.

On non-exercise days, we had lectures and a foreshortened programme. I was clear at 6pm and Elizabeth and I would go out to a night club and dance for a couple of hours. One night, our dancing won us a bottle of champagne.

At the weekends, Elizabeth and I ventured out into the countryside to visit Toledo and the Valley of the Fallen, the memorial that was erected to commemorate all the Spaniards killed in Spanish Civil War. On one of these expeditions, we stopped off at a local restaurant and ordered lamb, not realising that the unfortunate beast had not yet been killed or cooked. We sat on the veranda drinking vino and some considerable time later, it was finally announced that the meal was ready. We had sat in the sun and drunk wine on an empty stomach, and the lamb was also very rich. The consequences were disastrous.

Elizabeth had such a violent bilious attack in the hotel that night that we seriously considered putting her on the next plane back to England.

Another night, we heard lots of noises and bangs and loud reports

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Chapter 10 around the hotel and I, pessimistic as ever, reckoned that this was the beginning of the next Spanish Revolution. Bravely, I crept down the back stairs of the hotel and went out through the side entrance to find, in fact, that it was a major saint’s day and everyone was letting off fireworks to their hearts’ content.

One night, we attended a social function and Elizabeth was introduced to a number of Spanish officers who, with the greatest gentility, kissed her hand and fawned all over her. The next night, we were walking down the main street and, coming towards us, were three of the officers introduced to Elizabeth the night before. They were all so busy in animated conversation that they didn’t recognise Elizabeth and actually pushed her off the pavement as they walked by!

The great charm about Madrid, apart from sight seeing and social life, was that Elizabeth was able to visit shopping centres including the Sunday market, Thieves Alley. The large picture of fruit on the wall in the drawing room was carried back as a real bargain to the UK by air by Elizabeth very, very carefully as part of her hand luggage.

In the Easter holidays, I had a car and three of the Spanish officers on my course heard that I was going back to England via Vittorio and Pamplona and asked to come with me. I said I was delighted, loaded the car and prepared to set off. I was somewhat alarmed to see each of the Spanish officers cross himself before getting into the car. Did they regard me as such a bad driver that they were already interceding with the saints on my behalf?

When we crossed the Pyrenees I said to a brother officer: “Don’t let’s cross at Iruna/ St Jean de Luz. Let’s be more ambitious and do another crossing,” as I already knew that crossing quite well. So we did. After we had crossed over, there was a certain amount of discussion in the car. After a while, one of the officers asked me if I had noticed what the border guard had done with my passport. I had not noticed anything untoward. I was told that the guard had slid his thumb across my photograph to check that it had been embossed with the proper stamp from the Consulate. Apparently, false passports or passports where a photograph has been substituted, do

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In all, I spent nine months in Madrid. It was a busy, not to say dizzy time. I had motored across Europe twice and Elizabeth had come out to stay twice in hotels in Madrid either side of the children’s Easter holidays. I finally arrived back at 1 Wey Close, West Byfleet and we spent my embarkation leave prior to going to Naples packing up the house. We then collected the three children from school and with all our worldly possessions, less the major items in store, we set off to drive across Europe, this time - destination Naples.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN - Naples It was the summer of 1960 when we set off for Naples. This involved a drive of well over a thousand miles in our Vauxhall Velox estate car, which was packed to the gunnels with luggage on the roof, luggage in the back and luggage on the back seat. In the estate part of the vehicle, also surrounded by luggage, was a camp chair of all things. This was occupied mainly by Douglas, aged just 10, while the two girls, coming up for 15 and 14 and rather larger than their brother, perched on the back seat amid more luggage. Elizabeth and I sat in the front, and we had our fair share of luggage, too.

Our first night was in Belgium, and as per usual with our first nights on the Continent, we stayed in a hotel that was far beyond our budget. We should have guessed by looking at the Visitors’ Book where we saw the signature of the Duke of Gloucester and his entourage, who had spent a couple of nights there while visiting the battle fields!

We then ploughed on to southern France to visit Grenoble where Elizabeth had spent some time as a teenager. From here, we crossed into Switzerland and, once again, spent a night in an expensive hotel where the food was distinctly below par, compared with Belgium and France. The following morning, we crossed from Switzerland into sunny Italy, where Felicity emerged at breakfast time in the most stunningly fashionable summer frock, very suitable for a teenager destination southern Italy.

On arrival in Italy, we were beginning, as usual, to run short of cash and travellers’ cheques. We needed a hotel for the night and stopped off at a modest-looking establishment, south of Genoa. Did Signora have two rooms for the night, we asked hopefully. Yes, she did, she replied, whereupon she took us across the hallway, opened a door

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Chapter 11 and proceeded to shoo away some chickens that had taken roost on the bed. Elizabeth remonstrated fairly forcibly at this. The good lady then relented and took us to a brand new annex. Obviously, the Italians thought anything was good enough for English tourists and they were going to try to fob us off with cheap bedrooms occupied by livestock.

Sheila, by this time, had made a decision that she would have a different evening meal at whatever hotel we stayed in, whether it was Belgium, France, Switzerland or Italy. Now quite travelhardened, we had become fairly cagey by this time as to where we would spend the night. We spent a short time in Florence and decided that this would be far too expensive for us, so we by-passed the city and elected to stay at a wayside hotel in Poggibonsi on the road between Florence and Sienna. From here it was on to Naples where we found that the villa we were meant to move into was still occupied by my predecessor and his wife. While I was on the course in Madrid, an Italian officer had strongly recommended the Hotel du Nord in Sorrento. Elizabeth and the children stayed there at vast expense while I was accommodated by my predecessor, during which time I began to take over from him at Allied Forces Southern Europe.

Eventually money was beginning to run even shorter than usual. The Hotel du Nord was extremely expensive because of the continental hours. There was nothing for the children to eat between a late lunch and an even later evening meal and Elizabeth was forking out hard cash for ice creams and cool drinks at the height of the holiday season. To save money, I went and got Douglas and we eventually spent two nights in the Allied Officers’ Club.

The villa was in Parco Caruso, the centrepiece of the village of Arco Felice, itself a suburb of Pozzuoli. Pozzuoli is mentioned in the New Testament as the place where St Paul landed after his adventures in Malta. The Parco was owned by Signor Caruso who also had a large construction company in Boston, into which all the American families paid their monthly rental. We were one of the few families who paid him in lire. He had a son, Nino Caruso, and he and his

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Chapter 11 American wife also had a villa in the Parco. We became very friendly with them, particularly with Nino. He was in the motor-racing business. He also had a fireworks company on the outskirts of Naples which Felicity and I visited once, if not twice, enjoying a large and expensive lunch as his guests.

Also living in the Parco was an English couple, the Graves, with whom we became friendly. Arnold Graves had been in the Royal Engineers in World War II and had fought in Tunisia with the First Army and later in Southern Italy. He was a noted hockey player and had he not been abroad he might well have tried for a cap for England. He was married to Rita who came from Manchester, where she had been at Manchester Girls’ High School. They had a son, Peter, with whom Douglas became very friendly and who eventually went to Marlborough and into the same house as Douglas.

Both Arnold and Rita were extremely hospitable. On one occasion, they took Elizabeth for a picnic along the coast. When they arrived at the secluded beach and parked the car they got out the chairs, and opened up the boot only to discover that one or other of them had forgotten to put the picnic in the back - so Arnold had to go off to a local ristorante and buy a picnic lunch for them to enjoy on the beach.

There was quite a lot of socialising, especially in summer time, in the Parco. Unfortunately, at one of the more lavish parties, an argument developed in full view of the other guests and of some Italians who were walking through the Parco for a breath of fresh evening air. This resulted in very bad feelings between the Carusos and the Graves.

Gossip always surrounded subsequent events and one has no way of knowing if the misfortunes that subsequently befell Arnold and Rita were connected with this incident or not.

Nevertheless, their fortunes definitely seemed to ‘take a dive’.

First, there was a succession of strikes in the Sunbeam factory in Pozzuoli where Arnold was a director. In fact, the situation became so bad that the directors from North America came across and decided to close the factory down and move production to South

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Chapter 11 America. Next, when the renewal of Arnold and Rita’s annual lease at Parco Caruso came up, the Carusos refused to renew, so Rita and Arnold had to move out of the Parco and took a villa further up the coast at Cuma. Rita and Arnold had nothing but trouble at their new residence; they came out one morning to find all the wheels had been removed from their car and the car jacked up on its axles. No sooner had they sorted that out and bought a new car, than that was also stolen and found after some time up the coast. They therefore decided to move into Naples where they had a house on the top of Posilippo but their troubles didn’t end there, so eventually they moved right away from Southern Italy and bought a deserted farm house in Tuscany which Arnold with his expertise rebuilt, electrified and generally modernised.

Also living in Parco Caruso was a “CIA family” - at least he was the local representative of the CIA or the FBI in Naples. (I had better not name him!) By the most extraordinary coincidence, he happened to be at Naples airport on the very afternoon the gangster Lucky Luciano, who lived in the same expensive block of flats in Naples as my senior officer and his wife, drank a poisoned cup of coffee and dropped dead at the table. Was it a coincidence, we asked ourselves.

The wife of the CIA Agent was very keen on painting and used to sit out on a little promontory between Arco Felice and Pozzuoli, overlooking the bay. One day a couple of Italian teenagers spotted her, stopped to admire her painting and snatched her bag in the process. Handbag snatching was an art form in Naples. If you left your handbag lying on the front seat of the car and the window was open, which it inevitably was in the hot weather, someone would just come along and hook it out through the window with a stick.

We furnished our own villa in Parco Caruso at a cost of £300, buying the furniture, of which there was quite a lot, from our predecessor and his wife. We then settled down to a hectic balance of summer holidays with three children and the inevitable international parties to which Elizabeth and I were invited. We were newly arrived, not knowing anybody from the other five nationalities represented at the NATO base: American, French, Greek, Italian and Turkish.

I was lucky to be Deputy Operations and Plans to an American

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Chapter 11 General who had had very distinguished career in Korea, General Russ. I used to hold the fort for him sometimes when he went off for a long weekend golfing where, with the aid of his golfing partner, he made a bit of cash on side bets! Mrs Russ was a very elegant woman and she entertained beautifully. When I told General Russ that Elizabeth and I had been married very young and off the strength (i.e. not receiving an allowance for your wife), he told me that he had also had to ask his colonel in Texas for permission to get married.

In those days, the American army was very strict, and his colonel said that he could not have leave for a honeymoon. However, the colonel continued, George Washington’s birthday was coming up in a month or two’s time and this year, it fell on a Tuesday. Why not marry on Friday after work, then take a four-day honeymoon: Saturday, Sunday, compassionate leave on Monday and George Washington’s birthday on Tuesday!

Many of the American officers whom we got to know very well indeed still bought their uniform in London and had English cars.

Colonel Wallace, also a great friend of ours who came from Virginia, only owned English cars - and Jaguars to boot! So when he wanted to renew his Jaguar, he would fly to Coventry where he had already ordered a personalised Jaguar and collect it from the factory without a mile on the speedometer and to drive it back to Italy. One joke he would make in front of his wife, Eleanor, at a cocktail party was that he only opted to go to Westpoint Military Academy because it was the height of the Depression and he wouldn’t have been able to find a job. To which his wife would reply that she only married him because he was only man she knew who had a decent job.

Another army officer, Colonel Carter, whom we also got to know extremely well was sent on a course to England and when he returned, we met him at a cocktail party and asked him how he had fared. He told us that he had gone to Savile Row to order a suit. The tailor had first asked him whether he wanted a double-breasted or a single-breasted jacket. Then he had been asked more questions. Did he want a waistcoat? Did he require flares at the back of the jacket and, if so, one or two? And finally, did he want three buttons or two on his sleeve? Colonel Carter said plaintively to us: “All I went to Savile Row for was to buy a suit. “

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Chapter 11 While we were in Naples, the Carters invited both their sets of parents to come out and visit them. As his parents had been unable to come to their wedding, the two sets of parents had never met, and the setting of southern Italy seemed an ideal place for them to become acquainted with each other. There was no communication between the two sides of the family as to how the parents would come out to Naples, just an understanding they would make their own arrangements. The American forces, however, had a scheme by which spare cabins were allocated to the family of forces personnel.

Believe it or not, both Colonel Carter’s parents and Mrs Carter’s parents were both allocated cabins on the same ship. Not only that, they met on the ship and discovered who they were.

Colonel and Mrs Carter had five daughters. When the time came to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Allied Forces Southern Europe in Naples, the then admiral’s wife decided to have a most tremendous celebration in the Excelsior Hotel in Naples, a hotel which was often patronised by Princess Margaret. The ADC's were sent round to all the families to invite them to contribute silver and table decorations for this enormous party. When they asked Eleanor Carter if she could produce candlesticks, she said she was very sorry, she had no candlesticks but she did have five daughters and each would be prepared to hold up a candle. Eventually when the Carters left, we bought from them their camping equipment for $50. The family had recently been on holiday in Germany where they had pitched camp in the pouring rain every night for thirty nights. He and the daughters said they never wanted to see the camping equipment ever again and were delighted to offload it on to us.

Other very good friends we had in Parco Caruso were Mary and Bill Parker. He was in the USAF and Mary was a very good friend to Elizabeth. We still stay in touch with them at Christmas and various members of the family have stayed at their home in Virginia on visits to the United States. When the children came back from school, Mary Parker used to open the fridge and say: “Fix yourself a sandwich”, but her pièce de résistance was fried cheese sandwiches and even now, we sometimes say to each other: Let’s have a Mary Parker!

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Chapter 11 In 1961, the Queen and Prince Philip made an official visit to Italy, starting in Naples, as this was presumably a good port at which to berth the Royal Yacht Britannia. One of their earliest official engagements was to meet the families of the British contingent with NATO. As wife of the Senior British Officer in Naples, Elizabeth headed up the families’ section of the tour and was introduced for a few words with the royal visitors. Prince Philip, spotting the children who had been penned off in a separate area to wave their flags, turned to an immaculately turned-out, red-headed Geordie seaman who was one step behind him and waving a hand airily in the direction of the hundred or so children, enquired: “Are these all yours?” Whereupon the seaman blushed to the roots of his red hair.

In 1962, Vice-President Lyndon Johnson came on a visit to Naples and as Senior British Officer in Naples, I was lined up neatly with the senior officers to pay our respects to him. He shook me warmly by the hand and a local photographer took a splendid picture of me.

It seemed the photographers were not that keen on photographing a Vice-President shaking hands with American officers! As part and parcel of the Vice-Presidential visit Elizabeth, as the wife of the Senior British Officer, was invited to join other senior wives on the admiral’s barge which took Lady Bird, the Vice-President’s wife, on a cruise round Naples Bay .

The next year when Sheila and Felicity visited the USA to stay with relations and friends, I gave them two photographs of their father with the Vice-President to take with them. We put one photograph on the top of the clothes inside each suitcase. When the girls came through Customs at the airport, the officers waved them straight through as they were obviously the children of a persona who was very grata indeed with the Vice-President.

While in Naples, we also received visits from our own relatives and friends. One such visit was from my cousin Rose from Minnesota who flew out with my sister Rachel to stay in the villa. We made the traditional trips to Pompeii, Herculaneum and Cuma with them and I undertook to drive them personally to the airport on their departure. On the way to the airport, I had to halt in the Via Roma, and suddenly there was the most almighty bump at the back of the

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Chapter 11 car. An Italian motorcyclist and his pillion friend had taken it upon themselves to ram us. By this time, we had bought a Vauxhall Cresta from Switzerland and were therefore driving round with Swiss number plates. The motorcyclist had spotted this Swiss number plate and had decided to cause an accident in order to try and recover insurance money. He did not see who was driving; all he saw were two women in the back seat of the car wearing large hats and assumed they were Swiss tourists. Imagine his surprise when a fluent Italian- speaking British officer in full regalia emerged from the car, ran back towards them expostulating in Italian and dragged them off to the nearest police station. That’s where I left them as I continued my drive to the airport.

Another visitor, whose time with us in Naples was a huge success, was Cathy Grimshaw from Coates, who came out one Easter holidays. We took her out to the Sorrento peninsula and we all bathed in April in Positano. In the centre of Naples, there is a hill through which two tunnels run. There are double tram lines running through the centre of each tunnel and dual carriage-ways on either side of the tramlines. Cathy had recently seen the film Ben Hur and as we proceeded through one tunnel into the next she asked if we were taking part in a chariot race, as the Italian cars came whizzing by in every direction, each trying to outdo the foreign visitor in a Swiss motor car.

Her visit was such a success that her mother decided to come out later in the same year. Elizabeth strongly advised her not to come in the hot weather but, for reasons best known to herself, Dorothea insisted on coming. It was particularly hot that summer and so airless in the Parco Caruso that Dorothea not only opened her bedroom french windows but also drew the net curtains back, thus exposing herself to the full force of the night-time mosquitoes. After about three days, she had developed such a terrible rash that we recommended she cut her holiday short and return to England. She was in a really bad way.

Another visitor was Caroline Vanrenen, or Cal as we called her, the daughter of my sister Zizza and her husband Walter. Her father had put her as an unaccompanied teenager in a couchette in Paris from

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Chapter 11 where she had travelled overnight with various other companions including a Sikh gentlemen who, to the disturbance of everyone else in the couchette, spent the entire night unrolling his turban then rolling it up again until he got it to his complete satisfaction.

One Easter holidays, Mary and Mervyn now living in Bepton, Sussex, collected Douglas from Oakley Hall at the start of the Easter holidays and brought him out to stay in Italy. This particular journey provides an illustration of just how unreliable English cars could be in those days, especially when travelling outside the UK. Mary, Mervyn and Douglas arrived in Naples all right, but after staying with us, Mary and Mervyn decided to visit southern Italy, including Sicily. In this, the second part of the journey, at least two if not three major faults with either petrol pump or water pump occurred, and they had to spend vast sums of money getting these temporarily repaired so they could get back to Naples. The English Warrant Officer in charge of maintenance at the Base was able to fix them up for the return journey. When Mervyn wrote and complained to the car manufacturer, the only reply was that for such a major trip, he should have taken spare parts. How many spare parts!? Which spare parts!?

At least Mary and Mervyn were safely back with us in Naples for Easter Sunday and were able to witness the famous turkey incident, which has gone down in family history. For Easter lunch, Elizabeth had managed to acquire a turkey which she had cooked beautifully.

It was put down on its enormous platter in the centre of the table by Lucia the maid at which point, it seemed to give an enormous sigh and promptly subsided, falling apart in front of our very eyes. From my point of view, as the person carving, I was delighted, as the turkey had put me out of a job!

At the start of one summer holiday, we collected the three children from their respective schools at the end of July, along with Penny Bingham, Sheila’s friend from Rookwood school. This time, we were not going to get caught out staying in expensive hotels near the Channel coast, so we motored as far south as we could and eventually stopped in Soissons between Reims and Paris.

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Chapter 11 The next morning we woke up to heavy rain which continued all the way across France until tea-time in Dijon. Naturally enough, something had to go wrong with the car and, naturally enough, it had to be the windscreen wipers which had been on-the-go, nonstop, for six hours.

I enquired in my best French from some garage as to how long it would take to fix the windscreen wiper and they said two days. I therefore decided, as it had now stopped raining, to motor on. We continued south and never saw any more rain for two months. We stopped off at a hotel in southern France and had an extremely good meal. At the end of the first course, the waiter very politely drew our attention to the fact that we had not done full justice to the gravy and he explained to Elizabeth that the succulent gravy was all part and parcel of his very good meal. He provided more bread and made us mop it up.

Once again on this journey, Elizabeth managed to fit in some shopping and the vegetable dishes she bought then (and on previous expeditions) are in circulation to this day.

Near Rome, we filled up with petrol and, being easily identifiable as English tourists, we were charged the earth not just for petrol but also for the oil and for testing the tyres. We then decided to by-pass the coast road and go inland. We stopped off for the night in a very excellent hotel in the foothills of the lower Apennines, looking out over the Mediterranean. Once back in Naples, we then did the traditional sightseeing with Penny and the bathing at Varca d’Oro beach because, by this time, bathing in Naples Bay and Arco Felice were both taboo, due to sewage and oil pollution.

Another visit came from Douglas’ school friend from Oakley Hall, Michael Beasley. As a result of my military duties, I got further and further behind on the sightseeing for Michael, so that eventually in desperation we all got up very early on the morning of his departure and motored all the way out to Pompeii to make sure he could at least go back to his parents and say he had visited Pompeii.

An unrelated episode, not connected with visits by friends and

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Chapter 11 family, was a New Year’s Day outing the children and I made to Mount Vesuvius. On that particular day, as so often in Naples, the sun was shining, the sky was blue and everything looked like a perfect English bank holiday style “trippers’ day out.” When we got to Vesuvius, we motored up as far as we could to the highest car park.

As it was such a brilliantly fine day, none of us was prepared for mountaineering, the children being mostly in gym shoes, as I remember it. We climbed merrily up in the fading sunshine, aware but not quite aware enough, of the rapidly dropping temperature, until we stood right on the top of Mount Vesuvius, still snowcapped. We looked over the crest and satisfied ourselves that we had looked into the crater, then turned round to come back again, but by this time, the sun had suddenly set over the Bay of Naples, and it was pitch black. Not only that, the trodden snow had frozen to ice and, of course, we were totally unprepared for the descent in slip-on shoes. We eventually managed to navigate the slippery surface and get down to the car park without having taken a header down the hillside. It took ages and I literally had my heart in my mouth all the way down. Was I glad to get back to that car park!

On two occasions Elizabeth and I undertook to visit unexplored parts of southern Italy. We were so taken with the southern Italian climate and the cheap cost of living and value for money that I answered an advertisement in the Sunday Times for villas in Rosa Marina, south of Rimini on the Adriatic coast. Having received a reply, I asked the Consul-General whom I met at a drinks party in Naples, if he had any information on this venture. On my behalf he applied to the Banco di Napoli for information and a week later was handed a reply - in Italian which, translated, read: “Proceed with caution.”

We decided to motor anyway across to Rosa Marina. It was a brilliant, fine and sunny day. The place looked almost idyllic except that all the best chalets or should I say “glorified huts” on the sea front had already been spoken for, so the fact that we would be second-class citizens helped to dampen our enthusiasm somewhat. Nevertheless, we thought we would go and see them once again and motored across one Sunday in the late autumn. On the Naples side, it had been fine and sunny, but when we crossed to the eastern side of Italy, the

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Chapter 11 weather changed and we found ourselves in the teeth of a cold, miserable weather front straight out of Russia and the Balkans. We went to the nearest town to look around, but there was not a soul to be seen. Everyone had gone to ground. What would we do on a wet day in this place, we asked ourselves.

We also went and looked at chalets further up the coast from Varca d’Oro towards Rome. There again, we were lucky enough to visit the site with a strong wind blowing in from the Mediterranean. The chalets we visited were not only boarded up but had sand against the door! At that time, Naples HQ was expanding - on paper at least - and there was some idea of building an underground nuclear-proof HQ in the mountains north of Naples along the coast road. I had some wild idea that, if I were to retire, I might get a job in this underground HQ, because others would not want to be there.

Looking at the possible accommodation, however, made me realise that this was not on.

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of our first wedding in 1961, Elizabeth and I decided to visit Venice, the idea being not only that we visit Venice for the first time, but also buy ourselves Venetian glass as a wedding anniversary present. We travelled to Venice and en route stopped at a wayside furniture-making shop where we bought the little 4 drawer cupboard the silver is kept in. In Venice, apart from sightseeing, we also visited all the shops and establishments selling Venetian glass. None of this Elizabeth found particularly attractive, so we were advised to go to the source at the Murano glass factory. We travelled out by ferry to look at the glassware and although Elizabeth still did not find it all that attractive, I said that we had come all this way and couldn’t possibly leave without having bought anything. We bought ten of everything: wine glasses, sherry glasses, tumblers, staggered back to the car with the glass and chauffeured it exceptionally carefully from Venice to Naples. The next night we went into Naples to do other kinds of shopping and we passed a shop selling glass from Naples. Elizabeth said that the Naples glass was exactly what she wanted, so we bought that too. Now we had two sets of everything.

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Chapter 11 General Russ it was who uttered the immortal words to me, which I have never forgotten: “You know, David, the trouble is, I’ve got plenty of money, but no cash.” Well, we did not have plenty of money, nor did we have plenty of cash, but we were determined to enjoy ourselves in Naples, because we thought we might never get another chance.

Naples perhaps offered the best shopping of all our overseas postings. Elizabeth shopped very cautiously and very sensibly, once again due to the lack of money. Her earliest purchase was a small gold bracelet in a jeweller’s shop in Pozzuoli. The jeweller quoted a price of 15,000 lire, approximately £10 in those days. Elizabeth, by chance, had only a brand new 10,000 lire note which was a very large and very impressive-looking item to our English eyes in early 1960.

Elizabeth spread this large note on the counter and explained that 10,000 lire was all that her husband had been able to give her. After some traditional haggling, the jeweller turned his eyes to the ceiling and said in a mixture of Italian and English that in that case, the signora really must have the bracelet for 10,000 lire. Elizabeth later found opportunities in central Naples to buy jewellery in some of the more traditional shopping venues, Gold Alley off the Via Roma gave the best value for money.

On a later occasion, after we had left NATO, and I was late arriving back in England, Elizabeth came across a very elegant solid gold bracelet, which was very tasteful and, she thought, was good value for money. Elizabeth hoped that when I came out to join her in Naples, I would have enough money for her to be able to make the purchase. I travelled out just after Harold Wilson had had to devalue the pound in 1968 and, as a result of the devaluation, prices seemed to go haywire. The very afternoon before I arrived, Elizabeth went into Naples to see if the bracelet was still there and almost before her very eyes, a prosperous Italian gentleman walked into the shop, bought the bracelet and took it away. Elizabeth later discovered he was a prominent jeweller from Milan and had taken advantage of the turmoil in the European currency markets to make that and other purchases in Naples. Despite this setback there were plenty of other opportunities around Naples for Elizabeth and other members of the

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Chapter 11 family to take advantage of the fact that gold was still cheap and to buy other gold bracelets, rings and ornaments.

One of the other shopping venues was the Allied Officers’ Club in the NATO HQ Post where of course, the prices were artificially deflated because the shopkeepers were keen to make sales from which they would get American dollars rather than local currency.

Elizabeth purchased a black Persian lamb jacket here. As she was not all that keen on it, she tried to exchange it for a grey lamb jacket which eventually arrived from Greece. Sheila now has the jacket, to compensate for the fact that Felicity had Granny Wood’s fur coat.

There were other purchases to be made in the Allied Officers’ Club shop, mostly ornaments many of which are still decorating Haply, our present home in West Byfleet. One of the particular items that attracted Elizabeth were brass candlesticks specially flown over from Athens in a NATO aeroplane through the good auspices of Colonel Parker or possibly another American friend, Colonel Sep Richard.

Colonel Richard thought nothing of taking three or four days off duty in Naples to fly to India as part of his essential Air Force training and make purchases in India for other American officers or their wives.

Incidentally, it was Sep Richard who acquainted me with two hand signals to be used in Naples. One was to place the thumb and forefinger together to make an O shape which meant OK. The other was to make an undulating motion of the hand which meant extremely doubtful and very tricky.

The last and one of the best purchases that Elizabeth made was our landscape picture which she transported back by air from Naples to the UK. Some expert was of the opinion at one time that the gold leaf frame was even more valuable than the picture.

It cost us a lot of money to entertain those who had so wonderfully entertained us, and we received hardly any allowances from Her Majesty’s Government to “keep the British end up”. Talking of which reminds me of a minor Anglo-American diplomatic incident, when I turned up at a military ball in full evening dress uniform with a red jacket and blue trousers. General Kelleher, another American HQ

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Chapter 11 general, took one look at me and said: “Hey Dave, I thought we shot the last one at Bunker’s Hill!” He was referring to a famous battle of the American Revolutionary War in 1775, at which the British suffered terribly heavy losses, even though they forced an American retreat. In those days, King George III’s soldiers wore red jackets rather similar to mine.

The sometimes amusing American attitude to the British was also reflected in a minor incident when Elizabeth went into the library at AFSE to take out a book on England which she required to show friends exactly where we had lived in England. The black American sergeant behind the desk, when asked by Elizabeth for books on Britain, said she would find what she wanted under “third world countries”. I suppose we found their idiosyncrasies strange, too. It always amused us that the Americans, who had their milk flown in from Denmark and their vegetables from the United States, would allow their children to buy a water melon from the roadside, whereas we would not have dreamed of letting our children do this. Not that we refrained from buying fruit and vegetables locally, but we did take the precaution of washing fruit or vegetables that we ate raw, such as salads, in a potassium permanganate solution before eating it.

At the end of our time in Naples, I was taking part in a NATO exercise where we all had to imagine that World War III had broken out and that atomic bombs were dropping all around us. We were all taken into nuclear shelters and, being the deputy, I drew the dogwatch, 10pm till 6am. Around midnight of all times, I had an envelope delivered to me. The letter said that I had been posted to Nigeria.

I had to wait twenty four hours until the end of the exercise before I could seek clarification. Then I rang up the individual at Supreme Allied Forces who had signed on behalf of the Military Secretary in London, and asked him what all this was in aid of. They said Viscount Head had been appointed as High Commissioner in Lagos.

The first person offered the job of military attaché was the son of some Old Etonian the Viscount had quarrelled with at school. The

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Chapter 11 second was someone in the Brigade of Guards with whom he had had a row when serving at London District HQ some years previously. The Military Secretary in London had said: “He’s turned down two men on personal grounds so I decided to select someone he has never heard of and therefore cannot oppose.”

I was furious and composed an irate letter to the War Office to the effect that I didn’t have any papers but that, if I did, now would be the time for me to hand them in. I went on to say that I did not know how I could set about retiring, but I was not able to go to Nigeria. I had three children at boarding school and it was difficult enough to arrange holidays on the same continent just 1200 miles away, so how I was actually going to see my children and afford to bring my children in and out of Lagos when the Army only paid for one child fare per year was quite beyond me.

I showed my letter to Stew Porter of USAF. He was a great friend of mine and said to me: “Do you really think you should be sending this letter?” Whereupon, I added a further paragraph which read: “If I were to go to Nigeria for two or three years, I would then have completed twenty-two to twenty-three years of foreign service. I seem to remember it was the British Army I joined, not the Foreign Legion.”

Back came a letter informing me that I would not be posted to Nigeria, but this meant that at the end of my time in Naples, I had no appointment and nowhere to live. We could no longer go on living in the villa in Parco Caruso. The only reason we could afford the rent there was through our NATO allowances and, although we had lots of friends in the Parco Caruso, it was not a feasible proposition to carry on living there. We had already abandoned the idea of Rosa Marina, so Elizabeth went with Lucia, our maid, looking at suitable alternative accommodation in and around Arco Felice. We had bought our predecessor’s furniture, but when we came to move, our bachelor successor, of course, didn’t want it. We eventually found a small flat in a building with a shop beneath and two flats above. We moved some of the furniture into that and sold the rest.

This flat became our pied-á-terre for almost an entire decade.

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Chapter 12

C H A P T E R T W E LV E - Back to England -

When my time came finally to leave NATO, the arrangement was that I should return to the MOD, where I had already served with a certain amount of distinction, instead of Nigeria. I was due to report back to the MOD in January 1963. Elizabeth decided to remain at the flat, as Sheila was travelling in most nights from Arco Felice to the French school in Naples with a view to taking O Level French and to the RAF School at the base to retake English Literature and Art. Sheila was due to go to the University for Foreigners in Perugia in April 1963. This had all been arranged some time ago. We had gone to the town of Perugia during 1962 to see what it was like and whether it would be suitable for Sheila. Looking out of the window of our hotel, we were very impressed to see masses of students passing by on the way to their studies, all of them seemingly under twenty. We thought - and Sheila agreed with us - that it was the perfect way for her to spend the best part of a year, learning Italian.

Probably the only disadvantage for Sheila was that we arranged for her to board in a convent while at Perugia to keep her out of harm’s way! Perhaps for the same reason, Elizabeth elected to stay out in Italy with Sheila until the start of her term.

In the winter of 1963, there was one of the most severe cold spells on record in Northern Europe, and even places as far south as Naples caught the cold edge of it. One night in late January 1963, Elizabeth came in to the flat after shopping in Arco Felice to find that Sheila had just returned from shopping in Naples and was almost frozen to death in the unheated flat. Elizabeth immediately switched on the gas heater and to her horror, it blew up and the rubber tubing that carried the gas into the heater came adrift. With gas now leaking into the flat and flames gushing from the cylinder, though it may now seem in retrospect to be a bit foolhardy, Elizabeth seized hold of the

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Chapter 12 tube and reconnected it, probably saving the flat and the entire building from going up in flames.

In January 1963, Elizabeth and Sheila were in the flat, Douglas had had to go back to school at Oakley Hall a week early, and that left Felicity who was returning to Rookwood and me, who was off to start work at the Ministry of Defence in England. Felicity and I therefore decided to travel back by car together and I was determined to have a good trouble-free cross-continental journey. Thus, I went to inordinate trouble and expense to get the car really serviced before she and I duly set out. It was a Sunday. We had only motored about two hours up the coast road to Rome when the windscreen wiper water exploded in Felicity’s face, sending the fluid all over her clothes. It was two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, but I was nonetheless able to stop at a wayside township in central Italy and find a mechanic who was prepared to come out and fix the thing.

We then motored on to northern Italy without more ado because we were determined to take advantage of our knowledge of Italy and Italian prices before we faced France. We both wanted to travel back via Monte Carlo, so the next day in still brilliant sunshine - even though it was mid-January - we crossed over from Italy to the south of France and spent time in Monte Carlo. Here, we bought post cards and posted them from Monte Carlo to Felicity at Rookwood School.

Some were addressed by me and some by her to demonstrate to Rookwood School that we had actually been to this glamorous place.

On the third day, we headed north and spent the night somewhere not too expensive in central France. It was the following day, as we were half way up France that the car dynamo started to give us trouble. Fortunately, I knew there was a NATO HQ at Fontainebleau and late in the evening I pulled in and asked for help. An RAF technician volunteered to try and fix the dynamo so that we could get to the Channel port. By this time, north of Fontainebleau, it had become extremely cold and there was snow on either side of the road.

We had left Italy in glorious sunshine! Eventually, we managed to pull into Calais in the late afternoon, despite continuing dynamo problems, and cross over on the ferry. When we arrived at the English

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Chapter 12 Channel port, we found southern Kent in deep snow and I decided that it was not going to be feasible for us to travel any further. I pulled into Martin Walters’ big garage in Folkestone where they took out the old dynamo and gave me a new one. I didn’t know where on earth to spend the night, as there was snow all over the place, so we went on to Benenden and cadged a night off Mrs Cole. Next day, we set off to Andover, also in deep snow, for Rookwood for the beginning of Felicity’s term.

I then motored back to Sussex to stay with Mary and Mervyn at Bepton which was also deep in snow. That winter had been comparatively mild until Christmas. On Boxing Day, Mary and Mervyn had gone to a cocktail party and within a couple of hours, while they were enjoying their Christmas cheer, the snow had come down and they had found it difficult to get home. I spent two to three days with them and then went on to Woolwich in order to spend the next two or three weeks living in the War Office Officers’ Mess waiting until an Army quarter become available once again in West Byfleet. I asked at the reception if there was a garage and they indicated a vacant one to me. I drove the car into it and made the mistake of shutting the garage door. The snow came down that night, drifted up against the door, froze in a lump and all efforts to dig it out were useless. I was unable to get the car out for eight weeks which shows how extreme conditions were.

The snow even caught the central heating in the Officers’ Mess unawares. Fortunately, the night the big freeze-up occurred, there had been two servants at the Mess with wit enough to heat up the hot water boilers, partly for themselves to use while on duty. It was just as well, as the cold water supply promptly froze that night, and if the hot water heaters had not been heated, they would have frozen too, leaving us completely without water. It then became a question of improvisation just to get the right bath temperature. We would come back to Woolwich Station from Charing Cross, then before going for our evening meal, run a steaming hot bath. After the meal, the bath was just the right temperature to step into!

All over the country, the big freeze continued. Douglas at Oakley Hall

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Chapter 12 had no games at all that Spring and no cross-country. The boys were simply taken across to the gymnasium every afternoon for exercise.

Douglas began to know every plank of wood by heart, right down to the last knot.

In spite of the weather, I managed to travel down twice to see Douglas at school, once in late January and once in February by coach from London to Cirencester. It was a cold and miserable journey the M4 did not exist in those days - by winding country road and it was no better for me than it must have been for Elizabeth travelling by bus with me from High Halden to Ashford in 1946’s equally atrocious winter weather.

Eventually, I managed to get my garage open and the car started. I was then able to go down and see Douglas twice more and take him either alone or with his friend Michael Beasley out for a meal around the Burford area. I was also able to visit Felicity in Andover during the Easter term travelling by train from Waterloo. While at Rookwood, I remember meeting Penny and Rosemary Bingham and Lavinia and Charmian Neilsen. Sheila and Felicity have maintained contact with all four of these friends to this day.

At half term, with her mother and sister still in Naples, Felicity came up to visit me in London and we must have spent a night at a hotel in London. Encouraged by her, I saw two films in one marathon afternoon and evening session, one of them being Cliff Richard in Summer Holiday. I, in my slightly cynical way, thought I wasn’t going to enjoy looking at pop stars in films at all, but I found both the films highly enjoyable. It was a very successful half term and, as a result of Felicity’s initiative, I have always had a very benevolent attitude towards Cliff Richard ever since, despite the fact that he is now a multi-millionaire living at St George’s Hill, Weybridge, just a few minutes up the road from West Byfleet.

Then, the big thaw set in. After the whole of January and February “on ice”, things began to open up again. To my delight, I found I had been allotted an Army quarter at 6 Wey Close in West Byfleet, not far from 1 Wey Close where we had lived previously for six months. I

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Chapter 12 therefore ceased to live at Woolwich and moved to Surrey.

In some way or other, I managed to acquire the services of one Mrs Clarke, a cleaning lady. I remember her to this day still with astonishment. Mrs Clarke allegedly came in on a Monday, made the bed and generally tidied the house. On Friday morning, I put her cleaning money on the table before going to the office. I was on my own at this point and the arrangement ran like clockwork.

Eventually, the family joined me at Wey Close, Elizabeth from Italy, Felicity from school and Douglas from school. Sheila wasn’t even there yet! Whereupon Mrs Clarke took one look at the work and the problems involved and thought: ‘I’m not having this,’ and took her money and never came back.

Meanwhile back at work at the MOD for the second time, I found myself with another Clarke, no relation to the aforementioned unfortunate cleaning lady, General Desmond Clarke who everyone prophesied I would not get along with. When I was at Chessington in 1957, similar prophesies had been bandied about. There it was alleged I would not last for more than three weeks with General Jack Churcher who had commanded a division all through the Normandy campaign. Not only did I actually last with General Churcher, but he recommended me for promotion. Similarly in central London with Desmond Clarke, I worked with him for two years and he recommended me for a CBE. I had been recommended for this for my work on the missile base, but did not get it. The second time, they did not deny me my just desserts.

My relationship with General Clarke was rather like my relationship with Brigadier Brunker in Chester. General Clarke and I very seldom met before quite late in the evening. He was an extremely hardworking and ambitious officer who used to take masses of files back to study at home, which he was actually forbidden to do under MOD rules, and then bring them back in the early morning. He attended endless briefings and committee meetings. I, on the other hand, knowing that I was going to be working late never went up to town from West Byfleet until late morning on the 9.59 train. I always left two minutes after General Clarke. As a result of the briefings and

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Chapter 12 meetings, General Clark never seemed to be in the office until five in the afternoon anyway, so my tracks were well covered, unlike those of a fellow officer who lived in Headcorn in Kent and was in the office at 8am every day and out by 4pm. He had yet to learn “the system”.

The time I spent in the MOD coincided with the expulsion of Asians from African countries. These Asians had British passports and needed to be evacuated to the UK, so General Clarke and I used to share out the work. I did have quite a few problems and several matters to discuss with General Clarke and we concluded an efficient way of doing business.

Soon after I started work at the MOD, another officer in the department, whose responsibility, among others, it was to vet and approve army officers wishing to attend garden parties at Buckingham Palace. He asked me if I would be interested in having my name included on his list. I consulted Elizabeth, just arrived back from Naples, who seemed quite keen, and so I asked to have our names included. Hey presto, a few weeks later, we found ourselves with an invitation in our hands. This involved buying a morning suit and a top hat for me and a new outfit for Elizabeth. We arrived early, but not too early, not wishing to appear to look like “new boys”, but soon found that the “old hands” had no compunction about arriving early and had got there well ahead of us. Not only that, they had secured themselves the best places, close to the tea. We had to melt into the crowd and join the back rows of the queues lining up to meet the Queen. Those to whom she had wished to be formally introduced were, of course, in the front rank. After tea, we wandered round the grounds and went home again.

Douglas, by now, was gradually working his way up Oakley Hall School. Scholastically he was never necessarily top of the form, but he was always in the first flight. In sport, he reached the First XV in rugger as a fly half and played for the First XI in cricket. On one of the more memorable occasions, we had motored all the way to Oakley Hall from overseas while I was on leave to watch Douglas play in a cricket match. We saw him take a brilliant catch at cover

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Chapter 12 point and Dick Letts the Headmaster remarked: “What a long way you have travelled just to see that catch!” Also good at games and in some of the same teams, was Douglas’ friend, O’Regan, the son of an Old Marlburian of my vintage.

It was now time for Douglas to move on to Marlborough, where he went in September 1963. I had asked Dick Letts whether there was any chance of Douglas taking a scholarship to Marlborough, as I had done and failed, and I was told that although his Latin was excellent he was not in the scholarship class as he was not taking Greek.

Nonetheless, Douglas passed Common Entrance with credits and I was personally congratulated on his excellent papers by letter by the Registrar of Marlborough, Mr Jennings, who had taught me in the army class there many years before.

Douglas, as a result of his good grounding in Latin under the tutelage of Major Letts, passed O-Level Latin at an early age at Marlborough.

It was after this that he moved into B2, the house where I had been in the 1930s. Here, he came into the charge of the House Master, Jack Halliday, who has unfortunately since died, although his wife Edna still lives in Marlborough.

Sheila meanwhile came back from Perugia and embarked on a secretarial course at Guildford Technical College, travelling to Guildford each day by train, and walking back home alone in the evening from the station to Wey Close. While travelling in and out of Naples with its bad reputation on her own and often in the dark, Sheila had never had any problems with her personal safety. Now that we were in the “safety” of England, Sheila was mugged. The reason she was singled out by the mugger in question was probably because she carried a large and expensive-looking handbag, which she had bought in Italy. The young man followed Sheila down from West Byfleet Railway Station and along Pyrford Road, but it was only when she turned into the Oaks on her way to the army quarters that she sensed someone following her. She increased her grip on her bag as a result, so that when they reached the corner and he tried to grab it, he failed and scooted off empty-handed up a side road.

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Chapter 12 I reported the incident to the police who came to the house and took a statement from Sheila. Unfortunately for the mugger, he dropped an ID card from his place of work, the British Aircraft Corporation at Weybridge, at the scene. The next morning some well-wisher from the Oaks handed it into the police. The police put two and two together that the owner of the ID card was the young man who had tried to mug Sheila. He was arrested and the police said that if he was prepared to plead guilty, then he would receive a lesser sentence and Sheila, still just a teenager, would not have to appear in court to give evidence. So he pleaded guilty, his sentence was reduced and Sheila did not have to go through the ordeal of giving evidence.

Just before I came up for retirement in 1965, we wondered if it might be feasible for Sheila and Felicity to attend a Buckingham Palace Garden party with us. Luckily, the same officer was still in the position of being able to get people on the list, so I rather tentatively approached him in his office and to my surprise, he didn’t bat an eyelid, with the result that we found ourselves with another invitation to Buckingham Palace. It was another of those occasions where being in the right place at the right time proved to be a winner.

No longer being the “new boys”, we all arrived early and this time secured an appropriate table near to the tea. I was wearing the same top hat and morning suit as before and Elizabeth and the girls were all suitably attired for the occasion. Jim Callaghan was Labour Prime Minister at the time, and his two daughters were with him just as our two daughters were with us. Unlike Sheila and Felicity, however, who looked most demure, the Callaghan girls attended wearing very risqué attire, mini-skirts and white boots if my memory serves me.

They were the focus of all the photographers’ cameras!

My case was reviewed and I came up for retirement in 1965. It was at that time that I told Elizabeth we must now organise ourselves in a proper military and professional way because I might be going to carry on working at the MOD as a retired officer and I would need to be within striking distance of London, i.e. Waterloo or Charing Cross, by train. Of course, when I retired, the army quarter would no longer be available to us, so that meant one thing: buying a house.

We looked at a map and considered all the likely areas we might

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Chapter 12 retire to. We hankered after Kent because of the family connections and we actually went to Tenterden and walked round Headcorn, the main railway junction in the vicinity. We decided for no real reason that the area was not for us. We then tried Tunbridge Wells and could not afford it. Then we went to Langton Green and neither of us liked the look of it, plus there was the problem of transport for Elizabeth, who needed to be within walking distance of the railway station. The route to the station was uphill all the way which we knew would be a problem in later life and the area was also none too salubrious.

So we then switched our orientation from Kent to Sussex and Hampshire and with Hampshire came inevitable thoughts of Aldershot. In Aldershot, we consulted an estate agent who, in a rare moment of professional honesty, confided in us his amazement that anyone of a military background could possibly even contemplate Aldershot as a sensible proposition. But while the Aldershot Officers’ Club would have been a mild attraction for me, I could see that as far as the family was concerned, Aldershot was a bit of a non-starter.

Linked in with all this conjecture about our future was the question of a mortgage. I therefore booked an appointment to see my bank manager, Mr Atkinson, at Lloyds Bank, 6 Pall Mall. I asked him frankly about the mechanics of getting a mortgage. Mr Atkinson asked me how I was getting on and I told him my dilemmas. He said: “Well, what’s wrong with Surrey? I’ve never been to West Byfleet,” he continued, “but I can tell you that many of my customers have opted to buy a property there, so there can’t be much wrong with it.

Why don’t you buy a property in West Byfleet?”

The solution to our problems was therefore simple and obvious - and right on our doorstep. Acting on Mr Atkinson’s advice, Elizabeth and I started to look round West Byfleet. We first looked at the “highly desirable” Dartnell Park, but everyone agreed that it was much too far away from the railway station and, after Sheila’s experience at Wey Close, we felt it might pose a few problems if one of the girls were to try to walk back alone at night.

The top of Madeira Road was our next port of call, but there was

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Chapter 12 some snag to the house we looked at there. We then looked at a house on the Old Woking Road but it faced north east and was a semi.

Then, one day, by chance, Elizabeth happened to walk up from Wey Close via Camphill Road for coffee with Isabelle Woodley, a friend of hers, who lived at the lower end of Madeira Road. Three doors down, she saw a sign “FOR SALE� outside a house called Vernham.

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C H A P T E R T H I RT E E N - Vernham Vernham had been commissioned from the well-known local builder, Tarrant, during the late Edwardian period by its owners, Mr and Mrs Williams. Mr Williams worked for the Bank of England, which my mother had been keen for me to enter all those years ago! Perhaps it might have been a very pleasant occupation after all, for one gained the impression from the garden layout that Mr Williams had been leaving London relatively early each day for a number of years and travelling back to West Byfleet in order to spend his evenings working in the garden. The garden was one of the most attractive features of the property, with mature yew hedges dividing off the main part from the “Secret Garden”, which was planted with apple trees, and the vegetable garden. The yew hedges alone, as we were to discover later, took a fair amount of maintenance.

The Williams had no children living; one son had been killed in World War II and the other son had contracted an incurable disease.

We never met the Williams at all, as the son’s widow had come down to Surrey, put her in-laws in the car and driven them up to Scotland to live near her. What we did learn was that they had not changed the internal layout of the house since it had been built - and in the outside sheds and loft we were later to find quite a bit of black-out material dating from the war.

Elizabeth, on her first visit, spotted the possibility of modernising and improving the layout at Vernham. She took me to see the house and as it was within our price range and close to the station with a delightful garden, I was all in favour. In view of current house prices, Vernham may sound as if it was a cheap house at £7,500. Not a bit of it - and we needed every penny of the maximum mortgage Mr Atkinson was prepared to give us of £5,000 to purchase the house and do some renovation work.

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Chapter 13 The hall at Vernham, a key feature of the house, was most in need of modernising. The original stairs were enclosed, but Elizabeth had the idea of opening them up and replacing the wood panelling with wrought iron. The hall, therefore, was a top priority in our “refurbishment�. Out came much of the wood panelling and in came specially made pieces of wrought iron which opened up the whole staircase and the entrance hall, making it all much lighter and airier . Elizabeth also had a glass door put into the back wall which led out to the garden, which also made the hall look larger, more modern and cheerful.

- Elizabeth I decided that I must have a dining room, so turned the old kitchen which was the room on the left of the front door as you came in, into the dining room. I blocked up the fireplace and turned the space into a cupboard for the old scullery, which was beyond the dining room, which I had decided would be a small kitchen.

There was no downstairs lavatory apart from an outside loo which must have been fine for Mr Williams when he was working in the garden, but was not all right for a family of five. We therefore had the walls of the old outside loo knocked down and we incorporated this room into the new kitchen. Then we took a piece of the new kitchen on the other side of the room as a downstairs lavatory with a door off the hall.

-David There were many features of the house which were simply relics of a bygone Edwardian age. In the kitchen, there were five bells on the wall so that Mr and Mrs Williams were able to ring downstairs for the daily helps to come and serve them drinks and meals upstairs.

After Elizabeth had completed the modernisation, Isabelle Woodley, whose husband had been a cousin of the Williams, came to call on Elizabeth and simply couldn’t believe that this was the same house.

Elizabeth also overhauled the garden. We had inherited a gardener from the previous regime but unfortunately at the age of 70, his wife

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Chapter 13 insisted that he cease to work and in those days help around West Byfleet was few and far between. Elizabeth therefore also redesigned the garden to have fewer flower beds and this meant less work in terms of planting and weeding. The only drawback was that there was a greater expanse of grass to be mown. Another early visitor who visited Elizabeth while the house was still being modernised was Zoe MacDonald from the far end of Madeira Road. She dropped in on us because she was collecting for the Residents’ Association and she and Elizabeth continued to be friendly for the next thirty years. Elizabeth used to go fairly regularly with Zoe to Weybridge on a Monday for shopping and coffee. She and Zoe and two other West Byfleet friends also used to meet for coffee every Friday at Garnett Jones, the local department store. Regrettably, at the time of writing, one of these friends, Elsa Hemingway has died aged 93. Zoe has suffered two strokes and is in a nursing home near her daughter in Kent.

After two years at Vernham, which we bought in 1964, I retired from the MOD. We still had the flat in Naples and I had the idea, halfbaked though it ultimately proved to be, that it would be a good idea for me to go out to Naples and become a teacher of English. I had never appreciated either from the financial or psychological point of view, how vital it was for me to have a proper post-army career. I was only 53, hale and hearty and, in any case, with Douglas having gone to Marlborough the year before and looking set to stay there for four years more, I needed the money!

For more than ten years in the 1950s and 1960s, apart from our many and frequent army moves, the family focus had been on education and how to pay for it. I had in some respects been lucky. My rich Uncle Arthur, my father’s eldest but one brother, died when we were in Pakistan in 1954. He and Aunt Grange, his very wealthy heiress wife from Napier in New Zealand, had had no children. She had predeceased him and he left his estate divided between Aunt Jen’s four children in Australia and between my four sisters and myself.

The reason for this was that Aunt Jen’s husband had been a doctor and my sisters and I the children of an equally deserving but impecunious country parson.

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Chapter 13 Uncle Arthur had been very rich indeed. In the late 1940s, the then Labour Government, to stave off one of its perpetual financial crises, had subjected the very wealthy taxpayers to a capital levy, a one-off payment of 10% of their wealth - while they were still alive. This capital levy was introduced by Sir Stafford Cripps but no-one has dared repeat it, despite many subsequent Labour financial crises.

Uncle Arthur was one of the people subjected to this levy.

I had already appreciated on Uncle Arthur’s death in 1954 that one of my major financial commitments for the next ten years or more would be boarding school fees. I therefore set up an educational trust for the future through Barclays Bank. While the trust covered a good part of the fees, I still had to commute my pension to make ends meet, and I still needed to carry on working so as to have a little extra money to hand.

In spite of the money which changed hands between me and various educational institutions, I must say that army life with its inevitable moves, did disrupt the children’s education, especially the girls’.

Sheila’s schooling was the most varied and perhaps the most affected, starting as it did in Gibraltar at a kindergarten where she and Felicity both learned to read and write. It was a good start, but much of it went by the board on our return to South Wales when the girls went to the local primary in Pontypool. As this was where Felicity had her front teeth knocked out, the calibre of the education received here can well be imagined. Sheila was still not happy when we sent her away to Chepstow as a weekly boarder. It was only when we moved to Pembroke Dock, where both Sheila and Felicity went as boarders to Netherwood, that they were far more contented.

Netherwood may or may not have been in the top flight of educational establishments but they still aimed to provide a good grounding. Nevertheless, Sheila and Felicity had had such an interrupted educational background by this age that it was no surprise to us when the Headmistress of Netherwood, Miss Harris, said to us: “We’ve given them books to read, but we can’t make them read.” Both Sheila and Felicity did, however, distinguish themselves later when they went on to Rookwood.

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Chapter 13 In the 1965 Birthday Honours List, I was awarded the CBE for devotion beyond the call of duty. In 1966, Sheila accompanied us to Buckingham Palace for the investiture. I arranged for an army staff car to collect us and drive us to the Mall. There was a tremendous queue waiting to enter Buckingham Palace. This was not a problem to me, as I was taken off to an ante-room with other recipients to wait my turn. Sheila and Elizabeth, however, were shown to two seats which were not very well placed and they did not get a very good view of me as I received my decoration. In the ante-room we were given detailed instructions of what to do and say and what not to do and say. Then, to my horror, I found myself just about to come up before the Queen, when I saw a silver spur in my path right in front of the Queen. I had a vivid impression of some earlier recipient tripping over his spurs as he backed away from the Queen, and then another vivid impression of me stumbling all over it and making a fool of myself in front of her and all the assembled guests. In the event, I managed to skirt the spur, then to be sufficiently compos mentis to answer her questions as to what I was doing and where.

Then I stepped backwards, again avoiding the metal object in question, and left the next in line to go through the same trauma I had experienced.

Trying to be an English teacher in Naples was rather a flop all round.

We let the house to another service family who wanted to be within commuting distance of London. They stayed there for seven months, while I made the discovery that earning my keep in Naples would not be very enjoyable. For a start, I would have to travel in to Naples from Arco Felice every day, then hang around between one client appointment and the next, and this really wasn’t on. So it was back to Blighty for Elizabeth and me, although we did keep the flat on several more years for holidays.

At that time, Harold Wilson’s Labour Government was in power and to try to stop sterling flowing out of the country had imposed a £50 limit per person per year on money taken out of the country. The rent on the flat was £150 per year which may seem a pittance in today’s terms, but in the mid-1960s was not an insignificant amount of money. It also meant that to keep the flat going, the Ronald family

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Chapter 13 had to collectively and individually take £150 per year out to our Italian landlords. There was a rumour at the time - and I am not prepared to say whether it was true or false - that Elizabeth used to take the money out concealed about her person on the understanding that Customs’ officials would not search a lady. Suffice to say that we had a great deal of enjoyment out of the flat until we finally gave it up in the winter of 1972, due to structural problems for which we would have had to pay up.

After seven months living full time in the flat in Italy, we returned to Vernham. Our furniture had not yet arrived, but we were jolly cold after Italy and decided we would pay a visit to the house to extract some warm clothing from storage in the loft. Feeling rather lazy, we left the loft ladder down. The next day, the error was compounded when the postman left a magazine sticking out through the letter box.

The magazine was an obvious sign to burglars that the house was unoccupied. It was therefore, more or less, an open invitation to the burglars of this world to break and enter, which they subsequently did through one of the rear windows. The thieves found nothing of any value to be stolen downstairs because our silver box was still in the bank, and they didn’t fancy the pictures and ornaments we had left for the tenants. They did, however, spot the conveniently placed loft ladder we had left, and climbed up it into the loft. Here, they created enormous chaos as they turned the loft over looking for valuables. Elizabeth, trying to clear it all up in the next days and weeks, injured her back and I often think that her painful back dates back to the burglary at Vernham.

The burglars had a very clever plan, so they thought, but unfortunately for them, it was not really clever enough. In fact, it was quite stupid. Their plan was to work along the railway line.

They started out burgling a house or two in Guildford. The next night, they moved up the track by one station and burgled their way round Worplesdon. The next night it was on to Woking where they broke into a caravan site and, of course, one stop on from Woking being West Byfleet, our house was directly in their firing line. I can imagine the scene. Out they came from West Byfleet Station in the darkness and, quite naturally, they turned left into Madeira Road

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Chapter 13 where the beautiful houses were. There were no lights on at Vernham and the magazine sticking out through the front door made them quickly realise the house was unoccupied, so they said to themselves: This looks an easy target - and they struck.

I rang up the police as soon as I discovered the break-in on the Monday and gave them a list of missing possessions, including a grey flannel suit with a chalk stripe that I had just had cleaned and hung in the downstairs cupboard in the dining room. The police had, of course, detected the “pattern” that the burglars were working to, and told me that there had been a burglary in Byfleet and New Haw on the Sunday night. It was not too difficult to deduce that if it had been West Byfleet on the Saturday night, and Byfleet and New Haw on the Sunday night, Weybridge must be “up for grabs” on the Monday night.

Weybridge Station was duly staked out and on Tuesday morning, bright and early, a policeman keeping ‘cave’ caught sight of a young man in a grey flannel jacket with a chalk stripe carrying a blue suitcase. He approached the young man and said: “Do you live in Weybridge?” To this the young man said: “No, but I’m visiting my Auntie.” A bad mistake. What was the name of the young man’s Auntie, was the next question, and where did she live? The young man was unable to answer and was prevailed upon to open his blue suitcase (Elizabeth’s blue suitcase) and out of it came tumbling items stolen from us and from a heist in Weybridge the previous night.

The man, of course, was not working alone, and there was another “job” on Tuesday night in Walton-on-Thames, one stop up from Weybridge. A friendly man in Walton had undertaken to feed his neighbour’s cats while the man was on holiday. He duly went next door in all innocence to find a friend of our burglar busily engaged in helping himself to various items in the sitting room. Even then the man might not have been alerted had not the intruder said: “Oi mate, scarper, I was here first.” The neighbour duly scarpered and rang the police.

There was also a “third man” busily disposing of the evidence. The burglars had stolen a car to transport the booty to an air raid shelter

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Chapter 13 on Chobham ranges. The third man was no brighter than his chums had been. Needing to dispose of the stolen car, he set it alight right by the air raid shelter where the loot was hidden. This brightly burning beacon brought the police homing in on him like moths on a candle and twice as fast. Barely had burglar number three had time to put his matches away than the police were on the scene, arresting him and recovering our possessions and quite a few other people’s by the looks of it.

After the burglary, Elizabeth and I were invited to go to the police station where a huge billiards table had been set up filled with the loot. Elizabeth was cute enough to spot at least two items, including a brand new electric iron of Felicity’s, which we had both forgotten about. Later on, while I was out, detectives brought at least one of the burglars to Vernham, parked the car outside the front door, and asked Elizabeth if she would like to come outside and identify the burglar, but she graciously declined. The ironical thing was that at their trial, the boys, who had only recently been released from a stint in a local prison before going on their thieving spree, endeavoured to look as smart as possible so as to escape a heavy sentence. One of them decided to wear my grey jacket with the chalk stripe to impress the judge and sure enough, they were let off very lightly. A testimony, I think, to my taste in tailoring!

After our slightly false start, life at Vernham was exceptionally pleasant. One of the features of life there was the multiplicity of visitors from overseas, both friends and their offspring as well as many of the offspring of my father’s brothers and sisters who still lived in Australia. The words “Australian cousins” have entered our family folklore.

We also had so many good friends and neighbours at our end of Madeira Road: the Calders from South Africa who sent their two sons to Marlborough; Ron and Lorna Baines who lived in the house opposite; Darcy Garnier, an ex-gunner and his wife, the Honourable Lavender (who was christened in Singapore), who lived in the house which the Smarts subsequently moved to. Despite being the Honourable Lav, when shopping locally she still didn’t take off her

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Chapter 13 kitchen apron and pushed a child’s pram to the shops to carry her shopping back in, even though her children were all teenagers. Our own next door neighbours, on one side, were Isabelle and Mike Lacey and, on the other side, Douglas and Billie Fenwick. We often had drinks parties and Mike Lacey was often the first to arrive and almost invariably the last to leave. Both Isabelle Lacey and Isabelle Woodley have died, as has Joey Calder. After the Laceys left, the Waltons moved in and are still there.

Meanwhile, I had to think fairly smartly of getting myself a new career. As a result of the advice of Jack Halliday, Douglas’ House Master at Marlborough, I came to adopt teaching as my second career. Jack had a son in the Navy and thought that having been in the army, I had probably always been teaching someone to do something and therefore I had the ability to be a teacher. He explained that as I did not have a University degree, I would be unlikely to get a post at a Public School but that I was well qualified and very suitable to teach at a Preparatory School. He said he had no contact with the prep school world but suggested I contact Dick Letts, Douglas’ old headmaster at Oakley Hall, and that I get introductions through him.

Dick Letts gave me an introduction to the Assistant Secretary of the IAPS with whom I had an interview. When I came to have the interview, I discovered that the Assistant Secretary had fought in Burma with the Gloucestershire Regiment, which was one of the many regiments my battery had tried to support during the retreat in Burma. Having taken down a few particulars about my background, we then talked about our mutual interest in Burma. The interview ended and I came back to West Byfleet, believing that there would not be any response at all. To my surprise, I received a telephone call from Bristol from Peter Lazarus, the Headmaster of the Downs School. He asked me whether I was the Colonel Ronald who had been at B2 in Marlborough and served in the Royal Artillery.

He had been rung up by the Assistant Secretary of the IAPS who had recommended me, knowing that Peter Lazarus himself had also been in B2 at Marlborough and had served in the Royal Artillery as a temporary officer while doing National Service.

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Chapter 13 The voice at the other end of the telephone asked me to come down to Bristol the next Monday. He would pay my fare. We had an interview and he asked me to join the staff the next term. That is how I came to be a prep school master in the independent sector of the teaching profession for the next seventeen years.

There was a time in the 1960s when four members of the family were either being taught at school or university or teaching myself. Sheila had taken her O-Levels the year before and then had gone on to the University for Foreigners at Perugia from April 1963 for nine months.

Felicity worked her way through Rookwood, gained her O-Levels and then attended Tours University in western France with a view to gaining a distinction in French. She thoroughly enjoyed her time there, including going to the 24-hours Le Mans motor racing for which she had to have special permission from us and the University to attend because it meant staying away overnight. Finally, Douglas was at B2 working his way through O-Levels, where he did exceptionally well, and then moved on to A-Levels where he eventually passed in four subjects, including gaining a distinction in History of Art. He was also particularly keen on rugger, playing at fly half as he had done at Oakley Hall, but distinguished himself even more at hockey, becoming secretary of the First XI. He was Head of House and also a school prefect.

In his last year at Marlborough College in 1968, Douglas sat for a closed scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, which he did not obtain, being pipped at the post by the same individual who pipped him when he went for a scholarship to Trinity the next term. The Oxford entrance was one of the reasons he stayed on at Marlborough for an extra term. This meant, of course, that he had a nine-month gap between December 1968 and the following October 1969 when he was due to go to Edinburgh University. As my father had gone abroad after leaving University, and as I had opted for India rather than the UK soon after being commissioned, I proposed that Douglas should visit Australia for upwards of six months.

At that time, Elizabeth still had shares in Australian Mercantile Land and Finance Company and I therefore arranged with the Company

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Chapter 13 Secretary for Douglas to jackaroo for a few months on one of their properties before he took up an appointment as a teacher at Timbertop School, the ‘outward bound arm’ of Geelong Grammar School. The Headmaster of Geelong had previously been Headmaster at Marlborough and Jack Halliday, Douglas’ Housemaster, recommended to him that Douglas should fill the same sort of appointment that Prince Charles had filled at Timbertop a year or two before. Thus Douglas flew out to Australia and initially joined Sheila at Nap Nap for Christmas with Gaie Ronald. Gaie had entertained me at Nap Nap all those years previously. Douglas did his stint as a jackaroo on an AML property some 40 miles west of Hay, New South Wales, and then went off to Timbertop.

In 1967, Sheila, having gained a secretarial qualification and worked for a few years in London, had gone to Australia under the Assisted Passage Scheme by which she got an air ticket to Australia for £10, provided she stayed out there for two years. As Douglas and Sheila were both out in Australia at the same time, they had a holiday together at the Great Barrier Reef. Sheila too had started off almost by tradition at Nap Nap with Gaie Ronald. Then she had two different appointments, one looking after children and one as companion to Mrs Bunty Tanner, an extremely wealthy Australian in Sydney. Her brother-in-law and sister-in-law often used to come and winter in Surrey. Sheila then took up an office job with 3M in Sydney and shared a flat with some other girls, having visited Elizabeth’s sister who lived near Adelaide.

It was one of Elizabeth’s deepest disappointments that when both Sheila and Douglas were out in Australia, we could not afford the minimum of £1,000 required for the return air fare and living expenses in Sydney. This disappointment has continued the rest of our married life. Now that we could afford to go, neither of us is physically capable of withstanding twenty-four hours in an aircraft. The friends of Sheila’s whom we met in Surrey did mention to us that at our age we would find Sydney, particularly, a totally different experience from thirty years previously. In that six months of 1936 we were young and had no responsibilities and were able to indulge ourselves as far as our joint salaries would permit. Things had most definitely changed.

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Chapter 13 In 1970, Sheila came back from Australia. After qualifying in 1965 as a secretary from Guildford Technical College, now part of Surrey University, she had worked for a while for Price Waterhouse. She shared a flat with a number of girls with whom she has remained in continual contact.

Felicity did not fancy being involved in secretarial work. Just like her mother, she was artistic and good with her hands, so she went to work with Moyses Stevens, the top florist in Berkeley Square, within a stone’s throw of the building where I had worked at the Ministry of Defence. After some years with Moyses Stevens, she wanted to broaden her experience and therefore moved to the General Trading Company in Sloane Street. Just like Moyses Stevens, customers here included several royal personages. Felicity shared a flat with the Neilsen sisters from Rookwood School. There they were, some years later, sharing a flat just as they had shared a dormitory.

Vernham was very convenient for Elizabeth as it was just a short walk to the railway station. She was therefore able to travel to London to see Felicity on a Tuesday and have lunch with her in Berkeley Square or Sloane Street and then have time to “do” Dickens and Jones. Sheila’s place of employment was not so easily accessible, so Elizabeth was not able to see Sheila as often as she would have liked.

Douglas, meanwhile, had gone to Edinburgh University to read History and French which involved a four-year course, of which the third year was spent at a French University. Originally, he boarded in Portobello where Elizabeth visited him, actually meeting on Princes Street, quite by chance, a friend from her youth in Ayr. The woman came up to Elizabeth out of the blue and greeted her after fifty years. Douglas became engaged to Kathryn Murray in 1971, and they both went off to Nancy University in eastern France for the third year of University. While there, Douglas continued his rugger and toured all over eastern France with the team. I remember him telling us that there were fourteen captains in his rugby team, and that if his French had been better he would have been the fifteenth.

When Elizabeth and I closed down the flat in Naples, we were lucky

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Chapter 13 enough to sell our furniture to incoming NATO naval officers. We had arranged to travel across Europe and visit Nancy. However, as we did not get as much money from closing down the flat as we anticipated, because of all the inevitable end-of-lease expenses, we were not able to spend as much time as we would have liked there.

I worked at the Downs School, all told, for five terms, during which time I was not only away from Elizabeth quite a bit, but also having to put in a fair amount of motoring.. I came back to see her in Surrey from Somerset every week for 24 hours, following a precedent set by Peter Lazarus, the Headmaster of the Downs School. Peter Lazarus was the owner of the sixth most valuable collection of glass in the UK. He always used to go up to London on a Sunday night to get a preview of the glass that was being sold at Sotheby’s or some such auction house on the Monday. After attending the sale rooms on the Monday, he then came back to Bristol. As he himself set a precedent of being away from the school for a twenty-four hour period, all the other members of staff were able to do the same. My day off was Tuesday so I left sharp at 5pm on a Monday evening and motored back to West Byfleet to arrive by 9pm. At the height of the summer, I used to get up at crack of dawn on a Wednesday and motor to the school for breakfast at 8am, as the traffic was comparatively light.

While I was teaching at the Downs School, Peter Lazarus asked me if I would like to attend a refresher course in Geography, which was one of my main subjects, at Worcester College, Oxford. On the same course, I met Rodney Maynard and another member of staff from St Andrew’s School Woking. After a long discussion about the future, it was suggested I might like to teach there starting the following school year. At St Andrew’s School, I would only be a quarter of an hour from home as opposed to four hours down in Somerset. This was arranged in due course. Peter Lazarus wished me good luck and I joined at St Andrew’s School where I played out time until 1978, when I was due for an old age pension at the age of sixty five.

The year 1973 was the year of the marriages. Sheila had met Gerald Garnett at a cocktail party in London and they became engaged to be married. There was a certain amount of discussion as to the date

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Chapter 13 of their wedding and I said that if it was going to be in February, the only time that was suitable to me was the February half-term from St Andrew’s School. They planned to get married in London and I, as a CBE, was able to apply for and be granted permission for them to be married in the Chapel of the Order of the British Empire in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral. Felicity and Kathryn were the bridesmaids and Douglas an usher. Douglas and Kathryn had to travel down from Edinburgh for the wedding and Elizabeth undertook to make the bridesmaids’ dresses. There was certainly a dramatic and hectic time when Kathryn’s bridesmaid’s dress was not yet quite ready and Kathryn was marooned on a train somewhere in the Midlands en route from Edinburgh.

One of the clearest recollections I have of Sheila and Gerald’s wedding was of standing outside St Paul’s Cathedral after the wedding on the brilliantly fine February spring day. Sheila and Gerald were on the pavement outside St Paul’s while various wellwishers were taking photographs, but the major bevy of photographers were from Japan who queued up to take pictures of the wedding with St Paul’s in the background. These photographs presumably have pride of place in someone’s album back in Japan.

The reception for Sheila and Gerald’s wedding was held at the hall of the Armourers and Brasiers’ Company, of which Gerald’s family have traditionally been members. We were delighted to have at the wedding Cousin Rose from the States, Gerald’s brother, Micky from Australia, and Australian cousins, Peter Wood and Christine Mackinnon doing the Australian world tour. After spending their honeymoon in the Canary Islands, Sheila and Gerald went to live at Rede Place in Bayswater which Gerald had previously shared with friends of his. Gerald at that time had a very good job with Ranks Hovis MacDougall in London.

Douglas and Kathryn were married at Bramhall in Cheshire, where her parents lived, in August 1973. This wedding was attended notably by Jack and Edna Halliday who made a special effort to be present, as well as by Peter Wood and Christine Mackinnon. At the end of Douglas’ time in Edinburgh, his tutor had been keen for him to stay on at Edinburgh and take a Ph.D. in History, as the history

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Chapter 13 component of his degree had been equivalent to a First Class Honours. Douglas, however, decided that he had spent quite enough years being taught and it was time for him to get into the big world and start earning money. He started off in a money broker’s office with a firm called Anthony Mack, where it was very much a baptism of fire, then he decided to broaden his experience and applied for a job with Kleinwort Benson’s Italian Department for which he was successful. However, itchy feet are endemic in the Ronald family. In 1975, Douglas had acquired a job with United Dominions Trust in Wellington, New Zealand, and off he and Kathryn went on 1 June 1975, in a snowstorm from Heathrow Airport, never to be seen again, or so we thought!

On 13 February 1978, we celebrated the birth of Sheila and Gerald’s first child and our first grandchild, Rupert. We were occasionally called upon to baby-sit him at Rede Place while his parents escaped to a dinner party. Sheila, of course, did not have the benefit of nannies as we had had, and Rupert was quite a handful, being very robust with a healthy cry, as Elizabeth and I were to find out. We coped quite well with him, changing nappies and administering bottles on the occasions our services were called upon. I also began to perfect the art of pushing babies out in push-chairs.

Just after Rupert’s birth in the February, I was preparing to retire, for I was going to turn 65 in the May. In my last term at St Andrew’s, Jean Elvidge, the mother of three of the boys whom I had taught in the sixth form, two of whom won scholarships to Charterhouse, asked Elizabeth whether she thought I’d be interested in teaching at her school, Cable House, which she was expanding. Elizabeth seemed to think I should at least be asked. During a brief discussion while we watched the school cross-country competition, Jean asked if I would like to start with her in September 1978 after the summer break when the new building, Orchard House, would be completed.

This would be a part-time job and co-education. The latter was a real stimulus as I’d never embarked on teaching girls and boys, and it therefore meant that my approach had to be slightly different.

Then came a period of a few years when everyone’s accommodation

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Chapter 13 changed, including our own. Gerald’s company decentralised and moved to Windsor, which entailed them looking for a new residence in the Berkshire area. Rede Place with a small baby was becoming too small anyway. In those days, Windsor seemed like the end of the world to us, but the M4 was constructed at around that time, meaning that we could comfortably motor over there in three quarters of an hour, less than the time it took us to get up to London.

Sheila and Gerald bought a big, rambling farmhouse in Ruscombe near Twyford in Berkshire. This was mainly Victorian but parts of it dated back to the sixteenth century. While it was livable, it required modernisation and refurbishment which occupied Sheila and Gerald for much of the 1980s and early 1990s.

In summer 1978, Douglas and Kathryn arrived back from New Zealand. We had no idea they were coming back. The only people who did know were Sheila and Gerald. They, together with baby Rupert and Felicity, had come down to Vernham for the day and announced to us that they had to pick up some friends from Slough at Heathrow Airport. This they duly left to do after lunch. Imagine our surprise when the ‘friends’ turned out to be Douglas and Kathryn! Elizabeth jumped into the air and said: “Goodie, goodie!” and I repaired in a daze to the kitchen to make tea!

Douglas and Kathryn decided to buy a house at this time and purchased Haply at the top end of Madeira Road, a three bedroomed modern semi which they reckoned would be a useful pied-a-terre for them while living abroad. Douglas was now going up to London to work at Kleinwort Benson and waiting to see where he would be posted. He was rung up one afternoon to be told that they were sending him to Jakarta. By now, Philippa was on the way, and I remember telling Douglas very sternly: “You can’t take Kathryn to Jakarta!”

Douglas and Kathryn left for Jakarta in January 1979. It was about this time that Felicity - in family tradition - decided to go out to Australia and visit the relatives, and perhaps settle out there herself.

On the way, she stopped off to stay with Douglas, Kathryn and their new baby, Philippa, who was just weeks old. Felicity settled in

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Chapter 13 Wagga Wagga in New South Wales. She amused us in her letters by describing her living quarters as a tin prefabricated hut, but when Sheila and Gerald later visited the said hut, they brought back reports that the interior was exceedingly elegant, as only Felicity could make it.

I was now at Cable House School and having a whale of a time teaching English, History and Geography to eleven year olds, all of whom took me very seriously when I made them stand in the wastepaper basket for misbehaving. I also threatened to hang the really naughty ones out of the window in a basket as used to happen to wrong-doers in medieval times. Suffice to say that I kept discipline and from the academic standpoint, my pupils did rather well.

Sheila and Gerald moved into Southbury Farmhouse in October 1980, after their daughter, Clare, was born in May 1980. Meanwhile out in Jakarta in May 1981, our fourth and last grandchild was born, Alexander Bruce Ronald. Alex carried on, not only the family surname, but the family middle name, too! Douglas, Kathryn, Philippa and Alex came back to live in Haply in the winter, and Douglas took a short holiday before going back up to London to work at Kleinwort.

By now, we were finding the garden at Vernham a bit of a struggle.

Vernham as a house had been ideal for us, but the garden took quite a bit of maintenance as the yew hedges had to be cut twice a year, and there was a wide expanse of lawn to mow. As the hedges included various spheres and decorative birds formed in topiary, I rather felt that a youngster like Douglas would be better equipped to do this than I. We therefore decided to do a swap with Douglas and Kathryn whereby they would buy Vernham from us and we would purchase Haply from them. This we did and Elizabeth and I duly moved into our new residence in Spring 1982.

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Chapter 14

C H A P T E R F O U RT E E N -Haply As usual, Elizabeth immediately set to work to transform Haply into a lovely home. She bought curtain material, and had curtains made for the drawing room, feeling very guilty about this as she had always been used to making all the curtains for her various houses herself. She did, however, make cushion covers for the chairs to match the curtains which was a feat in itself. The furniture we had from Vernham fitted in very well to Haply - any surplus we gave to Sheila and Douglas - and we settled down with our smaller garden to begin, we hoped, an easier life.

Douglas and Kathryn, shortly after moving into Vernham, heard that Douglas was posted to New York. While they were living in Rye, New York, we made two visits to stay with them. The first was a huge success as far as travelling was concerned. Going at the end of March we had plenty of space in the aircraft and were met by Douglas at Kennedy Airport. During this first visit, Douglas and Kathryn arranged for us to motor to New Jersey and meet Zizza and Cal. I remember proffering a UK credit card to pay for the meal which was accepted by the waitress without demur.

The second visit was not so successful as far as travelling was concerned, as we had to declare that Elizabeth had a heart condition.

We therefore had to travel with our own oxygen bottle which kept getting under my feet because we were so crowded together in the plane. During the second visit, Kathryn and I were invited to lunch at United Nations Headquarters in New York by a Belgian diplomat.

Elizabeth preferred to stay behind and look after Philippa. I remember Kathryn and I walking down 42nd Street very nervously.

I was ever on the qui vive for it was my first time in New York!

When Douglas and Kathryn returned from New York in summer

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Chapter 14 1984, Philippa now aged 5 and Alex aged four, came as pupils to Cable House, but Philippa was not yet old enough to benefit from my teaching. Douglas and Kathryn sold Vernham and moved to a small rented house in Woking for a year while doing up a property they had bought next to Diana Giles’ old house in Rodmarton, Gloucestershire. In 1985, I retired at the age of 72 from Cable House.

All books have to end somewhere! At the time of going to press, we are living at Haply in contented retirement and we have celebrated our gold and diamond wedding anniversaries here.

We often say that one of our most pleasurable activities is reminiscing over amusing and interesting people or incidents from the past. In fact, that tendency of ours to reminisce was the original inspiration for our memoirs. We hope that the book will prove interesting to our children, their children and their grandchildren - as well as to any friends or complete strangers who may read it in the future. It chronicles a way of life that no longer exists. But it also gives an account of two lives that have been enjoyed and are still being enjoyed - thoroughly.

We are still in constant touch with all members of the family personally, by telephone and by motor car - wherever they may be: Sheila and Gerald still living at Southbury Farmhouse in Berkshire; Felicity at her homestead, Brunagee, in New South Wales, Australia; Douglas now married to Sue and living at College Farm, Bampton, Oxfordshire; Rupert in his second year at Bristol University reading Classics with French; Philippa in her second year at University College, Oxford, studying Classics; Clare has just left The Cheltenham Ladies’ College with good ‘A’levels; and Alex living with Kathryn in Vienna and studying for his International Baccalaureate.

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Chapter 14 And all of them travelling - as we ourselves did - here, there and almost everywhere. Perhaps, one day, they too will write their memoirs!

THE END

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