Week 51.2011 29.12.2011

Tendring Topics........on Line

Paying for ‘Sid’s Free Lunch’

            British children of the 1920s and ‘30s learned at an early age that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.  We were all familiar with the politically incorrect nursery rhyme about Simon, a young man with learning difficulties, who encountered a seller of pies on his way to a fair.

Said Simple Simon to the pieman, ‘May I taste your ware?

Said the pieman to Simple Simon, ‘Show me first your penny’.

Said Simple Simon to the pieman, ‘Indeed I haven’t any’.

            And poor Simon went hungry.

            It was a message that in the ‘80s the then Prime Minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher, would have whole-heartedly endorsed.  If I close my eyes I can almost hear her well-bred but somewhat strident voice:  ‘Wealth is a product of hard work and enterprise.  There is no such thing as a free lunch’.

            How strange therefore that it should have been during her period of office (in fact as a result of her initiative) that thousands of Britons came to the conclusion that there was such a thing as a free lunch after all.  I was reminded of this a week or so ago when a radio programme announced that the year nearing its end had seen the twenty-fifth anniversary of the then government’s privatisation of British Gas, the first of a series of similar privatisations of state enterprises.

            Towards the end of 1986 there was a brilliant sales campaign (do you remember it?) in which we were all asked to ‘Tell Sid’ about the forthcoming sale of British Gas shares.  Well, thousands did, and resold their shares later at a very comfortable profit.  This was repeated with other privatisations though resale didn’t always realize enormous profits.  

            It struck me as very odd at the time.  I remember writing in Tendring Topics (in print) in the Coastal Express that I had been quite persuaded that wealth was the product of hard work and enterprise and that there was no such thing as a free lunch.  Whose hard work and enterprise was it then, I asked, that had produced the profits realized by those who had been astute enough to buy – and then resell – those privatisation shares?

            The fact is, of course, that no extra wealth had been created.  Not a cubic inch of extra gas had been produced.  It had all been simply a paper transaction. I believe though that it was those and similar paper transactions (the deregulation of financial services, the transformation of Building Societies into banks and so on), over which Mrs Thatcher presided in the avaricious ‘80s, that are at the root of our current financial problems. You can ‘tell Sid’, if you encounter him, that the poor, the old, the disabled and the unemployed are today having to pay for all those ‘free lunches’ of a quarter of a century ago!

 Is ‘our Dave’ the only one in step?

          Many years ago there was a magazine cartoon showing a mum and her daughter watching a platoon of soldiers marching past.  The daughter was proudly pointing to one of the soldiers.  ‘Eh Mum, look at our Jim.  He’s the only one in step!’

         I remembered that cartoon (I think it must have been in an old copy of Punch) when I read the press headlines about our Prime Minister being alone in declining to sign up to a new treaty of the willing to sacrifice a small part of our national sovereignty to ensure a united economic Europe in the face of the economic blizzard that we are all facing.  He had already threatened to veto any amendment to the European Treaty to achieve the same end.

               Mr Cameron had been urged by his Europhobic Conservative colleagues to ‘stand up for Britain’ and ‘show the bulldog spirit’.  They had clearly forgotten (or perhaps were not old enough to remember) that Winston Churchill, the very epitome of British independence and the bulldog spirit’, had been a supporter of the idea of a United States of Europe in which Britain would play a leading role.  He had wanted to inspire and lead our fellow Europeans – not turn tail and run away from them!

            Whether we like it or not, Britain is part of Europe – geographically, historically and culturally.  Our ultimate destiny, I have little doubt, is for us to fulfil Churchill’s dream and to become not the leader but a leader of a Europe politically and economically united. As it is the 26 participating European states form a powerful political and economic unit.  It would have been that much more powerful had it included the United Kingdom as the 27^th. Before signing the American Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin is said to have declared, ‘If we do not now hang together then we shall assuredly hang separately’.  It could be that the same is true of Europe today.

            I hope, by the way, that the Parliamentary Europhobes do not imagine that that the ‘special relationship’ will ensure that the USA stands by us in our self-imposed isolation.  The USA acts always in its own interests (why on earth should it do otherwise?)   During the Cold War period Britain was the USA’s unsinkable aircraft carrier.  More recently we have provided the USA with a foothold into Europe.  I fear that, as far as the USA is concerned, Mr Cameron may well have made the United Kingdom redundant.

            By ‘opting out’ David Cameron has certainly earned a place in history.  Will it be as Britain’s liberator, who cast off the shackles of Brussels, secured the UK’s independence and led us on to financial security and prosperity?   Or will it be as the bungler who drove the final nail into the coffins of both the European Union and the UK; the politician who sacrificed British industry for the sake of the very financial institutions that had led us to financial ruin, and sacrificed his country for the sake of the unity of his political party? 

            I am not at all sure that I want to live long enough to find out!

  A Look Back at 2011

          For Great Britain, Europe and the World, 2011 has been a pretty disastrous year.  There have been earthquakes and tsunamis, devastating monsoon floods and, elsewhere, disastrous droughts.  There have been nuclear contamination fears.   The great depression, out of which we seemed to be slowly emerging before the last General Election, has again deepened.   So far our government’s attempts to lower the financial deficit have only made things worse. Several Governments within the Eurozone are threatened with bankruptcy. Efforts to remedy the situation, plus the incurable Europhobia from which a great many of our MPs suffer, have resulted in a two-tier European Union, with the UK alone and isolated on the lower tier. Tens of thousands of people have lost their jobs, thousands have been rendered homeless.  Meanwhile Climatic Change (progressing virtually unimpeded due to international failure to agree effective counter action) threatens to make our self-made financial crises look like Sunday-school picnics!

            For me though, on a personal level, 2011 has been quite different.   It has been the year in which I have celebrated my 90^th birthday and in which family events have made it a year to remember. It has been a year on which I can look back with quiet satisfaction.

            First, on 23^rd April was the same-sex wedding of my beautiful granddaughter Jo to her partner Siobhan.  It was an event to which I had looked forward with some trepidation – not least because I anticipated that I would be the oldest (probably by as much as 25 years!) of the hundred-or so guests and I had promised to say a few words during the course of the partnership ceremony.

            It turned out to be a loving and dignified occasion of which I have warm memories.  I shared with the other guests Shakespeare’s sonnet beginning, ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment……’ and a piece of wisdom that I had acquired from a German daily tear-off calendar while I had been a POW.  ‘Lieben und geliebt zu werden, ist das höchste Glück auf Erden’  (To love and to be loved in return is the greatest good fortune that there is on earth).

            A month later was my 90^th birthday and I celebrated it with my two sons and daughters in law, two of my grandchildren (Chris – the third – lives and works in Taiwan) and my younger son’s girlfriend Romy; eight of us in all, together with my German friends in Zittau, the small town in Germany where I was  POW from 1943 – ’45.

Highlights of the occasion were our champagne reception by the Mayor of Zittau in the Town Hall, my being presented with a splendid certificate confirming my honorary membership of the Fellowship of the Zittau Lenten Veils, and the celebratory dinner that I hosted at our hotel for my family, my German friends, the Mayor of Zittau (Herr Arndt Voight) and his wife and other local VIPs.

Accordion Orchestra.. In the background is the great Lenten Veil. 

 I remember equally warmly though, the spontaneity of the welcome I received from a local twenty-strong piano-accordion orchestra in the museum/church of the Holy Cross where the Lenten Veil, in whose history I played a tiny role, is on permanent display.  They entered playing When the saints come marching in, and gave us a concert of eight or ten folk or light classical items beginning with the European Anthem, Schiller’s Ode to Joy, ­and ending with Happy Birthday To You played with real gusto!

I also remember with great  pleasure a final celebratory family meal that we had together on the last evening of our visit to Zittau.  It was in Zum Alten Sack, a character-filled hostelry in the centre of the town just a few yards from the site of the building (now demolished) where we had the temporary ‘POW Barracks’ in which I lived from October 1943 till May 1945.  Younger son Andy is missing from the picture as he was holding the camera.

         
                Towards the end of the year we also learned that my younger grandson Nick (almost excluded from the photo above!) had been appointed Acting Executive Director of the European Travel Commission, a non-profit making organisation that has the purpose of attracting tourists from the rest of the world to Europe.  He is only ‘Acting’ Director.  Whether he will apply for and be offered the permanent post, remains to be seen.  In the meantime he is, while still only 28, gaining valuable experience at the top-most level of public administration.

            For my family and I 2011 certainly had some memorable moments!  What, I wonder, will 2012 bring?

           

Week 23 2011 14.6.2011

Tendring Topics……..on line


Phrase, Fable…..and Faith

A couple of years ago I changed my mobility scooter (my ‘iron horse’) for a later model. The representative from the mobility firm, a very bright and knowledgeable your man, explained to me how the controls worked. There’s a hand throttle that can be set at the beginning of a journey that determines maximum speed obtainable ‘When the arrow on the control knob is as far to the left as you can get it’, he said, ‘You’ve got the lowest speed. There’s a tortoise on the dial at that point to remind you’. He went on, ‘When the arrow is as far as it will go to the right, you’re on maximum speed – and you’ll see that there is a rabbit on the dial there to remind you’.

A rabbit? surely not. It must be a hare. And so of course it was. It was then that it dawned on me that this by no -means-ignorant young man had never heard of the fable of the Hare and the Tortoise – something that I imagined everyone knew from infancy. I certainly was never taught it at school. I must have just picked it up somewhere along the way – but where? Then I realized. We didn’t learn Aesop’s fables at school, nor did we learn the Greek myths. But by the time we left school we were pretty familiar with both – and with a huge swathe of stories from the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments.

We had never learned those fables and those myths, but we had learned to read, and had continually practised reading out loud. In our infant years we had read Aesop’s fables and traditional ‘nursery’ stories such as the Babes in the Wood, Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks and the three Bears and so on. As we grew older we graduated to the Greek myths and the plots of some of Shakespeare’s plays.. I can even remember the books from which we read them. They were Nathaniel Hawthorn’s ‘Tanglewood Tales’ and Charles Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Thus I learned all about Pandora and her box, Theseus and the Minotaur, Jason and the Argonauts, The Trojan Horse, and the voyage home from Troy of Odyseus (I also remember learning that his wife’s name wasn’t pronounced Penny-lope as I had fondly imagined!). When, a few years later we started ‘doing’ Shakespeare’s plays, the plots of at least some of them were familiar to us. As we read aloud to the class we also learned how to speak ‘proper’ English – though we may still have preferred our own Suffolk dialect at home and in the playground!

As for the Bible, in those days it was felt that one religion and one moral code were as much as any child could be expected to cope with. We didn’t have RE. We had Scripture lessons and we studied both the Old and the New Testaments. We also, of course, had a School Assembly every day at which a passage from the Scriptures was read and a hymn, usually with a Biblical theme, was sung. Roman Catholic children, whose parents objected to our non-denominational lessons and assemblies, were excused them – but they had their own religious instruction elsewhere. I never met anyone who wasn’t at least nominally a Christian until years later when I was in the Army. Nobody left school without at least some acquaintance with the main themes of the Old and New Testaments

Nowadays all of that sounds antediluvian! I am sure that today, instead of ancient fables, myths and folk tales, they read (if they read aloud at all) something more ‘relevant’ to today’s world. Britain is a determinedly secular society, but one in which all children are taught something of the beliefs and practices of the world’s major religious faiths. The hope is, I suppose, that children will leave school with a feeling that there is a measure of truth in all religions. I think it much more likely that most will depart the education system convinced that all are equally delusional.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter. The ‘proles’ in George Orwell’s 1984 could fulfil their task of creating wealth for others without any acquaintance whatsoever with, for instance, ‘The Hare and the Tortoise’, ‘the Boy who cried Wolf’, ‘the Trojan Horse’, ‘the Labours of Hercules’, ‘the Judas kiss’, ‘the Labourers in the Vineyard’, ‘the Widow’s mite’, ‘the Prodigal Son’, ‘Feeding the Five Thousand’, ‘Casting pearls before swine’.

Twenty-first century ‘proles’ (they’re nowadays more likely to be regarded as Human Resource Units) can do the same. Cultural ignorance won’t stop the wheels of industry from turning, or bankers collecting their bonuses. Politicians will still complain, and tabloid headlines mock, when ‘turbulent priests’ denounce policies which leave coming generations with no interests beyond computer games, professional football and the hope of ‘coming up on the lottery’.

Britain may, for all I know, become the most materially prosperous nation on earth but we will (if I may use an almost-forgotten metaphor) like Esau, have ‘exchanged our cultural birthright for a mess of pottage’!

A sub-culture of illiteracy?


Perhaps we ought not to worry too much about what children read and be thankful for the fact that, in our area at least, most children can read.

A week or so ago the London Evening Standard ran a series of news stories about the appalling standard of literacy among young people in London, and the effect that this has on their employment prospects. The newspaper claimed that 30 percent of children grew up in homes with no books. I find little consolation in the fact that 85 percent had access to a computer games machine!

Old people like me tend to go on and on about how different – and how much better – things were in the days when we were young. I try hard not to do that because I know perfectly well that I certainly wouldn’t want to be living again in mid-twentieth century England. In many ways life is infinitely better today than it was then.

I think though that school leavers were more literate in the 1930s than they appear to be today. Most children left school at 14 able to read and write. Their grammar and spelling may have left a lot to be desired, but they weren’t illiterate. Most of us, for example, read one or more boys’ magazines every week. They weren’t just ‘comics’. Full of exciting adventure stories, they were illustrated with line drawings but were by no means simply cartoons with captions. We read them from cover to cover and swapped them with our mates. There was the ‘Hotspur’, the ‘Rover’, the ‘Magnet’, ‘the Skipper’, the ‘Bullseye’ (this specialised in horror stories and incurred parental disapproval!) and others. They catered for boys between about the ages of 10 and 16. There were others for younger children and yet more for girls. Don’t forget that there was no tv in those days, only crackly ‘wireless sets’. Reading ‘tuppenny bloods’ as we called them (because they were full of blood and thunder?) was a major home leisure activity – a means by which we could escape into a world of Cowboys and Indians, of pirates and smugglers, of cannibals on tropical islands, ‘lost tribes’ in central Africa and - a theme that always fascinated us working class kids - posh English public schools!

I was in the army from 1939 till 1946, always in the barrack room (never the officers’ or even the sergeants’ mess). I lived with farm labourers, shop assistants, factory hands, fishermen – most of them manual workers. I knew only one man who was unable to read the typed ‘Battery Orders’ displayed daily and who was unable to write home to his family, his wife or his girlfriend. He was neither unintelligent nor lazy and I have little doubt that today he would be diagnosed as dyslexic and given special support. This was, you’ll realize, during World War II when illiteracy would not have been a barrier to recruitment!

In prisoner of war camps it was writing and receiving letters to and from home that gave us hope and kept us sane. Some received ‘Dear John’ letters announcing that a girlfriend (occasionally a wife) had found her ‘true love’ and was saying goodbye. I was not one of those!

Nowadays I can no longer write with any confidence with a pen in my hand, but I can, thank God, still use a keyboard. Emails have made it possible for me to keep in touch with my scattered family and friends in a way that posted letters could never hope to do. Nor can I nowadays find the concentration needed to settle down with a book. This, I think, is partly failing eyesight and partly inability to remember what had happened on the previous page!

The Evening Standard is much better able than I am to discuss the effect that illiteracy has on job prospects. I do know though, from the experience of many years, how much pleasure the illiterate miss as a result their inability to enter the world of books – even if they never progressed beyond ‘who dunnits’ and ‘sex ‘n violence’ thrillers.

Finding employment for the disabled – and losing it for others!


The Government has begun its big initiative to help back into the job market disabled folk who are considered to be capable of work.. Firms who take them on as employees will have financial help when and for as long as they do so. I hope that the scheme will prove to be successful

I would have been more impressed if, at the same time, that same government’s policies were not ‘exporting overseas’ jobs that could, and should, have been performed by able-bodied workers here in Britain. Just last week came the news story that to meet the demands of the cuts to local authorities finances, Birmingham City Council is saving money by outsourcing IT work to India. This work can be done more cheaply in India because of the lower wages, and cheaper (and nastier!) housing, transport and other services that exist there.

Loss of jobs in this way is inevitable for as long as there is unrestricted movement world-wide of goods and capital, and values that rate the reduction of prices for the consumer and the maximising of profits for multi-national retailing empires, above the retention of jobs in the United Kingdom.

Cut into our public services even more deeply, increase the number of unemployed and reduce their benefit payments (there’s nothing like the incentive of starvation to encourage the unemployed to seek work!), widen still further the gap between the richest and poorest of our nation – and who knows, perhaps we too could become a source of cheap labour for wealthier nations! Is that a thought that cheers you up?

Lieben und geliebt zu werden ist das höchste Glück auf Erden


‘To love and to be loved in return is the greatest good fortune on earth’

Regular readers of this blog will know that I quoted the above words, culled from a German calendar in 1944, at the partnership ceremony (same-sex wedding) of my granddaughter Jo and her partner Siobhan on 23rd April this year. I said that, in 60 years of marriage Jo’s Grandma and I had discovered their truth. I hoped that Jo and Siobhan would do the same.

How delighted I was three weeks later when, on my 90th birthday, Jo presented me with photos of her Grandma and I, and of herself and Siobhan, Siobhan holding their partnership certificate! The photos were displayed within a frame bearing the quotation from the German poet and philosopher Goethe! It was a deeply appreciated birthday present - and one that proved that my words on 23rd April had fallen on receptive ears!

Jo and Siobhan (Jo is on the right) on their ‘wedding day’, and Heather and I taken, I think in the 1990s, when we had been married for about 50 years.

Week 18. 2011 3rd May 2011

Tendring Topics……..on line


An Easter Wedding

It is springtime, a season in which according to Tennyson ‘A young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love’. This springtime phenomenon is by no means limited to young men. Nor are thoughts of love necessarily light!

On Saturday 23rd April I was present, and played a very minor role, in the official Civil Partnership Ceremony (in effect the same-sex wedding) of my only granddaughter Jo to her loving friend and companion Siobhan Donnelly. It was the first ceremony of its kind that I had ever attended and I found it to be solemn, love-filled and deeply satisfying.

The happy couple; Siobhan on the left, Granddaughter Jo on the right. I have loved my granddaughter since she was a little baby* and over the years I have greatly admired her courage in overcoming serious illness, her prowess on the football field, her capacity for study and hard work and her lively intelligence. She is the only member of our family who is both an M.A. and a B.Sc.! It was not though until I saw her in that white bridal gown, that I realized how truly beautiful she is!


There were about 100 guests at the ceremony that was conducted, with warmth, understanding and respect, by two mature and friendly women registrars. Both Siobhan and Jo had a great many loving friends and relatives. A number of Siobhan’s guests had come from the Irish Republic and one had travelled from Canada for the occasion. Jo’s guests included my elder grandson Chris who lives and works in Taiwan and had travelled halfway round the world for his cousin Jo’s ‘big day’, and my younger grandson Nick and his Belgian girlfriend Romy, both of whom work for the European Travel Commission in Brussels. They had travelled directly from an assignment in Budapest to the wedding venue (an imaginatively converted farmhouse in the Peak District near Macclesfield)

I was the oldest guest, probably by as many as twenty years! Siobhan’s mum and I had both been asked to read something appropriate during the course of the ceremony. I don’t find reading aloud from a script easy these days. Fortunately though I still have a good memory for things that I have read and that have impressed me years before – if not for the events of the previous few hours!

The 23rd was, of course, Shakespeare’s birthday and I enjoyed sharing with Jo, Siobhan and their guests his well-known sonnet; ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment. Love is not love which alters where it alteration finds or bends with the remover to remove………and so on. I am sure that readers of this blog will be familiar with it. I added that, many years earlier, when I had been a PoW in Germany we had had in our ‘barrack room’ a tear-off calendar with a ‘thought for the day’, in German of course, for each day. One that I had remembered for nearly seventy years was by the German poet Goethe. ‘Lieben und geliebt zu werden, ist das höchste Glück auf Erden’. In English ‘To love and to be loved in return is the greatest happiness that this world offers’. In sixty years of marriage Jo’s Grandma and I had found that to be abundantly true. I sincerely hoped that Jo and Siobhan would find the same. My contribution seemed to be found acceptable.



At the Wedding Breakfast, Jo chats with her cousin (my elder grandson) Chris.

The ceremony was followed by a sumptuous ‘wedding breakfast’ and an evening of music and dancing that I was far too old to appreciate. I was glad when the opportunity arose for me to depart.

Two families – left to right: Siobhan’s mum, me, Siobhan’s dad, Jo and Siobhan, Jo’s dad and mum.

23rd April (St. George’s Day and Shakespeare’s birthday) has been a significant date in the recent history of my family. It was on that day in 1979 that Jo’s mum and dad, my son Andy and daughter-in-law Marilyn, were married. In 1946, thirty-three years earlier, it had been the date on which I had been discharged from the Army after nearly seven years service in World War II – and just four days before Heather Gilbert, destined to become Jo’s Grandma, and I were married.

23rd April 2011 is another date that I, and every member of my family, will remember warmly for as long as we live. We all wish Jo and Siobhan every happiness.

*Postscript

Jo was the most beautiful baby that I have ever seen. Here she is as I first knew her, just five days old! Very shortly after that photo was taken she showed the first symptoms of a life threatening illness from which, thanks to God and to the professional skills of the staff at the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, she completely recovered.

……and the Royal Wedding!

I am not so tied up with events within my own family to have failed to note that there has been a Royal Wedding! I haven’t had my eyes glued to the tv all day, but I did watch and thoroughly enjoyed the wedding service for Prince William and Catherine Middleton in Westminster Abbey. I love the sonorous words and phrases of the Anglican wedding liturgy. The two hymns, Charles Wesley’s, Love Divine, all loves excelling and Blake’s Jerusalem are among my favourites, the former bringing back memories of my own wedding, almost exactly 65 years ago.

I was also delighted to hear Ubi caritas et amor, ubi caritas Deus ibi est   (where there is love and compassion, there also is God) used as an anthem. This – surprisingly perhaps – is often used (in Latin!) at a midweek United Reformed Church service that I regularly attend with a friend.

This was one of those occasions on I am doubly glad that I revived and renewed my membership of the Church of England a few years ago. I am now a regular communicant as well as, for well over half a century, a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and a regular attender at Clacton Quaker Meeting. I find that Anglican sacramental and liturgical worship and Quaker worship, based on a prayerful and expectant silence, complement each other perfectly. I would be very sorry to lose either of them.

Today (I am writing this during the evening of the wedding day) I enjoyed the joyful peal of the Abbey bells, the thunder of the organ, the fanfares of trumpets, the dress and demeanour of the bride and groom, the colourful uniforms and the carefully rehearsed ritual, all performed before the  high altar and beneath the ancient soaring arches of the Abbey – and the noisy enthusiasm of the waiting thousands outside the Abbey. All are part of a thousand years of English history and part of our still-evolving culture.

Many of the thoughts that I have published in this blog could, I suppose, be described as radical, even – by the uncharitable – as ‘loony leftie’. But I am not a Republican. I think that there is a great deal to be said for having a head of state who is not closely identified with any political party, who can claim to represent all the British people. I do not see how that can be achieved except by means of a constitutional hereditary monarchy.

I wish the newly created Duke and Duchess of Cambridge every happiness and very much hope that they are destined to breath new life and credibility into a British institution that, I think, we would be very unwise to declare redundant.

My VE Day!

Partly perhaps, because the TV channel Yesterday has been running programmes on World War II and its climax, there seems to be greater public interest in the anniversary of VE Day, when in 1945 World War II in Europe came to an end, than there has been in recent years. I hope to publish this blog on the web on Tuesday 3rd May. The 67th Anniversary of VE Day will be the following Sunday.

I remember that first VE Day very well indeed. Still a prisoner of war, I was one of a party of 30 ‘other rank’ British POWs who had been marched away from the battle front (and possible liberation by the Soviet Army) the day before. At about 11.00 am our guards told us that they had heard on the radio that the war was over. In our area SS troops (Hitler’s elite army corps) were fighting on – as the sound of nearby gunfire made evident! However they were not SS. They proposed to get rid of their rifles and try to make their way home. They suggested that we do the same.

Myself, aged 24, in 1945

Jim Palmer, an Ipswich milkman who had been with me since our capture at Tobruk, and I decided to stay together. The next day found us in a part of Czechoslovakia liberated and occupied by the Soviet Army. I had learned, from Soviet POWs and civilian slave workers, enough Russian to explain that we were British comrades on our way home to England. No one hindered us as we hitch-hiked and grabbed train rides though Soviet occupied Czechoslovakia to Prague, and then on to American occupied Pilsen, by plane to a British army base near Rheims, and finally home.

Heather Gilbert.  The 'Essex girl' who waited for me for four long years.

 VE Day was on 8th May. Just ten days later, on 18th May, I stepped through the front door of 31, Kensington Road, Ipswich. It was my 24th birthday and – after four years overseas, three of them as a POW – I was home again