1 My brother, William Henry, was apprenticed in early 1939 to a mining surveyor at Gres-ford colliery near Wrexham, the scene of the great disaster in 1934 resulting in the tragic loss of more than 300 lives. When war came his job was designated a ‘reserved occupation’. However, in 1943, at the age of twenty-one he joined the RAF; volunteering for flying duties was the only way he could get away from his ‘reserved’ job. In South Africa he failed his pilot’s course but re-trained as a navigator, qualifying just as the war was ending. In 1945/46 he was based at Scampton (Lincs) in a squadron then chiefly engaged in repatriating prisoners of war. There he met Sybil Jones, a WAAF. They married in Northampton, her home town, in 1946.
On leaving the RAF in 1947 he worked for British Thomson Houston at Stafford and later for ICI in Northwich, Cheshire. Having qualified as a member of the Institution of Structural Engineers and of the Institution of Civil Engineers he left for Australia in 1952 to work on the Snowy Mountain Project. Five years later he started his own business in Paramatta near Sydney. On retirement he lived between Sydney and Paramatta, the original capital of NSW. His son George and daughter Penny live nearby. Both George and Penny were born in England, in 1948 and 1950 respectively. Bill died in 2007.
My sister Rose, who after mother’s death took every advantage of the ‘laissez faire’attitude of father, in 1939 married a man twenty years older. He was an unprepossessing trade union leader at the big steel works at Shotton, to me a most boring man. She died soon after father died in 1942, leaving two sons, Kerry and Howard.
Marion married an ex-professional footballer – a forward, I think. I never met him. Again, some twenty years older. They lived in Wellington (Salop) where they ran a pub. Their only child, Robert, became a school master. After her husband’s death in 1971 Marion went out to Australia to stay with Bill and his wife Sybil. Whilst there she heard the tragic news that her son had been killed in a car accident whilst changing a tyre. The Robert Prouse Hall at Kimbolton School was named as a memorial to him. Marion returned to Wellington but could not settle and twelve months later emigrated to Australia. On a bus trip to Ayres’Rock she met and eventually married a retired electrical engineer – Michael Barrett, an Ulsterman, who, having served as a submariner during the war, decided to be demobilised in Australia, rather than Britain. Surrounded by a profusion of plants, trees and exotic bird life, they live in a house they built in Dorrigo in the north of New South Wales.
2 Thirty-three years later, whilst at a luncheon following my farewell ceremony at AFCENT, I just missed meeting this helpful Frenchman. The wife of a United States officer serving in AFCENT told my wife that she had been approached at the ceremony by an elderly Frenchman who had told her that he had put me on his motor cycle after seeing me floating down in flames. He said he would wait outside the mess. My wife and the American went in search of him, only to find that all civilian sightseers had been ordered away by the guard. I was very sorry that I was unable to thank him.
3 I had served with many Australians in the desert and some became lifelong friends. Many years later, in l984, Het and I flew to Australia with the intention of seeing my brother Bill and his family, my sister Marion and some of those old friends. We stayed for a few days just outside Sydney with the above-mentioned Bobby Gibbes and his wife. As a surprise he had organised a get-together of RAF fighter pilots of desert days. We had met a few of them since the war as they would always get in touch on their visits to the UK. When we arrived at the party we were not only delighted but amazed and touched that our friends had taken the trouble to come to Sydney from Adelaide, Melbourne, Brisbane and places further west and north.
4 It was in the Reichswald Forest that Peggie Henderson’s brother Noel was killed whilst attacking with the 7th Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers. Peggie and Het had been in the same form at Grove Park together and were still best friends some eighty years later.