I was born in 1919, a few months after the end of The Great War. "The War To End All Wars"?; and grew to manhood - (perhaps "youthhood" is a better description) in those very bleak surroundings.
I was just twenty years of age when I was called
up to fight the Germans, Great Britain was once again at war with Germany.
So much for "The War To End All Wars"!
The kids I grew up with would soon, like their fathers on reaching adulthood,
be called upon to defend the Great British Empire. To fight the same
enemy, and later a new enemy the Japanese. Some were to make the supreme
sacrifice; just at a time when they should have been enjoying those glorious
years, the years when youth matures into manhood. Instead they would
find themselves fighting, not only in Europe, but in far flung corners of
the earth like Burma, now Myanmar, a place many had never heard of, or at
best only read about in geography or history books.
I was one of those kids, a naive youngster who was soon to know the full horror and reality of war, but in the interim was to know what it was like to grow up in a community where to go hungry was a daily event.
