Knowing I would be called up soon, I arranged to marry on January 14th 1940. While the bans were being called, I received my notice to report for duty on the morning of the 15th.I was bundled into the Medical Corps because I had qualified for a First Aid certificate, not because I was a Conscientious Objector. Very few of our comrades were - perhaps one in a hundred. We respected them.
When the Invasion scare was on we were at Rye, Sussex. The Devons (infantry) were in slit trenches amid the sand dunes at Camber and it was said they had three rounds apiece with which to repel invaders. Along the shore were a few coils of barbed wire. So much for Churchill's "fight them on the beaches" rhetoric If trouble started, we were to carry casualties on stretchers back to a dilapidated farmhouse just behind the dunes. It would have been suicidal.
I arrived in Cairo in October 1942 just in time for Alamein and unloaded wounded (mostly Italian)from trains before being posted to a a unit.When the Africa Corps was routed, even the Medical Corps gave chase. We celebrated Xmas in Benghazi,having bought a couple of scrawny chickens from an Eytie farmer at Barce and tried to fatten them on army biscuits.
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