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8b - [continued from Part Nine] Vera now tells about her husband Tony’s War Service:

“He went out to India, they went to Bombay and whilst they were in Bombay waiting to go up to northern India to Burma to stop the Japanese from coming in and taking India over, apparently, and — I didn’t learn a lot of this until after he came home- something electrical was on a pole, quite a tall pole in the air, and something was wrong with it, and it was not his job but he did it, he climbed this pole to rectify whatever was wrong up there, and his topee fell off, his topi or whatever you call it fell off, and he got the sun and he fell off the pole to the ground, and shattered his right ankle, he had what they call a Potts Fracture, which is a fracture of the leg bit and the dislocation of the ankle, which just stymied him completely. He was in hospital for a long time and then when he was able to get out, he was anxious to go because his people were all getting ready to go up to northern India for Burma, and they said there’s no way you can go there. Had he gone there, he would have died because he wasn’t able to move, he would have died in those jungles, he would never have made that, I know that, but anyway. He wanted to go, and they said well you can’t possibly go, as a matter of fact you are now C3 which means home to England, you have got to go back, and he said please don’t send me back, I don’t want to go back till my…, all the rest of my mates…, we’ve been together ever since the first and I don’t want to go back. So Doctor Pateliokov, whose name I will never forget will I? he was a Russian who had joined in our forces and he was a doctor at this hospital, and he said there’s only one way we can stop you being sent home, he said, that’s if I keep you on here to help me in the hospital, and Tony said I’ll do anything, I can’t…, he felt it was losing face to come home and leave all his people he’d been with, and they’d all been through Dunkirk and everything, so he stayed.

So for the rest of his time, he was at hospital, he gave injections and did…, and helped this marvellous Doctor Pateliokov, and they became bosom friends, and he was there; now I think the Lord looked after Tony always, because he didn’t let him go to Burma, I know in my heart he would never have survived Burma, I know he wouldn’t.
He looked after him when he was at Dunkirk, because when he was there he arrived with all these men streaming along, and they were at De Panne, which stretches 3 miles along and he said, we found a boat because the French fish from there apparently. We found a boat, and he said, Tony said to his…, an officer, he said there’s a boat there, we could go to the ships, we could take people.

And he (the officer) said, well, I don’t know, he said, because rowing is rowing. And Tony said I have rowed at Henley,’cos he had, he rowed when he was at school, he was very keen on his rowing, and he was chosen with…, I don’t know whether it was fours, or something they call it when there are four of them in the boat — they had been at a team sent to Henley when they had a regatta during his period there. He said I can row, I only want one other man who’ll do what I say, and we could row anything. I mean, Tony said to me later on (you know, you don’t get things out of people when they’ve been through that, for years after you know), ‘cos he said to me, you think you can’t hide under a blade of grass but you can, and it wasn’t until I went (to France) this year that I saw what he meant, I wasn’t thinking of grass on a beach you know, it wasn’t a beach like that.

So they had this boat and they could take eight men in the boat with the two rowing, and they rowed out to the ships and took the men and did that — he did that for twelve hours! And he said to me we were as…, ‘cos I said how dare you? And he said we were as safe there as sitting on the beach waiting for the Stukas to come over and machine gun us, you know, it was just as safe there as there. So they did that. When he’d done his stint, the officer said I think it’s time that you went there, and he said we’ll just do one more, then I’ll go on the next one. So they did it, so this brought them into about 48 hours that they’d been like this, and then it was Tony’s turn to go. He had got to have another man rowing with the other man, so that he could get out and leave one other, and they rowed the boat, but before they got to it a plane came over and dropped a shell down the funnel of the ship, and it went, so they had to go back. But at last he did, and he said he was stripped off to just a vest, because you can’t row….He knew as a rower you can’t row with clothes on, so he had all his clothes off, and when he arrived in England all he had got was a wet vest, and an officer’s overcoat ‘cos they put it on him when he got on the ship, because he hadn’t got anything else on! They said are they stripping you as well now? And he said you can’t row..., they didn’t know that he had been rowing, I mean when they row they have got just a little singlet and shorts on.

So he was looked after wasn’t he? He wasn’t meant to die there was he? And when he went to India later, they had to dodge U Boaats, and he said…, and I don’t…, my geography’s nil, but they went from Dumfries straight as if they were going to America, to avoid those things with pimples on, and to avoid those, and submarines, and then they veered off to go to Bombay, he wasn’t meant to be drowned.�

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