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I was born in 1946 just nine months after the War, a "baby of the bulge", like so many others.
My Dad had come home from the East in April 1945, and my parents went for a holiday in Scotland. Mother told me I was the result(!), and perhaps that is why I always had a longing to visit there, which I eventually achieved when I was 50. Daddy was demobbed in 1947, but did not like life in civvy street and went back into the RAF in 1951, when my sister was a year old. We all joined him in married quarters at RAF Benson, but this stay was short-lived as six weeks later he was sent to Egypt. However I have a vivid memory of going with my father to pick field mushrooms on the airfield at Benson, and finding as a little girl of five, the aicraft rather scary like giant insects. Later on my parents separated, and as a child I never really had the sort of father/daughter relationship I would have loved - my sister even less so. I got to know my Dad in my twenties and during the last decade of his life he lived with my family for six years.
My Dad never spoke much about his wartime experiences. He was posted from RAF Debden to India, and what he did say was that when he got out of the plane it was like stepping into an oven as the temperature was so high! Daddy was no stranger to the heat however, as he had served in the RAF during the 1920's in Iraq. He had left his first period of service in 1935, so being a reserve was soon called up when WW2 broke out. After he died in 1988 I found many photographs (he was in the photographic section) of his life in India, where as a wartime commissioned officer he had an Indian servant. One particular picture which struck me, was a day out on leave at the races! Other leisure times were spent up in Kashmir which my father regarded as one of the two most beautiful places on earth (the other being Kyrenia, Cyprus which he was to visit later in the early fifties during his third stint in the RAF). Moving from India to Burma later, brought the reality of the war in the east a bit closer to home. My mother told me Dad was once in a place where they were cut off for three weeks by the Japanese, but it seems my father and his comrades were not near enough to be in any real danger - just a matter of sitting tight until the relieving forces got through. All in all, Daddy appears to have had a relatively trouble-free war. Perhaps that was why we heard so little about it - no tales of daring exploits, unless of course there were some hidden experiences which he found too difficult to talk about. My father was in many ways a reticent man, not easy to fathom, but I know he was proud of having been in the Royal Air Force for a total of 23 years, and would have served longer had he not been invalided out in 1957 due to a very bad road accident, coming home on leave. He lived until he was 80, and I am proud too, that he served his country, at a time unknown to me.