Donald’s war

My dad was born in 1919, and he was called up in the summer of 1939 before war was declared; initially a medical orderly, he ended up as a parachutist, jumping into some of the most dangerous theatres of the war. Like many soldiers, he never spoke about the dangers and horrors he must have seen, but he would tell us about some of the funnier sides of being with a group of blokes away in foreign fields.

There was the time he and his best mate, Harry, lost a body. They were guarding a mortuary in maybe Salonica, and in the morning there was a literal body count – and one was missing. was it stolen during the night? Had there been a mistake in the original count? Had the person just been wounded and thought dead and woke and walked out? No-one will ever know!

There was somewhere else in Greece, was it Thessalonica? Maybe! The soldiers including Dad and Harry were on a night out, and they lost Harry. They drunkenly searched everywhere for him, calling out his name. Eventually they heard faint cries of ‘Donald! Donald!’ They found Harry sitting on the back of a huge statue of a horse, many feet up in the air; Harry was about 5’2″… in the morning they asked him how he got on the horse… Harry didn’t even remember the horse, let alone how he got on it!

Dad was in Italy – it may have been round Monte Cassino; he and his mates were out on patrol, going up a mountain. They suddenly heard ‘tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap’; they cocked their weapons and proceeded cautiously, the strange noise getting louder as they crept along the wooded mountain side. There was a rough wooden hut ahead from where the noise originated; guns ready they crept round the side of the shack and there was a very old woman, a pile of walnuts in their shells on one side of her, a pile of shelled nuts on the other…

Donald and his chums ‘liberate’ a cask of wine… I don’t know if they were in France, Italy or Greece. Somehow he was invited to the officers’ mess to share it even though he was only a corporal. The mess was a tent and at one point, Donald, with plenty of wine consumed went outside for some fresh air. When he came back in he managed to miss the entrance and get in between the tent and the flysheet. Those inside the tent could see this Donald-shaped form, blundering round between the inner and outer walls, trying to escape…

Dad was a great story-teller, how I wish he was still here so I could ask him for details of where exactly he was when these various things happened!