I don’t know if this post-demob period was as warm and enjoyable as I remember it, or if it

is just a case of all times being good when they are past, as Byron said, but if there was

ever an unhurried time ticking away between youth and manhood, this was probably it.

We met up in one of the pubs every night when all the talk was of the desert or the jungle,

of near-misses and nothing on the clock except the maker’s name (and that was blurred !)

There was old Bill who had been in the navy before we were born. He left the sea for

good in 1924, but was back on China station in 1925. Tall and aquiline in double-breasted

blue suit and grey trilby, when Bill walked Broad Street the stones seemed to move

uneasily beneath him. He probably had more stories than Long John Silver. “When you’re

in a boarding party, Lofts,” he said once, “what you want is a bit of bent pipe.” He knew

everybody as Lofty or Lofts. One night his beer was untouched on the counter when,

quieter than usual, he said to me “You know, Lofts, when I think of them Maltese girls I just

There are many epitaphs to enjoy on churchyard tombstones – sad, funny, bitter,

gramatically uncertain. Lofty Bill’s just reads, below his name and dates, “Of the Royal

Navy”. Perfect. There was also S who claimed the Royal West Kents were afraid of the

dark when they were at close quarters with the Japs at Kohima and Imphal, and A who

Major D told how the 14^th Army, once they’d got the upper hand treated the Japs as

though they weren’t human at all. “We thought of them as rats,” he said. Then, of course,

there was R with whom I shared beer ‘till 1980, who had twice been mentioned in

despatches, and had been awarded the Croix de Guerre. He had been on the air escort

for Prime Minister Atlee when he flew to Potsdam to meet the President and Stalin. And

when on the occasion of the Navy taking King George VI to the Middle East, he had been

the lead navigator in the air escort. Always a thoughtful and enquiring man, on this

mission his prescience, his nous of inter-service rivalry, saved the RAF from serious

Then there was J a guardsman of the north Africa desert, you might say. He was all full of

unlikely stories and sometimes on Friday nights he would take a couple of us back to his

cottage, and his wife would ply us with some eats and coffee, and we’d play some music,

from Edmundo Ros to Mozart, and what became my unfavourite music, so often was it

played, the Unfinished Symphony of Schubert. Loafing there I thought it would be all down

The big joke amongst us was that friend J’s wife had had her fortune told when she was a

girl. We all laughed about it, and a miniature coffin was made. The fortune teller had said

that J’s wife S would have 3 husbands and 4 children. S’s first husband had been killed in

Burma. She now had 3 children with J. Not all forecasters are charlatans, and in 1950 J

died in a tragic accident. His wife in a year or so married her third husband and had her

We were now exactly half way through our frantic 20C. The preceding years had been all

about growing up and soldiering. Ahead soon we would meet the challenges of more

mature years. We would leave our little base-camp and make our attempt on what a poet

called “all the little emptiness of life”. Of trials and tests we could be certain. Sad days we

would not escape. Love “on myriad lips” we could dream of. But what no one told us of,

and what we never knew, was that Time would unfold his hidden wings and fly.

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