Australians at War Film Archive

I’m Herbert McKinnell and as far as I know I was born in a little village called Little Slaughter which is somewhere between Somerset and Dorset.

I don’t know for sure but my family told me. We then moved to Essex where my Dad was a carpenter and wheelwright. He fixed farm carts plus worked as an undertaker. I used to go with Dad and help him lay people out. I used to get three shillings for laying a person out. One day it surprised me,

…he would come and get met at certain times of the day if I wasn’t living with him, and during the night. And one day he said that Mr Pottwell had died and we had to go and clean him up. So we dressed him in the Mason’s uniform, and what surprised us was they drank. And suddenly his wife said to my Dad, “Would you like a whisky Mac?” Then my Dad nearly died.

But then…I went to school when I was 14… I got a job on a WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK farm

at 5 shillings a week but I could take my mother home a dozen eggs mid week and at the end of the week, and the man also sold fish because Dad made for his horse and cart a lead lined fish cart. And the horse used to know every where it went. It would just tootle along. I then changed from that and went and worked in a

bakers, a horse drawn bakers van. And that was 8 shillings a week. Then I found a better job and got 10 shillings a week…I went to learn to be a butcher. That was quite a good job. I used to sing in a church choir. I was in St John’s Ambulance, I played the clarinet. And just before the war we were called the

Corps Volunteers and then we changed it into St John’s. We had a little badge with a machine gun on it because the war was imminent in ’38. We were digging air raid shelters in our back yards in ’38. War wasn’t declared by Britain until ’39 but it was going on in Europe. So we were being prepared for it.

And in March ’39 I decided to join the Cameronians up in Scotland. And at that time unless you were Scottish, of a Scottish background you had not much chance of getting in. So I had no chance, but I had no trouble. And someone said why don’t I go to the local one. I said, “It’s only 20 miles away and I’ll be home everyday. I want to be away, 500 miles so I can’t get home every day.”

I met up with people. And then after drilling there we got drafted and I remember being with another fellow from Glasgow and we went to the barbers and had a haircut and he said I was going in the Greystone place and I said, “Yeah that’s right.” So I got a good haircut.

Well the next day after parade the sergeant major comes around and pokes a stick in my back and he said, “Get a hair cut.” I said, “I’ve had one.” And he said, “Shut up and get another one.” So I thought this isn’t too good is it. We used to get 14 shillings a week, and we used to keep 4 shillings back for when we went on leave. It then came to when we were going to go to India in 1940.

We volunteered to go to France but they said we were too young to go to France. But they were going to send us to the Far East. So we get on a boat and across the channel over to Marseille. Women we thought, but no we had to stay on the boat. We then went through the Mediterranean, through the Suez and

21 days from Aden to Bombay. We then caught a train, a 7 day journey over to Calcutta. About 20 miles from Calcutta at a place called Barakpur…Ishapore was where the ammunition factory was. So we did our training then ready to go in ’42. We went

in ’42. We were out in the Bay of Bengal and we were told we were going to go to Australia, the Northern Territory area or Queensland area for jungle training. Two days out in the Bay it came through that that was cancelled and that we had to go straight to Rangoon and fight the rear guard action to get the British Light Horse out.

Anyway the Japs overpowered us but several of us managed to get away in different parties. Some went up roadways up into Burma but they were silly because they were attacked. We had an American missionary with us and he knew all the different dialects in the mountains, so he took us through there. I saw little children smoking pipes…but it wasn’t, it was little women smoking pipes.

Then we went up further to the Naga Head Hunters and they had a hair cut like a mohawk. The story goes that Britain was offering five rupees for the Japanese heads. There’s also a story of a valley of a 1000 skulls.

Anyway their chief came down and he offered us a bottle of rice whisky and we thought how did he make the rice, they don’t grow any? The missionary said that they know when a Burman has his harvest in, so they come down and raid it. So he now grows extra rice because some gets knocked off. So he now grows extra rice.

Ok.

Anyway, we found out that they didn’t grow anything, so they wanted us to shoot a pig for them. So we shot a pig. They just stick a stick into its bottom and out through its mouth and they cook it like that. And we had just a bit of it.

Up in the Chindwin Mountains.

Well when we first went to Burma we went to the whole of Burma, from ’42 up until when we managed to get out. We did the whole time there. About a year or more, God knows. Time was nothing, you just had to get out. So you don’t worry about how long or what.

The 2nd Battalion Cameronian Scottish Rifles and we never sloped arms, never because we were riflemen and you were considered to be the scouts and so you didn’t slope arms. You carried it at the trail

or at the shoulder like this but never sloped. Never sloped arms.

No.

The Independent Brigade was the 4th Indian Independent Brigade which we were part of. That was after ’42, in ’43 and ’44. And that was Lord Wingate. He was the Brigadier. And it was the 4th Indian Independent Brigade. Someone

said a few months ago, “You were with the 14th Army.” And I said, “No we weren’t.” But we helped the 14th Army because we had to cause chaos for the Japanese. That was the idea. See the Japanese knew we were going to send a commando troop in through Ack Ack [anti aircraft artillery] but they didn’t know about us buggers being up in the mountains.

And that was the whole idea of it. We had to move our wounded…we could move them on Welsh ponies and elephants. It didn’t matter about taking a voice box out in the elephant because there were many wild ones there. But you made sure you didn’t camp near water at night.

After the war…I didn’t want to be in shops any more so I went and worked in a sawmill facing the North Sea. It was very cold in the winter.

No.

The CMF [Citizens Military Forces- the reserve] .

In the CMF I was made a Lance Corporal and I was barman in the officers’ mess. That was a good lurk.

About 10 years.

Well father had been in the 1914 war and he was with the Gloucesters. They wore two cap badges, back and front because apparently many years before they fought back to back in Egypt. So they wore two cap badges.

All I know is that he worked with his grandfather in the undertaking business, making the coffins and that. They were called box makers. That was also another one that I went into. I was a wood cutting machinist and then

I went to a factory that was making TV [television] cabinets and that sort of thing. Not plastic as they do now. Then I went into this undertaking place where we were making the coffins. But we were called undertaker suppliers. For the small undertakers who didn’t have a workshop. We had a workshop to supply them. And the funny saying was, doing St John’s duty down on the beach…people would say, “If you can’t do anything with them,

give them to Bert, he knows what to do with them.” I was in St John’s Ambulance. I was quite good at that and I joined it out here.

Not really, no. But what I can’t understand, the bugger joined up with the Second World War. I thought he would have had enough. My mother tell me he wanted to be near us boys. He couldn’t. I’m in the Far East. My second brother is in Italy. My third brother is attached to the South African Navy in the Indian Ocean. So how could Dad be near us.

So I’ve got his medals here now. I’ve got two lots of medals. His First World War ones and his Second World War ones.

Not that I know of. My brother was. He got a …what ever you call it? Distinguished Conduct Medal or something. He was a mad bugger Denis was in a way.

He would

go home and jump out a window and show mother how to land with a parachute.

My mother’s brother. He fought in the Dardanelles. He was an outrider on a gun carriage.

He reckon what saved him was his first horse tripped and went down and he went down there and another shell went over the top. So that horse saved his life. But that’s about all I know

Oh only about…he went back after the war to visit these French people who had befriended him.

So he went back and spent some time with them.

Oh good. He cut all our hair. That was done on a Saturday morning. You had a tablecloth wrapped around your neck and Dad would cut your hair. We would have to help him repair the

boot (UNCLEAR) some Sunday mornings. He would have the leather all soaked and we had to hammer it out while Dad repaired the boots. So we had something to do. We also had to feed the rabbits. We used to breed rabbits for the table, and when the snow was around there was no grass and he would say we had to go and look under the hedges because the grass is always there. He wasn’t a bad old bugger.

Yeah.

My Mum was pretty quiet in a way. I never knew her to do her nut as the saying goes. She cooked all our meals. Everyone had porridge.

The funny thing about that…if you run in about 5 minutes late…you had to run that mile and a half to school, and you might be running with the porridge and you could feel the porridge floating in your stomach. One of my sisters didn’t like porridge so I worked a wangle with her. I would eat mine and give her my empty plate and I’d eat her porridge.

And mother and grand mother (Dad’s mother who was staying with us at the time. We called her Grandma Mac). She said, “Good girl Gwen you ate your porridge.” She hadn’t had her porridge, I had had it. And I couldn’t eat new potatoes because the flour in them used to make me gag. The only way I could eat them was if they were par boiled and then fried.

So I would exchange with Gwen. Gwen would eat my spuds. And Dad used to make his own beer in the copper. So Mum couldn’t do any washing for a fortnight. So apart from that…

Well we had a thing…on Sunday’s you had to say a poem

or sing a song or play an instrument. Well I always wanted to play a violin. My sister was going to buy me one but Dad said, “No string instruments in this house. It had to be wind instruments.” So I said to him, “Well Mum plays the piano and that’s a string instrument.” “Not the same!” So that’s how I came to play the clarinet.

My brother wouldn’t read a piece of music but he could play by ear. He’d listen to what you had played and follow it for 8 bars and then he had it for life. So he could play a piccolo, a clarinet and a piano. Fred had those things he could do. And he also ended up a good tenor.

But he couldn’t read music, no way. But he would listen and he’s got it for life. There are people like that.

I went to one down at a place called Sutton. I walked down to that. On the way we used to

pinch some stuff off the farm like (UNCLEAR). They use to feed it to cattle but we used to eat it on the way to school. Then when we got a bit older we went to the school in the main town of Rochford at the time. So when you were 7 you were separated…when you went in first you went in

with what they called the Infants…boys and girls together. When you get to 7 you’re separated. The girls went one way and the boys the other way. We had this old teacher there. I had broken my arm but I still went to school and she said, “If he can come to school with a broken arm so can anyone else.” But it was good. Our old headmaster,

Mr Portis. He looked after his blind wife while running the school as well. He put up for the Council so we backed him. I used to like running and later on when I bought myself a racing bike, I would go out 50 miles and ride the 50 miles back. I would do cross country running which I loved. And I

did that later in the army. I used to run in the Harriers. I enjoyed it. There was a trick to get in front. Nine times out of ten we used to jenny start…where I was in (UNCLEAR) we would go up hill. Start going up hill. You let them all go because you knew they would be buggered by the time you got to the stop, and you would pass them.

And I tell the young blokes today who are running…get behind the person who’s running in front of you, change your step to his step and jog along. That will annoy him, but keep there for a while. You’ve got to sprint in for the last 100 yards. So you’re using him for a wind shield. He doesn’t know it but you’re using him as a wind shield.

As the saying goes, there tricks to every trade.

It didn’t affect us that much some how, although we had a large family at the time because there was always work around. Dad always had work.

Like repairing some toff’s [toffee nose- rich/ upper class person] house. He might repair carts on the farm. So we always had food. So it didn’t effect us that much really. You couldn’t have some things but…and you were always owing 10 shillings on your groceries. So you’d buy a pound’s worth of groceries. I used to take the old pram down to get them.

But Mum would only pay 10 shillings off. So we were always 10 bob in arrears. We got over it in the end, no worries. But we didn’t suffer like some people. No way.

They weren’t living in the country. I mean if they were living in the towns like London and that, they couldn’t go like us and go out and pick a

few things. Pick peas, they couldn’t do that. So living in the country was better. And everybody had kerosene lights. The radio…Dad and my mother’s brother build our radio. It looked like a big cabinet. It had valves and two types of batteries in it and an accumulator.

You got it charged at a garage for six pence.

No. We knew there was people but they were miles away from us. It seemed that our community was OK.

There was one family, they had 8 children. They didn’t wear boots, even in the snow. They had bare feet. He had a good job. He was the post master. And the schools used to in the end…Mum would pay…

…they paid the school sixpence. So they would get the boots for us and the girls and we would pay it off sixpence a week. The girls had those old fashioned old lace up boots. But the school provided them, otherwise you put cardboard in your shoe and put boot polish…to cover it up.

But we seemed to get along alright.

Well I suppose it was. It was important to learn about it but it didn’t really do anything much for us kids. We knew there was an empire there and that was it. And there was Empire Day with a special holiday day. But it didn’t worry us that much.

It wasn’t…we’ve got this and we’ve got that. We just knew there was an Empire and what ever it was. What else, they had a different name for it. Yes, Empire Day. Of course that gradually died away.

But apart from that…and Sir Francis Drake and Captain Cook and all that lot. And the Mayflower and the puritan type of religion that went to America on the boat called the Mayflower. That started up religion there. Things like that. And the Boston Tea Party.

That was when…what happened then…King George III imposed more taxes on them and they had to buy his tea that he provided. So that became the Boston Tea Party. They

tipped the tea into the sea and decided to have coffee rather than pay tax to King George the Third. That’s that bit.

I suppose in a way if you were reading a book. But they weren’t at the time as a kid.

They weren’t really. There was only that one pointing the finger saying ‘We need you.’ No they didn’t do much for us. It didn’t seem to worry me much. We knew there had been a war.

It was bad and in mud and all that sort of stuff, but it didn’t worry us all that much. And the zeppelins came over the town…when my mother was young, the zeppelins came over the town and little planes went up and shot at it and because it was full of gas it just exploded. And along the railway line between where I lived

in Gosford and Liverpool Street London, there’s an aeroplane prop there where that German fellow came down in 1914 war, and they buried him there and they put his propeller there. They preserve it even today and look after it.

Yes. It’s still there to this day as far as I know

Yes, Mum worked in a munitions factory making shells. Her father was an upholsterer who worked on the Queen’s ship the Britannica. And where ever they went he went to keep the furniture going. So he had a job on that, my mother’s father. And that’s where he went and

got the TB [Tuberculosis] because most of the sofas and things were made with horse hair, and they reckon he got TB from that. I never met my father’s father. He was a wine merchant but I never met him. I don’t know anything about him.

Not a lot. Only from magazines that Dad had. They didn’t talk much about it at school. Very little. Only

about progress of the Empire today sort of thing. And current affairs more or less. What the parliamentarians were doing. They never do much but what they were doing. Not a lot. Not a lot I can remember that was exciting. I remember one day we were doing

a sort of bible study sort of thing. It was for the church but we were doing in on a Saturday in the big school because they had more desks. And my younger brother by 3 years was sitting behind me and the question was, “What were the colours of Jacob’s coat?” So Fred kept nudging me, “What is it?” So I turned around and told him and I didn’t see the

teacher’s suddenly say, “What are you doing?” And I said, “I just told him the colour of Jacob’s jacket.” He said, “You should have let him find out himself.” So I said, “Well he did find out, he asked me!” And we used to go out…there were a lot of fields around in those days,

we used to play cricket up in the fields. It would be good because you could get away from the classroom. We’d walk up the road. Not many people had a bike. We had one bike in the whole streets where we lived. And nearly everybody had a ride on it. You just couldn’t afford a bike. When I did get a job I bought a racing bike.

That was a fixed wheel job. Not free wheel but fixed wheel. If I was coming down hill and took my feet off the pedals, I couldn’t get them back on until I slowed down. A fixed wheel job. At school…we had teams and we played against one another in all sorts of things. And there were cigarette cards around in those days.

Little picture cards in cigarette packets and we’d save them up or we would exchange them with other kids. That was pretty good.

I got a job first on a WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK farm. The fellow as also a friend of Dad’s who played in a band. He was teaching me to play in the band too. My job was to go and collect the eggs in the morning. I would get 4 shillings a week wages. But at 10 o’clock the farmer’s wife would blow a whistle

and…there were about 6 of us, boys and girls, and we’d all go in the house and all have…especially in the winter time, a big mug of hot coco and a lump of cake. Then you’d have lunch. So they provided our meals. Then I went from that job to butchering.

That wasn’t bad. I learnt how to carry beef on my shoulder and ride a bike and get more sheep and stick them on the front of the bike. I had a carrier on the front and I could put two sheep in there. Making sausages and salting beef and pork. Cooking pig’s trotters and making pressed beef. Making dripping.

But when I came out here I thought I wouldn’t do that. I’ll go back to woodwork. I didn’t want a shop job.

Yes, you could sit for an exam when you were 10 to go to the high school. You didn’t just go from one school to a high school just like that.

You had to sit for an exam and when you passed that you could go to high school. You could sit for it again when you were 13. Mind you, you were 3 years behind but you could still sit for it. But that meant money for your family too because you had to buy a special uniform, so

that cost your family money. So not many would do it because it cost money to go to high school. You didn’t go straight from primary school to high school. So what we would do was going up from what we called the Infants. That was boys and girls together until you came to the age of 7 and then you went to the higher part of the school and you were separated.

You stayed there until you were 14. You could stay until you were 15 if you wanted to but you could leave at 14. But as I say you could do the exam to go to high school but as I say you had to have the money to buy the uniform.

Multi colour. Well there were two dark haired ones. Myself and my brother Ron. He was about 5th down the line. There were two ginger haired ones. We used to call them rusty, that was Gwen and Fred.

There was one blonde girl and the rest were mousey coloured. So me and Ron were black and then the others were ginger and mousy coloured. And one blonde one. Where that came along I don’t know. But we were all good together. So us five boys used to sleep in one bed and the

girls in another bed. So sometimes you might roll over and you’d fall out of bloody bed. You’d hit the floor. Sometimes we’d change around.

And then Dad built a big form for us five boys to sit on. But poor old Fred had a boil on his backside one time, so Dad cut a hole in the form so he could sit down. Very painful. Dad had a terrible way. He would heat a bottle up

and put it over the boil and it could pull your bloody neck off. Then he used to use a poultice, stale bread poultice. That used to draw it out. A linseed poultice. Heat that up and put it on the boil. Dad saved Mum in a way. She had varicose veins and one must have burst during the night.

He dragged her to the bottom of the bed, the old iron frame bed and tied her leg high up. The old saying, water won’t run up hill, and went and got the ambulance. We didn’t have a phone. There was an ambulance fellow living up the road, so he went and got him and took Mum to hospital. And then one day she had ulcers bad on the leg and the doctor said to her,

“Mrs Mac we’re going to have to take your leg off.” And she said, “Well who’s going to look after my kids?” So he never did. They had a cure in the end. That was the easy way out, to cut her leg off. But Mum said, “Who’s going to look after my kids?” Which is a thing to be thinking about isn’t it. So what they did, like we did in the repat, [Repatriation board] you cure it from down deep down.

When the insides start curing you start building it up. I worked in the Repat for a while. In the surgical ward at Heidelberg. I liked the surgical ward. Every patient’s different. I remember old fella saying to me, “You’ve got to come up to my place to get the dog.” He used to breed Border Collies. I said, “What for?” He said, “You’re the only bloke who looks after me at night properly. The rest couldn’t

care less but you do.” So the wife and I went up for his dog.

Nine. I’m the 10th one. So there were five boys and five girls. One we’ve only got two girls left.

The youngest one I never saw her. She died with a hole in the heart because in those days they couldn’t do what they can do today. The other two sisters died older with cancer. The other one seems to be alright. The girls were taken. Mum died of a stroke.

That was the third one that took her. My sister Peg use to always go and visit her in the hospital and look after her. Her mother…we visited her as kids. Gran used to like a Guiness, so we’d take a small bottle of Guiness and a packet of Woodbines. She said to us one day, “What have you got for me today?” We said, “We’ve got a little bottle of Guiness Gran.”

“Oh good. I’ll hide it under my pillow.” It was like a workhouse, a nursing home, but it was run by the hospital. You see some funny things.

Yes definitely. We would support one another. I remember my second brother Denis,

Dad would be chasing him for something. He would run up and down and because I was starting a job and working I thought I was big didn’t I. I said to Dad, “Leave him alone, he hasn’t done nothing.” He left him alone and he picked me up by my shoulders and threw me into the corner and said, “Stay there until I tell you to get up.” In other words, who am I to tell him.

So after that we were all right. And when we got older he said, “You were a lot of little buggers but I loved the lot of you.” That’s the way he said it.

Well we knew that…Dad had the idea which is right in a way,

no good waiting for father to come home to tell him what they had done wrong. Mother should have asserted herself first. But anyway, we knew that we would get a good one if he did tell us. But often he might come home and send us upstairs. And he would go off to the pub.

Mum would creep up with a mug of cocoa and a lump of cake and say, “Don’t tell your father.” So we had to put the mugs under the bed. Don’t tell your father. But it was all good. He used to take us for walks on a Sunday. We would walk passed the hazelnut bushes and pick the hazelnuts when they were ready.

And blackberries. He would stop by the pub and he’d go and get his beer and he’d buy us all a lemonade and an arrow root biscuit. An arrow root biscuit would be about that big. A big one. We used to think that was a great treat. A walk and an arrowroot biscuit and a glass of lemonade.

Well setting

fire to the neighbours grass was one. And another time was…we used to knock the cakes off that Mum had made in the pantry. So he put a lock on the door. But we found a way around that. It had a window outside and our smallest sister. We’d use her. She’d stand on our backs and she would go through the window, get the cakes and come back out through the window.

So we all got into trouble over that. But we all had a job in the end. Us boys would scrub the concrete floor, the scullery floor. The girls would do the wooden floors upstairs. But we would clean the carpets down stairs. That was our job.

And help Dad plant his spuds and things like that. And perhaps cut the grass. We didn’t have a mower, even a hand mower. So we had to cut the grass by hand. We would do things like that.

They were enjoyable. You would see who could finish first.

We used to grow Jerusalem artichokes. And Mum used to cook them. But on the whole it was good. I think there were advantages of living in the country rather than town. If you were living in town you wouldn’t have half the chances of getting some of the things.

Yes there was. You had your mates. Of course the best thing

the house was called the Rochford 100. So that was the head council for a 100 hamlets around the place…two or three houses or something like that. But market day was the best day, Thursdays. It was an open market. You had the ring for the bulls, they were in a big iron ring. There was sheep and at the back of the market across from behind the pub was another

market where they sold the produce. I know I sold my rabbit for 10 shillings. It was a Flemish Giant crossed with a Belgium Hare. A big rabbit for the table. That’s what we bred them for, the table. Not these Angora ones with the fluffy white hair. You can’t eat that.

We used to watch the market and it was quite good. Some days the cattle would be brought up the road to market on foot. Sometimes they would be brought by truck but other times they would just walk them up the road. There was this drover called ‘Whacko’. He had a hook for a hand.

We went round and we untied the pens they were in. We let them out, and the pigs. And he was chasing us and all the fellows were running round trying to get the sheep back in the pens. That was the day

the pubs were open all day. But otherwise they wouldn’t be. Only certain hours. But they opened all day for the people in the market. They were the days they were.

Yes. You’ve got to go to Rochford Market. I remember

there was a tab…a jockey’s something or other. There wasn’t a thing like T.A.B. [Totaliser Agency Board] Grandma used to have a bet. Sixpence each way or something like that. So she would get me to take it down. When I got my money for my rabbit I would go over there to get my money for my rabbit. He ran the market money

as well as the horse racing. Then there was one old family. They’d been there for donkey’s years. From 1777. They were saddlers and had been there since 1777. There was another one across the road called Boozey and Hawk.

And they were horse carriage builders, and then the local old fashioned baker. He baked the bread by fire. Later on, in this big one when I went to work in this baker, they baked by steam. Not the old traditional way by fire, which

was better tasting bread I thought. Electricity or steam…But there wasn’t much electricity around in those days. Then gas came in. And the bicycle ones were good too. You had a catalane [?] lamp. You put these crystals in a base

and a tank of water and it would drip and make a gas, and it lit up. You’d have a green side and a red side and a light in front. But you could warm your hands on it. So a catalane gas lamp was good. Then of course you had kerosene lamps too. I remember one time we had run out of kerosene in the butchers and the butcher said,

melt some dripping and put that it. Well you could see me for miles because you could see the smoke coming out of it. Burning and dripping. But that worked all right.

Well Dad was I think, and one Christmas time…or after Christmas because it generally snowed about January or February, and

somebody came up to home and said to Dad…because my mother was out with his mother, and they said, “Mac I’ve seen your wife lying in the gutter in the snow with an old woman beside her.” And Dad said, “Jesus Christ, that’s my mother.” So he went down and borrowed someone’s horse and jinker and picked them. It was like going to the knackers yard.

What they did, they didn’t drink beer. They were both top shelf drinkers and they were sitting beside a big log fire. They came out and boom…the cold air gets them. They laughed about that afterwards.

Whisky. I remember her…we used to call her Grandma Mac.

And one day she was making a cake and I was staying at her place in Dorset. She was making a cake for my uncle who was a racing car fella. I was watching her make the cake and I said, “Grandma, you’re only supposed to put two whiskies in the cake aren’t you?”

“How come you’ve got a third one.” She said, “The recipe’s all wrong laddie. The recipe’s just for guidance. You have one for the cake and two for the cook.” She was a good old stick though. Whether she drank whisky or not, she was a good old stick.

I liked her. And then another time, we were going down to this big park. We had seen grandfather get a herring and toast it on a toasting fork in front of the fire. We were down there trying to catch these bloody great big goldfish. The gardener came by and he said, “What are

you doing you McKinnell’s, what are you doing?” We said, “We’re going to get a fish for grandad.” He said, “You can’t eat them, they’re no good. They’re goldfish. They’re no good to eat.” He would just put a herring on a stick and toast it in front of the fire.

No. Only maybe rabbits.

We bred some of our own so we didn’t worry too much about it. Sometimes we would take two ferrets. A rabbit can stare a ferret out. So you always have two. The rabbit has two holes so you put another one in down the back of it. And he gets them at the back of the neck.

But my wife here, she went out with her brothers one day and she was told to have a stick and clout the rabbit as it came out of the hole. She didn’t. She clouted the ferret and killed it. She wasn’t invited out rabbiting any more after that. Bloody women come here and bugger it up.

That’s when they were down it Gippsland.

No not really. I would have a beer or two but I wasn’t a big drinker.

The only time I was a big drinker was when I was in India. We were playing bingo or ‘housie housie’ as we called it. There would be a group of four of us. One would buy a big plate of chips. One would buy the bingo ticket and one would buy the beer. And I thought I had won and I shouted out, “House.” And a sergeant major came up and checked it.

He said, “That’s not right, you’re drunk you bastard.” Anyway when I got up to go to the toilet which was down 7 stairs like that, there was a bamboo basher at the bottom. Well, I missed the first step and tumbled down the whole lot and head first into the toilet. I woke up OK.

The sergeant majors were on a good lurk on that because they would get 5% of the game.

Yes in a way. But my mother’s mother was the best one. I liked her. She was a little short woman. She was the one we gave the Guiness too. She was alright too.

Just the way they did things. The way some of them cooked things and the way they looked after some animals and birds. And then knowing about what they had been doing,

as a trade when they had been growing up. Grandma, my mother’s mother had been a seamstress. My Dad’s mother was a …tailor. So they were in the clothing business.

I couldn’t find any fault with them. Good days.

No. I was in the scouts and we had to have the scarf which had to be two different colours. So Grandma Lane, my mother’s mother…she made them.

To make the waggle, we went to the butcher’s shop and got a marrow bone and we would make the waggle with that. We had to learn how to cook two sausages with one match.

Well you’ve got to make sure there’s no wind around.

You had to learn how to make a spark like the natives do with a stick. I gave that up long ago.

Learning how to do things like even plumbing. Now there’s copper pipes but they used to be lead pipes in those days. We would learn how to fix a burst pipe. You would heat it and smooth it over. It was called lead wiping. Ropes and that.

Learn all sorts of ropes and stuff. Knots and all that sort of thing. So that was good. And of course when we went on camp we didn’t go too far away because nobody had any transport, so we would go along the river bank or the sea coast. We’d pull

a hand cart. The boys would be pulling a hand cart.

I was only in there for a couple of years. Then I gave it away just before I joined the army. My young son, I’ve only got the one son,

he joined the life boys. And he was trying the belt team.

I was about 17. You could go into Rover Scouts then but I didn’t.

And finding a girlfriend, that made a difference.

Very good. I didn’t want much to do with sex at about that time. And I went to this place and this girl said, “Dad won’t be back for a couple of hours we can get together and have a good old time.”

I said, no. I didn’t want anything to do with it. I was going with another girl and I thought if this other girl tells this girl….no. So I finished up marrying the girl next door. I saw her family move in one day and there were five girls. So

I got pally with Marge and we went out together.

There was something I liked about her. The way she looked and the way she smiled. Her sister was a alright but a bit rough. She was going with my brother but he didn’t because he already had two hanging on.

He would change them over every week.

Yes, we would go bike riding. I used to like going Sunday morning but they would never go on that one. I would go on my racing bike and it was head down and bum up. I would go out 50 miles and 50 miles back.

But they wouldn’t go on those, no way. And bike riding…racing too on the grass…it was alright if you were in the first or second race, but the third and fourth the grass would get a bit slippery.

You did it on motor bikes two, small motor bikes, 250’s, and a 95 cc [cubic centimetre]. You would do grass racing. It was always the first and second race which wasn’t bad, but after a while the grass got chewed up with all the motor bikes going past.

It would have you off the bike in no time. It was fun. Then one time the river where I worked in the saw mill, in a bad winter the river would freeze up. It would about 3 feet high. So you go across from our side to the pub on the other side of the river. You could just walk across. And that be about an 8th of a mile across.

In normal times timber boats from Germany and Finland would come in, but when it froze it froze.

Don’t really know. I left it to them. I didn’t interfere.

But my brother, the one next to me, Denis, he got together with an Irish girl and he was doing alright but somehow she died of something, I don’t know what. Something to do with her breathing it was.

But she would be frightened about anything. If she saw a bit of smoke around she’d get panicky right away. She was staying next door and Mum used to go in and sort her out.

In a lot of place the grownups or kids would have pneumonia. Bronchitis and pneumonia…there was a lot

of that going around. Then there was a time with diphtheria and scarlet fever, and there was one religion there called the Peculiar People. That was their name. Now they didn’t believe in doctors or nurses. What

they would do, they would have an elder, a man come in or a woman elder and they would come in a pray for you. And which ever way it went it was the will of God if you died or lived. But because those children weren’t well looked after and they were going to our ordinary school, it was causing trouble. So the government brought in a thing to say that all children up to the age of 18 had to have

have a doctor or there would be prosecutions. It didn’t matter about the older people, but the kids had to have a doctor. They’d never cook anything on a Sunday, so it would all be cooked on a Saturday and taken down to the church for the night

and they would dish it up next day. And there were people who were always looking after other people. And they would leave a box on the doorstep and you’d know who it was who left it there, it was them.

Christmas time it would be the same. You’d know who it was. And I got one young fella who joined our band and he enjoyed that. So this particular day he had been allowed to go to the cinema afterwards.

So someone said to him, “I didn’t think you’d be allowed to go.” He said, “I told my mother we’ve got extra practice tonight. Extra practice. They weren’t allowed to play football or anything like that.

In 1938. Britain declared war in ’39. But ’38 because it was going through all those other countries. When he went through Poland

that’s when they decided to declare war, but before that we knew something was happening. Slit trenches were dug all along the coast. All around the coastal areas we had slit trenches and the Home Guards, or Dad’s Army as they called it were all along the coast in 1938. See, I joined the army before the war.

I joined in 1939 long before the war started. Just to get away from what ever, and I’d have 3 meals a day and 14 shillings a week pay. Free dental, free doctor. So that’s what I did. And my second brother,

he joined up too. He went to the (UNCLEAR) but he finished up as a gunner with the artillery. And Fred like I said went in the navy. South Africa to a place called East London. He was on torpedo boats and he liked the job.

Yes.

I just wanted to. I just wanted to get away and do something. So I joined in March ’39.

I used to train in the Alfred and St Ives, and then we used to go training up at Eldon.

Well first of all I left home. It was about 20 mile by train and I went to this place

called Walley Barracks. I stayed there the night and I was going to join up next day, and the procedure was you’d have to obey everything on the bible and then you were given a King’s shilling. You were then given a King’s shilling and the next day I was given a travel voucher

to go up to Motherwell in Scotland. So off I went. But the King’s shilling made me laugh. And the bible.

Quite good really. There were two Red Caps in there too but they wouldn’t know where you were going anyway.

And they gave me ten shillings, that’s right. I got the King’s shilling and then they gave me 10 shillings to buy any food on the way up. So that was OK.

Yes and another thing, it was one less for Mother to feed, and I got 3 meals a day.

I had free dental and medical. And while I was up there we all went to school. You did your ordinary duties but we also had four hours at school, the army school. And you sat for different certificates. I got a third class certificate which gave me three pence a day extra and

then if you could get the first class one, the top certificate, you would have the chance to go to an officers school. Unless your family had money it was useless because you had to have money to be in the officer’s class. The only other way you could become an officer…during the war a man could be made an officer…like if the sergeant major got bumped off and there was no leader, then they would bring someone else up.

We were digging trenches in 1938 because war was imminent then. It was only when he went into Poland that Britain decided to declare war.

No.

I wasn’t in the army, not then. I joined the army in early ’39. We

did training then. I’ll tell you what, running on heather is like running on a spring bed. Bouncy. But then they tried us with...we wore special clothes this day and they were dropping so called mustard gas. Then

you did a test in the tear gas thing. You had no mask on and bloody hell the tear gas almost choked you. It would make your eyes water. Then you went swimming and

other types of drill, normal army drill. All recruits had to do 3 minutes in the boxing ring. You would do physical training like climbing up wall bars and what I loved doing was country running. So I ran for the Harriers. I used to like that. I remember one time in Glasgow and running with the Glasgow Harriers.

And the next minute a bloody horse trod on me. It was running alongside. There was all sorts of sport you could have. And I found out you could get better food if you were a sportsman….either play football, running or boxing. You would go in a sportsman’s hut and you’d have better tucker than anyone else.

So why not. Now you could get yourself another five minutes in bed with the bugler playing. But not when you had the bagpipes instead of the bugle to wake you up in the morning. You can’t sleep with him walking around your hut.

We used to train with boots on and sometimes with bricks in the pack . That would make it a bit harder to run. Or run bare footed and run on your toes. All that sort of training. I still carried it on when I went to India. I did running.

The milkman used to leave me some goat’s milk. That cost me about two rupee a week or something. I found goat’s milk good. I thought it used to help me.

Just working I think. He would have sold us…he could have sold us to Hitler. He would have sold us. He was going along with Hitler. So we would have been sold by Chamberlain to the Nazi’s.

People weren’t very happy about that. I don’t know whether he got left out or whether he got knocked out, I’m not sure. It was different when Churchill took over. I think he lost. McDonald was alright. But no, he sold us. He was selling us to the Germans.

Peace in our time’s right.

It wasn’t very much. We didn’t take a lot of notice of it. So there no real flare up or anything. We just …he’s hopeless. We didn’t take any notice of it. We didn’t believe it so we didn’t make any fuss.

Yes they knew that war was coming in ’38. We were dig trenches. What would you dig trenches for? We were making our own air raid shelters. Digging our back gardens and building air raid shelters under the house. Now why would we do that if we didn’t know what was going on. No, he was selling us.

He would have sold the whole Empire too if he had had the chance.

I was in camp up in Northern England. And then we packed up the camp and we all went back to our depot then on a train and straight down to Southhampton.

And that’s when we went on the ship out to India. But first of all we thought we were going to go to France. The one’s who went to France, the poor buggers, were the Reservists that were called up. They went. They were older than us. We were all young blokes. They kept us back. The old boys went first.

We volunteered. We stepped forward and they said to take two paces back. They said we were too young to go there, but we weren’t too young to go anywhere. Nobody in a war is too young for anything. In any kind of war. But that’s what they did and then they pushed us off to the Far East.

Japan was in the war but up around China.

More in China than anywhere else. And I learnt later, some of the tortures they did were really Chinese tortures. Like sticking bamboo in your fingernails and setting light to it. Water dripping on your head and all that. They were

all Chinese tortures. They copied them.

I wasn’t there.

No. When they sent all the small boats out from England to rescue the soldiers at Dunkirk. We weren’t there. I wasn’t anyway. We were overseas. So

we didn’t see anything. When we came back from India and we went on a couple of weeks leave and then back again, then I went to …I got a job as an officer’s barman which was not bad.

Then we went back up to Scotland and we were training to go to Korea because the Korean war had broken out. But I didn’t get called.

We went across the channel on the ferry boat, then by train in France. We were going to go by train down to Marseille. The French girls were out offering us apples and that. So we thought oh, we’ll be able to go around and have some of these girls. No. Straight on a boat we went. No way were they going to let us go. Then we took off and I think it was about 8 days

with a naval escort down to Suez. I was amazed by what the boys could do. You could throw money on one side of the ship and they would dive down underneath the bloody ship and come up the other side. Unbelievable.

Yes. You would buy a paper…actually there would be no good buying a paper because it would be a month old anyway. You would throw a basket down and then pull it up. Then going through the Suez itself was fascinating. There was sand on both sides and then we came to a lake, Lake Timsah. There were Italian boats which had been sunk there.

Then we came through Port Tewfik which was part of Africa. We got off there and had a march around. It was just a rail head. Then we got back on the boat and went to Aden. We were there for a day but we didn’t get off the boat. Then it took us 21 days to get to Bombay. A long while to get to Bombay.

That was quite good.

Yes a couple of Jap submarines. That was where I was going to meet my brother. His boat was going to call into Bombay. I had arranged to see him but he got called out because there was a Jap submarine suspected

in the area. So I didn’t see him. He reckoned the people looked after him well where he was. He used to go out horse riding at some of the nob’s places. And there was a swimming pool. We had …in Calcutta one time. We were going further up the river to where they make the rope,

these people had invited us up there and we were using their swimming pool. It was a hemp factory.

Only when we had to pick up their prisoners. We came to pick them up from Bombay. They had come through Africa. They picked them up and put them on a train. They were alright.

One was an anti aircraft gunner and he said, “It is good for me.” I said, “Why’s it good for you?” And he said, “The war for me is finished.” He was right. And they took them down to Bangalore. And in Bangalore…you want to see the models they made carved out of stone.

And one said to me one day, “You want cigarette holder. I’ll make you one.” You know what he did? He said, “Give me your toothbrush.” And he folded it around and that and made a cigarette holder out of it. I gave him the butter because it was melted and the letters PRO had been rubbed out and it spelt DUCE. We gave them cigarettes.

Not fighting any more. The war was finished for him. They didn’t want to escape or anything. They were quite happy where they were. And if they had escaped in India, where would they go?

They wouldn’t know where to go. So they were quite happy. Same as some German ones. My neighbour next door when he was alive, he was a prisoner of war in Germany and him being a bit of an engineer, one of the old German sergeants paled up with him, and he used to disguise him and take him out to a German pub for a drink.

Same as I was put in charge of some German boys. There was an 18 year old there so I made him look after the boys because I could converse with him. And someone got upset with me. And I said, I couldn’t converse with the older man but I could with the young fella. He speaks English and I could understand him.

Well when I first landed at Bombay all I can remember was coming off the boat and being marched to the damn railway station. So we didn’t see much of it until we went on leave later. We went to Stewart’s Market and things like that.

That was quite good once you got around the place. But when you first got off the boat they didn’t give us much time for that. We were just banged on the train and off we went to Calcutta. Seven days it took us to get to Calcutta. It took us 7 days by train.

We went through a lot of …the Ghats…a small mountain range. You come through that in India and come

out the other side. Very dry in places but the water was a bit warm. We wanted some water, so when we stopped at some station…at some places we had to wait until the other train went by.

It might have been an hour. So we got some watermelons. The natives would sell us some watermelons and bananas. Madras is the place. Don’t buy bananas if you want to hold them in your hand. The bloody monkeys would pinch them. So there weren’t any monkeys there at that time. There were people ploughing their fields and planting

their rice. Quite colourful. You know, green and pleasant. Then we went to Calcutta…but first we stopped at this place called Barakpur and that’s where we were stationed in Barakpur. We had to do guard duty just up the road a bit, a couple of mile

at a place called Ishapore. It was an armament factory. So that was quite good.

Yes. Well this is the funny bit. They bombed them with fire bombs. Incendiary bombs. But before that nobody wanted to know an ordinary soldier.

The toffs didn’t want to know an ordinary soldier. But when they got bombed we got invited everywhere. I remember one night at the Starlight Hotel. The swimming pool was outside. If you wanted to go to the bar you’d just swim under a tunnel and come up at the bar. But before that, oh no. Unless you were an officer you wouldn’t get a drink.

I remember one time going to a place…I’ve got the picture there with the white uniform on. That one there. They wouldn’t serve us and we asked why not? And they said they would only serve officers. And we said, “Surely our money is as good as the officers.” But no. So anyway we found some other place.

But once they got bombed they let us in.

No. Not the Indians. They were different. They were friendly. Some of the high half caste Indians and some of the old English buggers.

Yes. They didn’t want to know us, bloody privates.

Well they thought they were the masters of the place if you know what they mean. So you had to be a bit careful about what you said.

No. Not many people took much notice of it. They were too far away to bother about…about the colonials. But some of them, because their parents had been out for so long, I think they took it into their hands that they were the masters. And to see us perhaps talking friendly

with the Indians…but he’s a man just the same as me, no different. He’s a brother, he’s a child of God. So what’s the difference. So we used to keep out of their way.

Yes most times

yes because they were sticking too much to the old Queen Victoria thing…to what we was. And I remember one Thursday a month we didn’t do any parades unless you were designated to do guard duty. I said, “What’s this?” And they said it was Queen Victoria’s Holiday. But she wasn’t alive but they still carried it on.

Queen Victoria’s Holiday. But on the whole we didn’t get too mixed up with them. The Gurkhas [Regiment of Nepalese fighting under the British Army] were allowed…they would only get about a half penny less than a British soldier. The other poor Indians were very poor.

So the Indians would be allowed in our canteens but the others wouldn’t. Of course the Gurkhas used to make rum and sell it. What’s it called now? But they made beer in Bangalore but it was pretty weak. It was called Bangalore Lady.

Pretty weak. But it was alright. It was beer. They made it in Bangalore. We did training in Poona. We trained on Lake Fife. That was built by a Scotch man many years ago. We did our boat training on there.

Never really took much notice. Now what did we call them? Chee-chees [half castes]. We had some working in the office. We called them chee-chees. But in the end they weren’t wanted by

neither side. That’s the trouble with the poor half caste, he’s not wanted by neither side. There were some nice people amongst them. That’s the way it was. I laughed the first time we landed in Trimulgherry. We had moved from

Calcutta, went up to Burma, came back and we landed in the state of Hyderabad. And we were in Trimulgherry and it was a real dark morning and all of a sudden I felt something hot on my face, and it was the barber and he said, “No worries Sahib, I’ll give you shave.” I thought, “Shit.”

For the price I was paying…it was only two rupees a bloody week. I even had a bearer too who looked after my clothes for three rupees a week. He looked after my clothes and everything. He took them down to the dhobi wallah, to whack them on the rocks. The nappi wallah was the barber

and then you had the fruit walla but you had to watch out for monkeys because they would grab all the fruit. But I enjoyed it.

Yes. We were on leave there.

Our place was five days train journey away. So as I was saying, the people changed their minds and let us in. But before that they wouldn’t have a bar of us.

It wasn’t very heavy bombing if you know what I mean. It was incendiary bombing. Setting places alight. And it always hit the poor natives side because most of them lived in straw huts.

But it didn’t get bombed a lot. And it was only the once. They didn’t come back 2 or 3 times. I don’t think so. But it wasn’t explosive bombing like high explosive bombs. It was incendiary bombs.

They would burn it down.

Yes. What they did, it was to prove a point that they could fly their…and in Burma, when we went to Burma in ’42, they had no air force because it had left and gone to India. So we never had no air force.

One general came in and said…I was doing escort on the back of his landrover. He said, “I can’t give you any more help so God be with you, God bless you, make your way back.” And then he took off in a plane. In other words, “Bugger you lot, I’m off.”

Yes. But what could you do. That was it. We had the youngest Colonel, about 24. I can’t think of his name now but he would good. Because the old man of 60 he didn’t go. They left him behind.

Too old to be clambering around. And the Sikhs were the best machine gunners. See some Indians were enticed over to the Japanese Army because if you saw that picture of the Aussie’s in that prison camp,

you will see the Indian soldiers. Some of them were enticed over and they were promised that they would be helped, and the Japs would take India and …but they weren’t given anything at all. And the Americans were slow. They need not have got bombed in Hawaii

because there was a story came out. There was an American born Japanese, very good on short wave and he picked the message up about them coming down to attack. What he did, he sent the message to the Pentagon and they wouldn’t believe him. But they soon found out he was right.

They wouldn’t do it to us but they did.

I never really saw what they were producing. I never went inside the place. But we would go on duty on all the foot bridges that went across. So we never went inside it. So what they made I don’t know.

Oh it was alright. For awhile we got prickly heat because when you come from the North your blood is thick and it’s got to have time to thin down.

You get this prickly heat so when it poured with rain we would get out in the mud. And that mud used to help cure the prickly heat. You soon got used to it after a while. When we were in (UNCLEAR) in the state of Hyderabad,

it’s more of a desert there, we used to bury the (UNCLEAR) in the ground to keep the water cool. Because the (UNCLEAR) would sweat and keep it cool. We also carried a canvas jargil. So that would be dripping but it would keep it cool. We all had to take our meal across the river when we were training.

At the midday meal we all had to go across to an island in the middle of the river. So you would take your meal over.

Not in Hyderabad. This was in Jhansi. So you all had to go across at meal time.

Hyderabad? Well Trimulgherry where we were was…as far as we were concerned it had been an old French barracks. The water was still going from an artesian well. We were still getting water from it and we used to make lemonade there.

It was more of a desert sort of place but I don’t know what it was like in his place where he had the fort and al that. But I did hear…how true it was I don’t know, but the story was, if you had a palm tree growing on your land, you had to pay

him five rupees a year for it, and that’s on your land. But you still had to pay him that. And they used to make a palm toddy from it. A powerful drink that palm toddy, I’ve had some. I remember saying to the fella coming down with it,

“Give me some of your drink mate.” And he said, “No no. No good for a white man.” I said, “If it’s good enough for a black man it’s good enough for a white man.” Jesus it was powerful. They would ferment it later with sugar to make it worse. But they had a red wine they made and that wasn’t bad. It was bloody good.

Yes he had his own little army. There was a story going round that if you would like to join his army he would give you silver buttons to wear on your uniform. What good was that. Silver buttons. That would be right. They had a narrow

gauge railway that ran through there and it ran through his place and I forget where it met up with the broad gauge railway. When we were down…we moved to Poona and Bangalore and that, we went up to the

mountains somewhere. You’d go up there if you had malaria and you’d recover. They’d leave you up there and that was quite good. You were in a hospital up there and you got to wear a blue coat and you could walk around. But you never did any heavy duty for a week because the air was thin. The oxygen was thin.

The train had the cogs in the middle of the line. You could hire a horse and go for a ride on a horse. And the old black panther was around at the time. You had to watch out for that at night.

No, up in Mount Wellington.

We were down below in Poona, but we went up. It was about 12,000 feet up.

Well…on a rickshaw. Or on a …what’s the one called that’s got the pony in the front.

All done up lovely with bells and all sorts of things. The rickshaw was the one pulled by the fella and the other one was with the horse. I can’t think what they call it. But that’s how you did it. You never really went in taxis because there weren’t many.

Yeah pretty reasonable. We used to have races with them. I might say to my one, “You race him and I’ll give you an extra 3 dollars.” And the other bloke would have one and they’d try and beat one another.

Oh yes.

We used to pay them because it was fair.

I don’t know because where we were we weren’t near any other regiment. So we never really made contact.

We were miles away from one another. Only one time up in Mount Wellington in the skillions. That was the only time we made any contact.

Oh yes. Some were married to them. That meant also that they would move out of the barracks into married quarters, and the girl would also get paid so much being his wife. Most of the others who had girlfriends…they were the chee-chees though. The half castes.

The chee-chees.

I didn’t have any. I would just go out and play sport. But no it never bothered me really. We had one there though I used to like, but I don’t know. You worried too much about venereal disease half the time.

Well the first time when we went in ’42, as I say we were supposed to be going to Australia to do training. But we had to go and get the British Light Horse out. Fight rear guard action. So we lost most of them and we lost some of our own.

It wasn’t too bad. It seemed to keep going somehow. So what was left of us we managed to get through. Some people were going up the roads but we went through the tracks. We met this American missionary who knew every dialect. They had a mission right up in the mountains, so he led us through over the mountains.

We met some people and I thought what are those kids doing smoking a pipe? They were little women, not little kids. And they were carry a kit on their back just like the Nepalese would do. They’d carry it up to the next village which might be 20 miles, then we’d go on to another village. And that’s when we’d come to the Naga Head Hunters who were about normal height. They wore the Mohican hair cut.

They were paid, so we were told by the British government five rupees a Japanese head. And also it was also suppose to be the Valley of a Thousand Skulls. But we never found them. We didn’t go looking for them in any case. Then they asked us would we shoot a pig for them. They don’t clean them out. They just stick a stick through their arse and out their mouth.

They eat everything. So we ate a bit of it. Then a little boy come down. I had a Chinese jade idol of Confucius I found on the way up. So I thought I would trade that. So I said, “Chicko, wants chonka chonka.” Six eggs. So he went off and came back with the 6 eggs and the Confucius.

And I said to this American guy, “Why did he bring it back?” He said, “They don’t believe in Confucius, they believe in Buddha.” He said he wanted all our brass buttons because they make something out of it. To give them money in paper would be useless.

They would just burn it. So you gave them money in coins which they would make in to bangles. I asked where they got the rice to make the rice whisky, they didn’t grow anything. I was told that they know when a Burma has his harvest in. So they go and pinch it. So then later the Burma would always grow a bit extra because he knew it would be pinched.

The 4th Independent Indian Brigade.

Well as far as I know there was the Black Watch and there was a couple of English ones. I think the Queens and the Gurkhas. We went under different names. Our lot, our radio contact with anyone else would be Aberdeen. And then the English one would be

Wormwooden and so forth. We also made contact by radio to General Kai Chek, and also with the Australians on the Malaysian border. They were known to us as Z-Force. There was Stillwell, an American guy with another mob in radio contact. Our supplies were brought in from Assam, by the old Dakotas.

So some of our boys weren’t fit enough to go with us. They were Class B. So they would be in the planes dropping out stuff. Food, medical supplies, ammunition would come down by parachute. What killed my mule was a free drop. That’s when the food comes down in free drop. It hit poor old Bill square in the back. It was coming from a 1000 feet up.

We had to do mule training so I was assigned to be a mule leader. So every morning you’d go out…when you were in training. You couldn’t when you were in the jungle. We’d go out and clean the hoofs out and lime it. Brush them down. At first he used to push me aside like this. So I said to this little Indian fellow I had with me and who was training us,

I said…he came from one of the Indian regiments…I said, “Why is he doing that?” He said, “You haven’t got the sugar nuts. He likes sugar peanuts. You give him sugar peanuts and he will do anything. Any hoof you like you can pick it up. Otherwise he’ll just push you.” And after a while he got real friendly. They were devocalised.

They would put them down. You held his head between a bale of hay and they would take the larynx out so they couldn’t make a noise at night. Our officer reckon we should have had ours out. But we had elephants too and Welsh ponies. Well they had their voice box taken out too, but not the elephants. Because there were plenty of wild elephants in Burma. But they were very handy going through

bamboo because they would get down on their fours and rise up and make a buffet through the bamboo. They were bloody good. But you made sure you didn’t camp down by the lakes. The flying boats used to come in and take the wounded out. The big Sunderland Flying Boats and they’d have an escort of Catalinas.

The elephants would come down for water at night and if there was a stampede you’d know about it. We used to go fishing with a 4 second grenade. You’d wait on the river’s edge and throw it in the river and boom. We didn’t use it for killing anybody, we’d use it to get food.

Because where we were going no mobile transport could go. You couldn’t drive up there. No motorised vehicle could go where we were going. That’s why we had the mules.

Because our unit was organised to do it. And at training…there was a river where we were training in Jhansi.

At meal time we had to take the mules across as well. So you learnt the way…you had to try and help your mates swim too. And if they couldn’t swim we would get them to hang on to the back of a mule. And we would make sure when we got near the edge they would drop off because he would kick them back in.

India, training.

The first mission we went on was tracing where they were. We did find a camp…we got 3 American nurses out of there. We got them up on a hill and we managed to get a plane to land in a certain spot and it took them back to India. And we asked them what happened

to the Chinese girls, and they said they just killed them. They didn’t kill them but they killed the poor Chinese girls. So we could watch that. We would have natives too who were spotting for us. And we would wait until we would see a Japanese patrol go out and then we’d shell that place. We had 25 pounders dropped in with us.

Big ones. If we were leaving that spot we’d take the breech block out and blow up the gun so they couldn’t use it. We mainly used our 3 inch mortars. What we did once, we were sitting out side a training camp in India and we were taking the top of the bomb off and a bloke went by and said, “Look at those mad bastards, playing with the bomb.” To make that bomb explode it had to have a pressure of 180 pounds,

like when you drop it. So it’s charged ready to go. What we were doing…it was a smoke bomb. So we took the ball bearing out so when it goes it would make the smoke bigger and spread it much thicker. One said, “Hey Mac what you doing, going to blow yourself up.” I said, “No, no. Not unless you’re going with me.”

We had 2 inch mortars but I had the 3 inch mortar, the big one. The 2 inch mortar, a fella could carry one of them. But the big ones…it was a 7 pound bomb and sometimes we used to use that charge we had to light a fire. And cook a bit of stuff. We did away with taking British rations, carrying those bloody great tins of bully beef. We did away with that.

Only one man carried it in your section of 8. And if he got bumped off then you haven’t got any food have you. That’s why they changed us to American K rations. [field rations- K Type] And the other thing about them was, you had a packet of cigarettes in every packet. And the other thing that tickled us was the toilet roll. Instead of wiping your arse on grass we had a toilet roll. That was the way it was.

The American rations were better and yes, we had a Canadian doctor with us. The rations had some lemonade powder in it and he said, “Don’t use that stuff.” I said, “It’s lemonade powder and it’s American isn’t it.” And he said, “That’s why you don’t want to use it, it’s bloody American. Get some Canadian stuff.” They hate one another sometimes. I made a mistake one time when I was talking to a Canadian. I said, “What part of America do you come from?” He said, “I don’t come from American, I come from Canada.”

Yes, but most of them wanted to know…we hammered in one time to an American hospital when we were having a rest, and being relieved before we went back and this fella came up and said, “Have you got any souvenirs?” And I said, “Listen mate, you haven’t got time for souvenirs, you’re here to fight a bloody war.”

That’s what they were looking for. Flags and things, Japanese flags.

Not much. But I had this Japanese officer that we had got. He could speak English in an American accent. I decided to ask him where he learnt and he said he came from San Francisco.

And he was a coal merchant. So I said, “Why are you in the Japanese Army if you’re an American?” He said, “You would do the same. Would you go home to your native country, although I was born in America or put in a concentration camp. So that’s what I did.” I gave him a cigarette out of my rations. And another bloke said I shouldn’t give him a cigarette and I said,

“Why not?” So I gave him to me. But we handed him over to the Chinese and we don’t know what happened to him then. He had a rope around his neck with one bloke pulling this way and another pulling that way and he had a tommy gun in his back, so…God knows. The Chinese could be crueller than the Japs if they wanted to be. Some of the techniques that the Japs used were from Chinese torture. I mean, I’m not going against the Chinese and that but

they had a lot of tribal wars.

Yes, bamboo under your finger nails and set light to it. Bore holes in your tongue and all that sort of business. The Japanese were terrible but they copied some of the old Chinese tortures and they perfected it a bit more really. When you saw those poor buggers

from the camps, like in Malaya and Singapore…Changi, walking skeletons. That’s where Weary Dunlop did his work with just ordinary razor blades. Bloody good. We had this…this Canadian doctor we had, he was good too but

he died along the line. He got Yellow Jack and died. A good bloke. And there was another sergeant major we had. He was getting a bit terrified and he was going to shoot himself. I said, “Don’t shoot yourself.” He said, “Why?” I said, “The Japs are here to shoot us so why shoot yourself.” And he said to me, “You’re mad.”

Well it was on that route when we were making our way back to India.

That’s where they wanted us to have a drink with the rice whisky they had made, and we had this missionary with us, this Yank. And I said, “We’re not supposed to drink until after midday.” And he said, “You had better drink it, don’t upset these people. They’re head hunters.” And I said, “Give us a drink then.” A so called story about there being so many skulls in this valley but we didn’t venture in to find out.

and the old story about the Brits paying them 5 rupees per Japanese head. But I don’t know about that. But that was the story going round. And paper money, if you gave them a 1000 rupee it wouldn’t mean a thing. They would probably roll it up and make a cigarette with some of them, or hashish because they had hashish going in those days. But they had silver money which they would meld down and make into

bangles and things like that.

Yes only one. We found this woman. We managed to get a plane into a landing spot up on the mountain. She had had her breasts cut off and this young Canadian doctor was able to do some sort of patching up. He couldn’t put the breasts back. So she was flown out to India. Another time 3 boys

beheaded over a well. Things like that. So there were.

You feel real sick. But I think the part that made me feel the sickest was back to ’42. We were in Pegu

where there were all these small Buddhist temples, loads of them in the area. It was also a rail head for the railway line. They thought all the village had been cleared out because the Japs were coming up to Pegu. But like any old man, he doesn’t want to leave his house does he. And I saw one of our own people machine gun that house and kill him. And I thought it was bloody disastrous.

I mean, why not go over to him and get him out. Why shoot him. He doesn’t want to leave his house. But our own side machine gunned him. Bloody mad. See there were things done on both sides. We were all that bloody innocent.

I mean we did a few atrocities as well. Anyway that blowed passed and in a town I picked up a little old calendar book. All the villages had left bar this old fella. Another time in the next village, the chief was there with his daughters.

My mate, always fancied getting a Sheila whatever way. He said, “We don’t have much food so let’s take them up some tinned bacon and jam. We might get a Sheila.” I said, “You’ll be lucky. The old boy’s standing there with his sword.” We went up and had a bit of coffee with them…no, green tea and sweet peanuts.

So we gave them that and it was alright. We did tell them it was best to leave the village if possible because it was going to go up one way or the other. Then we got up to Param…I never knew there was oil in Burma but there was. This place called Param, up along the Irrawaddy. There were oil wells there. We started to blow them up

so the Japs would have a job getting them going. Then we left and that’s when the sergeant major wanted to shoot himself and I said, “Don’t shoot yourself, why shoot yourself, the bloody Japs are around the corner.” He said, “You’re a bit of a mad bastard.”

Anyway he calmed down in the end and we saw this plane come and you make sure you fire up underneath it when it’s coming towards you. Then we fired into some of the pipelines too.

And that’s where I first saw mules. I didn’t have a mule then, but that’s when I first saw them because the Indian Sappers had mules, and the poor mules were panicking for water. They were going berserk and running everywhere.

I don’t think evenly so but in that spot. Just because the old man didn’t want to leave. They were accusing him saying he was working for the Japs.

But I couldn’t see that. Old people don’t…even now here in peace time, you try and move an old person out of their house. The council trying to move him out. Why should he go anyway. For his health possibly yes. But they don’t want to leave their house and to just go and shoot him. No I didn’t see that .

There were some people who were gung ho happy. They wouldn’t wait to see and work things out, they’d just go and shoot anything. Now the Gurkhas…the Japs sometimes disguised themselves as Buddhist monks, but the Gurkhas knew the difference.

They’d get the Jap and kill him and they’d come back and they’d have his ears on their belt. God they were funny those boys. I learnt from one of them, the ‘havildar’ which means sergeant,

how they get up to that position of being a man. When they’re about 16 to 18 they’ve got to throw the big knife…I forget how many yards it is, but let’s say, from where we’re sitting to the edge of the road, there’s a goat there and so they had to throw it and cut its head off, to prove they’re a man. But whether

they still do it today I don’t know. But that’s how it was then. Then they’d all have a feast.

Yes. You had a little tiny knife. I mean that’s what you had if you wore a kilt. A dirk in your sock. You also had a skinny knife for scalping.

So it wasn’t just the red indians. But you learn things from other people. You see what they do and how they go about things.

No, never. Never.

No, but that was what they said it was for. But I was amazed at how well the Indians…all types of Indians, whether they were a Sepoy or Sikh or whatever…how they could play the bagpipes. They all had bagpipe as part of their regiment. But the other ones who were the good ones were the Bengal Lancers.

They were mechanised then but before they rode horses. They were well known fighters, the Bengal Lancers. They were armoured this time. And we were in the Ghandi riots too. You would travel on the train and they would lay themselves out on the railway line. And they would dare you to move the train over them.

But the Gurkhas were funny. They’d come along and say, “Ah, they want to rest. We move them for you Sahib?” “Where are you going to move them?” They’d get their old fellas out and they’d piss all over them. “See they move, they move, they go.”

Ghandi’s idea was resistance with no fighting. And of course we weren’t allowed to shoot unless they shot first. And every carriage had a rifle rack in it. For every seat in the train there was a rifle rack in every carriage…whether it be a first, second or third class.

When we were picking up Italian prisoners from Bombay who had come back from the Middle East and had been captured by the Aussies [Australians]. We were taking them on the train down to Bangalore. We would stop along the line. They’d have their boots off and they’d come up to the front engine to get hot water to make their coffee. They couldn’t care less.

One said to me…he showed me he had been an aircraft gunner. He said, “I’m happy now, the war is finished for me, but not for you.” He said, “You smoke? Do you want a cigarette holder?” We used to have the old bone cigarettes. How he did it I don’t know but he kept fiddling around and he made a cigarette holder.

We would give them tins of butter…the butter was so melted you would just pour it out. And it’s got Produce on it. And they would rub out Pro and it left Duce which was Mussolini who they called the Duce. But they were no trouble. They were happy. And when they were in Bangalore you should have seen the carvings they done on some of the rocks. Really beautiful carvings. They were quite happy.

Well the first one was one he went in first. We didn’t go with the first one. The first one he did to see whether it could be done. And he proved it could be done so we went back in ’44. We went down to Infoul in Assam, loaded our mules on. They were blindfolded.

We used to blindfold them to take them over a bridge. They hate walking over anything that’s empty under them. They don’t like walking over something empty. Then we put them in the plane. We had a revolver and if they played up we just shot one but made sure we didn’t damage the plane. We loaded them on and we went on a separate plane. The other boys with the first lot of mules they went on there.

We went on another plane and we just sit along the inside. There were no seats. Not like an airline. The bloke said, “What are we sitting on?” I said, “I think we’re sitting on 25 pounder shells.” So if something hit us we’d have no worries. We land there and get off and make our way. I remember one time I was sick. I went out and then they had to bring me back. I flew in a Lysander to meet my regiment.

It had two patients. That’s when we met up with…another thing about flying in the Dakotas. Now this is not being biased one way or the other, but if the yanks…I’ve got two Yankee brother-in-laws. If the yanks were to fly those Dakotas in and it had started to rain, they wouldn’t go.

But you could trust the Aussie pilots. They would come in rain or snow and drop our stuff, but not the yanks. No way. And we used to light fires at night if they were coming by night, in the shape of a letter T which meant Japs around. T meant Japs. If we made it in the shape of a L it meant land. Often we had to keep changing things around because you did

alter those things every day. Later on we had lights because the RAF [Royal Air Force] came in and we had lights. But the same sort of signalling was done every day. Someone could pick up and get your drop.

We were a group of about half a dozen when we got there. We were with the American missionary and this young officer from the Light Horse. We were in civvies. We had one rifle between two of us.

When we got there the Gurkhas were in charge of the area at Assam so they wouldn’t let us pass, no pass. And a story went around about why he stopped us…the young officer asked him to go and get Havildar [sergeant]. Then he told him to go and get the officer because generally it was a white man who was the officer…to prove who we were.

Because the story was, that some Germans were in with the Japanese helping them. True or false I don’t know. That was the story why they weren’t going to let us through. So we went through and about a mile up the road we met our regiment, or what was left of the regiment.

Yes.

No, just that when we got to the regiment they told us about it. They thought there were Germans in with some of the ranks of the Japs [Japanese], and that was why we got stopped.

Oh yeah. But the Gurkha boy was doing his job.

He wasn’t going to let us pass, no bloody way. That’s for sure.

We went to join up with our regiment and then we all went back to India and did more training.

With the mules then. We didn’t have the mules that first time. But Wingate he did, he tried that. The idea

was to see if it could be done because the Japs had come through at one stage and killed a lot of Chinese nurses in the hospital. They wanted to know how they got through. If you’re on a high point of the ground…you’ve heard of Elephant Grass? It grows pretty tall. You could always look down and see the grass moving. And you’d know someone was in there or something.

So we used to put traps out like tin cans and things like that on strings. So if anyone came near it it would rattle. One day someone heard it and they fired and it was a bloody goat. We did that here in training with the CMF. We would have to go and reconnoitre and area where the service corps was because the idea was to pinch a service truck.

And we’d set up traps, string traps to make a noise as they were going. We did eventually pinch a truck. This was here. Someone said, “We’d better go and get the truck.” And I said, “Not yet have a look. This is undulating ground but that bit is level, and it’s level, not right.” They had

twigs over it. So I said, “Get your dummy grenade and throw it alongside the trench, not in it” because it would burn someone if it went in. So 3 men jumped out of the trench and I said, “I told you.” That wasn’t right.

In the same regiment.

You had a bit of leeway, about a week of not doing anything, but then back on drill again.

That was the end of ’42…about the middle of ’43.

That was up in Jhansi.

That’s where we were with our mules. I used to like it. Saturday mornings was soap saddle day, clean all the stuff up.

No that was in India. We couldn’t do much cleaning when we got in the jungle though.

Yeah.

Very good, yep.

Only what I’ve read. I’ve tried to find the book. I’ve got it here somewhere. We had one major we called Mad Major. Major McPharlan. ‘Mad Major’. He wore a monocle. He was clever but we

called him the Mad Major. We threw away the tin helmets because we worked out that a bullet could go through a tin helmet anyway. It was alright for bouncing shrapnel off. We just wore the slouch hat like the Aussie’s wore. That black feather there, see that, that we wore on the side of our Balmoral, the round one.

That was that. Someone asked if that was from the Black Watch and I told them the Black Watch wear a red one. We wore a black heckle and they wore a red heckle. That’s the difference.

When we were in Bombay on leave and as far as we know it was the 6th Div which came back from the Far East and

they were put in a transit camp 30 mile up from Bombay. It was called Deolali. Anyway if anyone went mad they would say he’s gone Dulally. That’s where we met them. We went up there and they’d say, “Hey you starving buggers, come up and have a meal.” They would give us a whole flap of bloody lamb and I’d think, shit.

I couldn’t eat all that, and they’d say, “You’re starving you bastard, eat it.” That was the first time I had Australian beer. Swan Beer. We had been having Bangalore Lady. That was the only Indian beer that I knew of. They must have got some Swan over for them. I didn’t mind paying say six bucks for a bottle.

Good. The one thing I liked about it too was when I was in the CMF [Citizens Military Forces]. In the Pommy Army, no matter if you were in Scotland or where you were, the sergeant you had to call, ‘Sarge [sergeant]’ or ‘Sir’.

Well we were going over the river and it was quite a big river. We were on a ferry and when we were just about getting to the shore there was a little village all lit up, and the little chicos, the boys came up and said, “You want my sister?

Plenty sisters here, you want?” I said, “No.” “Mister, you can have plenty sisters.” Some boys went. But I didn’t go. I thought bugger it you might get your head chopped off.

No, they were Indian, or Assamese. You could class them as Indian anyway.

That’s where the tea plants are. I remember going with one one time but this is jumping back a bit to Calcutta. I go to the pictures with this girl Kathy. She was a chee chee. We go upstairs and we had always been taught to hide our money in our socks.

I saw photos of a sailor on the side and I said, “Who’s that?” And of course there they had gun boats come up the river, and she said, “My husband.” I thought this was a bit crook. She said, “He doesn’t mind.” Ten rupees for a shag and he don’t mind.

He’s not there, the poor bastards on a boat somewhere.

Yes.

Ten rupees.

Yes.

Not really.

Only that once.

Oh, and another time in the cinema. I was going with another one and she hit me across the face with a bit of paper. I said, “What’s that for?” And she said, “You don’t like me no more.” And I said, “No, I like Kathy better. That was her sister.”

In the bazaar. I’m trying to think of the name of the bazaar. It was when we were in Calcutta. I forget now. They were good kids but one got a bit jealous.

Oh yes. I left India then to get married in England,

and of course she had my regimental address. So they sent it to my regimental address and sent it home to my place. My then wife said, “Who is Kathleen Niger?” I said, “Just a girl who used to work in the office.” “What’s this about, she wants to marry you?”

I said, “That’s nothing.” It nearly caused a bloody row near enough. I was just getting married.

Yes. She said, “I come to the wedding too.” And I said, “No.” I thought God, what have I got myself into.

Not too bad in the end.

Then she must have wrote the letter then or maybe before because it went through the army and what ever and got to my home town. I told my girl friend…I had been going with her for years before the war, and her sister wrote over to me and told me she wasn’t going out or anything. So I wrote and told her

to go out and enjoy yourself. You’re getting bombed every day by the Germans and we don’t know whether we’ll be alive tomorrow. And if you find someone, don’t wait for me because I may not come back. Go out and enjoy yourself. That’s the way I put it. She could be dead one day or I could be dead one day. Go out and enjoy yourself, and I left it like that.

I think it was something everyone wanted to achieve. Everyone wanted to achieve it. Some blokes got married. I know two corporals who got married to Indian women.

So they were allowed married quarters and when he went home she went with him. So that was…they would go into married quarters. An achievement, that’s what it was. But even if you didn’t want to have sex

you could not go out the barracks without a French Letter. They would say you had to have it. So you would have a ‘French Letter’ [condom] and you would have a tube of this stuff that you squirted up your penis so you wouldn’t get gonorrhoea and all that. They wouldn’t let you go out the barracks unless you had that.

Well we always called it a French Letter for years. Thinking of the French always having sex you see.

Yes French Letter means French and sex.

Yes.

I can’t describe what it was like or anything. But you would squeeze it up your penis so if you didn’t have a condom on…if you had used one condom and you wanted to go again, well with this you wouldn’t get whatsaname.

But I’ll tell you how I landed up in a VD [Venereal Disease] hospital. Right. We were out on training and somehow I got slapped down on a bloody bull ants nest and it bit my balls to buggery, and I stood up and the sergeant major said, “Sit down.” And I said, “I can’t bloody sit down.” So anyway he came up and they had swollen up and they sent me

into the bloody VD hospital. And they got this awful black paint which they painted my balls with. And I told them I didn’t have venereal disease but they told me they weren’t going to take a chance. You go in there even if you haven’t got VD. They stop your pay for awhile if you’ve got it. They stop your pay.

And that was the biggest laugh. Some of the fellas were on guard out the front of this particular hospital and they said, “We had little Reenie.” And I said, “Who the bloody hell is little Reenie?” And they said she came around for sex. And I said, “But this is a VD hospital.” But she still came. But the guards were having sex.

I think that’s what ruined the army, sex.

It would be in a way.

If you’re going into battle you think well at least I’ve had sex.

I don’t think it gave them much assurance, relief probably but not much reassurance I don’t think. But the fact that they had had it before they died…

Not all soldiers but most. We had one bloke shot himself.

He shot himself, I don’t know why but he did shoot himself. I couldn’t see the point in shooting yourself because I always thought the Japs are there to shoot us and there’s always the chance that you were going to come out, so why bump yourself off. Why commit suicide.

He didn’t want to go any further.

They tried to restrain him but they should have taken his guns off him but they didn’t. But it wouldn’t be wise to have a person in the group in that sense either because he could make a mistake and cause you all to get shot. So there’s two ways of looking at it.

Yes. Some were in our unit and they were getting arsenic needles ever so often in their backsides. They would be treated with that. We had an American born boy in our unit who had VD that was inherited from

his family. So he was getting arsenic needles too in the backside to help knock it out. Whether it did or not I don’t know. I wouldn’t know about that. But some were getting it. And of course you could get your pay stopped, that’s for sure.

I’ll tell you. I went down Stewart Street Markets in Bombay and there parts where you weren’t supposed to go but we would go down there. And there was this great big fat madam there and my mates went off to the cages they called it. Like a bloody animal cage. And one of my mates went off and I didn’t want to go so I stayed there and the Madam said, “Why you not go?”

And I said, “I don’t want to.” “I make you go soon.” “How?” She sits her big arse on my lap and starts wiggling her arse around and I said, “I don’t want to.” “Why not?” she said. “I’ll give you a free one.” I said, “No.” So my mate came out and said, “Did you?” And I said, “No bloody way but the big fat arse was trying to get me to go.”

Gawd. And there were areas that you weren’t supposed to go to because the medical staff did used to check some of them. So there were places where you wouldn’t go. I made friends with a Muslim fella. His father was Head Station Master of Byculla Station in Bombay. I would go with him for a coffee and all I had to do was take

my hat off and put it in my shirt. We became blood brothers. See on my arm here, we crossed our arms like that. We wrote to one another for years and some how during the late 60s I didn’t hear any more of him. Maybe he got killed. He was a Pakistani. Something might have happened to him. I never heard any more. We were good mates.

I always try to make mates. I don’t try and make enemies. It’s not easy, but you can. But there’s too many…like you said before, these high faluting Poms [English] as Dad would call it who think they’re the kings and they’re not the bloody kings at all.

If they look back over history they’ve learnt a lot from other people. Don’t they realise that. They didn’t learn much themselves. And us in England especially are related to Germany. I came from Essex which is East Saxons and they came from Saxony in Germany. And in Kent they came from Jutland which is called the Judes. Wessex, West Saxons. So the Germans are there. The old King and Queen, George V are relations of the Kaiser [German Emperor], they were cousins. And the two cousins fought one another. I mean that’s it. So we are of Germany extraction.

They said, you’ve got a Scottish name and I said yes, I’ve got a Scottish name but I wasn’t born in Scotland. My father’s grandfather did.

That’s how we got it but we’re not Scottish. I can get away with it but I’m not Scottish. I like to look into History.

I think the best film I ever saw…did you ever see Gunga Din…the Water Boy? That was a beautiful…way back in the 1800s when they were fighting up in the Himalayas. He was well liked by the officers and that. One day he learnt to play the bugle and he stood to attention … “Me sergeant now.”

When the Thuggees which is part of the Afganis were going to destroy an English post up there. He got shot up. He knew where they were going to go, so he gets up with the bugle on the last bit and he blows some tune, so the British colonel knew there was an attack coming. And the poor bugger gets shot as he plays the last note.

And he comes down and the old colonel says, “Gunga Din, you’re a better man than I.” That’s an old film. They played it the other week. It’s a real old film, but it’s true to that part of history.

Well I think…the only thing is the different classes.

I mean you’ve got the Untouchables, the sweepers and those who clean the toilets and so forth. Then you’ve got the high Brahmans who wear the star. There’s too many classes in it. It’s the same as England was years ago. The high class and the low class. You were the worker. Not a lot of difference.

And funny thing, if a girl or a boy from either the Brahmans fell in love with someone from the Untouchables, they weren’t allowed to marry because they were breaking the tradition. But some got round it but not very often. The only way they could was to get out, get married and come

over to Australia. I’ve seen some good doctors.

In 1943?

We didn’t go in ’43. 1943 was the first one to see if we could get into Burma.

Well we never met them. Only by radio contact. They were on the Malaysian border.

They were doing a lot of fighting in Malaya. So we came across the Brahmaputra River to Assam…

What was the question?

We never met them, only by radio.

Radio contact. General Kai Chek.

By radio. Also with the American run…the Marauders or something, but they were further up North.

But we met up with the Americans who were making a Leado Road that was going to bring more stuff into China and Assam. That’s when the American Army police said…because we wore no rank…for a purpose. Anyway they asked

who we were and this young officer, he wasn’t going to say who we were. And he said to this American Red Cap [British Military Police] you might say, he said, “Who’s your officer in charge?” And he said, “I can’t tell you.”

And this officer just turned around and said, “I can’t tell you and another thing is we’re not in your army.” That was it. How that happened was…we exchanged cigarettes with a Negro. Those poor buggers were building the roads. Not the white ones. The Negroes were doing the roads.

So we exchanged cigarettes. They don’t like the American Negro much but they have them in their world sports. They’re great sportsmen and they use them for that. They’re in the war but they don’t really want to know them.

That happened when we were in American. Our sister-in-law came up and said, “We’re not talking to them.” And like I said before with the Japanese officer. I said, “Well he spoke to me and he done no harm to us so I gave him a cigarette.” That’s the way I feel making friends. You don’t….you make it worse for yourself if you’re going to accuse other people all the time.

Oh yes. But I mean, there were times when they thought they were the tops, but after that time when that fella said, “Have you got any souvenirs?” And I said, “Mate, we’re here to fight a war, not pick up souvenirs.” He wanted to know if we had any Japanese flags. We didn’t wait around looking for flags.

We used them in Burma. We knew how to use them. One of my friends, his brother got killed. They were both in the same regiment as us. He got killed when the Japs made a run on the front trench. So he goes down with his flame thrower which we called a life buoy, onto the Japanese and set fire to them all.

He just let it go.

They were shaped like a life buoy. You know a life buoy belt, round like that. We had another thing…talk about mines. It could be…the same size and shape of a 303 bullet. You would

bury it in the ground, just below the ground, so when a person walked on it and they pressed it down with their toe, by the time they had lifted their heel, that bullet had fired up their leg. We planted them. That was a type of anti personnel mine. It didn’t make a big blow it just blew up and shattered your leg. We had a sapper engineer who used to do that.

He was laying them and somehow he must have pressed it with his hand and it came up through his finger, chopped one finger off and came up through his slouch hat. He was lucky. Anyway he got what we called a Blighty. They sent him home.

Blighty means going home to England.

If you’re injured badly yes. Well you go back

to India and then you probably go home.

In 1942, in a place called…a rail head with all these little Buddha temples. That’s when we made contact with them first. We only landed the day before

we slept in the barracks and moved up the next day and that’s when we met them. Can’t think of the name of the town. I mentioned it somewhere along the line. That’s where we made contact. And then another time we made contact, we saw them moving with their Mongolian ponies through the jungle. So we fired mortars at them from where we were. They were coming on push bikes too.

And mules…they weren’t mules, they were Mongolian ponies, beautiful ponies. We got one one day, a beautiful animal. They were using them. What the hell was that bloody railway head….Pegu.

That’s where we first met them. They said to come across the river…where that film is made about…when they blew up part of the camp…The River Kwai. But it was further down the river where we were, getting towards the mouth of the river.

We got into Assam

I don’t know if we went by train or what. No it must have been about train. So we did a bit of training up there in Assam and we were tested out medical wise. If you were A1 you’d be going in, if you were B you wouldn’t be. One of my mates was B. But he would be on a plane anyway. He would be unloading goods on a plane so he had just as much chance of getting shot out of a plane.

That’s where we did training there. Then we moved on further into the jungle. But I didn’t, I was sick, so I stayed back for a while and then flown in by a small Lysander single wing plane. They knew where the regiment was and it dropped us off. That’s where we met the big Nigerians.

The tall darkies. There was one plane…they dropped cyclone fencing to drop on the paddy fields because a couple of DC3 came down and hit the rice paddies and collapsed. So by putting this cyclone fencing on it, it gave them some bounce so they could take off again. They learnt by trial and error.

Yes. We wore no rank, and we wore no big map cases. We had a silk scarf for the area we were going to work in, which in the case of being caught you could ignite.

And we only had a small four point compass. No big fancy compasses. So that was what we did. We wore no rank but we all knew who was who.

The chemist bloke should be coming by now, it’s quarter to three, I’ll have to give him a ring….they were pretty good, but I remember this one, we went and had a bit of dinner with him. He mixed it all up and he said, “White man funny. Don’t like it like we do, and mix it first.” But we get it all mixed up down here. Fair enough.

He was good. He was a teacher.

Big fellas. Some of them were nearly 7 feet, some of them.

No not really. I had better ring that chemist because I need those.

I’m going into respite on Monday so I need to take them with me.

Yes.

A fair way I suppose. I wouldn’t know exactly, but a fair way. And there were 3 or 4 different units. There was the Black Watch and the others. They’d all get a drop.

It was pretty good. But one time, our machine gunners were being held down by Japs because they sometimes use to climb a tree and they’d have enough rice and dried fish up there to last them 7 days. So what we did, we contacted the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] to bring in

a type of land mine to drop on the trees. It would blow the tree tops out. So that quietened him down. They would drop the mine so as soon as it hit the tree it would blow up. They could stay up there a whole week. A little bowl of rice and dried fish.

Yes.

Well yes. Snipers are in any position. Snipers are anyway. Places like Iraq and places like that. They’re probably using telescopic sights too. So they would drop the mines and blow them out of the tree tops.

No. See it didn’t matter where our machine gunner moved, he would get picked on. He didn’t get shot he just got picked on. So we had to move him away, but send for the RAAF to drop the bombs.

No, it’s not my usual Chinese friend who’s coming today. I rang her before, it’s someone else.

It wasn’t so much the tactics, it was to make us elusive. You would move around. The idea was not to stay

in the one position for long. You would move around, even if it might be a few hundred yards. They were pretty good at picking it up the old Japanese.

I don’t know but they seemed to be. One thing about them was,

the Imperial Japanese Guards were pretty good. Not only that, they were also good to the prisoners. The other ones who were collared into the army, the Chinese and Koreans, they would make them come in and they were the ones who were the cruel buggers. The Japanese Imperial Army weren’t. They were good soldiers.

They didn’t do the atrocities that were known, but they all got blamed for it anyway.

No. No we didn’t go there. Didn’t get called up for that.

I suppose so.

Yes. They had Indians in their army too. They had gone over from the Indian Army. The Sepors.

Well the promised great things. They would have their own rule.

There was no way the Japs would let them do that. They wouldn’t let them do that, no way.

In my section there wasn’t

because in the mortar section we didn’t do much ambushing. In the other parts of the regiment would. But you wouldn’t be able to do much ambushing with a 3 inch mortar. The only way you could get information from the rest of the infantry who would tell you where they were, then you could get them with what they called Three Rounds Rapid. Do you know what Thee Rounds Rapid is?

It’s nine bombs. Three rounds rapid and that is nine bombs. It would make a hell of a mess. So we relied on information we got from other sections as to where this group was. Maybe they couldn’t get at them so they would need us to shell them.

Some times.

I’m over here. Come and get me. I’m over here. I can’t move. I’m over here. But you could always find a twang.

You wouldn’t answer back for a while because you could hear a twang. Something not quite right in the speech.

They would say if we came with them they would give us a better life. Why do you want

all the nonsense with your officers. Leave your officers and come with us.

Certain sections were. Say if they were in the rifle section and not the mortar section. The 3 inch mortar section became part of headquarters.

So if you were in the ordinary line you would be trained in guerrilla warfare. How to jump on someone from behind and strangle them and all that. So we were HQ [Headquarters] 3 inch mortars and were always with headquarters.

Oh good.

You were doing what the other side was doing anyway. If you didn’t do it then they were going to do it more. So you had to do it.

The idea was sneaking up on people, and it was mainly done at night time.

Sneaking up. Feeling the ground in front of you and making a surprise jump. You would try and get a group if you can and push your way in. Everything in guerrilla war is unorthodox.

It’s something that every many has a different idea of. It sometimes works. Sometimes when you have something planned and organised, it don’t work out right, but if you do it that way it does.

Altering your range.

You might have a fella further down the line or maybe up a tree even, and he would give you the positions. May be 100 degrees left or down or whatever. To the right or to the left. You couldn’t see. You were able to fire over a hill if you had somebody who could translate that position to you. So it had to be someone well in front that could tell

you where to aim.

Well you wouldn’t directly, but your observer would. The one who had given you the distance. He would tell you to go up one or down one. So it was him who could see it. Unless you were firing it yourself into the open. But mainly your tactics were firing from behind something,

behind a big wall or behind a hill. So there would be a fellow up there watching. And he would let you know.

Yes you were hoping you had a hit. You might not though. You might be so many degrees too low.

If you wanted it to become higher or land nearer, you elevated it. If you wanted to go further then you laid it down a bit. Sometimes you might even make it come too close and it would land on your front lines. So you had to work all that out. Elevation.

No.

You had two inch mortars. They were good, but not as good as the three inch one. It was on average a 7 pound bomb and it has an average range of 100 yards killing area. So it’s a fair way.

Yes,

I think you tend to feel safe because of that distance.

Yes, that’s right.

In some cases yes. But otherwise it might not but in some cases it would.

You’re hoping you’ve got everything sent to you correctly, so you can discharge them quickly.

That your informant has given you the right message.

No.

Yes. You never had to do it and we weren’t in close combat. Of course they changed the bayonets to the pig sticker.

A pig sticker is just like one straight piece of metal rounded. Not like the old bayonet. Funny enough, in the Scottish regiment where I was we never called them bayonets. We called them swords. So when you did a drill and they wanted you to attach the bayonet to the rifle, they said, “Attach sword.”

Why they called it a sword I don’t know, but they did. We did everything just about opposite to the rest of the British Army. We put our putties on the other way round. We did most things in the opposite way to the British.

We wanted to be different. And we had black buttons. No shiny buttons, but black buttons.

Well you see the old bayonet was a most disastrous one. That’s why some of our fellas and the Aussies learnt how to give it back to the Japs with no thought about it. ‘Bang’ right through the stomach and cut the bowels and they were in trouble right away. Because

that’s what they did when they charged. But the Aussies were pretty quick on that. No worries. But things are funny.

Yes. We always knew… if we had Aussies alongside us

then things were apples [alright] mate.

Well if anybody wanted to fight them they’d fight them. So I don’t know of any other way. But if someone wanted to fight them then they’d fight them. See they got hit several times and so did other people. In Korea…the Americans

were bad at working out the distance to fire guns. Many a time we’ve had shells land on our bloody lines. Not from Japan but the bloody yanks. They’ve got no idea. I never trusted them.

Oh yes. See we couldn’t trust the Yanks with even dropping our material to us. And as I say, if it started to rain they wouldn’t even fly the bloody planes.

And it’s funny. You get an American soldier say, he’s probably not been very important but as soon as you stepped on that troop ship you got a purple medal for stepping on that boat. He didn’t have to fight but he got the medal

for stepping on the boat. In the British and Australian armies you wouldn’t get that medal for just stepping on the boat. You had to do something for it. The Purple Heart. Just step on a boat and you get a Purple Heart.

I met some good ones amongst them. But see

it’s there command. I met a lot of good ones amongst them but it’s their command that would do stupid things.

In some respects yes. What I did like to watch…when they came to Edinburgh Tattoo and when they came to Melbourne once…I was on duty with St Johns.

When they do their drill with no command and throw their rifles and that with no command. That was terrific. That’s for show. They were pretty good that way. I mean, I’ve got two brothers-in-law in America and I’ve got a brother in America too, but I mean…

I told my brother-in-law, the one in New York, because he was a meteorologist. They don’t call it the air force, they call it the Army Wing. It’s all the army. He was a colonel in that and I said, “You know you guys get the weather all wrong. You tell us you can give us the weather four days ahead, but it turns out wrong.

Mother Nature can change her tune at any time in the day, but you can’t. So you’re telling us wrong.” But it’s right isn’t it. Mother Nature changes. He doesn’t tell you it’s going to change but it does change.

Well they way they looked at life really. If it happens it happens.

The same as when the 6th Field Ambulance and …

Normally, if we went on training we didn’t have a sergeant major of our own. We would always borrow one from Pucka [Puckapunyal]. I was to wake them all up, and I’ve never known a colonel not to drink and this one didn’t. I thought he can’t be a true Australian, he never drank. What I noticed the difference about him was, now he was a sergeant major,

and even on duty and off duty I could call him…so long as it wasn’t on parade, I could call him Smithie and he would all me Herb. Not corporal or that. The only time…was in Scotland was when we had this Drill Sergeant. He was pretty good that way. He would always say, “On drill, on drill, off drill, outside of camp, different.”

Whereas some would still hold their rank up, he wouldn’t. Anyway one day, the old colonel comes by and he says, “Corporal have you seen Sergeant Major Smith?” And I thought quick, I said, “Yes, he’s gone down to the MT [Motor Transport] Lines to check on the MT lines.” They were down the river a bit.

I knew he wasn’t because he was down fishing. So I belted down after the CO [Commanding Officer] went off and he made his way to the MT lines going the roadway. I knew that Smithie could get along the river bank quicker. I get down there and say, “Hey Smithie” and he says, “What?” “You had better tie your rod up, the old bugger’s going around looking for you and I told him you were at the MT lines.” “Oh shit.” Just like that. So he gos off to the MT Lines.

He came back later. One bloke we had to throw in. He was going around to light the fires but he put too much high octane in. ‘Phoom !’ So we grabbed a blanket and grabbed him and we chucked him in the river and someone said, “Can he swim?” And I said, “We’ll make sure we get him when the flames go out.”

So he landed up in Mansfield Hospital for awhile. But how he done it I don’t know. I used to like going early because after 21 days I might have more. Me and Smithie used to go and set up camp before the rest of them came up. Good that was. We would set up one marquee and then go down the road and have a drink.

And we used to pick up some workers from the Salvation Army and they’d have a job with us for a fortnight. We saw one bloke one day nicking off down the road, and I stopped him and said,

“What have you got?” He had half a side of bacon up his jacket. I put paid to that. And one old girl in the pub up there. This little pub, I’m trying to think of its name…she was charging us four shillings a phone call.

She was doing alright. So when we made up the Vietnamese village for training she was made up as a Vietnamese woman with some sheep and goats. Then we made up a well, and when the 5th Victorian Regiment came up…they had a Victorian Scottish regiment. Someone had to test the water. The officer didn’t. He asked the sergeant to test it. We put Epsom Salts in it.

He just went….we had the flags and all like they do flying for the spirits and all that. And this young officer had some Chinese music so we had that playing and all. It was all hidden. And I was laying down on the bank with this so called dummy grenade underneath and this bloke came up and said, “Hey Mac, why don’t you get up. You’re my prisoner.” I said, “No, if I get up you go up. I’ve got a bloody grenade

under me boy.”

Yes because my uncle was over here. My Dad’s brother. He was on a sheep ranch in Tassie I think. So I had to go and look at Tassie [Tasmania]. And Tassie reminded me of Scotland, undulating land, all the hills and that.

It does remind me of Scotland very much. So does South Gippsland.

I had never met him mind. I had never met him. He went out onto a sheep

farm in Tassie. So then they lost contact so what happened to him nobody knows. He just disappeared.

Oh, in the Bay of Bengal? A bit upsetting because we thought at least we’re going to go somewhere where they can speak bloody English.

I mean we might have an accent but we can speak English. That was going to be a bit different. So yes we were a bit disappointed. Although, we wondered, why would they want to load 25 pounder guns on the boat just to do jungle training in Queensland. I never thought of that at the time.

Anyway most of us got through.

Yes. It seemed far away enough for us to feel safe.

Both I think. There’s a picture on the wall

when we came back in ’42 to Trimulgherry. Yes it was a bit of adventure. Another thing was…I could have stayed with the band,

although we had a band in India too, I could have stayed with the band. Then I thought to myself, what would my children or grand children say, “What did you do Granddad?” “ Played a clarinet in the war.” You know? Not trying to be brave but just to have something to say. Instead of playing the clarinet in the band.

That was a good lurk I know, but that’s why I dropped out of the band and went into the infantry side of it. When I first joined in ’39, we used to have to do 3 hours schooling. And they had an educational corps via the army. They would come and teach us and then we’d do other drills, and unless you were on guard that day, then you missed

but otherwise you had to go to school. Say if you passed 3rd class which I got, you’d get another threepence, so you’d be getting two shillings and threepence a day. And as second you got a bit more. And if you managed to get 1st class you had a chance to go to officers school. But unless your family had money it wasn’t worth it.

You had to have money to be there. You had to pay for the officer’s uniform and that. So unless you had money what was the point. So we had many boys made officers from the ranks. That fella of mine, he was made up. Old Jock. He was a sergeant and led patrols and Christ knows what.

So he got made up to a lieutenant.

By a free drop. When they dropped to you…things that came by parachute was medical, ammunition, clothing and food.

Food for humans. For the animals, it doesn’t come by parachute. So it’s dropped from about 1000 feet. And Bill happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. One hit him in the middle of the back and killed him. And of course we ate him. We cut him up and ate him and had fresh meat. Some people when you tell them that today they go….

but if you hadn’t nothing else, you’d eat it. Or snake or anything. If you’ve got nothing else you’d eat meat.

It was in a way because…I think the wind must have been up a bit at the time. It didn’t happen very often. It must have had the wind carry it a bit of the way. It broke his back. Poor old bugger.

It had been but not very often that I had heard of. It was a freak. It just happened that Bill was in the way.

Well you didn’t really have any thoughts, just oh Jesus. You couldn’t do anything about it.

You can’t blame nobody or anything. Same as when you saw a beautiful horse that some of the officers were using. This beautiful black stallion. It broke it’s fetlock. You can’t do nothing so they just shot it. But in America, they’d have it back in camp and it would be on a sling.

But we can’t do that but America does, they put it on a sling. When it broke the fetlock and lay down, there was no choice. It had to go.

I shall imagine so. We were up higher on the banks and he was down lower. There were guards around but they were on either side.

By the time I got down there he was dead. I think if it broke his back it would have broken all the nerve system in the whole animal.

Oh yeah. He was just like a dog. You had to be careful you didn’t leave your pack open too much because he would find your biscuits and get them out.

For feeding, you had waffle bits that moved like that. So they could have the bit still in but still eat, but if you were training them and breaking them in, they’d have a straight Spanish bit which you could pull on and it would hurt them every time they did something wrong. So you had two types of bit.

Yes and no. You have to utilise these things.

I could tell he hadn’t been out from England long

because some young blokes were transferred out to us for a while. And he came down from the officer’s line. They were further up a bit, and said, “Oh, could we have the liver for the officers?” And I looked at my mate who had been a butcher all his life…I had only been an apprentice myself, and I said, “It’s no good Sir, we’re going to

chuck it away. It’s got spots on it.” He said, “What’s that mean?” I said, “It means it’s got TB.” We wanted it for ourselves, for the boys. Bugger the officers. And

you hear people say they wouldn’t eat that and I say, “If you hadn’t had any food for 21 days, would you eat it. You would. People have been known to eat rats.” You’ve got nothing else, so what are you going to do.

We had American rations. But I was telling him that if we didn’t have, what are you going to do. You’re going to eat it.

No. Everything I had to keep back. I wanted to save his bridle but I had to give it back.

Yes.

No we didn’t bring in any more. That was just what we got.

I tell you what, the Japanese picked up some good horses though. The Mongolian ponies. Beautiful long tails they had. We got one day.

A beautiful horse. Quiet, docile.

We got one from the Japs somehow. They left it behind. They must have gone off in a hurry somewhere and left it behind.

Yeah. Only the equipment, we had to extend it a bit because it didn’t fit it really. It had a bigger body.

Somewhere in ’44, I don’t actually know when. It was sometime after old Wingate got killed. When his plane crashed into the mountain going out.

Then some other bloke took over. Then we all had to shave because we didn’t shave when Wingate was there. By not shaving you had ten minutes further rest and you could walk ten miles further. It also acted as more camouflage too. So you never had a shave. You didn’t use a knife and fork. Things like that. You don’t need this or that because you’re not going to use it.

Like when we came back the other time in ’42. We didn’t have the sewing kit.

Oh yeah. A funny man he was old Wingate. And then his plane somehow crashed into the mountain.

I don’t know how, but that was the end of Wingy. He used to come and visit you before you went into action and before we were flown into Burma, and he’d say something out of the bible and he would also say, “You are like the chrysanthemums. You are flowering today, some will return and some will not.”

And off he’d go. And he dressed haphazardly. The other British Army blokes, the officers with their smart this and that. He would have a desert jacket on and tie a knot just like that. We had Mountbatten with us. He was with us for a while. He was pretty good Mountbatten.

He got killed when the IRA [Irish Republican Army] blew his motor boat up on the lake. He was a good bloke old Mountbatten.

I didn’t see him then. But that other joker took over and we all had to shave then.

Well

we had thrown or razors away so that meant we got issued with a new lot. When we went to this place and stayed on the border, they brought a new lot of razors.

Oh yes. I used to like the old Indians to give you a shave. They would use the old cut throat.

He reckoned that it helped with the camouflage. The other one reckoned it was unmilitaryfied.

Good for camouflage. The sun wouldn’t shine on your face.

You had it camouflaged which is fair enough.

The other bloke said, “As from tomorrow at such and such a time you will shave.”

If it was an order then you just had to do it. That was all there was to it, unless your leading commander said no, then it would be up to him. Nobody disputed this other bloke.

In the river if you were near a river. But I remember when we were

training…I forget where it was now…but anyway…

I can’t think.

Oh yes. We did that in the river. But there was one river we went into. The river was lovely and clear looking. It must have had lots of mites or something in it because you would come out of the river and it seemed like you had bites all over you.

That’s the way it goes. What was the other one…A bloke said, “Are you going to have that Indian woman?” and I said, “No way, she’s had about 23 blokes going through her.” He said, “It’s only five rupees.” And I said, “Bullshit, I’m not going after someone else had been there.”

Oh yes. It would be a lot of money. Even five rupees was good money. Twenty three fives. Bloody millionaire.

No they didn’t seem to. Apparently she cleaned herself all the time.

Hiking? Yeah we walked everywhere.

Not too bad. We tried out different things.

After I had got back. I got back some months before it had ended and I was back up in Scotland and we were learning…those boats you go out on and the navy brings you in…landing craft.

We were training to go to Korea. Korea was going to come in and we were going to fight in Korea.

Not long after the Second World War had finished. I don’t know how long it was, but it wasn’t so long. I was on paid reserve at the time too. I had just got onto paid reserve.

So we were training using landing craft. They would bring you in undercover and you had to jump out undercover. I was on paid reserve for about 2 months and then I was to get a call up to go to Korea but I didn’t get called, so I didn’t go.

Yeah. And my brother, he got called up next to me. He got called up. And he finished up. He got shot somewhere, and he finished up in Tokyo and he changed from the rifle regiment. He went and did a course in the medical corps and became a sergeant in the medical corps. He was lucky.

We were in…what’s the place? Ayrshire. In the town of Ayr. We were using the racecourse as a barracks. The race course stand was part of the barracks.

And I learnt from that. I got a week and a half’s leave, …..

Yes. And then when (UNCLEAR) came up to meet me that was funny. I was going to meet her in Glasgow

but she came up and landed in Edinburgh. She came up on the LNER [London North Eastern Railway] Line, the London North Eastern line and I thought she was coming up on the Scottish Midland Line. That was funny. Somehow we met…I think I got a message through to the station. So she had to hop on a train at Edinburgh and come across.

I went berserk for a while.

Get drunk. I took some silk stockings and things home for a young fellow of ours, young Kim, for his sister.

So she learned me iceskating. I was iceskating. And my mate was …him and I use to go out skating, round Edinburgh…not Edinburgh, down Motherwell. And we used to take the same sized boots, so it would cost you a shilling to hire the boots and sixpence to skate, so we had one pair of boots.

We would change the boots and go and have a skate and then change again. That was handy that was. We only paid for one pair of boots.

Oh yeah. I think it was also for the ordinary people too. Although they had been bombed. But they managed to get away from it for a while. They made

houses out of old Nissen huts. (Plays the tin whistle)

(Plays the tin whistle)

It’s an Irish tin whistle…a Feadog.

No. I used to train on the chanter but I could never get enough wind up. It’s easy playing a chanter but I can’t get enough wind up it.

Sometimes by ear. I had a brother who could play the piano, the piccolo, the clarinet and never read a bit of music.

He would listen. He might listen to about 8 bars of something and then he’s got it for the rest of his life. That’s what you call playing by ear. And a lot of people are good at that. They can learn the song and they’ve got it.

Sometimes. I use to read music. He was in the choir with me too. He used to follow us. If you put a sheet of music in front of him, it wouldn’t mean nothing to Fred.

Well Dad wanted us to be because he had sung in the Abbey Choir

as a youngster and later as a tenor in the Abbey Choir. So he wanted us in the choir. And there were no girls in the choir in them days. They were all boys. I don’t know when the women came in. But it was always boys. We used to get paid two and sixpence ever 3 months.

Yeah I played a little bit. I can play the chanter but that’s what you learn on. You practice

on the chanter. And a chanter read is like an Oboe really. The whole reed goes in your mouth. So you blow through the read. It’s a hollow read. But filling up the bag and playing the big drones, that’s beyond me.

Quite a few I think. There’s a difference between a Scottish bagpipe and Irish one. The Irish pipe’s got one drone less. The Scottish one’s got four and the Irish one’s got three.

I’ve only been able to play the clarinet for years now. I’d have to get used to it again. It’s better to learn on a hard reed

I might be able to play on a soft reed now, but a hard reed is a better tune. When we couldn’t get clarinet reeds after the war, we used to buy saxophone reeds and cut them down. Cut them down to size, and spit on them and scrape them with a razor blade until you got them to the thinness you wanted them. Then you would put a half penny on the top and burn it off and round it off.

When I was about 10. Dad put us in to learn it. I used to go and play at the soccer matches. At the beginning of the match and half time. We’d go around at half time and sometimes two of us would take a blanket around and people would throw pennies for the band.

Oh yes.

Mum couldn’t play the piano. But I told her to give me C she could do that. I wanted to play a violin. My aunt was going to buy one but Dad said no string instruments in this house, only wind.

And I thought to myself, a piano is a string instrument isn’t it. The heart shaped instrument underneath the cover.

We were already in there before we knew about it. Next to us was the girl’s barracks.

And when it happened they jumped the wall and came into our barracks. That was alright.

All sorts of things. They went berserk the sheilas.

Well all sorts of things we were trying to do. The sheilas were egging us on. There was no two ways about that.

Well we never saw any in Burma except for the poor bloody peasants. Never bothered much in India.

You come back and meet your old girlfriend.

Then I got a letter from this Indian girl. A half Indian girl, saying she wanted to marry me. And how it found me…she posted it in India

so it went to the last barracks I was in, then it went back to England and then up to Scotland and then came back down to England. I was married then and my wife wanted to know who this Katie was.

I had joined for seven years with the colours and five on paid reserve. So I had to stay. I was a regular. So I had to finish my time. I had to do six months extra in (UNCLEAR), to finish my seven years. Then I had five years on paid reserve. Four pounds ten every three months. And they could call me up at any time to

do twenty one days training or go to Korea. I didn’t. I was lucky.

It didn’t really take us by surprise. It didn’t really sink in.

I don’t know. It was the commo’s who were fighting. They were coming down from Russia really.

Absolutely. Same as the First World War was the war to end all wars wasn’t it. It never was.

Yes, yes. The Koreans are really half Japanese. Because the Koreans

if you look at them…and the Japs had been living there for years too. They look very much similar.

No.

No. My brother did, he got called up. He hadn’t quite finished his time.

No. My brother went and he swapped over from the rifle regiment to the medical corps and did a course and he finished up as a sergeant in the medical corps. So he was out of the actual war although he was over t here.

Yes.

Yes, one. Only had the one. She couldn’t have any more. It was something to do with her small pelvic area or something or other. And he was born and we nearly lost him because he had meningitis.

We had to drive 40 miles to the nearest hospital which was London, slowly with a police escort. But now he’s married, got two boys and a business. He’s lucky.

Yes.

And he’s got a reaction to penicillin. He can’t take penicillin. He has a reaction to that. And he’s taking some other drug, a new one, Streptomycin, and they told us it could either kill him or he would live. So I said to the wife that we didn’t have much choice. If we don’t…so give him

a chance. Try the new drug and it worked.

Yes. But then, if she couldn’t have them then that’s it be. Caesarean is a pretty tough thing. Lately a couple of women have been dying from having the wrong drugs. They cut them open.

In 1961.

More or less the next day. Half the people wanted to know if I was courting again and was going to get married again. But that was it. I had had enough of that.

Yes. And Dad said, “Are you going to America?” I said, “No, it’s too near home. Easy to get back. I’m going to Australia.” If it’s a long way away it’s harder to get back.

Well in a sense yeah.

I don’t know. It seemed to be more adventurous. To be able to get away from home and be able to come back and tell them of your adventures. If you haven’t been away you can’t tell them nothing.

Cancer. When she died,

she looked down the bottom of the bed, her sister was there and she said to me, “Don’t give her nothing.” Then she just coughed up this blood and that was it. “Don’t give her nothing” she said. Her sister was always borrowing stuff. She had more children than what we did, but she was always borrowing stuff.

(UNCLEAR)…But my wife

Marge, she didn’t like it.

Yes it was. And my second wife died here too. She had two faulty heart valves and they couldn’t do nothing about it. They were going to use pig valves but they couldn’t. But some people when they’re dying, and they’re near to dying, know they’re going to do it.

And she said to this professor, “Can you give me something to make me go to sleep, so I don’t have to wake up?” He said it was against religion and against the law and that. And she said, “Well you give it to horses don’t you.” Just like that. But we couldn’t give it to her. Her heart valves just didn’t work any more.

With my mother-in-law. She helped to raise him. And my mother. He lived between the two grandmothers. One down the road and one this side. And going to school was the same. He would call in to my mother’s and she would always have…he would come in at lunch time so he didn’t have to have a sandwich.

She would always have a nice rice pudding for him. And the other one would have something good for him cooked.

About a year or so.

No not bad.

I went to the church, St Paul’s Cathedral. I came out through the church. They got me a job. So I went up to get the job at Epping. But then I worked out, I don’t really know where Epping is. I’m living in North Fitzroy. And I didn’t know how long the train was, and it was half a mile’s walk

from the station to the factory and I thought this is no good. So then I couldn’t get a job for my son because he was coming out. He was about 16. There was this fellow from Shepparton staying in a place where I worked. He said, “Why don’t you have a look in the paper. You’ll find something.” Well we did. We found this spiritual lady, four pound a week.

There was gas there and electric for four pound a week rent. She asked one day if I could fix her toilet. It was the old fashioned toilet where you could just bend it like that, how much water you wanted, more or less. So I was allowed to bring my car in instead of being out on the road. And the other fellow, the Russian bloke who had been there longer than me was quite annoyed because he couldn’t bring his in. But I did because I had helped her fix her toilet.

So I was allowed to bring my car in. The only thing, she wanted me to become a spiritualist. I said, “No love. I don’t want to be a spiritualist. That’s your way but I don’t want it.”

It’s in that red book. I can’t remember myself.

Plane. I landed at Essendon. And that’s why I chose Essendon as my football team.

Yes.

Yes.

Well to move on somewhere else probably. But I met up with an Irish fella and another Welshman and

we had a ball. The Irishman went over to Western Australia where he lived with his sister.

I just felt I needed to still be with the army. I thought I had been in St John’s all that time, I know enough, so I did.

I thought I could help younger people about army life. I could teach someone else something, younger people. I could give them an insight in to it. And I just liked being with it. Being with the army.

Oh yeah. But the thing was, as I say, teaching younger people about the war time and what to expect and how to do things, and how to evade things. You know, get out of something. Things like that.

Yeah.

And then I got myself a good job as a barman in the officer’s mess. That was good.

Oh that was during the training that time. I forget, but it was during that time. It was coming up to that time. So we were training there at St V’s Hospital [St Vincent’s Hospital] and at the Alfred [Hospital]. And in the Alfred

one of the surgeons was one of our majors.

Only what you could read in the newspapers at the time.

That it was under French control and then the North Vietnamese were communists,

so they wanted to take over the whole regime. And they were shooting people left right and centre. And they did when they got to South Vietnam too. They showed us a picture of this policeman who was kneeling down and he was shot in the back of the head. And the girls running up the street on fire from the napalm bombs. And they showed it on TV the other night about this poison…

for making the leaves disappear from the trees. Agent Orange [herbicide used in Vietnam]. Apparently it was some poison and they put diesel with it to make it spray more. Some blokes have been suffering from that and some of the children have been suffering. It’s not been a very nice friendly war. Not really.

No. But if I had to go I had to go. And also my son was called up too. He was called up. He was at Pucka [Puckapunyal].

Well I didn’t think much about it. But anyway, he didn’t go. He was on a training course up there at a place called Tit Hill where they trained the tanks. It was shaped like a tit. Anyway he said all of a sudden they were firing over head

and he went down and they thought he had been shot and two ambulances came up, and all it was, his knee collapsed. So they put him in hospital up there at Pucka and then transferred him down to Heidelberg Repat [repatriation hospital]. He was down there for awhile. So they gave him a 5% disability pension or whatever. Then

he was going to get discharged. So he had to call into Watsonia Barracks every day before he finally got his discharge.

No. He seemed to know. Your marble came out of that barrel and that was it. Your birthday marble. He and his mates had long hair and you went and visited after three weeks and there they all were, nobody with any hair.

Oh yeah. They had about five patients,

they were giving different injections. Not with the same needle, but five different ones. But they had a bit of meat on their rumps, and they came to the last one and he was real skinny and I thought I’m going to break this needle on him so I stepped back and a nun said, “What’s up boy?” I thought I’m 40 odd and she called me boy. Anyway,

“Well Sister, it was alright on the other four but he’s that thin I’ll break the needle on him.” She said, “Don’t worry. Just do what they do when they do it in the army, just lift up a bit of skin and whack it in.”

We went up there…

I’m trying to think of the actual name of the place. We had flags and one doctor had some Chinese music and we had that going. We made a well and the woman who owned the pub came up with a couple of goats and she acted as a Vietnamese woman in the village. And we hid stuff around.

We also hid two dozen cans of beer. They had to find whatever it was. Anyway one came to me and he said, “Come on Mac, you can stand up now, I’ve caught you.” And I said, “No I can’t. You’ve got to try and get me up, but don’t do it.” He said, “Why?” I said, “I’ve got the trap for you. You move the dead body and you all go up, I’ve got a bomb underneath.” That’s what the Vietnam were doing.

And they got the sergeant to try the water and we had put Epsom Salts in it. So he tried it…

Yes.

Yes.

Well it was nearly as real if they didn’t laugh so much. You know you have…what did they call them now…marshals or guides to check if that was going right.

Yeah. With the Australian Army it’s more of a friendly atmosphere. Not too bad in the Scottish one, but you couldn’t call the sergeant major by his nickname, Smithie.

You couldn’t do that in the Pommy army. No way. You’d be in gaol for the night.

No.

Yes, I reckon.

But we didn’t. Apparently they didn’t need us, so we didn’t get called. Maybe it was too far to bring us from down south to Scotland maybe.

He had an accident which saved him.

Oh yeah. Definitely.

Not really. Not unless you’re in it or near it.

I mean you can see pictures and photos but you’re not there are you. So you don’t know.

About ten years.

Yeah.

I thought it was about time I left. I got a good wedding present off he CO [Commanding Officer] when I married. I did well in the officer’s mess.

About $500. Then of course I used to…if we had a dance on and there was food left over then I would take it home.

It was rare.

I don’t know. Maybe I treated him alright. Gave him what he wanted.

For a while. And then when I got…the second time with St John’s Ambulance. I was a make up man with them.

I used to do all the make up. Fake injuries and you had to play the part sometimes. My favourite one was throwing an epileptic fit. I would go to a class when they were in their fifth week. They would need to know what to do, and I would sit in the class and they would say this man has come from division so and so.

And I would throw a fit in the class and it would seem ages before anyone would come near. That was it. So the next time I went they would ask if I was going to throw one again. I threw something better. I was the utility man, changing lights in the high school. And I had a cadet with me who was going to be my helper. So I fell and I put an arterial pump up my arm and I was pumping blood out.

And I saw this woman bloody faint. I was just checking them out.

Yeah. I checked out the local fire brigade. We were going to burn this old hut down for training. So this woman and I were inside the house and they had to get us out before it burnt down.

So they get me out and I run back in. The head one said to make it tricky for them. So I ran back in the house. I was calling out, “I want my cat, I want my cat.” So three or four had to come and grab me because I was going to get my cat. I made them do extra work.

I enjoyed that part of it, the makeup part of it. And then another time in Bendigo the wife was down a mine shaft. She was down the mine shaft and I had to rescue her. And I was down another one and I had a three minute fuse lit and a snake which moved by electronics. The

first aider had to work out which was the thing to get out first. Well he sort of done the snake. He buggered that up. He trod on it. And then he threw out the fuse. Well you should have seen them scatter outside. He threw this three minute fuse out. He took off.

And then I played dead in the hot sun. When you’ve got make up on your face it’s like cooking your face. That was alright. Another time I was at Waverley they were going to make up a robbery and I was going to get this bag off this bloke. Like they do in the films, they use sugar for glass.

I had to rush through there and down I go and there I am again laying in the bloody sun.

I wasn’t there.

I’ve heard of people who have been there but I’ve never been there. I would have loved to have gone there but I’ve never been there.

I knew people who had been there and they were always telling me about it, but I never went.

My brother-in-law has been there and he said what a wonderful place it was. He didn’t tell me too much just that it was a wonderful place. And he hadn’t really been in India so he didn’t know too much about India.

He was in a transit camp for a while.

Deolali. The transit camp.

We used to say that when someone went bonkers in the regiment that they had gone Dulally. Yes that’s where I met them. They gave us a good feed. That was the first time I drank Swan beer. We used to get Bangalore beer in India. That wasn’t very good. The only drink that was good was

Tiger Rum which came from the hills. But beer no. But we didn’t get Fosters. There was no such thing as Fosters then. Swan beer was the nearest one.

Yes.

But only when you were in camp. You never got any out in the field. And it was generally this Bangalore Beer which is not very good.

Well, you always

had to make sure that if you had a hat on you had to salute the officer. So most time you hoped if you did a job you didn’t have to have a hat on so you didn’t have to salute. But with the Australian Army we did the salute but it was more casual. And you didn’t have to keep saluting him when he came passed.

You had discipline and there were times when you had to salute them but it was limited.

No, I’m alright.

I can’t off hand. See we were with the three inch mortars.

We didn’t do close fighting. Only one time, in ’42 when we were coming out, this young captain said to this lieutenant, he said, “If you don’t get hold of yourself and get hold of your men, I’m going to shoot you.” Anybody could have turned around and shot him.

No I haven’t seen anything like that. I’ve heard of it but I’ve not seen it. In 1914 they used to tie them to the gun wheel and all that. None of that.

Can’t think of anything. What was the question again?

No I don’t think so.

No. I don’t think so. No I haven’t seen anything like that. Only one of our

young corporals. He lead the Gurkhas into charge there. The white officer always used to lead them but he got shot. So he jumped up and lead them into battle. That’s the only thing I can think of. I was there but not when he took over. That’s all I know. And he was made

what we called at the time, a King’s Corporal which meant he wore a bugle above his corporal stripes and it was a great honour. Can’t think of anything else.

I didn’t hear of any deserters. If there were I didn’t hear of them. Where were they going to go anyway in India.

Well I don’t know about the whole British Army but we did, we took no prisoners.

We shot them. The only thing that annoyed me was, if we got an officer that could speak English, he’d be saved and we’d send him back to India

in a plane. We shot the others. That was the only thing, shooting them made me a bit sad.

No. All I’ve done is hearsay.

I’ve not seen anything. So I definitely can’t turn around and say to you I’ve seen this done and that done because I haven’t. That’s the way it is.

Well the Imperial Guards were pretty good soldiers but the others were riff raff .

They were made up from people who had been forced into it from China and all that sort of business.

Thank you too.