Snapshot: Dad’s lucky wartime escape

This is my father, Elliott, in Crete in 1941. He was a despatch rider in the British army and had sent the photograph on a postcard to my grandmother. She had not seen him since he and his brother had set off for a Territorial Army camp in the summer of 1939. He had been sent to France when the second world war broke out and was later evacuated to Crete from Athens, following Germany’s invasion of Greece. He was nearly 21.

My father found himself in the chaos that surrounded the evacuation of Crete. German paratroopers were invading the island and the message went out to all troops to head for the beaches at Souda Bay, a treacherous ride through the mountains. He rode his motorbike until it ran out of fuel and walked the rest of the way.

He joined the thousands of Allied troops (Australians, British, New Zealanders) waiting to be evacuated. Boats came and went and still my father waited. Three days later, still stranded, he fell into conversation with an Australian soldier. He said he was worried he would end up as a prisoner of war if he didn’t get on the next boat.

The call went out for the Australians to board. The Australian soldier suggested that my father go on with him: their uniforms were the same colour. In a split second, my father removed the British insignia from his uniform and went aboard. It turned out to be the last boat off the island.

If he had hesitated, he would have been captured and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner of the Germans. He survived the journey to Alexandria, Egypt, and was picked to join Montgomery’s Intelligence Corps.

I was proud of my father’s daring, and never questioned whether he was right or wrong to do what he did. He did not talk about the war and the only proof we children had that he had served was a pair of “Nazi sunglasses”; a treasure that fascinated us.

He died when I was 23 and I did not have a chance to hear the story from him first-hand.

An uncle (who is now in his 90s but has a razor-sharp memory) told me recently that my account missed out an important detail.

One of the Australians in charge had pulled out a gun and pointed it at my father, saying that he would shoot him if he dared to join the Australian boat.

I would have loved to have heard my father tell his story. I have collected what fragments of the story I can, in honour of his memory.

Jane Lamb

Playlist: Harum scarum exam pressure

A Whiter Shade of Pale by Procol Harum

“We skipped the light fandango / Turned cartwheels cross the floor / I was feeling kinda seasick / But the crowd called out for more”

My father’s family were a model of social mobility. They went from being poor Lithuanian-Jewish immigrants, illiterate in English, to British professionals in a generation. A doctor, two pharmacists and two teachers trundled off the production line. No benefits, it was the bootstraps principle: education plus dedication. They employed the “baton method”: each graduate helped the next one through. I am extremely proud of their achievement, but it is a template that creates extraordinary pressure on the next generation: equal or exceed these standards or you have betrayed the legacy. So this did not sit well with the very average raw material I presented to the education system. Fear of failure made education and anxiety unwilling bedfellows.

After an undistinguished school career I excelled at university, briefly. Top of the psychology class – unprecedented success for me. Two years is a long time to rest on your laurels and advance your knowledge of human relationships. Come finals time, I was hideously unprepared and the last few weeks’ revision was accompanied, indelibly, by the haunting, poignant, conscience-tweaking A Whiter Shade of Pale. It followed me everywhere, even my nightmares. It felt like a funeral march for my education, career, life.

In my first exam, which might as well have been written in Lithuanian, I thought I might faint: I felt and looked paler than white. I left after 15 minutes. Ditto my second.

“Flunked. Sorry” read the telegram I sent to my parents on holiday. My professor and a friend intervened and persuaded me to stay. I wrote five firsts, had a 21st birthday party and Sgt Pepper was released – on the day I heard I had scraped an upper second.

It’s a study pattern I have never recommended to my students. Nor have I ever played Procol Harum again.

David Milner

We love to eat: Eve’s temptation sandwich

Ingredients

White sliced bread
Margarine or butter
Apples, peeled, cored and sliced
Sugar, any sort

I never knew whether Mum invented Eve’s temptation sandwiches or had eaten them herself as a child but growing up in the 1950s as one of a hungry brood of six children, I ate them with relish.

We rarely saw brown bread and were quite content with a white sliced loaf from the local shop or from the bread van that came round the streets.

It was rarely spread with butter, which was a treat to be eaten without further adornment to make the most of the taste. It was usually block margarine with little taste of its own, hence the need for the other ingredients, which were piled on top.

The apples were usually eating apples rather than the cooking variety, although a nice thick layer of sugar could make even sour apples palatable to us. Sometimes the apples came from the market or greengrocer’s; at other times we were given “fallers” by the neighbours and we would set to work cutting out the bruises and the maggot holes.

Last, but decidedly not least, was the sugar, sprinkled over the apple slices to finish off the sandwiches. The sugar was mostly white granulated but sometimes we were able to savour golden demerara or, best of all, the soft, sandy consistency of muscovado.

Mum loved sugar and must have felt the lack of it keenly during the years of rationing. Filling our tummies was a necessity, but I believe it gave her great pleasure to share with her children these crunchy, sweet treats all served up with a smile and a biblical reference to the first woman to ever crave an apple.

Felicity Middleton

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