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My year as a child soldier
ARMY cadets in Plymouth have been banned from carrying rifles in public just days before they were due to take part in a Remembrance festival. (The Herald) Yes, I did carry a rifle before I was eighteen years of age — for a year. Along with my fellow members of the Air Training Corps (ATC) I also learned how to assemble a Bren gun and recognize enemy aircraft from their silhouettes (Second World War Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitts from our new allies the Germans, because those were the only flash cards available).
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Remembrance
One might say, at a stretch, that I am a survivor of WWII, as a piece of shrapnel penetrated our Anderson shelter during an air-raid in the first week of my life and parted my mother’s hair as she held me in her arms. Even though I don’t remember that or anything else that happened to me as a baby during the Second World War, I remember vividly the war’s aftermath. I grew up in the poor part of town, where the rubble of the last war wasn’t fully cleared until I was at university in the early sixties.