Glimpses of Britain. Reader - стр. 9
Of his three brothers, one was killed at Arras, one died at the Somme and the third returned home with shrapnel in his head. Mr Lloyd still regards himself as one of the lucky ones.
So, too, does Mr Stone. “Every day, I think what a bloody lucky man I am to be here,” he tells me from the Oxfordshire home where he still lives alone, doing his daily exercises with his chest-expanders and handgrips: “I’ve got such a strong handshake, people won’t shake hands with me.”
By the time he joined the Royal Navy, the war was nearly over, although he still remembers seeing the German fleet scuttled at Scapa Flow. But if his youth was an asset in the First World War, it did him no favours when the Second broke out.
Just as he should have been retiring, he was sent back to sea in 1940. He made five desperate trips to Dunkirk, watching his sister ship and her cargo of fleeing soldiers blown to pieces. Chief Petty Officer Stone was mentioned in dispatches after his ship was torpedoed off Sicily in 1943 and endured the horrors of the Russian convoys.
And still, he cannot believe his good fortune. “I survived the first war, then the influenza which killed even more people, then the second war. That’s why I trust in God.”
You won’t hear much grumbling from any of this lot. Whatever subsequent hardships life threw at them, they still see themselves as the Lottery winners of their generation.
“I reckon I’ve had this guardian angel sitting on my shoulder,” says Henry Allingham as he recalls his Great War, one which took him to the three most infamous battlegrounds of the lot.
As an air mechanic in HMS Kingfisher, he witnessed the great Battle of Jutland which effectively neutralised the German fleet – not that he sensed its significance at the time. “We didn’t do much. We just watched the shells ricochet.”
The First Mechanic and his squadron were then moved ashore to the Western Front – Ypres and the Somme – where one of his most vivid memories is of nearly drowning in a huge, festering shellhole filled with human remains, rats and mud.
“It was night. I couldn’t see and the sides were crumbling. I thought I’d drown, but I put my foot the right way and managed to drag myself out. But I couldn’t move until dawn because there might be booby-traps.”
In his darker moments, he can still see his pilots turn to “jelly” in the wreckage of their burning planes just yards in front of his position.
Nine decades on, the memory still brings back the tears. He prefers to dwell on the few happier moments of the war. “There was great camaraderie. You knew you could bank on the other bloke.”