Quote:
Originally Posted by orasot
Following on from JT's opener I would like to recommend Twice in a Lifetime by M.L Walkinton, few will be surprised to hear that Marmaduke Leslie Walkinton started off in the Queen's Westminster Rifles and this is his story from enlisting and his early days less than a mile from where I live, going through his time with the QWR, moving on to the Lincolns then MGC and as you may guess from the title it goes into WW2 & his time with the 4th Royal Sussex. A cracking little book for me with my QWR research & should appeal to anyone with a London interest in particular, well I enjoyed it anyway 
Wilf. |
I Would like to thank Wilf, for his recommendation of this book; I found it to be peppered throughout with all sorts of fascinating little insights into myriad areas of army life during wartime. Walkington certainly had an interesting and varied career as a Territorial soldier across the span of the Great War, and into the opening stages of WWII.
For those with an interest, Walkington talks on several occasions of the MGC training centre at Grantham, and Belton Park, sites which were the subject of a superb episode of Time Team (
series 20, episode 1) which can be seen
here.
Let's not forget that Londons interest though... plenty of references to other London Regiment battalions throughout; the London Irish, Artists Rifles, CSR, to name but a few.
For me, one of the most abiding memories of this book is Walkington's account of leading his HQ staff, clerks, storemen, officers' servants and the newly-formed battalion band into Tournai, and describing a solitary shell falling harmlessly in a field a couple of hundred yards from them, just one hour before Armistice, on the 11th November 1918. The men, reasonably secure in the knowledge that this was going to be the last shell they would ever see, began to sing their farewell to shellfire, to the horrors of war and to their fallen comrades who would not be returning home with them:
'Goodbye, goodbye,
Wipe the tear, baby dear, from your eye,
Though it's hard to part I know,
I'll be tickled to death to go.
Don't cry, don't sigh,
There's a silver lining in the sky,
Bon soir old thing,
Cheerio, cin-cin,
Napoo, toodle-oo, goodbye.'
Thanks again, Wilf. A thoroughly engrossing read.
JT