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the delta spread out below like a huge  fern stretching across to the horizon. Ahead the sky became pitch black every so often illuminated by gigantic flashes of forked lightning which gave a terrifying look to the scene  arriving and landing luckily just before the most violent tropical storm struck  the base. The storm was ferocious with driving rain and a furious wind that bent the casurina pines around base. It got pitch dark but the rain  continued  lashing down flooding everywhere  and then there was a roar as a Dakota ended up near station with  both its twin propellers  all covered in telephone wires as it had lost its way in landing, but fortunately no harm came to anyone this time. So we spent another night in the officers mess. The walls of the dining room were decorated with the most wonderful portraits of  Arabs in their traditional dress, the pigments for the paintings had all been made from local ochre  rock and the intense blues and other colours again were from other local rocks. They had been done by an RAF officer stationed there.  And so for another night and then up early flying over the the steep hills and deep wadis of Saudi Arabia looking at the Camel caravan trains, to reach Cairo for lunch in sight of the pyramids. In the early afternoon we took off  and the pilot invited me into the cockpit whilst he descended to 5,000 ft for  a low flight over  Sollum &  El Alamein to see the battle-field and all the wrecked tanks guns etc at close quarters. We reached Castel Benito near Tripoli about 10 pm and a quick meal and then off on the final leg to England. This entailed us flying for a part of the way at 17,500 ft and we sat wearing our oxygen masks. Half way through I wanted to use the toilet and walked three rows back and clutched the wall to steady myself from feeling so drunk. I staggered back to my seat re fixed my oxygen mask and once again was fully conscious and normal.  The following morning at about  4.30 am on the 14th April 1946 we landed at RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire and I was the colonial boy back at last in the land of my birth. We had a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs and  about an hour later  boarded a coach on a bright clear spring day and arrived in bombed out London.. This  was the end of our travels. Apart from the paid passage aboard the Nankin, we had travelled about 20,000 miles across  the Southern Indian Ocean and then through the China  Sea, across the Pacific to Japan, courtesy of the German Navy, then back across the Pacific via Sydney to Bombay by the Royal Navy  and then on to Lyneham  in  England by the RAF. I had seen at first hand German Nazism and hatred of the Jews by order of the state, I had seen Japanese Militarism imposed cruelty on essentially a peaceful and resourceful people, I seen the pathological Communist ideology take hold amongst ordinary Greek seamen   I was now in finally in  England described by Arthur Koestler so eloquently as a “ country where arrows are only used on dart boards, where people are suspicious of all causes, contemptuous of systems, bored by ideologies, sceptical about Utopias, rejecting all blueprints, enamoured of its leisurely muddle, incurious about the future, and devoted to its past.  A country of potterers-in-the garden and stickers in the mud, where strikers play soccer with the police and Socialist  peers   wear crowns”.

Soon  it was back to work and having to adapt to the rigours of Public  School. and for the next two years I worked ceaselessly with an iron grit and determination to catch up on my 5 years lost schooling from the War  and T B earlier  This was the hardest work that I undertook in my life, but was rewarded two years later with a good Matriculation and a University entrance. The confinement of the Camp had given me an instinctive fear of being enclosed for a lifetime in an office, and so when it became a choice of career  I settled on an outdoor job and decided that as I was interested in plants that I would take a degree in Agriculture. First I worked for a year on Farms in the West Country and finally in 1950 I entered Reading University  where a few months later I met my future wife an attractive and determined girl Jill Colledge. We had a most wonderful romance at University and what was even more especially happy for me was the wonderful rapport that she had with Mother. Both respected each other and would talk openly on every subject from Cakes to life in the Tropics, art,  music books etc. Mother had in 1948 purchased a lovely home Orchard House in Buxted, Sussex.  It was a large light airy  house with a large garden of which I always have fond memories.  It seemed that there was always sunshine streaming through the large south facing windows, through beautiful

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