Boy's service

     "In this book are just a few events noted by a young boy who became a man long before his time and who lost his youth in the service of his country."

     These words are from the preface to Len Chester's Bugle Boy, his account of his life as a boy bugler in the Royal Marines. Joining the service in 1939 at the age of only fourteen, under five feet tall, a lad with little or no experience of the adult world let alone a world at war, Len served at Eastney Barracks, Portsmouth, before being based at bleak Scapa Flow, and then becoming part of the dire and dangerous Arctic Convoys.

     Len's beautifully easy conversational style marks him out as a natural story-teller, and I could happily read him for hours, so engaging is he. He brings wit and warmth to a subject which is harsh and often tragic and in doing so he achieves that most important of objectives: to make us aware of, and remember, the people and events of which he writes.

    As H.R.H. The Duke of Edinburgh remarks in his Foreword to the book, "Future historians may concentrate on the broader issues of the war, but it is reminiscences like these which will give them the opportunity to include the human dimension", and a very human story this is.

     Here is the the author himself, proudly wearing campaign medals and the off-white beret of the Arctic Convoy. Thank goodness his family nagged him to write down his stories of that character-forming episode of his life, for they truly are well worth reading.

Comments

[KAYAKER]

The Boy, The Man, The Legend, My Grandad x

[Lindsay]

My father was in submarines during the war, at least some of the time on convoy duty in the Arctic. Partly due to his modesty and shyness, and to the horrors of war he later suffered, I have no records or memorabilia of his service. I don't even know how I know what I do know about that period in his life - presumably very early conversations with him and Mum. I understand Kayaker's pride: they were men in a world of men, largely and unfairly unsung.