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Brown Dog Books - Glyndwr Phillips

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35 pages

English

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Approached by the Intelligence Force to help in the release of VIPs held by the Germans in is last year at school and the last year of World War II, Glyndwr afterwards returns to real life, looking for a job he likes and can do. Years later he is drawn back to help the Force and they offer an expected incentive. This becomes a pattern for his life. This story, written in the late 1970s, remained undiscovered until three years after the authors death in 2014. Much of it was familiar but the sections involving Operation XX were completely unknown. At first it was thought the title referred to the group of boys trained for the first operation but internet searches brought to light the double meaning of XX: 20 (in Roman numerals) and double-cross. Operation XX was set up in 1941 to use captured German spies to feed back misinformation to Germany. It eventually came under MI5. Glyndwr always questioned what choice, if any, he had in the events and the way life took him. For his family the discovery of the story raised many questions that may never be answered.

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Lettres et linguistique

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Publié par	Brown Dog Books
Date de parution	01 mai 2019
Nombre de lectures	5
EAN13	9781839520150
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	3 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

OPERATION XX AND ME
DID I HAVE A CHOICE?
OPERATION XX AND ME
DID I HAVE A CHOICE?
GLYNDWR PHILLIPS
First published 2019
Copyright © Glyndwr Phillips 2019
The right of Glyndwr Phillips to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the copyright holder.
Published under licence by Brown Dog Books and The Self-Publishing Partnership, 7 Green Park Station, Bath BA1 1JB
www.selfpublishingpartnership.co.uk
ISBN printed book: 978-1-83952-014-3 ISBN e-book: 978-1-83952-015-0
Cover design by Andrew Prescott Internal design by Andrew Easton
This book is printed on FSC certified paper

Printed and bound in the UK
Contents
Operation XX and Me
OPERATION XX and me
“The Headmaster wants to see you” strikes fear at any time, but where this would lead I had no idea.
I attended Green Park College in Bath and our swimming lessons were held in the Roman Baths. It was Tuesday morning and as I was walking back to school after the swim I was told to report to the Headmaster. I thought it was someone having a joke, so after break I went to my next lesson, where the teacher asked, “Have you been to the Headmaster’s room?” “No Miss,” I replied, thinking what would he want with me?
“You’d better go now,” I was told.
I tapped on his door, hoping he was not there.
“Come in. There you are. I want you to meet the Captain here. He would like to talk to you,” said the Head.
“I am looking for young men with certain talents, real skill with horses and a photographic memory; your Headmaster tells me you have these,” the Captain says.
An hour later, to my astonishment, he seems to know more about my past than me. To listen to him I came from another world. Then I realised he was talking about talents and not spelling and writing.
I still did not know why he picked on me.
“I see you are puzzled. It is because of an essay you wrote,” he told me and then said, “I am arranging for you to have extra lessons at a gym two afternoons a week.” He told me where it was and added that he would meet me there at two o’clock the next day.
The gym was about a mile from the school. A lot of private schools used it but you had to pay extra on the fees. The Captain met me outside right on two o’clock. We went in and I was introduced to a retired Naval Commander who ran it. Then I was introduced to two other lads, one from Bristol and one from Exmouth; they seemed a lot older than me.
“You are here to learn the art of self-defence,” we were told, and that we should put ourselves in the hands of the Commander. It had been arranged that we should attend the gym on two afternoons a week.
The Captain then left, saying he would see me in two weeks, back at school.
After we finished at the gym, I thought I would catch an early bus home.
Sometimes, going home to Box, my two friends and I would get off a few stops early and walk the stream, but today by myself I had time to go to the stables before doing my bread round.
At this time I had two jobs. One was exercising the horses, the other was the bread round. This meant riding a bicycle with one big and one small basket full of bread. I had about twelve customers. It was a good five miles journey round for six days a week and I was paid six shillings and sixpence. When I went to school in the village I did the round in the morning but when I went to college in Bath, I had to do it after school, when I got home.
I arrived at the stables the same time as Mr Peter. He had been out with six riders, two on leading reins. I helped him water the horses and rub them down.
“What was I doing home?” he asked me. I told him a little and then he said, “That must be the same person that’s been asking about you and your riding.”
That night I thought a little about the day, but was soon asleep. When I woke in the morning I remembered we were asked, about six weeks ago, to write what we would like to do when we left school. Well, I wrote things like being a top-class rider, able to speak three different languages and bringing back news from the war: was that the essay the Captain mentioned, I wondered.

School at Pengam 1935-6
I was born in Gelligaer near Bargoed and Mountain Ash in Mid Glamorgan and went to school at Pengam. I had four brothers and three sisters all older than me.

In the cottage garden at Middle Hill with my older brothers and dad in the back
The only work in South Wales was mining so very soon my brothers began to leave and find work in England. Three of them went to work in Northampton in the shoe factories. My eldest brother and a friend set off on their bikes and found jobs in the stone quarries between Box and Corsham. Eventually he found us a cottage in a small village called Middlehill. It was an old coach house, at one time, with a big garden and a high wall all the way round. There were twelve pear and two plum trees. At the bottom was a door that opened on to a wood that at one time had been an orchard. There was a stream and another door leading on to the common.

Playing on the farm
I had two friends. One was older than me, the other about my age and his father owned a big farm. We would play shops in his barn and my friend’s mother would give us real chocolate bars to sell in our shop.
When the farmer was cutting the corn, we were allowed very close to the machine to keep the rabbits in the middle of the field. Then when the last bit was to be cut all the men and the farmer would stand by with their guns to shoot the rabbits as they came out of the corn – sometimes as many as sixty in a field.
Then my brothers began to come home, as there was a lot more work in the area, but this meant they had to sleep in a big tent out on the common as there was not the room in the house. The lady from the big house, who rented us the cottage, lent us the tent and it was big enough for three beds.
About a year or so later we were offered a council house with four bedrooms; this would allow my brothers to sleep in the house. It was on the outskirts of Box, high above the village, called Barn Piece, half way up Quarry Hill. From it you looked out on fields and a big wood. In the woods were old quarries, caves and tunnels.
Moving from the cottage was not easy, to get to Box we had to go under the railway bridge. We called it the Dirty Arch. There was a footpath eighteen inches high and the cows used it to get from one field to another. If it rained it flooded. When the lorry came to move us it could not get across the common, so we had to carry all the furniture a hundred yards. Then when we arrived at Barn Piece the lorry could not get up the hill so we had another two hundred yards to carry it all. We had to put up with mud on our shoes for the next three months until the workmen finished the road.
The move was life-changing, not just for my brothers, but my sisters and I now only had half a mile to get to school and could get home for lunch. There was everything a boy could wish for. A brook with lots of fish, moorhens and their nests, and it was deep enough to swim quite a long way if you didn’t mind the reeds. You could walk for hours without walking on a road. There were plenty of rabbits, nut trees for nuts and making bows and arrows, big trees for climbing and in the winter when it snowed we were surrounded by fields for sledging.
My favourite place was the woods and caves where you could always find someone with a fire, roasting potatoes or swedes from the farmer’s fields. When it rained you could go into the caves. You had to be very careful, if you went in too far all you had to see with was a piece of burning rubber from the local rubber factory. One day we decided to go back in a cave as far as possible. After about half an hour all the rubber burnt out and we were in there for a good four hours till some of the parents came in after us, with torches.
Soon after this the war broke out. At first it did not affect us but then my brothers and a brother-in-law went into the army, and then we were overloaded with children from London. The young children in our school had to move out to the chapel to make way for them.
It was about this time I became involved with horses. Mr Peter’s riding stable was on a railway siding close to Box tunnel; it had no piped water. So in return for mucking out and carrying two buckets six to ten times a day from the spring at the church, up the hill, across the bridge and down to the siding we were allowed to turn the horses out at the end of the day. Which meant riding them bareback to the fields where they grazed.
After some months we became quite good riders. We were then taken out for our first ride with a saddle. We had been riding so long without one it took some time to get used to, but Mike and I became very good riders. Good enough for some of the local gentry occasionally to ask us to race their horses at meets and point to points.

With saddle and bridle
A fortnight later after gym on Tuesday the Captain came again. “I would like to meet your father,” he said. “Shall we say two-thirty p.m. on Sunday?”