There were lots of us but sometimes you’d wake up one morning and someone had gone, and you didn’t ask why or where they’d gone. Eventually the officer selected 7 of us and we went across to France once. In the harbour there was a little boat called the Wine Dot and there was an old Frenchman on there called Pierre. The ship I was on was called the Roger Juliet. She never lifted her anchor up, she just lay mid stream. We weren’t allowed to talk to Pierre, we weren’t allowed to go here, we weren’t allowed to go there, and we were watched every minute. If the telephone on the ship rang we could only answer it if it rang 3 times and sometimes they’d come aboard ship and interrogate people, but they’d be speaking in French.

One night we went off to France on the Spirit of Dover, a motor launch. We landed ashore and took orders via hand signals. We eventually came to a wood. The officers went into the wood, and they appeared with a woman and a girl. We found out later that they were old Pierre’s wife and daughter.

Soon after we were sent to the Mediterranean and first port of call was Sidi Ferruch, near Algiers and we did our training at night. We wanted to live on a schooner, so we went to Sicily in the invasion and got a schooner called the Gilfredo. The owner wouldn’t leave it but an officer came and told him the British Government would pay him for the boat. It was rat ridden, we couldn’t sleep down below, and we cooked on 2 primus stoves lashed to the mast. We ate irish stew, potatoes, hard biscuits, or whatever. We weren’t involved in the Sicily invasion, we were waiting to get into Italy. Round the heel of Italy was a place called Monopoli, and that was our base. This old schooner was rat ridden and we were trying to get another one, which we eventually did, a nice Yugoslav one.

Our training was aimed at blowing up railway lines and bridges and we’d do this when there was no moon, but if the moon was up rather than kick around, for a bit of fun, we’d go across the minefields from Mafredonia to Yugoslavia. We weren’t in uniform, and we’d go to this place under cover of darkness and cover ourselves with camouflage netting before it got light. Whenever we went over there they’d be 2 German planes circling up and down this lake or river and if they saw as much as a rowing boat they’d fire at it. When it was dark we’d let go and go alongside a quay which was cut out of the rock. From around the corner would come these Yugoslav people and we’d take exactly 90. They were wounded, some old women, and children. We’d put them down the hold and take them back to Mafredonia.

When there was no moon we’d use Italian torpedo boats. We’d go out to sea and head up north, we didn’t know where we landed but they said if you couldn’t get back to you boats you had to come back to this place every other night for 6 nights and wait to be picked up. If you hadn’t been picked up you had to make your own way across German lines. Next to our skin we had the equivalent of £75 in Lira, a flask of rum, a first aid kit, and you had your gun with 2 clips. The torpedo boats would take you in to say a quarter of mile from the shore and we’d launch our Dory’s which the equipment we needed in them. If we were doing a bridge we needed twelve 75 pound canisters of ammonal, the same explosive they use in a depth charge. For railway lines we’d use 808 plastic cutting charges and we’d cut the line in half either side of the fishplate where the railway lines were joined. Our officer would use a detonator called a pencil. It had acid inside it and you had different coloured pencils according to how long it would take to fire. The officer would press the pen and this would break a phial of acid inside, and holding back the striker on a spring was a wire, and the acid would eventually eat through the wire and the striker would make the spark. The first one we done we could hear the train in the distance, so we went back on the boats to the Mazby. We saw the train coming because of the firebox and I thought to myself “poor devil” as he didn’t know what we ahead of him. We saw the flames first and then heard the rumble. We heard later that the explosion had only derailed the train for 3 or 4 days.