Am I allowed to review my dad's book? We'll soon know if this appears, if not you'll be none the wiser!
You have no idea what I went through to persuade my dad to write all this down, months of nagging to at least get this on the record for the family, so to get it in print for the nation, with a foreword by the Duke of Edinburgh is an added bonus. As the stories started to appear, e mailed to my inbox each morning after my dad had sat up on sleepless nights recalling events of so long ago,I was overwhelmed because suddenly the impact of it all became clear. My dad had lost his youth and his teenage years in the service of his country and do you know, he never moaned about it once! All those years of growing up and I barely knew any of it, nothing laid on me when I was 14 ..."if you knew what I'd been doing when I was 14", nothing like that at all so that makes all this even more remarkable because now I understand where his sense of humour comes from, and his common sense and his ability to keep a home ship shape and just about everything else about him that I've always taken a bit for granted.He didn't want to write about death and destruction, just about the things that struck him as a 14 year old boy fighting a man's war so you can safely give this book to any 14 year old today and they might understand a bit more about what that generation did for them. I know I'm grateful and even more grateful, for obvious reasons that he survived!
