Thursday, 6th July 1944

All quiet on the western front - or at least this part of it. This day was a day of reorganisation, pay, re-equipment and a visit from the mobile NAAFI with sweets, cakes, fresh tea (made with unchlorinated water!), tobacco for my pipe and copies of the divisional magazine, "Tam O'Shanter". The only lines I recall in that are:

When in Bayeux,
Don’t play with fayeux

The advice comes a little late for our stragglers, but now they can rejoin us after being the guests of "B" Coy.

Dearest Christine,
If your photos are from the 40s, they are probably monochrome and could be easily copied with your scanner or all-in-one. The same applies to modern color prints, but, in between, there was a period of color slides which need to go to a photo shop.
You can take you pictures home on a CD, DVD, memory stick or even a floppy if you have a floppy drive. At home you can drag them from the transport medium to your "My computer/Christine's Documents/My Pictures" file by having both visible together and holding down the <Ctr> button and the mouse button with the mouse pointer on the file icon all the way.

Friday, 7th July 1944

Now it was quiet for a while, even the guns in the next field were silent - presumably, they too were resting after the noise of battle. Now we could also relax and think about more local walks, until night, when the air was filled with noise, as the R.A.F. came over in strength, filling the sky with bombers, so there was hardly room for the Lightnings and Spitfires to defend them as they annihilated Caen, leaving it in ruins, except for the cathedral and convent, as we would hear later. Civilians had been warned beforehand and told that the cathedral would be spared as a shelter for them; presumably, the enemy had heeded the warning and left the town, leaving it free for our troops to battle their way into and past it.

Sunday, 9th July 1944, or thereabouts

We were all bored stiff. After recceing the district in small groups, nobody had found anything more exciting than the local farm, so the company sergeant organised a P.T. class. When we were all dressed up, er... down to our P.T. kit, we had a visitor - a low flying German fighter plane, and I don't think he was flying low to do some crop spraying.

I am sure I would have remembered Cecil Harris if we had met, but I was not attched to any engineering unit until after the war, when I was M.O. to 70th Corps Engineering Regiment. This was in Liverpool - a long way from Tottenham!

If you still want to copy a photo from your computer into a posting, I can not help. As far as I know, this is not possible unless you use a web domain (inluding your own domain, if you have one). The two images below, in my siggy, are copied from the public domain or from advertisements. The owners of the domains presumably accept responsiblity for the reproduction costs because the publicity is of value to them.

Monday, 10th July 1944

A few of us, standing at the roadside by the gap in the hedge where the Panther had been, see an open car with some very recognisable occupants, including “Monty” and Winston, passing by at speed. For the next three days, our brigade, the 44th Lowland was on loan to the 53rd (Welsh) Division.

Thursday, 13th July 1944

We had spent a day or two in Bretteville enjoying a bath and a film show, “Four Jills in a Jeep”, and now we were back in our rest area. Our previous slit trenches were no longer available, so we had dug new ones, covering them with our anti-gas capes, as it looked like rain. Caen was at last in our hands, so our work in this area was finished for now.