I take my inspiration from another thread, where a TZUK stalwart shared his father's most interesting WWII and subsequent story.
I bet some on here have tales to tell, as related by their parents. Here is mine.
My father entered WWII with the Royal Engineers. As a stonemason his talents were recognised and deployed in making cemetery gates, though he did have spells of "real" action, mainly in the Sicily landings.
Postwar, he was employed on the maintenance staff (or so he claimed) of Netherne hospital, a huge mental health establishment in Surrey. He also had a second career as a music hall act, a Harry Lauder tribute act in fact (the family is of Aberdonian stock, Huntly to be precise). He ended his life as a self-employed builder in Liskeard, Cornwall, at the age of 52. Smoking was his downfall; he should have been buried in Old Holborn.
My mother was barking mad; she had a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. It made her life interesting to say the least.
In WWII she was a WRNS naval nurse at Devonport. The nurses' hostel at Stonehouse Barracks had a direct hit and all nurses were killed save those on duty at the hospital. How anyone remained sane after such experiences I will never know.
Postwar she worked as an immigration nurse at Croydon Airport when it was the main airport for London; just pre-Heathrow.
Then, being medically-trained and a gifted artist, she was employed as an anatomical artist, painting muscles and ligaments onto polymer resin skeletons cast for the medical education sector. The Art Dept. consisted of my mother and Dr. Tauber, brother of the tenor Richard Tauber; the siblings had fled Austria to avoid the Jewish persecution.
One side effect of this was me being supplied with a reject child's skeleton saved from the skip; the purpose was to avoid having to buy me a teddy bear or similar; I sometimes wonder how I managed to remain so normal.
We lived in a grace-and-favour flat above the skeleton factory in Brighton Road, Hooley, Surrey. When trade demanded an expansion, the company (ESP - Educational and Scientific Plastics) built a new factory in Reigate (or was it Redhill?), but they selfishly omitted to design a flat above the factory so my parents decided to make the Big Move to Cornwall. Skeletons were delivered via British Railways to Liskeard station for my mother to outwork, a fact that caused much gossip in the local community given that the contents of the crate had to be displayed on a label.
She died in 2000 following a stroke caused initially by a fall from the window of her 1st floor sheltered flat; she told me before she died that she had to jump out of the window because the complex manager was cutting the faces off the occupants and storing them on a shelf in her office. She had seen them.
Anyone else care to share?
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