Anthony Eden’s Estate

Just before the D-Day, I went with all the rest of the reinforcements up to Northern Scotland, Northern England to Yorkshire. And there may have been other camps but the one I went to was a huge camp on Anthony Eden’s estate. There were thousands of troops there. Being a doctor, there were … I was in a Quonset hut with a number of other doctors. There were about eight Quonset huts, which were medical centres for this huge camp. There would be two or three doctors in each Quonset hut and the troops would come in for sick parade in the morning, and in the afternoon they’d be called up for duty to go down south and join either the Italian campaign or the Northwest Europe campaign. And then after that, if you weren’t called for at that time, you were free for the rest of the day. And we were fortunate to be able to borrow Norton motorcycles from the army up there and travel around the countryside. And I was interested to get out on the moors and to see some of the farms, and there were big farms in Yorkshire that had … they were built in a … buildings in a quadrangle, with a manure pile in the middle and the chickens, and so on. The people I remember were very annoyed that they had to have pasteurized milk because they thought that it spoiled the milk, you know, just as it was in Courtney when I first came here. They couldn’t, it missed them entirely that their grandchildren were in hospitals with tuberculosis of bone from unpasteurized milk. I had not had much acquaintance with these English people before. My family were long separated from England or wherever they came from. Being, I think they were United Empire Loyalists and they had been in America for many generations. So I didn’t know the English people very well. They seemed, they seemed rather fixed in their ideas. They certainly were very class conscious as we noticed in the army. If you didn’t belong to the upper classes in the English Army, you couldn’t be an officer.