World War, 1939-1945 -- Personal narratives, American; World War, 1939-1945 -- Prisoners and prisons, German
On December 23 we arrived it Keevil, England in the southwest not far
from Bath. This was not an airfield, just a place to stay until we got
a base and planes. Keevil was horrible and the worst of places to
spend your second Christmas away from home. We lived in board shacks
covered with tar paper and the weather was cold and damp. We had
little stoves in our shacks but nothing to burn in them. The only
tools we had were knives so we used them to cut branches of trees and
bushes. It was green wood so we would coat the twigs with shoe polish
to make them burn. We had one large building for a mess hall with one
stove in the middle of it. Here we were served powered eggs for
breakfast every morning and they were terrible... tasteless, smelly
and a sickly green color. Instead of the eggs we would get a couple of
slices of bread and toast them on a stick in the one stove in the
middle of the room.
Neill and I made one trip to Bath where we went through the old Roman
baths and walked through the rest of the city. We made one trip to
London by train and walked around the city. Trafalger Square remains
in my memory. It was a long trip by train from Keevil so we only went
once while stationed there. Later we were closer to London and went
more often. I remember once getting a cup of coffee while waiting for
a train back to base. The English were unfamiliar with coffee making
and it was so hot and strong that the train arrived before it was cool
enough to drink. One of the interesting things at Keevil was how we
would take a bath. The bath house was a long narrow building with
openings at either end and had a cement floor. Partitions separated
bathtubs set up on higher concrete slabs in each stall. It was winter
and there was no heat in the building but the water was always hot. We
would hang all our clothes, including our shoes up high, fill the tub
with water, jump in and leave the water running the entire time. The
tubs would run over and the water would run down the aisle and out the
doorways at either and. The building would fill with steam and we
would lay in the tubs for one to three hours as it was the only place
we could get warm. I have no idea how they heated the water, but it
was always hot. I was in the same shack as Ullo and Bruce so we all
suffered that place together. While we were overseas we asked Lettie
and Ullo's girl friend Dolores, who lived in Oakland to get together
and they became friends.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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