11. Back to Italy

After Greece it was decided that we should go back to Rome again, until another airborne operation could be planned. They thought that we should drop North of the Po, holding the bridge so that our tanks could then move across quickly. We were just starting to get ready for this when Capt. Kerr was no longer a player.

After an evening in Rome, at the “Chateau Laurier”, as I remember, I awoke in the middle of the night with a severe pain over my kidney, radiating down to my private parts. This I immediately diagnosed as renal colic and immediately gave myself a shot of morphine, from a syrette which was always kept in my pocket. It was easy to understand why people like morphine. What a relief. I fell asleep but when I awoke the next morning, the pain was back. The surgeon said I should go right to hospital, and I agreed but the hospital that he wanted to send me to wasn’t admitting that day, so I had to go to the second choice, another British Military Hospital.

When doctors are admitted to a hospital, you would think that they would be treated royally. Not so!  I shouldn’t have told the admitting officer that I had given myself a shot of morphine, because that was the first thing that was written down. I was a marked man, right away. However, the medical officer who examined me seemed sympathetic and ordered all the tests that they could do.

The first was an intravenous pyelogram, and the technician injected the corrosive substance, not into my vein, but into my soft tissue. She apologized and said she would try the other arm. That one worked. The test was negative. My temperature went higher and higher, as did my pulse rate, white count and other things. They didn’t know what was wrong, but after a couple of days, the surgical Lt-Col. examined me carefully.

He thought there was dullness over my chest that the medical Lt.-Col. had missed. The x-ray now confirmed this, so he stuck in a needle and drew out a syringe full of clear fluid. I asked him if he was going to see if it burned with a clear blue flame, and he said that it wasn’t something to joke about!  Anyway, he thought that I had a sympathetic pleurisy, due to a subdiaphragmatic abscess. I was glad that something was sympathetic, but he didn’t think that was funny either. Some doctors lack a sense of humour.

He intended to operate the next day, unless my temperature and white count went down. They did!!!  Slowly I began to improve, being able to get out of bed, then walk around the room, and finally down the hall. After about two weeks, I could walk outside, by which time I knew an attractive nurse, and since V-E Day had been declared, decided to take her to dinner.

There was a very nice British Senior Officers’ Club not far from the hospital so we walked there. When we went in and I said that we would like dinner for two, the nice lady at the desk said, ”But you are not a senior officer.”  However, since it was V-E Day, she said, “Oh, I guess it will be all right”. So we had a beautiful dinner, with generals and brigadiers at the surrounding tables.

The medical consultant decided, by then, that I was fit to go to a convalescent depot for a few weeks, and sent me to Sorrento. What a beautiful place!  We had the complete use of the Hotel Tramontana on the edge of a cliff looking across to the Isle of Capri.

My wife and I enjoyed staying there with our children in 1964 while we were posted to Germany for three years and were fortunate enough to meet the eighty-plus year old owner, who lived in a suite below the hotel. He had heard me play the piano, and asked us to visit his luxurious accommodation so I could play on his Steinway. He had treasures, including original manuscripts from Byron and other English poets who had visited Italy during the Romantic Revival.

After about a week at Sorrento, I was fit enough to accept an invitation to sail on a 35-footer to Capri. When we arrived nearby, just at the mouth of the Blue Grotto, two of us decided we could swim in, along with the little rowboats that were taking tourists to see this amazing sight. We dived in and had the fun of swimming underwater a little to see the blue sunlight coming up from an aperture well below sea level.

When there with my family, we had to pay for the privilege of riding in one of their little boats, and it wasn’t nearly as dramatic.

I had been careful not to tell my family that I was in hospital, and it was only when I left that I confessed this, although they would have thought that I was there to give anaesthetics or use my stethoscope. All things must come to an end, however, not before we had our most important visitor, Lady Mountbatten, who threw a sherry party for us. A charming lady, she had been very active in the St. John Ambulance Society, which was partly responsible for running our convalescent home. It was a pleasure to meet this lovely lady, whose husband was so famous and like so many others, she wondered how a Canadian happened to be a British parachutist.

With V-E Day, everything had to be rearranged, and many troops were going back to England.  There would still be a need for airborne troops against the Japanese, but we were all to get a month’s leave, and I was allowed to go back to Canada for my leave, when I enjoyed seeing my parents and sister and brother again.  Ethel had taken her B.Sc. studies along the lines that I had followed, but continued taking higher work in atomic physics and eventually became the one woman working on the atomic bomb in Canada.  She moved to Chalk River and married another atomic scientist.

It seemed strange to be returning to Europe, when all the Canadians were coming home, though some were supposed to form a Japanese force.  This time, travel was on a luxury liner, the New Amsterdam, quite a contrast from the S.S. Bayano.

Back in England, we worked hard to get ready for our new mission.  Suddenly, the atomic bomb was dropped and the war was over.  However, the War Office had new ideas for us, and although the 1st Airborne Division was being reduced, the 6th Airborne Division was re-formed to go to Palestine.

So, Capt. Kerr again set sail, to keep the peace between the Arabs and the Jews and also to be ready to fly to any other country around Russia where there might be trouble.