Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> The beginnings of this story lie in a short bus ride in the city of Athens in the mid-sixties. It was just going home from their week’s work. The bus was crowded and with two friends Allan Cole and Bruce Martin I was straphanging. It was a short sentimental journey two good friends had agreed to share. Memories from childhood told me my scoutmaster Bruce McClymont was buried in the Commonwealth War Cemetery at Phaleron and I wanted to see his grave. Memory told me also that Bruce McClymont was a big gentle man who smiled rather more often than he spoke but then to an 11-year-old most men seem impressively large. When he came to the hydro village of Arapuni he was a recently graduated engineer and newly married. He probably had no wish to become involved with a bunch of rowdy village kids but my recollection suggests he was the kind of man who would have found it inordinately difficult to say no. I rest on that appreciation of him though memory certainly played me false in another way. He is not buried in the heartbreakingly lovely cemetery at Phaleron. With so many others he lies on Crete. When a perspiring and slightly breathless conductor finally reached us in the pressed throng I held out a handful of Greek coins and asked for tickets to Phaleron. He did not understand. So I tried again repeating the words ‘war cemetery’ in the blind hope that repetition would bring comprehension. He clearly wasn’t getting any sort of message though almost every other passenger certainly did and they set about him with voluble explanations instructions and it seemed to me recriminations as though being a dull fellow he was embarrassing a stranger. I do not know who paid our fares or whether he was simply told not to take our money. He pushed my hand aside and disappeared. When order was restored a small man with short-cropped pepper and salt hair looked up and asked.