Ken Welch

Yes, he let me join, yes, yes.

I suppose he thought he could take care of me somehow.

Well, I was full of life and very interested in stuff like that.

I knew it wasn't the Home Guard proper, but I just thought I was joining a kind of Home Guard, a secret sort of thing, which I was very excited about.

But I never considered the consequences if we were invaded.

What happened was if we were invaded, we would go to the operation base.

We had a fortnight's supplies there, stuff like that.

And we would go out at night.

We wouldn't go out during the day.

We'd go out at night and do as much damage as possible.

We would have made Penrhyn Viaduct unusable in case we were invaded.

You know, that sort of stuff.

We had to do as much damage to delay the enemy as possible.

Yes.

We used to go to Swindon for training for a weekend once in a while.

I went up to Swindon.

I remember going up, it was in November time, and it was very cold.

And we were in these big half-wremmed huts, and there was two tortoise fires in them.

When we got there, one each end, both red hot, they were, I remember.

And we had our meals with the officers.