Memories of Catterick, Shingle Street and the Americans

My father, Peter Wilfred Peart, was at Catterick. He told me this. He was with his army mates and you know those churns [milk churns], well the farmer kept losing his milk because certain people reached out of the lorry. I don't know how, but the farmer managed to nail them to the wood! So they probably got dislocated shoulders the next time they did it.

Another one [?] Shingle Street. Do you know about it? My father remembered that when he was a reservist he had to go and recover some of the bodies after something had gone wrong. My Dad wasn't allowed to talk about it, neither was the Lighthouse Keeper who had seen a lot of it too. I know Dad also went somewhere else to do the same thing, recovering bodies, but I don't know where. In 1953 he helped with the flood too.

When the Americans left after the war we heard that they dug a big hole (or maybe the hole was already there and they buried all the stuff they couldn't take back - vehicle parts, cutlery, you name it.