Wartime Coincidence
It is impossible in these days of continuous and instant communication, to describe how desperate people were in the Second World War for news of missing servicemen.
My brother, who was fourteen years older than me, had been repatriated from Germany due to grievous injuries sustained when he trod on a mine while on reconnaissance in Italy. He had been reported missing in action and we had been six months not knowing if he were alive or dead (and that's another story.) It was customary to send home people no longer combatant or likely to die. My brother was one of these fortunate/unfortunate prisoners. He weighed only five stones (31.75 kilos) having been fed only on thin potato soup and black bread which on analysis was found to contain sawdust. History has shown that the German people were starving as well. On this occasion my friend Shirley who lived next door had come to tea with me and she asked my brother if he had met her cousin in the POW camp as he was also a prisoner? He asked his name and she said "Keith Jones". "That's not an uncommon name," he replied. She said, "It's Keith Hamilton Jones and he's in the Guards." Shirley and I were told to go and play - we were only ten years old - and my father rang our next door neighbour Mr. Jones.* A short while later Mr Jones arrived with his brother (Keith's father) and my brother was able to tell them that he had been on the train with Keith en route for Germany. Keith had been shot in the backside and endured much teasing about having been running away. There was much rejoicing (our boy's alive) and carefully hoarded whisky brought out for the gentlemen (ladies drank gin then, usually with orange).
It was an amazing coincidence that two soldiers who were from different regiments, the Guards (don't know which one) and the East Surreys, should have met on a train in such circumstances in Germany given the vast number of troops that were there at that time. His family were so happy to have had first-hand knowledge of their son.
*People were much more formal in those days and despite years of shared danger my parents and their neighbours always addressed each other with their titles. The man who said "the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there" certainly knew what he was talking about.
