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| GILBERT KILLED AT 19 | |||||
| Nellie and Jim Sutcliffe were friends of Gilbert. He was killed at the battle of Mount Casino during World War II. They recently went to visit his grave. |  |
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| Nellie – Aged 75,states the
following: I have recently returned from Casino, visiting a grave of a very good friend of mine who was killed in the Second World War, at the battle of Monte Casino. The village itself was at the bottom of this great big hill and on the top of this was the Casino Monastery where the monks were. Fighting the battle were the English,the Indians,the Polish and the New Zealanders.There were a mixed bag of people there. My friend was nineteen and it was his first encounter of any warfare at all,he was a war recruit and he was killed immediately. He was my boyfriend and consequently this terrible shock when we heard about his death. We always said,now that I'm married and the fact that my husband was a very dear friend of his as well,that we would go and visit his grave and the place itself. Where I lived next door to our house was a garage, a garage where they had lorries and things like that. It was quite a big place. That is where I met him.He used to come into our house, as a friend,and he would ask me to go out with him but I wasn't really bothered about things like that.Eventually he joined the Army. He got one leave in England and the only other leave he got was his embarkation leave and he went to CMF, the Central Mediterranean Forces in Italy. I received a letter the day we got the news from his mother that he had been killed and that's all the correspondence we ever had,just one letter. It was a massacre there really. It was a mistake, two American Generals who wanted to get there first.It was really a waste of time and a waste of life. Gilbert met his death at nineteen but I met him at eighteen when he was working and used to come in to our house. We would make him a cup of tea,all the family loved him because he was a really good and decent person.He was poor and when he came back from leave he looked quite different.He went away a boy and came back as a man. He just had one leave after that and I will always remember going to the pictures at The Palace. The film was The Road To Morroco with Bob Hope and we were laughing about that. At the time I was working on war work on George Street West. We walked back to where I worked,said goodbye and that was the last I saw of him. I came home from work one Saturday morning and there was letter for me. He had just written that and shortly after he was killed. Dreadful. He wasn't a Catholic boy, he was a Protestant. He told me in this letter that he had been visiting the priest. You see the village of Casino was at the bottom if you can imagine it and Monte Casino was up in the clouds. It is a beautiful country is Italy, it's a very Catholic country. It's a rural area and in the backyards you see statues of Our Lady and the Sacred Heart. It's such a pleasure to be in a country, a Catholic country and you feel close to God there. So he had been to see the priest and he said that he would write again soon but he never did because he died. Jim married Nellie soon after the War he was also a friend of Gilbert. Well Gilbert was born in the next house to me. He lived at No. 53 and I lived at No. 51. He was born a year later than me on the same day. When he was on leave he brought who is now my wife to our house to meet my mother, who was a life long-friend and he said that she would be a life-long friend to her. That is how I met my wife. Nellie was Gilbert's girlfriend and they intended to get married. I was in Burma when he brought her to meet my mother and I heard about his death while I was in Burma. I felt terrible because I regarded him as a younger brother. I give him a bit of advice , like come into the RAF, which he ignored. It really shook me. He was a great lad. Very easy to get on with, good to talk to, always singing but he was a terrible singer. We were very good mates, very good friends and he was one of the best mates I ever had,along with many others of course. When Gilbert was killed Nellie carried on visiting my mother. My mother wrote to me whist I was in Burma and said I have met a nice little girl I would like you to meet. It was just before a particularly big action in Burma and I said to them that she had got me a woman. Everyone said you'll never get away from her. Of course, when I came home the first thing on my mother's agenda was meeting Nellie. We got married and she and my mother were just like mother and daughter. I have been married to Nellie for fifty-four years. I came back from Burma,which I don't talk about much because thousands of people did a share there. I went through some of the heaviest fighting there but I don't like to talk about it. I think it's obnoxious. When I came back I started work and eventually finished up at ?Pipeham? Power Station where I was the Assistant Mechanical Maintainance Engineer. From there I went on to Australia with Nellie and the children. Nellie and I have had eleven children and we have taken them all over the world with us. We brought nine of them back to England. The others where already in England and when we came back my eldest daughters were singing in London. We went through Australia,through the Suez and we came back through the Panama. I went out to Australia as an engineer. They were making a rocket called the Blue Streak. They were going to launch it from there. I went working in a cryogenic plant there. Making liquid oxygen and nitrogen for fuel. I retired when I was sixty and I like doing nothing. I don't do a thing apart from potter around. I have always said I would go at sixty. People thought I meant die at sixty. I meant retire at sixty. Apart form Nellie and I we don't do anything and we are very happy. When I say I potter around,I have a garden in London where I have a set of apple trees |
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