Now that’s a very clucky coincidence

PREvIOUs articles about coincidences reminded me of one that happened to me in the sixties. stationed with a British army cavalry unit in Germany, I was given the task of taking four troopers out on a characterbuilding exercise. this three-day stint involved being taken by truck and dumped somewhere we didn’t know with only a compass, a map, a change of underclothes and a sleeping bag. We had to arrive back at a rendezvous at a given time and were not allowed to carry any cash. We also had to forage for food and were allowed to sleep only in cowsheds. On the third day, weary and hungry, we arrived at a very pretty village somewhere in Bavaria. We noticed that there was a fountain spurting water, so we rushed to it to fill our water bottles. While we were doing so, we were told off by some very irate villagers. We couldn’t understand what they were saying, but we did understand the manner in which they were saying it! We were trying to sort out the trouble when along came a gentleman who addressed us in very good English and offered us a place in his house, or as it turned out, farmhouse. We were well fed, wined and dined and given beds to sleep in — this gentleman was very generous. We got into conversation, and it transpired that he had been a PoW in the UK and said that he had been held at Oxford. that was where I once lived and I told him that when I was 11 in the Forties I had made friends with some German prisoners (against Mum’s instructions) digging out the ditch at the bottom of our road. I used to give them bits of wood and tin, and they used to make the most fabulous toys that we children could buy for pennies. I told him one German prisoner made a toy called a pecking chicken, and he gave it to me for bringing him the wood and tin as I didn’t have enough pennies to pay for it. I was astonished when our host told me he had been that prisoner and that he well remembered that scruffy little 11-year-old, who was me, 20 years later.

J. Newbigging, thornton Curtis, lincs.