Toughened up by a genuine toughie

The year was 1953, early spring, and even earlier in the morning, but I had been awoken by a small stone hitting my bedroom window. My neighbour had come to call. so it was grab the togs and a towel to dash to our destination: a deep, wide crater, gouged into the riverbed, by a defunct weir, known locally as the sleeper. above this crater sat a concrete emplacement, and it was from there that one tried to enter the freezing waters of the river allen. I was under strict orders not to check the temperature with my toe, but to dive straight in. We would be doing this at just after 6am every morning. apparently, I needed ‘toughening up’. Considering that I had only just learned to swim and was not even an accomplished paddler, how could anyone talk me into standing on the edge of this misty, freezing, watery hole, in my older brother’s knitted, cast-off cossie, knees a-knocking? The reason was simple: my neighbour was a very special person, a survivor not only of Dunkirk, but also the Japanese horror camps — the remarkable ron Tague. Two years earlier, in 1951, the Tagues had arrived in the railway cottages opposite the police house in Fordingbridge, Dorset. My father was a policeman and our upbringing, though happy, was strict, so the arrival of ron and his lovely wife Louise had an immediate impact. For despite the hell that in different ways both had been through, they were always pleasant and cheerful. Lou, who had been advised not to expect to see her husband again, never believed that. ron managed to survive Dunkirk and the inhumanity of the Japanese. In 1945, he came home. When my father retired from the police force in 1955, and we moved back to the family farm near Fareham, the families rather lost contact. sadly, Lou passed away in 1971; she was only 59, another terrible blow that ron managed to survive. In October 2012, ron passed away, one day before his 94th birthday. he was a member of a generation we shall probably not see the like of again. It had been an honour to have known him. James V. Clover, Bournemouth, Dorset.