LUCK’S FAVOURS

Luck’s Favours by Cyril Crompton and Peter Johnson was launched towards the end of last year. Published by Echoing Green Press, it retails at R185. (Review by Michael Green)

These are two extraordinarily vivid memoirs by two South Africans who served in the Second World War. That six-year-conflict began more than 71 years ago, and the veterans who are still alive today are obviously very senior citizens. Cyril Crompton is 94 and Peter Johnson is 89, but one would not say so, judging by the general style and delivery of their recollections. Both served “up north”, to use the phrase of the time, and both became prisoners of war, experiencing the associated hardship, brutality and uncertainty, and the fearful excitement of trying to escape.

It is not quite clear when these memoirs were actually written, but the manuscripts seem to be of fairly recent origin. Perhaps the writers made some notes after the war ended and kept them for decades. Whatever the background, the detail of both accounts is astonishing.

Consider, for example, this snippet from Cyril Crompton’s description of life in a big prisoner of war camp in Germany in 1943:

“The food was terrible. We got spinach water in the name of vegetable soup. They cooked this spinach for all the thousands in a huge cauldron, which had a big tap on it. We’d put our tins under the tap and out would come a green slime of spinach water with sand still in it --- they’d not even washed the spinach. The chunk of bread and ersatz coffee we got every day was the best of it. We had proper food only when Red Cross parcels began to arrive”.

The story of both these soldiers is testimony to their resilience and their sense of humour. I found this book consistently interesting. Perhaps its appeal is mainly for older readers, but many younger people may also enjoy this slice of personal military history.

The title comes from a comment by one of the writers that in war (as in peace) much depends on luck.

Cyril Crompton, incidentally, was born in Pietermaritzburg and is the oldest living Maritzburg College old boy. - Michael Green