Greetings from Plas Yolyn

Just a quick word from Rachel's grandparents' house in Shropshire, England. We had a great Christmas and there's been time to catch up on some reading and go for walks around the muddy but aesthetically perfect countryside.

Christmas dinner was for twenty:

We've also had the opportunity to learn more about Rachel's grandfather's experiences in India during the Second World War, when he operated a degaussing range in Bombay harbor. This was a method of protecting ships against magnetic mines using copper wires called "M-coils". The ships' magnetism was measured by passing them over a vast length of undersea coils connected to a thoroughly analog monitoring system. The effect, as Roger wrote a couple of years ago:

A magnetic mine is detonated by a change in the magnetic field surrounding it. If the effect of the ship's natural magnetism is correctly opposed by the effect of the M-coil, the mine will not explode.

As an engineer, Roger had been given a choice between degaussing and working with unexploded bombs. After quite sensibly choosing the former, he was dispatched to Bombay on a ship along with, "among others, the latest entrants to the Indian Civil Service" - the last of the British colonial officials to be sent to the subcontinent.

I shared a cabin with a fellow called Barton - who was one of them. Another was a very recently married chap called Dodd. He and his wife did not appear from their cabin for about a week - and thereafter we had another meaning for the word "Doddery"! They were all looking forward to a lifetime's work in India with a final golden handshake which would have left them rich men. In the event the ICS ceased to exist shortly after the war, after independence and partition.

Roger made it through the war in mostly good health, though he was bedridden with dysentry for several months, during which time he was subjected to a certain amount of culinary malpractice:

I went down to about nine stone [130 pounds]. I had a cook who was old and nearly blind. We were often given food (e.g. eggs and bacon) with hundreds of ants cooked with it.

On April 14, 1944, Roger was looking into the harbor through a pair of binoculars when he witnessed the explosion of the SS Fort Stikine, a disaster that killed 800 people and made many more homeless, raining debris thoughout the harbor and ashore.

At first a white column rose about 100 feet - it was followed by a column of red hot material which rose to an estimated quarter of a mile and then opened out to fall on the surrounding area. Many Indian sailing craft which were at anchor outside Princes Dock cut their ropes and drifted on fire down the harbor on the ebb tide. The warehouse fires destroyed stocks of food and war materials and burnt with a sickly, acrid smell for the next six weeks.

The explosion also scattered hundreds of gold bricks across the harbor floor, from which they are still, from time to time, being retrieved.

Roger's 90th birthday is coming up next month. He hasn't been very well in recent years, but he still took time today to ask Rachel and me all about the plans for our trip, and to wish us well.