Around the World in 88 Years -E Book - Arthur Burt

1 Father“Oh God, help us! The Germans are here!” Mother cried out,awakening me. She snatched me out of bed and carried me downstairswhere we cowered, trembling to the thud, thud, thud, asthe plummeting bombs exploded almost completely destroyingWhitley Bay. We were twelve miles from Vickers Armstrong’s shipbuildingyards in Newcastle, and the Germans were after that.Along the way, the Germans devastated our town.In the morning I discovered my friend’s house had collapsed inon him. The roof and some of the rafters crushed the top andbottom of his bed, but he was still alive underneath. Miraculously,our house was untouched, while everywhere around uswas absolute wreckage.Later in the war, after Great Britain had captured some Germanprisoners, I trembled when I saw 200 or 300 of these Germansmarching down the road with red, white and blue targets ontheir backs. Oddly enough, there was only one British soldierwith a gun conducting them along the seacoast to where theydug trenches. They seemed to be glad to be out of the war, contentto be prisoners. The end of World War I came in 1918, alongwith my sixth birthday.An aura of mystery surrounded my father.Although these are some of my earliest recollections, I supposeall stories really begin at the fathering of something. My fatherwas thirty years older than my mother and had two sons fromhis first marriage who were older than she was. Emerging into aworld of conflict, I was born in England in 1912, the only child by1