Don McDouall was evacuated from London during World War II when he was five years old. He was sent to the small country village of East Hanney to live with Grans and Grampy at a house called Tamarisk. When the war ended nobody came to take him home and he was sent to a children's home. When the children's home closed he was given the choice of returning to Tamarisk or to live in another home, he chose Tamarisk. He now lives in Australia.

I would spend most days with Marion at the Depot in Steventon but although I knew that I loved Marion we were very young, I was seventeen and Marion was sixteen.

It was October now and starting to get cold and I would daydream of living in a warm sunny land. I had these visions of sitting on a horse complete with a rifle and big hat with a very wide brim. There I would be following all these very wooly sheep.

I would daydream of boiling the billycan in the shade of a large shady Gum tree! Of sitting beside this babbling creek and catching large trout which in my fantasy I would take home to my sweetheart to the little white house we lived in with our two bonny children and in the evening we would feed the wild Kangaroos. Then later perhaps walk down to Bondi Beach and have a lazy swim!

Oh dear me, just how ignorant or naive or just plain stupid can you be! But that's the way it was. Believe it or not that's the impression you got from the ridiculous propaganda that was fed by Australia house to the uninformed British immigrant

I remember that last winter Doug and I worked on Mr Smith's Farm. One of the jobs we did was winnowing, which was cleaning the cereal seed. The seed such as oats were passed through a tractor driven machine that caused the oats to move over a series of screens. Behind the screens was a large capacity fan.

The wind created by the fan blew the chaff and dust away. It caused a tremendous amount of dust to billow out all over the operators. The dust made us sneeze a lot and made our eyes very sore. You coughed up black phlegm for many weeks after.

The boss knew I was leaving very soon. Mr Smith had this ex US army Dodge truck. It was one of those commonly referred to as a 6x6 truck. The 6x6 meant all three axles were driven by the transmission.

It was indeed a rare event for a farmer of that time to own his own lorry. I cannot recall any other farmer in the vicinity owning such a vehicle. Mr Smith taught me how to drive it and by the end of that first day I was really proud of myself and started to daydream of being a truck driver.

After that driving lesson Mr Smith probably could see I was mechanically minded because he use to let me help him when he did any repairs to his equipment, I probable learnt enough to be dangerous!
Mr Walter Smith had four tractors in all, three wheeled tractors and one crawler type. All three wheeled tractors were Fordson Majors. The crawler type tractor was a Caterpillar D4.

One of the hand started paraffin oil tractors also had a starter motor on it. This piece of equipment would have not been connected electrically as there was no generator or battery attached to the tractor. I use to drive this particular machine at times and was always intrigued by this starter motor thing that was bolted to the engine block.

At the time I was so ignorant as far as engines went that I didn't for one moment associate the generator and battery being essentials as to the starter motor being operable. I decided in my infinite wisdom that I would fix what ever was wrong with this starter motor. So I took the bolts out that held the field coils casing onto the rest of the starter motor housing.

Well of course as soon as I pulled the casing away from the armature the brushes popped out of their spring-loaded slots! I didn't have any idea how to put them back in their housings so after much effort in trying I completely panicked and cut them off!

I threw the brushes away and bolted the casing back on. Then for weeks I lived in fear that the boss would find out what I had done to this blasted starter motor. I have always wondered what happened when someone eventually came across this starter motor with no brushes! Then again the starter motor was probably already stuffed so perhaps no one ever thought anything!

Don McDouall, Australia, 2001