Ye Olde Booke

Today I traveled all the way down to Bungendore to pick up a parcel and do a few odd errands. One of the errands was to hire out the new movie "Journey to the Centre of the Earth", but as our video store doesn't open until 3:00pm (and closes at 7:00 pm), Jamie, who had come down with me, and I decided to walk into the second-hand bookstore.

It has an amazing pile of books, barely any order at all. Any other time I have walked into there I have come out empty handed, as they either do not have anything I might want, or if they do, it is an old, broken down edition with a very pricey tag.

This time, however, I found a whole section of truly glorious books! I squeezed past "bookshelves" and tiny openings, into a back section dedicated to real literature. I found Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope and other great authors...and then I came across the WWII section...

I found heaps of books by my favourite WWII author, Paul Brickhill. I have read "The Great Escape", "The Dam Busters" and "Reach for the Sky" already. But Jamie found for me "Escape -or Die"......then I found something that I have been wanting for a while, "The Wooden Horse" by Eric Williams M.C. So Naturally I bought them both, but as hard as I and the bookstore owner looked we couldn't find my favourite war novel of all time, "HMS Ulysses" by Alistair MacLean. I just have to keep an eye out for that one.

"Escape or Die" is a collection of "eight stories: stories of escape in the desert, escape through Poland and Russia...escape by canal boat, and perhaps the most horrifying and amazing escape of a war that was richer in escape stories than any war ever fought--the escape of Squadron Leader McCormac from Malaya to Australia by way of Java."

("Escape or Die" introduction)

"It is well known that when a member of the armed forces is captured by an enemy in time of war, it is his duty, by all possible and reasonable means, to escape."

("Escape or Die" introduction)

"The Wooden Horse" takes its genius from the Trojan Horse myth. The POWs involved in this operation thought through their plan carefully. They built (out of wooden planks shoring the underside of the camp huts) a wooden 'horse'. It was hollow, with enough room for one man. The man whose lot it fell to would climb into the 'horse' and the others would push it over to a certain spot by the barbed-wire fence. Then he would dig through the opening underneath the 'horse'. There were two shifts per day, a morning and an evening. Over time, they dug a tunnel all the way into the woods on the other side of the fence, covering up the hole after every shift. The Germans never suspected what they were doing, not until the escape was made. The escapees traveled through Germany, Switzerland, eventually up through France and eventually back home to England.