“We had been expecting it for a long time, and we weren’t surprised when the Captain spoke to the ship’s company and told us that we were ‘on our way’.

“As we waited off the beaches shortly before the troops landed, I experienced a feeling of apprehension (or, to put it more bluntly, fear) and wondered when the enemy was going to wake up to what was going on.

“Just prior to our arrival, the bombers had dropped their load, and then we followed with other ships, close on their heels with the bombardment. Believe me, it was terrific, and the noise defied comparison. The troops then started landing from their barges…”

So wrote Sub-Lieutenant Fred Greenop from HMS Scylla on 17th June 1944, describing his role in the Normandy landings on D-Day, the sixth of that month. It marked the opening of the long-awaited “second front” against Germany, the goal being to expel its army from the lands it had occupied in Western Europe. Indeed, the country had, as Fred noted, been expecting it for a long time. For the Russians, who had fought the Germans on the Eastern Front for three years, it was overdue. From east and west, the forces of the Wehrmacht were to be pushed all the way back to Berlin by the first months of the following year.

Fred Greenop’s letter was not written to his wife, his sweetheart, a friend or his parents. It was written to Miss Daisy Baker, teacher of mathematics and Latin, at the Kingsbury County School.

For once the Second World War broke out, and with the support of her Headmaster, Mr A.G. Tracey, Miss Baker took it upon herself to reach out to every former scholar of Kingsbury County who was serving their country, whether at home or abroad. More than two hundred Old Kingsburians replied, sending over five hundred letters between them. Those letters survive – and they are the subject of this book.

Fred Greenop was an ordinary scholar, mentioned just a few times in the school magazine, firstly as an under-14 football player, later as a member of the “old guard of the Second XI who had kept a good spirit alive in the team”, and finally, in 1938, the year he gained his General School Certificate, as a steady opening bat for the First XI. Three years later, he was an Ordinary Seaman, learning the ropes alongside twenty-five New Zealanders. He acquitted himself well in the Royal Navy, being promoted eventually to full Lieutenant, and was involved in one of the great turning points of the war. He found time to write thirteen letters to Miss Baker between 1941 and 1945, and to drop into his old school when on leave.

This book aspires to provide a memorial to the hundreds of Old Kingsburians who served their country during the Second World War. It is a tribute, too, to a remarkable teacher, and to the school’s first Headmaster, whose values and educational philosophy created an equally remarkable school, the ethos of which survives to this day.