Helle-Biblio

This is a memoir with a difference, Its author, Air Marshal Sir Peter Horsley, was deprived in his earliest years of both parents. The youngest by several years of a family of seven, he has what he himself describes as 'a miserable start'. Though given a traditional middle-class upbringing through the generosity of relations, his restless spirit led him to leave school and go to sea, living a tough life as a cross between a cadet and a deck hand before escaping once again- on this occasion to join the Royal Air Force on the outbreak of war in 1939. While Peter Horsley's career in the RAF necessarily forms much of the backcloth to his story there is so much more here besides. He sees his life as a house, each room of which marks an incident or period of such intensity that it altered his whole pattern of life thereafter. The corridors between those rooms mark the passage of time. Some of the incidents he describes brought him into great danger and very close to death- as when he survived three days and nights adrift in a rubber dinghy in storm force confditions, having been shot down during a night on the Cherbourg Peninsular and, much more recently, when he and his car were used as the innocent tools in a terrorist gang to bring about the murder of a former officer of the Special Air Service. Others had a deep effect for quite different reasons- such as the seven years in the personal service of Her Majesty the Queen and HRH Prince Philip as Equerry, or his intriguing encounters with psychic phenomena, all true but described in town-to-earth terms which make no attempt to explain the inexplainable. Peter Horsley is an intensely human and sympathetic man and his writing contains many passages of great sensitivity. His description of the storm which so very nearly cost him his life must stand as a classic amongst Second World War stories.