The story so far

I published I Think I Prefer the Tinned Variety: The Diary of a Petty Officer in the Fleet Air Arm during World War II as a download for Kindle in October 2012.

At the start of the book I explain how I came to research my dad's war time diary and publish it with my annotations as a Kindle download.

"After I retired I spent many a happy hour researching both my own and my husband's family histories. Eventually though, I came to a dead end after I had explored every aspect of the lives of even the most distant relatives. I had already sorted through a box of old photos that had been in the loft for years and had labelled as many of them as I could. Now I turned my attention to an old, homemade, hard backed notebook with the initials N.B. stencilled on the deteriorating hessian cover. I knew that this was a collection of photographs and postcards that my dad had stuck in the book accompanied by captions in his tiny, precise handwriting. Folded into the book were lots of pages torn from an old diary for 1944 and several sheets of notepaper covered in that same spidery handwriting.

I'd read all of this many years previously and knew that it recorded his time at a Royal Navy airbase known as His Majesty's Ship (H.M.S.) Spurwing in Hastings, near Freetown, Sierra Leone, West Africa. It also covered the weeks he'd spent in Australia prior to being sent to Ponam in the Admiralty Islands (part of present day Papua New Guinea). I read it again and was intrigued by what my dad had written and as I deciphered his handwriting a number of questions were raised in my mind. I decided to type up the manuscript to make the extracts more legible and accessible and then passed copies to my two sisters. Like me, they were intrigued and also prompted to ask questions in relation to what they were reading. When he was alive, our dad had never really spoken about his war time experiences and when we were younger we hadn't been interested in what he'd been doing thirty years previously. Now we had the interest we didn't have the person with the answers.

I decided to use the skills I'd acquired in pursuing our family histories to track down more of the background to our dad's war. The more I read and the more of the background I understood, the more interested I became. I paid for a copy of dad's records from the Royal Navy Archives but these gave incomplete details of his service. Then my sister discovered in her loft, in another old suitcase, a folder containing the original documents that were his Fleet Air Arm records: they detailed in chronological order where he'd been and what his role was. There were other documents that added further to his story."

If you would like to read I Think I Prefer the Tinned Variety: The Diary of a Petty Officer in the Fleet Air Arm during World War II you can get a flavour of the book from the free sample on the Amazon site. Just follow one of these links:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009QXEUG2

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B009QXEUG2

Currently I Think I Prefer the Tinned Variety: The Diary of a Petty Officer in the Fleet Air Arm during World War II is available exclusively for the bargain price of just £0.77p / $0.99. If you don't read with a Kindle did you know that you can download a free Kindle app. from the Amazon site? It's easy to install and works on a range of devices: mobile phone, tablet, P.C. etc.

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Thanks for reading.

Best wishes

Cathy