Mike's memories of Sussex Regiment

Mike was there for two months from January 1956 before being whisked off to Canterbury as a potential officer. He then returned to Chichester before service abroad.

It was a harsh regime: "Guys used to cry themselves to sleep. It was the first time they had ever been away from home."

His first arrival at the railway station was met with drizzle. His arrival at barracks was met with an expletive-laden injunction to get his hair cut, all tales he tells in his book of memoirs, alongside recollections of being machine-gunned by the Luftwaffe on his way home from school in the 1940s and growing up in war-torn and post-war Lewes and Eastbourne.

Puttees And A Pinstripe, as Mike says, is an invitation to join him in his riotous boyhood romps, teenage gropes and relationships, plus his army service with the Royal Sussex Regiment in Korea and Gibraltar.

Mike, who promises bawdy, includes a range of uproarious adventures, among them dancing with the young Brigitte Bardot in a Spanish cellar.

More seriously, this year marks the 60th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War, in remembrance of which the Korean government is hosting a series of commemorative events. UN and Commonwealth Forces fought in the conflict, and when they left Korean soil in 1957 the Royal Sussex Regiment was the last British battalion to serve there.

Earlier this year, Mike with a 70-strong contingent of British veterans was the sole representative of his regiment to return, invited by the Korean government as part of a 300-strong Commonwealth contingent of Australian, New Zealand and Canadian veterans for a week of parades, banquets, nostalgic battlefield visits and wreath-laying ceremonies.

"Last time I was there I lived in a snow-filled ditch with a dead rat and a packet of hard-tack biscuits for company.

"Seoul then consisted of rubble, slush and mud with its 1.5 million war-torn population living in tarpaulined plywood boxes, crinkly-tin huts and despair. Fifty-plus years has an effect on places. Everything (Seoul's population is now 11 million) is now extremely noticeably different. Affluence, success and prosperity abound.

"You could eat off the pavements and simper with charmed delight at the Koreans' courtesy, respect and manners, their politeness and gentility.

"As our days there unfolded it became humbling to be the recipients of such lavish hospitality and generosity of spirit. People came up to us in the street to shake hands, many of them crying with appreciation.

"Once we'd won the peace for them, the Koreans nurtured it, and today the results of our sacrifice can clearly be seen, and what has flourished there on our foundations.

'This time round it was five-star Sheraton all the way for us. I tried to find our old camp, but I was told it had been washed away in a flood some years ago.

We were detained three extra days by the volcano, but what with that and the election, after the smooth efficiency of Korea (it was such a relief not to see crisp packets, chewing gum and beer cans strewn about the place) returning to UK it almost seemed as though we were coming back to a third-world country."

Puttees & A Pinstripe (8.99) and All Wind & Pips (11.99) by Mike George are available through Amazon and all booksellers. Contact: [email protected].