Bugle boy - Len Chester

"Sleeping on a straw-filled palliasse was like lying on the back of a hedgehog.
But nothing had prepared me for day one."From the day he went to his elder brother's Kings' Squad Parade at Chatham in 1937, all Len Chester wanted was to become a bugler/drummer boy.
Two years later, when he was 14, he did just that and joined the Royal Marines. He tells of life on board HMS Iron Duke in the dangerous waters of Scapa Flow and then on the Arctic convoys to Russia, how he learned the many bugle calls, and of playing at the funerals of men when he had never been to a funeral before. Len Chester survived the war and came home.
At Remembrance Day parades he wears the rare off-white beret to which only men from the Arctic Convoys are entitled - yellow-white because blood turns yellow when frozen in snow.