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This is for my grandchildren and great grandchildren. I will try to cover the generations of
Auxillou's with as much as material as I still have.
I was born in Sheppards Bush, London, England in 1937 before
World War 2 began. The blitz of England is well covered in history books. As a child I played in the bombed out ruins of brick
buildings. My mother and I were buried alive twice during German air raids. We survived inside these small steel cages people
had in their basements. With some drinking water, a blanket and pillows. We were eventually dug out by rescuers. I was shipped
off to Grimsby during the blitz on the NE coast of England. It was here I lived and watched the air raids and dog fights in
the skys above, by the night time searchlights trying to capture enemy fighters. As a child we played in the streets of bombed
buildings. To me it seemed normal! I was happy. Some of my school friends were maimed or killed by picking up booby trap bombs
the Germans dropped called clappers. Once during an air raid the building across the street blew up from a bomb and a flying
brick hit me in the head. I ran home to mother crying and fainted dead away. But a few stitches from the visiting doctor fixed
it. In those days, we had a hand cast iron pump for water and an outdoor backyard privy for toilet. Another time a Messerschmidt
fighter was strafing the Grimsby docks and tried to kill me, but was unable to lower the guns low enough as it flew just above
the chimney tops. The line of bullets pockmarked the lintel of the door in which I was crouching. I wasn't afraid, only curious.
It all happened so fast. Uncle Bill came home from being a merchant seaman. He lost his leg due to being torpedoed. He had
been in ships torpedoed twice by submarines.
My father was a behind the lines British Officer, French speaking spy for
MI-6. The first time I remember seeing him, I was 4 years old. He had been behind in France for two years and escaped when
the Gestapo had swept up his Resistance Movement Escape Line. Dad made me a Spitfire airplane out of carving a broom handle.
He also taught me to handle a pistol and a Lee Enfield military rifle. I never fired them just practised taking them apart
and aiming them.
In 1945, Senior British Army ranks families were allowed to join their husbands in Occupied Territory.
My dad was a Colonel then in Vienna, Austria. This German city was divided into a Russian zone, a British Zone, a French Zone
and a USA zone. The Russians were raping and looting their section of the city. We even had a British officer visiting female
nurse raped by three Russian soldiers outside our house on the lawn, in which we lived. She was a friend of my mother's. It
was during this time I got hit with a ricochet machine gun bullet from German holdouts and Hitler Youth in the leg. We British
kids went to German schools, but fought with the German kids with real pistols and grenades in the Vienna Woods. I remember
getting my weapons taken away from me on the hill next to the Schonnbrun Palace in the woods by British soldiers who scolded
us. I must have been about eight years old or so? The Russians packed the basement of the big 399 room, Schonnbrun Hotel with
explosives and blew the hotel up trying to wipe out the Allied High Command during a celebration. I slept in that hotel that
night and was in the small section that survived the blast. I was covered in window glass pieces, but otherwise alright. My
dad was kidnapped by the Russians twice and traded back for someone German that they wanted. Usually a scientist. At one point
I ended up in the Russian Zone by mistake. You could go in on a tram car, but not get back out. A little old lady led me through
the sewers into the French zone to escape. I climbed up the rusty iron steps out into the street and took the correct tram
car home. The Russian Zone was swarming with soldiers who were raping women and throwing them into trucks to take back to
their sleeping quarters. As I was dressed in short leather pants, they didn't bother me, but I was sure scared.
Dad got
appointed Liason Officer in the French Zone in the Tyrol region of Austria. We lived in Igles a holiday resort up on the mountain
range overlooking the city of Innsbruck. We had a fancy car and a fancy house and a chauffer that was a prisoner S.S., as
driver. I don't know what Dad did during those years, but I was often taken along as COVER on trips to pick up British deserters
living with German women. Or taking loads of arms going to Italy and refugees from our house up on the mountain. Everything
was stored in the garage. Some Air Commodore would deliver the stuff to the house and Dad and I would take a jeep over the
mountains by back logging roads into Italy and store the guns in piles of cordwood firewood. The refugees were met by someone
and taken off, to eventually go to Palestine, or Argentina.
The Army was disbanded in 1949 and Dad immigrated to Canada.
My mother and by then me and my twin sisters joined him later. I saw my first candy in my life at the Airport at Gander in
Newfoundland. The deal was our family were indentured labor for two years to pay for the passage. Slavery by another name!
We lived in a little one room cabin on a farm near Woodstock, Ontario. The ice would form on the walls one inch thick, in
winter from our breathing. But we ate better than in Europe or England. In Europe the truck loads of dead people from starvation
went around every day to pick up the bodies. It was normal and I never thought much about it. Though on a train in France
I was disturbed by ten thousand children killing other children when I threw a sandwich bread crust out the window. The population
of Canada then, was about 2.5 million people scattered over 5000 miles of frontier. I was alway an outdoors person. Learned
to survive in the woods and trap muskrats, shoot squirrels for bounty and all those things that kids love to do. I must have
been 10 or 11 years old when I got my first birthday present single shot .22 rifle. I joined the Canadian Army for the Korean
War. Was in the Signal Corps as a radio technician. The war finished too soon and being under age, I had entered at 15 years
old in a Boy Soldier program, I resigned at age 18 years. Then I joined the reserves where I eventually made Seargant over
the next five years. Went back to High School, got into trouble over sex and girls as I was a virgin and knew nothing about
the subject. I was a good stage magician and hypnotist in my high school years. A holiday in Cuba in 1959 saw me with Castro
as they entered the city of Havana. My companion and I had a wild three weeks. The Tropicana Club, stayed at the Riveria Hotel
FREE and other persuits. I loved the tropical Caribbean. The revolutionaries taking over Havana in those few weeks were very
rough. They killed one woman in front of me in the street gutters with rifle butts because she was shouting at them,
that Castro's mother was a whore.
I explored most of Canada and the USA during those years. Hitchiking mostly and
singing for my supper with a ukelele. Rode the freight train cars, slept in hobo camps and generally lived an interesting
life, mostly during the summer school holidays. One time, I hitchiked to Hollywood, California and back to Ontario, Canada
in one week and mailed my parents postcards to prove it. Worked as a cowboy in Alberta on the last large round up and trail
drive in North American history. Spent a summer at the Banff School of Fine Arts surrounded by young girls studying ballet,
art and music. I didn't pay, but was tolerated as the large girl student body didn't have many male friends for their romantic
kissing games.
Eventually I wound up in British Honduras, flat broke. Slept on the fishing tables at
the port market. Eventually got married and had a family and lived on Caye Caulker most of my life. Here I built boats, taught
school and started the tourist business. I fished and did whatever it took to lead an outdoor life and earn a living. I loved
island life, boats and the sea and the warm colorful Caribbean.
During my twenties, I worked as an unofficial
SPY for the British Army camp Intelligence Officer in what was then the colony. He would send me to Guatemala as nobody in
the British Army were allowed to go to this dangerous country. I was expendable, deniable and young and foolish. But
I enjoyed myself. Once in Puerto Barrios I was interrogated and sentenced to be shot in the morning. A bribed guard got me
the use of a telephone and I called the British Consul, who called Ian Munn, the British son-in-law of the President Fuentes
of Guatemala, who called the Commodante who was going to shoot me and ordered him to let me go. I was put on the plane for
Honduras the next day. Everybody else with me in jail was killed as fighting had broken out in Guatemala City in a revolution
and airplanes were dropping bombs on the airstrip.
This was about a decade before the British Army Airport Camp Intelligence officer,
I think he was also a Captain paymaster; asked me to bring him intelligence of troop movements in Guatemala. He was
interested in anything, as the local Garrison of 200 troops in the colony had no information coming out of England.
I don't know what the British Embassy were doing over there?
This was at a time that Guatemala Generals were rattling sabers and building troop encampments
on the border. The pseudo counter insurgency was going on and over 200,000 civilians were killed by the army.
To have a map at a highway army checkpoint, even a Esso Highway Map would lable you as a subversive and you would have
your hands tied behind your back and forced to kneel in the ditch and get your brains blown out. I remember reading
in the newspapers of Guatemala City, how the reigning Miss Universe had returned from her World Pageant and when
interviewed on the news expressed how amazed she was at democracy in the outside world and how she thought Guatemala would
be such a beautiful country under democracy. The next weekend her naked body was discovered under a Highway bridge,
gang raped, tortured and mutilated. I made several trips into Guatemala. In one, I penetrated the Guatemala Army
Classified Map Section in a group of American Oil Geologists posing as one of them. In a classified well guarded map
room, I located fabulous maps of British Honduras and purloined them successfully. Back in British Honduras at the Army
Camp the officers went wild and asked to keep them. I did so and a couple of weeks later, got word I was wanted at Airport
Camp and left from my home on Caye Caulker. A Brigadeer had flown out from the UK and wanted to interview me.
I sat in a conference room and the Brigadeer was clearly in charge, but there were local high camp officers, like the Captain
and Major and some others that came out from the UK in the entourage. The interview didn't seem to go well from my point
of view. I was asked to explain how I got the maps? They were apparently a complete surprise to Whitehall in the
UK? The British Army were using blank spaced UNKNOWN territory maps of the 19th century. These maps I stole from
the Guatemalan Army Headquarters were less than 90 days old, recently made by aerial jet surveys. In hindsight, I guess
the USA had made them for Guatemala? I'm sure the fur flew back in England between the military and the other members
of the British Cabinet. Houses and roads and creeks were on the maps that were brand new, including the ammunition dumps.
I was asked about the chances between the Guatemala Army and the British Army Garrison and frankly said they would be wiped
out in 24 hours. Lots of insults and protestions there from the local officers. But it was true, as the 200 man
Garrison was unprepared, basically unarmed and were essentially a small trip wire, expendable force.
What happened over the next couple of years was due to my intelligence reports that
I brought back is my belief? The Garrison was reinforced from 200 to 1200 soldiers and eventually to 2000 soldiers.
A contract was let to map the country, from jet aerial photographic surveys and formed the basis of the current maps in Belize.
The airstrip was contracted to be lengthened and strengthened, to handle military jet cargo planes like the Hercules.
This turned the strip into the jet transportation usable Belize International Airport, it more or less is today. Though it
has been expanded in the last twenty years.
I had some close calls
in Panama once, when caught in a military zone. Another time with Secret Police for Generalismo Somoza in Managua, Nicaragua, who
robbed and beat me, and the hotel and military barracks on Tiger Island on the Pacific side of Honduras got shotup by raiders
one night, while I was staying in the hotel, by Nicaraguan Sandanistas from a boat. Despite the killing in the Salvadoran
civil war, I never saw any violence myself during the Salvador war.
In Belize though, sea pirates were common along the islands and atolls and still
are today out on the Cayes. Was boarded and robbed a couple of times and turned the tables on pirates twice with the help
of tourists, though we were unarmed and they were not. But it was at night and they couldn't tell, all we had were knives
and spearguns, while they had pistols and shotguns. The pirates were Belizeans, either from Belize City, or Mullins River
area.
For education I had the two year Belize Teachers College, which I thought was mostly a waste of time. They
could have taught everything in three months was my opinion! Became a marine architect, shipwright and Ham
Radio Operator from my Canadian Army days. I must have built a dozen boats, the biggest about 45 feet. For a dozen
years, I was a locally famous magician. This was during my children's formative years before they were 12 and we all
had a great time together, learning illusions and tricks and preparing for performances in schools and around the country
as Raymundo the Magician. Went to several International Brotherhood of Magician Conventions in the USA and the UK. Became
a scuba instructor and eventually sailed all the Caribbean, the Great Lakes, and Pacific Coast of North America, which was
my real love in life. I always wanted to sail around the world, but never made it. Now I'm too old! It's been a great life
though! ( grin! )
I enjoyed a lifetime of adventure, travel and exploration. Wouldn't change it for the world. During my life I held different
qualifications. A Marine Architect qualification. Shipwright skills in wood boats, fiberglass boats and ferro cement. Designed
and built about 24 boats up to 50 foot size. Held a 2000 ton Spanish Honduras Merchant Marine Captains license and sailed
the Western Caribbean Sea with cargo buying and selling often, from country to country. Held Amateur Ham Radio licenses in
different countries. The internet has replaced Ham Radio today though.
Had an airplane back in 1961, an Ercoupe. Bought it in Miami and flew it solo to British Honduras around the Gulf of Mexico
and via Mexico to the colony. I'm currently building an airplane in my backyard. A two place 1929 Pietenpol. Held Scuba
Instructors certifications, Lifeguard, Pool Operators, etc. Spent a good deal of seasonal commercial fishing in British Honduras,
from deep water red snapper, to conchs and lobsters. Tried shrimping as well off Corpus Christi, Texas. When I was in my
teens I worked as a cowboy, both in Arizona by Winslow and also up in Alberta, Canada for summers. Spent three teen years
in active Army service and then about 5 years in Reserves. Taught myself several musical instruments, but music I enjoy,
but I'm an amateur, just not talented at it. At one time taught school and got certified with an Associate Degree as a teacher
from the Belize Teachers College. Through force of circumstances became in my prime a pretty good marine diesel mechanic
but never certified. Usually had to fix the darn things in rough seas and high waves when everything was going wrong.
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