My condition was too poor for me to stand up for my rights, especially now that those three or four Medical Board poker-faced masters of inflicting mental cruelty, had succeeded in creating total confusion within my mind and had at each annual appointment, achieved bringing me very close to losing consciousness. I felt it was disgusting for me to be treated in such a way, they being heavily laden with power against the minute amount, if any, which I had arrived with, and which they were being employed to destroy.
In my opinion I should have been automatically awarded a war disability pension for life on the strength of my wartime medical history and the Army records of my front line infantry service in four major World War Two campaigns, without the war disability authorities subjecting me to those punishing Medical Board "trials." What more did they need to prove that my case was genuine?
It appeared to me that there was more of the country's finance spent on endeavouring to stop individual war disability pensions than what the continuous payments would have cost the country on the strength of a more sensible and fairer system of awards which Britain could have been proud to advertise to the world. There may have been non-genuine claims being made but I believe that the medical history of each claimant would have eliminated many such claims without putting the genuine ones to a considerable amount of misery with what I regarded as a huge waste of tax-payers' money.
It did not require specialists of any kind to confirm that the damage the war had done to my body was with me for life. There must have been many more like me who are still suffering today, and who have never received the just level of compensation they should have had for the weaknesses affecting them which were due to the part they played in saving our country from being completely taken over by an unpredictable and evidently ruthless dictatorship.
There had apparently been no change in the system of war disability pension awards since the Great War (World War One). Elsie's uncle was buried alive due to heavy enemy shellfire soon after having been affected by Mustard Gas whilst he was serving as a Rifleman in that war. His colleagues saved his life but he never fully recovered from the shock of having been buried whilst still living, plus the after affects of the poison gas. When dug out he was completely deaf, but his hearing returned slightly for a while and he was able to hear a little at the time his military service came to an end. Soon after leaving HM Forces he lost his hearing altogether to become totally deaf for the rest of his life, confirmed by subsequent Doctors. His wife frequently tried to obtain a war disability pension on his behalf with the aid of Doctor's certificates, but her applications were always turned down on the grounds that he was able to hear at the time of his leaving the Army.

On my sixth or seventh annual attendance to the Medical Board, the Board interrogators told me that my poor post-war health condition was considered by them to be due to my childhood, and in view of the fact I had been in regular employment for a year or two they had reached the conclusion there was no justification to continue the payments of my war disability pension. They had achieved getting my mind into such a confused state when cross-examining me, that I never thought of pointing out to them that I had been passed as A1 fit on an official medical examination when conscripted into HM Forces, and had been regarded as A1 fit for close to six years of active service until graded E and discharged as unfit for further military service by the Ramsgate Medical Board.