In-Pensioner John Kershaw, late Sergeant

Tell me about your memories of India and what sort of impact they made.
Well after Quetta we went to Allahabad, and there was nothing but internal riots. We had been out to Benares, the holy city there, and various places from there, but it was a rather quiet sort of place, Allahabad, and four years of that was not too clever really and then we went to the frontier at Razmak, a year up there and then again up to Peshawar, another year up there.
What was the most difficult thing about India?
The operations in India were very difficult, some of the toughest warfare you could go through, mounted warfare and being shot at, I was quite close once or twice as well. I was guarding a place where the guy who relieved me had his head shot off straight away, he looked out one way instead of another way. They used to fix them up rifles you know from the park, wait until somebody passed by a couple of times. It was tough fighting up there if you were on operations and we had two lots of it, one in the winter and one in the summer when we went out to Tohki Valley, the furthest the troops had been.