The following comes from the daughter of one of the original rats, under the command of Monty himself.

I never knew my paternal grandfather as he died shortly before I was born. By all accounts he was a very moral man who brooked no nonsense and didn't suffer fools at all. He was an exceptionally strong man who continued to fight in the desert after the incident described below. I feel very proud and exceptionally humble of his experience, an event I only learnt of recently. Here's his story related to you by my mother:

'My father had to leave to go to war with the 8th Army artillery division (The Desert Rats) on my birthday. He was aged 39. His name was Geoffrey Charles Proctor. I was named as near as possible to him, Georgina.

'When he was back from the front, he did not talk much about the war but one of the things we did find out was the reason his centre crease in his tongue had a split in it about 1/4 inch wide. Here is a snippet of his war life.

'The 8th army were advancing through the North African desert and dad was in a trench that he had been digging out and it was quite deep with shoring. A bomb dropped close by and the trench collapsed, burying him. It was fortunate that a piece or pieces of the shoring supporting the trench walls kept him from being totally buried as this stopped him being crushed to death. He started to try and dig himself out which was successful - albeit the time taken to do this was three days.

'When he managed to free himself of the earth, he discovered that he was now on his own as his comrades believed him to be dead and had had to advance even further to track Rommel's Spook Division. In order to try and catch them up, and to survive the desert heat and sand, there were certain things to do that he knew would help keep him alive. He had a piece of muslin into which he put an amount of sand, then he had to urinate into the sand and let it filter into his mug. This had to be done at least three times to semi-purify it, and then he would drink it (he ran out of purifying tablets). He also had to eat, so the only thing that he could do was to catch lizards etc. He dared not light a fire to cook them as this would have brought attention to his whereabouts, so he had to eat them raw and this coupled with the lack of clean water, I believe, was the cause of his tongue splitting.

'Another thing that happened as a result of being buried alive like that was it affected his writing. Before this happened he had beautiful handwriting but, afterwards it was awful to see him try and write anything. His grip on the pen or pencil was so extreme that they would snap in his clenched hands. His writing was straight-lined instead the lovely flowing script that he had before this incident.

'Life was never the same after the war, he went down with a stricture within 12 hours of being decommissioned and went on to suffer from this for the rest of his life. It is thought that the water purifying tablets that they used caused this stricture as other Desert Rats suffered the same illness.'