# Other People's Lives



## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

Have you ever - I expect you have! - wondered what it would be like to *be* somebody else - to feel like them and experience things through their brain & eyes?

I remember wondering that at the age of eight, looking at my best friend Ann, as we went home down the lane from Shipton Street Junior School, York.

This thread is about *stories from the lives of others*. I was struck by a story in an obituary today, and first thought of calling the thread 'Obits' - but that would limit it, as we might hear stories through friends, or read about them in biographies.

Please pass on stories that that make you think, 'Gosh - what must *that* have felt like?

Today's story concerns a lad of eighteen taking much upon himself during the Second World War.

*From the Telegraph obituary of Gordon Stevens (1926-2019, a Unilever marketing director)**:

Fascinated by ships from boyhood, he joined the Royal Navy in 1944 & served as a sub-lieutenant first in fast gunboats in The Channel, & later in what he recalled as a "creaky old tub" that left Malta as part of a convoy bound for Palestine, in very rough seas.

Having warned that the ship was unfit for such conditions, Stevens in due course told his superior officer that he thought she was actually going to sink.

When it became obvious that he was right, an order was reluctantly sent by the convoy commander to abandon ship, but three sailors refused to do so - until Stevens drew his revolver & threatened to shoot them in the leg. No crew were lost & Stevens was last to leave the fast-sinking vessel. In the court martial that followed at the end of the war, he was exonerated with a commendation. 
*


----------

