In 1934, 12-year-old Herbert Tatem walked into a store on Front Street and purchased live ammunition for his brand new Buckhorn rifle.

In today?s world some parents don?t want their children to own a plastic toy gun leaving out a real one, but in 1934 the purchase led to no great tragedy. For Mr. Tatem, owning a rifle and also being part of a cadet corps programme turned out to be excellent preparation for young adulthood as a soldier in local forces.

Mr. Tatem has recently released a book of memoirs, ?As You Were? about his time serving in various local branches of the military during the Second World War including the Bermuda Volunteer Rifle Corps (BVRC), the Bermuda Volunteer Engineers (BVE), HMS Malabar and the Cipher office at Admiralty House.

?I joined the BVRC in April 1939 at the ripe age of 16,? said Mr. Tatem who is now 84. ?I put my age up a year to get in. At that time you supplied your own boots and the army paid for the rest of your uniform.?

Although Mr. Tatem was young, his skill behind a gun quickly caught the attention of his superiors.

?In July I went into camp,? he said. ?I went up there and practised the machine gun.?

Mr. Tatem was in BVRC B Company (Vickers Machine Gun Company). As part of his machine gun training, Mr. Tatem was required to fire at a row of five steel plates and a target at 600 yards.

?You had to site on the first group of plates, fire a short burst, and then you knocked the site down and then fired,? said Mr. Tatem. ?You would hear the bullets hitting the plates. If you were missing a lot you would see the sand flying up.?

?I fired a second burst on the second target. Fired again on the third lot. I hit the fourth time which went on to the target, which was the important one. It was supposed to be a hedgerow with enemy troops behind approaching from my right hand side. I fired a short burst maybe five or short rounds.

?I kept firing short bursts. We had seventy bullets left in the belt for the target. I got 64 hits out of the 70 bullets.?

According to Mr. Tatem it was virtually unheard of for a young man in training to hit the target so accurately.

Some of the men in charge actually grumbled good naturedly about the time it would take to patch up the target again. News of Mr. Tatem?s accomplishment travelled around the camp.

?When I went up for my pay, I held out my hand and the captain asked me how old I was,? said Mr. Tatem. ?I said, ?17 sir?. He said ?when will you be 17?. I said, ?next week sir?.?

Because of his age, Mr. Tatem was only entitled to a boy?s service pay, but because of the ?man?s job? he?d done on the machine gun, he was given full pay, a little over a pound sterling and six pence.

?The sixpence they put aside, and when the six pence built up after ten weeks then we got 25 shillings that week,? said Mr. Tatem. ?I was made number one on the gun being an excellent shot.

?In 1939, the war was started on the third and we were getting our gear together, and boiling out our rifles because they were all packed in grease, and the grease had to come off.?

Mr. Tatem decided to write the book after a number of people suggested it would be a good idea, particularly he and his wife Dorothy?s friend Elizabeth Bickley.

What is perhaps amazing about Mr. Tatem?s book is the depth of his recall. In one chapter he lists off the names of all the men who were sleeping in his room, and the order in which their beds were arranged.

?When you live something, it should stick in your brain,? said Mr. Tatem. ?I was very close with the chaps.?

Mr. Tatem said this fraternity has lasted and lasted. Men who didn?t necessarily know each other while serving or weren?t in the same platoon, still feel a bond with one another.

Since the book has been released Mr. Tatem has sold many copies, often multiple copies to many of his old friends and their families.

?A few names I have forgotten, but I would remember the last name or the nickname in many cases,? said Mr. Tatem. ?Some fellows I didn?t know until many years after the war what their name actually was. It was strange how the names will come back to you.?

For example, when he first started to write the book he couldn?t remember the name of American war correspondent Ernie Pyle, but later the name popped into his head while he was writing another chapter.

?Some of the names I had to search around a bit from the children or grandchildren,? he said. ?I had to call them up and ask them ?what was your father?s name??.?

Not all of Mr. Tatem?s memories are good. Some of them revolve around the sheer drudgery of military life.

?There are so many things that I remember, and I can still see them happening in my mind,? he said. ?I can see myself laying barbed wire underwater in February at the Dockyard across the old dock, outside of the dockyard.

?From there looking at the main gate and looking out. There was an opening there and a little bridge and we laid barbed wire from the Dockyard Gate right out to that bridge ? in February... underwater!

?Someone had a bright idea, I guess. If anyone tried to invade in a boat, they probably wouldn?t have come in where we put the barbed wire because there was all kinds of rusty iron and junk there at that time.

?They would have come on the other side run aground and jumped over the wall which wasn?t that high, right up over the next wall and into the Dockyard Gate.?

Although, all of the men in the forces stationed in Bermuda worked very hard to protect the island, Mr. Tatem didn?t think they would have been able to stop a real invasion.

?We had nothing really to stop an invasion,? said Mr. Tatem. ?There were two guns up at the east end and later they put two to the west of Warwick camp. There were two six inch guns. The cruisers that came out had 11 inch guns. They could sit a mile out of the range of our guns, and just pulverise Bermuda.?

?As You Were? also touches on more humorous happenings, such as a naval exercise in the early 1940s that easily could have turned tragic.

?There were times when we had up to forty ships here American and British, but mostly American,? said Mr. Tatem. ?The British ships would go off and exercise off of the Southeast of Bermuda. They would go out early mornings.

?They would go out in line, one behind the other. When they first came here, they would go out every morning and come back in the evening.

?They would do their exercises, thirty miles Southeast of Bermuda because the water goes off very deep on that side of the island.?

He said when the ships were out on exercises they had dummy ammunition to avoid any mishaps.

?Right in the middle of this exercise, this German sub comes up,? said Mr. Tatem. ?He saw all these ships around. He panicked and dove down as far as he could go. All of the ships that saw the submarine had no live ammunition, and they panicked and went off.

?I wrote in the book it seemed rather funny, when you visualise this happening, an enemy submarine coming up in the middle of a British and American group exercise, and one running away from the other.?

In early 1942 he was transferred to the BVE?s. Later he was sent to the Cypher office at Admiralty House where he remained until July 30, 1945 when he was returned to the BVEs station at Prospect.

He was put in charge of signals, telephone installation, repairs and telephone line repairs, the motorcycle dispatch riders among other things.

After more than six years of service, Mr. Tatem was officially discharged on March 3, 1946. He went back to his pre-wartime job of working for H.A. & E Smith?s Ltd.

On February 26, 1946 the captain of the Bermuda Volunteer Engineers Arthur N. Harriott wrote to Mr. Tatem: ?Your fine work in the signal section was most commendable and those of us who had to sit the war out in Bermuda know the utter monotony of keeping on the alert for an enemy that may have struck at any unknown moment and I strongly commend your patience and high morale during these past years for it was this spirit that kept our Unit a going concern.?

Mr. Tatem will be signing books on September 5 at 8 p.m. in the Historical Society on Queen Street in Hamilton.