If Spoons Could Talk

This spoon lives in my grandma's cutlery drawer - she uses it for stirring soup. It's had at least three owners, four if you count the US government to whom, I suppose, it still technically belongs. The previous custodian was my great uncle Ernest - her brother - who must have acquired it from an American GI while serving with the Royal Scots Fusiliers in Burma. It would have been in his kit (along with his bullet-drilled tam-o-shanter that his ever-resourceful sister later recycled into a fashionable beret) when, months after the fighting had ended , his troopship finally docked at Southampton. Most of the men on board hadn't seen their families for years, and all of them had seen some of the very bitterest jungle combat of WW2. The dockers were on strike and refused to unload the ship. Until a senior officer of the Fusiliers threatened the shop stewards with a Bren gun, anyway.