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MOTORING: Phil Carey and his father Frank with their Vauxhall 14, and left, Phil's fruit stall in Dunstable market, Bedfordshire

IT'S the kind of memento many people would like to leave their families.

Phil Carey - charity worker, Salvationist, long-time councillor and the man who helped make supermarket fruit and veg what it is today - has published a memoir.

I Did It My Way!, which Phil has been sending as a gift to family and friends, is an autobiography-cum-scrapbook of a fascinating life. Originally from Tottenham, Phil moved home and school several times as a child, and had "little enthusiasm or desire for learning".

He came to Bournemouth with the RAF in 1941 and stayed at guest house in Florence Road, Boscombe. He still remembers with fondness the few perks that came with being an RAF conscript - including free tickets to the Hippodrome music hall (now the Opera House) and the broken rock which the assistants at Woolworths would give servicemen so they didn't need to use their sweet coupons.

His wartime experience was lively even before he saw action. He was accidentally gassed during a gas mask drill, and his boots can be seen in the Leslie Howard film The First of the Few, as he helped push a Spitfire out of its hangar.

Phil was stationed at Hurn Airport in the run-up to D-Day, before embarking from Gosport for Utah beach. There, he helped establish landing strips and facilities for the air crews.

As the Allied invasion progressed, Phil headed through France, Belgium, Germany and Holland to Lubeck, close to the Russian border. His experience at the newly Belsen concentration camp still haunts him. "I shall never eradicate from my mind the sight and the stench; bodies of the prisoners, mainly Polish, were in mass graves and the SS were made to remove them to ensure a decent burial," he says.

After the war, Phil followed his parents into the fresh produce trade, starting a business buying from the wholesalers at Covent Garden and Spitalfields and selling to weekly markets.

Later, working for Anthony Jackson's Food Fair, he was practically the first person appointed in the UK to develop the produce departments at supermarkets. He was the first person to buy direct from the growers, so supermarkets no longer had to wait until nearly midday for their produce and lose out to the independent greengrocers.

Phil later joined another company establishing Keymarket supermarkets and, as a consultant, helped transform Asda's then-ailing produce department and develop a fresh produce department for Woolworth's.

Phil moved to Bournemouth in 1978 and began his long association with the Boscombe, Poole and Winton corps of the Salvation Army. He had been an office boy at the SA's international headquarters in London in 1936, and in 2005 he was invited back to tour its new international headquarters in the City of London.

He also devoted much of his spare time to Rotary, especially the Rotary Club of Parkstone, and at Christmas still runs the Daily Echo Toy Appeal.

He became a Conservative county councillor in 1989 and continued to represent Boscombe on Bournemouth council until 2003. His memoir records his parting with the Conservatives in 2002 after he defied the party whip by opposing the demolition of the Winter Gardens.

For 61 years, he was supported by his wife Olive, who had been his childhood sweetheart at Sunday school. She died in 2002, shortly after the couple moved to Ferndown.

Phil recalls such sad episodes in his book, but concludes that the life of an "ordinary Londoner" has been "as full and exciting as many born into more privileged circumstances".

10:40am Tuesday 8th July 2008

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