Open Writing

When I left home to answer a call to arms as a member of HM Forces in February 1944, the day was dark, dismal and cold, and it was raining. I carried a railway travel warrant in one of my pockets and in another a potted meat teacake. Thus equipped I strode boldly forth, poised to do battle with the enemy, or as least part of it, that being the bit which floated, since I was en route to becoming one of Britain’s fighting blue jackets.

Call-up had been eluded for sometime past, not because of any pacifist leanings, nor because of unpatriotic sentiment, but as a result of sheer personal teenage vanity. Didn’t one have simply to look one’s most attractive to girls when attending the Saturday night dance in the local Town Hall? So it was that I had striven to achieve stylish tonsorial elegance by washing my hair at home during a previous Thursday dinner break. Then, with the thatch still damp, I had cycled bare-headed back to work through a cold November afternoon.

Alas, unlike Cinderella I was not taken to the ball. I took to my bed instead with what the doctor diagnosed as a rapidly developing case of double pneumonia. Who said, ‘Woman, thy name is Vanity’?

It was later that I learned of my being saved from an early demise by the wonder of M and B tablets -- trade code jargon for penicillin, which had arrived on the scene in the nick of time, like the U.S. Cavalry in a western film.

Thus it was that the fighting forces of the Allied powers had to struggle on for a while longer without my aid, which they seemed to do quite adequately.

Eventually I was deemed fit to fight, and the anticipated ‘paper’ arrived along with the aforementioned travel warrant instructing me to present myself at HMS Glendower, Puchelly, Puthelly, Puwelly! Anyway, it was in North Wales and had once been a Butlin’s holiday camp but was then a training ship for the Royal Navy, where innocents such as myself were to be navigated via diverse channels into sons of the sea. At the end of such piloting we would be issued with a pair of sea-legs and sent on our ways to follow in the footsteps of Nelson -- find your own Lady Hamilton.

My journey to the lido of joy and delight was uneventful, meandering gently as pre-nationalised, unheated trains did, by way of Manchester, Crewe, Bangor, Afon-wen and Peny-Chain Halt. Ah, those exotic names of yesteryear. At journey’s end a chauffeur-driven conveyance awaited my arrival, prepared to whisk me away on my second stage towards a life on the ocean wave. In actuality, the transport was a Royal Naval Bedford wagon, and I was told to ‘Ger in the back!’

We travelled the few miles from the railway station in damp and darkening dismalness. Inside the main gate I clearly remember being handed over to an escort who steered me through Welsh-wetness into the awaiting arms of the Senior Service and a life on the rollicking briny -- eventually.

It was not long before I came to appreciate the fact that out of all the hundreds of companion ratings in training I was the only one in civvies, this being because initial intake and kitting out had been transferred to HMS Royal Arthur, Skegness. So I found myself in the paradoxical situation of being the first to be last, if you follow.

I don’t imagine I cut a dashing figure when on parade in mufti -- trilby hat included -- but so I was to remain for what seemed an age until at long last a uniform of sorts was produced which fitted me, well it fitted where it touched. Jumper sleeves and trouser bottoms were at half mast, but I was accustomed to that, since at the time my rate of growth was quicker than the tailors could stitch a suit together. One of telescopic design might have done the trick.

During the first week of initiation I, as every other trainee, was probed, prodded and perforated, courtesy of doctor and dentist. I was also charged 6d to be scalped by the official barber. Throughout this early period new intakes were readily identifiable. They were the ones carefully protecting the upper part of one of their arms from boisterous entanglements or even a casual collision, this after receiving inoculation. Pale, trembling bodies were to be seen, propped against walls or curled up on their beds, eyes tightly shut, whilst through chattering teeth they prayed for death to claim them, this being closer than their mothers, whom they swore they would never again disobey if only the throbbing arm would subside.

Squeezing into one’s uniform top was very painful. So was getting out of it. Indeed, there were many sufferers who never attempted its removal, preferring to live in their clothes until all pain subsided. It was we pitiful objects who were the ones selected to ensure Britannia continued to rule the waves. Why indeed should Britain have need to tremble?!!

We slept four to one almost unheated chalet. The only furniture was beds, and wasn’t it just my luck to have to sleep opposite a homosexual. I became suspicious when he embroidered his name on his belt in multi-coloured sewing silks. That was when I began sleeping with my back to the wall.

Booklets were issued which contained a brief and ambiguous explanation as to why the establishment was named ‘Glendower’. This, we were informed, was in honour of the Welsh folk hero Owen Glendower. But what we were not told was that he had, in history book phrasing, ‘harried the English’ several hundred years earlier. Indeed, he’d knocked seven bells out of them from time to time. So Their Admiralty Lordships, in divine wisdom, customarily sidetracked the issue, regarding it no doubt as information detrimental to the national interest, as were the recipes of some of the food we received. Eventually we were allowed shore leave when we descended on Pwhelli, there to regale ourselves with sausage, eggs, beans and chips, far more palatable than ‘dead DEMS’.

A few words by way of explanation here. Stepping out of one’s chalet into the customary early wet morning before dawn had broken, our nostrils would be regularly assailed by the smell of tinned pilchards, an aroma which some authors in similar descriptive circumstances have referred to as ‘hanging heavily on the air’. In our instances we were crushed by the appetite-destroying stench. We knew well in advance what lay in wait for breakfast: ‘dead DEMS’. DEMS was the mnemonic for Defence of Equipped Merchant Ships, those ratings -- all volunteers -- who manned the armament on board mercantile marine vessels. An unthankful task, especially at the height of the U-boat attacks on Atlantic convoys. Jolly Jack though, with his fertile mind, visualised pilchards fattening themselves upon such sunken provender, rather like ‘t’ worrum on Ilka MoorBaht ‘at’ --hence dead DEMS.

Naval descriptions were often graphically pictorial. Fried eggs, bacon, sausage and tinned tomatoes became ‘train smash’. Custard was ‘baby ______’ yellow in colour. Think about it!

Our training days passed quickly, being filled with fiendish practices purposely introduced to make life unpleasant -- or so we maintained.

There were few dry days during the whole of our stay at ‘Glendower’. Daily rig was ever topped by a cumbersome oilskin, the collar of which chafed our cheeks, whilst cap with its webbed chin strap scoured one’s lower jaw.

Agreement appeared unanimous that in Wales it rained six days out of each week, and on the seventh day it poured down. In all fairness though, there were periods of relief from the rain. They occurred when it either sleeted or snowed.

In due course the day of our departure arrived, and would you know it? The sun shone, and the air was warm. It was balmy April. Southern climes beckoned, and we were bound for HMS Pembroke, that dreaded dreadnought of the Medway towns, Chatham Barracks. Constructed almost 100 years earlier than our time, the barracks design allowed for the accommodation of 2,000 ratings. At its height in the 1940s it housed 20,000 bodies. One never felt isolated! Mealtimes meant grab, get and gobble. Cutlery was dispensed with. It was all hands in, truly a fight for survival. But we were all on the same side -- I think!

The barrack block in which I found myself was Collingwood, from where two memories still linger, those of lentil soup and ‘the tunnels’. Lentil soup because that was the only time I ever needed to take bites in order to consume the stuff, it was so thick!!

‘The tunnels’ were underground chambers. Why they were there in the first place I have no idea, but for us inmates they served as air raid shelters. Each night we descended down 94 steps, again carrying our hammocks. The air in those subterranean caverns might accurately be described as fetid long before the arrival of dawn, particularly since half the assembled company had been frequenting the local hostelries earlier in the evening.

Which, quite naturally, brings one to the sanitary arrangements. These, or more accurately ‘this’, consisted of one two-gallon bucket situated in a corner behind a canvas screen. Oh the modesty displayed by the Senior Service! The picture of this facility remains vivid in my mind -- overflowing bucket and a three-yard flooded area.

Everyone walked across the watery waste on their heels, since it was advisable to discharge at, if not into the bucket. To be caught delivering one’s contribution amongst the surrounding urination would be deemed a serious breech of regulations, quite unhygienic!! For security purposes, upon retiring for the night footwear was tied to one’s hammock nettles -- strings which support the hammock. Then, with saturated boots dangling beneath one’s head, it was off in sweet repose. A situation not to be sniffed at!!

After a month of such conditions by night and time-filling square-bashing by day we were on the move once more, this time to HMS Cabot, Wetherby, today a remand home for delinquents, in World War II a physical training camp. In each instance the inmates were behind wire and under guard.

It was from that base I obtained my first leave, a 36 hour weekend. Thus it came to pass that I eventually attended a Saturday night dance at the Town Hall. By then my hairstyle was immaterial. It wasn’t long enough to comb.

Ten days later and it was kitbag and hammock at the ready. We were in transit once again. This time we were bound for overseas, a fact confirmed officially. Our port of departure was Liverpool. Consequently, with light hearts and high hopes we sailed down the Mersey and into open water, westward bound for Douglas, Isle of Man. There we were to spend four weeks training as radar operators, at the end of which time we would be deemed suitable for service on seagoing vessels.

Our base in the IOM was HMKS Valkyrie II, in actuality promenade boarding houses, each one self-contained insofar as food preparation was carried out in the cellar kitchens, which in our particular case proved to be an incubator for prolific breeding cockroaches. One memorable mealtime I ended up with the corpses of seven of them adorning the edge of my plate. Maybe I missed seeing some! It was useless to complain. Nothing would have been done. I did, however, think it time I spoke out when I found an electric light fitting in my cabbage. Presumably action was taken in that instance. At least I never received another one.

At the end of our sojourn on the island it was back to Chatham, this time to St. Mary’s Barracks, the gunnery school, where I was content to sunbathe on the barrack block roof, idly watching doodlebugs passing overhead. The Admiralty, however, had other plans for me, and in the September, at long last, I was drafted to my first seagoing ship, HMS Mauritius, a Colonial class cruiser assigned to the Atlantic Fleet, based in Scapa Flow.

It was in that outpost of the Orkneys where we wintered, sallying forth from time to time to do battle with the elements and enemy shipping along the Norwegian coast, with the odd run into Icelandic waters. We sought the Tirpitz but never found it, big as it was, and it was off the Lofoten Islands on one such patrol that I lost the Illustrious. Twenty-two thousand tons of aircraft carrier slipped right off my radar screen. Luckily we found her again or Their Lordships would have been annoyed.

During one encounter with enemy armed merchantmen our own gunfire shook my radar set into inaction, and a nasty incoming shell created a new porthole, which we didn’t really need -- on a Saturday night too, when I thought I could have been far better employed at our local Town Hall dance.

Throughout this period though was where earlier training stood me in good stead. What of the Atlantic gales or Arctic blizzards? Hadn’t I withstood the fury of wet and wintry Wales? The rest had to be plain sailing by comparison. Besides, there were no dead DEMS for breakfast or chewy soup for dinner. Cockroaches were few, and the ‘facilities’ were regularly flushed. There was no fighting for food. Oh what a lovely war!!

TOPERS 1942

Their bones are sludge now,
who by day drank
raw spirit at a dockside bar
till night, then tanked,
rolled homewards, heavy laden.

Wolf-packs prowled.
Blazing seas paled throbbing starlight.
Yesterworld’s revellers
gulped down free drinks:
crude oil and iced Atlantic chasers.