Open Writing

As each session of hostilities between nations ends, heaps of military junk have accumulated, piles of damaged, discarded, obsolete armaments which somehow have to be disposed of so that more modern devices may succeed them, devices with the capabilities of killing more people, preferably cheaper and hopefully quicker than previously. Then their inventors may be lauded and awarded national honours.

Be that as it may, January 1946 found HMS Vengeance lying alongside at Woolloomooloo, Sydney Harbour, with myself as a crew member. It was at that time that the idea was hatched of employing her as a hearse for ‘dead’ aircraft along with their dismembered parts then lying around the Sydney suburbs. Thus a regular graveyard shuttle service was undertaken with the ‘deceased’ being loaded onto the carrier’s flight deck, the remains of fighter planes ranging from wood and canvas varieties to the then modern types, which had in some way been worsted in their lifespan and were by that time considered suitable only as pollutants of the sea. Aircraft bits and pieces also helped fill the gaps between the cadavers as they littered the flight deck of Vengeance.

Once loaded in this manner the ship put to sea and when far enough out and presumably in sufficiently deep water, reverse gear was engaged and the flight deck crew manhandled the debris over the bows into the watery grave. How many trips of this shuttling service were made I do not recall, but they seemed never ending.

I do remember all souvenir cannibalising of such crates being forbidden to the ship’s crew after someone misguidedly tampered with the undercarriage retraction system on a Corsair fighter plane, so that when its turn came to be conveyed to the deep, sadly belly-flopped. Fortunately no one had their feet underneath at the time. On another occasion all that was carried were forty aero engines unused and with transporter seats still intact. Funereally black and shiny they looked as they went to their final resting place.

Eventually our dumping of the dead was ended. Perhaps that was when envious eyes were seen to be ogling the harbour bridge as possible future cargo, and it was thought the time had arrived for the ship to sail on, which she did and resumed deck-landing trials of her own aircraft, some of which were added to the underwater cemetery.

At this time an opportunity arose for me to take advantage of an early discharge under ‘B’ scheme release. It would have meant frog-hopping back to England via transit camps. Troop ships were bad enough. Transit camps were worse. Besides, there was a ‘buzz’ -- Naval jargon for rumour -- that we were destined for Cape Town. Those two combined reasons were sufficient for me to turn down the offer of early freedom. I was in no hurry. My future was unmapped territory. Nor were there any strong home times, no close family drawing me back. I was a free spirit. The world was my oyster. I was being paid to explore it, and we all are aware of what a slimy mess an oyster is!

As events transpired, however, we did not go to Cape Town. Surprise, surprise, we went to Hong Kong instead! So much for mess deck ‘buzzes’. It was my third visit to the Colony and as it turned out, my last. I have never been back, nor do I have any desire to do so. From what I see on film, the whole place has been ruined by modernity. Temples to mammon rise like stalagmites across the city, hindering views of the hinterland hills.

Time had moved on by then. 1946 was passing by, and we were ordered to sail for Japan and the port of Kobe, since it had been decided that our educations should be improved by way of a visit to Hiroshima where we might view the then ultimate limit of man’s unleashing of nature. Taking passage on a drifter and sailing the 50 miles through the straits dividing the islands of Honshu and Shikoku, we docked at Kure, a port on the outskirts of what had once been the city of Hiroshima.

It was August, one year after the holocaust, a year since I had first heard the news when aboard the Wrangler and wondered what it all meant. I was about to find out. 70,000 inhabitants killed, 70,000 wounded on the sixth of August, 1945.

The one-time city’s streets and roads had been cleared, displaying a gridiron of rubble-filled enclosures. Flatness spread across the field of vision with the exception of the easily recognisable skeleton domed structure, preserved for posterity as memorial to that fateful event.

For ourselves at the time, all we could do was wander around the barrenness. Each pathway was much as another. Each angle of sight presented the same prospect of desolation and destruction. Amongst that dilapidation we discovered what had once been an engineering works with, by then, its machinery remains rusted over, yet still bearing that famous logo ‘Made in England’. There were no people around, no wildlife. We seemed to be the only wanderers in that man-made wilderness.

Back at sea once more our meanderings finally ended in Sydney, where I became entitled to seven days leave, a privilege I took advantage of, since hospitality was assured further north where my previous period of freedom had been so enjoyably spent, leaving me with hazy memories of alcoholic jollifications. Being a glutton for punishment, I was prepared to imbibe in a second session.

Calling briefly on my previously accommodating friends the Tillitykis in Newcastle, I boarded the Kempsy Mail train and rode off into the night. A night of humid hotness, so much so that, as the railway compartment was empty of passengers, I am left with the vision of myself with coach window lowered and my stockinged feet stuck out to catch the cooling breeze as we rattled along. Fortunate perhaps that there were no mail collections from wayside gantries, or I could have found a post bag dangling from my legs. The downhill rocking and rolling of the train reminded me of my approaching destination, Stratford.

Memories of my stay there are hazy sober ones, well mostly, but a jaunt into the forest I do recall. Accompanying the log-truck driver one day, our route first took us through pastureland with the tree line skirting various meadows. Beyond one such pasture, squatted on a tree stump at the edge of the woodland sat a quaintly attractive Australian kingfisher, a kookaburra -- the laughing jackass. But that one kept its beak shut as we drove by.

Entering the gloomy forest along a rutted track, we were greeted by one of the loggers who stepped out from amongst the undergrowth. When we stopped he proudly displayed a bootlace snake, perhaps a foot in length, very poisonous and, at the time, very dead. The logger dangled it from a stick he was holding, saying he had caught it the night previous. How or under what circumstances I never learned. The lumberjacks camped out amongst the trees during the week, returning home at the weekend, not an occupation that appealed to me after I had learned of their camping companions.

I recall re-visiting the outlying farm as I had previously done and that my last night at Strafford consisted of drinks and joviality, then eating passion fruit on my return train journey. I also clearly recall presenting myself on board ship and announcing to the regulating officer how proud I was to have returned within one hour of my leave expiring. Then came the blow. I learned I should have reported back the previous day. Consequently I was 24 hours adrift. Outcome: commander’s report the next day. Result of that encounter: seven days stoppage of leave and pay. I wasn’t too inconvenienced. The evenings I spent as a peeping Tom by viewing households on the harbour headlands, this through a telescope obtained from a Japanese field gun. Time passed quickly.

Eventually the day drew near when we were to bid farewell to Sydney for the last time. Prior to that, however, a farewell dance was arranged to which all the surrogate families of us Pommies were invited, mine included. Bidding them goodbye the following day we rejoined Vengeance which, amidst fluttering streamers and with many sad souls on the dockside, their tears streaming, we sailed out from that great natural harbour. I carried with me lasting memories of the intermittent six months I had spent in New South Wales.

It was goodbye to the communities of Stratford and Gloucester, to the Monkerai farming district with its chirping cicadas and chattering budgerigars, away from the Dungog Forestry to hear no more the kookaburra’s cackling notes nor the whine of power saws in the timber yard. The owner of the sawmill, my host Mr. Turner, is long gone, as will be my chauffeur the baker along with his daily bread round. Who carries the local news there today? Where now the wooded grove in which bread and cheese was shared in the company of the baker’s timid guests, the ‘guanas’?

The Kempsy Mail still runs its nightly service, I recently learned, whilst parts of the main Pacific Highway are washed away as they ever were when annual storms visit the area. The Pacific rollers continue to beat along Sydney’s coastal fringe. It is decorum in beachwear that has been eroded. Gone the days when men were obliged to wear skirted swimming trunks or vacate the beach, whilst two-piece swimsuits for their counterparts carried with them the veiled threat of tar and feathers. Even men wearing shorts on city trams was cause for heated debates by newspaper columnists and letter pages.

Thus it was that a further phase of my naval service came to an end. We sailed north and in so doing changed zones of operations, transferring from the Pacific Fleet into the East Indian Fleet, fresh lands and waters new.