大象传媒

When war was declared on 3rd September I was nineteen years of age and I didn't expect to see the end of it. On 4th September, I was up in Whitehall volunteering for the Navy and of course they weren't interested because they weren't looking for volunteers at that stage. A little later I saw an advert in one of the papers for "supply" and "writer" ratings for the Royal Navy. There were fifty places for each. I applied. I went through the medical examination and the physical examination OK and then went down to Chatham to sit the educational one. Well there were a hundred places and there was about 2,000 lads sitting it at Chatham alone. On the same day they were also sitting at Plymouth, Portsmouth, Rosyth and Edinburgh. So there was probably 10,000 lads looking for a hundred places and obviously I didn't get one. Eventually I got into the Navy - i went in as a boy and came out as a man - very formative years.

On VE Day I was on the way to the Japanese war. I was drafted out during the latter part of the European war. The Navy realised that the ships had to be out to the Far East for the attack on Japan. So what they were doing was sending the ships out through the Suez Canal to a base at Colombo in Ceylon - Sri Lanka now, of course. I didn't get far though. I'd had an inoculation for smallpox on the way out, and I had violent reaction. So I spent VE Day in a base in Egypt recovering from the inoculation. I was feeling pretty miserable for two respects really. I'd not only had three and a half years at sea, I'd already fought one war and I wasn't looking forward to fighting another. I thought it was a bit tough really. Anyway, as you know the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan a few weeks later and the whole thing came to an abrupt halt.

I was in a place called Massawa by the time VJ Day occurred. After this I was drafted home. I went down the Red Sea on a Lighter, a flat-topped boat, with a few hundred other ratings and we finished up in Aden. I waited in Aden for two or three months until there was a ship that came in from India with enough room on it for a few more ratings to go home. And that's how I reached home sometime in February 1946. I had leave due to me but I wasn't particularly keen on taking leave in February in England so I hung about Devonport barracks for a few weeks until I was ready to be demobbed in April or May that year. I had a few weeks leave and a few pounds in my pocket. I'd got married during the war and my father had died, so I went back to the family home in Northbhurch in Hertfordshire and my wife and I stayed with my mother for a few years.

I found it difficult, quite difficult to settle down again after the experience of war. Probably a couple of years, even longer perhaps before I settled. For instance, I lived at Northchurch and I was working and going to Aylesbury on a motorbike every morning. I had an alarm clock that used to go off at 7.30. Well, when the alarm bell went, I was on my feet and ready to run. It was back to action stations, it was the same sort of reaction when the action bells went. You jumped out of your bunk and you got to your action stations. It was probably a couple of years after the war, perhaps even longer when I stopped jumping out of bed when the alarm went off.

Without the war, life would have been very dull, wouldn't it? In the war years I was on a small ship and when I first joined it I was what they called a "hostilities only" rating. Most of the ship's company was either time serving RNR men (Royal Naval Reserve) or RNVR (Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve). Pensioners who had been called back. These fellows were the salt of the earth, they really were you know. You had a terrific esprit de corps with them. You went ashore with them and you drank with them, you fought with them and you mucked in with them.

Initially most of these men were older than me, but as the war went on so the ship paid-off and we got an increasing number of 'hostility-only' ratings that got younger and younger, or older and older. Now the eighteen year olds adapted, but the men in their forties found it very, very hard, most of them were married, they'd got careers behind them, families and homes.
On the corvettes we got an extra one shilling and sixpence a day, what they called hard line money. That's because it was a hard life.

Corvettes were small ships rather like a big trawler. We had a ship's company of seventy and our job was escorting convoys, submarine patrols that sort of thing. We saw a lot of action. One particularly bad night, the convoy was caught by the wolf-packs - the submarines - and five ships went up in flames within a few minutes and we were detailed to pick up survivors. Well, our ship's company was seventy and we picked up roughly one hundred and forty survivors that night so you can imagine what it was like on a small ship with an extra one hundred and forty people you didn't expect. It was my job to feed them, which I did. I was the supply rating, it was my job, and we managed to feed them, give them one meal a day for about five days. We were detached from the convoy because obviously we couldn't fight. One funny incident was that we had four or five ladies who came on board as survivors. One of them was quite old, at least fifty, well, she seemed quite old. I was going round with a gallon measure of rum giving everyone a tot. I gave these ladies a tot and one of them wanted to be sick. Well, I had nothing for her to be sick in except a sea boot. So I picked up this sea boot and she was sick in it. Unfortunately the 'subbie' came down shortly afterwards and put his boots on!

I accepted that some people in Britain had to be in reserved occupations, but one thing that did make me bitter was to see ladies driving round in motor cars after having watched tankers burn. This was a bitter experience I can assure you because you knew fellows were burning in those tankers and they were still using petrol.

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