大象传媒

This is a story by John Side. It has been written by his daughter Lyn Davis who kindly provided it to the Thanet Libraries and UK-Online project during the session at Broadstairs Library.

John Side 鈥� South to Africa

In the June of 1942 I reached the age of 19, and within a few days I received the papers to go for a medical test at Canterbury. I passed with flying colours. On July 2nd I caught a train at midnight from Euston railway station in London; this took me to Dewsbury Yorkshire and on to Ossett. I was in the army. My Home Guard service was to prove very useful. I was put in charge of some new recruits like myself. After picking up all of our uniform, we were housed in an old disused woollen mill, where we were to spend the next 4 weeks training.

It was hard work 鈥� the day began at 6.00am, and you usually got back to your quarters about 5.00pm, however the evenings were free. You usually spent the evenings walking around the town searching for eating places like the NAAFI, Salvation Army or Y.M.C.A. Most chaps wrote home the first few weeks, several were quite homesick the first few days. The weeks passed quickly, and when I passed out I was posted to Signals 鈥� the Royal Artillery. I joined a squad of other lads working on wireless operating, Morse code and flag signalling, the latter was gradually dying out in the army, but not in the navy. At least one day a week was spent learning to drive and soon I was going to be able to drive most British military vehicles and motor cycles. When we were suddenly given a 5 day pass to go home to see our families and army personnel in Great Britain received 10 day passes, so we sensed something was up, and I think we knew we wouldn鈥檛 be seeing our families again for a long time.

We got our passes at 5 o鈥檆lock in the afternoon and arrived in London around midnight. My mate Charlie Avis from Dover and myself went to Ealing where my sister Doris and her family lived. Fortunately for us London did not suffer a blitz that night, and we found ourselves in Ealing about 6.00 in the morning. I knew from earlier visits to my sisters flat, that the front door key could be found on a length of string inside the letter box. We decided to try our luck! We made as much noise as possible, and opened the front door and started to ascend the stairs, when Lionel her husband met us with a poker in his hand 鈥� I shouted who we were, and as you can guess it all ended in a friendly cup of tea.

Immediately the leave over it became quite obvious that we were moving out. After a short lorry journey we boarded a tram, which at 2.00 in the morning took us to Liverpool docks, where we boarded a large troop ship. By the first light of dawn we were to be part of a very large convoy. I counted one aircraft carrier, a battleship and six destroyers, a dozen merchant ships and ourselves completed the flotilla. We appeared to be doing a zigzag course, mostly westwards for about 5 days and guessed we could not be far off the coast of America. During one night our course changed to south, still following a zigzag pattern. Some more days passed till we suddenly started to lose some of our protective fleet and changed course to due east. It looked as if we were steering back to Blighty, but the high temperature said otherwise. Life on board was now monotonous, very little to do apart from queuing for meals, there being some 5,000 troops aboard. We played I spy, but as you can imagine, the cue word always began with S. At night a strict lights out was observed. So anyone wanting a fag had to light up under cover.

We woke one morning to discover that we had stopped outside Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, in a mill pond type sea. We were soon surrounded by the local people, hoping to sell us their wares of bananas, pineapples and other fruits 鈥� as you can guess, being 50 foot above them on the top deck, afforded them impossible sales. We spent the rest of the day motionless whilst stores and water were brought aboard. During that night we moved off, to find, in the morning that we were far out to sea and travelling southwards.

When we arrived at Durban we were going ashore and about to test our sea legs. Before the ship actually stopped, we were surprised and very pleased to see a lady in 鈥榳hite鈥�, welcoming us from the pier with songs like 鈥淩ule Britannia鈥� and 鈥淲hite Cliffs of Dover鈥�. Our stay was short and when the ship set off, it looked as if the whole population of Natal were there on the quayside waving us goodbye, and the lady in white wished us goodbye with the song, 鈥淲e鈥檒l meet again鈥�, ringing in our ears. We passed through the following places:-

FREETOWN - DURBAN 鈥� ADEN 鈥� TEWFIC 鈥� CAIRO 鈥� GIZEH 鈥� ALMAZA 鈥� AMERICA - EL ALAMAIN - MURSAH MATRUM - BUK BUK - SIDI BARANI 鈥� BARDIA 鈥擜JEDABIA - EL ADEM 鈥� SOLUMN 鈥� HALFAYER 鈥� TOBRUK 鈥� DERNA - EL AGAILA - BIR HACHIM 鈥� BENGHASI 鈥� SIRTIE - FORT CAPOZZO - HOMS


At Homs 3 of us were parted from the main part of our regiment for 2 days, we survived on rock hard biscuits and date jam, until some friendly Bedouins traded some eggs for cigarettes. Our problem was how to cook them. I managed to cut a tin of corn beef open and cook the eggs in it by the heat of 2 candles (our only night light), it took about half and hour for each one.

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