大象传媒

This story has been submitted by Bernard Deere and is added to the site with his permission.

n autumn 1944...back from leave sent to Liverpool. Of course nobody tells you anything especially if you're just a Signalman.... so we didn't know where we were going. But we were in a transit camp for a couple of weeks in Liverpool and then we were taken down to the port for embarkation. I was part of 6,000 souls who went aboard the steamship Otranto which normally plied to the Far East carrying 400 passengers. We were a fortnight in the Liverpool roads waiting for a convoy to form up...and then off we went. In fact we were the first convoy to go through the Straits of Gibraltar since 1940/41 when the Italians and Germans closed the Med off to our shipping.
From the time we boarded in Liverpool until the time we disembarked in Bombay it was six weeks. Food was short, we were all hungry on board... on each deck we slept in hammocks head to toe. The hammocks were taken down in daytime....but at night you slept head to toe right through. An incredible feat of organisation that there was question of any disease or anything and the ship was spotlessly clean. The captain and the commanding officer would do their rounds quite early in the morning....and you had to be up, shaved. You'd be standing in a queue for a cold shave in sea water at five a.m. in the morning to be on parade for something like 7 a.m. You had to have a good routine to maintain the day to day running of the ship.

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