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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Catherine Blandford and has been added to the website on behalf of Mr Geoffrey Barnes with his permission and he fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

When I was fifteen I was an apprentice fitter for Hubert Scott Paine at the British Power boat Company right on the water’s edge next to Imperial Airways. We were always being bombed because flying and torpedo boats were built there. I was a coppersmith and so wasn’t called up. But then my apprenticeship came to an end and I WAS called up. They were after metal workers and you had to do a test piece of work. Well I was a coppersmith and that’s a different skill so it wasn’t perfect but they let me in because Scott Paine trained me. That meant I got paid 4/6 a week instead of 2/6. I was enrolled with the Fleet Air Arm on HMS Vengeance though the ship was run by the Royal Navy. I can still remember my number — LFX 768000. We went to Norway, Ireland, France. Vengeance was sold to the Brazilians after the war but I heard it’s been bought back and may return to the Hamble.
I worked on the aircraft on board the ship. Pilots were being trained to land on the ships but they often crashed. If the plane was too bad to repair it was thrown over the bow - never the stern mind - so it would break apart in the waves and not sink to the bottom in one piece else it’d get tangled with the rudder. Funny to think of it now, all those sections of aircraft lying on the sea bed.

Good, Clean Fun

Some of the best times to be had were at the local cinema. It was a hut really, with a tin roof so when it rained you couldn’t hear the film. Cost 4d to get in. But the man who collected the tickets was a misery. Sourbutts was his name and sour was his nature. He’d always be warning us not to be noisy even if we filed past in strict silence. And he smoked a long pipe — never out of his mouth. One day five of my friends and I all bought long pipes, and we filed past, our pipes smoking at the corner of our mouths just like his, a miserable expression on our face, shoulders hunched, neck rounded, head thrust forward. He never spoke a word. He just took the money and handed out the tickets. We kept quiet right till we got into our seats and then - you can bet we were noisy!

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