大象传媒

On the Way Home

Eventually, of course we did leave. We went down to the harbour and joined the French liner, SS 脦le de France. It had been converted to carrying troops. We left Alexandria eventually, went through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea and down the coast of Africa, and called in at Cape Town for a short while, but we weren't allowed off the ship, of course. We went in there for refuelling and were then supposed to come straight up to Freetown on the way home, but they found as we left for Freetown, that there were some submarines on our route in the Atlantic. So, as we weren't escorted because we could do about eighteen or twenty knots, we went straight over to Rio de Janeiro. Now, Rio, of course wasn't in the war, and there was no blackout so every port we'd been to had had a blackout, yet the first sight we had of Rio was a glow on the horizon and then eventually as we went through the entrance of this wide bay, we were astounded to see the whole shore line was neon signs of all colours, flashing. We were so used to being dark that we were almost shouting, "Put that light out!" On the left hand side was the Sugar Loaf Mountain, with the large figure of Christ with his arms outstretched. We left the next morning and went across the Atlantic again into Freetown eventually. As we entered the harbour and the boom was about to close behind us, a German submarine surfaced, the conning tower opened and a German officer came up with a white flag. So obviously, they had taken advantage of the boom opening up for us, to follow us in submerged. They'd evidently run out of fuel or for some reason had had enough, anyway. After refuelling, we left Freetown and went across the bay and the English Channel and eventually reached our homeport.

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