大象传媒

After about two weeks we were taken off to Liverpool and embarked on a ship called the Duchess of Richmond. This ship hadn鈥檛 been converted to wartime service so we had cabins which were all very comfortable. It was my first experience of an ocean going ship so I was enjoying life.

Eventually we sailed out of Liverpool and joined up with a large number of other ships in a huge convoy, this travelled at a speed to suit the slowest ship so we trickled along at about ten knots which was all right while we were in sheltered waters, but as soon as we got out into the Atlantic we hit an Autumn storm. It was then that I found out the nick name of the ship we were on, it was called the Drunken Duchess. Apparently it was designed for travelling up the St Lawrence seaway, and had a flat bottom which caused it to roll hugely in any sort of weather.

I was hit by the worst bout of seasickness ever. I stayed in my bunk for a fortnight, with only occasional trips to the toilet. To me the voyage seemed endless especially as we still didn鈥檛 know for certain where we were going. Of course there were all sorts of rumours flying around, and people reported seeing the Statue of Liberty, icebergs and various other landmarks, but in truth nobody had any idea where we were or where we were going to. After about four weeks of this we had a crossing the line ceremony and it was quite hot so we knew that we were headed into the South Atlantic. It was then that we arrived at Freetown, it was very hot and very humid and we were due to stay there several days as it was rumoured that there was a U-boat pack waiting for us outside the harbour. We heard the depth charges going off but didn鈥檛 see anything.

Every afternoon the clouds would build up and at about four p.m. it would start to rain and there would be a terrific thunderstorm. This would happen with monotonous regularity, and we were glad to leave eventually.

We sailed on again and after a couple of weeks sighted the unmistakable outlines of Table Mountain and doubts as to out destination were dispelled at last. After a few more days we entered Durban harbour, and were greeted by the South Africans. They certainly put on a good show for us, bands were playing and a girl came and sung to us from the quay side.

After a short while we were disembarked and taken to a transit camp just outside Durban. We now found out that we were going to Southern Rhodesia, and having spent a few days in the transit camp exploring the delights of Durban, we were put on a train and sent off north where we expected to start our flying training. The journey took nearly three days and we travelled through the most spectacular scenery, and finally arrived at Bulawayo where we were taken to another ITW much to our disgust. The time spent here was to prove most frustrating, because we went through the same stuff we had been taught in ITW in England and we felt that we were just wasting time.

It was to prove interesting though living in the tropics. We lived in straw huts on bedboards and straw palliasses and all around us was wild life totally strange to us. Firstly we had a Locust swarm which was to be quite sensational. I was having a bath at the time when I heard an odd sound and the sky suddenly got dark. I stood up and peered out of the window and saw this huge cloud heading towards the camp, it was horrid, I tried to get dressed as quickly as possible but by the time I was nearly dry the bath was half full of huge locusts!

When I got outside I was amazed at the sight, they were everywhere smothering the trees and bushes. In about a half an hour they had gone having eaten everything in sight. The camp looked devastated, not a leaf was to be seen, it looked like midwinter in England!

The next thing was the start of the rainy season, this occurred quite suddenly and caused flying ants to emerge from the ground. Apparently they fly for only a few minutes and then mate and shed their wings. The whole camp had a carpet of discarded ants wings in a matter of minutes, it was a complete cover and looked like snow.

At this time there was in South Africa a lot of anti-British feeling and an organisation called the Ossawa Brandwag or OB鈥檚 existed. They came over the border into Rhodesia and tried to raid our camps. So we had to do guard duty on a regular basis. This was a bit of a chore but helped break the monotony.

After some three months at Bulawayo we at last got our posting to a flying station, and started to learn to fly on Tiger Moths. I had only done a few hours flying when I had to go sick with severe stomach pains. I was found to have appendicitis, I was rushed to hospital and had my appendix removed. This of course caused a hiccup in my flying training, and I was sent off for three weeks recuperation leave. I decided to go back to Durban as I had like it so much when I had passed through on my way to Rhodesia. I stayed at the MCA for a couple of nights but then a South African family took pity on me and invited me into their home for the rest of my stay.

Durban was a wonderland to me coming from wartime Britain, the plentiful supply of food was astounding. I found a wonderful place to have breakfast, this consisted of everything that you could eat, including ham, bacon, eggs, toast, coffee, etc., all for about three and a half pence! The fruit was very cheap, and was the cause of several cases of cauliwobbles.

Many servicemen went to the Jewish Club, which laid on free food and drinks for anyone in a British uniform.

My three weeks soon came to an end and I was off bath to my flying training in Southern Rhodesia. I had to join a course two later than the one that I was on before and so had to make a new set of friends.

Our day was pretty consistent, we were woken at about an hour before dawn by a sergeant running a stick along the corrugated iron that was the wall to our quarters. We were not allowed to fly unless we had something to eat, we were therefore given hot sweet tea and freshly baked currant buns to eat. We were then marched down to the aircraft hangars and then had to get the aircraft out. This was done by picking up it鈥檚 tail and dragging it out to the flight line. We then got kited up and went for our first lesson of the day.

At this time of the morning it was pretty cold in the open cockpit of the Tiger Moth, and we were glad to get on the ground again and go and have a decent breakfast.

Among the people on our course was Max Jaffa, unknown to most of us then, but he had a violin with him and we had some good singsongs in the local NAAFI. There wasn鈥檛 anywhere much to go in the evenings or at the weekends, as we were flying most of the time. We had the odd excursion into the local town of Gwelo, but it was pretty dead, and being young we were always on the lookout for girls, unfortunately there were very few, certainly not enough to please all the servicemen around.

Apart from the flying we had to attend Link trainer exercises, which were an elementary form of simulator which taught us about blind flying. Also periods of lectures on airmanship, aerodynamics, engines, aircraft recognition etc.

We had to complete eighty hours of flying on Tiger Moths before we could proceed on to more modern aircraft, and in order to make life more interesting for us, and I guess to relieve the boredom for the instructors. We were sometimes taken on low flying trips. We had an auxiliary airfield which was just an open field, and sometimes game would come on to this and the instructor would chase them around the airfield with the tail in the air!

We also had training in the cockpits of the aircraft we would be flying later, the Airspeed Oxford and the Harvard. It wasn鈥檛 until we had finished our course on Tiger Moths that we were categorised as to single engine or multi-engined flying. I finished up being categorised for single engine flying so was due to move a few miles away to another airfield in the same locality.

When we had finished our elementary flying training we were given a weeks leave. It wasn鈥檛 long enough to go back to Durban so a group of us decided to go to Victoria Falls. We had been told that there were cheap rates available to servicemen so we booked up and set off.

The journey proved to be quite an experience in itself. The only way to get there was by rail, so we set off from Bulawayo station. The line was a single track and went through bush and semi jungle. We had to stop regularly for water and timber which was used to fire the engine. The trip was to take just over a day and there was no restaurant on board so we bought food from locals who met the train whenever we stopped. At about seven in the evening the train stopped again and all the passengers were invited to get off the train and get on to a series of jeeps parked along the track. We then set off through the bush for what seemed several miles, accompanied by the night noise of the animals in the jungle which sounded quite scary to us.

We eventually arrived at a building totally surrounded by bush in which a generator was humming away, and were served a very good meal during which the generator packed up twice, the jungle seemed to close in and the animal noises seemed to get louder. We retraced our journey back to the train and started off again.

We finally arrived at Victoria the next day and soon found that our journey was well worth while. The hotel was superb, we later found that it was reputed to be the best hotel in the Southern Hemisphere. Presumably because of the war the place wasn鈥檛 very busy and we were looked after marvellously. The hotel was about half a mile from the Falls, and in beautiful grounds, baboons would come out of the bush and scrounge titbits from the hotel guests.

The hotel was some five hundred feet above the Falls and guests got there in a most unusual way. There was a narrow gauge rail line and a couple of small open coaches with canvas canopies, but no engine. We were a bit mystified by this but got on the coaches and to our surprise a local lad put his shoulder to the coach and off we went down hill with the lad applying a touch of brake when necessary. We enjoyed the ride down but wondered if we would have to walk back up. Having had our trip around the falls we soon found out that we didn鈥檛 have to walk back up we just sat in the coach and two local lads pushed us back up which was quite an effort and we felt like getting out and helping.

The Victoria Falls were absolutely spectacular, no words can describe the awesome sight or the huge noise of the falling water. We went back again and again whilst we were there and were sorry when our week was up and we had to return to our flying.

We were to report to Thornhill, an airfield nearer to the local town of Gwelo, there was much excitement about our change to the Harvard aircraft. It was great to be in a modern aircraft with a closed in cockpit and electric earphones to talk to the instructor. In the Tiger Moths we had gadgets called Gosport Tubes which consisted of a length of rubber tubing down which were shouted instruction. This aircraft had a bit of a fearsome reputation regarding its landing capabilities. It had a tail wheel which, if you applied too much rudder achieved a caster action, and if you were too heavy on the rudder just after landing caused what was called, graphically, a ground loop. This caused the aircraft to swing violently and usually to dig a wing tip into the ground. This in fact didn鈥檛 seem to be a problem to any of our course and was probably a rumour set up by previous courses.

We set about learning to handle the aircraft and we had to get altogether a hundred and sixty hours in before we left. These were split up into two halves. The first half was spent learning to handle the Aircraft and to put into practice what we had been taught in our classes. We couldn鈥檛 wait to start the second half because this was concerned with the operational aspects of flying, this consisted of formation flying, dog fighting, air to air and air to ground firing, and bombing, together with some long distance navigation exercises. Practically all of this was done flying solo, and was all very enjoyable.

At the end of our course on Tiger Moths we were promoted to Acting Sergeants Unpaid or ASU鈥檚 as we were called. This gave us an entry into the Sergeants Mess which was an immediate improvement in our living standards. We now had rooms between two of us instead of living in barracks, and eating and living in the Sergeants Mess was quite splendid after the Airmans Mess we had become accustomed to. The food was better and we could spend our bit of leisure in relative comfort.

One thing presented us with trouble in our new accommodation, this was bed bugs which seemed to thrive in the climate, and we had to move out whilst they were killed with cyanide. This was OK for about a month and then they appeared again. The weather was always producing the unexpected, whilst we generally had good flying weather, sometimes a tropical storm would brew up, and on one occasion we had a hail storm which was quite frightening. The hailstones were as big as cricket balls and could kill you if you were hit by one, and they did serious damage to our corrugated iron huts.

An odd thing about the course on Harvares was that when we were half way through the course we qualified for our wings but were not presented with them until the course was ended. This was of course a very proud moment, we were presented with them by the Station Commander, but the occasion was rather spoilt by being asked to sign for then immediately afterwards.

We were given wings leave at the end of the course, and because we had enjoyed the Victoria Falls so much we immediately headed back there, and again had a wonderful time.

After our leave we were put on a train back to South Africa, and had a riotous journey, this time to Capetown. The journey took three days and about twenty of us on the train caused almost a riot. When we arrived we were put in a Transit Camp and left there to await a passage somewhere. There was endless speculation as to our destination, and we passed quite a few hours trying to figure out where we might be going. We did manage to get into Capetown a few times, and when we were finally told that we were to embark the next day we decided that in case we were going back to Britain we had better enjoy a good meal while we could.
We went to a restaurant called Del Monicos in the centre of Capetown and after a long look at the menu decided that we would have a mixed grill. The platter that appeared was as big as I have ever seen and had everything on that it was possible to grill, it took us about two and a half hours to get through it and we waddled back to the camp.

The ship we were embarked on turned out to be an American one called the Mariposa, and we hadn鈥檛 been on board more than a few hours when we discovered that the Americans had some funny ideas about feeding people on troopers. There were only two meals a day, all taken on a roster so that we were eating at the most outrageous times. Our first meal was at eleven in the morning, by which time we were starving and the second was at four thirty in the afternoon. However the helpings were huge and you cold have as much as you liked of most things so we took to acquiring a stock of food to see us through the day and night.

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