大象传媒

36b - "There was one very bright event in this second sojourn at Manchester. There
were not enough billets on the camp so available rooms in the district were
commandeered and the owners given tuppence per night, the equivalent of 1
pence now, for putting up a camp bed, or beds, in one or more of their rooms
God was really with me. I was sent to see a Mr and Mrs Hickingbottom. They
only wanted one airman and said there was no need for camp beds, they
gave me one of their sons' rooms as they were away serving in North Africa.
They were not meant to feed, only to sleep us, but not them. I had my evening
meal with them and also had cooked breakfast before I left in the morning. As
I said they really were sent from heaven. Their theory was that if they looked
after someone else's sons then someone in the world would look after theirs.
Although in the circumstances I doubt whether their sons found someone like
their mum and dad in the middle of the desert. It did however work for varying
people who needed a billet in Rugby, because my mother was another 鈥楳rs.
Higginbottom' and hence received equally royal treatment. So as occasionally
in these jottings I have pontificated I shall do so again. The Good Book does
say "Do unto others as you would have others do to you". Not a bad rule of
life.
Manchester and Mrs Hickingbottom, especially her Saturday night suppers| could not last forever. So at long last, in the middle of May, my very unreal war was about to end. One early morning, whether living in or out of camp, we had to parade on the main square at nine o'clock. We were then told that we would probably be leaving that evening and were given two hours to make sure that we had got all of our kit together and that it had been carefully packed following completely my hated drill corporals oft repeated instructions. Sticking out of the top of the tropical bag was my te-pee. It would not take a genius in the general public to realise that a troop convoy was about to leave our shores and that it's destination was the South. Although many years afterwards when reading my records, which I had sent for from Gloucester, I saw that in the posting column there was for May 17th in large capital letters CANADA! We left the Park early evening to go to the station from when we joined the troop train. A few hours later we were at Greenock to embark in a United States troopship called the Argentina. It had been a peacetime cruise ship for 500 passengers. Now it had 5000 officers and other ranks on board.
Each cabin, which had been for two passengers, now held 50 of us in ten tier blocks of 5 bunks in each tier. In fact that meant each one of us had about two feet of space. I was on the next to the top. Some wag on a previous trip had drawn a nude female on the bottoms of the bunk above so that every time its occupant moved so did the drawing make suggestive movements. It was not only the sleeping that was poor; so were the washing and toilet arrangements. Not for the first time, nor would it be the last time, there were too many bodies, too many bodily functions competing for too few facilities. There were always queues and never any privacy. The only water available for washing clothes as well as bodies, was seawater for which we were issued with seawater salt soap, a commodity I have never seen or heard of since. Skin cleanliness came only from the removal of its first layer!
Meals were twice a day and by some ingenious arrangement twelve hours apart Again very long queues. When you finally arrived at the serving hatch you collected your metal tray with its varied size compartments; not that that was thought to be of any importance to the server! Slop anywhere on the tray would suffice - porridge, kipper, bacon, bread all landed on top of each other. There were no tables, rather counters at which one stood. As these were presumably for the average height then the short could hardly reach and the tall, like me, bent double.
The next snatched memories I fear again point to the class war, in this case of officers and men. My readers will be beginning to think chips are starting to grow on my shoulder. There were three decks: the upper deck was for the officers and most of their rooms opened on to that deck. The remaining two were for the 5000 other ranks, which included of course we trainee aircrew. However after the first two or three days at sea the officers claimed they had not enough room so commandeered half of the next deck. In other words as far as deck space were concerned 500 officers had one half and 5000 of we lesser mortals had the other.
There was a similar distinction as far as feeding arrangements were concerned. They used the traditional dining-room, sat at tables for four. We fed in what I presume was once the crews mess, had two meals a day and spent much of the 12 hours between the meals queuing.

A little later an opportunity arose to serve as a waiter in the Officer's Mess so I took it. This meant that when their meals finished I had the same as them in the kitchen I was also was able to put their more wholesome leftovers in bags to take to my friends.

I have spent some hours trying to remember what we did other than queue for showers, toilets and meals. I fear without much success. Where you could we made some attempt to keep fit, but because space was restricted so were activities. Tug of war became the in thing. I suppose we aircrew were fitter than most and so we became quite proficient at it. When at Durham in the previous year, because of my rather skinny frame (at 6'3" I was under 11 stone) I acted as the college team coach. I did the same for the aircrew teams and became very good at it. In the end we won the other ranks competition and I鈥檓 delighted to say later thrashed the winning officers team pulling them all over the deck.
When we crossed the equator we had the crossing ceremony with a limited number of press-ganged men being ducked in a large canvas pool. The rest of us were given certificates. Somewhere in the exhibits attached to these notes you should find my certificate. A little tattered but not bad after 60 years. Why didn't I save everything?

Once again I should be able to remember more, after all it was a unique experience, but I cannot. We were at sea some six weeks, apart from a brief stay in Freetown harbour. The rumours were that submarines were in the area and that they knew that it was largely a troopship convoy, a prize indeed if they could sink one. If I am forced to give a number to the convoy or the escorts then I would say at least half a dozen troopships, double that number of other merchant vessels and on the escort side a cruiser and three destroyers. We were not, of course, allowed to disembark and go into Freetown, but there were frantic attempts to throw coins into the native boats in exchange for pineapples to be hoisted up on the rope or even string thrown down to them. I did not indulge, thank goodness, because those who did
suffered severe diarrhoea problems and believe me toilet facilities were not
adequate for that! I cannot remember the destination of the other troopships
but presumably many were due in the Far East.
We finally arrived at Durban on the 21st June 1943. We were met by, and I
believe it was traditional, a lady at the end of the docking pier with the most
marvellous voice singing typical patriotic traditional songs.
After disembarkation we entrained to a transit camp at Clarewood. Yet again
conditions were pretty basic. We were given two horrible blankets and slept
on concrete floors and toilet facilities showed no improvement on the low level
of privacy which I had seemingly encountered throughout my career so far.
This time each lavatory consisted of 48 holes in a long concrete slab, 24 on
each side, no partitioning, but this time with the great advantage of
permanently running water passing underneath. After each convoy arrived the
transit camp was absolutely full so there were queues even for those facilities.
Suddenly having all the fruit one could eat after years of rationing meant the
queues never dispersed. If your imagination can stretch far enough then you
will appreciate the guy who screwed up rolls of paper lit them and put them in
the stream flowing under all those bare bums.
Whilst we were there we were put in the hands of army physical training
instructors. Two of the activities certainly did not appeal to me. One was self-
defence and a particular instructor who seemed to enjoy shouting at the top of
his voice - "lofty" every time I was near enough to him, delighted in throwing
me to the ground to land feet away from him. The other activity, which I simply
hated because I was dead scared, was to go on the assault course. Climbing
some of those structures, walking along the top of extremely narrow planks
did not appeal to my fear of heights and the subsequent wobbly legs. In the
end I became quite adept at getting to the end of the assault course without
anyone noticing that I had run round many of the obstacles.
I did go into Durban on several occasions but don't remember who I went with or what we did there. If any of you go to Durban, and it will then be presumably 60 or 70 years since I was there, I wonder if you will still find the aquarium and reptile house. Why I wanted to go into the latter goodness only knows. The beaches I think were gorgeous, but whether I swam or not I do no know, presumably not, because fear of sharks was very prevalent. We had to be careful about where we swam because coloured people were not allowed on the same part of the beaches as we were. This was a prejudice that I was to meet many times later out there and also read of it still in our newspapers today. There was one remarkable small world story from this period. I was sitting in an unlit train one night coming back in from the city to the transit camp. I suppose there must have been some minutes before the train moved off and the lights came on. There sitting opposite me was a boy, I think called White, who had been in the sixth form with me some two years earlier. He was in the army and thought that eventually he would move up to North Africa. All in all I was at the transit camp for four weeks and moved to number 48 Air School at East London towards the end of July.

That was for my ground training and because much of its contents were fairly academic I did well in it. Although the course was intensive we did have time off and there were reasonable sporting activities. Once again my prowess as a tug of war coach came into play and my course team won the finals with ease. I also played one or two games of rugby football and succeeded in getting my eye cut needing several stitches. That seemed to give me a macho appearance because it was suddenly easier to find partners at the dances we went to. On one occasion shall we say a rather mature lady almost literally took me in hand. I went back for coffee at her flat only to
find to my absolute horror and fear some few minutes after being in varying compromising positions that her husband was asleep in the bedroom. Whatever we were doing stopped. My retreat was instant and speedy! The sea was in walking distance from the camp and on one rather homesick occasion I remember thinking that theoretically it would be possible for me or a message to go on or in the water round the varying seas into the Bristol Channel up the Avon and on to Rugby unimpeded. There to reach Delmah Leeson - my unrequited love from my school days.
Earlier I said the course was mainly academic, or perhaps I should say theoretical. I fear I cannot remember all the subjects studied and certainly cannot remember their content. Obviously the main topic was navigation. I took to this like a duck takes to water. The fundamental basis of all navigation was the 鈥榯riangle of velocities'. From our instruments we knew the airspeed and course of the aircraft and from meteorological information we knew the direction and speed of the wind. The resultant vector was the speed of the aircraft and its direction relative to the ground. These were called track and ground speed. If I ever get as far as putting all this into a book form I will try to draw one or two diagrams. Another wretched computer task I shall have to learn; perhaps when I learn to print the photographs that I still have to illustrate parts of this talk. However in case I never get that far let me try to explain in words. If the aircraft were in a huge block of space forever then the course shown on the aircraft compass and the speed shown on the airspeed indicator would be all that there is. If the craft was a balloon and had no power then that course and speed would be identical to the wind. So two sides of a triangle are created - by the direction and speed of the aircraft flying in a block of wind which itself has a speed and direction. The third side of the triangle created is the path of the aircraft relative to the earth. A simple, but perhaps not very good explanation would be if the aircraft was flying directly into the wind and its speed was the same as the wind then relative to the earth the aircraft will be stationary and remained precisely above a point on the earth and remain there. The problem of course is that the speed and direction given by the met office was rarely absolutely correct so one needed to check whenever one could one's exact position. This could be done in a variety of ways, but the main ones we were taught were visual sightings, radio or radar direction lines, and at night the stars and a complex set of calculations with which we were provided - a bit like a large book of logarithms. Looking back I am staggered that I could go from A to B reasonably successfully using my sextant and the stars. Now apart from the North Pole I cannot remember any of the stars that I used. In daylight the position of the sun had its use.
We also learnt the theory of bombing which included knowledge of a bombsight used and knowledge of the shape and weight of the bombs that we would have to do drop. More maths! This again was based on tables of
calculations derived from those weights and shapes. When first released the bomb would be travelling at the same speed as the aircraft, but later the effect of gravity would increase the speed vertically and decrease it horizontally I remember that gravity was 32 feet per second per second until they reached what was called terminal velocity and one would know that for each type of bomb.
Some time was also given to the use of radio equipment and here I must say I found things more difficult, particularly knowledge of the Morse code and the ability to send, receive and interpret messages. All I remember now is SOS!
Last of the main theory subjects was meteorology, important because a sudden and unexpected deterioration was life and death. Often, to press on when it had become certain that a target would be obliterated by cloud could be foolhardy.

Similarly realising that fog would occur in landing areas or that there could be potential changes in height of cloud were likely to give rise to most important in-flight decisions.

The course had lasted three months and we ended with a course dinner at Deal's Hotel (I wonder if it is still there) in East London on Friday the 15th of October 1943 and I still have the menu for the occasion. There are over 20 names on it but I cannot put a face to any one of them. One thing that you must look out for is a poem especially written by me (!) and printed on the menu. Sounds very puerile now. I wonder if other course members still have a menu and can conjure up my face - the poet, and can recall my face whey they read it!
Five days later we left East London to go to 45 Air School at Outdtshoorn in
the Cape. .

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