大象传媒

as a young man of 18 years old me and some of my mates from north road workshops decided to join the navythis was in 1938 so we were all sent upto newcastle to a camp there befor departing for our respective camps and also thinking we were going to stay togeather through out our navy life how wrong i was , the following day i was sent off to a place called chatham (pemboke bks ) geee how scared was i at this time as i went through the big iron gates to my new world and life .
the one thing that comes to mind as i walked up the hill to my bk room was the 23 psalm yea tho i walk through the vally of the shadow of death i shall fear no evil .
the size of every thing appeared to be so big to me how daunting it was to a young lad such as myself .
I found my room and inside it was just bare walls and bare floors with plain wooden floors with plain wooden furniture tables and benches oh boy what have i let myself infor here i thought to myself any how the room began to fill and i did not feel lonesome for long as i started to talk to what was going to be my new freinds .
after a while there was a couple of us acting on one night just befor supper we were running around and another lad was chaseing me his name i cannot remember sorry but anyway i slipped on a wet floor and went through a blass door ripping my upper arm wide open , so i said get a cooks towel and make a torniquet any how no one knew how to do it so i manged to roll the towel and put it under my arm and stop the bleeding so some one could take me down to the sick bay oh boy did i get it in theneck for self inflicted wounds .
Then the 05 05 1939 i was posted to F.A.A FORD in Sussex where i took up my roll as a cook then in September 03 1939 was broke out i would not have minded so much but it was three day's befor my birthday still never mind as i am a sailor now and thos type of thing dont bother us a pint would have been nice tho seeing as beer was 4d a pint .
the year after 1940 i remember whilst at ford we saw the german planes fly over and start bombing the airfeild about 8 miles away from where we were then the next week it was our turn so we had the air raid shelters for us all but me and a few of the other cooks decided that we would be safer in the kitchen between the stoves and the brick walls which on the other side they had sand bags so we said to ourselfs where safer that in here so during the air raids we would hide in our kitchen , any how the stores for our kichen was like two shed with locks on outside the kitchen this is where the rum ration was kept well it got hit by some of the shrapnel and pierced the barrels so they had to be plugged but not very good as i recall as we would go in and fill our tin mugs and get as high as kites wow it was great for a couple of days drunk as lords we were after all the bombing some bigwigs from admiralty were send to have a look at the camp and becourse of all the drains and the sewers the camp was closed for a while wilst it was put rite again so yes you have guessed it we got sent to another camp guess where mine was yes pembroke bks chatham well serves me rite for being a bad lad .

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