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This story has been entered onto the peoples war website by John Warner on behalf of Bert Vickery, the author who fully understands and accepts the sites terms and conditions.

Now that I’ve gone to sea so many stories came up, some very humorous, some a bit sad, but I’m sure you can look forward to some interesting stories come the future.

And now we go to November 1942. I joined the training ship Vindicatrix. I went on board as a sixteen year old boy and four months later I came off a sixteen year old man, succh was the hard training that we went through, and the food I’m sure wasn’t fit for human consumption, and it prepared us for what lay ahead of us when were on the sea. Whilst on the old Vindicatrix I looked forward to Marys’ parcels twice a week.

But my first ship was a Saw Saville refrigerated old vessel. Holds means h o l d s. She carried meat, lamb from New Zealand, but we went out via New York and Panama. When in we loaded up with ore or ammunition to take to Australia to be shipped off to that awful war that was going on in the Far East. and this old ship was called the Mahona (?), which in Maori language meant ‘The Great White Lady’, nothing could be nearer the truth. Or far from the truth I should say. She was a 14,000 ton coal burner, and she was my home for six months. All sorts of experiences happened to a rooky deck boy, such as myself, in this six months. But I’m only going to mention two incidents; while being on board there were two colourd firemen. Now, unlike the Royal Navy the stokers were named firemen. They were brothers, but they must have had two different dads, because one was a big muscular chap with the usual type curly hair, flat nose, and large lips; the other was small, black hair, slick, and the tiniest of moustaches. He was a ringer for Nat ‘King’ Cole. I was to find out what good musicians they was.

Two days out from Liverpool the ship was one of thirteen in a convoy. I came off watch one evening and on my way down to the foc’sle, which was forward, I could hear these two lads playing and singing like the famous Inkspots, so I went up on the foc’sle end, where they were playing, just to listen. Well I couldn’t help joining in with them. Well my efforts were rewarded and appreciated by these two brothers to such an extent that they told me that they had a plan and that had put together, concerning two guitars they had seen in New York on a previous trip. They had set their hearts on earning enough dollars to pay for these two guitars. We knew that we were destined to go to New York because the cook, who was known as the galley wallah was a friend of ‘the old man’, the Captain. When we arrived at New York the two brothers took me to the music shop where these guitars were on sale, a hundred and fifty dollars each. They had had a sub from the chief steward, ten dollars, but me being a deck boy I only got five dollars sub, so between us we could only look and admire these guitars.

Anyway we went New York, Sydney, Melbourne, Wellington, Littleton, which is near Christchurch, Southern Island, New Zealand, and at Bluff, where a six foot two, eighteen stone Maori girl learned me three chords on a little wooden ukelele.

(I diverse for a minute; Mary’s been wanting to kill her for the past sixty one years for that’s how long that she’s been putting up with my ukelele playing.)

The brothers and I had played in all the seamens’ missions, and also in a couple of night-clubs and all these different venues that we could that the ship called into, so by the time we reached New York on the way home we had accumulated six hundred dollars. We went ashore, the three of us,making straight for that music shop, where instead of buying the 150 dollar guitars they had enough to purchase two Selmer guitars. This type of guitar didn’t have a hole in the middle, like most acoustic guitars, but they had the music clef cut out either side.

Well, when we set sail for home, that was Liverpool you all know, the first night out they played and sang on the foc’sle engine, with these lovely new Selmer guitars and the sound was so deafening from their own acoustic guitars. Well everything went fine until two days out from Liverpool I was sitting on my bunk when one of the deck boys mates of mine said, “Bert, your two mates have fallen out and there one hell of a fight in the firemens’, that’s the stokers’ quarters. I was brave enough to go in their sleeping quarters only to find they had smashed these two lovely Selmer guitars over one anothers heads. I was sixteen years old when I witnessed this happening, and I could not get my head around how after all their efforts to obtain those guitars their mentality was so neglected, having been at sea for so many years that they could not restrain themselves from destroying those most precious possessions.

Now my next ship was an old tramp steamer, also a coal burner, its’ name was the SS Maycrest, she was so old that they re-named her, or we did, The Mayflower; you remember that was the first ship to take the immigrants over to America. She was sold to the Greeks pre-war, and we borrowed the bloody thing back for the war! How we ever survived the poor condition she was in one will never know, but one good thing was that we had to call into Lisbon due to a steering fault, whilst out in the Bay of Biscay. Everybody says that they go through the Bay of Biscay, huh, they don’t, they go on the outside of the Bay of Biscay. Anyway at the time Portugal was neutral, but the goods in the stores were out of this world. Things that we had not seen in England for years. Mary and I planned to get married at the end of this trip, so what little money I had, bearing in mind that I was now an ordinary seaman, I bought all sorts of things for our bottom drawer, and I paid of that awful old tub on 12 April 1944.

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