大象传媒

February 1939, Attended a social evening with the Youth Hostels Association in St Michaels Hall Lincoln and was introduced to a young girl by the name of Iris Crookes. Thereby hangs a tale and we are still associating 65 years later.
Early May 鈥� When 110 Squadron moved to Wattisham, a pal of mine serving on the same flight as myself, joined me in travelling up to Lincoln at weekends to see his girlfriend while I stayed with Iris鈥檚 family. One particular weekend we met at Lincoln station yard with the two girls on the Sunday afternoon waiting for the train to return to Wattisham. We carried on talking as we usually did until we heard a train pulling in to the station. George my pal said, 鈥淚s that our train鈥�,? looking at me. I thought about it for a while and then said to George, 鈥淲hat a pity, our train has pulled out without us鈥� and we all had a laugh. We eventually returned to our squadron on Monday afternoon and on Tuesday morning, George and I were marched up in front of the C.O. and were duly given four days C.B. This entailed getting dressed in full uniform with packs filled and reporting to the guardroom at least four times a day. The time soon passed and we both felt it had been worthwhile for it gave us an extra day with the girls. So ends one of the tales connected with the simple days with Iris.
February 1942 During the first week in February , I received my overseas kit and moved up to a holding station just outside Liverpool. It was not a very comfortable place and we were pleased to get loaded on to a boat for the journey abroad. We sailed out early one morning to join a convoy of about a dozen boats nearly all of which had been commandeered from civilian shipping lines. Our boat was quite small, only 10,000 tons, an ex Dutch east Indies boat with wide open decks to attract cool breezes called Sibajak
Of course when we got started, all set up in convoy with our protecting navy boats around us, a violent storm blew up and it lasted for two weeks. I always remember going out on deck one day and looking over the rail and seeing a Navy Destroyer quite a few feet higher than me with its propeller turning in fresh air. In no time at all, the destroyer dropped down below me and I was looking down into the funnel. As I said, this storm lasted a full fortnight and many of the lads suffered badly from sickness. I was very fortunate and it didn鈥檛 bother me at all. I feel sure, that our boat must have been the slowest boat in the convoy for having almost crossed the Atlantic we turned South for the next week and then went east to Anchor off Freetown in Sierra Leone, West Africa. We only stayed here for a day, just long enough to take survivors from a ship which had been torpedoed a few days earlier and then headed out into the Atlantic again. We were told that there were U boats near, fortunately, our escorts were able to disperse them and soon afterwards, the convoy turned South and headed for Cape Town. By the time docked in Cape Town we were into April.
As we approached South Africa, we heard that the Japs had taken Singapore so we would be changing ships and going north to Suez. I shall never forget our entry into Cape Town harbour; the weather was now much warmer, a beautiful April day with the sun shining on Table Mountain and lighting up all the beautiful buildings of the city. We arrived during the afternoon and were kept busy sorting out of kit bags from the ship鈥檚 hold after which they were taken along the docks to another boat, - The Begensfiord, - for the journey up to Suez. The next treat was seeing all the houses lit up, and the street lights and shop lights all on and, better still,- no noise of Jerry bombers overhead.
The next day brought a lot more surprises,- soon after breakfast, we were aware of a lot of civilians entering the dock area and when we were allowed out of the gates, the people split up into families and collected two or three of us and entertained us for the whole day, and that included some lovely meals that we had not experienced for years.

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