大象传媒

Another instalment

Troop Ship
We Travelled to Liverpool in the usual overcrowded troop train after an overnight
journey of stopping and starting, and embarked on the good ship 鈥淒urban Castle鈥� formerly a luxury liner of the Union Castle Line plying in happier days between Tilbury and Capetown South Africa.
Our draft staggered out of the train and made our way to the docks to get on board, on our way we passed many dock workers standing around and looking at us, a couple of them wished us good luck, but what was upsetting were those who were laughing and calling out 鈥淭hat鈥檚 your lot Mate!鈥� 鈥淵ou won鈥檛 be coming back!鈥� not very cheering remarks, and did not seem to be at that time typical British humour. Anyway whatever the effect it meant to have on us we pretended to ignore them however one man in our group was upset by the remarks, broke ranks and tried to clobber one of the dockers with his rifle but was grabbed by an MP and pushed back into line, luckily for that man no other action was taken.
Once on board we were allocated our mess decks, shown how to sling our hammocks,and detailed for various duties. Most of that trip is now a bit of a blur for me to remember, but some things things do stand out very clearly and that was how rough the ocean was and how seasick it made me. I was so ill during that rough sea period that I was on deck most of the time because as soon as I went below I was sick, I hardly ate anything despite the medication that the ships doctor gave me to settle me down .some how I managed to keep down the occasional meal when I ate in the mess deck, when the ship wasn鈥檛 rolling around too much but I seemed to survive mainly on the cans of fruit, something I had not seen since the war started (Del Monte pears and peaches) that I bought from the ships canteen. Thank goodness once we were in the 鈥淢ed鈥� the ships motion was not so bad
And I felt a lot better. What interested everyone as we passed through the Straits were all the lights on the Spanish coast.

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