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Thousands of miles and still far from home, that was how the newspapers reported our travels that autumn. Before the war, I lived with my family in Madeira where my father was the English chaplain. We had come to England for a summer holiday in 1939. Our return journey, by sea, had been booked for early September, just three days after the war had been declared.

Before our departure, my father was told that we might not call at Madeira but that the captain had sealed orders which he could not open until we were at sea. Once we had set sail, we were told that we would be taken directly to South Africa, a trip which normally took a fortnight.

After a short stay in Capetown, we obtained a passage in another ship to return to England. During the journey, there were rumours of an enemy-armed raider being in the South Atlantic and we discovered, a long time later, that the Graf Spee had been in the same area at that time. There were very strict rules about the blackout and people were not even allowed to smoke on the deck at night in case the light could be seen from a distance.

Our ship had to stop at Sierra Leone for ten days waiting for a convoy to escort us back to England. When eventually the chance came we had run short of fresh water. The Captain decided to leave anyway and had to severely ration the water. There were a number of young men on board who were travelling back to join up, who took this light-heartedly, agreeing not to shave and to run a contest as to who could grow the longest beard.

One morning, two lady passengers told us of a very frightening incident the previous night. They had been awakened by a very loud thud and one of them had called out ‘It’s come at last!’, feeling sure we had been torpedoed. She reached to switch on the light in the cabin, but it remained dark. Her companion then said ‘It’s getting colder and colder’. In fact, she had switched on the fan in mistake for the light and the noise that had disturbed them proved to be a barrel landing on the deck above their cabin carrying a message from another ship in the convoy. In spite of the initial fear, they were able to joke about this the next day.

Another little amusing thing that I remember concerns a particular lady who kept losing her small daughter on board. Anyway, Mrs Kendall was known to be going around constantly asking: ‘Has anyone here seen Marion?’. Mrs Kendall was a very large lady, both fore and aft, and a very talented young man sketched a clever cartoon of her asking her question while little Marion was standing directly beneath her. He asked my father if he thought Mrs Kendall would mind if he pinned his picture up on the noticeboard. My father replied that he thought she might not see the funny side of it, to which the cartoonist’s response was: ‘Which IS the funny side?’. However, he showed sufficient consideration not to put it up.

Overall, our return journey to England took six weeks rather than the normal time of two weeks between Southampton and Capetown and we never did get back to our home in Madeira at all.

This story was submitted to the People’s War website by Sue Craig on behalf of Margaret Yellop and has been added to the site with her permission. Margaret fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

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