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1356092 Sgt.Wright B.O., Station Signals, R.A.F.

If an A/C Plonk arrived late for breakfast he found a clutter of dirty crocks and very little in the cooking pots so the usual late relief of my watch after a night spent with head between the ear phones meant I suffered at breakfast time. I complained to the Signals Officer who kept the peace by having me posted, overseas.
While on embarcation leave a policeman came to my home, my leave was extended because, unknown to me, the largest convoy so far was being assembled on the Clyde but with the Japanese closing in on Singapore early in 1942, its destination was uncertain. Eventually I climbed the gangway of the Largs Bay, drew the short straw and washed up fish and chip dishes in tepid sea water.
The bum boats came alongside at Freetown offering jig a jig but we were not offered shore leave. Instead we stood naked on the foredeck in the afternoon tropical rain enjoying the first freshwater wash for days.
The ship left the convoy and sped southward. I sunned myself by day and, avoiding the humidity and jostling hammocks below, slept beneath the stars, leaving others, including my mother, to worry about torpedoes.
Under canvas for a week in Durban while awaiting the next ship, we gorged ourselves, with disastrous consequences, on fruit denied to the folk at home and, because the local population entertained the fortunate, I spent a warm autumn day on a local farm..
The Khedive Ismail took me to Bombay where I took a return ticket on public transport to the terminus as the best way of seeing the city. Then Colombo on another ship. Two elderly Singhalese gentlemen advertising the Island’s best known product stood on the station platform with a tea pot waiting the statutory time for the liquor to brew while a train load of parched servicemen waited. It was good tea !
At Kogalla, near Galle on the south coast of the Island, I found demoralised personnel from Singapore manning the Signals office. I was allocated a direction finding station situated beside the ocean so off duty hours were spent cavorting among waves breaking on a coral beach. However the visit to paradise was short, the adjacent railway line with its two carriage diesel trains distorted wireless signals so the station was relocated at the other end of the runway, on an island in the Lake, used by 205 Squadron’s Catalina flying boats. My watch-keepers slept in our own palm leaf hut, had our own cook and a garden of canna lillies.
The orderly room clerk thought I was mad to ask for a railway warrant to the ancient city of Anuradhapura where I intended to spend my leave. Other leaves during those years were spent at a R.A.F. rest camp on a tea estate, in the household of a tea factory engineer where I left an oil painting of a datura lily I made with paint and brushes found in the house, and with a missionary who took me to see men fire walking. I was welcomed by a lawyer in Badulla who put me in touch with his brother, the Superintendent of Police in Ratnapura. He provided a policeman guide for a night time climb of Adam’s Peak where the Buddhist guardians of The Footprint fed me with curry before dawn brought the sight of a rainbow.
I was posted, now a wireless mechanic, to Sigiriya. One operative cultivated tomato plants, found in the wild, beneath our aerial masts. Then Ratmalana where our giant transmitters with automatic morse keying sent S.E.A.Command’s messages to England. Best of all, my qualifications made me suitable for a few month’s spell as wireless operator on an R.A.F. supply ship visiting Addu Atoll, in the Maldives, and the Cocos Islands before signing me off in recently liberated Rangoon.
I then became one of a Mobile Signals Unit destined to be put ashore by assault craft at Port Swettenham in Malaya. It happened two days after the Japanese surrender and during the month I was in Kuala Lumpur the only wireless equipment I saw had been abandoned by the enemy. I spent my time learning to ride a motor bike and issuing free cigarettes and condoms from the unit shop until sent home in time for Christmas 1944.
Recently I returned to the Island I had learned to love. The fortnight’s tour of Sri Lanka cost me a few hundred pounds, far more than I had earned during my war time ‘Cooks’ Tour’.
Peter Skellern’s anthem written for a B.B.C. Remembrance programme contains words that epitomise my sentiments : Lord give me the wisdom to comprehend
Why I survive and not my friend.
B.O.W. 2004
794 words

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