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My name is Thomas Dawson Parfitt, and I was born in 1916.
I worked in the Employment Exchange from the age of 17, and I was there when we were responsible for issuing call up papers for the forces. The Employment Exchange got involved in a lot of things like that. The call up started age-wise, at 18, and gradually, as time went by, the age went up all the time. And eventually it caught up with me at about 23/24. So I had the pleasure of writing out my own call up! I just ticked my name off on the list, there was nothing much to it, really. That was an event, but not to be avoided.
I went to Morecambe, to do square bashing, marching up and down the prom. Then I went to St Athens, between Cardiff and Swansea, and there I stayed until I was called up for overseas.
The overseas business created a problem, because of two rules, both of which were quite sensible, but they didn’t marry. One was that they wouldn’t accept people for clerical jobs unless they were Grade 2 or 3 medical. They said there was plenty of active jobs for Grade 1 medicals, so they wouldn’t let them be clerks. That was fair enough. And then it came to the question of sending people overseas, and they said there was an additional health risk. They couldn’t send anyone overseas unless they were Grade One medical. Well, where did you find Grade One medical people who were also clerks? Because they wouldn’t take them as Grade Ones! So the result was that wherever we were overseas, we were always understaffed, because they couldn’t find any more Grade One clerks to send out.
So I ended up taking a long trip. We left Glasgow first, went down the Western side of the Atlantic, next door to New York, and all that, and from there we crossed over to Africa, across the South Atlantic, from Freetown to Durban, landed in Durban for a week, and then we went to Singapore. That was already in danger of a Jap attack down Malaysia. By the time we arrived there, the convoy was being dive bombed. One of the others got hit, so they left us alone and went to them. We actually suffered a couple of near misses. The first near miss shook us up and put all the lights out, and we were below the decks, and the second near miss shook us up and stopped all the engines. So we were sitting there then, waiting for number three. But by then, they’d moved on to the other that had already been hit, so they left us alone. So we eventually crept into port, found the docks already ablaze in different places. And we were there from evening one day, until mid day the next, and then we came back out again and sailed off from there. First of all, to Java, landed on the North coast of Java, and spent three weeks moving on from one place to another, until we finished up on the South coast, and by then, the Japs had arrived at the North coast. And eventually we were waiting on the South coast to get away, with some officers who were left. And one morning we woke up and said ‘Where are all the officers?’ Nobody knew. But they’d managed to get a boat or something, and had cleared off. Anyway, a naval auxiliary came in, and they said ‘Right, this will do, get on board.’ So, off we sailed, and we’d only just got out of harbour when they moved us all onto the other side of the boat because we were leaning because of all the luggage!
Eventually, the engine stopped, and we thought ‘What next?’ because we were sitting ducks for a while. We were still in range for the Japanese. But they eventually got them started again, and we moved on again, then it stopped again, and again- a blank for a while. We were still wondering who was going to catch us first. And then a British destroyer, a naval ship, came and towed us all the way from there to Colombo. And that’s where I finished up, in Ceylon, until it was time to come home, which was a month short of four years.

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