We marched, counter-marched, and did rifle drill, which was highly recommended by grinning instructors for arms painfully swollen by vaccinations. We were tested for swimming in a huge metal tank, and those who seemed to be drowning were hooked out by a petty officer with a long pole. We were taught the rudiments of rowing a ship’s boat which was firmly secured in place in one of Mr. Butlin’s swimming pools. And we did all manner of manual work, washing literally thousands of dishes in the kitchens, sweeping the roadways, even labouring in the sewage farm. My favourite duty was in the guard house-cum-cell block where, after a night spent reading, rolling fags with the duty-free tobacco thoughtfully supplied by the Admiralty, and making sure the drunks in the cells were surviving, one could go up and down the rows of huts at dawn, hammering on the doors to turn out resentful shipmates. There were occasional half-day leaves, but all there was to do in Skegness was to line up at a café for eggs and chips, or sausage and chips on good days, before heading for the pub.
The friend with whom I had joined up was selected as officer material and sent off for training where he suffered perhaps a worse fate than not being selected in the first place. The navy in its inscrutable wisdom suddenly decided it needed no more officers and tossed his class back into the pool, where he became a seaman. We met again a year or two later in Hong Kong, he aboard a ship and I at a shore base. I also was a victim of inscrutable wisdom; instead of the regular three months at Skegness, my group spent five, mainly doing clean-up duties, before we ascended to Heaven, which is to say, private billets in London, and training at Highgate College, a famous school commandeered for war service. The navy, of course, had its own arcane system of bookkeeping, assigning to each of thousands of items a price which bore not the remotest relation to prices in the shops. It had probably been invented by Nelson, or around his time, and I found the study of it boring in the extreme.
However, I was kept awake — most of the time, anyway — by the arrival of Hitler’s secret weapon, the V1 buzz bomb. That was a pilotless plane that went put-put-putting through the sky until it ran out of fuel and crashed, usually on London. Sitting in class, we would hear the distinctive engine noise, and if it was anywhere near us when it stopped, the lot of us, including the instructor, would sink below a desk. When I passed the course, without distinction, I was sent to the naval depot at Devonport, adjoining Plymouth and only forty or so miles from Exeter, to await further posting. Devonport barracks were notorious, some buildings dating back to the Napoleonic war. It was rumored that the Admiralty had tried to sell them to the Prison Commissioners who found them not up to standard for felons. The usual escape was to go to sea, which is perhaps what the Admiralty had in mind. But there were ancient seamen, known as Barrack Stanchions, who lived in odd corners of the old buildings, and sometimes took a free meal in a seamen’s mission in the town, one of which was known as Jago s. They did not much of anything but dodge draft chits issued by the master at arms, the ship’s policeman, much feared but for some reason known in naval slang as the Jaunty. (The master’s deputy, a regulating petty officer, was known more appropriately as the Crusher.) The navy had a satirical song for many situations, most sung to hymn tunes and too rude to repeat, but one went like this:
O I wonder, yes I wonder
Did the jaunty make a blunder when he made out this draft
chit for me
For I’ve been a barrack stanchion and I’ve dined in Jago’s mansion
And now they are sending me to sea.
Eventually, and none too soon, I and the rest of an entire ship’s crew, some hundreds of us, were sent by special train to Greenock, on the Clyde, near Glasgow, to commission HMS Empire Spearhead. She was a mass produced Liberty ship configured as a landing ship and intended for the invasion of Europe, which by then had happened. The interior included troop decks with metal framed canvas cots four or five high, and on davits along the sides she carried assault landing craft — LCAs — manned by Royal Marine crews and designed to carry forty or so men from the ship to the beach. With several other landing ships, we were going to the Pacific to show the Americans that, with the war in Europe well in hand, the Royal Navy was coming to help them defeat Japan. And so I went to war, sailed around the world, saw many interesting places, and had many interesting experiences which I would not have wanted to miss. But life in the navy was never comfortable, the arbitrary discipline was hard to endure, and the class distinction between officers and men was a hangover from past centuries. But looking back on my career as a warrior, I doubt that I made a scrap of difference to the war effort — or, if I did make a difference, I’m not sure whether it was to the advantage of the Allies or the Axis.
My first job in the Empire Spearhead was in the supply office where I was a clerk entering columns of figures in ledgers. That ended when, bored to tears, I made an error that took the chief petty officer days of work to discover and correct before he could balance the ship’s books. One up for the Axis, I suppose. I was thereupon banished to work as a manual labourer, more or less, in the holds where the stores were kept. I much preferred it to bookkeeping. I had other duties, one of which was to mix and ladle out the lemonade which was issued instead of the traditional lime juice as a protection against scurvy. With the luck that has often attended me, I happened to be doing that job on the foredeck on a golden summer morning when we sailed up New York harbour, to dock in Manhattan — the land promised not by God but by Hollywood. After bombed, blacked-out, rationed Britain, the bright lights and well stocked stores of New York were an extraordinary experience. We worked hard to store ship for the Pacific, and to prepare to take aboard the American sailors and soldiers we were to ferry to New Guinea, but on shore leave with mates I managed to visit The Stage Door Canteen where we saw no stars but encountered a puzzle which remains to this day: On every table there was a can of condensed milk, and nobody seemed to know why.
The Americans, black soldiers and white sailors, came aboard, a band on the dock played “Anchors Away,” and off we went into the wild blue yonder, or in fact south and through the Panama Canal. By that time, the Yanks, who were fresh from training camps in a land flowing with steaks and ice cream, had encountered British naval rations and cooking. There were mutters of mutiny, but the presence of Royal Marines with rifles discouraged any such ideas. As the weather got warmer, life below deck for the crew and passengers became difficult. Instead of slinging hammocks in the traditional way, we were assigned to the canvas cots intended originally for troops on short trips to the invasion beaches. The sun beating on steel decks turned the troop decks into ovens and we tossed, turned, and grilled on our cots, stacked one on top of the other. By the time we reached Bora-Bora, an island in French Polynesia which had become a refueling base for ships and aircraft, the idea of a run ashore with dusky maidens with Parisian style was attractive. But it was not of course to be. We were told that there was so much venereal disease on the island that we would be allowed no contact with the island population. Instead, the landing craft would take us to a remote beach for swimming. Better that than nothing, until I came as close to drowning as ever I have in a lifetime of swimming. As young men will, we were wrestling in the surf when a shipmate got one arm around my neck, forcing my head under water, while with the other arm he fought off another mate. All my struggles seemed to him to be just part of the game; to me it became life and death, but fortunately he let go before I expired. From Bora-Bora we went to New Guinea to launch our passengers