There are no words for the sheer misery of seasickness. Those immune to it are born lucky; the rest of us have to bear it for longer or shorter periods before the ‘sea-legs’ come. Forty-eight hours of wanting to die usually dealt with mine but a fellow cadet on that first voyage was so ill that we thought him lost overboard. He was found hidden behind some coils of rope in a dark storage space, grasping his stomach, dry-retching and semi-conscious. He never went to sea again. The navy, of course, refused to recognise the illness. Officers watched with cold eyes as you mumbled an excuse and ran from your post to deposit another meal over the side. As long as you chose the leeward side of the ship they pretended nothing had happened.
Marion Island is well into the ‘Roaring Forties’ in the treacherous Southern Ocean. Howling gales bludgeon it all year round, so delivering stores to the weather station required taking swift advantage of the limited windows of good weather between. Our passage south had been almost as rough as the vessel’s earlier ill-fated one, with the gale this time reaching 90 miles per hour. More or less over my seasickness, I exulted in lookout duty on the bridge-wing of the frigate as she smashed into the massive seas, burying her bows deep into solid water and then, with a shudder through her hull, heaving high into the night, tossing the spray back into our faces, readying for the next assault. I was in awe of the fact that nothing stood between me and the chaotic black depths but the thin hull of this vessel, creaking and groaning as she took on the worst the Southern Ocean could hurl at her. Ships are living things and the bond between them and the souls aboard is something only sailors understand. It was also very cold. The Loch Class frigates had open bridges and as we plunged further south, the icy wind could whip scalding cocoa or ‘chai’ out of the mug in your gloved hands, freeze it in mid-air and send the solid pellets clattering against the bridge house. Off watch below, life was sodden. These ships, built hurriedly for wartime convoy duty, had no luxuries. Amidst the violent motion, when I did sleep, it was in a canvas hammock slung over a large generator that hummed and buzzed on and off all the time.
The only landing stage at Marion was a platform suspended by cables from a cliff. Everything we carried had to be ferried from the anchored ship by motor launch and hoisted to the cliff top. Then a long slope up the soggy, lichen-covered surface led to the cluster of wooden huts that constituted the 1950s-era weather station. I came to know that slope. For 22 hours non-stop I hefted 4-gallon jerry-cans of diesel fuel, one in each hand, to the dump behind the huts. We needed to get the job done before the weather closed in. The ground was covered in wire netting to prevent us from sinking in, but it was very heavy going. Over our ordinary seaman’s clothing we wore kapok flying suits, duffle coats, thick gloves, sea-boots and balaclavas, but when we paused to rest, our drying sweat chilled us to the bone. We even brought a piano ashore, somewhat dismantled, but still ungainly enough to make for a very risky passage in the launch. Apart from our marooned shipmates we were the first outsiders the weather people had seen for six months, but you would not have thought it. They looked on while we sweated and seemed quite relieved when we were on our way again. Presumably a preference for isolation is why they chose the job.
There were other sea-going opportunities. Simon’s Town was still the headquarters of the British South Atlantic fleet in those days and in the dead of winter, when the Cape of Good Hope transformed into the Cape of Storms, the annual NATO Capex exercises had South African ships working in heavy seas with a Royal Naval squadron ‘hunting’ a British submarine. I had chosen the anti-submarine branch so spent time in the ‘asdic’14 hut abaft the bridge, juggling what looked like a little car steering wheel, directing the sonar pulses beaming out underwater. It was all WWII vintage weaponry and some of the officers and senior hands had vivid memories of the Battle of the Atlantic. They remembered when all of this was life and death, and however staged the exercises were, when the dreary, repetitive ‘pingggg’ suddenly became ‘pinggg-guh’ hearts stopped momentarily and the hunt was on. During these exercises there was a moment when things did threaten to get real. When Egypt’s President Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, we were ordered into port to fully ammunition our ships because there was a chance we could be sucked in to a looming conflict. It was then that I saw the older hands on board become very serious, but the Suez crisis dragged on for months until the disastrous British, French and Israeli attacks on the Canal Zone. After the canal closure South Africa’s only task was coping with the massive increase in shipping rounding the Cape.
I was loving every minute of it and looked forward to the day when I would be gazetted as a midshipman. During the entire year there was only one moment of doubt: some of us had been sent to Salisbury Island, Durban to familiarise ourselves with Torpedo and Anti-Submarine (TAS) weaponry and I recall us crowding round a dismantled 21-inch torpedo while our instructor showed us how it functioned. I marvelled at the technology that drove this weapon through the water at 45 knots, and the guidance system that led it to its target. Yet I also remember the beginnings of a nagging question: all this clever science to blast human beings to smithereens? I know now that on that day the seeds of a different attitude to war and peace were planted in me – seeds that would germinate nearly a decade later.
I would love to claim that the decision at the end of 1956 to enter the Christian ministry was motivated by faith and vision, but it was more like being kidnapped.
The call – I can give it no other name – came at a most inconvenient time. During the year, some 20 of us had been selected as ‘Upper-Yardsmen’, a term from the days of sail that set us aside as potential officers. Some had already dropped by the wayside and the time had now arrived for final selection as Midshipmen. It was the moment we had worked for.
Enter the Reverend Arthur Attwell, childhood hero and at that time Methodist Chaplain in the SA Navy. Arthur had been a Royal Naval officer in WWII, in the ‘little ships’ in the Mediterranean and Adriatic, where a stealthy war was fought supplying Tito’s partisans from the sea or dropping commandos to support them. His war had been a desperately dangerous one and beneath his kind exterior, like so many veterans, he carried some deep emotional wounds. Meeting him as a child and being shown the tattered White Ensign from his last command sealed my determination even then to become a career naval officer. Arthur was now a deeply respected padre in the Navy and had been invited to SAS Saldanha to help in the officer selection process. Commander ‘Flam’ Johnson, later to become Chief of the Navy, but at that time CO of the training establishment, asked Attwell to have a chat with me to confirm my intentions.
Meanwhile, I had been thrown into confusion by what I can only call an ‘inner encounter’. That same day, alone on the cliffs above the small boat harbour, I experienced a clear and unexpected conviction that cut across everything I had wanted and worked for. Something spoke inside me, saying, “You will be a minister.” It was as simple as that and almost as matter of fact as if a passing officer had barked an order, yet it came with more authority than anyone in the Navy could muster. I’ll leave it to the psychologists to wring from it what they will; all I know is that it was as real an experience as any I have known and it shook me to my boots. This was not what I wanted. I admired my dad, whose preaching had always moved me, but while I wished I could emulate his fine character and moral example there was no conscious desire to follow his vocation. Furthermore, he had never once hinted that he would like to see me in the ministry. This was an ambush. Having listened since to scores of stories from young candidates for ordination, I know beyond doubt that God ‘calls’ people in every generation to serve in this way, but unlike most of them, I was anything but pleased and remain mystified about why it landed on me.
Later that day Padre Attwell invited me to sit down alongside the sports fields for a chat. I had no idea of his mission, but I needed very much to tell someone what had happened to me. Arthur enjoyed recounting what happened afterwards: in the wardroom that evening Commander Johnson enquired, “Well, Padre, do we have our man?” Attwell’s response was, “Yes, sir, in a manner of speaking we do, but not quite in the way you expected. He’s signing up in my outfit instead.”
In the end I was gazetted as a midshipman. I had passed out well, with my most prized award being one in practical seamanship. The Orator’s Cup also came my way, whether as a piquant nod to my new future, I don’t know. Our passing out parade was a proud one, but it was hard to ignore the new