Because we had been sent to Lancashire it was assumed that the ship would set out from nearby Liverpool, but orders came to go by train to Southampton. Issued with rifles, laden with full kit, and arms still tender from the latest jabs, there was the usual singing, card games and eating of rations during the night. One developed the facility of falling into cat naps, and being comfortable in all kinds of postures, so that time drifted easily by.
In the morning, when the train drew parallel to the quayside, the huge portholed flank of the Ranchi was visible through the door of the customs’ shed, which Royal Mail ship was to be our home for thirty-one days.
Chapter Nineteen
Land and much else being left behind told me that opinion should be set aside in order that the unique situation could be assimilated and turned into memory. People on shore, if they bothered to look any more, saw a common troopship thick with men, one of whom — me — had barged through the crush to the port-side rail, not having been on anything bigger than a ferry boat or a stretch of water wider than the Mersey. Steamships and small yachts on blue rippling water, wooded hillsides and succulent fields on shore, made me wonder when England — for all I thought about such a crucial part of myself — would be seen again. My observations would become blurred with the passing of time, as the carborundum wheel of an impacted past rubbed too hard against it. Such reflections only made more piquant the suggestion from that other part of me, though it was not altogether trusted, that I could not have cared less.
Beyond Lee-on-the-Solent lay the buildings of HMS Daedalus where I would have done naval training and learned to fly with the Fleet Air Arm, but regret was a feeling little known, and passed like a shadow as the ship altered course to go around the Isle of Wight. On 8 May 1945 the war in Europe had ended; on the same date in 1946 I had reported for duty with the RAF; and now on 8 May 1947 a ship of 12,000 tons was taking me away from England — and nothing significant has happened on that vital date since.
The vessel carried 1,000 crew, and 2,000 troops accommodated in ten low-ceilinged mess decks, a space claustrophobic but soon accustomed to, with long fixed tables and forms for sitting on to eat, and large hooks above for slinging hammocks at night. In the morning they had to be taken down, tidily folded and placed in a rack, space being claimed anew each evening.
Shipboard was as different a life as I had ever been pitched into, a barracks surrounded by water, and regulated by bells at six for us to stow gear, shower, shave, and be at breakfast by seven. After everything on the mess deck shone we could roam or josh about till bells sounded for muster stations and lifeboat drill, when the captain, OC troops, provost marshal, and a gaggle of other scrambled-egg personalities, after inspecting the cleanliness or otherwise of our quarters (though there could be no otherwise), walked by our ranks, an endless sea frothing greenly beyond the rail. For the rest of the day we were free, unless called on for routine duties which were few with such numbers to share them.
Many sicked up crossing Biscay, latrines clogged with vomit. Portuguese fishermen, in rough water for small craft, waved on the third day, green cliffs of their country like a fairyland in the distant glow. Off Cape St Vincent some card spoke Browning — in May — while our vast boat steamed on towards the Pillars of Hercules, another place and time-group pencilled on my map.
The distance run every day, posted up in the saloon, showed an advance of about 300 miles. A letter to Squadron-Leader Hales of the ATC in Nottingham gave an account of life on board, but told of no murmur or anything felt. Much of the time I lay on deck, thoughtless and inert, getting up only for the good and copious food at mealtimes. One cadaverous airman covered page after foolscap page of a journal, and I wondered how he found so much to write about.
The Mediterranean was more stormy than Biscay, but there was little seasickness by now. My face became painfully swollen, and the dental officer pulled out an abscessed side-tooth. Dull days were interrupted by orders to stand in line and have more serum pumped in, and in the evening we hugged our arms in the cinema showing Two Years Before the Mast (or was it Mutiny on the Bounty?), the ship on the screen wallowing in as rough a sea as that around us, a double dose of weather at the top end of the Beaufort scale.
I took up time to explore the complicated structure, or stood on a lower deck as close as possible to the hypnotic bow wave sheering through grey-green cream-topped water, staring hour after hour to diminish a primeval fear of the sea. Passing liners and merchantmen flashed Morse from bridge to bridge, which I could interpret for those who saw only a meaningless flicker of light. Every vessel, out of courtesy and safety, announced its name, port of registration, where it came from and the place it was bound for, and my ability to read visual messages, not taught at radio school but practised on airfield control, improved immensely during the voyage.
One morning the nearest porthole showed a camel ridden by an Arab along the Asiatic side of the Suez Canal, much like a picture in an early geography book come to life. At the other end of the waterway the mountains of Sinai turned purple in the afternoon light, bathing the place where the Israelites had gone over to escape the wrathful Pharaoh and his pursuing chariots, and fulfilling another image of my infant days.
The hammock provided an underlay for sleeping on deck, too hot now to spend the nights below. By day we wore khaki shorts and gym shoes, being obliged to dress smartly only at boat stations. After the morning intake of cool lime juice I settled on to a piece of vacant deck to play endless rounds of clock patience, much like Benkiron in John Buchan’s Greenmantle, which I had just read, or watch Red Sea dolphins come playfully out of the glassy water as if to keep the ship safe from all malevolence.
At ashy-looking Aden fuel was taken on, and my close-grained twelve-page letter to Squadron Leader Hales went with the mailbag on the next westward boat. Socotra was the starting point for a seven-day passage across the Arabian Sea, the compass set at points familiar only on my map, in whose margins I kept a log so as not to lose the reckoning of time. None knew at what place we would disembark, and the power of the sea, waves smaller but the swell mightier, caused the old Ranchi to roll as if never to level out again, slowly coming up only to go down as steeply on the other side, yet cutting crisply for mile after nautical mile as if through an endless light green jelly cake.
From the rubbish of the ship’s small library (all items relished none the less) I took out the Penguin edition of Mutiny on the Elsinore by Jack London, on whose prose my eyes focused sharply enough to realize that here was something different. The novel punched home the opinion that the Nordic races (whatever they were) possessed an innate and eternal superiority over all other people. Though I might not have seen anything too outlandish in this — such attitudes inculcated from the beginning of consciousness — Jack London reiterated the point so as not only to slow down the narrative, which was unforgivable, but to make me find something objectionable about an idea which I hadn’t previously cared to formulate.