When we had disposed of ourselves in the coaches, and stowed all the kit in the string webbing of the luggage racks, the engine got under way, taking a mighty pull on the hundreds of tons of vehicles and humans as the driver swung his long regulator handle and released steam into the cylinders, the pistons thrusting back and forth, and hot gas shot along the copper intestines of the boiler and up the chimney.
As the train moved out of Scarborough into the total darkness of the Cleveland Hills, all we knew was that we were going north. I guessed that we were on the east coast main line. In the middle of the morning, stiff from a night in a crowded and heated carriage, I looked out the window and recognized Joppa Station, a quarter of a mile from my home. My mother and father were two hundred miles to the south. The moment felt very empty. I knew then that our final destination would be the Clyde, where our ship would be waiting.
I was about to leave Britain to go to a war in Asia, defending the eastern borders of the Empire. I thought I had learned so much and that I was ready for anything, but before leaving Scarborough I had done one last thing. I got engaged to S., the young woman from the Chapel in Charlotte Street.
She came down to stay at Miss Pickup’s; my parents arrived, and found the engagement a fact they had to live with. They did not approve, but accepted it as my final declaration of independence. My fiancée was all of nineteen, I was twenty-one. We were children, emotionally, though the Chapel gave us a false sense of rigid maturity. I felt that it was the right thing to do. We were so young; we barely knew each other.
CHAPTER THREE
THE TRAIN TRUNDLED on through Edinburgh Waverley and later that morning the southern outskirts of Glasgow, running past sidings and factories. That afternoon we slowed into Greenock, on the eastern end of the Clyde estuary.
Out on the water, in the chill wind of late winter, lay a great armada of ships. I felt part of a heroic expedition, seeing those vessels strung out down the estuary. There were four splendid P&O liners, a captured French passenger ship, the Louis Pasteur, several destroyers and two battleships. These looked immense, even at the distance I was standing from them on the dockside. I remembered going to see HMS Hood when it came to the Firth of Forth in 1938: the awesome power, decks as long as fields, the grey gun turrets the size of houses. It made you feel small and safe to have this weight of firepower on your side.
After the usual milling and shouting, and the unpacking of my goods wagons, we formed up on the quay in the deceptively casual disorder of armies on the move. But we knew we were highly organized; we felt our power. Tenders came to take us to the ships, we embarked quickly and soon we were slapping through the choppy water towards the long line of vessels. Our tender pointed through the spray to one of the nearer ships, a big P&O liner which we discovered was the Strathmore.
Most of us would never have imagined that we would ever step aboard this floating country house. It was an imposing environment, all polished wood and brass, but its spotless decks and its cabin windows seemed deserted, as though the diplomats, the administrators and the gilded travellers who normally used it had abandoned ship at the sight of these boyish invaders in rough khaki. Feeling like pirates, we were soon allocated to cabins or mess decks by our senior officers and by the crew.
Although this was a military adventure, we were still guests of the ship. The Captain was still very much the captain; we were passengers. All our activities had to fit in with his organization of the ship. So on this strange peacetime basis, we set about our warlike duties.
The following day, our convoy of about twenty ships drew up its anchors and with a minimum of noise, no ceremonial blasts on the sirens or crowds on the harbour walls, headed out into the open sea. We were not told where we were going, and after we had left the Firth of Clyde, running out into the north channel between Ireland and Scotland, we hadn’t much idea where we were – except that we were sailing roughly north west into the Atlantic. It was difficult to be sure even of the number of ships in our company, because the convoy occupied such a large area of the ocean. Nor were we told the names of the grey warships that occasionally glided up out of the fog.
In this state of official ignorance, our time was filled for us. Every morning hundreds of young men would be out doing PT exercises on deck. After the first few days the deck grew hot under the thin soles of our gym shoes, and the sun higher in the sky. We were no longer sailing north west, and had turned south. Somewhere off to the east lay the coast of Africa.
The Signals contingent went over to a training routine, keeping ourselves and our men busy by organizing courses and reminders about how to keep an army’s communications clear and efficient. In the evenings we tried to run entertainments, using whatever talent we had available: songs, revues, mild ribaldry, but all held in check by the total absence of alcohol. And of course there was not a single woman on board; even the nurses were male.
We were setting off to sail around the scarlet map of the Empire, and we talked endlessly about where we might end up. As it turned out, we were preparing ourselves to face the wrong enemy. Our assumption was that we would have to defend the north-west frontier of India against a German attack through Persia; no other enemy seriously crossed our minds.
I shared a cabin with a friendly young fellow signals officer, Alex Black, and got on well with him. We talked about the business of what we were doing, as all colleagues do, and gossiped about men and officers. Enforced companionship can be a hell for some people, but these years were made bearable for me partly because of the comrades that the war chose at random for me. I vividly remember eating green ginger for the first time in my life aboard that ship, and sharing it with my cabin mate.
The warmth of the weather was now tropical, damp and intense. The day came when it was announced that we were about to put in at Freetown, in Sierra Leone. This was a real event for us; young people from the backgrounds that most of us came from had never been ‘abroad’ before in our lives. We were now well and truly travelled, if sitting on board a liner in the bay at Freetown counts as abroad.
Unfortunately only very small ships could be accommodated at the Freetown quayside, so most of the convoy had to anchor a long way out. But not so far that I couldn’t see and even smell the land, the docks, the palm trees just back from the harbour, the damp jungly smell coming out on the breeze, like rotting vegetables in the dusty green heat. I saw a very distant train heading up-country on the far side of the city. I knew that this was the famous 2 foot 6 inch gauge main line railway, probably the only one of its kind in the entire British Commonwealth. The little white drift of smoke from the engine seemed to hang in the hot air.
It became oppressive on board ship, hotter and more humid each day. The exercises and routines became exhausting; the coast more tantalizing, the smell more disgusting because we could not move around the city that was generating it. We were not sorry when the entire convoy resumed its journey. Our immediate destination could now only be South Africa.
About five days later I was detailed as Paying Officer for the Signals draft as we sailed along the South African coast towards Cape Town. So when the spectacular docking of so many big ships was accomplished, I was below decks handing out cash to men eager to get ashore.