Life Without Armour (15 page)

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.

During a few hours' shore leave in Colombo the Victorian engravings from books at my grandparents' were now in colour, and less impressive to my mind of nineteen than they had been to a child in the age of wonders. One of a group, I felt like a somnambulist, my first experience of a foreign land little more than a meal at the YMCA and a meander along York Street and down Queen Street, nothing to impress beyond the sight of a few strange costumes.

Perhaps memories are few because my sensations were so absorbing, yet there remained the corrugated Arabian Sea beyond the harbour, and the sudden appearance of a palm tree bending over a stagnant pool. In the heat of the day, with no town plan to show how far we were going, it was nevertheless enjoyable to be walking with that aimlessness of young and indigent soldiers in an overseas town, though I was happy enough to get home to the ship.

The one diversion came when a couple of turbaned men stopped us near a park and wanted to read the future in our hands, a proposition I may have rejected too brusquely – believing whatever was in store to be totally irrelevant, and not wanting a stranger to tell me what it was, even if he knew exactly, which in any case I didn't see how he could – for the parting words of one that I had ‘snake eyes' intrigued rather than offended me.

The boat rocked around the coast of Ceylon, lights far off on a dark tree-crowded shore, and headed across the Bay of Bengal towards Malaya 1,300 miles away. Those contingents disembarked at Colombo had left the ship less crowded, and with the patience of the sea I hoped to be carried even beyond Hong Kong, almost wishing the boat would go on for ever, oceanic vastness inducing a resignation not previously known.

I slept deeply at night, one of a long row on deck, waking at dawn to let barefooted Lascar seamen in their saris sluice all woodwork clean with jets of salt water. The gramophone record of a brisk march by Souza, which hurried us to boat stations, became more and more cracked, and I wondered when the captain would authorize a new copy from the top of the stack by his elbow. Either that, or find another tune after skimming the old one duck-and-drake across the briny.

It was as pleasant a peacetime cruise as anybody could wish for, especially when we sighted an island off the tip of Sumatra entirely covered in jungle. Huge spherical grey jellyfish took the place of dolphins in the Straits of Malacca, the sea swollen, the sky dull, the air steamy. A day before Singapore we learned that the destination for wireless operators was close, and at two in the afternoon my larger scale map sheet of South-East Asia, taken from the briefing hut at Langar, and brought as an inspired guess as to what region at least the final landing would be in, revealed with precision that we were off Port Swettenham. By nine at night Malacca was passed, the Singapore Approaches closing around the ship at half past four next morning. An increased speed for the last twenty-four hours led us to speculate that the captain might have some sentimental reason for going all out.

In spite of our pleasant cruise we were more than ready to quit the fuel and stew smell of the ship, the rumble of perpetual motion underfoot, the constant swish of water keeping the air tacky with salt and ozone, and the swaying sailor walk developed on promenading the ever-shrinking decks. With kitbags ready, and rifles distributed as if on landing we might inadvertently stray into a battlefield, which I wouldn't have minded in the least, we watched the ship tie up at half past seven in the Empire Dock, an area of petrol tanks and warehouses, though palm trees and bungalows on hills provided a more residential backdrop to the scene.

Chapter Twenty

Events moved slowly enough, and only later could I say they raced and leapfrogged – almost up to the present, when they go slow again. Stepping down the gangplank with full kit to a waiting lorry was like a scene in a newsreel. Such pictures from the past, though trivial, become salient due to an uncanny persistence in being remembered, but in the process they exclude anything of importance that may have been in the mind, as spars on a calm surface after a boatwreck provide few clues regarding the currents which might have existed beneath the water.

Whatever my irrecoverable thoughts, to which I would have said ‘good riddance' at the time, even supposing there were any, we crossed the island into Johore via the Causeway over which the Japanese Army went on to occupy in 1942 what military strategists had said could never be taken. A few days in a hutted camp several miles into Malaya gave time to retrieve the use of our legs, by leaping half-filled trenches among neglected rubber trees. Otherwise we played the usual card games for unfamiliar cents and dollars.

Accustomed to Duke of York manoeuvres, a group of us were posted back to Seletar on Singapore Island. Our accommodation was in barrack blocks set between lawns and gardens, four-course meals in the mess seeming like two dinners in one (as I might earlier have thought) and we shared an Indian servant for a few dollars a week to fix beds, clean shoes, bring coffee in the morning and see to the laundry (
dhobi
now). Two shillings a day overseas allowance since leaving Southampton enabled me to buy my first wristwatch, as well as a new fountain pen – for which only red ink was available.

The high-frequency direction-finding (HF/DF) station was a small square hut at the end of the runway with a view across to Johore. Such work hadn't been included in the school course, but I was soon taking bearings with the Marconi-Adcock apparatus and tapping out three-figure numbers in Morse to Sunderland flying boats of 209 Squadron, as well as to KLM, BOAC and QANTAS airliners on the Europe run.

Nightwatch, from six in the evening till eight the next morning, was a long time to be on the alert, but the operator soon to go home underlined in a copy of Balzac's
Droll Stories
the remark that ‘You have to be over twenty to stay awake all night.' Free issues of tobacco and cigarettes helped, as well as a liberal allowance of tea sweetened with condensed milk and a
katti
of sugar from the village store. Water was boiled on a primus stove, but the danger of an arm being licked to the shoulder by pristine and painful flame was so constant that I preferred trawling the scrubby area around the hut for scraps of wood to make a fire.

Just before dusk (what there was of it), I spotted a half rotten box, and aimed a kick in case a snake lurked there, cautious because one had run over my foot the other night as I came out of the camp cinema. While arranging the pieces under my arm to take back to the hut, a paralysing ache gripped my leg. Cursing and limping, I made tea before bothering to investigate the pain now gone into my foot as well. Unable to find punctures in the skin, I imagined it to be the bite of a hornet, though never knew for sure, and after several days all trace had gone.