Once I had more or less got over the malaria they drafted me to HMS Dragon, a very old cruiser. She was in Freetown, preparing to sail for Britain where she would be decommissioned.
‘You’ll sign on as crew,’ I was told bluntly.
I was still desperately ill and hopelessly detached, so the prospect of hard physical work was daunting. Oh well, at least I’m going home! No one seemed to care that I was just out of hospital after suffering from malnutrition and malaria. I was a wreck, but there were no free rides and little compassion. So, around the middle of November, I went aboard Dragon. I was kitted out in a replacement uniform that hung limply from my scarecrow frame, anxious to be on my way. A few hours out of Freetown I was on deck when the division officer approached me.
‘What was your last ship?’ he asked me.
‘Valiant, sir.’
‘What was your job?’
‘Gun crew.’
‘We’ll make you a lookout, then.’
The logic of that escaped me.
‘Where, sir?’
‘Up there,’ he said, pointing to the crow’s nest at the top of Dragon’s main mast.
‘Aye aye, sir.’
There was no point in arguing or trying to explain, surrounded by a battle-hardened crew, that I was too weak to do it. They had all experienced plenty of unpleasant things, so I knew I couldn’t expect any favours. It was something to be accepted without complaint.
So I climbed with my weak legs shaking until I reached the yardarm near the top of the 80-foot mast. The crow’s nest perched on the yardarm was like an over-sized metal bucket, with just enough room for one man and a telephone. It was impossible to sit down. When I reached the top I had to stretch out onto the yardarm to make room for the other sailor on the masthead watch to get out of the crow’s nest. Then I climbed in to start my two-hour watch.
It was a spectacular vantage point. When I looked straight down, the guns on the foredeck appeared no bigger than my fingers, and the sailors moving about on the deck where just tiny uniformed figures. The view of the bow cleaving its path through the sea was impressive. From that lofty perch the ocean appeared so vast that it was easy to believe I’d never see land again, that the world was nothing but green sea and whitecaps.
The weather was cool as we steered into the North Atlantic, and we soon struck rough seas. It was a wild ride on top of that mast, like swinging on a giant upside-down pendulum, but I managed to spend most of my watch peering anxiously through a pair of binoculars. My job was to report any ship sightings to the bridge. I was terrified of U-boats, of course, and it took a lot of concentration to distinguish between what I was seeing through the binoculars and what was raging through my imagination. Any disturbance on the surface was a periscope as far as I was concerned. My nerves were really jangling.
Just south of the Azores, I was on duty in the crow’s nest when I sensed that Dragon was slowing. The bow wave got smaller and smaller until it disappeared altogether and the old cruiser stopped. My telephone rang. It was the officer of the watch telling me that there was a problem with the engines.
‘Keep a sharp lookout,’ he said.
‘Aye aye, sir.’
He didn’t have to remind me. I knew only too well that a cruiser dead in the water was a sitting duck for a U-boat commander. My imagination went into top gear.
Maybe Hartenstein is out here somewhere. He could be looking at us right now, his crew setting the ranges on their torpedoes.
But I figured the crow’s nest was safer than being at action stations below deck somewhere. If Dragon was torpedoed and rolled over, I thought I’d be able to ride the mast all the way down to the water.
It took several hours to get the engines running again and then we got slowly underway, steering for the Azores. When we arrived, Dragon berthed in a pokey little harbour on a rocky island while more work was done on the engines.
The Azores, of course, were Portuguese and therefore neutral territory. The Portuguese wharf labourers told us very proudly that there was a German U-boat berthed just around the corner from us. I was horrified. The U-boat was the buzz throughout the ship within minutes. Everyone was keen to go and have a look at it.
‘Coming to see the U-boat, Mac?’ a sailor in my mess asked.
‘I know what a U-boat looks like,’ I said. He glanced sideways at me, a bit put out.
‘Suit yourself. Once in a lifetime chance, though.’
I didn’t try to explain. He probably wouldn’t have believed me anyway. The word came back that the U-boat was holed up in the Azores for the same reason as Dragon. I was astonished and didn’t like it one little bit. There was nothing to stop it signalling our presence, or leaving harbour before us and lying in wait.
But the U-boat was still there as we pulled out of harbour a few days later. I went back on duty in the crow’s nest and was even more vigilant than before. However, apart from the weather becoming foul, nothing happened. As we ploughed through increasingly severe storms, I decided the Irish certainly knew a thing or two when they called the Atlantic ‘the sea of bitter tears’. I just about froze to death on the masthead. Climbing down with numb hands and feet was pretty dicey. It was best not to think of the consequences of falling.
Eventually, after many days of pounding through heavy seas, Dragon approached England. When I heard we were going to dock in Liverpool I was absolutely ecstatic! After all this time, the Royal Navy was going to deliver me virtually to my front doorstep. We sailed through St George’s Channel into the Irish Sea, skirted around Anglesey and finally into Liverpool Bay.
The morning we glided up the River Mersey is etched forever in my memory. I was off watch, so I went to the upper deck to savour the moment. It was a brilliantly sharp winter’s day, absolutely beautiful with a miraculous blue sky, a few puffy white clouds hovering about. The Mersey was like glass below me as we slipped past Liverpool’s famous light ship, anchored at the river mouth to warn ships of the sandbar there. My nostrils filled with the salt-and-tar smells of my childhood and, when we steered for Gladstone Dock, I was swamped by emotion. I’d come full circle. Gladstone Dock was where, in 1938, I had gone aboard the battleship Royal Oak and decided to join the Royal Navy. Four years later I was back in the very same place. But I wasn’t the same person.
Dragon had barely tied up when gangs of dock workers rushed aboard to start the job of decommissioning her. After I’d completed my duties, which took me through to the afternoon, I was assigned to the shore watch, so I was free to leave the ship. I was off her like a shot, although I had to be back the next morning. I must have looked a sight in my baggy uniform, thin as a bean pole, clutching a battered little suitcase I’d scrounged.
I had a fair way to go. While I was serving in the Mediterranean, my parents had written to say they’d moved from my boyhood home in Walton, to Speke, near Liverpool Airport. So first I caught a train on the overhead railway to Pier Head, where I could catch a bus. I waited for a short time at the bus stop, pent up with emotion at the prospect of seeing my family again, and eventually a green bus rumbled along. I climbed onto its rear platform where a very big woman in an even bigger conductor’s uniform blocked my way. I smiled at her but she didn’t smile back.
‘Where are you going, Jack?’ she demanded.
‘Home, to Speke. Out near the airport.’
‘Well, you’re not going there on this bus.’
‘What?’
‘You’re not going to Speke or nowhere else on this bus.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s for war workers only, this bus, that’s why not.’
I was absolutely dumbfounded. Unknown to me, special buses were allocated to factory workers directly involved in the war effort. Here I was, in the uniform of the Royal Navy, being barred from travelling on one of them. What sort of work did she think the navy did?
‘But …’
‘On your way, Jack. War workers only on this bus.’
She was such an imposing, intimidating woman that I meekly did as she said, and the bus drove off with her standing impassively on the back, a cold statue of authority. It was the last straw. Stranded there at the bus stop in the middle of town, clutching my suitcase, I felt like the most pathetic human specimen of all time. And just to complete the picture I had one of my all-too-frequent crying spells. The frustration was overwhelming. What a welcome home.
War workers be damned!
It got dark. I waited over an hour before getting on another bus that took me out to Speke. I got off and found 9 Hale Road, the family home I’d never seen. It was right next door to a church. I didn’t have a key, of course, so I knocked on the front door.
For years afterwards my three sisters, Florence, Dorothy and Enid would argue good-naturedly over who actually opened the door that night. I certainly don’t know because I was engulfed in the most wonderful emotional chaos. All I remember was being swamped by them, wrapped in their arms, the three of them almost collapsing with the shock of seeing me. They looked at me in total disbelief, saying my name over and over, tears streaming down their faces.
‘Oh God, Jim, we thought you were dead!’
‘A letter came from the Admiralty.’
‘Lost at sea, it said.’
‘No one told us you were safe.’
‘We didn’t know.’
‘Where are Mum and Dad?’ I managed to ask through it all.
‘They went out, to see a film. They’re at the cinema.’
‘Is it really you? You’re so thin.’
‘It’s me, all right,’ I said.
One of the girls ran out and went to a neighbour’s place to ask if they could go and get my mother and father. When they eventually came home there was another torrent of tears, disbelief and shock.
‘Jim, dear, what have they done to you?’ my mother asked, her voice trembling.
Did we have a time that night! My brother George wasn’t there because he was serving in the Fleet Air Arm, but the rest of us celebrated my return until I was dead on my feet, unable to speak or cry anymore.
Someone must have put me to bed.