The next morning I awoke late. In fact extremely late, well past the time I was due to report back to the ship. I groaned and got moving. Within a few minutes I was in my uniform and heading for the front door.
‘Cup of tea, Jim?’ my mother asked. She and the others had been up for ages. In all the excitement of my homecoming I’d completely forgotten to mention that I still had duties on the ship, so they had innocently let me sleep in.
‘Can’t. I have to report back to Dragon.’
‘That doesn’t seem fair,’ she said. ‘You’ve only been home one night.’
‘It’s the navy, Mum. Don’t worry, I’ll be getting some Christmas leave soon.’
I said hurried goodbyes and made my way to the docks, knowing I would be in trouble the moment I went up the gangplank in full view of the crew on duty. But I had to face the music, which came soon enough and loud enough. There was an RPO, a regulation petty officer, on deck as I came aboard. He wasn’t smiling.
‘You’re late, Able Seaman.’
‘Yes, sir. Slept in, sir.’
‘Name?’
‘McLoughlin, sir.’
‘What do you mean you slept in?’
‘Well, I was pretty tired, sir.’ The simple truth of it even sounded pathetic to me.
‘What sort of excuse is that? We’re all bloody well tired!’
‘Sir.’
‘Commander’s Report!’ he bellowed at me.
‘Aye aye, sir.’
Any seaman getting back late to his ship was labelled a defaulter, pure and simple, and I had to face the wrath of the executive officer, under the pitiless eye of the RPO. I lined up with a number of other defaulters to discover my punishment.
‘Caps off!’ the RPO ordered.
‘Name?’ the Executive Officer asked without looking up from the papers on his desk.
‘Able Seaman McLoughlin, sir.’
‘Charge?’
‘Late back to the ship, sir,’ the RPO told him.
‘Anything to say?’ the executive officer asked.
‘I slept in, sir.’
The executive officer was a lieutenant commander. He lifted his eyes to stare at me with chilly disdain. I was just another sailor as far as he was concerned. He wasn’t interested in where I’d been, what had happened to me, just that I’d broken the rules.
‘One day’s pay, one day’s leave,’ he said.
‘Aye aye, sir.’
I saluted, about-faced and marched away. I couldn’t believe it. I’d lost one day’s pay and one day’s leave, both of which were in short enough supply as it was. To add insult to injury, later that day I was told I wouldn’t be going on leave. Instead, I was posted to barracks. My official barracks was HMS Drake in Devonport near Plymouth, because that’s where I’d done my training in 1939. So, with no opportunity to go home again, I left Dragon and went straight to Lime Street Station to catch a train south. I was pretty low when I got to Drake. The weather was gloomy and no one seemed to know why I was there. A doctor examined me in a desultory fashion, prodding and poking me a bit. Then he struck a match and held it in front of my face.
‘What do you see?’ he asked.
‘A match, sir,’ I replied.
‘What sort of match?’
‘A burning match, sir.’ I had no idea what he was getting at.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Very sure, sir. It’s a burning match.’
‘Very good. That’s all,’ the doctor said. I came to the conclusion that he didn’t know what he was getting at either.
After that mystifying episode I did general duties around the barracks, trying to give the impression that I had a real reason to be there. When they finally gave me Christmas leave, less one day and one day’s pay of course, I caught the train back to Liverpool.
That Christmas of 1942 was wonderful and difficult at the same time. I found a brief peace, surrounded by loving faces and laughter. Despite Britain’s austere wartime food rationing, my mother managed to conjure up the most delicious meals. I mostly spent my days sleeping and chatting with my family. I told them the barest details about the sinking, the German U-boat, the lifeboat voyage to Africa, and how one of the survivors had been a nurse named Doris Hawkins. They didn’t press me for more. I suppose they thought I would tell them everything in my own time.
But quite often I sank deep into myself, swamped by a debilitating vagueness. I sat slumped in a chair for hours on end, not quite knowing who or where I was. My family had enough sense to leave me to myself as I drifted into unwanted daydreams about that wretched lifeboat, adrift once more on the Atlantic swell. I could actually smell the salt and feel the blistering tropical sun. Then some noisy activity or conversation elsewhere in the house would intrude and I’d claw myself back to the present, drained and depressed.
One afternoon there was a knock at the door and I opened it to find an American sailor standing there. I looked at him blankly. He looked back at me with his mouth wide open.
‘Jesus, Mac. I thought you were dead!’
‘Hello,’ I said, puzzled about how an American sailor could possibly know my name. He broke into a laugh, which my fuddled brain vaguely recognised.
‘Johnny?’ I queried, looking more closely at him.
‘You’ve lost weight,’ Johnny Hennessey said.
‘Bloody hell, I can’t believe it’s you. I thought you were dead, too.’
‘Fancy a pint?’ he asked.
‘I fancy a dozen! What are you doing in the Yank navy?’
We caught a bus into the city and, when we’d got ourselves nicely settled into a pub, Johnny confessed that he’d really come to the house to see my mother and father.
‘I came to tell them I thought you were definitely dead.’
‘Cheery bastard,’ I laughed. However, his thoughtfulness and the effort he’d obviously made to find out where my mother and father lived touched me.
‘I thought they’d like to know you were up on the stern with me when the poor old Laconia started to go down.’
‘That was a moment and a half, wasn’t it?’
‘Bloody shocking.’
‘You still haven’t answered my question,’ I said.
‘What question is that, then?’
‘How you came by that Yank uniform.’
Like me, Johnny really didn’t want to talk about what had happened. All he told me was that the Vichy French cruiser Gloire had eventually picked him up. It already had a large number of survivors on board. It took them to North Africa, first to Dakar and then on to Casablanca where they were interned in a prison camp. In November, some two months after the sinking, the camp had been liberated by the Americans. By then Johnny couldn’t walk because one of his legs was badly infected from a scorpion bite, so the Americans took him to a US navy ship that was preparing to sail for Norfolk, Virginia.
‘Went all the way to America in the sick bay. First class, it was. They gave me this uniform and I thought, well, they’ve got plenty of others just like it so I never gave it back!’
‘Quite right, too.’
We drank a lot of beer, which fooled us into believing that the whole thing hadn’t been quite so bad after all, and staggered out of the pub, arms around each other, talking nonsense and slurring futile promises to stay in touch. It was the last we ever saw of each other.
My much-needed leave ended in January 1943, when I was sent south to a shore establishment at St Austell in Cornwall, HMS Vulcan. Before long I was posted north, to a place called Afonwen near Pwllhelli in North Wales, which was a Royal Navy recruit-training establishment. It also seemed to serve as a collecting house for survivors, and people who could only be described as bomb happy, those who had been broken by the strain of combat. I certainly qualified for the first category, possibly even the second. Over the entrance gates to the camp was a sign proclaiming it to be HMS Glendower.
The camp, which before the war had been one of Butlin’s holiday camps, overlooked the lovely beach that swept around Cardigan Bay for over five miles. The scenery was spectacular, with Mount Snowden clearly visible in the distance. Recruits in their brand new uniforms were everywhere, doing drill and dashing about looking all shiny and enthusiastic. There was a contingent of women in the camp, too, members of the Women’s Royal Navy Service, who were always simply known as Wrens.
Several doctors gave me another cursory examination when I arrived, but they didn’t ask me about my time in the lifeboat, or offer any help or advice. I was put under the command of a leading seaman who went by the rather charming name of John Rainbow.
‘Mac, you’ll be the sentry for the Wrens’ quarters.’
‘All right.’
It could’ve been worse, I suppose. Rainbow didn’t give me any instructions so, armed with a rifle, I spent my time patrolling the barbed wire fence that surrounded the Wrens’ quarters. The Wrens came in and out, going about their business, and they were pretty easy on the eye. I didn’t have the faintest idea what I was protecting them from and I’m quite sure my skin-and-bone presence and vague expression did nothing to reassure them.
Sentry duty didn’t exactly stimulate my mind, so I kept drifting off to places I really didn’t want to go. The camp and Wrens frequently disappeared from my mind and I would find myself below in Laconia as the torpedoes struck her, or being hauled aboard Hartenstein’s U-boat, or frantically swimming to the lifeboat.
But I was in good company at Glendower, because many of the experienced sailors in the camp were in a pretty bad way, traumatised for one reason or another. We never talked about what had happened to us, and just tried to make the best of it. Sometimes a group of us would get passes to leave camp and we’d set off on foot, keen to have a look around, although our main ambition was usually to find a pub.
The countryside was very peaceful, the winter air smelling of farm animals and the tang of an occasional sea fret drifting in from Cardigan Bay. But other than those pleasant excursions, there seemed no purpose to anything. Being ashore didn’t bother me at all because I felt certain I wouldn’t survive another stint at sea, but not knowing what the navy had planned for me was hard. I was a shore-bound sailor with no ship, no real job and no hope. That is, until early in 1944 when they sent me south again to Drake. More doctors examined me. They said little and explained even less. I was assigned to general duties, and I wondered if I’d somehow slipped through the cracks of officialdom, that my records had been lost and no one even knew where I was anymore. It was a bleak period of my life. I had gone from being adrift on the Atlantic to being adrift on land.
Sometime during March, I was posted to another general duties job at the naval dockyards in Devonport, not far from Drake. I would report for duty late in the afternoon and work through the night, running messages, saluting the officers and generally doing what was asked of me. It wasn’t hard. I was billeted in a schoolhouse on a hill beyond the dockyard, quietly settling into a routine without anyone bothering me too much. Occasionally I’d go home to Liverpool on a weekend pass.
During one of those weekends at home, I was sitting in a chair with my mind wandering as usual, when my father gave me an envelope. It was addressed to me in handwriting I didn’t recognise.
‘This came for you,’ he said and then quietly left the room. There was a carefully penned letter inside:
Dear ‘McLoughlin’,
I automatically write the familiar name by which I knew you in those days and nights during which we tossed on the Atlantic, but somehow I feel that back in civilisation ‘James’ would be more suitable.
It was so kind of your father to write, & I was very very glad to hear of you again. I am sending you a copy of the booklet which I was persuaded to write. I think that I am glad now that I have done it as it seems to have helped many people. Do let me know what you think of it, & whether it gives a true picture of our experiences for you too.
If you have the addresses of any of the other survivors do please let me know & I will send each a copy.
I am glad to hear that you are well & working again. So am I, but I never forget, & I am sure you cannot either.
I hope that one day we shall meet again—you were always so kind & helpful to me & always looked after me whenever possible, & I am so grateful for those memories in the midst of many that I would rather not have.
With the very best of good wishes.
Yours very sincerely,
Doris M. Hawkins,
‘Freckles’
I had tears in my eyes as I read those words. The whole dreadful experience overwhelmed me once more. I sat alone with the letter in my lap for quite a long time, and then read it again. It finally sank in that my father had written to Doris off his own bat, based on the scant information I had given him, to let her know that I was all right.
When he came back into the room he showed me another letter from Freckles, which she had addressed to him. In it she spoke of me in a way that I think made him very proud. She told him that she was doing full-time nursing work again as Sister in the Maternity Department of her own hospital, St Thomas’s, which had been evacuated from London to Woking for the duration of the war. She wrote, too, of how much it had pained her that she’d been unable to do much for us in the lifeboat.
‘She sent us two copies of her little book,’ my father said. ‘One for your mother and I, one for you.’
‘I don’t feel up to reading it just now,’ I admitted.
‘Atlantic Torpedo is what she’s called it. Read it when you’re ready, lad. When you’re good and ready.’
‘Sometime later.’
‘No rush.’
‘No.’
‘She seems a decent person.’
I couldn’t find the words to tell him just how incredibly decent Doris was. We both wrote a short letter back to her, and I felt guilty that I couldn’t comment on her account of our voyage. I hoped she would read between the lines and understand why I didn’t mention it, that I didn’t have the mental strength to read it.
Even though her letter dredged the experience back to the surface, I found comfort in the fact that I wasn’t alone in struggling with the awful memories. That was something positive to take back to my work in Devonport, where the dockyard was really bustling. We didn’t know it at the time, but the build up to the D-day invasion of Europe was in full swing, with shipping of all kinds in very high demand. This attracted attention from the Germans, who mounted a number of bombing raids, usually in the early evenings.
Late one afternoon in early June I reported for my shift, half expecting an air raid a little later. Even though air raid shelters were scattered around the dockyard, a group of us always gathered in a room on the ground floor of the signals building. It was dangerous and against regulations, but we would sit there for ages with nothing to do while the bombs went off. On this particular afternoon I figured it would help pass the time if I could get hold of a good magazine to read. So I went upstairs where I’d seen a collection on previous visits. A Wren was operating the switchboard there. She was absolutely gorgeous.
‘Can I borrow one of the magazines?’ I asked her.
‘No,’ she said in a very haughty fashion.
‘I just want to have something to read if the Germans come over.’
‘No,’ she said again.
‘I’ll return it, you know, after the all clear.’ I really wanted that magazine.
‘All right,’ the Wren finally said. I thought she only relented because she was busy and wanted to get rid of me.
Sure enough there was an air raid, a pretty big one that went on for a long time and caused quite a lot of damage. I sat it out reading my magazine and thinking about the Wren on the switchboard. After it was over I went back to my work until early the next morning. I was just getting ready to go off duty when I remembered the magazine, so I went back up the stairs of the signals building, where the Wren appeared to be finishing her shift as well.
‘Just returning the magazine,’ I told her.
‘Good,’ she said.
‘You finishing up now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can I walk you back to your billet?’
‘Oh, yes, I suppose so,’ the Wren said. Her earlier haughtiness had dissolved somewhat because she was going off duty.
We picked our way through the bomb damage and dodged the fire engines entering the dockyard, chatting quietly. I was instantly at ease with her. She was no longer the business-like Wren on duty at her switchboard, more like a normal friendly girl. She told me her name was Dorothy Field and that she was 19. When we got to her billet I knew I had to do something right there and then.
‘Would you like to go out with me?’ I asked.
‘I’ve got a boyfriend.’
‘Oh.’
‘A Royal Marine. He’s away at sea, on HMS Black Prince,’ she said. I knew Black Prince was a cruiser.
‘I see.’
‘I would like to go out with you, though. Just as a friend, mind,’ she said. ‘That would be nice.’
‘All right,’ I said. I felt wonderful.
Some very special chemistry was at work between us, I knew that for certain, despite the fact that she had a boyfriend. We began our friendship by going for long walks on Plymouth Hoe and various other places in and around Plymouth itself. Then we started to meet for cups of tea at a cafe called The Magnet, which was apt because I was very strongly drawn to this beautiful young woman. Friendship was unexpectedly becoming something more.
Plymouth was pretty much a military city at that stage of the war, swarming with people in uniform, so privacy was hard to come by, especially for two young people living in separate billets. Our lodgings were always noisy, with people coming and going at odd hours of the day and night, so I suggested to Dorothy that we meet in the nearby cemetery. It was the only quiet place I could think of.
‘Very romantic,’ she said.
We’d meet in the cemetery and, strange to think of it now, we fell in love among the headstones. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. As for telling her about my experiences in the navy, I merely mentioned that my ship had been torpedoed and that I’d been in a lifeboat for a while, then left it at that. I must have hid my trauma well.
‘You’re such a happy-go-lucky sailor!’ she told me.
After several weeks of walks, cups of tea and meeting in the cemetery, Dorothy invited me to her family home in Totnes to meet her parents. A chap knew things were pretty serious in those days if a girl asked him home to meet her parents. They were lovely people, but I don’t think they were overly impressed that their daughter was involved with a sailor, let alone one who was obviously a little vague and confused.
A few weeks after meeting Dorothy’s parents I received a draft chit, ordering me to join the aircraft carrier HMS Implacable. They sent me on leave for about 10 days before I was due to join the ship at Scapa Flow in Scotland. I was anxious about this, because I didn’t know how long I would be away, so I took Dorothy for another walk on Plymouth Hoe. There were a number of Royal Navy vessels riding at anchor in Plymouth Sound, from where I’d first gone to sea on HMS Valiant nearly five years before. It was about as traditional a British naval scene as I could imagine. Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh and all the other Elizabethan naval heroes had stood on this very spot before setting sail on their great voyages.
‘Will you marry me?’ I asked. I had little time to waste, so there was no point in beating about the bush.
‘Yes,’ Dorothy said straight away.
‘That’s good.’
‘But my parents will never agree. After all, we’ve only known each other for a few weeks,’ she gently reminded me.
‘What are we going to do then?’
‘I can get some leave as well. I’ll come with you to Liverpool and we’ll just go ahead and get married,’ she said calmly.
Without telling her parents, Dorothy joined me on my leave. We went to my parents’ house in Liverpool, where I introduced her to the family. When I told them we were going to be married there were some worried comments about not knowing each other long enough and that it wouldn’t last. Naturally we ignored all of it because we knew we loved each other and simply wanted to be together. After they’d recovered from the shock, my family threw themselves into the moment with good humour and enthusiasm. We made arrangements for a simple wedding service in All Saints, Speke, the church right next door to my parents’ house. Dorothy and I exchanged our vows on 12 September, 1944. We’d known each other for just 12 weeks. It was the happiest day of my life and, by a strange coincidence, it was exactly two years after the very worst day of my life, the day Laconia was torpedoed in the Atlantic.
After the ceremony we went back to the house, where we had our honeymoon. I showed Dorothy the sights of Liverpool, such as they were. Then my leave was over and I left to join Implacable. It was a painful parting. Dorothy caught a train south to break the news of our marriage to her family in Totnes, while I caught one north to Scotland. We didn’t know when we’d see each other again. Our situation was nothing unusual, though. A live-today-for-tomorrow-we-die attitude was strong among young people at that time. Many couples were getting married quickly, then being parted even quicker as their lives were tossed upside down by the instant demands of wartime postings. Everyone was affected in some way and teary railway station farewells were commonplace. Liverpool’s Lime Street Station was, it seemed to me, the saddest of places.
If I had been overawed by Valiant when I first joined her in 1939, then I was completely overwhelmed by Implacable. She was a brand new carrier, fresh out of the shipyards and just commissioned. Her flight deck was nearly 800 feet long and 100 wide. She displaced about 33,000 tons fully loaded and could steam at 32 knots. On 20 September 1944, I was just one sailor in a new crew of 1500 officers and men who came aboard to take her on her first operational cruise. Also on board was a 700-strong Fleet Air Arm contingent charged with maintaining and flying her aircraft, a mixture of Seafires and Barracudas. I had only been on board a few hours when someone told me Implacable had a range of 11,000 nautical miles. I winced. We could be going just about anywhere in the world. But as it turned out we were only heading to Norway on an anti-shipping operation.
I didn’t know a soul on board. I was assigned to the wireless operators’ mess and only a short while after we put to sea I could feel myself slipping into a most dreadful state. I was beside myself with anxiety about the possibility of a torpedo attack. If ever there was a juicy target for a German U-boat, it was an aircraft carrier. The thought of Implacable sinking almost immobilised me, and I realised that I had to do something about the way I was feeling.
With a great deal of trepidation, I went to see the surgeon-commander, the senior medical officer. But I was lucky. He was a kind, gentle officer who asked me a lot of questions about the sinking of Laconia, my time in the lifeboat and what I was feeling. He listened patiently for quite a long time as I did my best to explain it all.
‘These experiences take time to get over. You’re stuck on board for the moment, so stay with it as best you can,’ he said.
‘Aye aye, sir.’
‘Come and see me in my quarters at any time.’
At least there was someone who understood a little of my fears. So I went about my duties, trying to suppress a boiling anxiety, my health slowly deteriorating.
After four weeks of aircraft operations off Norway, during which we hit very heavy sea conditions, Implacable returned to Scotland to have some weather damage repaired. The surgeon-commander must have had significant influence because as soon as the carrier docked, the master-at-arms gave me a chit posting me back to barracks. So I returned to Drake and had a wonderful reunion with Dorothy. She had plenty to tell me. She had received her discharge papers from the Wrens.
‘Oh, and I’m pregnant,’ she announced.
I was amazed at her calmness about such a momentous occasion. To begin with I was overwhelmed, but then an extraordinary happiness and contentment rushed through me. I couldn’t keep the smile off my face. Becoming a father was just what I needed. It gave me something special to think about, something positive for the future instead of dwelling on the past.
However, it seemed the navy still had no real plans for me, except perhaps to give me some easy duty after my miserable spell on Implacable. Another doctor examined me half-heartedly, and I got the impression that he thought I was bomb happy. Then I was relieved to be posted to the Royal Naval College, which had been moved to Chester from its traditional home in Dartmouth, to reduce the risk of bombing. So I went north once again, leaving Dorothy in the care of her parents. It was nearly Christmas, 1944.
The College had taken over a stately country mansion with magnificent manicured gardens. Everything about the place was immaculate, traditional and very spit-and-polish. My job was that of sailor-servant to an elderly officer who had served at sea in World War One, returned to civilian life between the wars, then rejoined the Royal Navy at the start of hostilities in 1939. He had private quarters tucked away in the old mansion and gave me instructions while warming his feet in front of a homely open fire. I ran his messages, made sure people reported to him when they were required, and generally looked after him. I could never quite work out what his job was, which was fitting really because I wasn’t sure what mine was either.
In posting me to Chester the navy had done me something of a favour, because it wasn’t far to Liverpool by train and I could easily get home to see my family whenever I got a 12-hour pass. After a while it became a rather pleasant routine, marred only by the fact that I desperately wanted to return to Dorothy. Another small difficulty was that the College was nine miles from the Chester railway station. When my leave was over, I would have to run back to the College for fear of being late and getting docked leave and pay again. It improved my fitness and general health no end, that did.
I had just begun to enjoy the posting in Chester when the navy sent me back to Drake where I was drafted to an establishment I’d never heard of, HMS Golden Hind.
‘Where’s Golden Hind?’ I asked.
‘Sydney.’
‘Where?’
‘Sydney in Australia.’
‘Australia! I can’t go to bloody Australia, I’ve got a pregnant wife!’
‘You’ll go where the chit says.’