CHAPTER 19: Joys of being a 1^st Lieutenant

My struggles over, I got down to the job of being a First Lieutenant and the Herculean task of making Pict, clean, shipshape and into a fighting unit which would give us a chance surviving the war. The task of a First Lieutenant is basically a very simple one. He is required to present to the Captain a ship and its crew both in all ways equipped and ready to fight, a simple prescript which calls for endless work, lots of tact and on a number of occasions sheer robbery. Having served both as a First Lieutenant and as a Captain, I had few illusions as to what the job demanded. I had done my homework very thoroughly, with the Cox'n at my shoulder and my work book in hand, l had gone over the ship from end to end and from truck to keelson. I now knew her as if we had grown up together. The tasks ahead were numerous, already some five score on my list, an undoubtedly a few more happily developing. In addition I had gone through the signals logs for the past six months. Now I had a clear picture of the progression by which my predecessor, backed up by the Captain, had first infuriated the dockyard staff before the present state of open warfare, annotated by a bevy of signals going up as far as the Admiral himself. Experience had taught me that this as not the way to get things done. There appeared to be humble pie on the menu for quite a time ahead. Some feathers needed smoothing and now was the time to do it. In full uniform, i.e. white drill shorts, short sleeved white shirt with the old wire epaulettes, long white stockings, a pair of immaculate white buckskin shoes, and the old white tropical cap, I took the "trot boat" ashore, picking it up as it wended its way found the fleet anchorage, dropping off bodies and stores before returning to its base at Perseverance Pier. It was quite a pier, a series of steel caissons floating lashed together, moored to the seabed by monstrous steel piles. It as a rugged piece of work and today's charts still note its remnants as a hazard to shipping.

Out in the bay the breeze from the sea had given some little succour from the heat, here on the pier, however, it was different. As I stepped ashore the heat shimmering above the steel caissons struck like a hammer, a physical blow which staggered me and found me gasping in the searing air. Over the steel sheets, the heat shimmered, scorching the air which went searing into my tortured lungs. It as not the best start to what looked like being a pretty arduous day. From the Pier, the rough, red laterite road ran up through the dark evergreen shrubs which covered the hillside. The Sun beat down and the moving lorries covered all in red laterite dust. Slowly, before the Sun reached its peak, I wended my way around the various offices and workshops, making contacts at the level I knew mattered, talking to as many people as possible : CPOs; warrant Officers; Lieutenants and I those knew actually did the work. Irrespective of rank, my patterns was roughly the same, trying to be friendly, relaxed and easy, asking for nothing, just making my number, laughing at the follies of my predecessor and letting them put a face to my name. Then the first steps towards healing some pretty obvious open wounds. Come aboard, be my guest, come for a drink or a meal, even for a quiet hour of two away from the dust and the flies. Nobody threw me out. I was hot and sweaty but felt that I as making progress. My last, really official visit was to the establishment of the Principal Medical Officer. Wearing a placatory smile and the air of a sheep going to be sheared, I told my sad tale, a tale of rats, fleas, stinking beds and filthy water. Obviously I, a mere layman, did not know how to set about it. I was sorely in need of sound advice and I cast myself at their all-knowing feet. Officialdom took over. Worry not young innocent, they would inspect my fleas and beds. Worry not, the Medical Cavalry were riding out to war. I had early decided that there as little future in discussing ship's problems and ways and means with my Captain. He was tired, ill and waiting for his relief, who had already been appointed and awaited passage out from UK. I would prefer to have some real results under my belt before we reached the talking stage. My days work done, I made my way to the Officer's Mess at Kìssy Barracks. I wandered in, walked over to the bar, a hand touched me on the shoulder and a soft Kiwi accent, an accent out of my past, said, "What is it?". My mind surged with memories of Johnny and Bill, happy memories of my two New Zealand friends, long dead, shot to bloody rags by our own gunboats in some night confrontation in the Med. It was, however another Kiwi, immaculately turned out, stocky, olive-skinned, wisps of black hair slicked back covering a very bald top, a very male presence, radiating good will and welcome. Dean Ayres, Lieutenant in HM's New Zealand Navy, another one and, I was to find, of the same ilk. We were all a bit odd, but Kiwi stood there, leaning slightly backwards, his right hand softly stroking an invisible but very real dragon. It was real enough, for it and Dean were to follow me through West Africa and later, even down Princess Street in Edinburgh. He took me to lunch and the only problem of the day occurred when a somewhat careless West African steward stood on the dragon's tail. However, a pat and a tit-bit, and it as once more recumbent and docile. l have always hoped that it found New Zealand to its liking. To my surprise and not mine only, the Medical branch chose the following day to make their visitation. They appeared, led by a Surgeon Captain in all his braided glory,with only the interlacing of scarlet between his stripes to show his non-combatant status. His minions dragged out the blankets and bedding and, on the upper deck, the vermin cavorted happily, leaping briskly in the sunshine, while the great man himself pursued them with a damp bar of soap in each hand. It as a very one-sided struggle. The fleas had the advantage of numbers but they were definitely outweighed. Ad so the beasts were identified, the bedding condemned and it departed with the gilded staff. It left a lot of people open mouthed but the performance was not yet complete. Out from the shore, in a special trot-boat came a seemingly endless stream of new mattresses, blankets, pillows and even covers for the same. Officers and crew were all somewhat befuddled. I am sure they were listening for the sound of sleigh bells and hoping to catch a glimpse of the man in the red and white cloak. Knowing the full story, which I was keeping to myself as yet, I had a more mundane approach to the next step. Reed and I took advantage of the general euphoria, walked into the evil smelling hovel under the gun-deck and demolished,with sledge-hammers, the flea-impregnated woodwork. Very weary, but more contented and so to bed.

The loss or hazarding of any of HM Ships eventually leads to a Court of Enquiry, whose purpose is to investigate the cause of the disaster and to make such recommendations as will prevent a repeat performance. If the Court should decide that someone is at fault, it will recommend the convening of a Court Martial. As the only uninvolved witness to the loss of Southern Pride, particularly as the only eyeball witness, I was required to attend the Court of Enquiry. This ate heavily into my time, setting back many of my dearest plans. Unfortunately, as expected of course, the outcome was the convening of a Court Martial. There was, however, a queue for these highly undesirable social events, and |Pride's Officers had to wait their turn. This gave me time to start on the ship's water tanks. We ran them nearly dry, then in the brilliant sunshine, on the foredeck, unscrewed the hatches and stepped back. Below was brown slime and utter stench, long streamers of slime hung from the sides of the tank, it as a glimpse into some medieval sewer. Now for it . Reed and I stripped down to shorts, put a bowline rope found each of us, and with two good men on each rope, go ready to lower ourselves into the dank depths. Yes! Two good men to each rope, for closed tanks of this kind tend to accumulate some pretty noxious gases. If we passed out the means of rescue and the rescue party were at hand. Down in the first tank we plied brooms, scrubbers and squeegees, while the hoses from above sprayed us with tepid but cooling water. The thick brown sludge squelched between our toes while we sluiced it all down to the original shiny lining. We flushed out the tank, painting on a sterilisation agent provided by the now ever helpful staff, and cleaned out the delivery pipes throughout the ship. That was tank No l, now for tank No 2, and the same arduous procedure. It took two days of back breaking work. Then the next step; call the water-boat, test carefully the quality of her wares, then fill the tanks. I threatened Chiefie with slow castration, with a rusty machete, if ever I found he had taken on board anything but the best of water. The necessity for clean water related not only to the fact that we needed to drink about ten pints each day, but that at that time the culinary ideas on board were very limited, being composed entirely of bush cow and dehydrated vegetables. Imagine the appearance of a plate of food on which potatoes, turnips and cabbage were all the same nauseous shade of turd brown. Just to see the clear water running from the tap was in itself a joy. Word had now been confirmed that we were to proceed as soon as possible to Durban for a long overdue major refit. No Buzz this, we even had our first RADAR set on the deck in carefully packed boxes. That of course meant coaling ship. In the old Navy this had been the job of all hands, including officers; here in West Africa there was a very different procedure. Nay! Not a procedure but a ritual. Out from the coaling yard came a tug hauling a scruffy looking barge which contained an even scruffier cargo of"coal". At least that was what the tug master suggested it was. The ritual never changed, down into the barge went the Chief and I, there we made sundry foul and defamatory remarks as to which street in the village had provided these road sweepings. After a volley of abuse, the tug would make its way back to the coaling jetty, shortly to reappear with another cargo, which the tug Master referred to as "Welsh Steam Coal". Having recovered from our bout of hilarious laughter at such a good joke, we would again carry out our inspection. Yes! We could agree this had once been coal, many years ago obviously. Was it a memorial to some long dead collier? Again the volley of abuse and the departure of the garbage. Sometimes, if one were lucky or particularly foul-mouthed, this might bring the initial pantomime to a close. Next would arrive the "workers", who flooded onto the ship and began to take up any position of shaded comfort each could find. As there were about two hundred of them, each carrying a shallow wickerwork basket of about 18 inches diameter and about 12 inches deep, the place was beginning to get a bit crowded. My next job as to find the "Boss Man "; there was a drill or should I say a ritual for this too. A full packet of cigarettes produced a quick appearance, then real negotiations could begin. I had a record for fast coaling before I left the Coast. My procedure was simple, effective, and never let me down. I gave the Boss Man half a packet of cigarettes, indicating that as I as generous I would give his senior henchmen one each, so that their dash would not to come out of his packet. Ah! But there was a catch to it: future awards would depend upon the time it took to coal. My scale was carefully graded, becoming an increasingly generous rate as the loading time decreased.

Then, at last, let loading commence. That was a sight not to be missed. A brow was rigged from the barge to our main deck, off came the round steel hatch covers, up the brow crawled a trail of human sloths, each carried a wickerwork basket which held no more than two shovels of coal; imagine the fun of loading about 150 tons of coal in this way. As they worked, a dust cloud of fine coal filtered down on the ship, onto paintwork, into food and over us all. We were going down to Durban so we stuffed Pict with coal. The job ended, the Boss Man and his henchmen were then all presented with slightly more cigs. than had been agreed, while we set out to hose down the ship and then to get ourselves clean. This was, however, not to be a normal day. Alongside came a picket boat, whose Cox'n, obviously rather puzzled, delivered, to me personally four dozen bottles of Alsop's Export. There was a note from Kiwi saying he had found these and expected I could put them to some use. I could, he said reimburse him in due course. So what are friends for? Dodd, who now awaited his relief, had gone off for a rest, nevertheless, I was somewhat astounded to be required to respond, forthwith, to Captain John Money, Capt. D Escort forces. We had met, indeed, as he as prosecuting officer at Pride's Courts Martial and I had been a major witness. We had talked, albeit in rather formal surroundings. Crossing to the base ship, I racked my mind as to what it could be about. My mind as quite empty, "D" was pleasant and affable, too pleasant, too affable it struck me. He sat me down, gave me a very large pink gin, and came to the nub of the issue. We were not going to Durban to refit. He was sorry but the floating dock had just arrived. He did not like it either, but we could refit in Freetown. It took another rather larger pink gin for me to absorb that one. Further bad news was to follow. We were to be Africanised, i.e. we were to begin the process of building up a West African Navy, which meant taking on a crew in which only key ratings would be white. Only a very distant and somewhat balmy bureaucrat could have dreamed that West Africa was a single country. Time was to show them the errors of their intentions, meanwhile we who ran the ships must try to cope with the near impossible. I took the bad news back to Pict. The crew were appalled, They had been dreaming of a long interlude away from the war, besides the girls among the survivors had all done much letter writing to ensure that there were lots of people in Durban who would know the story, and give them hospitality and kindness. Dodd and Solly didn't seem to mind very much, both were due to go home, and a trip to South Africa could only add to their difficulties offending a passage home. Solly, I am sure had other, more cogent blonde reasons. Charlie and I saw it rather differently. We both knew the war in Europe was coming to an end. Out here there could still be odd interlopers and casualties and we both had now begun to think that we might survive this struggle. That was a luxury in which, we had never before dared to indulge. Three months in Durban would improve our survival chances immensely; now it had been snatched away. It did, however, mean that there was a vast amount of work to do. Firstly all the coal, which we had just loaded had to be removed and the ship emptied of shells, cordite, depth charges and all the other odd munitions of war. We started about the 18^th Ju1y and by the 20^th Ju1y were ready to enter the floating dock. Getting in was easy enough, and once in there was plenty of skilled European labour to shore us up and make all secure. It left, however, one brutally laborious job. We had somewhere about l3 shackles of cable to hoist out of the cable locker and make out on the deck so that it could be repaired or replaced as necessary. The magnitude of the task seemed quite beyond our capabilities, recognising that we had no source of machine power on the ship or available within the dock. It can of course be worked, as the Andrew has a formula for every occasion. We had thirteen shackles of cable, which at 12.5 fathoms of cable per shackle, gave us a length of 162.5 fathoms to play with. The weight in hundred weights of 100 fathom of cable is found by the formula:

Weight in Ct. per 100 fathoms 48x (size)² + 2.5 %

i.e. weight in Ct. per 100 fathoms = 48x (1.25)² + 2.5 %

Thus, weight per 100 fathoms = 77 cwt, or about 4 tons.

But our 162.5 fathoms, rusty and ten foot down in the cable locker, must have weighed in at about 6.25 tons. So that was what we had to do, and do it quickly and not kill or rupture anyone in the process. The Navy of course has being doing this kind of job long before Nelson was a Snottie, and naturally if you look in the book there is a drill. So I turned to the Manual of Seamanship and looked it up. The tool we used was what the Navy describes as a three-fold purchase, which consists of three triple blocks and gives a power ratio of six or seven to one. This was the old gear used for weighing anchor by hand. Wonderful book, it so told us exactly how to rig it (Chapter 111, pager 121) . That made it possible but it still meant hours of brutal physical labour, naked to the waist in the blistering sun and all consuming humidity. We got it out at last, a Herculean performance, we thought. what a mess it was in and all was to scrape and clean for the day when the experts could come and measure the amount of wear. For me, it was also a traumatic event, I awoke in the early morning with my insides screaming in the last spasms of agony. Self-diagnosis was easy, either I had a good case of dysentery, a rupture of the appendix with peritonitis or - if really lucky, merely a case of extreme gastro-enteritis. Charlie got a hospital boat quickly, and the medics arrived on board. It as however, 30 feet down a single rung wooden ladder to get to the floor of the dock. They looked at it with trepidation. I looked at them with even more trepidation, yet somehow I found enough strength to crawl down the ladder before collapsing in a noxious heap on the floor of the dock. Some aspiring racing driver rattled up the winding road to the Fifty-First General Hospital. I was past caring, he could go over the bloody cliff if he felt like it

I was there for a fortnight before I reached the stage when I could chase the foot long centipedes from my wash-bowl and sit on the verandah and watch, with some equanimity, the huge bird-eating spiders devouring their prey as they hunted below the board-walk. Obviously it as going to be some wee time before I was really fit for full duty again. I wondered what the next few weeks had in store for me. Pict, still in the floating dock, as well in the hands of the dockyard, so really I was of no use there.

The Navy, however, did some very odd things, so I might be lucky. Roscoe, a friend of mine had been on a mine-sweeper which as first dive-bombed and then the survivors machine-gunned when they took to the boats. Thirty-odd sailors had sat don for breakfast that morning, by nightfall only Roscoe was alive. He wasn't in very good shape, no real physical damage but, thoroughly mentally shattered. Indeed too shattered to be allowed to go home on leave. The Navy, in its wisdom, put him in the Olde England Hotel at Windermere, gave him a boat, fishing rod, outboard engine and petrol, and left time and the Good Lord to do the rest. I had little hope that I would end up in the Olde England but, within the limits of what as available, Their Lordships did pretty well for me. Once I was really up and about, they packed me off to the old Musketry School at Kortright. Really a sinecure of a job. Task to oversee the range training of the handful of naval ratings who could be spared from more pressing duties. By lunchtime each day work was over and I could retreat to my abode. A lovely abode it was. Some 1500 ft. above the great sweep of Freetown Bay, my tent caught every draught of breeze that the bulk of Sugarloaf made as it lifted the clean sea air passing over into the hills behind. The bed was, of course, something out of real Victoriana: cast iron with beautiful brass bed knobs; ornate iron bed ends; all this standing on wide wooden blocks. The blocks themselves stood in deep water drums. The whole was designed to ensure that I never woke in the morning sharing my pit with something large and noxious. Even then, the first job each morning was to shake out shoes and clothes and rid oneself of the odd intrepid scorpion, spider or small snake that had snuggled down there for the night. They left me there for the rest of August and then sent me down to Lumley to take charge of the Rest Camp. Here, I was delighted to meet Solly and most of the Ship's company, who were there to get a break from the heat, sweat and tedium of the floating dock. I set about getting everyone fit, including myself: early morning runs, visits to the beach and long hours in the lukewarm surf. A fortnight of this and we were getting into pretty reasonable shape and to my delight I found that, even in the handful of white ratings who were going to stay with the ship, we had some pretty useful footballers. So I went ahead with my plan to get a ship's football team started. That, I thought, might be an improvement on Pict's usual shipboard games, namely cricket-without-a-ball, darts-without-darts and watching the coupling antics of the two tortoises which we carried as non-fare-paying passengers.

In the middle of this bliss arrived a peremptory order from Dodd, that Solly was to return to the ship forthwith in order to sort out some minor store problems; knowing what the problems were, I blew my stack. By now I had contacts in the base and was quite prepared to use them. The outcome was that Solly spent a couple of hours on board, sorted out the problem and was back at Lumley the same evening. Solly was pretty shot, Months before, he had fallen down an open bunket hatch and torn open his shin. It had never healed and each day he went through the drill of filling the wound with sulphonamide dust, and covering the mess with a dressing before he started work. It must, by now, be obvious that Dodd, my CO and I did not hit it off. We were very different types with very different service backgrounds, which in itself did not help. We was what I always think of as the Black Irish, not the small dark man of legend, but tall, slender, very black of hair, with a high complexion on an otherwise pale skin. I nevef found any trace of humour in him but perhaps there I am being unfair, for by the end of one's time on the station the humour of the situation had worn a bit thin. So let me admit that there as a natural antipathy between us. I had spent all of my previous service career either in the immaculate Egret or the shining boats of Coastal Forces. His shorter background was Patrol Service and all that carried with it. The real parting of the ways had, however, come from an incident immediately after the recovery of survivors from Southern Pride. If there were any kudos from that sorry affair, they went first to the boat crew and to myself; he had been shut out, waiting and wondering, I could see his point. We had sailed down to Takoradi, I had spent some time checking the system for mooring which was to drop anchor in a specified spot, veer cable and go astern manoeuvring to put the stern on to the specified mooring buoy.

The Navy has a time-honoured drill for doing this. First one lays off a course to steer which will carry the ship along the line on which it is intended to drop the anchor: this is preferably done by having a safe course indicated by a transit, i.e. by two markers which are in line as long as the course is held; a second marker and a bearing is selected which will intersect the course at an angle of 90 degrees, exactly where the anchor must be dropped. Such a system is infinitely variable, but removes all danger and doubt from whar can otherwise be a tricky procedure, especially in a crowded anchorage. I was very keen on having a chance to handle Pict. I had even worked out in advance courses and bearings for putting her onto the mooring.

However, Dodd gave no indication that he intended to involve me in any other than routine tasks. We came in past the wide swung breakwaters of the outer harbour and steamed through the piers into the inner harbour. No sooner were we in, than he ordered Hancock to let go the anchor. I as flabbergasted at the position he had chosen. Before I could speak he turned round to me and said "She's yours No. 1, put her on the buoy". I never hesitated, I simply said, "No Sir, she won't go from here". Well, he tried to frizzle me with a glare, then he turned to the task of getting onto the buoy. After twenty minutes, he had to admit that she wouldn't go and in full view of all the other interested ships he had to up anchor and start again. This time he came much further in and dropped the anchor in front of the mooring buoy and went astern until we could secure. This procedure had its own built in problems, for each subsequent ship coming to a mooring had, of necessity, to lay its anchor cable athwart ours. Oh! Happy days. It as fortunate that I knew just how to clear cables fouled in this way - a lesson from the CO of RML 516, Tony Bone, master shiphandler and teacher. By then dead like so many others. Additionally, for over a year I had handled ships as a daily routine, coming and going to all kinds of moorings, under all kinds of conditions, and had known before being asked that a clanger had been dropped. Dodd never said a word about my rank defiance, but he never gave me a chance to handle Pict. Even today, I cannot decide as to whether it as a genuine error on his part, or an intent to take the wind out of my sails. Whichever, you don't start an action like that and then spring it on someone you are convinced is not prepared. After an auspicious start like that, is it any wonder we failed to gel? Fortunately for Pict, me and every one else concerned, Dodd had really ceased to be interested in Pict and largely left me to get on with it, which as the way in which I had previously been left to work by able and conscientious Commanding Officers and it suited me don to the ground.

Fitter and better than I had been for sometime, I went back to Pict, still sitting in the floating dock but coming to the end of her tribulations, Unfortunately, with the state of the war in Europe and the shortage of skilled specialists in Freetown it had been decided not to install RADAR. This was a decision which came near to costing us deary. I was no more capable of taking in some of the idiosyncrasies of living in the floating dock. For instance, there were no built-in toilets, and the heads consisted of a large ramp boomed out over the sea, up this one progressed to a chicken-coop which, almost bottomless, looked down into the blue waters of the harbour. Down in the blue waters of the harbour were some interesting piscine species: there were small fish of every size colour and shape; long slender barracuda, those voracious hunters; lastly of course, there were sharks. I've often looked down from my toilet some fifteen feet above the sea and wondered if sharks, like dolphins, had the same remarkable ability to catapult themselves out of the water. I never lingered. By the last few days of August we were back in the water and lying in our usual berth alongside Turcoman. It as a bit of a turmoil, cleaning up the remains of the dockers' rubbish, soon however, she was "All ship-shape and Bristo1 fashion". Turcoman was Senior Officer of our Trawler Escort Group as Dodd was very junior. We often worked together and in many ways we were "chummy ships". Come Sunday, there as a rattle on the wardroom ladder announcing the arrival of Mulligan. "Spike" Mulligan, of course. What other nickname could you give to a Yorkshireman who hailed from such an outlandish place as Heckmondwyke? He was Turcoman's Gunner, a tough, friendly little man, lines of sun and long stress etching his face. Like us all, a tired man, yet steadily the humour oozed from him, deadpan and with an atrocious Yorkshire brogue, a brogue that was part of the man. We all liked Spike: one of his great attractions was his lack of weight, so that even when we had to carry him back from parties - a frequent occurrence - we did it without too much objection. Spike had come to inform us that for this afternoon he had acquired the use of a service "Tillie" to take a party up to Lumley Beach. There was of course lots of room, so would Charlie, Solly and I like to join him and Bull, his No.l. We went ashore in Pict's 16 ft. sea boat, now powered by a shining new Seagull outboard. The Seagull was Charlie's pride and joy and was usually to be seen in pieces on the foredeck while Charlie happily carried out the six-monthly service every week. From Kissy Pier, the Tilly took us along through the Hastings Valley to the beach at Lumley. In the baking summer heat and high humidity, Lumley was our favourite place where the golf-course backed onto the palm fringed but steeply shelving beach. Normally we splashed around in the shallows and swam just a little in waist-deep water before lying lethargic on the beach where the flood tide coming in over the burning sand scorched our bodies as if we were being plunged into a hot bath. Our sweating, aching bodies relaxed and some of the bodily aches went away. Sadly, most of our aches were not of the body. Yet the Sun, the sea and the sand helped. After our swim we could wash off some of the salt and retire to the Golf Club. There we ould have "tea" served in a beautiful china teapot, with bananas, monkey nuts and the odd jungle fruit, which the West Indian steward had shipped up fof the occasion It was remarkable that John, the steward, did not bring milk with the tea. The reason for this lack of service was that Mulligan had arranged that there must be a simple solution to the club order that hard liquor was not to be served before sundown. The teapot therefore contained an entire bottle of Scotch. What it cost in hard currency I dread to think. It was, however, a basic rule of the escorts that we should all be spent up before we sailed: Fancy, dying and leaving unspent money behind.

That Sunday, however, was set to be different. On the beach the Sun shone down from a sky bleached of colour and the sweat ran freely. Just time for a scatter into the shallows to cool down, before drying off and wending our way up the beach for a long anticipated "rea". We paddled and splashed, but with increasing circumspection as it was obvious that the tide had turned and the vicious ebb was starting to run off the beach. I had already turned and as making my way, thigh deep, out of the water, when I heard a shout. It was Spike, the buffoon, so for a moment we ignored it. Somehow, though, it got through that this was not just another Mulligan lark. Solly caught on first and splashed his way across to Spike, to my astonishment, he suddenly went from thigh to chest deep and then he was swimming for it, trying to support the brickweight of Yorkshire pudding that was Mulligan. I was there within seconds, planting my feet on the sea bed, I tried to pull them both toward the beach. All that happened was that the scouring ebb drained the sand from beneath me. I was standing in a hole that got deeper and deeper, until I too, was swimming for it. We had Spike, Solly on one-side and myself on the other, while the ebb-tide had us. We struck out hard for the shore and in horror watched it move away from us. We were being carried out to sea and to some extent along the beach. I looked at Soly, no fear there, just a gritted jaw, together with the certainty that he as going to stay with it. Struggle as we might, that ebb swept us out to sea. Out from the sheltering shoals and into the deeper water where the sharks kept their never-ending watch and scavenged whatever came their way. They had scavenged a soldier here the previous week: Sunday looked like being a bonanza day for sharks. We were not, however, deserted, for Bull, wise in the ways of surf beaches had sent Charlie running for the life saving gear and now, strapped in its harness, was plunging in to help. Charlie and Donk Mules were running out the line but it, like time for us was running out. Alas, we were now far out of reach of Bull and his lifeline. Spike as pretty far gone, just enough left to gasp and hang on. Solly was a better swimmer than I was, alone he might make it to the reef which lay to our east and to which the ebb as now directing us. I, never the best of swimmers but very much at home in the water, might alone, have kept myself afloat and drifted towards the reef. With Spike there was no hope, we were not going to make it. Bull, with his winch man and gear, was following us along the beach and Donk was busting a gut as he tore along looking for a native canoe. Solly and I guessed we had had it and soon would be able to do no more than drift untli either the sharks or the sea took us. Still, we struggled on, the ebb no longer pulling us further out to sea each minute yet pushing us along well out from, though parallel to, the shore. As this happened the configuration of the waves changed, there were now rollers, and on this section a surf was building up. One by one they swept in, past us or over us. Came at last the mother of surfs and somehow we got Spike and ourselves on top of it; solid and green as it coursed in, coursed in with Spike on Solly's back and I, on top of Spike. They made a super surfboard. The beach raced toward us, I had a glirnpse of white surf, of Bull charging into the water, and then the green came down on me and I as fighting to hold my breath until I should surface again. I remember the body-shaking crunch as we hit the beach. We lay where the ebbing wave had left us. I raised my head, nothing left, the next wave would carry us out again. In that despair, I saw Bull charging in like a gorilla in heat, somehow his two arms embraced the three of us, hanging on while the relentless surf dragged at us. Ihen they were all there and we were dragged up the beach above the water-line. Retching, coughing and shaking with exhaustion. I lay face down, fingers still digging desperately and fearfully into the sand. Slowly we all sat up and began to take stock of this world to which we had returned. A dour, but hoarse, Yorkshire voice said "I've lost my ring". Solly's response was quick and to the point, "Lost your ring? Couldn't have been me, I as in front - blame Bob, he was on top". We at last realised that Mulligan was not claiming sexual assault in that grim struggle, but that sometime out there he had lost the wedding ring from his finger.

We went up for tea and never did whisky taste better, Mulligan disgraced Yorkshiremen by insisting on paying for the meal. I looked at Solly, knowing that twice at the bitter test he had come through to stand at my side. I thought, it will be a sad day for me hen the day comes that you will at last go home. We got back to Kissy, the Bay as awash with troopers, mostly carrying new boys out to the Far East Campaign; but not all: reliefs were there for Solly and Dodd.