In our last year at Torpoint we had two spells, each of two weeks, in the old French battleship Paris, which had been sailed to Plymouth when the French collapsed in 1940. It was too old to have any operational value and was used as a maintenance depot, serving small ships in Devonport dockyard.
We went daily onto ships to get a bit of practical experience; most memorable were the few days on HMS King George V. This was one of five modern battleships whose construction started when Britain began to re-arm before the war; a sister ship, the Prince of Wales, had been sunk by the Japanese off the coast of Malaya a few days after the attack on Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941. It was on the Paris that I first slept in a hammock.
My mother died in February 1944 at the beginning of the last year of my apprenticeship. I cannot recall exactly when she was first diagnosed as having tuberculosis but think it was early in 1943. She went into a sanatorium at Branston near Lincoln and I think it was during the summer that she came home, after the doctor at the sanatorium had wanted to send her to Brompton hospital in London to have one lung collapsed but she refused to go. I was at home on my summer leave when she decided that she would undergo the operation. She went back into Branston and was soon sent to Brompton but it was there decided that both lungs were so badly affected that the procedure would not be effective. She returned to Branston and soon afterwards returned home.
While Dad and John had been without Mum they had a live-in housekeeper, a widow called Mrs Taylor, a sprightly 70-year-old. She had been to Canada, I think with the intention of staying there with a son, but had not settled and returned to England needing a home. She told Dad that she would not be able to cope and would have to leave if Mum came home, but changed her mind and stayed to give Mum her devoted attention to the end. It was fortunate that Christmas leave for Ken and I coincided so the family was together for Christmas 1943. By this time Mum was confined to bed; as I walked up Station Road to return from leave I realised that I would not see her again and shed a few tears.
I was in the mess room at tea time in February 1944, and when the message came over the loudspeaker "Apprentice Turner report to the Regulating Office for a telegram" I knew what it would tell me. Arrangements were made for me to have compassionate leave and a railway warrant, and I left Plymouth late that night arriving in Brigg at about 3:00pm the next day.
Passing the shop on the way from the station I called in and Nana said "It's a sad home-coming". I recall little about the funeral and next morning I returned to Torpoint. My instructor at the time had a few sympathetic words with me. Apart from the chaplain, who had called me into his office soon after I received the telegram, he was the only person in authority to do so. This man was from mum's home town of Spalding.
The remaining months at Torpoint soon passed and at the end of the year we were promoted to Artificers 5th Class with pay of five shillings and threepence per day - comparative riches.
I did well enough in the final work test and examinations to get my choice of port division. All navy men were allocated a home port: Devonport, Chatham or Portsmouth; I had chosen Portsmouth. So just before Christmas 1944 about a third of the class of approximately 80 boys went off to Portsmouth Barracks (HMS Victory) laden with kit-bags, suit-cases and hammocks. On arrival we were given immediate leave so after dumping kit bag and hammock in a baggage store I caught a train to Waterloo Station in London then to Kings Cross and home to Brigg.
I remember almost nothing of my two weeks leave and then it was back to Portsmouth. Before the war, the training I was now about to begin was all done at another shore establishment in Portsmouth, HMS Vernon, but the need to greatly increase the number of trainees caused the Admiralty to requisition Roedean School, the St Dunstan’s Institution for the Blind on the Sussex coast between Brighton and Rottingdean, and some small hotels further along the coast at Eastbourne.
And so the day after we returned to Portsmouth my classmates and I were removed to Roedean, a school for upper class girls. It can safely be described as the female equivalent of Eton or Harrow. The thing I remember most is the pleasure of luxuriating in a hot bath for the first time in my life as we only had showers at Torpoint. One day I saw a copy of the Scunthorpe Telegraph and enquiries revealed its owner as Tom Melton who came from Scunthorpe and was cousin to Tony Melton, my class mate at the grammar school. Later I met Tom's father who owned a furniture shop in Scunthorpe and he told me he had been an apprentice cabinet maker with my grandad.
The time was mostly spent in the classroom. We learned about the electrical distribution systems in ships; about the way in which information about enemy ships was processed in fire-control tables so that an enemy ship could be hit at a distance of more than 10 miles. Most electrical apparatus in British warships operated on Direct Current (DC) but we had about two weeks of intensive instruction on AC theory which served me well later in life.
Some boys of the class immediately ahead of us at Torpoint were still at Roedean and from them we learned of the Running Horse pub in Brighton which they patronised, and so those of us who had taken a liking to beer also made this pub our Brighton "local". It was run by a middle-aged couple known as Ma and Pa. Ma used to make us cheese sandwiches free of charge; I do not know how she obtained the tightly-rationed cheese. Ma was huge; when she laughed, which was a frequent occurrence, the floor shook. One night we went to the pub to find a tearful Pa who told us Ma had died suddenly.
More memories to come from Cliff on Brigg Blog.
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