Читать книгу The Inside Story - Anthony Westell - Страница 12

~ Chapter 3 ~

Going to War

I was vaguely aware from childhood that war was approaching. There were black-shirted fascists handing out pamphlets in the High Street, and I was told that they scuffled with Communists on Saturday nights, even in sleepy old Exeter. After the Munich crisis in 1938, we were all fitted with gas masks, and there was much talk of civil defence against air attack with bombs that might explode, create fires, or shower us with poison gas. But life went on, and we spent the summer of 1939, as usual, on the Warren. I remember when we were shopping in Exmouth one morning seeing the front page of the Daily Express announcing that Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a non-aggression pact, and being told that this made war more likely. We had no radio and heard that war had been declared when a police constable pushed his bike over the sand dunes to tell us and others that we must black-out our windows. That was not a problem; we just turned out the oil lamps, but for the first time in memory there were no lights on the seafront across the water in Exmouth, and no lighted trains passing in the night. The lights did not come on again for five years.

When we packed up to return to Exeter we knew that we were losing a battle to another threat, the sea, which had been eroding the dunes year by year and was by then almost at the backdoor of The Cabin. During the winter storms in 1940, the sea finally broke through the Warren to join with the estuary bay. All the summer homes were eventually swept away and the Warren became a sandbank visible only at low tide. But years later, the unpredictable sea began to return the sand, and the Warren dunes rose again, although smaller than before. There are no buildings now and signs on the beach say, pleasingly, “Give Way to Birds” because it is part of a much larger sanctuary.

I was still at school, of course, when the war began and became probably the greatest transforming experience of my life — as indeed it must have been for everyone who was near the front lines. It changed everything, and often for the better, including social and moral values, and economic and political expectations. It is a disturbing paradox that the world was a much better place in 1945 than it had been in 1939, and reflecting on it, I realize that the social values of Britain in the war years were almost the opposite of those today. In short, they were those of the left, liberty, equality, fraternity. The national spirit was fraternal, not individualistic. We were united against a common enemy, and the struggle for liberty took precedence over everything else.

Even the famous British class system softened, and people who would hardly have talked to each other in peacetime found common cause and a measure of fellowship. The goal was production, not consumption, and in fact it was unpatriotic, often illegal, to consume more than one’s equal share. Food, clothing, and petrol were severely rationed: four ounces of butter per week, an ounce or two of cheese, four ounces of bacon or ham, two ounces of the essential tea, a couple of shillings worth of meat which families pooled in order to buy a pitiful Sunday roast. One had to present a ration book to buy almost anything edible: dried and canned vegetables, rice, cereal, canned fish, cookies, candies, everything except bread, and for that you lined up at the bakery to buy the standard, greyish National Loaf. And then of course one had to queue, often for hours, for a ration book when they were issued from time to time.

The popular fish and chips were not rationed, but the shops could open only when they had cooking oil, so one went out looking for a shop with the welcome notice in the window, “Frying Tonight.” The unthinkable happened when pubs occasionally ran out of beer, and Scotch whisky, like cigarettes, was mostly “under the bar,” which meant that it was reserved for regular customers and no others need apply. Feeding pets was a nightmare:There were special shops selling horsemeat dyed green to prevent it from going onto the black market for human consumption, and one of my jobs as a schoolboy was to line up at a horsemeat shop and, if supplies held out until I got to the head of the queue, tuck a bloody parcel into my schoolbag for the ride home to a grateful dog. If we had known it at the time, no doubt we would have used the American saying popular during the Depression when clothes were an unnecessary expense, “Make it do, wear it out, use it up, do without.” We recycled waste to an extent that makes today’s programs look half-hearted. There were special bins for everything, including bones. Exhorted to give aluminum to make more Spitfires, we lined the streets outside our homes with cooking pots, learning only much later that they proved unsatisfactory for the job. Miles of old books lined the roads during paper drives, and the iron railings on our front garden were cut down and taken away, along with everyone else’s.

When Winston Churchill formed his coalition government in 1940, political debate and media criticism almost disappeared. Those few critics who remained, mostly on the left, were frowned upon, even reviled. Newspapers were reduced to four or six pages and found ways to print even in the “gutters” between two pages. The BBC radio news at 9 p.m. became the national source of reliable — or so we thought — information. We know now that after the collapse of France and the rout of the British army, Churchill seriously doubted Britain’s ability to survive. But at the time his defiant speeches rallied the country, and I doubt that the thought of defeat bothered many Britons. Call it stupidity or arrogance, but it probably saved us. The spirit was that of the solitary British solder, in David Low’s great cartoon, holding his rifle high and saying, “Alright, alone!”

It would be wrong to say war made people happy. Life was hard, particularly for women left to raise children on their own, and it was often tedious for everybody, but war removed a lot of reasons for envy and complaint. In fact, complaining became almost illegitimate and brought a swift and sarcastic retort, “Don’t yer know there’s a war on?” And in a way life was fulfilling; everyone had a job to do, and most did it, which was a relief for millions after the mass unemployment of the Great Depression. This helps perhaps to explain another paradox: While we claim to hate war, history suggests that it has been a popular occupation in most centuries. When wars were declared there was more celebrating than sobbing, with patriotic crowds marching through the streets in many countries. Now, films, TV programs, and books about past wars appear every year and often are hugely popular. In my view, the absence of a popular war helped to explain the militancy of young people when they opposed the unpopular war in Vietnam and struggled for civil rights in the 1960s and 1970s. I was teaching in a university at the time and was intrigued by the fact that students dressed in military-style clothing and spoke of their protests in military jargon: a march here, an offensive there, the campaign for this or that. They were seeking a substitute for war. I understood how they felt because for me the Second World War came as an adventure, a chance to escape from the routine of normal living.

My brother was eighteen when the war began and he soon volunteered for the Royal Navy. He was trained as a coder — encoding and decoding radio messages — and volunteered to be part of a small crew taking a ship to New Zealand, a long and uncomfortable voyage. He returned to Britain in 1943 and was commissioned and trained as a meteorologist, a handy skill for a sailing enthusiast who later took up ocean racing. When invasion threatened in 1940, my father joined the Home Guard, and I was thrilled when he brought home a rifle. It was still greasy from storage, and was called a Ross rifle. I discovered much later that Ross rifles had been manufactured in Canada to equip troops serving in the Boer War, and also the Royal North West Mounted Police. Despite various improvements, however, the rifles were never satisfactory and were eventually abandoned during the First World War when the Canadian army adopted the British Lee-Enfield. But so desperate was the need for rifles in 1940, after the British army left much of its equipment on the beaches of Dunkirk, that the old Ross rifles were dug out of storage and issued to the Home Guard.

Stranger things happened in those days. Some of the brighter sparks in the Exeter Home Guard mounted a machine gun on a tiny Austin 7 car as our answer to the German Panzers. Minefields were laid across the Warren golf links to hold up German invasion forces, but there were paths through the mines so that golfers could continue to play. Tank traps were installed on the beaches at Exmouth, which made it difficult to land dinghies, but they were used mainly as racks for bathers’ clothes and towels. Coastal defence guns were dug into the red sandstone cliffs to command the approaches to the Warren beaches, but as the nearest point in France was Cherbourg, about a hundred miles across the Channel, I can’t imagine, in retrospect, why anyone thought it remotely possible that the Germans would attempt such a dangerous and difficult crossing.

The war was going badly at the end of 1941 when we heard on the radio that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor. “We’ve won the war,” said my father, with unusual prescience — and with undue optimism because it was not until several days later that Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. That bears repeating when so many people, including most Americans, are under the impression that they entered the war in Europe to support Britain in the defence of liberty and democracy. They entered in fact because Hitler and Mussolini declared war on them in support of Japan. Of course, the United States had been aiding Britain and edging toward war with Germany, but one can only speculate about what might have happened had Germany and Italy not forced the issue. Obviously, there would have been a powerful argument in the United States for concentrating its strength against Japan and leaving Europe to its own war. But my father proved to be right, and within a year or so American troops began arriving in and around Exeter.

My image of America, like those of millions of other around the world, had been shaped by Hollywood movies, but the American soldiers tended to confirm our good impressions. They were on average bigger than our own soldiers, better uniformed, better educated, and with better manners. They were instructed in how to treat British civilians, and their military police were quick to remove anyone who seemed to be causing trouble. So while there were incidents, mainly over women, most Britons tended to see Americans as saviours whose presence guaranteed victory over Germany. That may be why, many years later, I could not sympathize with the anti-Americanism of many Canadian nationalists who saw, indeed, still see, the United States not as an ally but as a threat.

I became a “Firewatcher” while still at school. The job was to watch for incendiary bombs and, if possible, put them out before they started a major fire, with a bucket of sand or a stirrup pump — that is, a pump with one leg in a bucket of water to suck, and one leg outside on which the pumper stood to stabilize the operation. Stirrup pumps were distributed by the thousand, and if they sound like an poor way to tackle a bomb, the girl who later became my wife actually made it work: she and an aunt rushed our in their nightdresses when an incendiary fell in the garden and put it out. Even more remarkably, an incendiary fell through the roof of the house next door and was promptly kicked downstairs by an old lady and extinguished. Nothing as exciting as that happened to me.

With a friend, I spent an occasional night firewatching at our school. We played chess and the headmaster came down in his dressing gown and trounced us both. At home, when air raid sirens sounded I put on my steel helmet and, with my father, turned out to patrol the crescent in which we lived. But not as promptly one night as I might have done, because I had got too accustomed to sirens when German bombers passed over, going to or from Devonport, a major naval base about forty miles away, or Bristol, an industrial centre seventy miles away. Sometimes the planes dumped their bombs on us when they couldn’t find their real target, or perhaps were being chased by night fighters. There were in fact nineteen raids on Exeter between August 1940 and May 1942, most of them minor affairs.

I was in bed on the third floor of our house — on a hill about a mile from the city centre — on the night of May 3-4, 1942 and did not pay much attention when the sirens went and I heard bombs exploding a couple of miles away. But then I saw the night sky turn red and realized there was a major fire in the city. In fact, great stretches of the High Street were ablaze, including Tudor era buildings which burned all too easily. My father and I donned our steel helmets and went outside, while my sister, our housekeeper, Alice, and the dog, and a new kitten, promptly named Blitz, took shelter in a sort of store room between the sitting and dining rooms. When, a little later, I tried to check on them, I had a struggle to open the front door; blast had lifted the linoleum throughout the house, jamming the doors. I don’t know what caused the blast. No bombs fell very close to us, but nearby, on the county cricket ground, anti-aircraft guns were blasting away. Or perhaps the great fire in the centre caused a powerful wind as it sucked in oxygen.

We learned after the war that 40 Junkers 88 bombers flew up the River Exe to find the little city of about 80,000 people, and dropped 10,000 incendiaries and some 160 explosive bombs to spread the blaze. About 160 people were killed and hundreds more wounded. One bomb fell through the roof of the cathedral and exploded, but they built medieval churches to last and, with a huge tarpaulin over the roof, the place survived until it could be repaired when peace came. The new library and a million books burned, much to my dismay: I was a great reader, even then, and it had been my custom to stop at the library on the way home from school to replenish the supply of books — G. A. Henty’s stirring stories about boys adventuring in the Empire, and, always favourites, yarns about boys who ran away to sea. I remember the indignation of a librarian when I borrowed a short book, read it over tea, and tried to return it the same evening: Not allowed!

We didn’t know at the time why the Germans had picked on Exeter, a city of little or no obvious military or industrial importance. There were rumors but censorship was tight; I had just begun work as an apprentice reporter and spent the next few days phoning our reports through to London for censoring. We were allowed to announce that there had been a raid on a place in the southwest, and to describe the damage in general terms, but not to name the city because, it was ruled, that would show the Germans, who might have been lost, where they had dropped their bombs. Actually, as we found out after the war, the Germans not only knew they had blitzed Exeter, but also why, and were boasting about it. The raid was in fact a reprisal for an attack by the Royal Air Force in March on the historic German city of Lubeck, on the Baltic. Sir Arthur Harris, chief of bomber command and known popularly as Bomber Harris, had come to the sobering conclusion that night bombing of specific German targets was so inaccurate as to have little value, and he decided to try the tactic of attacking whole German cities, setting them ablaze where possible. Lubeck was chosen as an experimental target because it could be approached over water where there were no A-A guns, and because it was “flammable,” many of the buildings being medieval. The raid was a success in the sense that Lubeck was set ablaze, but Hitler, outraged at this uncivilized form of warfare, ordered that reprisal raids be carried out on historic British cities. The targets were picked from the famous German guide book, Baedeker, and so the raids on Exeter and other cathedral cities were called Baedeker raids.

When I told this story some fifty years later in the course of a travel article about Exeter published in The Globe and Mail, I was attacked by an Ontario judge who had been a bomber pilot in Britain and had taken part in the raid on Lubeck. He insisted that old city was a legitimate target because it was a port and an industrial city manufacturing U-boat components. Perhaps so, but that was not why Harris made it the target for the new form of fire bomb attack — terror bombing, as it came to be called. Similarly, the British Admiralty’s chart-making division had been evacuated from London to Exeter, but that was not why Hitler ordered the attack on the city. The Germans were wrong in claiming that Exeter had been destroyed, but acres of the ancient centre were, and the city has never recovered its former charm. In the postwar rush to rebuild, more attention was paid to commerce than to history and culture.

For me, these first years of the war were a waiting time. I wanted desperately to join the armed services, preferably the navy. Why? Adventure, I suppose, a challenge, new experiences, independence in the sense of leaving home and becoming a man. I believe those are the reasons most men, and most women, volunteer in a war. It’s absurd to call us heroes just because we served, or to pretend that we all marched off to defend liberty — and even more absurd to call those who were conscripted against their will heroes and martyrs. There were of course heroes, men and women who served far beyond the call of duty, displayed unusual courage, gave their lives to save others. To call us all heroes demeans those who deserve the title. I registered as a volunteer as soon as I was old enough, which was seventeen years and eight months. A close friend who also was working as an apprentice reporter volunteered with me, and we were called on December 23, 1943, two days before Christmas and four weeks before my eighteenth birthday.

The navy gathered most of its recruits in what had been a holiday camp — Butlin’s Holiday Camp — near Skegness on the flat North Sea coast of Lincolnshire. In times of peace, workers and their families enjoyed cheap holidays, living in long lines of wooden huts, grandly called chalets, and eating and playing in vast, jerry built halls. Over the entrance there hung a welcoming sign that said, as I recall, “Your Pleasure is Our Endeavor,” and it remained there, heavy with irony, when the Admiralty took over. Pleasure was not on the agenda for the scores of thousands of aspiring sailors who passed under the sign; basic training, square bashing, discipline, indoctrination, inoculation and immunization, and more discipline were. For a well-brought-up middle-class youth, the culture shock was severe. My shipmates — in the navy they are shipmates even in a shore establishment — came from all parts of Britain, and Ireland. There were volunteer youths of my age, and older men with families, because by 1943 Britain was calling up men in their late 30s. For the first time in my life, I was living, and suffering all sorts of indignities, with mates from the working class and with accents I could hardly understand. I have a group photo taken at the time in which I am a pudgy youth with owllike glasses, with my head on one side, of course.

The living huts had never been intended for winter and were perishing cold. There was no hot water in the communal washrooms. And there were lots of rough sailors to shout orders at us every day. The food would have been almost inedible had the sea air and exercise not made us starving hungry. Breakfast one day a week was canned herrings in tomato sauce, a delicacy so familiar in the navy that it was known just as “herrin’s in.” Not many recruits could stomach them for breakfast so there was always a stack of unwanted cans at the head of the long dining tables. I got to like them, and in fact still do: On toast, they make a cheap, tasty and nourishing meal. We were tested for skills and, partly because I wore glasses and was assumed to be able to write legibly in view of my reporting skills, I was assigned to the stores branch. The navy has a nickname for everything, and we stores assistants were called Jack Dusty, presumably because we laboured in the stores where we would always be dusty. It was not the seamanlike role which I had imagined, and our uniform was a white shirt, collar and tie, with jacket and pants, not the jaunty jumper and bell bottoms of real sailors — which the Admiralty, with unconscious irony, called “men dressed as seamen.” But while we might not appear to be real fighting men, in a ship we would all share the same risks.

We marched, counter-marched, and did rifle drill, which was highly recommended by grinning instructors for arms painfully swollen by vaccinations. We were tested for swimming in a huge metal tank, and those who seemed to be drowning were hooked out by a petty officer with a long pole. We were taught the rudiments of rowing a ship’s boat which was firmly secured in place in one of Mr. Butlin’s swimming pools. And we did all manner of manual work, washing literally thousands of dishes in the kitchens, sweeping the roadways, even labouring in the sewage farm. My favourite duty was in the guard house-cum-cell block where, after a night spent reading, rolling fags with the duty-free tobacco thoughtfully supplied by the Admiralty, and making sure the drunks in the cells were surviving, one could go up and down the rows of huts at dawn, hammering on the doors to turn out resentful shipmates. There were occasional half-day leaves, but all there was to do in Skegness was to line up at a café for eggs and chips, or sausage and chips on good days, before heading for the pub.

The friend with whom I had joined up was selected as officer material and sent off for training where he suffered perhaps a worse fate than not being selected in the first place. The navy in its inscrutable wisdom suddenly decided it needed no more officers and tossed his class back into the pool, where he became a seaman. We met again a year or two later in Hong Kong, he aboard a ship and I at a shore base. I also was a victim of inscrutable wisdom; instead of the regular three months at Skegness, my group spent five, mainly doing clean-up duties, before we ascended to Heaven, which is to say, private billets in London, and training at Highgate College, a famous school commandeered for war service. The navy, of course, had its own arcane system of bookkeeping, assigning to each of thousands of items a price which bore not the remotest relation to prices in the shops. It had probably been invented by Nelson, or around his time, and I found the study of it boring in the extreme.

However, I was kept awake — most of the time, anyway — by the arrival of Hitler’s secret weapon, the V1 buzz bomb. That was a pilotless plane that went put-put-putting through the sky until it ran out of fuel and crashed, usually on London. Sitting in class, we would hear the distinctive engine noise, and if it was anywhere near us when it stopped, the lot of us, including the instructor, would sink below a desk. When I passed the course, without distinction, I was sent to the naval depot at Devonport, adjoining Plymouth and only forty or so miles from Exeter, to await further posting. Devonport barracks were notorious, some buildings dating back to the Napoleonic war. It was rumored that the Admiralty had tried to sell them to the Prison Commissioners who found them not up to standard for felons. The usual escape was to go to sea, which is perhaps what the Admiralty had in mind. But there were ancient seamen, known as Barrack Stanchions, who lived in odd corners of the old buildings, and sometimes took a free meal in a seamen’s mission in the town, one of which was known as Jago s. They did not much of anything but dodge draft chits issued by the master at arms, the ship’s policeman, much feared but for some reason known in naval slang as the Jaunty. (The master’s deputy, a regulating petty officer, was known more appropriately as the Crusher.) The navy had a satirical song for many situations, most sung to hymn tunes and too rude to repeat, but one went like this:

O I wonder, yes I wonder

Did the jaunty make a blunder when he made out this draft

chit for me

For I’ve been a barrack stanchion and I’ve dined in Jago’s mansion

And now they are sending me to sea.

Eventually, and none too soon, I and the rest of an entire ship’s crew, some hundreds of us, were sent by special train to Greenock, on the Clyde, near Glasgow, to commission HMS Empire Spearhead. She was a mass produced Liberty ship configured as a landing ship and intended for the invasion of Europe, which by then had happened. The interior included troop decks with metal framed canvas cots four or five high, and on davits along the sides she carried assault landing craft — LCAs — manned by Royal Marine crews and designed to carry forty or so men from the ship to the beach. With several other landing ships, we were going to the Pacific to show the Americans that, with the war in Europe well in hand, the Royal Navy was coming to help them defeat Japan. And so I went to war, sailed around the world, saw many interesting places, and had many interesting experiences which I would not have wanted to miss. But life in the navy was never comfortable, the arbitrary discipline was hard to endure, and the class distinction between officers and men was a hangover from past centuries. But looking back on my career as a warrior, I doubt that I made a scrap of difference to the war effort — or, if I did make a difference, I’m not sure whether it was to the advantage of the Allies or the Axis.

My first job in the Empire Spearhead was in the supply office where I was a clerk entering columns of figures in ledgers. That ended when, bored to tears, I made an error that took the chief petty officer days of work to discover and correct before he could balance the ship’s books. One up for the Axis, I suppose. I was thereupon banished to work as a manual labourer, more or less, in the holds where the stores were kept. I much preferred it to bookkeeping. I had other duties, one of which was to mix and ladle out the lemonade which was issued instead of the traditional lime juice as a protection against scurvy. With the luck that has often attended me, I happened to be doing that job on the foredeck on a golden summer morning when we sailed up New York harbour, to dock in Manhattan — the land promised not by God but by Hollywood. After bombed, blacked-out, rationed Britain, the bright lights and well stocked stores of New York were an extraordinary experience. We worked hard to store ship for the Pacific, and to prepare to take aboard the American sailors and soldiers we were to ferry to New Guinea, but on shore leave with mates I managed to visit The Stage Door Canteen where we saw no stars but encountered a puzzle which remains to this day: On every table there was a can of condensed milk, and nobody seemed to know why.

The Americans, black soldiers and white sailors, came aboard, a band on the dock played “Anchors Away,” and off we went into the wild blue yonder, or in fact south and through the Panama Canal. By that time, the Yanks, who were fresh from training camps in a land flowing with steaks and ice cream, had encountered British naval rations and cooking. There were mutters of mutiny, but the presence of Royal Marines with rifles discouraged any such ideas. As the weather got warmer, life below deck for the crew and passengers became difficult. Instead of slinging hammocks in the traditional way, we were assigned to the canvas cots intended originally for troops on short trips to the invasion beaches. The sun beating on steel decks turned the troop decks into ovens and we tossed, turned, and grilled on our cots, stacked one on top of the other. By the time we reached Bora-Bora, an island in French Polynesia which had become a refueling base for ships and aircraft, the idea of a run ashore with dusky maidens with Parisian style was attractive. But it was not of course to be. We were told that there was so much venereal disease on the island that we would be allowed no contact with the island population. Instead, the landing craft would take us to a remote beach for swimming. Better that than nothing, until I came as close to drowning as ever I have in a lifetime of swimming. As young men will, we were wrestling in the surf when a shipmate got one arm around my neck, forcing my head under water, while with the other arm he fought off another mate. All my struggles seemed to him to be just part of the game; to me it became life and death, but fortunately he let go before I expired. From Bora-Bora we went to New Guinea to launch our passengers into jungle warfare which probably made the Empire Spearhead look like a cruise ship.

Our next stop was Cairns in Northern Queensland, now a popular resort, but then a frontier town with raised wooden sidewalks and swing doors on the bars. Australian troops recently returned from the Middle East were doing jungle training nearby, and they didn’t appreciate the fact that Americans by then were pretty much occupying their country. The arrival of the British navy added to what already a dangerous national mix in a small town. The bars had plenty of beer but few glasses so everybody had to drink out of bottles with the tops cut off, and prostitution was legal. One evening Australian soldiers who seemed to feel they had not received satisfaction for money in a brothel dismantled a large brass bed and threw it piece by piece into the street, to the applause of an admiring crowd, including me. That was more or less harmless, but there were dangerous street fights which I took care to avoid.

Our job was to pick up Australian troops and take them on training landings down the Australian coast before delivering them to New Guinea. We sent in our landing craft to bring them out to the ship, and I watched with awe as enormous men with rifles and packs, plus a mortar barrel or a piece of a machine gun on their backs, clambered up the scrambling nets we let down the side of the ship. Climbing those nets looks easy when you see it on a newscast, but the rope forming the net sags and swings and I found them difficult even when wearing swimming trunks. But I suppose that’s why they did jungle training: to become tougher and stronger than I ever was or would be. The first night aboard the Spearhead, on the deck under the Pacific moon, the Australians sang soldiers’ songs and then, inevitably, “Waltzing Matilda.” Even I with my a solid tin ear was moved.

More practically, it soon became apparent that our LCAs were too small and light to ride Pacific rollers. Once or twice, embarrassingly, a roller carried one up the beach and left it stranded. So after a time we were reassigned to the scores of ships which followed the U.S. fleet into action, carrying supplies and reinforcements. In this way we participated in the invasion of Luzon in the Phillippines and observed, from a reasonably safe distance, the Japanese suicide bombers attacking U.S. ships. Crocodiles were a more immediate threat: On a swimming party on an island in a river mouth, we saw far away down the beach a Jeep racing towards us; it arrived in time to tell us that the other side of the island was swarming with crocs which liked on occasion to roll in the surf, as we were doing.

As more and more British ships arrived in the Pacific, whatever symbolic importance the presence of our landing ships might have had ended, and we headed for Sydney, on our way home. But by then I was suffering from an unheroic condition, athlete’s foot, known in the navy as footrot, which kept getting worse despite the best efforts of the ship’s doctor. He had in fact been more successful in treating my eyesight. I had worn glasses for years and was handicapped when I sat on and broke the only pair I had while we were in some remote part of the Pacific without an optician in sight. The best the doc could do was to say that in the ship’s little library there was a copy of a book called Better Sight Without Glasses, by Aldous Huxley, as I remember. The basic idea was that poor eyesight was caused by lazy muscles that wouldn’t focus the eyes properly, and that eye exercises could correct that. Without specs, the alternative to falling down a hatchway or some other shipboard disaster was to make my eyes work better, and they did. It was years before I again needed glasses.

But no such luck with the footrot, and at Sydney I was discharged into the skin disease ward in a naval hospital, right next to Rose Cottage, the navy’s name for the venereal disease ward. Life in the hospital was a good deal better than on a ship, and some of my fellow patients spent hours every day irritating the skin disease the doctors were trying to cure. Rubbing the milled edge of coins into the skin was supposed to work a treat. We enjoyed the presence of female nurses although it was entirely understood that they reserved their social life for officers; played cards on a bedspread in which the incriminating evidence of gambling could be swept up and hidden in a second, read, yarned, and took our treatment every day. My treatment was soaking my feet and ankles in some concoction which gradually brought the disease under control, although it could not cure it.

When I was allowed shore leave — the navy goes ashore even from a hospital on land — I was commissioned by the ward to smuggle back bottles of cheap wine, called plonk. It was winter in Sydney so I wore my issue raincoat and concealed bottles in the deep pockets. The problem was that tropical rain and heat had weakened the stitching and I feared that unless I kept hold of the bottles they might easily fall through. That of course entailed keeping my hands in my pockets, which further entailed meeting no officers I would have to salute. Somehow I managed. But the time came when the doctors decided they could do no more and that I would have to return to a cooler climate. Equipped with salves and potions, I was discharged into the temporary Royal Naval barracks built on a dusty plain on the outskirts of Sydney, supposedly to await a passage home. But the United States dropped the atom bombs and Japan quickly surrendered.

I was in Sydney on VJ Day, August, 15,1945, always the lone and interested observer rather than a participant in the celebrations. Within a day or two I had the awaited draft chit — but to go to Hong Kong rather than back to Britain. The Japanese in Hong Kong, and no doubt elsewhere, were ready to lay down their arms, but not until there were British or American forces to protect them from the civilian populations they had mistreated. The Royal Navy scrambled to sweep up all the spare bodies it could find and ship them off to former colonies now to be reoccupied. With hundreds of others, I went from Sydney to Hong Kong on an aircraft carrier, arriving when the actual surrender was still underway and the colony was in turmoil.

During the Japanese occupation, the harbour ferry service between Hong Kong island and Kowloon on the mainland had fallen into disrepair, and there were even pirate junks operating in the approaches to the harbor — pirate junks being in the main regular trading junks which saw an opportunity for a little private enterprise on the side. I was assigned to a party based in the old British naval dockyard in Kowloon, on the mainland, with the task of running a small boat ferry service across the harbour for a month or so until the regular service could be restored. My job was to arrange to feed and fuel the fifty or so men in the group, and the problem was that there were no supplies and no place to cook anyway. I scrounged food off ships in the harbour, but attempts to cook over an open fire, using the top of a metal depthcharge container as a large pan, were not successful.

Equally or more serious, there was no rum. When he was first lord of the admiralty — that is, civilian minister in charge of the Royal Navy — Winston Churchill was asked by a pompous officer to remember the traditions of the service, and famously replied that the traditions were rum, buggery, and the lash. The lash was no longer in use during my service, I’m happy to say, and the occasional incident of buggery of which I was aware, although nominally a serious crime, was ignored. But rum was almost a religion, and it fell within the responsibilities of the supply branch. Ratings aged twenty and above were entitled to one-eighth of a pint of rum a day, mixed with two-eighths of a pint of water to make grog, the idea being that grog could not be hoarded because it would not keep for more than a day. Chief and petty officers got neat rum, while commissioned officers had a private bar in which pink gin was the favored tipple. The rum was bought in barrels and tended to vary in strength depending on where it came from, but it was always stronger than the pub rum we know today. So at age twenty men who might never have tasted spirits before were issued every noon with three eighths of a pint — six ounces — of potent grog.

It was easy to make it a habit — almost a precondition of eating the unappetizing naval lunch, or dinner as it was called — but it was more than that. The daily issue was a secular ceremony of almost mystical importance. “Spirits up” was piped throughout the ship, the rum and water measured exactly into a wooden tub under watchful eyes, and the grog issued to a representative from each mess who would be found in grave default by his mates if it were short even a drop. So it was not enough to dip a measure into the tub and fill it more or less; the level in the measure had to be convex — filled to the fullest extent possible. And every drop of rum in the ship had to be accounted for, which created real problems because the stuff tended to evaporate from the barrels. Anyway, there I was in Kowloon with no rum for sailors demanding their rights. Japanese brandy made from pine needles, which I discovered in a store in the dockyard, was sampled, but found to be no substitute. Nor were the sailors comforted by the knowledge that in lieu of rum they would receive sixpence a day. But the navy knew a crisis when it saw one, and rum was somehow procured after a day or two.

Shortly, catering was turned over to Chinese contractors, known as compradors, who, amazingly, could make both passable meals and a profit out of the naval ration allowance, and I was ordered back to the main base on Hong Kong island. It was a fascinating time, almost like living in a rip-roaring, lawless frontier town. Although the war with Japan was over, the Chinese civil war was still raging, and much of the country was devastated. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Commission (UNRRA) was sending in freighters loaded with food which was offloaded onto queues of waiting junks to be carried up the Pearl River to Canton — although the occasional junk scooted off in the wrong direction, causing much shouting and fist-waving. Divisions of Chinese Nationalist troops passed through, on their way, aboard American ships, to Shanghai to fight the Communists. The Happy Valley racetrack, which had served as a Japanese internment camp for civilians, reopened for business, amid dark suspicions that all the races were fixed. If they were, I saw one sailor who must have been on the inside: Coming away from the track, his shirt was stuffed to overflowing with HK dollars.

The former civilian internees began to trickle back from Australia where they had gone for rehabilitation and were much annoyed to find that their colony had not reverted to prewar customs. Imagine, the insolent soldiery did not automatically step aside on the sidewalks. The securities markets reopened to wild speculation, and it was said that someone had made a killing by tapping the telegraph line to Shanghai and inserting false information. Because many things were in short supply, the black market boomed, a predictor, I suppose, of the remarkable cowboy capitalism that has since made Hong Kong an economic dynamo. Luxurious restaurants reopened, and for a short time even common sailors could afford to eat in them. Japanese officers — mostly, it appeared, short, fat, middle-aged men in stiff, high collared uniforms — were made to run through the streets on their way to be tried as war criminals. But, again, routine health problems removed me from the scene. I was struck down by fever first diagnosed as malaria but then as the much less serious sand fly fever. For some reason, recent cuts and sores reopened and had to be drained by lint wicks soaked in some strange mixture of Epsom salts as I lay on the floor of a primitive sick bay. Then, running closely behind a mate to catch a tram, I went straight into an iron lamp standard which he dodged around. After several days of insisting that it was nothing worse than a strain, a naval doctor conceded that I had broken a small bone in my wrist, and as I couldn’t take care of myself in barracks with my right arms in a cast, I would have to go to hospital. Such luck!

A few more pleasant weeks of leisure, during which I solved the puzzle of why there was a yellow line on the grass all the way around the building: The rumour had got around that the yellow tablets we were supposed to take daily to ward off malaria were in fact a drug to suppress sexual desire, so instead of swallowing them the patients were dropping them out of the windows, and they dissolved in the grass. With my arm out of cast but weak, I was sent to a convalescent camp, once and now again, I hear, a famous resort. And then, after nine months in Hong Kong, I was shipped home to Britain — via the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean, which meant I had circled the world — as a working passenger on a mighty battleship, to await my turn for demobilization. I spent those last few months in what had been a harbour defence base near Devonport, where the important task was to try to get the quantity of stores on hand a little closer to the quantity shown on the books. That involved various tricks for writing off more food and materials than we actually consumed, and the problem, as usual, was rum. It sometimes took several sample tots for a warrant officer to decide that, yes, this gallon jar had gone off, and to sign the necessary papers. When my turn for demobilization came I handed on the task to my successor, and he no doubt to another, and so on until the books were balanced.

I left the navy in the fall of 1946, two years and ten months after I had joined, aged twenty but a “veteran” in today’s absurd terminology. We were offered none of the benefits provided to Canadian and American servicemen and women, but we could choose a suit of civilian clothes from a mass-tailored range. I chose a grey pinstripe suit, natty shirt with a blue weave printed on one side, herringbone overcoat, and a distinctly conservative trilby hat. For years, you could identify former servicemen, including me, by their demob clothes because replacement clothing was still rationed. But if little in my material circumstances had changed, I was not the shy, awkward, naive youth who had joined up. I was leaner, without specs, more worldly, and with a durable shell around the soft centre of shyness.

I was not then much interested in politics but my experiences had shaped my response to the political wars already raging in what we called “civvy street.” Many of my shipmates were from the working class in regions of Britain where the Labour Party and the dream of socialism were strong, the sort of people who would never have been my friends in peacetime. And the sharp division in the navy between officers and men — far sharper, I think, than in the army or the air force — made me resentful of the sort of class distinction between bosses and workers that I might have accepted as natural in civilian life. The landmark election of July 1945 had occurred while I was still in some remote corner of the Pacific, and it had made little impact on me. I was too young to vote anyway, but I remember that the petty officers, conservative to a man, were deeply concerned that the Labour Party might win and bring their familiar and hierarchical society crashing down.

The Labour Party had helped to make Churchill prime minister, and faithfully supported his national government. But with the war in Europe won, it withdrew from the coalition, forcing an election. At once, ferocious party warfare resumed, and Churchill contributed with an extraordinary attack on the Labour leaders, many of whom had served in his Cabinet: They would, he charged, if elected, introduce “some form of Gestapo” to enforce their plans, and their socialism would lead inevitably to totalitarianism. The press also resumed the prewar party warfare with most national dailies supporting the Conservatives, but Labour won in a landslide, despite Churchill’s immense personal popularity. The vote, I think, was essentially a vote for the values that had been established during the war, for fair shares instead of class and privilege, for a planned and directed economy that would guarantee full employment instead of relying on a market that had in the 1930s produced massive unemployment; in short for liberty, equality, and fraternity, a.k.a. socialism. The war had shown what government could achieve in organizing the national resources of labour and materials, and now we could set about building that famous land fit for heroes. To the extent that it was a negative vote, it was not against Churchill, but against the Tory party which was held to blame for the prewar depression, the years of appeasing Hitler, and for leading the country into war so ill-prepared that we came to the brink of defeat and disaster.

I shared those values and ideas, so when the time came to choose sides in the postwar political wars, I chose Labour. That displeased my father, a typical-middle class Conservative with no confidence at all in the ability of the working class to govern itself, let alone its betters. When the august Times newspaper, which sold for three pence when other dailies cost a penny, supported the Labour government in its early days — as in fact it thought proper to support all new governments — the businessmen’s club to which my father belonged declared it to be a mere “threepenny Daily Worker,” the Worker, of course, being the Communist daily. Indeed, any hope that the wartime spirit might continue was soon shown to be hopelessly naive. Nevertheless, having found my political home — what we now call social democracy — all those years ago, I have never seen cause to change. It seems undeniable to me that democratic government is the best, perhaps the only, agency through which ordinary people can hope to make progress against capital and privilege. By progress I do not mean merely higher incomes, but fuller and more equal participation in a society that raises the quality of life along with the quantity of goods and services we are able to buy. This does not mean I have always supported a party calling itself social democratic. In Canada I have voted for the CCF/NDP, the Liberals, and the Conservatives when that seemed the best way to advance social democratic ideas. The war years did not make me, but they shaped the attitudes I carried into journalism.