like fish. They swore like troopers and I really can’t print even one of the scurrilous comments which they yelled to encourage us to keep on throwing our money at them. But waterlogged! They swam and dived as if they had been born in the water whose several fathoms they could bottom in a few moments and then pop up, yelling for more. Waterlogged? What a sick joke.


But this call at Freetown was just one episode on my journey out to Southern Rhodesia. It was exactly two years after the War had begun that I found myself, after a week or two of leave and a train journey up to Glasgow in company with a gaggle of other Service members, Army and RAF, being ferried out from the pier of Greenock on the Clyde Estuary to an imposingly large liner anchored a quarter of a mile from the quay. We clambered aboard. It was a Cunard ship, the SS Scythia, displacing 20,000 tons and now commandeered as a troopship crammed with 400 crew members and some 4,000 troops bound in the main for the Far East. A small number of us were RAF on the way to South Africa and Southern Rhodesia but the main body of men – there was not a single woman either in the crew or among the troops – was bound for Burma where there was a real war in progress.


Officers were in the former passenger cabins and I shared one with three other RAF types, only one of whom I remember, if only because he failed to shower with the frequency the rest of us thought proper. We set off shortly after boarding, down the Clyde and into the Irish Sea on what I think must have been the 3rd or 4th of September 1941. It was not a particularly eventful voyage. We were in a convoy protected by the battle cruiser, HMS Repulse, which later met a sad fate in the naval war in the Far East. There were several smaller naval vessels to protect the big cruiser and ourselves, and they used to dash around us with their great bow waves making us wish we could use our cameras. Crossing the Bay of Biscay in the dark was quite an experience, for the weather was dreadful, the waves of frightening size and the visibility poor. To keep station, we were visually following the wash of something being towed behind the ship in front on the end of a long cable. We could see the wash, but no ship, and I suppose those who had us in their care were rather glad to have such dreadful weather at a critical time in the voyage, when we might have been a handy target for the enemy aircraft and submarines from the French mainland not too far away. I believe we then struck out a fair distance into the Atlantic, but there was a strict and complete blanket on any news of the ship’s movements and progress.


Meals were a welcome relief from the boredom of what was to prove a long voyage. We were all rather chuffed to find the menu for our first dinner included caviar! So did the second – and the third – and indeed every dinner we ate. For some reason, an excess of caviar had found its way to the ship’s stores and we got very tired of it very soon. There were a few lectures about topics like tropical climate precautions, the dangers of mosquito bites and the like. Bingo


48


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