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When I started the job I forgot the one lesson I had learned in the Navy which stated ‘what was good enough for Nelson is good enough for me’, which being translated means, since Wolf took Quebec, we have arrived here by trial and error, mainly error, so don’t tinker. I tinkered and the Army suffered. Perhaps that saying should be in poker-work over the bed of every ambitious politician.
My boss was another demobee called Captain Something-or-other, let us call him Captain Small. He had been a captain in the army but like me was also an HO and so not really entitled to the title, if you follow me, but insisted on it nonetheless, which was a comment in itself. It was he who explained the archaic documentation system and my role. I really think the problem stemmed from it being too easy. I was not under enough pressure, I had too much time to think and criticise. The ‘idle hands’ syndrome.
Each soldier had about six record sheets which set out every imaginable action he had performed or which had been performed on him during his service career, from arriving late on parade to having his appendix out. These were kept by me, alphabetically, in separate books, and when he arrived and when he left I had to note the fact on practically every sheet. All the records of a group of soldiers would arrive together, I marked them all, put them in the separate books, and so on in reverse when they left. As it was a ‘Holding Unit’ people came and went like sales-reps at a convention hotel, here today and gone tomorrow.
I thought the whole business was a bloody waste of time for everyone and promptly went about changing it. As every sheet had to be annotated with all comings and goings of the man, it occurred to me that an envelope with his vital statistics and his arrival and departure on the outside would mean only two notes, one on arrival, and one on leaving, would be sufficient. Obvious to anyone, but unfortunately Captain Small could see my point of view, poor deluded fool that he was. He was too easily persuaded
Within a week I had scrapped the cumbersome books, introduced the envelope system with everything one normally required on the outside and the sheets within, one envelope per soldier. I sat back feeling virtuous and smug. Unfortunately I was now the poor deluded fool. I had omitted to take into account one vital consideration, namely the inherent laziness of the regular serviceman and the fact you can’t beat the system – any system.
The various men from the different departments who required the records were, according to my scheme, supposed to take the whole envelope, leave a slip which had been provided, which would tell me when and by whom it had been removed. That was too difficult, instead they took the single sheet, gave no indication where it was, with the result that panic reigned by the time the first batch were ready for departure. Many of the envelopes were nearly empty and so commenced the Great Paper Chase.
In the end I had to revert to the old, tried and trusted system and by the time I left to take up my studies once more, the Army was still in a state of shock and minor chaos. Good intentions are never enough without hindsight and experience. Oh! If only the current wave of shakers and movers in The Palace of Westminster had been at Palace Barracks when I was there, how different things might be today.

There is something seriously wrong with my brain, I have known it for years and first came across the trouble when I started the cram course preparatory to entering the Entrance Examination for Queen’s. I can’t be taught, I much prefer to read books and find out for myself. Whether, as I suspect, the droning of another voice hypnotises me, or whether I just nod off, all I know is I tend to get on better on my own. This attitude does not go down to well in academic quarters, for example, that paragon of all virtues, patience personified, that teacher above all teachers, Sophie, was a bit miffed when I found it easier to teach myself French than avail myself of her renowned accomplishments, although I did allow her to correct my exercises..
The guy I went to for a cram, who had a classroom over the Fifty Bob Tailors at the Junction in Belfast, was also none too pleased when another student and I started to teach him mathematics instead of the reverse. In Sophie’s case I realised that most of what I had to learn was pure memory and it was a waste of her time to sit at my shoulder as one would a child, revision is not like that. In the case of the Crammer, he was so far behind current day thinking in mathematics, he was practically using the abacus to calculate what we owed him in fees.
This other student was a real character, he was doing the same exam as I because he had been in the Naval Commandos and been demobbed at roughly the same time. We would only meet at the Crammers’ and then go for a drink afterwards. We discussed our relative careers at first and when that palled we worked at examples we were sure the Crammer was making a mess of.
Slowly the time drew near, we were both working hard and comparing notes when we met, and on one occasion he showed me some Benzedrine tablets he had which were left over from beach-landings he had taken part in. He was using them from time to time so he could study through the night without sleep. I warned against it without success, in my case I was merely resorting to coffee and tobacco.
The day of the Exam dawned and I entered the world of the university for the first time. We were to sit in the Great Hall, an old part of the building with darkened oak or mahogany woodwork, stained-glass windows and a gnarled, stained, wooden floor. The little desks were in rows in isolation. The atmosphere was what I had anticipated, austere and not a little intimidating. I think for the short time I was seated before we opened the papers, I was mesmerised just by being there, in a place I knew all my family in England would revere. Sophie had trod those boards two years earlier. We had been given examination numbers and when I looked across to where I expected to see my friend his desk was empty and stayed so. I found later he had succumbed to the Benzedrine and when he should have been at Queens he was in hospital. I have said he was a character, that is true, he was larger than life and when his name hit the headlines in Northern Ireland it only went to prove the point. Failing to get into Queen’s he had left and gone to the rigorous climes of Northern Canada and it was there he walked for days in the harshest conditions of blizzards and ice, without food, to fetch help when he and some of his work mates had been involved in an accident. The feat was so extraordinary it was even carried in the press here.

Economics, the queue for housing, the fact that I was unemployed and we were now three rather than two, all conspired to ensure that we stayed with Sophie’s parents and their other limpets.. In the first instance, of course, Linda’s condition had been the overriding consideration and then, somehow we got into a rut and never again parted from the family bosom.
We had put our names our down for a prefab on the Westland Road, corrugated asbestos dwellings with all mod cons, built rather on the lines of a railway carriage, but none the less better than most accommodation we were likely to be able to afford.
JAMES
James was the head of the household, a position he clearly shared with Liza, this was not an autocracy, we all had an input and equal rights, all but Linda, she was special to us all. Jimmy worked as a Leading Plater, in the shipyard, a job where both skill and strength were called for and one where the pay was probably higher than most other trades.
He was a quiet man, never given to raising his voice or the exhibition of temper. I only remember once when his calm even tenor was disturbed and I believe I was the only one in the family he told of what had happened. The squad of platers James led operated on a semi-contract basis, paying themselves out of the kitty in an agreed fashion. Apparently some young buck who had only recently joined his squad was throwing more than his weight about and required to be taught a lesson and it fell to Jimmy to do the necessary. James was more than capable, he was strong, tough and had been a sportsman for much of his early manhood, playing football for the local team, the Crusaders, and running in cross country races, but psychologically I believe it took a lot out of him, it was not his way.
There was never any doubt in anyone’s mind that James was the bookies friend. He would enter competitions in newspapers, convinced he had all the right answers and if he was wrong would go to great lengths to prove why the adjudication was correct and it was he who had been wrong,. He had a passion for the horses and it was a family joke that he would go over to England to Aintree or the Derby, with a fortune and lose it all. No one objected, the family never went short and if they thought it a waste, they kept it to themselves. As far as Liza was concerned, he earned his money in a tough job, he gave what was needed, what he did with the rest was his own business. These days, probably a unique outlook, but not uncommonthen, among the wives of men in similar circumstances..
James loved to do the Football Pools and had copious records related to practically every aspect of the previous results. There was no doubt in his mind that he would strike it rich one day, in spite of having won the Treble Chance Pool on about five occasions and netted no more than 80 pounds, gross. Being Jimmy, he was planning for the family, the whole family not himself. I believe that he was so contented with his life as it was that he would have found excessive wealth an encumbrance.
On Saturday nights he and I had a ritual. In those days there was a newspaper published by Bairds called the Ireland Saturday Night which was a melange of sport, entertainment and titbits of anecdotal material, and was the bible for James when it came to preparing for the onslaught on the Pools for the following week, only supplemented by the back pages of the News Of The World, the following day. The ritual was always the same – at about eight o’clock, there was no television in those days – we would set out ostensibly to buy the ‘Saturday Night’, but in fact we were off to a local well- known hostelry call the Shafstbury Inn on the Antrim Road. There we would set them up, turn about.
Jimmy would have a John Jameson Irish and a pint of draft Guinness, while I was content with a pint of the latter. He would drink his whiskey, shake the remains into the beer and then slowly and deliberately we would lower the pints. It was on these occasions I began to know the man, respect him, and I believe we became very close. He would tell me stories of the troubles in the twenties and thirties..
When ERNIE bonds came out James, the gambler, had to buy a few, but he received nothing until the day he died. On that day his number was up in more than one sense, he won two hundred and fifty pounds, although he was never to hear of it because notification only came the day of his funeral and if the draw had been made a day later, his family would never have profited..

The first time I ever heard any deep discussion on the Northern Ireland political theories, apart from being warned during the war not to go up the Falls in uniform, was one night when there had been some trouble or other in Belfast, long since forgotten. That night Jimmy told me of the twenties and thirties. He was not a political animal, and, as will be seen in the next instance, he held no brief for discrimination. He knew the form in Ireland, how could he not? But he did not have to conform and he did not. He told me of how, in the early thirties, the men at the shipyard were worried for their jobs as so many had been laid off, even to the extent that through lack of traffic passing along the Queen’s Road supplying the shipyard, grass was growing between the granite sets. He said that there had been marches to Stormont and the City hall and the interesting part of those marches was that both factions had buried the hatchet, and Catholic and Protestant were marching in unison. He alleged, that when this situation was realised, a false wedge was driven between the two factions so that they went back to addressing their separate grievances and left the unemployment problem alone. James was never given to hyperbole nor political extremism, therefore I believed him and with hindsight I am convinced he was right.
There was another alarming state of affairs which Jimmy got himself into through his broadminded attitude to religious bigotry. The situations in the twenties and thirties were very much similar to those we have been experiencing over the last decades but it lasted only a short time. People were shot on the doorsteps or put out of their rented houses simply because they were of the wrong religion, and people who had the lack of foresight to marry someone from the other religion, even if they never went to church, were also shot.
On more than one occasion customers of his, who were Catholic, living in a mainly Protestant York Road area, came to him to be helped across sectarian lines of demarcation to get to their own kind in safety and James was so well thought of by both communities that he was able to ferry them, not in a vehicle but on foot, by his own routes to the Catholic districts. On one occasion though, things were not so simple.
James had been standing in the door of the shop one evening when he heard a shot coming from the shop on the corner of Alexandra Park Avenue. It was an off-licence owned by a Catholic, Paddy Blaney. Most pubs, bars and off-licences were owned by Catholics. Without thinking James entered the shop to find Paddy lying dead on the floor of his shop and at that moment the door opened and a policeman entered, gun in hand, to find James leaning over the body.
“Think yourself lucky it was me who came in.” said the constable, “If it had been anyone else who didn’t know you they would have shot first and asked questions after.’

I had had companionate leave, for the birth of Linda coupled with Christmsa leave. After Christmas I had to say good-bye to them both and head back, but it was not to be for long. Within two weeks I received a telephone call to the effect that Linda was seriously ill and I was to come home at once. I was allowed home leave indefinitely. It transpired that Linda had a very unusual illness for which there had been no successful cure in the UK although there had been some success in America with a procedure which our doctor was adapting. The disease was called Sclerema and took the form of the thickening of the cells of the skin so that the pores ceased to function and therefore any change in temperature was immediately transmitted to the body. Pneumonia and death could follow almost automatically.
The treatment carried out by us was to keep Linda in an even temperature, twenty-four hours a day, and rub the affected skin which covered her back with olive oil to keep the skin supple. That was all we could do, although some also prayed. Liza and I were afraid to be hopeful, we had been told that the chances were one in ten thousand for recovery and no one in Britain had been known to survive
Slowly the thickness began to recede, we were afraid to hope and still Sophie did not realise the seriousness of the situation and then, one day, the doctor said he thought we were out of the wood and with a little more time Linda would be cured, as indeed she was.
The outcome of this story was that Linda had now become a bad sleeper, she had learned that if she cried she would be lifted. I spent hours in the night rocking her and singing the only songs I knew, which were not suitable for a young lady of pure upbringing, but the alternative was unthinkable. We did discover she had a propensity for diluted whisky and that it helped her to sleep. When we bent down to kiss her it was not uncommon for her to belch whisky fumes into our faces and so she was christened Drunken Diane for a while.
I never did go back to teaching, I merely returned to collect my gear and be demobilised officially. A farce if ever there was one. After all the form filling and the medicals we were marched off to a huge hangar somewhere in Portsmouth where we were let loose to find ourselves our demob clothes. The problem was that the group I was with were not passed through until late in the day when everything had been picked over and stocks were rock bottom. I came away with a sports jacket the colour of strong, milked tea and an emerald green raglan overcoat, the rest was equally embarrassing.
At last I was free. When I had returned from compassionate leave a well meaning officer had suggested I should sign on as a candidate for Dartmouth and a commission, but I had had all I could take of the Naval straitjacket and anyway Sophie and Linda called loudly.
On my way home from leaving the Service I had called in with Willie and at the same time I went to see Cluttons with the result I have already mentioned. They had an embarrassment of riches, a surfeit of staff, not enough of us had been killed to allow them to honour their promise, a statutory one in fact, and as I now seemed content with the thought of working in Ireland they had taken the easy way out and agreed it was best for us all. The only thing they did not do in my presence was wipe their corporate forehead in relief
When I returned to Ireland I had barely scratched the surface of my training as a surveyor, so I had no job in any professional sense, but I did have a fair knowledge of radio repair I decided that I would do that, repair rados, after all I had been teaching it for years on sets which were a hell of a lot more complicated than the common domestic radio. I bought a newspaper, and scanned the pages. Clydesdale’s, a Scottish-based radio retailer, not the bank, was advertising for a repair man and I went along immediately. Not interested! The manager said, in so many words, that Service personnel were useless, knew nothing and I was wasting my time and his. The attitude was so positive, almost belligerent, I suspect he had had some bad experiences. I found no other advertisement and gave up on that tack.
Grants of about two hundred pounds per annum were being offered for ex-servicemen and women to resume their education. I discovered there were no courses anywhere in Northern Ireland for Valuation Surveying, but I was eligible, with my London School Matriculation to go to Queens University Belfast, with one proviso, I would have to sit their Entrance Examination in French and Mathematics. I suspect it was a test of my ability to study rather than an entrance exam per se, after all it had been six years since I left school, nearly seven years previously It was March 1946 and I had six months in which to get up to speed.
We were without any income, other than the dole, and I knew I would need to study hard to reach the required standard, there would be no second chance. We decided I would get a job for three months and study on the dole for three, and in the ways of the world, members of the family fixed it for me. I got a job as a documentation clerk for three months and then wangled my way back on to the dole for the last three without all the rigmarole of the waiting time. How it was worked I forget, even if I knew at the time, all I can say is that I was grateful to the relatives who rallied round.

There were two occasions at the Jolly Sailor which stand out in my memory and both, at the time, seemed to epitomise the whole reason for the existence of the English Pub and were a tremendous contrast to the drinking ethos of Belfast at that time, where drinking had seemed to be a serious business not to be taken lightly.
I had just been installed as a teacher and was still living in Leydene when Frank and the others took me under their wing and introduced me to the delights of the Jolly Sailor. It was my first night off as a member of the teaching staff and as we walked into the pub to celebrate, Frank said to the owner, ‘Al ! “Here’s another recruit.’

Al was pouring a pint into a silver tankard and as we approached the bar, after passing it to Frank, he took another from a row hanging at the back of the bar and started to fill it. “Has he brought his own tankard?” Al asked with a knowing smile, handing the second tankard to Don, and again went through the ritual with yet another tankard, a glass one this time. “You’d better instruct him,” he added, handing the glass tankard to me, following that by bringing out three sets of darts from below the counter and passing them over. “Al, here, keeps our tankards and darts for us, he does it for all the regulars,” Frank said, “You’ll have to get a tankard and some darts for yourself.” Al lent me a set for the night with the admonition that I would have to get myself kitted out pretty soon if I was to be a regular.

I know it was a ploy to keep the regulars loyal and Al was no sentimentalist, but he had the human touch so many pub owners seem to have either by instinct or cultivation. For a man miles from home, in a new environment and a new way of living, that little bit of schmaltz, that consideration, fake or not, was a great lift. It seemed to be the form that we each bought a round of four pints of beer and then played darts, bar billiards and dominoes, for small stakes, ending up in a manner reminiscent of my days in Newcastle, singing in harmony all the latest hits as we walked home. I was hopeless, of course and had to take the melody, I could never put a left hand to it no matter how I tried.

The suggestion that the attitude of the owner of the Jolly Sailor to us on my first night might have been contrived rather than instinctive was negated several months later when, after Sophie and I were married she came over from Ireland to share my meagre one-room-flat. We, the gang, were due for our regular trip to the Jolly Sailor and as Sophie had sent me my pewter tankard it seemed only reasonable she should see the whole routine for herself. We entered and she was duly amazed at the way we had integrated into village life. We then went to play bar billiards and as there were now five of us and she had no wish to play, she was left to do the scoring. When Al saw this he came over to her and said “you must be bored with these chaps, come with me.” He went to the bar, collected a sherry and then took her to the other end of the room where there was a roaring fire and a group seated round it chatting. He introduced her, sat her down with the sherry and left her to enjoy the other’s company. This was a salutary experience for both of us, it was the best introduction Sophie could have had to the camaraderie of the English pub, but it also taught me humility, and the duties of a new husband and not to be selfish, all of which I promptly forgot.

I have always thought the examination techniques we adopted at the Royal Naval Signal School should have been the norm for the Country’s education system in general. Education is not a case of knowing information, but knowing where to find it and how to apply it. The Leydene examination organisers had obviously taken this theory to heart. We, the students, were a mixed lot. If we qualified we were going to be far from land and advice for weeks on end and solely dependent upon our own resources, so while we were thoroughly taught how to carry out repairs and the basic fundamentals of radio technology, the course was based around the fact that the Mechanic would have a text book at his elbow. The examiners also knew that cheating had to be lived with as, for the students, passing the exam was the aim, how was secondary. To combat cheating, talking during exams was forbidden, but any written matter was allowed in with us to the examination, on the principal that if we had to look anything up it would waste valuable time, compared with those who knew it all. As the students ranged from the school-leaver to the hardened telegraphist, with a few university graduates thrown in to make the life of the instructor that little bit more difficult, they designed the papers with the questions graded, starting easily and then progressing in difficulty with each question. They tried to maintain a fair balance between pure knowledge and a sensible amount of referral. The person who knew the answers would have the advantage while a reasonable referral would not place a person beyond passing.

The marking system was equally advanced The lecturers had a good idea who would come out on top, and the general quality of his work. Having marked all the papers they examined the top three of four, first to make sure there was no doubt of reaching the standard expected, then they took the highest mark and proportioned it to receive between 90 – 95 percent, depending on the candidate’s ability and the quality of his paper. They then graded all the papers by the same factor. Someone hopeless who spent much time referring to cogs and text books would fail miserably

The Vagaries Of Teaching At Leydene It is one thing to sit in a classroom and criticise the poor devil standing in front trying to teach and another thing entirely being that poor devil, especially if it is what the Navy terms a ‘pier-head jump’, being volunteered without a word to say about it. Some of the instructors had been teachers in civvy life, but I was chucked in at the deep end to make the best of it. We had a day’s instruction which I totally forget, but one little jewel did stick. They told us that students learned one third through what they heard, one third through touch and one third through what they saw, and we were to instruct accordingly

I was teaching people to be practical technicians, not theorists and if truth be known, when I started, my theoretical knowledge was a lot more sketchy than my grasp of the innards of the great many sets I was teaching. Initially this left me open to attack from men who had just come down from university with bright shiny degrees and who proposed to run rings round me for the aggrandisement of their own egos and the delectation of the rest of the class, a not uncommon syndrome, especially among university students. That I was at a disadvantage was patent, what I was to do about it was more difficult and gave me hours of discomfort in the beginning. I had two aspects in my favour, the classes ran only for a matter of weeks, or a couple of months at the most, and then my tormentors would have left and any reputation I had created left with them and I started with a clean slate. The other plus was that I am a quick study and with every encounter I learned – oh how I bloody well learned! The one stance I had to avoid was the Uriah Heap affliction, the ‘I’m not as well educated as you’ ploy, seeking sympathy. I soon discovered that the best method of defence is attack and I also learned how to dig a hole and then lead the charging bull elephants into it. I had the advantage of knowing the sets inside out and soon discovered the difficulties the students were finding. Sympathy with the difficulties the class was encountering and a feigned amusement when I might be tripped up by a brain-box, tended to balance the class attitude in my favour and as time elapsed I was very often able to impart what these university graduates had taught me as if I had known it all along. One situation did frighten me, though. We were not supplied with duplicated notes, we spent hours dictating. The routine was such, we could predict what we’d be teaching at any time weeks or months ahead and the same was true of the dictation. It was so repetitive I was able to talk and think of something entirely different, my brain on auto-pilot. So that I had to lift an exercise book from time to time to see exactly what I had been saying. I never remember having to alter a word, but, it says something about the loss of spontaneity short repetitive courses can produce in the teaching staff if it is not watched.

Since my Naval days I have never been remotely interested in hypnotism as entertainment. I would go so far as to say that I disapprove of the practice. When my daughters were young and we were on holiday, on more than one occasion they and Sophie went to the theatre to see a hypnotist and, while I did not openly object, I refused to go with them. I did though warn them not to go on the stage as subjects.

At Leydene, there was a theatre where films were shown in the evenings and occasionally ENSA would put on a show. Sometimes the Entertainment’s Officer would call on talent within the camp and we would have an amateur show, although to use the word amateur is unfair as many of the men and women who performed had been professionals before joining up.

One such was a hypnotist. We had first come across him on the Isle of Man where he had performed there in a similar type of concert made up of Naval and RAF talent. I attended the show and found him very competent. It was the first time I had ever seen hypnotism demonstrated and somehow even at the show I had misgivings. I disliked the idea of needles being pushed into people without their knowledge or permission, and I was always suspicious of what effect the process would have on the brain long term, I have a thing about the amount of respect which should be attendant on the brain. The hypnotist was on another course running parallel with ours, and therefore several weeks after we arrived at Leydene, he turned up.

By the time he arrived I was an instructor, but did not teach his class, and as he was below the rank of Petty Officer our paths never crossed, so for some time the stories I heard of him were gossip, unsubstantiated. It was said that he held court each evening in his Nissan hut and using anyone who was there, including a resident of the hut, he would practice his skills to entertain those who packed the hut to the doors. Then the rumour became rife, which worried some of us on the staff. It was purported that there was one man the hypnotist could put under at a distance of a hundred feet, just by clapping his hands.

Leydene had been a large country house before being taken over by the Admiralty and had a huge stable complex with stalls and a saddling area the size of any which could be seen at the best horse trainer’s yard. The area had been converted into small demonstration rooms. The hypnotist and his acolytes and the subject all arrived at the same time. My colleague and I were standing talking in the yard when we saw the hypnotist walking towards us with a group surrounding him, and in the distance was the man whom we had heard could be hypnotised at long range. As Arthur Askey of Radio, film and TV fame used to say, ‘Before our very eyes’, and so it was, the hypnotist clapped his hands, the man in the distance stopped and seemed to become trance-like, another clap and he was on his way as if nothing had happened. It was frightening.

Apparently we were not the only ones to have seen the demonstration. We heard that next day the two men, the hypnotist and his main subject left the camp. What happened to them was never divulged, but the Navy was no place for a man with those skills who used them for his own aggrandisement with such irresponsibility and inhumanity. I have been left with the conviction that hypnotism is never a plaything to be used just to amuse, amaze and titillate.

Isle Of Man, Two – A careless death The second visit to the Isle of Man was an entirely different experience, we were now Petty Officers with the privileges that entailed. The work if anything was harder, and the sets we were learning much more sophisticated and in some cases as big as a small kitchen. When one can walk into a large high-voltage transmitter, it seems to have less threat than putting one’s hand within a small one, with the result when a Radio Mechanic left the door of a set open while functioning on full power, an operator, who regularly dried his clothes inside the set ‘On Standby’ – the heat of the huge valves would dry his clothes in an hour – walked in and was electrocuted. This act was analogous to throwing an electric fire into a bath. I’m sure the practice of hanging washing in a dangerous area went on, long after I left the Service, you see, we all, by necessity, had the philosophy that ‘it could never happen to us’.

The Italian Prisoners Several blocks further along the front at Douglas, in a loose compound, surrounded by a barbed wire fence nothing more than a gesture to security, the Italian internees were still housed, but when we arrived they were about to be moved out, block by block and we were instructed to supervise the clearing out of the hotels and boarding houses they had been occupying. These men were prisoners, in spite of the fact that they had held jobs at every level in British society, and one can but guess at the trauma incarceration had caused them and their families. The one aspect which pervaded all these lodgings was the way these prisoners had decorated their prison. There were murals on walls, pictures on windows giving a stained glass effect and the quality of the work, in many cases was breath taking. I have often wondered if the returning occupants retained those works of art, as many had a religious flavour, it is possible that they might not have been acceptable, but the quality was irrefutable.

Leydene
The Cabooshes The fact that we were Petty Officers had no effect on our accommodation at Leydene – a top bunk, on a tier of two, in a row of twenty, on each side of a standard Nissan hut, with a coke burning, fat bellied stove and steel chimney set in the centre, and one chair each. That was home. The top bunk was just below the shelf running the length of the hut on which stood the small suitcases and hat boxes, safes where anything valuable or of a deeply personal nature was stored, and that was the limit of privacy. At night rats would sometimes run along the shelf above our heads looking for food and cats would produce kittens on the beds of the lower bunks. We had a cat called Vera frequenting our hut, a strange creature, with hind quarters like a rabbit, she could jump prodigious heights with ease. Vera adopted me. I would wake up to find a furry creature snuggled down under the blanket, face on the pillow, purring like a Morris 8 going up hill. So it would be no surprise that the instructors organised alternative accommodation, away from the Tannoy system and Vera Lynn, where one could relax, sleep read and write. The cabooshes were small brick huts which housed machinery for the sets we were teaching and, because we serviced them, we had the keys, and so our irregular behaviour was unlikely to be discovered.. Occasionally we had to make them shipshape for some inspection, but as we generally scheduled these as well, we were never caught on the hop. We were the men in charge, the officers were merely there to make up the numbers

The Silly Side Of Leydene A student, on a long course, had built up a relationship with one of the Wrens billeted in Leydene. She slept in a dormitory high in the main building, overlooking a flat roof. He was in the habit of climbing onto the roof, entering the room through one of the windows, and getting into bed with her, quietly, and leaving before the others woke. If the others were aware of what was going on it was never divulged, but in the end they were rudely awakened. The Wren was suddenly taken ill, and her replacement in her bed, was a woman in her forties, stern and prudish. You’ve guessed it! The sailor got in beside her. The rest was pure Ealing comedy.

With the war ended people were looking to the future. One guy intended setting up his own business in radio repairs, and was collecting stock towards that end. The authorities, aware petty thieving was rife had everyone below Wardroom rank searched before leaving on the bus. I saw the man queued up, searched. tying shoes, while the driver was revving the engine. An accomplice rushed up, a bundle of washing clutched in his arms shouting that the man had forgotten his laundry. It was duly handed in, the bus took off and another load of valves, condensers and a B28 receiver were on their way to his new shop at a certain port in the North of England.

I don’t think I ever entirely accepted the Navy philosophy of calling any accommodation, be it a house or a concrete bottomed wreck, a ship. I could never think of myself as being ashore when I went out the gate. In fact I thought the whole concept childish and foolish, but it was surprising how simply it rolled off the tongue without thinking, and does even now when taking about the Navy Instructors and senior staff at Leydene were allowed to live ‘ashore’, this gave the married men the opportunity to have their families with them, which I think was at the back of the privilege, but the single men also profited. I was not at Leydene long before I was introduced to Madam Spirella and her concentration camp. Although we were given a living allowance and still enjoyed all the facilities of Leydene, including retaining our bunks and being fed, living ‘ashore’ was inevitably dearer, added to which there were the local attractions in the form of the pub, The Jolly Sailor, the cinema and Portsmouth just down the road, were all a drain on an insubstantial income.

My mate Frank had suggested Madam Spirella’s as a suitable pied a terre and I was duly ensconced. I rented a single room on the first floor, furnished with a narrow, single steel-framed hospital bed, a card table, two cane dining chairs, a dressing table and a wardrobe which trebled as a food cupboard cum cleaning store. With linoleum on the floor and a worn mat in front of the fireplace which contained a 500 watt cooking ring that doubled as a heater, for which we paid some extortionate sum – this was to be home for quite some time. It was bleak, inhospitable, but a relief from the years of communal living, the claustrophobic atmosphere of mass humanity, repeated expletives, noise, perpetual noise, the constant demands of the public address system and Vera Lynn at every hour of the day from the wake-up call to lights out. Don’t believe all they tell you about the popularity of the Stars of the past, even they had a sell-by date and constant repetition can pall

Madam Spirella was our name for the woman who ran the house. I say ran, that is an overstatement because all she did was collect the rent, the tenants had days when they were responsible for the cleanliness of the hall and stairs and they were totally responsible for their own rooms. On the front of the house was a brass plate which said ‘Madam XXX, Corsetier and Spirella Specialist’, or words to that effect. She was not unlike Madam Arcarti in the film Blithe Spirit, detached from reality, on a higher plane of artistic genius, but that didn’t stop her coming down to earth with a thump if anyone digressed from the list of do’s and don’ts pinned up everywhere, or on rent day. We were a happy band of refugees from authority. One of our number played the trumpet in a dance band at a nearby seaside town on the weekends when he was not on duty. He constantly amazed me how every night he would take out the sheet music of the latest tune to hit the streets and proceed to orchestrate all the parts for the band, without playing a single note. Frank and a one-time school teacher from Huddersfield called Don, also had rooms and the three of us would sometimes eat together, generally on the first day of the weekly ration. At that time, 1944, with the Second Front in full swing, rations were fairly strict and only those in the know could take advantage of the black market, with the result that on Monday of every week we had a blow-out of almost all the week’s ration at one go, and then ate in the local Salvation Army canteen for the rest of the week.

Sophie, coming from Ireland did not suffer the same restrictions as we did in England. and when she came over to stay at Christmas, she brought a good deal of food she had gathered up, for the two of us, or so she thought. What she had not realised was that we, at Madam Spirella’s, tended to share and share alike and so her precious butter and eggs were destined not only for us, but my mates. It was more than a shock to her, I think it took her a day or two to get over it, especially as in our chauvinist society she was expected to cook her provender as well. It was the first morning after Sophie had arrived in Madam Spirella’s prison camp when, as I knew the ropes, I decided I would make the breakfast. Staying there were two Wrens and one was in the kitchen when I arrived downstairs. It was clear she was not in the best of form by her posture, from the way her dressing gown was holding her up rather than the reverse, and by her reaction to my breezy ‘good morning’. When I asked her what was the matter she looked at me with the most jaundiced look I have ever seen and said, ‘I hate this place,’ meaning Petersfield, ‘its full of Irish and Plymouth Brethren.’ For a moment there was silence, but she was totally unaware of her gaff. For me, there was no way I could let that go, it was too good an opportunity to be a chauvinist, so I made her bad day even worse, I told her my wife was Irish. The size of the hole which opened at her feet and into which she disappeared was just enough to accommodate her and make my day.