Og's Blog Pt. 07

Daughters.

My father had a bright idea. One of his colleagues from our time in Gibraltar lived in Alverstoke. He had seven daughters, all of whom I knew. The eldest was a couple of years older than me, the second was a week or so younger than me. But the second daughter had a boyfriend that he father disapproved of. He was an apprentice car mechanic and not very well off as an apprentice. If I was invited to a meal with the family, maybe, perhaps, I could replace the boyfriend as someone with better prospects. Neither father told either of us about their idea.

The eldest daughter was already engaged but her fiancé was away that weekend when there was a sailing race in Portsmouth Harbour. Although all the sisters could sail, she thought, with the weather forecast, that a very heavy crew member would be useful and I was very heavy. We would be using RNSA 14 feet sailing dinghies, a very heavy clinker built class with a Gunter rig and a retractable steel keel board.

She asked me to be her crew. Her father was slightly disappointed that it was his eldest engaged daughter who would be with me, but there was always next time. I didn't know I was supposed to be the boyfriend of the next younger sister and I wouldn't have considered her because I knew she already had a boyfriend.

The wind during the sailing race was strong and erratic with significant flat spots as we were shielded by the ancient ships of the Reserve Fleet including the Aircraft Carrier HMS Leviathan, The tide was ebbing fast and there would be areas that would either dry out completely or become very shallow. But the oldest sister had a plan. We would be tacking across the shallowing water. If I sat out as far as I could, with my weight she could carry more sail than anyone else. With the dinghy tilted the depth of the keel plate would be less as it was at an angle. Eventually she could retract the keel plate completely. We might crab sideways without the keel, but we could continue sailing in six inches of water.

We did and many of our competitors, attempting to follow, ran aground and were stuck until the tide turned in several hours' time. We weren't good enough to win, but we achieved a higher placing than she had ever managed before. I was hugged and kissed after the race more than an engaged young lady ought to do but I knew it was just for her success.

The younger daughter and her 'unsuitable' boyfriend had been watching the race from the clubhouse. I met him and decided that he was a perfectly acceptable bloke perhaps not as well educated as the daughters all of whom had been to grammar schools but he seemed a hard-working reliable person and they were obviously in love with each other.

Back at her parents' house, the evening meal and later meals at their house were awkward as their father tried to persuade me and the second daughter to go on a date. Eventually we were so annoyed with his persistence that we agreed to go to a local cinema to see a movie. We would go a few hundred yards down the road to the public house first, walk to the cinema and there she would meet her 'unsuitable' boyfriend while I watched the movie from another seat some distance away.

But neither he nor the daughter had told me one critical fact. The public house was busier than I would have expected this early in the evening. We were served by a young barmaid while the landlord was with other customers at the other end of the bar. She asked for a half pint of commercial cider -- the sort of sweet sickly muck I would never touch and I bought a pint of the local draught bitter. We sat down, side by side, on a padded bench in a quiet corner. She was worried that she was deceiving her father and that he would find out. I tried to reassure her. After the movie she and her boyfriend would walk back towards her house. Out of sight, I would take over for the last one hundred yards and deliver her back home.

She started to sip her cider, I had just got to the end of my pint of bitter when she suddenly keeled over and lay unconscious along the bench. I was startled. I was trying to sit her up again when the landlord came over shaking his head.

"She's done it again, hasn't she?" he said.

I must have looked uncomprehending.

"She can't take alcohol, any alcohol. If I had seen her I would have refused to serve her any. This is the third time she had done this in my pub. You'd better take her home. He father will understand. He knows she can't drink."

He helped me to pick her up and put her on my shoulders in a fireman's lift. I walked back to her house and pressed the doorbell. Her father answered the door.

"Oh dear!" He said, "She's done it again. You'd better bring her in and put her down on the settee. She'll be OK in an hour or so but I'm sorry. Your evening's ruined. I should have told you but I thought she would."

I made my excuses as soon as I could and rushed off to the cinema to tell her boyfriend she wouldn't be coming. It was still a quarter of an hour before the movie started.

"Silly girl!" He said.

I had expected him to say something stronger.

"She knows she can't drink but she keeps trying. She hadn't told you?"

"No, It was a shock. Taking an unconscious young lady back to her father was awkward."

He laughed.

"I'll bet it was. She's done it to me once when weren't supposed to be together. I had to get her older sister to collect her."

He and I went off to a nearby pub to drown our sorrows.

Over the next few months she and I were apparently on dates which really were with him. Sometimes I didn't even know I was supposed to be with her. It ended when I was posted away from Portsmouth which was the excuse for our non-existent relationship ending.

Eventually he finished his apprenticeship, got a good job and they married with her father's reluctant consent. He never had to regret it. He acquired a good son-in-law and now they have been happily married for over fifty-five years.

+++

The next training event was at the submariners' training base. We had to practice escape from a submerged submarine inside a deep water tank using DSEA breathing apparatus, When we had passed that we went out on patrol in a submerged diesel submarine.

We, as ANSOs, were told the story of a WW2 submarine based at Malta. It was attacking an Italian convoy heading for Libya, firing torpedoes while on the surface because it was in very shallow water. One of the escorting warships scored a hit on a forward compartment that filled with sea water. The submarine was able to get away and even submerge because the shut watertight door had stopped the pressure hull from being flooded.

But they had a problem. In the flooded compartment was the submarine's complete stock of toilet paper. They had none at all. Before they got back to Malta they had used every scrap of paper on the submarine including the forms to order more stores. Back at base they had to borrow a form from a neighbouring submarine to order more forms on which they could order toilet paper. Meanwhile almost the whole crew had rushed to the toilets on the depot ship.

As a result of that incident the method of storing stores on ALL navy ships was changed. Instead of storing like things together, they would be split up so damage caused by an enemy would not cause the loss of all the stock of any one item. Toilet paper wasn't critical. Radar spares might be.

So no matter how a stock of an item might be delivered to a ship, it had to be split up and spread around the ship and the stores ratings had to keep meticulous records to know how many of anything they had, even if that stock might be in fifteen different places.

[An aside from a couple of years after this account.]

In the mid-1960s the Naval Stores Department introduced computers for stock recording, issuing and receiving stores. Every stock item, and there were millions, had to have a unique numerical number that was common throughout all NATO allies. But one code caused problems. There might be a code number for one of an item, another for a pack of ten, and third for a pack of 100 etc.

The supply officer on a submarine based at Portsmouth wanted steel wire wool. It was used in the ship's gallery for cleaning pans, and in greater quantity for removing paint and rust for repainting. He thought he needed 100 pieces of steel wire wool, normally supplied as a bundle of a pound weight.

He looked up the code for steel wire wool. There was the code for a one pound bundle. He wanted more than that. But he was in a hurry. The order had to leave the submarine before it went out on patrol for a few days. He wrote down the code number that he thought was for ten pounds and ordered ten of them.

When the submarine arrived back at its berth in Portsmouth there was a small pile of crates of the stores he had ordered. But next to them was a large trailer. It was enormous. He hoped it was nearly empty. It wasn't. Inside were ten tons of steel wire wool. He had ordered ten times one ton not ten times ten pounds.

[End of Aside.]

We trainees now had to face the most feared ordeal whether for ANSOs or any service personnel.

We had to escape, underwater in the dark, from an apparently ditched helicopter that was sinking upside-down. We would get into the helicopter's fuselage, be dropped into the water, turned upside-down and we then had to kick out the escape panels and get to the water surface thirty feet above us. There would be aqualung wearing divers to rescue anyone who failed, but being rescued meant doing it again and once was more than enough. Graham and I passed but we never wanted to do it for real.

[Another aside]

From time to time, the Naval Stores Department would issue a list of older stores of which there only a few items left that were apparently unwanted. Any unit could apply for an item on that list if they had a use for it. Think of it as an end-of-line offer in a mail order catalogue. Most of the code numbers were ancient, long before computers, and the descriptions were minimal, usually a couple of words. Very few items were wanted and the remainder was sent to Defence surplus auctions.

One ship's carpenter thought he could use an item. It was an old-fashioned glue kettle which had an outer container for boiling water and an internal vessel for glue -- usually fish or bone based. He needed, from time to time, to melt some wax for furniture repair and thought that kettle might work. He ordered it but transposed two of the digits.

Instead of the glue kettle he had delivered to his ship an anchor from an old battleship of the era when they were steam and sail. It weighed seven tons and was absolutely useless. It had been in store since 1880.

Eventually he got his glue kettle but his shipmates called him 'anchorman'.

[End of Aside]

Final Training course from this part.

We went to an underground depot in rural South Wales. To this day I have no idea of what went on there or what we were supposed to learn.

Why not?

The training officer, originally from Wales, had just returned from a two year posting in the Persian Gulf in a dry state that allowed no alcohol at all, not even on visiting ships. He wanted to renew his acquaintance with the Welsh beers but Wales was dry on a Sunday. We trainees were staying in a nearby public house. As residents, we could drink. As he was paying for our stay, so could he. The owners left the bar open and left us a pad of paper to record all the drinks. The account would be settled at the end of the week and we trainees didn't have to pay it. It was covered by the cost of our course. The training officer would pay 10% more than the total just to allow for any drinks not recorded because we were too drunk.

That first night we were in the bar until 3 am. We crawled into bed only to have to get up at seven to be in the depot at eight. At lunchtime we had lunch in the canteen and moved to the depot's bar until 3 pm. At five pm we left to go back to the public house for an evening meal at six. At seven o'clock the training officer arrived with a small RN bus with an official driver to take us on a pub crawl around Welsh pubs until closing time when we returned to where we were staying and drank until 2 am.

That was repeated for the whole week of the course. I remember the public house we were staying at, the Welsh beers and public houses, but what the course was about? I have no idea.

The End of Part 07.