I Sank The Bismarck (4 page)

They invited me to sit down and I was asked some simple
questions about my local town and the job I was doing, and
was asked to read a logbook. The interview then took an odd
turn, as the chairman of the board, who seemed by far the
oldest man there, realized that I lived next to the Tweed and
Teviot rivers. The rest of the interview became a discussion
about trout and salmon fishing, the effectiveness of various
fishing flies and the best techniques for tying them. I was very
interested in fishing and I had caught my first salmon when I
was eight or nine, although entirely by accident. It came on to
the end of my line when I had been hoping to get trout, and
it was too strong for me to land. Eventually my trout rod
broke and I wound the line round a bush near the river and
raced home to fetch my father, who helped me gaff it. I told
them this story, and the chairman brought out his fly box and
we talked about the best flies to use in different parts of the
river. He knew far more than me, but I was content to listen
and make the odd comment. Then the interview was over. It
was very strange, and I did not know what to think as I
journeyed back home to Kelso.

Back I went to the office again, with nothing but winter rugby
to look forward to. I heard nothing from the navy and was
once more beginning to sink into despair, when one day I read
yet another advert – as you can imagine, I was scouring the
newspapers in desperation. This time it was for recruits to
the
Southern Rhodesian Mounted Police. I knew little about
Southern Rhodesia, or Zimbabwe as it is now called, but
clearly this offered enormous possibilities: travel to a far-off
land, a marvellous climate and, most important, the opportunity
to work with horses, which, after rugby, was one of my
greatest passions. So I applied and was invited to an interview
at Rhodesia House in the Strand in London.

I had been to London once before, in a school party that
had visited the Houses of Parliament, but this time I was more
able to appreciate how different it was from Kelso! I found it
daunting as I got off the train at Kings Cross and asked a
porter for some directions, my small case with a few clothes
in it clutched in my hand. I was staying at the YMCA, near
London University in Bloomsbury, and the porter directed me
to the nearest bus, but there seemed to be hundreds of them
outside the station, and more taxis than I had ever seen
before. I decided to walk and found that my destination was
not that far from the station, but I had never seen streets so
busy and crowded. I should have been excited by the huge
bustling city, the hub of the Empire, but to be honest it was
dirty, and for a young lad with not a great deal of money it
was not very inviting.

The staff at the YMCA were a great help and I managed to
find my way to the interview. It seemed to go well – they
appeared impressed with my knowledge of horses – and on
leaving I was confident that my life was about to change for
the better.

Back in Kelso, I did what I had been longing to do for the
past two years: I resigned from my job at the
bus company.
This caused some problems with my parents, principally my
father. The economic situation had not improved greatly and
there were still a lot of unemployed people looking for work.
He thought I was being reckless in throwing away a secure job
without any firm prospects, and neither of them wanted to see
me join the navy, or go thousands of miles away to central
Africa. I suppose deep down they felt that my ambitions were
too great for my talents and that I would end up disappointed.
They knew how hard life could be, and they valued the settled
life they had established in Kelso. But I could not be persuaded:
I gave up my job. That year I travelled as a reserve with the
Scottish
rugby team to Ireland, but, unfortunately, we lost.

This was the winter of 1938/39 and, now without a job, I
decided that I would move down to
London. Not that I liked the
place, but I thought it would be only a matter of time before I
was offered a passage to Rhodesia. Also, staying with my
parents in Kelso, unemployed and just kicking my heels while I
waited for a letter, was not very attractive. My father had been
good to me, but relations between us had soured somewhat. He
told me that I would be back within six months, but I thought,
'Will I hell.' So back I went to the YMCA and managed to find
a low-paid job in the parcels department of Harrods.

Weeks passed and I heard nothing further from the
Rhodesian High Commission or the Southern Rhodesian
Mounted Police. I was very depressed, and beginning to
wonder how long I could stick it out before going back home
with my tail between my legs, when out of the blue I received
a letter from the Royal Navy. It was a request to go to Queen
Anne's Mansions for a medical exam. The address turned out
to be a row of Georgian houses just off Harley Street in the
West End. The letter was not what I wanted to receive. I had
abandoned any thoughts of taking up flying, having convinced
myself that I would be accepted into the Southern
Rhodesian Mounted Police. This was the aim on which I was
now focusing my ambitions, and I waited impatiently for the
letter of acceptance with details of how I would be expected
to travel to Rhodesia. However much I wanted to learn to fly,
all that the navy could offer was a part-time job in the
Reserves, while the Mounted Police was full time, a career
with long-term prospects, clearly much more of a vocation. It
was, after all, nearly six months since I had attended that
rather strange interview with those sailors in civilian clothes
in Glasgow and it seemed odd that I had heard nothing more.
But there was no reason why I should refuse to take a
medical, so I duly presented myself before the men in white
coats, coughed, had my eyes and hearing tested and kneecaps
hit with a hammer, and then went back to my dismal job at
Harrods.

Within a week or so of this appointment I received a second
letter telling me to report on board HMS
Frobisher
at
Portsmouth naval base to begin my training. This caused a bit
of soul-searching. I still had heard nothing from Rhodesia
House and, despite my reservations about the navy, it did
offer an alternative to the storeroom at Harrods, so I went.

On the train going down to Portsmouth my thoughts were
mixed. I was still coming to terms with the sudden interest
shown in me by the navy, and I was apprehensive about what
I was letting myself in for. I had absolutely no idea what naval
training entailed and was beginning to wonder whether this
really was a wise move. I managed to find my way to the
naval office in the harbour, from where, with my small suitcase,
I was eventually given a lift on a motor launch out to
the ship at her moorings. My feelings of trepidation were
compounded as I approached
Frobisher.
She was a big cruiser
that had been detached from the Atlantic fleet a few years
previously and designated for cadet training. The boat I was
on tossed about in the harbour and, as we got closer to the
ship, I could see that there were rust streaks on her hull, and
she looked grey and forbidding above me. This was the very
first time that I had seen a warship, or been out on a small
boat. The experience was unsettling.

I learned later that
Frobisher
was scheduled at that time to
be taken out of her training role with a view to her being
mothballed. If I had known that, perhaps I would have been
less surprised and confused when, after I had climbed up the
gangway on to the ship, the duty officer immediately issued
me with a travel warrant back home. I returned to the mainland
once again on a small boat, only to find I was too late
for a train back to London. The harbour office sent me to a
naval dormitory in a large building that housed the Sailors'
Rest – known as 'Aggie Weston', after the woman who
founded them – and there I bedded down for the night.

I felt upset, rejected and close to despair in that strange bed,
in a building full of sailors who ignored me. I had been uneasy
as I approached that forbidding ship, and now the journey
from London had proved to be a complete waste of time. Very
little had gone right with my life since I left school at sixteen;
I felt that I had no idea what to do with myself; and, worse,
it seemed that nobody else had any use for me either. The
truth was, of course, that the Naval Air Service was in a
complete state of flux. The handover from Royal Air Force to
Admiralty control was still going on, and how and where the
training of naval pilots was going to take place had not yet
been properly decided. It was one thing to advertise for
people, it was another to set up a proper organization. The
impact of this on me was to make me very downhearted.

Next morning I arrived back in London. I had foolishly
given up my job in Harrods believing that I would be doing
my naval training for the next three months, so I was now
unemployed. I was determined not to go home, as my father
would have said, 'I told you so.' I just could not face the
defeat and humiliation. So I was forced to sign on the dole
and look for a job. It was a very depressing experience and I
was at an extremely low ebb. I was eking out my savings,
living in the YMCA, walking the streets, visiting some of the
sights like St Paul's Cathedral and the Houses of Parliament,
but I was like a piece of wood floating in the Thames, a piece
of flotsam drifting here and there. I had come a long way since
my carefree days with my little terrier Wiggy running along
beside me, and none of it was for the good.

While I was in a state of limbo in London, the newspapers
and news programmes on the wireless were describing events
with an ominous tone. The
Spanish Civil War had ended in
victory for General Franco, and there had been a very tense
period in 1938 when
Hitler demanded that the Sudetenland,
Czechoslovak territory in which a large number of German-speaking
people lived, should be ceded to Germany. There
was a feeling that another war might start over this and a
general military mobilization got under way as the crisis built
up. Air-raid shelters and trenches started to be dug – I remember
noticing the piles of fresh earth as shelters were built in
Hyde Park. Gas masks were given out to the civilian population,
and hundreds of lorries carrying winches and towing
trailers full of gas canisters were parked around the city. These
were mobile installations to launch
barrage balloons – small,
hydrogen-filled balloons that rose into the air tethered by steel
cables, the idea being that they would prevent enemy bombers
from flying low over cities and factories. They floated high
over the city, like hundreds of huge, strange fish, the sunshine
glinting off their silver surfaces. People expected war to start
quite quickly.

Then in September 1938 the British Prime Minister Neville
Chamberlain flew to Munich to discuss the situation with
Hitler, returning with a deal that looked as though it might be
a peaceful solution. It gave Hitler everything he wanted,
including the Sudetenland, and
Winston Churchill was
bitterly opposed to it. However shameful Chamberlain's
appeasement of Hitler might have been, most ordinary people
were relieved that another war had been averted. The dreadful
slaughter of the First World War was still very much on
people's minds; it had been over for only twenty years and
millions of people had been affected by it. There probably
wasn't a family in the country that had not lost someone in
the trenches, and it was still seen as a great and unnecessary
tragedy. Most towns and villages had erected a monument to
those who had died in what we called the Great War; I
remember the big ceremony in Kelso when I was younger for
the unveiling of the town's memorial to the local men who
had never come back from France. Nowadays there is a
ceremony at the Cenotaph in London, and in towns and
villages around the country, on the Sunday nearest to
Armistice Day, but in the 1930s there were local ceremonies
of
remembrance on 11 November itself, whatever day of the
week it fell, and the two-minute silence at eleven o'clock was
very strictly adhered to. Buses and cars stopped and people
stood still in the streets. At the time you were aware that this
silence was being observed all over the country. It was a very
emotional moment. So the threat of another war filled people
with dread.

The relief of the
Munich Agreement didn't last long. In
March 1939 Hitler took over the rest of Czechoslovakia. By
then we had had time to become accustomed to the threat of
war, and I think people thought now it was bound to happen.
The question was, when?

Meanwhile, I was tramping the streets of London, signing
on and looking, unsuccessfully, for a job, when I received yet
another letter from the Admiralty, this time telling me that I
would be sent for training, probably at Drem in Scotland,
which was an RAF flying training school at the time. When I
read it, I made up my mind that I would now go home to
Scotland, face my father and wait for further instructions
about training. My return in August didn't go too badly – my
letter from the Admiralty was proof that at least my life had
some direction.

It was in Kelso on 1 September that I heard on the news
that the Germans had invaded Poland, and I knew that war
was inevitable. My father and mother and I were gathered
round the wireless set on the 3rd, which was a Sunday, to hear
the Prime Minister announce that once again we were at war
with Germany. It was a profound moment, where every
person listening knows that their life will be utterly transformed,
for ever, and there will be great changes in the world
and that the future has suddenly become completely
unknown. I knew that I would be part of the war, and that the
question of what to do with my life was probably no longer
in my hands. My parents must have felt a great deal of unease,
but they kept it to themselves. My father in particular, with
his experience of Gallipoli, must have had his own thoughts,
but he had never discussed them before and didn't do so now.