The morning we glided up the River Mersey is etched forever in my memory. I was off watch, so I went to the upper deck to savour the moment. It was a brilliantly sharp winter’s day, absolutely beautiful with a miraculous blue sky, a few puffy white clouds hovering about. The Mersey was like glass below me as we slipped past Liverpool’s famous light ship, anchored at the river mouth to warn ships of the sandbar there. My nostrils filled with the salt-and-tar smells of my childhood and, when we steered for Gladstone Dock, I was swamped by emotion. I’d come full circle. Gladstone Dock was where, in 1938, I had gone aboard the battleship Royal Oak and decided to join the Royal Navy. Four years later I was back in the very same place. But I wasn’t the same person.
Dragon had barely tied up when gangs of dock workers rushed aboard to start the job of decommissioning her. After I’d completed my duties, which took me through to the afternoon, I was assigned to the shore watch, so I was free to leave the ship. I was off her like a shot, although I had to be back the next morning. I must have looked a sight in my baggy uniform, thin as a bean pole, clutching a battered little suitcase I’d scrounged.
I had a fair way to go. While I was serving in the Mediterranean, my parents had written to say they’d moved from my boyhood home in Walton, to Speke, near Liverpool Airport. So first I caught a train on the overhead railway to Pier Head, where I could catch a bus. I waited for a short time at the bus stop, pent up with emotion at the prospect of seeing my family again, and eventually a green bus rumbled along. I climbed onto its rear platform where a very big woman in an even bigger conductor’s uniform blocked my way. I smiled at her but she didn’t smile back.
‘Where are you going, Jack?’ she demanded.
‘Home, to Speke. Out near the airport.’
‘Well, you’re not going there on this bus.’
‘What?’
‘You’re not going to Speke or nowhere else on this bus.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s for war workers only, this bus, that’s why not.’
I was absolutely dumbfounded. Unknown to me, special buses were allocated to factory workers directly involved in the war effort. Here I was, in the uniform of the Royal Navy, being barred from travelling on one of them. What sort of work did she think the navy did?
‘But …’
‘On your way, Jack. War workers only on this bus.’
She was such an imposing, intimidating woman that I meekly did as she said, and the bus drove off with her standing impassively on the back, a cold statue of authority. It was the last straw. Stranded there at the bus stop in the middle of town, clutching my suitcase, I felt like the most pathetic human specimen of all time. And just to complete the picture I had one of my all-too-frequent crying spells. The frustration was overwhelming. What a welcome home.
War workers be damned!
It got dark. I waited over an hour before getting on another bus that took me out to Speke. I got off and found 9 Hale Road, the family home I’d never seen. It was right next door to a church. I didn’t have a key, of course, so I knocked on the front door.
For years afterwards my three sisters, Florence, Dorothy and Enid would argue good-naturedly over who actually opened the door that night. I certainly don’t know because I was engulfed in the most wonderful emotional chaos. All I remember was being swamped by them, wrapped in their arms, the three of them almost collapsing with the shock of seeing me. They looked at me in total disbelief, saying my name over and over, tears streaming down their faces.
‘Oh God, Jim, we thought you were dead!’
‘A letter came from the Admiralty.’
‘Lost at sea, it said.’
‘No one told us you were safe.’
‘We didn’t know.’
‘Where are Mum and Dad?’ I managed to ask through it all.
‘They went out, to see a film. They’re at the cinema.’
‘Is it really you? You’re so thin.’
‘It’s me, all right,’ I said.
One of the girls ran out and went to a neighbour’s place to ask if they could go and get my mother and father. When they eventually came home there was another torrent of tears, disbelief and shock.
‘Jim, dear, what have they done to you?’ my mother asked, her voice trembling.
Did we have a time that night! My brother George wasn’t there because he was serving in the Fleet Air Arm, but the rest of us celebrated my return until I was dead on my feet, unable to speak or cry anymore.
Someone must have put me to bed.
12 – Adrift on land
The next morning I awoke late. In fact extremely late, well past the time I was due to report back to the ship. I groaned and got moving. Within a few minutes I was in my uniform and heading for the front door.
‘Cup of tea, Jim?’ my mother asked. She and the others had been up for ages. In all the excitement of my homecoming I’d completely forgotten to mention that I still had duties on the ship, so they had innocently let me sleep in.
‘Can’t. I have to report back to Dragon.’
‘That doesn’t seem fair,’ she said. ‘You’ve only been home one night.’
‘It’s the navy, Mum. Don’t worry, I’ll be getting some Christmas leave soon.’
I said hurried goodbyes and made my way to the docks, knowing I would be in trouble the moment I went up the gangplank in full view of the crew on duty. But I had to face the music, which came soon enough and loud enough. There was an RPO, a regulation petty officer, on deck as I came aboard. He wasn’t smiling.
‘You’re late, Able Seaman.’
‘Yes, sir. Slept in, sir.’
‘Name?’
‘McLoughlin, sir.’
‘What do you mean you slept in?’
‘Well, I was pretty tired, sir.’ The simple truth of it even sounded pathetic to me.
‘What sort of excuse is that? We’re all bloody well tired!’
‘Sir.’
‘Commander’s Report!’ he bellowed at me.
‘Aye aye, sir.’
Any seaman getting back late to his ship was labelled a defaulter, pure and simple, and I had to face the wrath of the executive officer, under the pitiless eye of the RPO. I lined up with a number of other defaulters to discover my punishment.
‘Caps off!’ the RPO ordered.
‘Name?’ the Executive Officer asked without looking up from the papers on his desk.
‘Able Seaman McLoughlin, sir.’
‘Charge?’
‘Late back to the ship, sir,’ the RPO told him.
‘Anything to say?’ the executive officer asked.
‘I slept in, sir.’
The executive officer was a lieutenant commander. He lifted his eyes to stare at me with chilly disdain. I was just another sailor as far as he was concerned. He wasn’t interested in where I’d been, what had happened to me, just that I’d broken the rules.
‘One day’s pay, one day’s leave,’ he said.
‘Aye aye, sir.’
I saluted, about-faced and marched away. I couldn’t believe it. I’d lost one day’s pay and one day’s leave, both of which were in short enough supply as it was. To add insult to injury, later that day I was told I wouldn’t be going on leave. Instead, I was posted to barracks. My official barracks was HMS Drake in Devonport near Plymouth, because that’s where I’d done my training in 1939. So, with no opportunity to go home again, I left Dragon and went straight to Lime Street Station to catch a train south. I was pretty low when I got to Drake. The weather was gloomy and no one seemed to know why I was there. A doctor examined me in a desultory fashion, prodding and poking me a bit. Then he struck a match and held it in front of my face.
‘What do you see?’ he asked.
‘A match, sir,’ I replied.
‘What sort of match?’
‘A burning match, sir.’ I had no idea what he was getting at.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Very sure, sir. It’s a burning match.’
‘Very good. That’s all,’ the doctor said. I came to the conclusion that he didn’t know what he was getting at either.
After that mystifying episode I did general duties around the barracks, trying to give the impression that I had a real reason to be there. When they finally gave me Christmas leave, less one day and one day’s pay of course, I caught the train back to Liverpool.
That Christmas of 1942 was wonderful and difficult at the same time. I found a brief peace, surrounded by loving faces and laughter. Despite Britain’s austere wartime food rationing, my mother managed to conjure up the most delicious meals. I mostly spent my days sleeping and chatting with my family. I told them the barest details about the sinking, the German U-boat, the lifeboat voyage to Africa, and how one of the survivors had been a nurse named Doris Hawkins. They didn’t press me for more. I suppose they thought I would tell them everything in my own time.
But quite often I sank deep into myself, swamped by a debilitating vagueness. I sat slumped in a chair for hours on end, not quite knowing who or where I was. My family had enough sense to leave me to myself as I drifted into unwanted daydreams about that wretched lifeboat, adrift once more on the Atlantic swell. I could actually smell the salt and feel the blistering tropical sun. Then some noisy activity or conversation elsewhere in the house would intrude and I’d claw myself back to the present, drained and depressed.
One afternoon there was a knock at the door and I opened it to find an American sailor standing there. I looked at him blankly. He looked back at me with his mouth wide open.
‘Jesus, Mac. I thought you were dead!’
‘Hello,’ I said, puzzled about how an American sailor could possibly know my name. He broke into a laugh, which my fuddled brain vaguely recognised.
‘Johnny?’ I queried, looking more closely at him.
‘You’ve lost weight,’ Johnny Hennessey said.
‘Bloody hell, I can’t believe it’s you. I thought you were dead, too.’
‘Fancy a pint?’ he asked.
‘I fancy a dozen! What are you doing in the Yank navy?’
We caught a bus into the city and, when we’d got ourselves nicely settled into a pub, Johnny confessed that he’d really come to the house to see my mother and father.
‘I came to tell them I thought you were definitely dead.’
‘Cheery bastard,’ I laughed. However, his thoughtfulness and the effort he’d obviously made to find out where my mother and father lived touched me.
‘I thought they’d like to know you were up on the stern with me when the poor old Laconia started to go down.’
‘That was a moment and a half, wasn’t it?’
‘Bloody shocking.’
‘You still haven’t answered my question,’ I said.
‘What question is that, then?’
‘How you came by that Yank uniform.’
Like me, Johnny really didn’t want to talk about what had happened. All he told me was that the Vichy French cruiser Gloire had eventually picked him up. It already had a large number of survivors on board. It took them to North Africa, first to Dakar and then on to Casablanca where they were interned in a prison camp. In November, some two months after the sinking, the camp had been liberated by the Americans. By then Johnny couldn’t walk because one of his legs was badly infected from a scorpion bite, so the Americans took him to a US navy ship that was preparing to sail for Norfolk, Virginia.
‘Went all the way to America in the sick bay. First class, it was. They gave me this uniform and I thought, well, they’ve got plenty of others just like it so I never gave it back!’
‘Quite right, too.’
We drank a lot of beer, which fooled us into believing that the whole thing hadn’t been quite so bad after all, and staggered out of the pub, arms around each other, talking nonsense and slurring futile promises to stay in touch. It was the last we ever saw of each other.
My much-needed leave ended in January 1943, when I was sent south to a shore establishment at St Austell in Cornwall, HMS Vulcan. Before long I was posted north, to a place called Afonwen near Pwllhelli in North Wales, which was a Royal Navy recruit-training establishment. It also seemed to serve as a collecting house for survivors, and people who could only be described as bomb happy, those who had been broken by the strain of combat. I certainly qualified for the first category, possibly even the second. Over the entrance gates to the camp was a sign proclaiming it to be HMS Glendower.
The camp, which before the war had been one of Butlin’s holiday camps, overlooked the lovely beach that swept around Cardigan Bay for over five miles. The scenery was spectacular, with Mount Snowden clearly visible in the distance. Recruits in their brand new uniforms were everywhere, doing drill and dashing about looking all shiny and enthusiastic. There was a contingent of women in the camp, too, members of the Women’s Royal Navy Service, who were always simply known as Wrens.
Several doctors gave me another cursory examination when I arrived, but they didn’t ask me about my time in the lifeboat, or offer any help or advice. I was put under the command of a leading seaman who went by the rather charming name of John Rainbow.
‘Mac, you’ll be the sentry for the Wrens’ quarters.’
‘All right.’
It could’ve been worse, I suppose. Rainbow didn’t give me any instructions so, armed with a rifle, I spent my time patrolling the barbed wire fence that surrounded the Wrens’ quarters. The Wrens came in and out, going about their business, and they were pretty easy on the eye. I didn’t have the faintest idea what I was protecting them from and I’m quite sure my skin-and-bone presence and vague expression did nothing to reassure them.
Sentry duty didn’t exactly stimulate my mind, so I kept drifting off to places I really didn’t want to go. The camp and Wrens frequently disappeared from my mind and I would find myself below in Laconia as the torpedoes struck her, or being hauled aboard Hartenstein’s U-boat, or frantically swimming to the lifeboat.
But I was in good company at Glendower, because many of the experienced sailors in the camp were in a pretty bad way, traumatised for one reason or another. We never talked about what had happened to us, and just tried to make the best of it. Sometimes a group of us would get passes to leave camp and we’d set off on foot, keen to have a look around, although our main ambition was usually to find a pub.
The countryside was very peaceful, the winter air smelling of farm animals and the tang of an occasional sea fret drifting in from Cardigan Bay. But other than those pleasant excursions, there seemed no purpose to anything. Being ashore didn’t bother me at all because I felt certain I wouldn’t survive another stint at sea, but not knowing what the navy had planned for me was hard. I was a shore-bound sailor with no ship, no real job and no hope. That is, until early in 1944 when they sent me south again to Drake. More doctors examined me. They said little and explained even less. I was assigned to general duties, and I wondered if I’d somehow slipped through the cracks of officialdom, that my records had been lost and no one even knew where I was anymore. It was a bleak period of my life. I had gone from being adrift on the Atlantic to being adrift on land.
Sometime during March, I was posted to another general duties job at the naval dockyards in Devonport, not far from Drake. I would report for duty late in the afternoon and work through the night, running messages, saluting the officers and generally doing what was asked of me. It wasn’t hard. I was billeted in a schoolhouse on a hill beyond the dockyard, quietly settling into a routine without anyone bothering me too much. Occasionally I’d go home to Liverpool on a weekend pass.
During one of those weekends at home, I was sitting in a chair with my mind wandering as usual, when my father gave me an envelope. It was addressed to me in handwriting I didn’t recognise.
‘This came for you,’ he said and then quietly left the room. There was a carefully penned letter inside:
Dear ‘McLoughlin’,
I automatically write the familiar
name by which I knew you in those days and nights during which we tossed on the Atlantic, but somehow I feel that back in civilisation ‘James’ would be more suitable.
It was so kind of your father to write, & I was very very glad to hear of you again. I am sending you a copy of the booklet which I was persuaded to write. I think that I am glad now that I have done it as it seems to have helped many people. Do let me know what you think of it, & whether it gives a true picture of our experiences for you too.
If you have the addresses of any of the other survivors do please let me know & I will send each a copy.
I am glad to hear that you are well & working again. So am I, but I never forget, & I am sure you cannot either.
I hope that one day we shall meet again—you were always so kind & helpful to me & always looked after me whenever possible, & I am so grateful for those memories in the midst of many that I would rather not have.
With the very best of good wishes.
Yours very sincerely,
Doris M. Hawkins,
‘Freckles’
I had tears in my eyes as I read those words. The whole dreadful experience overwhelmed me once more. I sat alone with the letter in my lap for quite a long time, and then read it again. It finally sank in that my father had written to Doris off his own bat, based on the scant information I had given him, to let her know that I was all right.
When he came back into the room he showed me another letter from Freckles, which she had addressed to him. In it she spoke of me in a way that I think made him very proud. She told him that she was doing full-time nursing work again as Sister in the Maternity Department of her own hospital, St Thomas’s, which had been evacuated from London to Woking for the duration of the war. She wrote, too, of how much it had pained her that she’d been unable to do much for us in the lifeboat.
‘She sent us two copies of her little book,’ my father said. ‘One for your mother and I, one for you.’
‘I don’t feel up to reading it just now,’ I admitted.
‘Atlantic Torpedo is what she’s called it. Read it when you’re ready, lad. When you’re good and ready.’
One Common Enemy Page 13