One Common Enemy

by Jim McLoughlin

‘Sometime later.’

  ‘No rush.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She seems a decent person.’

  I couldn’t find the words to tell him just how incredibly decent Doris was. We both wrote a short letter back to her, and I felt guilty that I couldn’t comment on her account of our voyage. I hoped she would read between the lines and understand why I didn’t mention it, that I didn’t have the mental strength to read it.

  Even though her letter dredged the experience back to the surface, I found comfort in the fact that I wasn’t alone in struggling with the awful memories. That was something positive to take back to my work in Devonport, where the dockyard was really bustling. We didn’t know it at the time, but the build up to the D-day invasion of Europe was in full swing, with shipping of all kinds in very high demand. This attracted attention from the Germans, who mounted a number of bombing raids, usually in the early evenings.

  Late one afternoon in early June I reported for my shift, half expecting an air raid a little later. Even though air raid shelters were scattered around the dockyard, a group of us always gathered in a room on the ground floor of the signals building. It was dangerous and against regulations, but we would sit there for ages with nothing to do while the bombs went off. On this particular afternoon I figured it would help pass the time if I could get hold of a good magazine to read. So I went upstairs where I’d seen a collection on previous visits. A Wren was operating the switchboard there. She was absolutely gorgeous.

  ‘Can I borrow one of the magazines?’ I asked her.

  ‘No,’ she said in a very haughty fashion.

  ‘I just want to have something to read if the Germans come over.’

  ‘No,’ she said again.

  ‘I’ll return it, you know, after the all clear.’ I really wanted that magazine.

  ‘All right,’ the Wren finally said. I thought she only relented because she was busy and wanted to get rid of me.

  Sure enough there was an air raid, a pretty big one that went on for a long time and caused quite a lot of damage. I sat it out reading my magazine and thinking about the Wren on the switchboard. After it was over I went back to my work until early the next morning. I was just getting ready to go off duty when I remembered the magazine, so I went back up the stairs of the signals building, where the Wren appeared to be finishing her shift as well.

  ‘Just returning the magazine,’ I told her.

  ‘Good,’ she said.

  ‘You finishing up now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can I walk you back to your billet?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I suppose so,’ the Wren said. Her earlier haughtiness had dissolved somewhat because she was going off duty.

  We picked our way through the bomb damage and dodged the fire engines entering the dockyard, chatting quietly. I was instantly at ease with her. She was no longer the business-like Wren on duty at her switchboard, more like a normal friendly girl. She told me her name was Dorothy Field and that she was 19. When we got to her billet I knew I had to do something right there and then.

  ‘Would you like to go out with me?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve got a boyfriend.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘A Royal Marine. He’s away at sea, on HMS Black Prince,’ she said. I knew Black Prince was a cruiser.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I would like to go out with you, though. Just as a friend, mind,’ she said. ‘That would be nice.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. I felt wonderful.

  Some very special chemistry was at work between us, I knew that for certain, despite the fact that she had a boyfriend. We began our friendship by going for long walks on Plymouth Hoe and various other places in and around Plymouth itself. Then we started to meet for cups of tea at a cafe called The Magnet, which was apt because I was very strongly drawn to this beautiful young woman. Friendship was unexpectedly becoming something more.

  Plymouth was pretty much a military city at that stage of the war, swarming with people in uniform, so privacy was hard to come by, especially for two young people living in separate billets. Our lodgings were always noisy, with people coming and going at odd hours of the day and night, so I suggested to Dorothy that we meet in the nearby cemetery. It was the only quiet place I could think of.

  ‘Very romantic,’ she said.

  We’d meet in the cemetery and, strange to think of it now, we fell in love among the headstones. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. As for telling her about my experiences in the navy, I merely mentioned that my ship had been torpedoed and that I’d been in a lifeboat for a while, then left it at that. I must have hid my trauma well.

  ‘You’re such a happy-go-lucky sailor!’ she told me.

  After several weeks of walks, cups of tea and meeting in the cemetery, Dorothy invited me to her family home in Totnes to meet her parents. A chap knew things were pretty serious in those days if a girl asked him home to meet her parents. They were lovely people, but I don’t think they were overly impressed that their daughter was involved with a sailor, let alone one who was obviously a little vague and confused.

  A few weeks after meeting Dorothy’s parents I received a draft chit, ordering me to join the aircraft carrier HMS Implacable. They sent me on leave for about 10 days before I was due to join the ship at Scapa Flow in Scotland. I was anxious about this, because I didn’t know how long I would be away, so I took Dorothy for another walk on Plymouth Hoe. There were a number of Royal Navy vessels riding at anchor in Plymouth Sound, from where I’d first gone to sea on HMS Valiant nearly five years before. It was about as traditional a British naval scene as I could imagine. Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh and all the other Elizabethan naval heroes had stood on this very spot before setting sail on their great voyages.

  ‘Will you marry me?’ I asked. I had little time to waste, so there was no point in beating about the bush.

  ‘Yes,’ Dorothy said straight away.

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘But my parents will never agree. After all, we’ve only known each other for a few weeks,’ she gently reminded me.

  ‘What are we going to do then?’

  ‘I can get some leave as well. I’ll come with you to Liverpool and we’ll just go ahead and get married,’ she said calmly.

  Without telling her parents, Dorothy joined me on my leave. We went to my parents’ house in Liverpool, where I introduced her to the family. When I told them we were going to be married there were some worried comments about not knowing each other long enough and that it wouldn’t last. Naturally we ignored all of it because we knew we loved each other and simply wanted to be together. After they’d recovered from the shock, my family threw themselves into the moment with good humour and enthusiasm. We made arrangements for a simple wedding service in All Saints, Speke, the church right next door to my parents’ house. Dorothy and I exchanged our vows on 12 September, 1944. We’d known each other for just 12 weeks. It was the happiest day of my life and, by a strange coincidence, it was exactly two years after the very worst day of my life, the day Laconia was torpedoed in the Atlantic.

  After the ceremony we went back to the house, where we had our honeymoon. I showed Dorothy the sights of Liverpool, such as they were. Then my leave was over and I left to join Implacable. It was a painful parting. Dorothy caught a train south to break the news of our marriage to her family in Totnes, while I caught one north to Scotland. We didn’t know when we’d see each other again. Our situation was nothing unusual, though. A live-today-for-tomorrow-we-die attitude was strong among young people at that time. Many couples were getting married quickly, then being parted even quicker as their lives were tossed upside down by the instant demands of wartime postings. Everyone was affected in some way and teary railway station farewells were commonplace. Liverpool’s Lime Street Station was, it seemed to me, the saddest of places.

  If I had been overawed by Valiant when I first joined her in 1939, then I was completely overwhelmed by Implacable. She
was a brand new carrier, fresh out of the shipyards and just commissioned. Her flight deck was nearly 800 feet long and 100 wide. She displaced about 33,000 tons fully loaded and could steam at 32 knots. On 20 September 1944, I was just one sailor in a new crew of 1500 officers and men who came aboard to take her on her first operational cruise. Also on board was a 700-strong Fleet Air Arm contingent charged with maintaining and flying her aircraft, a mixture of Seafires and Barracudas. I had only been on board a few hours when someone told me Implacable had a range of 11,000 nautical miles. I winced. We could be going just about anywhere in the world. But as it turned out we were only heading to Norway on an anti-shipping operation.

  I didn’t know a soul on board. I was assigned to the wireless operators’ mess and only a short while after we put to sea I could feel myself slipping into a most dreadful state. I was beside myself with anxiety about the possibility of a torpedo attack. If ever there was a juicy target for a German U-boat, it was an aircraft carrier. The thought of Implacable sinking almost immobilised me, and I realised that I had to do something about the way I was feeling.

  With a great deal of trepidation, I went to see the surgeon-commander, the senior medical officer. But I was lucky. He was a kind, gentle officer who asked me a lot of questions about the sinking of Laconia, my time in the lifeboat and what I was feeling. He listened patiently for quite a long time as I did my best to explain it all.

  ‘These experiences take time to get over. You’re stuck on board for the moment, so stay with it as best you can,’ he said.

  ‘Aye aye, sir.’

  ‘Come and see me in my quarters at any time.’

  At least there was someone who understood a little of my fears. So I went about my duties, trying to suppress a boiling anxiety, my health slowly deteriorating.

  After four weeks of aircraft operations off Norway, during which we hit very heavy sea conditions, Implacable returned to Scotland to have some weather damage repaired. The surgeon-commander must have had significant influence because as soon as the carrier docked, the master-at-arms gave me a chit posting me back to barracks. So I returned to Drake and had a wonderful reunion with Dorothy. She had plenty to tell me. She had received her discharge papers from the Wrens.

  ‘Oh, and I’m pregnant,’ she announced.

  I was amazed at her calmness about such a momentous occasion. To begin with I was overwhelmed, but then an extraordinary happiness and contentment rushed through me. I couldn’t keep the smile off my face. Becoming a father was just what I needed. It gave me something special to think about, something positive for the future instead of dwelling on the past.

  However, it seemed the navy still had no real plans for me, except perhaps to give me some easy duty after my miserable spell on Implacable. Another doctor examined me half-heartedly, and I got the impression that he thought I was bomb happy. Then I was relieved to be posted to the Royal Naval College, which had been moved to Chester from its traditional home in Dartmouth, to reduce the risk of bombing. So I went north once again, leaving Dorothy in the care of her parents. It was nearly Christmas, 1944.

  The College had taken over a stately country mansion with magnificent manicured gardens. Everything about the place was immaculate, traditional and very spit-and-polish. My job was that of sailor-servant to an elderly officer who had served at sea in World War One, returned to civilian life between the wars, then rejoined the Royal Navy at the start of hostilities in 1939. He had private quarters tucked away in the old mansion and gave me instructions while warming his feet in front of a homely open fire. I ran his messages, made sure people reported to him when they were required, and generally looked after him. I could never quite work out what his job was, which was fitting really because I wasn’t sure what mine was either.

  In posting me to Chester the navy had done me something of a favour, because it wasn’t far to Liverpool by train and I could easily get home to see my family whenever I got a 12-hour pass. After a while it became a rather pleasant routine, marred only by the fact that I desperately wanted to return to Dorothy. Another small difficulty was that the College was nine miles from the Chester railway station. When my leave was over, I would have to run back to the College for fear of being late and getting docked leave and pay again. It improved my fitness and general health no end, that did.

  I had just begun to enjoy the posting in Chester when the navy sent me back to Drake where I was drafted to an establishment I’d never heard of, HMS Golden Hind.

  ‘Where’s Golden Hind?’ I asked.

  ‘Sydney.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Sydney in Australia.’

  ‘Australia! I can’t go to bloody Australia, I’ve got a pregnant wife!’

  ‘You’ll go where the chit says.’

  13 – A sea change far away

  It was hard to grasp that I was being sent about as far away from England as it was possible to go.

  ‘They must know what they’re doing,’ Dorothy told me when I broke the news to her.

  ‘I doubt it,’ I said.

  Although unhappy about this posting, Dorothy took the news in her stride, resigned like so many other service wives to the routine disturbances of life. Her confidence that everything would work out all right helped ease my concerns.

  I joined a ship called Dominion Monarch in Southhampton in February 1945. She was a luxury Shaw Saville liner before the war, cruising regularly to Australia and New Zealand, but had been requisitioned by the Royal Navy to serve as a troopship. Stripped of all her pre-war luxury and painted a gloomy grey, she could carry over 3000 troops. Her sea-stained, war-weary appearance reminded me of how Laconia had looked when I went aboard her in Cape Town in 1942. The old anxieties gripped me again, but were quietened somewhat by the fact that I was taking passage for the first time. That was a change. So, I settled down to experience shipboard life without duties.

  It was a reasonably pleasant six-week voyage. There were personnel from all three British services on board, as well as many Australians, so there was no shortage of company and conversation. I shared a mess deck with a group of soldiers.

  We were supposed to wash our own dishes after meals, and after only a week or so I noticed that the mess was running short of crockery. That puzzled me until I saw a soldier finish his meal, get up from the mess table and throw his dirty dishes through an open porthole.

  We sailed south-west across the Atlantic and entered the Panama Canal near Colon. The trip along the canal intrigued me no end. It took an entire day to travel the 40 miles through the system of massive water-filled chambers and man-made lakes that raise and lower ships through the mountainous terrain of central Panama. We came out into the Pacific at Panama City and headed for Australia.

  My intense fear of being below decks had not diminished, so I spent most of my time on the upper deck, idling away the hours reading and watching the sea. My mind wandered quite a lot. On several occasions I imagined I was on Laconia again, which sent a disturbing icy sensation through me. As we crossed the Pacific and the weather got warmer, I slept out on the deck most nights. I planned on being first over the side if something went wrong.

  The Dominion Monarch sailed through Sydney Heads early on a lovely March day, and the sight of Sydney Harbour was absolutely beautiful. I recalled my father talking about its great coat-hanger bridge being built. Finally seeing it for myself created the strange notion that this was a homecoming of sorts.

  We docked at Woollomooloo, where the wharf was swarming with people who’d come to see the ship berth. Among them were Sydney families selected to welcome servicemen to Australia, who came on board to introduce themselves. A middle-aged couple singled me out and greeted me like their long lost son, though they didn’t know me from a bar of soap. He was a beefy bloke, a rough-and-ready signalman with the New South Wales Railways. She was a short, chunky woman. They both had, to my ears at least, the most extraordinary Australian accents.

  ‘G’day mate, what’s ya name?’ t
he bloke asked.

  ‘Jim. Everyone calls me Mac.’

  ‘’Ow yer goin’ Mac, all right?’ He shook my hand and almost crushed it.

  ‘Fine thanks.’

  ‘Meet me missus.’

  ‘’Ow yer goin’ Mac, all right?’ his wife asked.

  ‘Fine thanks.’

  ‘Want any washin’ done?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Dirty clothes, love. I’ll wash and iron ’em for ya.’

  ‘It’s no bloody trouble for the missus, Mac,’ the bloke said.

  ‘No, honestly,’ I said. I couldn’t believe the generosity of these people.

  ‘Come on, then,’ the woman said. ‘Let’s go ’ome and ’ave a cuppa an’ a decent feed.’

  I couldn’t have wished for a warmer welcome. Those perfect strangers took me to their home where they produced the promised cup of tea and a meal, then entertained me with their easy going conversation for the rest of the day. They couldn’t do enough for me. It was my first taste of genuine, no-questions-asked Australian mateship. Compared to the often-stifling English reserve I was accustomed to, their extroverted, carefree nature was a real eye opener. When it was dark they took me back to the Dominion Monarch.

  The next morning I joined a big group of sailors on the wharf. A convoy of covered army trucks arrived and we all climbed aboard. I didn’t have a clue where we were going, but it turned out to be to the Warwick Farm racecourse, which had been transformed into a massive tent city, a sort of mustering centre for navy personnel. I found myself in a tent with a few other blokes who were also wondering what the hell was going on. As usual, no one was telling us anything. A lot of complaining started up.

  ‘So this is bloody Australia.’

  ‘End of the earth, this is.’

  ‘Wonder when the next race starts.’

  ‘Is this Golden Hind?’ I asked.

  ‘I think so.’

  I spent a few miserable days at Warwick Farm with nothing to do, during which I sank into one of my dark, low moods, wondering why the navy had sent me all the way out here while I had a pregnant wife to take care of in England. The only worthwhile things in my life, my family and my wife and unborn child, were all on the other side of the world and it didn’t make any sense at all. I was eventually ordered to report to the Royal Navy Hospital at Punchbowl, and the thought crossed my mind that I was going to be admitted as a patient. Maybe this is the place where they treat survivors. Make a bit of sense, that would. It was a rather appealing thought. I felt I could do with a spell in hospital.