occasions, and my father for four, before they died.
Many ‘ten-pound Poms’ found it too difficult in Australia and quickly returned to Britain. But not my parents. After a very tough beginning in a transit camp, my father took up a ‘temporary’ teaching post in the Victorian town of Castlemaine (they chose the town because it had the same name as a town in southern Ireland). He became, in time, a much-loved and respected teacher at the local high school. On a recent visit there to see my sister I was frequently stopped in the street by his grown-up pupils, telling me how much he had changed their lives, as two of my teachers had changed mine. My mother, also much-loved, worked as a nurse in the local hospital. Australia and Castlemaine were very kind to my parents and my brothers and sisters. Of the five of my siblings who went there with my parents, one has died, one was killed in a road accident, one, Mark, has returned to England and is a solicitor in Bristol. But the remaining two, my brother Tim and my sister Alisoun, are proud Australians and have established families firmly planted in that country’s welcoming soil.
Now, however, I was on my own – apart from Jane that is. But our relationship was still in its early stages.
The next phase of our training took my colleagues and I to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth to learn navigation and seamanship. This culminated in a three-month training voyage with the Dartmouth training squadron, consisting of three frigates, HMSs Venus , Vigilant and Urchin . We visited Gibraltar, Tenerife and the Cape Verde Islands before making a very rough Atlantic crossing to the West Indies, where we spent six weeks cruising the islands and calling at the major ports. We learned the routines of shipboard life, watch-keeping, gunnery, engineering, damage-control, first aid, and how to fight the ship on active service. We also had a very good time, climbing Teide (the mountain on Tenerife), visiting the strip joints in La Linea, close to Gibraltar (grubby, sweaty and sordid and enough to put me off such things for life),drinking too much rum in Barbados, and then learning the technique of negotiating the gangway on our return, under the alert eye of the Officer of the Watch, without letting it show too much.
During these three months Jane and I kept up a regular and passionate correspondence as our relationship deepened. I spent that summer holiday with her and her family and then, in late August, sailed to Norway to take part in a joint-services expedition based in the town of Glomfjord, well north of the Arctic Circle and sheltering under the largest glacier in Europe. The town was also famous for being one of the targets of the daring SOE raids (immortalised in the film The Heroes of Telemark ) on Norwegian power stations during the war, in order to prevent the German production of heavy water, a key ingredient for the development of a nuclear weapon. *
Our task, however, was far less dangerous. We were to map some of the high mountains above the fjord and, in the process, learn about cartography. We lived at the time almost totally on dried rations, which share one quality of almost all service field rations, only more so: they look very much the same when they come out as they did when they went in. This is especially true of dried apple rings, which formed a major part of our diet and which, I observed, could pass through the entire intestinal tract of healthy young men without any detectable change to either their composition or their shape.
I know this because in Glomfjord I helped to construct the finest latrine upon which I have ever sat. It happened like this.
One of my fellow expeditioneers was a young Royal Engineer officer who had just finished his demolition course. He was given the job of building the camp latrine, and I was apprenticed as his assistant. After an extensive reconnaissance we finally settled on a small ravine, perhaps thirty feet wide and
Many ‘ten-pound Poms’ found it too difficult in Australia and quickly returned to Britain. But not my parents. After a very tough beginning in a transit camp, my father took up a ‘temporary’ teaching post in the Victorian town of Castlemaine (they chose the town because it had the same name as a town in southern Ireland). He became, in time, a much-loved and respected teacher at the local high school. On a recent visit there to see my sister I was frequently stopped in the street by his grown-up pupils, telling me how much he had changed their lives, as two of my teachers had changed mine. My mother, also much-loved, worked as a nurse in the local hospital. Australia and Castlemaine were very kind to my parents and my brothers and sisters. Of the five of my siblings who went there with my parents, one has died, one was killed in a road accident, one, Mark, has returned to England and is a solicitor in Bristol. But the remaining two, my brother Tim and my sister Alisoun, are proud Australians and have established families firmly planted in that country’s welcoming soil.
Now, however, I was on my own – apart from Jane that is. But our relationship was still in its early stages.
The next phase of our training took my colleagues and I to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth to learn navigation and seamanship. This culminated in a three-month training voyage with the Dartmouth training squadron, consisting of three frigates, HMSs Venus , Vigilant and Urchin . We visited Gibraltar, Tenerife and the Cape Verde Islands before making a very rough Atlantic crossing to the West Indies, where we spent six weeks cruising the islands and calling at the major ports. We learned the routines of shipboard life, watch-keeping, gunnery, engineering, damage-control, first aid, and how to fight the ship on active service. We also had a very good time, climbing Teide (the mountain on Tenerife), visiting the strip joints in La Linea, close to Gibraltar (grubby, sweaty and sordid and enough to put me off such things for life),drinking too much rum in Barbados, and then learning the technique of negotiating the gangway on our return, under the alert eye of the Officer of the Watch, without letting it show too much.
During these three months Jane and I kept up a regular and passionate correspondence as our relationship deepened. I spent that summer holiday with her and her family and then, in late August, sailed to Norway to take part in a joint-services expedition based in the town of Glomfjord, well north of the Arctic Circle and sheltering under the largest glacier in Europe. The town was also famous for being one of the targets of the daring SOE raids (immortalised in the film The Heroes of Telemark ) on Norwegian power stations during the war, in order to prevent the German production of heavy water, a key ingredient for the development of a nuclear weapon. *
Our task, however, was far less dangerous. We were to map some of the high mountains above the fjord and, in the process, learn about cartography. We lived at the time almost totally on dried rations, which share one quality of almost all service field rations, only more so: they look very much the same when they come out as they did when they went in. This is especially true of dried apple rings, which formed a major part of our diet and which, I observed, could pass through the entire intestinal tract of healthy young men without any detectable change to either their composition or their shape.
I know this because in Glomfjord I helped to construct the finest latrine upon which I have ever sat. It happened like this.
One of my fellow expeditioneers was a young Royal Engineer officer who had just finished his demolition course. He was given the job of building the camp latrine, and I was apprenticed as his assistant. After an extensive reconnaissance we finally settled on a small ravine, perhaps thirty feet wide and
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