Still Our Dad

Only much younger! Following on from last week's Sepia Saturday, where, in a comment, Nancy asked for more of a background story, I've found something I wrote shortly before I started blogging, and give it here now, with apologies for its great length! I called it Nautical Notes.

                   My Dad was in the Royal Navy for 22 years, so I think the sea was in my blood from birth.   He was born in Birmingham, and because he was a very gifted  artist, he wanted to go to art college, but his Mum said 'No', so into the Navy he went, at the tender age of 16…

I remember the lovely, tarry smell of his naval uniforms, but I didn't like the attendant cigarette and smoke smell.  Sailors used to get cheap cigarettes, and he used to have one hanging out of the corner of his mouth nearly all day long, when I was little, with resultant hacking cough first thing in the morning, that I listened to in horror whenever he was home.

For years after the war, the annual trip round the Dockyard during Navy Days was a regular family outing, until one year, when there was a submarine in dock that was open to the public. We queued up for ages for the privilege of getting escorted on a tour through this amazing vessel. I remember it being somewhat claustrophobic because of the limited space inside, but my Bro was even more affected than me, and caused a great commotion when he got panic-stricken and Mum insisted on getting him off, or out, rather,  half way through the trip. It caused havoc with the one way flow of traffic the submariners had so carefully planned. You try going up against a crowd of  moving people in the confines of a submarine's tiny passageways!

We used to enjoy the Searchlight Tattoos at the Marine Barracks in Eastney, though, as well as demonstrations of the Gun Run on Whale Island. Several teams from local barracks would compete against one another, with the victors going on to compete at the Royal Tournament in London.

Dad actually  used to be a member of  a Field Gun Crew, and I still have a medal awarded to him the year his team won. Over a measured distance, sailors have to race with a huge gun mounted in a gun carriage, dismantle it and take it across a 'chasm' with the help of slings and pulleys, then reassemble the whole thing and race on the outer side of the course, dragging everything back to the start, when the gun has to be fired to prove it still works. Very exciting to watch, and quite dangerous to take part in. Other nautical sports, like tug of war and rowing, were also activities he enjoyed as respites from the more arduous duties of the engine room, where he was a Chief Stoker PO.

He served on destroyers or minesweepers in the war, and when the ship had to stop engines to keep silent, whenever there was a threat of hovering submarines, if he was off duty, he'd sit and draw, and I still have some amazing sketches he did under those trying conditions.
Apparently, he used to be the wardroom barber, too, and I can still feel the pinch of his clippers running up the back of my neck to trim wispy bits of hair when I was about eleven, and had suffered a disastrous hair cut at Treloggan's, a hair dressers in one of the side roads off North End.

Sometimes the men in the mess took turns with the cooking,  and 'Brum', as he was known, was always welcomed, when it was his turn, as he was a great cook. His suety-duff or spotted dick became the stuff of legends. He did try to join the Navy as a cook, but they didn't need any more at the time he enrolled, so he ended up in the engine room.

He must have retained a lingering soft spot for enormous engines, for he always took me to see the engine rooms of the Isle of Wight or Gosport ferries whenever we travelled on them. Best of all, many years later, was the trip on the old paddle steamer, The Waverley. I peered at its gleaming pistons and breathed in the hot, oily fumes, and remembered childhood. 

 N.B. Dad never went to sea in a submarine!! Some comment(at)ors seem to have got the wrong end of the stick!