raid was a success in the sense that Lubeck was set ablaze, but Hitler, outraged at this uncivilized form of warfare, ordered that reprisal raids be carried out on historic British cities. The targets were picked from the famous German guide book, Baedeker, and so the raids on Exeter and other cathedral cities were called Baedeker raids.
When I told this story some fifty years later in the course of a travel article about Exeter published in The Globe and Mail, I was attacked by an Ontario judge who had been a bomber pilot in Britain and had taken part in the raid on Lubeck. He insisted that old city was a legitimate target because it was a port and an industrial city manufacturing U-boat components. Perhaps so, but that was not why Harris made it the target for the new form of fire bomb attack — terror bombing, as it came to be called. Similarly, the British Admiralty’s chart-making division had been evacuated from London to Exeter, but that was not why Hitler ordered the attack on the city. The Germans were wrong in claiming that Exeter had been destroyed, but acres of the ancient centre were, and the city has never recovered its former charm. In the postwar rush to rebuild, more attention was paid to commerce than to history and culture.
For me, these first years of the war were a waiting time. I wanted desperately to join the armed services, preferably the navy. Why? Adventure, I suppose, a challenge, new experiences, independence in the sense of leaving home and becoming a man. I believe those are the reasons most men, and most women, volunteer in a war. It’s absurd to call us heroes just because we served, or to pretend that we all marched off to defend liberty — and even more absurd to call those who were conscripted against their will heroes and martyrs. There were of course heroes, men and women who served far beyond the call of duty, displayed unusual courage, gave their lives to save others. To call us all heroes demeans those who deserve the title. I registered as a volunteer as soon as I was old enough, which was seventeen years and eight months. A close friend who also was working as an apprentice reporter volunteered with me, and we were called on December 23, 1943, two days before Christmas and four weeks before my eighteenth birthday.
The navy gathered most of its recruits in what had been a holiday camp — Butlin’s Holiday Camp — near Skegness on the flat North Sea coast of Lincolnshire. In times of peace, workers and their families enjoyed cheap holidays, living in long lines of wooden huts, grandly called chalets, and eating and playing in vast, jerry built halls. Over the entrance there hung a welcoming sign that said, as I recall, “Your Pleasure is Our Endeavor,” and it remained there, heavy with irony, when the Admiralty took over. Pleasure was not on the agenda for the scores of thousands of aspiring sailors who passed under the sign; basic training, square bashing, discipline, indoctrination, inoculation and immunization, and more discipline were. For a well-brought-up middle-class youth, the culture shock was severe. My shipmates — in the navy they are shipmates even in a shore establishment — came from all parts of Britain, and Ireland. There were volunteer youths of my age, and older men with families, because by 1943 Britain was calling up men in their late 30s. For the first time in my life, I was living, and suffering all sorts of indignities, with mates from the working class and with accents I could hardly understand. I have a group photo taken at the time in which I am a pudgy youth with owllike glasses, with my head on one side, of course.
The living huts had never been intended for winter and were perishing cold. There was no hot water in the communal washrooms. And there were lots of rough sailors to shout orders at us every day. The food would have been almost inedible had the sea air and exercise not made us starving hungry. Breakfast one day a week was canned herrings in tomato sauce, a delicacy so familiar in the navy that it was known just as “herrin’s in.” Not many recruits could stomach them for breakfast so there was always a stack of unwanted cans at the head of the long dining tables. I got to like them, and in fact still do: On toast, they make a cheap, tasty and nourishing meal. We were tested for skills and, partly because I wore glasses and was assumed to be able to write legibly in view of my reporting skills, I was assigned to the stores branch. The navy has a nickname for everything, and we stores assistants were called Jack Dusty, presumably because we laboured in the stores where we would always be dusty. It was not the seamanlike role which I had imagined, and our uniform was a white shirt, collar and tie, with jacket and pants, not the jaunty jumper and bell bottoms of real sailors — which the Admiralty, with unconscious irony, called “men dressed as seamen.” But while we might not appear to be real fighting men, in a ship we would all share the same risks.
We marched, counter-marched, and did rifle drill, which was highly recommended by grinning instructors for arms painfully swollen by vaccinations. We were tested for swimming in a huge metal tank, and those who seemed to be drowning were hooked out by a petty officer with a long pole. We were taught the rudiments of rowing a ship’s boat which was firmly secured in place in one of Mr. Butlin’s swimming pools. And we did all manner of manual work, washing literally thousands of dishes in the kitchens, sweeping the roadways, even labouring in the sewage farm. My favourite duty was in the guard house-cum-cell block where, after a night spent reading, rolling fags with the duty-free tobacco thoughtfully supplied by the Admiralty, and making sure the drunks in the cells were surviving, one could go up and down the rows of huts at dawn, hammering on the doors to turn out resentful shipmates. There were occasional half-day leaves, but all there was to do in Skegness was to line up at a café for eggs and chips, or sausage and chips on good days, before heading for the pub.
The friend with whom I had joined up was selected as officer material and sent off for training where he suffered perhaps a worse fate than not being selected in the first place. The navy in its inscrutable wisdom suddenly decided it needed no more officers and tossed his class back into the pool, where he became a seaman. We met again a year or two later in Hong Kong, he aboard a ship and I at a shore base. I also was a victim of inscrutable wisdom; instead of the regular three months at Skegness, my group spent five, mainly doing clean-up duties, before we ascended to Heaven, which is to say, private billets in London, and training at Highgate College, a famous school commandeered for war service. The navy, of course, had its own arcane system of bookkeeping, assigning to each of thousands of items a price which bore not the remotest relation to prices in the shops. It had probably been invented by Nelson, or around his time, and I found the study of it boring in the extreme.
However, I was kept awake — most of the time, anyway — by the arrival of Hitler’s secret weapon, the V1 buzz bomb. That was a pilotless plane that went put-put-putting through the sky until it ran out of fuel and crashed, usually on London. Sitting in class, we would hear the distinctive engine noise, and if it was anywhere near us when it stopped, the lot of us, including the instructor, would sink below a desk. When I passed the course, without distinction, I was sent to the naval depot at Devonport, adjoining Plymouth and only forty or so miles from Exeter, to await further posting. Devonport barracks were notorious, some buildings dating back to the Napoleonic war. It was rumored that the Admiralty had tried to sell them to the Prison Commissioners who found them not up to standard for felons. The usual escape was to go to sea, which is perhaps what the Admiralty had in mind. But there were ancient seamen, known as Barrack Stanchions, who lived in odd corners of the old buildings, and sometimes took a free meal in a seamen’s mission in the town, one of which was known as Jago s. They did not much of anything but dodge draft chits issued by the master at arms, the ship’s policeman, much feared but for some reason known in naval slang as the Jaunty. (The master’s deputy, a regulating petty officer, was known more appropriately as the Crusher.) The navy had a satirical song for many situations, most sung to hymn tunes and too rude to repeat, but one went like this:
O I wonder, yes I wonder
Did the jaunty make a blunder when he made out this draft
chit for me
For I’ve been a barrack stanchion and I’ve dined in Jago’s mansion
And now they are sending me to sea.
Eventually, and none too soon, I and the rest of an entire ship’s crew, some hundreds of us, were sent by special train to Greenock, on the Clyde, near Glasgow, to commission HMS
