I Sank The Bismarck (3 page)

We lived in and around Kelso for the next few years, and I
first went to school at the Abbey public school in Wark. For
some of that time we lived in a small village on the outskirts
of a town called Carham and from there I walked to the
school, which had only one classroom and one lady teacher.
My parents then moved into Kelso, but I was occasionally
sent to my grandparents at Waskerly and then had to walk
about a mile and a half to school on my own. The walk was
fine in summer, but pretty tough going in winter, when it
seemed to be dark when I left home in the morning and dark
again on the journey back. On the way home I had to pass a
solitary building called the Moor Lock Inn and I was once
attacked there by a very angry gander, which flew at me and
knocked me down. He would not leave me alone, but luckily
somebody heard my shouts and came and beat him off with a
stick. I gave the building a very wide berth after that, which
added to the unpleasantness of the journey.

This area of country was often used for motor-bike trials
and a checkpoint for the riders was set up nearby. I remember
seeing a well-known woman motorcyclist,
Marjorie Cottle,
there, riding an extremely impressive bike called a Red Indian.
I had heard a lot about her, as she was one of the few women
motorcyclists in those days, and she was very successful in
races and time trials. The fact that she was competing in a
sport dominated by men was controversial – after all, women
had only been given the vote in 1928 – and she was often the
subject of articles in newspapers and magazines. She had
blonde hair and, even with her riding gear on, she was quite
glamorous. She left a great impression on me. I must have
been growing up!

I had not had a very pleasant time in the schools I had been
attending so far, because of the behaviour of the other
children towards me and the arduous journeys. By the time I
was eleven I was determined to go to
Kelso High School,
where the pupils wore very impressive red-and-white-striped
jerseys and the building was in the centre of town. I was very
pleased when I passed my entrance exams and was accepted.
The school was marvellous compared to what I had had to
put up with in County Durham and at the school in Wark.
The headmaster,
Mr Shepherd, was one of those characters
who was both imposing and charismatic. When he entered a
classroom the pupils just ate out of his hand, he was so
respected. At Kelso High School I started to excel at rugby
and I eventually made it to the school's first team. I continued
to enjoy playing rugby long after my schooldays, and still
today think it is a marvellous game.

Before I qualified for the High School I used to walk past
Kelso Abbey to the Abbey school and was fascinated by a
stone obelisk in the Abbey grounds. It bore a rather ominous
inscription:
REMEMBER MAN AS YOU PASS BY, AS YOU ARE NOW,
SO ONCE WAS I, AS I AM NOW SO MUST YOU BE, PREPARE FOR
DEATH AND FOLLOW ME.
I had no way of knowing then, but
there were to be times in my life when I had to confront the
prospect of death rather urgently, as did many of my friends.
I often remembered that inscription, though I cannot say that
it helped, or offered any way out of a dreadful situation.

There was a very active social life in the town, as there was
in those days in most towns around the country. There were
two annual gatherings in the big square, when the townsfolk
all made an appearance. One was every Hogmanay – New
Year's Eve – and the other was in the summer for the start of
the annual trip to Spittal, a seaside town on the coast across
the estuary from Berwick-upon-Tweed, where everybody was
transported free by bus or train for a day at the beach.

My parents took an active part in some of the town's clubs.
The Kelso Swimming Club was formed while I was at school.
A hut was built on the riverbank near the Duke of
Roxburghe's estate boundary, and the Pirelli company, a
manufacturer of electricity cables, which was putting up
pylons to bring mains electricity to the town, was persuaded
to build a diving board with 10-foot and 20-foot platforms
for the club's use. My father was one of the first to dive off
the top, but I'm afraid I never managed it.

My mother, who was very musical, had a good voice and
was a keen amateur singer. She was active in the local
Operatic Society, which was extremely well supported and
attracted talent from other towns around Kelso. Their repertoire
ranged from Gilbert and Sullivan's
Pirates of Penzance
to the operetta
Goodnight Vienna.
I was always recruited for
the chorus. My mother also encouraged me to take up a
musical instrument and eventually I started to perform with a
band.

The ability to play the
piano and violin served me in good
stead later on. Amateur musical performances were extremely
important for all of us during the war, and my experience with
them started at the age of ten or eleven, when my friends and
I took part in a custom that was very popular back then but
now seems to have died out altogether. It was carried out at
Halloween, but instead of going round asking for trick or
treats we did something called 'Guising'. A group of us lads
would go to the front door of a house we thought might be
welcoming and politely ask if we could come in and perform.

Our particular playlet was suggested by my father; it was
one he had performed when he was a lad, although whether
there was any deeper tradition behind the verses we recited I
cannot say. We were all dressed up in costumes, with one boy
dressed as a king with a cardboard crown on his head. Once
all were in the house most of us would cluster behind the
sitting-room door, then the first boy would enter the room on
his own and say, 'Red up sticks and red up stools here comes
in a pack of fools, a pack of fools behind that door. Step in
King George and clear the floor.'

The boy with the crown on his head would enter and recite,
'King George is my name, sword and pistol by my side, I hope
to win the game.'

The first boy would answer, 'The game, sir, the game, sir, is
not within your power. I will slash you and slay you within
half an hour.' These two boys would then have a duel with toy
swords and the first boy would drop down as though dead, at
which the king would kneel down and say, 'Is there a doctor
in the town?' A small boy with a little attaché case would then
pop out from behind the door saying, 'My name is Doctor
Brown, the best little doctor in the town. A little to his nose
and a little to his bum, now rise up, jock, and sing a song.'

It was an absurd little sketch, but we used to get showered
with pieces of cake and home-made toffees and fudge, and we
would pass from house to house performing the same sketch.
Even now I can recall the words perfectly.

I also started to enjoy
horse riding, which did not go down
very well with my parents. My grandfather had been a keen
gambler and had lost a considerable sum of money over the
years on the horses. For understandable reasons, my father
didn't approve of gambling; he also took the view that anything
to do with horse racing or riding was dangerous and
would inevitably lead to ruin. However, I became fascinated
by the meetings of the local hunt, where I would turn up in
shorts, rugby jersey and running shoes, and try to keep up
with the hounds.

Naturally I was told off by my father, and the school also
took a dim view of it. But I soon found that opening the odd
gate to allow some of the less adventurous riders through
would be rewarded with a sixpence and, as I became more
familiar, riders would encourage me to hang on to a stirrup to
help me along. Soon I started to learn to ride at the local
stables with the help of the stable boys. I enjoyed it and found
that I was good at it. Whether it was my years of running
around with just my dog Wiggy for company I don't know,
but I felt easy with horses and they felt easy with me. Even
now, as I look out of my window and observe some of the
pupils at a riding school in the nearby fields, I have to resist
the urge to rush out and tell them to relax, loosen the reins a
little and encourage the horse to feel that he is working with
them, not against them.

I got on very well with one particular horse called Answer
Me, who was owned by a local vet, a grand character. He
would give me a few shillings for exercising his horse every
Saturday, and when he entered it into a race near Hawick I
decided to put some of my money on it. It came in first and I
picked up my winnings. There was, however, hell to pay with
my father, who saw all his grim forebodings coming to pass.
He flatly told me never to go back to the stables. I disobeyed
him, of course, I am sorry to say, but didn't gamble any more.
It was the horses and the riding that I was interested in and,
like rugby, it is something that I continued to enjoy throughout
my life and encouraged my children to take up. So all the
things that I enjoyed as a youngster stayed with me as I grew
up, and made me what I was to become.

The major event of my childhood took place in Kelso when
I was about ten years old. It didn't last very long, but I think
it had a profound effect on me – I honestly think it changed
my life completely, although it took some time for its true
impact to be felt. An aeroplane appeared in the sky over Kelso
one day, manoeuvring low over the town a few times to
attract attention and then flying off to land at the point-to-point
course. It was an Avro 504, a very common and popular
aircraft at the time, a biplane with two open cockpits,
powered by a single rotary engine at the front and a big
curved skid, like a bent ski, mounted between the landing
wheels as a substitute for a nose wheel. Several thousand of
these planes had been built during the
First World War and
they had served as fighters, with a machine gun mounted
above the top wing. This one, presumably an ex-services aircraft
and without its machine gun, was flown by a
professional pilot, a 'barnstormer' I suppose you could call
him, and he was offering joy rides for 10 shillings. He looked
like Biggles, the flying-ace action hero of boys' stories, dressed
in his breeches and high, laced-up flying boots, with a leather
flying helmet and goggles and a long, white silk scarf that flew
in the wind. Was he impressive!

As for the experience of flying, I was astounded by it. This
was like riding in the locomotive but infinitely more thrilling.
There was the noise, the smell of hot oil and high-octane
petrol, and the speed seemed immense as we took off into the
air, high above the countryside, with the town far below us. It
was the stuff of dreams, like a glimpse of another world that
made it impossible, once I was back on the ground, to view
my surroundings in the same way again. But I thought it was
inevitably a once-in-a-lifetime experience, not something I
could ever repeat as easily as I could go riding a horse. Now
that I think back on it, that pilot has an enormous amount to
answer for.

It's hard to tell if the world seemed to be becoming more
threatening and difficult because it was, or if it was just
because I was growing up and paying more attention to things
going on around me.

I have already talked about the effect that the General
Strike had on me when I went to County Durham as a seven-year-old.
By the time I was sixteen I was certainly paying more
attention to the news on the radio and in the newspapers, and
you couldn't help noticing that the economic situation was
affecting everybody. The great crash in 1929, when stock
markets around the world collapsed and millions of people
were thrown out of work, was impossible to ignore; it was a
daily topic of conversation between my parents and other
adults. The effects of that financial disaster were still with us
in the mid-1930s and we were living in very depressed
economic times. There were a lot of unemployed people in the
streets, hardly anybody was hiring agricultural workers, and
it was not easy to find a job. There wasn't the demand for new
cars, so business was difficult for my father.

I wanted to go to university in Edinburgh, but my parents
couldn't afford to pay the fees and pay for my keep while I
studied. I applied for a bursary, took some examinations and
was interviewed, but apparently I did not make the grade, so
I was not offered any financial assistance. With this very
negative news I had no choice but to
leave school at sixteen
and start looking for work along with many others. Through
some of my father's connections in the coach business I was
offered a job in the office of a bus company in Kelso. It was a
job I hated. My life started to become depressing. I still played
rugby for the town, which I enjoyed, and continued to ride
horses at the local stables and accompany the hounds hunting,
much against my father's wishes, but these activities did
not compensate for the feeling that my life was wasting away
in a boring job as a clerk.

I thought that I might be able to improve my position if I
saved up enough money to put myself through university. As
an extra source of income I joined up with some of my old
classmates to form a small dance band. I played the violin and
the banjo, and we toured around, performing at weddings
and giving concerts at dances in local church and community
halls. One of the band members, the only one who could
drive, would use his father's milk-delivery van to get us
around to wherever we had to appear. I continued to live at
home and paid my mother half my wages each week, which
was 18 shillings, or 90 pence in today's money. I had to buy
my own clothes and fares out of the money I had left. At the
end of the week there was precious little to put by for my
university fund.

While I was languishing in the bus company, there seemed to
be a great deal happening in the world outside. There was no
television, of course, but the cinema was extremely popular
and provided great entertainment. Not only was there a
supporting picture before the main feature, but there were
also the newsreels, Pathé or Movietone, which dealt with the
main news of the day. Germany appeared to be extremely
dynamic and exciting, not suffering as we were from high
unemployment and poverty. They were building roads and
constructing Zeppelins that crossed the Atlantic. It didn't
seem to be the same country that had been so badly defeated
in the First World War, when many of the population were on
the verge of starvation.

In the winter of 1936 a couple of hundred unemployed
shipyard workers set off from
Jarrow on Tyneside to march
on Parliament, over 300 miles away in London. They wanted
to highlight the poverty and desperate circumstances of the
industrial cities and coal-mining areas of the north. In some
parts of England and Scotland, such as Clydeside, there was
70 per cent unemployment. But in the summer of the same
year we had seen newsreels in the cinema of the Berlin
Olympics, which appeared to show that Germany under
Hitler was booming, with plenty of jobs, holiday camps for
the workers and recreational activities for youngsters, all
organized by the state.

Other news from overseas was more disquieting. Italy had
invaded Abyssinia, causing the Emperor Haile Selassie to flee
to safety in Britain. Under their dictator,
Mussolini, the
Italians were seeking to expand their empire in Africa and
were enlarging their navy. Civil war had broken out in Spain,
and Italy and Germany had sent some of their forces to fight
on behalf of General Franco, who was trying to remove the
socialist government in Madrid. Of course, none of these
events stopped me getting up in the morning, having breakfast
and going to work; I was at least fortunate in having a job to
go to.

The biggest event, however, and the most talked about, was
the abdication of
Edward VIII, forced to choose between the
crown and the woman he loved, Wallis Simpson. It was
the subject of considerable gossip the length and breadth of
the country, with expressions of great disapproval of affairs
with married women and of divorce in general. There was no
doubt a great deal of hypocrisy over the whole issue. I was not
a prude about sex, and never have been; in fact, I was
beginning to be extremely interested in women, young as I
was. It was at about the time of the abdication that I had the
first encounter with a woman that made me realize they knew
what they wanted and were quite capable of getting it. During
one of my rugby matches I injured my foot and the wound
became infected. I went into the local hospital to have a small
operation on my big toe and had to stay in for several days. I
was extremely well looked after by the night nurse, who was
a lovely woman. I won't go into details, but even now I can
remember the rustle of her starched aprons and the warm feel
of her breath as she leant over me. If we had ever been discovered
she would have been instantly dismissed, and
probably prevented from ever working as a nurse again. Why
she took the risk I don't know, but when it comes to romance
and sex, reason flies out of the window. It certainly made
Edward abdicate the crown and become the Duke of Windsor
instead.

There were other incidents that relieved the soul-destroying
boredom of the office in the bus depot, and one in particular
stands out, though at the time it did not seem particularly out
of the ordinary. Southern Scotland was used to falls of snow
in the winter months, but in 1937 the weather was particularly
severe. I was in the bus office one day – I think it was
shortly after New Year – when we received a phone call late
in the afternoon. The scheduled bus service from Newcastle to
Edinburgh, which went via the town of Jedburgh, had not
arrived there. Clearly something had happened, but there had
been no news of an accident. The situation was worrying: it
was snowing quite heavily, it was very cold and it would not
be long before it got dark. The depot manager asked one of
the bus drivers, a chap in his fifties called Turnbull, and me if
we would set out along the route to see if we could discover
what had happened. Turnbull was a wonderful chap the way
he prepared us; he must have known what to expect. He
secured boots for both of us, an extra pair of breeches, jerseys,
greatcoats and piles of rugs. We loaded them into a small bus,
along with torches, ropes and shovels, and we set off, driving
as quickly as we dared into the teeth of a blizzard along
the Kelso to Jedburgh road. It was by now eight o'clock in the
evening and pitch dark. Eventually we could go no further;
the snow was piling up in the road and we decided that we
would press ahead on foot. We covered our heads with the
rugs, leaving small gaps in the folds so that we could see
ahead. The gale-force wind was whipping the snow almost
horizontal, creating a complete white-out. Great snowdrifts
were building up. Our torches barely penetrated the darkness
more than a few feet, but we set off. Turnbull and I were
roped together, and he led, trying to make a path in the middle
of the road where the snow was mostly waist deep. We knew
that if we wandered off the road we might stumble into a
ditch or fall into a field and be over our heads in a huge snowdrift.
Our situation was getting dangerous, and we moved
forward slowly and cautiously. I remember thinking how
isolated we were and how very careful we must be. Strangely,
neither of us considered abandoning our search, although it
would have made much more sense to head back to our own
vehicle and return to safety in Kelso. There is a strange conflict
in people, and very often a sense of duty or responsibility
will provide as powerful an impetus as a sense of self-preservation.
Accompanying this is an equally strong
motivation not to give up or admit defeat. Whatever was
going on in our heads, we never discussed the possibility of
turning back.

We couldn't hear ourselves against the wind and had to put
our heads close together to speak to each other, fighting down
the noise of the gale. My companion, who had driven that
road many times, used the telephone wires as a guide; it was
a blessing that they had not been brought down by the heavy
snow. Without them we might easily have wandered off the
road and headed into the surrounding countryside, not to be
found for days. We struggled on, and as we neared the summit
of a steep hill we noticed that the snow suddenly felt different
underfoot. We had been walking through very dense snow,
when suddenly old Mr Turnbull realized that we were walking
on a firm surface that seemed to be higher than the
surrounding verge.

We paced out the length of this mound – and then it hit us
that we had found the bus. We dug down with our hands to
where we thought the door would be. It took some time, but
we eventually broke through the snow and banged on the
window. Inside there were about six passengers, the driver
and the conductor. They were not in very good shape. The bus
had skidded to the side of the road and after coming to a
halt had quickly been covered by a snowdrift. They were
badly shaken and of course extremely cold. Nobody on the
bus had warm enough clothes to venture out into the blizzard
to seek help. They had kept the engine going for warmth, but
that had run out of petrol and they had started to cut open the
seats and used the stuffing to build little fires on the bus floor.
It was surprising that they had not succumbed to the smoke
and fumes.

It took a lot of coaxing to persuade them to come out into
the blizzard, but they could not stay there over night. They
were so cold that I doubt they would have survived for
another twelve hours. Eventually we persuaded them that
they would be safer coming with us, and they clambered out
to be roped together and led back down the hill that we had
made in the snow to our waiting bus, where we wrapped them
in blankets. One lady insisted on putting up her umbrella as
she left the stranded bus. I tried to dissuade her, saying it
would be of absolutely no use, but she wouldn't listen.
Naturally, as soon as she got outside it was whipped away by
the wind, never to be seen again.

So we made our slow journey back to Kelso Hospital,
where they were given food and hot drinks and checked by a
doctor.

Turnbull and I received a letter of commendation from the
bus company, and a reward of £5 each! Looking back, it
seems remarkable that just the two of us ventured out on this
rescue mission to find a lost bus and its passengers. Nowadays
there would have been a mountain rescue team, an emergency
helicopter in the air and the mobilization of police and
ambulance services, but we did the job ourselves without
much thought for the dangers involved.

For the most part, working in the bus office day after day
made me more determined to find an alternative, and when I
was eighteen years old I saw an advertisement in a newspaper
asking for applications to the
Naval Air Service Reserve. This
was a new organization, being set up because, after a long
fight, the navy was finally going to take control of its own aircraft
and the men who repaired and flew them. The Naval Air
Service had existed in the First World War, but in 1919 all its
aircraft had been handed over to the
Royal Air Force. The
latest change back to Admiralty control was due to take place
in 1939. If I had understood this a bit better at the time, I
might have been spared some depressing months.

The advert that I saw was the first stage in setting up a
reserve force. Successful recruits would be taught how to fly
and would be required to spend several weeks per year on
duty in the Reserves, for which they would be paid. The idea,
of course, was that in the event of a war there would be a
group of trained men who could be called up rapidly to
enlarge the regular service. When I saw the advert I suddenly
thought that, at last, here was a way that I could learn to fly
– something I had secretly set my heart on ever since I climbed
out of the cockpit of the Avro 504 that had flown me over the
rooftops of Kelso. In those days the prospect of flying was so
remote for ordinary people that I had buried the desire deeply,
but seeing this advert brought me fresh hope. I would be
absolutely crazy not to apply: I might be able to learn to fly
after all, and I could say goodbye to my boring life in the bus
office.

I wrote off and, within a couple of weeks, received a note
asking me to appear for interview in front of a board in
Govan, Glasgow. It was a long journey, involving a bus to
Edinburgh, then another bus to Glasgow, then a long tram
journey from Glasgow to Govan. About eight other applicants
were being interviewed at the same time as me and they
all seemed very confident. The members of the interviewing
panel were all dressed in civilian clothes, but they had ruddy
faces, I assumed from a lot of time spent out in the open air.
The gentleman at the head of the table had mutton-chop
whiskers, and two of them had full beards. To my eyes they
seemed very nautical. When they introduced themselves, I
realized that they were fairly senior men.