Moon Boots and Dinner Suits

by Jon Pertwee

  Years later, a portrait painter friend actually painted my portrait in there. His name was Philip Steegman and he had many years before served as an Officer in the Royal Navy. He was laconic in the extreme, and with his affected manner made me laugh a lot. Philip possessed a cigarette case given to him by the National Broadcasting Company of America, which was inscribed ‘To Philip Steegman, the only man to have said “the” word over the National Hook-up.’

  It seems he had spent a lot of time in India painting Maharajahs and Maharanis and was quite an authority on the country. ‘Tell me, Mr Steegman,’ said an NBC interviewer as Philip was passing through America, ‘what do you know about these magic men of India? You know, these – what do you call them? Ah yes – these fakers!’

  Philip bridled.

  ‘You have said the word quite incorrectly, sir,’ he said. ‘The correct pronunciation is . . .’ and here he paused to give his pedantic instruction its full effect – ‘Fuck - here.’

  Which when spoken together, at normal speed, Philip assured me, was the only way the word ‘fakir’ should be pronounced.

  On another occasion he showed remarkable bravery in the face of the enemy, or stupidity, depending on the way you look at it. We were on a Russian convoy off the north coast of Norway manning an after ‘pom-pom’ gun. Freezing cold with a temperature well below zero, we had been on duty without food or anything to drink for hours. This was the position that brought us within range of the German Focke-Wolf reconnaissance planes, who, on sighting us, would immediately call up their submarine ‘Wolf Packs’ and give them our exact position. The U-Boats would then come in and wreak havoc with our convoys. On one, the disastrous PQ17, we lost a total of twenty-four ships, Merchant and Naval, twenty-three belonging to the United States and UK, and one Dutch. 166 men were killed.

  We had been watching one such Focke-Wolf go round and round as always just out of range, for an hour or more, and our nerves were beginning to fray a little around the edges. On a previous occasion our Gunnery Officer, feeling as frustrated as we now felt, had sent up an RT message to the German pilot. Speaking in English he had said, ‘You up there, can’t you go round the other way, you’re making us dizzy.’

  Back came the reply, also in English. ‘Certainly, anything to oblige the British,’ and he did. Just to make sure that the German pilot didn’t take any liberties, the Gunnery Officer ordered the high-angle guns to loose off a few rounds. Small black puffs of smoke appeared well beneath the circling plane.

  ‘How’s that?’ said ‘Guns’ on the RT.

  ‘Not out,’ answered the obviously anglophile German pilot.

  As we sat, becoming more and more dejected, a young Midshipman, wrapped in two duffel coats and looking for all the world like a babe in swaddling clothes, came up to the gun and proceeded to give us a right tongue-lashing. The gun was dirty, we were dirty, the ammo was improperly stacked and altogether we were a disgrace to the Navy. Philip stood it for a moment and then fixing the wretched ‘Snotty’ with ice-cold eyes he said,

  ‘Piss off, you bum of impudency! You booby, germinated outside lawful procreation! I was a Naval Officer before your birth, and have no intention of listening further to your infantile burblings. So away with you, before I kick you in your under-developed testicles.’

  The Midshipman’s jaw fell lower and lower and then with an expression of such abjectness that I was inclined to feel sorry for him, he turned and slowly walked away. We never saw or heard from him again. I think his ego must have been pricked to such a degree, that he decided he would imitate the ‘ooslem bird’ and disappear up his own orifice.

  My second lucky count was in having as a friend the ‘Jack Dusty’ of the ship, CPO Geoff Pope. Geoff had an office to himself with a big desk and a home-made bunk for his much needed afternoon siestas. Being in charge of stores, he had easy access to the rum barrels, in consequence of which his office reeked of it, as did CPO Pope. Delivering a message one forenoon, the Chief asked me my name.

  ‘Pertwee?’ he said. ‘Any relation of Roland?

  ‘My father,’ I replied. It transpired that Geoff was an avid fan of my Dad’s and had read everything he had ever written.

  ‘Would you like a signed copy of his latest novel?’ I asked artfully.

  ‘Sit down, lad, and have a tot,’ said Geoff, and from that moment on we became the best of friends. When work was slack and the sea was flat, I would call in for a grog and a chat, but if it was rough, Geoff let me crawl in under his desk with my jam tin, and seemed quite impervious to my noisy discomfiture.

  Geoff would often pump me for stories of my father and never seemed to tire of them, so I regret all the more that I never got him that promised signed copy before he, too, went down in Hood’s action with the Bismarck, on May 24th 1941.

  Lucky count three, was my friendship with the Second in Command of the Royal Marines on board, Lieutenant Davies. This was a somewhat dangerous situation for him, as having a lower deck rating as a friend was unheard of, and could’ve been suspect. But this delightful man found ways of getting me into his cabin that defied any criticism. Running errands, discussing ship’s concerts, tuning his guitar, and translating (very roughly) passages of French poetry. Once in, I was made very much at home and over endless cups of tea, laced with some of Geoff’s ‘neaters’, we talked and talked. He was quite besotted by the theatre and the arts, and despairing of finding a kindred spirit among the Officers on board turned to me. Thank God he did!

  One of his more unenviable duties was to censor part of the crew’s letters home. This censorship was unfortunately essential as letter writers often included, quite unintentionally, vital information, that would prove disastrous should it fall into the wrong hands. Lieutenant Davies also had the well nigh impossible task of running to earth those lusty lads who had given nom de plumes and aliases to various female conquests in port. Among the favourite names to be assumed was Able Seaman Derek Topping. When the arm of a derrick or crane is about to reach the perpendicular, the operator would shout ‘Derrick Topping’ meaning the crane arm had almost reached its limit. This pseudonym was frequently given after a night of love and passion, to minimise chances of identification should the sound of tiny mistakes be heard pattering up the companionway. Another much-used name was Able Seaman B. M. Lever. The initials B. M. standing for breech-mechanism, and lever referring to the lever on a gun that opens and closes the breech. So pathetic letters of remarkable similarity would arrive with envelopes marked SWALK (sealed with a loving kiss), possibly reading:

  Dear Derek,

  You said you was going to rite but you never. I am now three months gone. I am disperate has I am begining to show – wot are you going to do about it? Rite soon.

  I.T.A.L.Y. Doris. –P.S. H.O.L.L.A.N.D.

  These impassioned pleas were posted on the ship’s notice board and brought forth little response other than cruel laughter. Derek Topping and Basil M. Lever should’ve felt very ashamed of themselves. (I.T.A.L.Y., I should explain, stood for ‘I trust and love you’ and H.O.L.L.A.N.D. for ‘Hope our love lives and never dies’.)

  It was my friendship with Lieutenant Davies and Geoff Pope that kept me going through some of the most wretched and despairing periods of my young life. Time spent with my mates on the mess-deck was fine, but in small doses only; for any long period, the noise and the subject matter of general conversation was one of boring and monotonous repetition, ‘parties’, poking and booze, booze, poking and ‘parties’. For finding me even temporary relief from it, I gave them both much thanks.

  Sad to relate, Lieutenant Davies also went down in Hood, just after I had attended his very jolly wedding in Edinburgh.

  When at anchor in Scapa Flow, off duty liberty men used to go ashore to taste the pleasures of Lyness night-life. This, for the majority of the men, meant going to one of the enormous NAAFI canteens and, armed with Naval issue coupons, imbibing their allotted two or three pints of beer. Clever barterers, however, always managed to coll
ect a pocket full of additional coupons, which allowed them the long-looked-forward-to opportunity of going on a monumental ‘piss-up’. After several such outings I sold my beer coupons and opted for other joys of the flesh. With two or three friends I would take an early liberty boat to Kirkwall, go ashore and walk the starkly beautiful island of Mainland for hours. The strange quality of light up there at dawn and dusk is unique, and to all young painters I advocate a visit. The furthest I ever went on one of these excursions was when we hitched a tractor ride to the opportunistically-named village of Twatt.

  During one leisurely walk we came across a little croft in a hollow where, after passing the time of day with the crofter’s wife, we were invited in for tea. This tea came under the Naval-slang heading of ‘Big-eats’ and consisted of tea (pots of it), lashings of bread and real butter, scones, oat and fruit cakes and simply oodles of home made jam, the precursor to all this being a tremendous plate of sizzling eggs and bacon. How, and from where, all this magnificent rationed fare came, we certainly didn’t ask. Suffice to say, we accepted their gracious hospitality the first time, but mutually agreed that on all future visits, the high tea should be properly paid for. If my memory serves me right, the sum in question was one shilling and sixpence per head. About seven and a half new pence.

  These visits to the McKenzies continued over a period of quite a few months and it was on one of our last sojourns there that old Mac said, ‘Well, laddies, yer a guid, well-behaved lot of young gentlemen, and because of that Mrs McKenzie and I have a mind to let you meet our daughters.’

  A hush settled on the room. What daughters? We’d been to the house half a dozen times and never had sight nor sound of any young women.

  ‘Have they been away then, Mac?’ I asked, puzzled.

  ‘Nooo, they’ve no been awa’.’

  ‘Then where have they been?’ I enquired, perplexed.

  ‘Locked in the cupboard, where else?’ said Mac, seeming surprised at the naivety of my question.

  At that, he bade Mrs McKenzie to go to the bedroom at the end of the house and release the poor incarcerated girls. Within minutes, chattering like cheeky budgies, Mrs Mac and her three daughters entered the room. They were not of startling beauty but their well-scrubbed, white-toothed, rosy-cheeked look made up for any such deficiency. From the chuck-up they made it seemed impossible to believe that throughout all our previous visits they had sat so silently and for so long in a locked-up clothes closet.

  Judging by the lusty light in their eyes, I was never quite certain whether the incarceration protected them from us, or us from them. All I do know is, that as the weather got colder and the evenings drew in, the word ‘bundling’ kept cropping up in Mac and Mrs Mac’s conversation. This was accompanied by the downcasting of eyes and a pretty flushing of the cheeks from the daughters.

  The ancient custom of ‘bundling’ was native only to the wilder parts of Scotland and the Islands and had been practised by young girls and their menfolk, affianced, or ‘just good friends’, for centuries. The idea was this. In winter, when temperatures fell to zero and below, in order to allow the old folk closer access to the fire, the daughter or daughters were allowed to take their men to their beds fully clothed, for warmth and verbal, not sexual, intercourse. The latter possibility being made impossible anyway by the simple expedient of tying the young ladies’ legs together with rope. The same procedure was then carried out on the young man. The calvinistic and God-fearing father, having checked the prospective lovers’ knots, would take leave of the young couple and return to the warmth of his wife and the fire.

  This ancient Scottish rigmarole was probably more than sufficient to guarantee the intactness of the crofter’s daughters’ hymen with a local lad, but in retrospect I think it was just as well that this turned out to be our last visit, for there was not one of us that would’ve been averse to a bit of ‘bundling’ with a Miss Mac and seamen, as you know, are fair devils when it comes to the untying of knots.

  *

  As I mentioned previously, the matelots not interested in the nature surrounding them amused themselves in the NAAFI bars and games rooms that had been built for that specific purpose. There was not a single habitable dwelling within sight, other than a small cottage that rested alongside the footpath leading from the wooden jetty to the canteen. This little cottage was completely surrounded by barbed wire, making access by any unlawful intruder impossible. lf you looked carefully you could see the eyes of the occupier peering expectantly through the lace curtains of her front room as the sailors made their way to and fro.

  Some months before, this widow-lady of advancing years had been roisterously taken by an inebriated sailor, and was evidently so enthused by the almost forgotten experience of intercourse that she became something of a man-eater. Like a black Tarantula she silently lay in wait for her prey, and, as they rolled drunkenly by, would nip smartly out and drag the poor unsuspecting victims into the net of her boudoir. The barbed wire entanglement was, therefore, erected not so much to keep the befuddled sailors out as to keep the voracious widow in.

  One night a drunken Stoker from the Rodney was arrested by the Naval patrol for committing bestiality with a sheep. At the hearing held on board the flagship, the prisoner’s defence was unique in Naval annals. Here it is: – not verbatim, of course, as sadly I was not present . . .

  ‘Stoker second class Robinson,’ said the Prosecuting Officer, ‘what have you got to say, in defence of the charge laid before this enquiry, that you did, on 21st March 1941 at 2230 hours, commit an act of bestiality with a sheep, the property of one Angus McTavish, farmer of this parish?’

  The Stoker thought for a moment, clearing the clouds from his mind and replied with what must be one of the classic rejoinders of all time.

  ‘Sorry, sir. I thought it was a Wren in a lamby-coat!!’

  There was a temporary silence in court followed quickly by the rumblings of barely controlled mirth.

  ‘You don’t usually find a female member of His Majesty’s Women’s Royal Naval Service running around a field on all fours, wearing a sheepskin-lined overcoat turned inside-out, do you?’

  ‘Well, sir,’ said the undaunted Stoker, ‘up here in Scapa, you never know.’

  The previously controlled laughter now broke through the retaining walls of the twenty attending Officers’ stomachs, the resulting reverberations of that explosion of unseemly mirth being heard in mess-decks throughout the fleet. We never heard what actually happened to that drunken, depraved, but none-the-less delightfully droll sailor, but the general consensus of opinion was, that in view of the great laugh he had given us, he should’ve got off with a caution.

  But the unusual nature of the charge started something of a feud between the lower deck crews of Rodney and Hood. It began when several hundred Hood seamen lined up on the fo’c’sle to give three rousing cheers to the flag ship, ‘offed-caps’, and instead of replying ‘Hooray’ to the Captain’s ‘Hip-Hip-Hip’, bleated ‘Ba aaa!!!’

  As we were all facing the same way, with Officers and non-commissioned Officers at the front, it was hard to pin down the perpetrators.

  There was only one recourse left to the CO and that was to stop all shore leave for several days. That really put the cat amongst the pigeons, and by the time our leave had been restored, we were champing at the bit to take on our rivals in Rodney.

  That night in the company of a phalanx of boozed-up Hood shipmates, I was weaving down the jetty prior to boarding our liberty boats, when we spied fifty or sixty liberty men off the Rodney, waiting to be picked up by their boats.

  ‘Let’s see if the sheep-loving bastards can swim,’ cried a primed torpedo-man. With unanimous agreement we linked arms and, advancing slowly, systematically swept the poor unfortunate men straight off the end of the jetty into the sea. Inevitably a few of us up front went in the ‘oggin’ with them, as the pushers at the back couldn’t differentiate in the dark between Rodney’s crew and ours and didn’t know when to s
top. The drop from the end of the jetty was some fifteen feet and the resulting shouting and general hubbub from the tumbling men was tremendous. Apart from that the water was freezing and we realised that if we didn’t get out quick, someone was going to drown. Suddenly the feud was forgotten, albeit temporarily, and everybody started helping everybody else to safety. Strange how immersion in cold water will kill off passion, in all its forms. The serio-comic end to the foray was that quite a few of the more drunken participants, being capless and therefore unidentifiable, ended up in the ‘Lions’ Den’ by finding themselves aboard the wrong ships.

  From that night on the crews of the Rodney and the Hood were understandably never again allowed ashore at the same time.

  *

  From what I have written in the last few pages it would seem as if wartime at sea was one endless sky-lark, but this was far from the truth. The combination of lack of privacy, living conditions and the weather with its freezing cold were enough to break the spirit of far stronger men than me. When high-up in the main-mast on ‘look-out’ duty, wrapped in two duffel coats, two pairs of trousers, two sweaters, two balaclavas, two pairs of socks, winky-warmer and one pair of seaboots, I was still frozen to the marrow. As the bow dropped, the resulting spray would fly up and instantly freeze, the ice particles hurtling over the ship and endangering any unprotected men on deck. Where I was, up in the spotting-top, I have seen icicles whip past my head that I swear could have impaled me and brought about my instant demise. What a way to die in wartime, to be stabbed to death by an icicle. They were lonely, lonely times up there, and terribly sad ones too, when one saw so many ships and men go down on those vitally important convoys to Russia. The submarine and air attacks were inevitable and punctual, for one knew almost to the hour when they would come. As soon as we reached a certain latitude off the northern tip of Norway we could expect attack, and got it. From stygian darkness the bright flashes of torpedoed and burning merchantmen would light up the night skies, and to the crash of gun-fire and the muffled thud of exploding torpedoes and depth charges I came to realise the true horror of war at sea. The Hood, weaving and dodging an evasive course to make her own destruction a more difficult task for the U-boat Commanders, was never a very happy ship, and no-one had much confidence that she would come out best in any action with a German boat of equivalent size. We were an old ship in comparison to the Bismarck and we carried nothing approaching the same amount of armour. I think we had only one armoured deck and once the heavy anti-magnetic mine gear had been installed, Mr Churchill ordered that in order to ensure her speed was restored to that of the fastest enemy battleship, all our unnecessary weight should be removed. This it seemed included the thick armour-plated hatch covers over the fifteen-inch gun magazine-hoists – hence the feeling amongst the ship’s company that if she ever came to grips with a German battleship, she wouldn’t remain long on the surface.