Moon Boots and Dinner Suits

by Jon Pertwee

  By landing heavily on my head I had received a six inch cut on my scalp which bled profusely and quickly formed a pointed haemotoma. Unconscious and covered in dust and rubble I was quickly taken on a stretcher across to the Officers’ Mess, which, because of the considerable number of wounded, was being used as a temporary casualty clearing station. When I came to, I found I was lying on a marble slab in a larder. On the shelf above me was another, presumably wounded sailor, whose still arm hung down before my face. To get his attention and ask what the hell was going on, I gave his arm a firm tug, which, unfortunately, dislodged him from his narrow shelf and brought him crashing to the floor. One look at his poor pallid face told me that he was in no state to answer my question. In fact, he would never answer any question again.

  Frightened, I looked around in the cold gloom of that black slate mausoleum and saw to my horror that every one of the shelves’ occupants was already behind the veil in Abraham’s bosom. That was enough. Had I been entombed aforetime? I started yelling blue bloody murder.

  The door was flung open by an ashen-faced sick berth attendant.

  ‘Hey! All these men are dead!’ I cried in anguish.

  ‘Blimey mate, I thought you fuckin’ well was.’

  ‘Well I’m fucking well not, so get me out of here, before I am,’ I said, and promptly slipped off once again into a stupefied, sense-bereft state. With dozens of other unfortunates, I was eventually laid out on the floor of Haslar Naval Hospital in Gosport awaiting treatment. At one point, in a reverie, I saw a beautiful angel with a red cross on her breast fly down from the heavens to hover smilingly over me.

  ‘What is your name?’ she said looking down at the black-faced, bloody, pin-headed patient lying there on the stretcher beneath her. I could hardly hear a word she was saying as the blast had done my ear-drums no good at all –

  ‘Wha’?’ I said.

  ‘Your name! What – is – your – name?’ she repeated patiently.

  ‘Oh, er, Pertwee, Jon, PJX 178358.’

  With that the angel let off a cry like a factory whistle, and collapsed sobbing on to my chest. Hard to believe she was a girl-friend of mine, Aileen Anders, with whom I had just spent most of my last leave. I knew that she was training to be a nurse, but neither of us had had the slightest inkling that she was to be posted to Haslar. Unable to recognise me under all the blood and grime, she had had a nasty shock when she had heard my name. Quickly pulling herself together, she asked the MO in charge if she could be assigned to look after me as ‘he is my fiancé,’ she lied prettily.

  Permission was given and for the rest of my sojourn in hospital, I had the private attention of a very personal nurse.

  Still feeling a bit woozy, I returned to barracks to be put through the mangle of Chief Petty Officer Branch, now in charge of CW candidates’ basic training. This was the Chief all the cadets feared but like ‘Rebel Riley’ at Wellington House, he made me laugh inordinately and I never resented his ways or obscene outspokenness. It wasn’t long before he handed me my first good laugh.

  Lined up on the parade ground for inspection, CPO Branch, took a turn along our rear ranks – coming to a sudden halt behind me he said,

  ‘Ah, yes, it’s Pestwit isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, Chief – well near enough anyway.’

  ‘Come to stay for a bit, ’ave we?’

  ‘That’s right, Chief.’

  ‘Well it won’t be for very long if you don’t get your bleedin’ ’air cut. You look like a bloody chrysanthemum.’

  My father had a Staff Sergeant in charge of his cadet training in the First World War who must’ve been cast in the same mould as CPO Branch, for when marching his platoon up and down the parade ground had shouted, ‘Get those shoulders back, Peewee. It’s a case of me ’eads ’ere and me arse will be along in a minute.’

  As prognosticated by the Chief, I wasn’t long at the barracks before being drafted to an enormous tented camp not far from Fareham. This move was to get as many men as possible out of bombing danger, and was very much appreciated, as we were by now all a bit bomb-happy. Purloining a service bicycle, I successfully worked the ‘messenger’ trick throughout the month I was stationed there. This meant taking a large brown envelope with as many franked stamps on it as possible, all around the camp. When stopped and asked your destination, you replied urgently, ‘I’m taking this important missive from the Captain to the First Lieutenant’, at which point you trod smartly on the pedals and were away, before your interrogator could look too closely at your envelope. This ploy also enabled me, once I had the respect of the guards, to leave camp and head off to visit friends and pubs in the firm belief that I was delivering and collecting secret documents for the CO.

  After that blissful rest, all new CW candidates were posted to HMS King Alfred ensconced in the old Roman Catholic public school of Lancing, for the first serious part of their training. My OLQs (Officer Like Qualities) were all right, because that involved the physical more than the mental side, i.e. drilling, signalling, rope work, etc. It was in navigation that I fell down badly.

  On the first day, the Lieutenant Commander Instructor said, ‘Right, now you all understand the theorem of Pythagoras, don’t you?’

  My hand hesitatingly went up.

  ‘I’m afraid not, sir.’ Maths was my worst subject. Without fingers and toes I was finished. A day rarely goes by without my offering up a prayer of thanks to Mr Sinclair and his pocket calculator.

  ‘Well, I’m sorry, but I cannot hold back the rest of the class by teaching you the fundamentals of geometry and trigonometry.’

  ‘But, I thought that was the purpose of my presence here, sir,’ I said politely, ‘to learn such things.’

  ‘Well you thought wrong,’ replied the now irritated instructor. ‘So in future, sit at the back of the room, pay attention and try to make as much sense of it as you possibly can.’

  I did as I was bid, but as I could not make any sense of it, I drew pretty pictures of galleons on my exam papers instead, for which I obtained three marks out of 450 for neatness.

  From that moment on I knew I was doomed. If I couldn’t pass my navigation exam, I would never become an Executive Officer and would be relegated to the lower deck once again. This was a thought that filled me with fearful trepidation throughout the rest of my course.

  Suddenly, one day in the middle of a class on pilotage, I developed a headache that literally blinded me, and necessitated my undergoing rigorous tests for eye damage. Evidently, my bang on the head had slightly displaced the retina in my right eye, causing me less than perfect vision – reason enough for not permitting me to continue my training as an Executive Officer. I was therefore brought before a selection committee to decide whether I should be returned to the lower deck or sent forward as a green-striper, or Officer of the Special Branch.

  ‘What have you learned since you joined the Navy?’ asked Captain Pelley – the panjandrum of HMS King Alfred.

  ‘Apart from anything else, sir,’ I replied jocularly, ‘an entirely new vocabulary.’ A remark that went down like a cup of cold mud with the good Captain. Like my performance at one of our ship’s concerts in June 1941, when I very nearly blew my commission by: a) telling what was considered by the CO, Captain Pelly, to be a very tasteless joke; and b) singing a vulgar song, that he thought suggestive in the extreme. It was written for me by Guy Morgan, a well known humorous writer who had been responsible for the wonderfully funny column ‘Beachcomber’, in the Daily Express. The song went down splendidly with the cognoscenti, and it was this point, I think, that saved me from expulsion, yet again. Sung by a bibulous, red-nosed seaman (me) the first two verses went something like:-

  They call me Seaman Harry

  I don’t know why they do,

  For I’m full of hope

  When I pull my rope

  And the wind comes whistling through.

  They cannot do without me

  For the fact remains you see,

 
If it was not for the seaman

  Where would the nation be?

  When Officers cry, ‘Hi men!’

  The whole crew quickly rise,

  For we’re keen to show

  We are not slow

  In answering such cries.

  No they can’t get on without us

  It’s plain as plain can be,

  That without some jolly Seaman

  Where would the nation be?

  Pretty innocuous you would think, but take the two ‘A’s’ out of Seaman and substitute an ‘E’ and you will see what the sensitive Captain was getting his knickers in a twist over.

  However, despite this faux pas, my plea that it would be a shame to waste all the money that the Government had already spent on my training, and that I must be good for something, did not go unheeded, and I passed and became Sub-Lieutenant J. D. R. Pertwee, RNVR, Special Branch.

  The proud day had arrived when I could go across the road to ‘Gieves’, the Naval tailor, and be fitted for my RNVR. Officer’s uniforms. The tailor was a delightful Jewish gentleman whose command of the English tongue left a lot to be desired. There were two uniforms to be made, one in serge for everyday use and one in moleskin for ‘best’.

  Trying his utmost to please, Mr Jikster the tailor asked, ‘For ziss soot, you should vant more pudding in the shoulders?’

  From then on, whenever I wore that uniform, I had a vivid mental picture of my shoulders beginning to sag as the suet spotted-dog slowly subsided down my sleeves.

  A few days later my commission was personally presented to me by Lord Louis Mountbatten, closely accompanied by Noel Coward, a good friend of his and his wife Edwina’s, and who seemed to be always popping into my life at just the right time to give me his patronage and moral support.

  ‘Congratulations dear boy,’ said Noel, ‘so you are going to sea to serve your King?’

  ‘That’s right, sir,’ I replied, head up and lying through my teeth.

  ‘Patriotic fool,’ he said, sotto vote, ‘best of luck and give my regards to your dear father, bless him.’

  This dialogue had given a nice cosy feel to a proceeding that might otherwise have been somewhat overwhelming.

  It was shortly after this, that I made a very grave error of judgement.

  One fine morning a Senior Officer from Admiralty arrived, and stood importantly before us. ‘Can any of you young Officers speak French?’ he asked. Having been properly taught never to volunteer for anything, I remained silent. The Senior Officer now stood in front of me, having been pointed in that direction by my Divisional Officer. ‘Is your name Pertwee?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘But you speak French. It says so in your papers.’

  Having horrid visions of being dropped behind enemy lines as a spy, I replied, ‘Very little, sir, and that’s pretty rusty, it wouldn’t be good enough for what you had in mind, I’m sure, sir.’

  ‘Pity,’ said the SO moving down the line to another new Sub-Lieutenant. ‘What about you then? Rankin isn’t it? You’re supposed to speak French aren’t you?’

  He, like me, pretended that his knowledge of the language was limited to just a few words. But the SO said, ‘Never mind that’ll have to do, come with me.’

  ‘Poor fool,’ I thought to myself; ‘I wonder what dangerous mission he’ll be sent on?’

  You can imagine my feelings, therefore, when I found out that he had been made Resident Naval Officer in Tahiti, where he spent the rest of the war, lying in a hammock, sipping cold drinks from fresh green coconuts shells, and being fanned, rocked and loved by bevies of elderly Tahitian ladies of around seventeen.

  Ten years later, when I was living in Tahiti, I asked the British Consul Freddie Devenish, if he had ever heard of Tony Rankin – ‘What, old “Randy” Rankin, I’ll say! Mr Pertwee’s asking if we have ever heard of “wham-bam” Rankin’, he said turning to his own seraglio of dusky acolytes.

  The hearty laughter and the twinkling in the eyes that followed his enquiry caused me intense and instantaneous jealousy, and I shall hate Tony Rankin until the day I die.

  *

  After a long leave, during which time I had continuously worn my uniform to show myself off, I returned to barracks to await my first draught. This time, though, I slept in a fine cabin on the third floor of the Officers’ Mess, not on a slate slab in the basement. Although I did go down there with some disbelieving friends, to see it once again for nostalgia’s sake.

  It wasn’t long before I was posted to HMS Valkyrie in the Isle of Man as a Divisional Officer. The ship or stone frigate consisted of a collection of boarding houses and small hotels stretched along the front at Douglas, the largest, and centre one being the Officers’ Mess, and the rest to right and left accommodating the Staff Chiefs, POs and men that were to undergo training as Radar Operators and technicians. There were four of these sections with an Officer in charge of each, and I was allocated the foretop division.

  My Captain, a hero from Dunkirk, was a fey, elegant man called Mike Ellwood, who always looked as if his uniforms had been made for him by Hawes and Curtis, and his caps by Herbert Johnson. Thus impeccably dressed, with cap worn at a jaunty angle, he was a cross between Lord Beatty of Jutland and a nautical Jack Buchanan. His one great passion was German Lieder and, armed with song-book, he would frequently ask permission to enter our Mess, for the sole purpose of cajoling Sub-Lieutenant Ray Roberts (of whom more later) into accompanying him in a song – or twenty. Ever anxious to keep on the right side of the ‘Skipper’ we sat with faces fixed in false expressions of rapture, when in truth there wasn’t one among us who didn’t feel, as each reedy top ‘C’ was striven for, that a red hot centipede was crawling through his brain. One by one the Mess would empty, with every exit being accompanied by some banality or other such as ‘Ah well, can’t stop I’m afraid sir, got to get off and do me rounds, don’t you know’, or ‘Damn, that’s my favourite, but got to go, sir, the “Number One” wants to see me.’ The fact that Number One was sitting uncomfortably in the corner of the room did little to aid the veracity of his excuse, but it seemed to be of no consequence, as the Skipper with eyes closed in rhapsody, was plainly transported to the very boards of La Scala, Milan itself

  The Commander of HMS Valkyrie was the ex-heavyweight boxing champion of the Navy, ‘Ham’ Darwin, a gruff man who walked with a limp and a stick, had tufts of hair growing from his cheeks and nostrils and went blind and deaf whenever it suited him. When informed by direct signal from Admiralty that he should leave the protective barbed wire fencing around the perimeter of the establishment where it was, he instantly had the lot torn down, sank it out at sea, and professed when confronted by the Captain that he hadn’t had his monocle with him at the time and had completely misread the instructions. To me he had confided, ‘What do those idiots up there expect me to do? Keep my ship looking like an infernal internment camp?’

  ‘Ham’ had an absolute thing about the internment camps on the island and the inefficient way in which he thought they were run. At a cocktail party one day, attended by all the local big-wigs and heads of the services, he proclaimed in a loud voice, when everyone was discussing the method of the most recent escape of a large group of Italians, ‘Oh I should think they used the same tunnel as they used in 1915, only this time I expect they’ve got a turnstile at either end!’

  Further up the front from us there were the many other boarding houses where hundreds of Italians, Austrians and Germans were interned and Commander Darwin had no intention of letting his ship look like those establishments with their towering barbed wire fences. So he drew immense stocks of canvas from stores and ran it round the perimeter painted in grey ‘Pusser’s Crabfat’, in an attempt to make us look as much like a Naval vessel as possible. He even had constructed a canvas and iron railed area in front of the Officers’ Mess, which was to be referred to in the future as the ‘quarterdeck’, and to be saluted every time anybody stepped into the sacrosanct enclosure. To remind
all and sundry that this was indeed a ship of His Majesty’s Navy, Ham had two white lifebelts hung to port and starboard of the ‘quarterdeck’s’ entrance gap with HMS Valkyrie painted in bold lettering around them.

  One day an elderly Paymaster who suffered badly from the staggers, tripped and prostrated himself on the road, right in front of the Commander’s office. ‘Ham’, witnessing the episode, Hung up his window, or as he would have had it, ‘flung open his porthole’, and yelled to the Quartermaster standing impassively on the front steps, ‘Don’t just stand there you fool, throw the Pusser a lifebelt!’ On another occasion, standing at his window imagining he was once again back at sea on the bridge of his own ship, a rude boy on a bicycle rode up to deliver the Sunday meat, and temporarily leant his bike up against the quarterdeck’s canvas jigger. Up went the window again and the stentorian voice of the Commander roared, ‘That’s no way to tie your dinghy alongside, boy. Take a line and tie up to that bollard over there’, pointing a wagging finger at a newly grey painted lamp post.

  The big laugh of the day was always the Commander’s report, where culprits of various crimes were brought before Ham for umpirage. You could always be sure of a full house for these sessions as the office would be packed with Ham’s fans. Normally loud, he was at his most dangerous when the volume of his voice lowered several decibels.