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Cooking For The Royal Berk’s Wasn’t
Always Fun!
by
Sgt. Bertram King 14254119
.....We
were put on a train, the journey lasted a day and a night, up to Liverpool
and we boarded a troopship called the Orontes, which was a 28,000 ton luxury
liner from the P&O line, 4,000 and odd troops on onboard. We got four meals
a day, and we did such training as possible, all the way to India. We went
right out to South America, in a convoy which dodged the U-Boats, then we came
in to Sierra Leone, a place called ‘White mans grave’, and we went
in there for a week to wait for another convoy, to take us down to Durban,
South Africa.
.....South Africa, on Easter Day I saw Table Mountain, we had a church service
on the boat and then went up there to Durban, and we were in Clairwood Camp,
which was an all canvas camp, Bell tents, and we were there for nearly twelve
weeks, awaiting a boat to go up into India.
.....Now the boat we went up there on was called
the Dunera, which subsequently became a school ship. I worked in the ships
bakery on the way, I’d probably been about twenty then, they got me shanghaied
into the bakery to make bread, and all the bread was absolutely riddled with
Weevils. It was a very posh boat, a 1938 troopship which was put on the stocks
by Hore-Belisha, the War Minister of that time, the bloke who invented the
Belisha crossings. There was a rhyme going about, about him....
Belisha, Belisha, Belisha, your beacons are
getting on fine.
But if your balls was as big as your beacon,
come up and see me some time.
.....Quite funny, but anyway, we got the boat
up on the Dunera and I landed, I was about twenty, when I landed.
Well I’ll tell you what, on those boats, the Durban, and the other one
we were on, the Orontes, all the toilets were situated so that there was a
continuous flow of water going down, to the edge where all the effluent was
dumped at sea, and what it consisted of, was a sheet of corrugated-iron inverted
up into a u-bend, and they ran along, from the toilets where you crapped, straight
out into the sea. There was plenty of water coming down there; anyway it weren’t
long before somebody there tumbled that they could have a bit of fun. So they
got some paper boats made, of course next to the privates toilets, was the
sergeants. The sergeants sat there, and the men got these paper boats, and
made sailing boats, and a box of matches, and of course they waited until they
could see a row of behinds, from the sergeants there, and they set these paper
boats alight and sailed them down the river. It was quite a bit of fun.
.....Of course they also discovered that the water for the sergeant’s
showers was fed through the private’s showers, so they turned all the
cold water off, so the sergeants got a scolding.
The canteen situation, there were no NAAFI’S, no canteens at all in India
when we was there, and there was a client their called Kadabux, he was a multi-millionaire,
an Indian, who ran all the canteens on behalf of the army.
.....The squaddies had to by their own toothpaste,
so we never got any toothpaste on many occasions, one time, my mother must
have sent me some out, so I got toothpaste sent to me, and I was the only
bloke in the battalion who had any. Also she sent me a nice big tub of
Germolene, which I found it was the only thing I could cure my jungle sores
with, so I was using that, doling it out to all-and-sundry, friends, you
know.
P 1 :: P
2 :: P 3 :: P
4 :: P 5 :: P
6 :: P 7
Sgt. Bertram King