One man’s journey, through life.

 One man’s journey, through life.

 

From February 1988 to August 1999 I worked as a commodities logistics operative, or to use English I was a lorry driver. The firm I worked for was a large paper company, with paper mills all over the country, with thirteen depots and over four hundred trucks, the drivers had many nights out away from home, they would meet one another in transport cafés all over the country. One favourite stop was the truck stop at Lymm in Cheshire, we would have a meal then sit for hours talking telling jokes and arguing about politics, which I suppose is the same thing really. It was here one cold blustery rainy night this book was given berth, some might say it should have been stillborn but here it is for all its worth.

 

The truck stop was very large with parking for hundreds of trucks, and there were a hundred tables in the dining room, six drivers from different depots of our firm including myself sat around a table, just ideally talking and swapping jokes when one of them said to me.

 

“Hay Harry you were out in Australia what was it like, to drive those road trains I bet it was a lonely job.”

 

“Not in the least” I answered, “on a busy day you could see up to four trucks a day in the bush.”

 

“Come on then tell us all about it,” he asked, this was defiantly my favourite subject and I needed no ones encouragement to talk for hours about it as I had regretted our move back to England, a few months after we had returned in 1976, I had tried several times without success, to go back permanently. We have been back a number of times, for holidays to visit old friends down under, I love the place, and could waffle on forever about the outback and the fish I had caught. After an hour or so of me waffling on telling story after story, Steve a driver from my own depot, ( ‘he had also been to Australia’) said.

 

“Harry you should write a book about your life.”

 

“Who would want to read about me?” I asked,

 

“look around you,” he said,  I did; of all the tables in the place, the only ones occupied were the ones around our table, and they were all listening to my stories, of my adventures in Australia.   

 

So that night as I lay in my bunk, I thought it all through and found that I had indeed done things that were not ‘run of the mill’ for most people, perhaps others may find my tales interesting enough, to read about in a book, especially the adventures I had had with my friend Don Ellis in Australia. Now I had a big ‘but’ come up in my thoughts I’m dyslexic, can’t spell can hardly read, how the hell am I going to write a book, and let us not forget my grammar?

 

Revelation.

 

My answer came when I got interested in computers, and that fantastic tool the word processor, plus a wonderful piece of software called voice recognition, now I could talk to my computer and it would spell the words and type them, then there was a tool I found later called Grammarly that improved my work tenfold. Now with these tools at my command, I have enjoyed reliving my life by writing it down, I hope you enjoy reading about it.

 

 

Introduction

 

In 1947 the Australian and British Government's implemented the free and assisted passage scheme for British migrants to Australia, fifty ex-servicemen arrived in Australia in January 1947 as a trial run before the scheme got underway. They were all building workers, destined to build houses in Canberra, the first party of emigrants selected following the formal introduction of the scheme arrived in Australia in June 1947. 

 

Between June 1947 and June 1950, 78,800 British migrants had travelled under the scheme. By June 1962 that number had reached 427,938 but during the next eight years, no fewer than 506,639 arrived in Australia. Many arrived with jobs secured; others like us went with just dreams of a better life and faith in themselves to achieve that goal, some of these migrants returned to England, for one reason or another. This is the story of just one of them.

 

My name is Henry Joseph Macey and this is my story, it was hard to know where to begin, so I have decided to give a very short history of my life, to begin with.

 

I was born on the 25th of March 1939 in Lambeth, London, 0at the age of two, I, together with my family, was evacuated to Wellington in Somerset to avoid the blitz, this was where I spent my childhood and at the age of seventeen, I joined the Navy. At the age of twenty one I was married and had left the Navy, then in February 1968 together with my wife Jane and our three sons, we immigrated to Australia. May 1976 saw us returning to England, and I have regretted that move ever since.

 

Chap 1 My early life.

When the family fled the London blitz to be evacuated to Wellington Somerset, my father stayed behind in London, his job as a welder kept him there, ‘something to do with the war effort,’ but he did miss the family dearly and tried in vain to join us.  Later he heard of a job for welders in a factory in Wellington, making military tanks for the Army,  thinking it was the same ‘Wellington’ he happily applied for the job and was accepted. 

 

Looking forward to seeing us all again he boarded the train that had been laid on, but on his arriving at the factory, he found he was in Wellington SHROPSHIRE! and he now was further away from us, then he had been in London, he would come down to see us all at our new home in Wellington Somerset, for long weekends once a month.  After the war, my father finally joined us in ‘Wellington’, SOMERSET.

 

I was the last-born, having three elder sisters, the youngest being five years my senior.  You have all heard the ‘poor’ jokes; I don't think it was quite that bad, but I have been told, in my first few years, my sisters had a decent sized doll to play with (namely me).  Being the only boy, I did not have to suffer the indignity of wearing hand-me-downs, although not new, they were at least boy's clothes bought from second-hand shops or from the Salvation Army. 

 

At Xmas, our presents if we had any were wrapped in newspaper and tied with string, and most of our toys had been handmade by dad or a rag doll made by one sister for another.  One memory I have of that distant past was a fine toy my father made for me, from four pram wheels, a plank of wood, two boxes and several different sized logs.  I was the proud owner of a train engine I could sit in, the only one of its kind in town; and I was surrounded by boys who wanted to be my friend and play on it with me, as we would trundle along the pavement, imitating a train whistle and forcing people to curs us and leap from our path.        

 

We lived in a row of old mill cottages called Burgage that had an ally leading to them from the centre of town, the cottages were very small; upstairs there were two bedrooms and a landing, I slept on a folding bed or cot on that landing; while my two eldest sisters shared one of the bedrooms.  My youngest sister slept with mum, except when dad was home, downstairs contained a small living room and a scullery, cooking was done in an oven next to the open fire which had a kettle hung on a hook over it. 

 

This fire was also the only heating source for the house, it was fired by sticks and logs cut from branches I would carry from the nearby woods on a pram, an added fuel source was peace of coke my father would bring home in his lunch bag from his days work at the gas works.  The cold stone floor was covered with homemade rugs, which we made out of old clothing and hessian sacks, these rag rugs are now quite fashionable as a hobby craft. 

 

To make them we would sit in front of the fire, cutting cloth into strips and with a special sort of hook, we would pull the cloth through the weave of the Hessian bag, doubling it over we would pass the two ends through the loop; pulling it tight, it would make the pile.

 

Our job as children was to protect these rugs from the fire, sitting in front of it to keep warm, we would have to extinguish the sparks that the logs would spit onto them before too much damage was done to the pile, then we would repair any damaged pile by replacing it. Needless to say, the oldest and shabbiest piece would be placed in front of the fire, to be changed with a better one, if any company was expected.  In the scullery, there was a large wood-fired copper boiler and a large stone sink, on washdays, the women would do the washing in their own sculleries and then would meet, in the garden to help one another put the clothes through a large wooden wringer.

 

There was only one source of water for all the families, one tap set in the garden in front of the toilets, all water would be drawn for the families’ needs, in buckets to be poured into the copper for heating to have baths and the washing of clothing, or cold water to the sink to rinse the soap from the clothing, I remember standing in that stone sink myself to be bathed, the rest of the family would use a tin bath in front of the fire.  All four cottages shared the two outside toilets, which were at the end of the garden, with eight adults and fifteen children, there were sometimes agonising waits outside the loos.

 

In the early day of 43, there were a great number of Americans soldiers and airmen stationed in camps around Wellington, they would drive through the town, and we would wave and shout at them and they would throw chocolate bars to us.  Some of the bars would turn out to be chocolate laxative; we would feast on them and have the runs for days.  There were good times to be had as well; the Xmas party’s at the camps where all the kids got presents, and for the older girls, there were dances to go to, chaperoned of course.

 

When these servicemen were confined to their barracks, ‘we realise now it must have been the days before D-day,’ a large number of young people mostly girls went out to the camps, to speak with them through the wire fencing.  Some would run errands for them mostly things they needed from the shops, or to take messages to someone they wanted to see, then suddenly they vanished, we had been so used to seeing them around that the town looked so empty without their presence.  My eldest sister has told me ‘when I pressed her for information of those days’ that there were many weeping young ladies following their disappearance.

 

After the war ended there was great rejoicing in our house, for we were told our father would soon be returning home for good, then there came the question will we stay in Somerset or move back to smoky old London, Somerset won hands down, my mother and sisters liked the clean country air, and of course the boys my sisters had met. My father did like his gardening, as he had never really had a garden before, he turned the whole garden into a food factory, but his greatest joy was his chickens, I remember the postman bringing boxes of day-old chicks; that my father had bought from a catalogue.

 

He reared them to provide eggs, some to be eaten some to be hatched, these, in turn, would be reared to provide food for the table.  His layers were prized, and safe from the table, he had his favourites; one, in particular, was a large rode island red cockerel, a huge beast that was almost as big as me, well, I was only about five then; it would chase me whenever I stepped out of the door, I had to wait until it looked away then run like the wind to get to the gate.

One day it was found running around with its neck broken, the head hanging to one side,  I got the blame, which was quite unfair, just because I had a stick in my hand at the time, didn’t mean I did it, did it? We couldn’t afford to waste good food so mum cooked it for Sunday dinner, I tucked into it with relish, knowing from now on I could go safely out into the garden, with the rode island red sitting nicely in my belly.

 

School! I did not like it from the first day, my mother dragged me there kicking and screaming, where she left me to wonder, was she ever coming back for me?  The task of making sure I got to school fell to my second elder sister Ellen, she objected to this job, for it meant she had to go home straight from school, and not socialise with her school friends 'meaning boys', so for revenge, she would hold me by the collar, and kicked me all the way there and back.

 

I was no good at school sports, so I always played the left-back position, left-back in the sports store, cleaning the equipment for the others to use.  I was no good at classroom work ether, always at the back of the class out of the way, so the bright sparks and teacher’s pets could impress the teacher from the front.  I found out later I was dyslectic, and even today I write bear when I mean bare, thanks to the man who invented word processors and electronic spell checkers you are reading this today, I excelled in geography and history and had a knack for remembering dates and places of battles and so forth.

 

There seemed to be more snow in those days, or did it look deeper because I was smaller.  Behind the milk factory, there was a hill, we used as a ski run, with sheets of corrugated iron as sledges, we would hurtle down the slope with no fear at all, to crash into the wall at the bottom.  In the hills around Wellington, there were fruit farms owned by large landowners, in the summer my mother with a large number of woman from the surrounding area would pick the fruit from low bushes, the mothers would take their children along with them, the young ones tied to their backs so they could not get lost.

 

It was back-breaking work for the woman, for the little they were paid, I was there to help mum, but in truth, I would eat more than I put in the basket.  On summer holiday trips to London, we would end up in the hop fields of Kent, dad used to joke you pick the hops, I’ll drink the beer.  It was on one of these trips, my father taught me the meaning of patience, as I loved riding on the old trams, my favourite being the Rotherhithe tunnel.  From the Elephant and Castle, we would take a horse-drawn tram to the terminus just south of the river, from here we would wait to catch an electric tram, for the run through the tunnel.

 

This day we seemed to be waiting forever, my father just sat and talked to someone he must have known, as I started to get impatient as several trams came and went; stamping my feet I insisted we catch the very next one along.  He looked at me and said “do you really want to go on the very next tram,” I answered him in a demanding voice that I did, so when the next tram left we were on it, going back to the Elephant and Castle.

 

When I was eleven, I joined the Army Cadet Force of the Somerset Light Infantry which I stayed in for the next five years, we did the normal things like marching, rifle drill, and exercises on the moors around Somerset and of course, the two-week camp.

One camp in particular sticks in my memory, I was about thirteen at the time and we were camped at Tregantle Fort, an old Army Fortress in Cornwall, it is just south of Plymouth across the river Tamar, a few miles from the river crossing at Torpoint.

 

The reason I remember it so well was that it was the first time I saw death, and it was not a pretty sight, we were going on an exercise in the moorland adjacent to the Fort and were taken to the starting point in Army trucks.  The track was narrow and built up about three or four feet above the moor, as the truck in front of us was going around a bend, the bank gave way and the truck toppled and rolled down the bank.  It had a canvas roof that offered no protection for those inside, it came to rest upside down, the canopy crushed against the body of the truck, trapping all those inside.

 

The truck I was in stopped and we all jumped out to help, I am ashamed to say that I froze and was violently sick, and had to be carried away by the medics myself, I cannot be sure, but I think seven cadets lost their lives that day.  I rose to the dizzy heights of Colour Sergeant and held the flag at ceremonies, but weapon training was my forte, the Bren gun being my favourite, I knew its history and could strip and rebuild it blindfold.

 

Just before I left school, I got a job as a paperboy, so I had to have a bicycle, here my father took this opportunity to teach me the finer points of finance if you want something you pay for it.  The other paperboys and I formed a cycling club called The Wellington Wobbly Wheelers, and went for rides in the country and around to the nearby towns, my bike was an upright Raleigh, with a lock in the forks to lock the front wheel at an angle so it could not be stolen. On an excursion, to the seaside town of Minehead, we parked the bikes, and played in the sand and went for a swim.

 

On returning to my bike, I was devastated to find I had lost the key, as I didn’t want to damage my bike; and because I had a spare key at home I had to walk my bike home. The other boy rode on without me, with one saying he would go to my house and get the key then ride back to me. I started heading home which was easier said than done, as I had to carry the front wheel because I could not steer it, on the outskirts of Minehead a police car pulled up beside me, and the policeman asked if I had stolen the bike. I explained my predicament, quit tearfully.

 

I must have touched a soft spot in his heart, or perhaps he just wanted to check out my story, because he loaded my bike in the back of his car, with the front wheel sticking out and drove me home, he was on his way back to Taunton and would make the short denture to Wellington.  We passed my friends not long after, and I was home a long time before them.

 

One day, a few of us were sitting on our bikes in town when a fire engine flashed by, closely followed by an ambulance, we raced after it but when we got to the fire, it turned out to be in the coke works where my father was employed, I pulled up just as they were carrying my father out on a stretcher.  His clothes were still smoking and his skin was blackened and hanging from his body, he spent so long in the hospital that we didn't think he would make it, but one thing I can say about my father is he was definitely a fighter, he fought the battle for life and he won hands down, he pulled through, though badly scarred and lived until he was in his nineties.

 

He never went back to work at the gas works but got a job it the milk factory making butter and cheese, I can remember making butter at home myself; out of the buttermilk, he brought home in the old stainless steel flask he carried his tea in. I can remember staring for hours, and add salt to taste and poring the way away, and we had a verity of cheese’s maturing in one of the cupboards, that made the kitchen smell of mould. I have to add here, that this was not contraband, all the workers at the milk factory were allowed a certain quantity of milk, or the like as part of their wages.

 

My first brush with the law was when I was still at school, my friends and I decided it would be fun to go scrumping, as there were many orchards around Wellington, most of which grow cider apples. Most of the apples would go to the cider factory in Taunton, but a lot was made into farmhouse cider, the locals called it stumpy or tanglefoot, I have never drunk it but you can tell the ones who do by the big purple noses they develop.

 

As we left an orchard with our shirts bulging, we ran straight into the local Police sergeant on his bike, he marched us to the farmer's door where we had to empty our undeserved profits onto a table.  The farmer sorted the apples into different piles and then told us to eat one pile, after two apples I was full, but the sergeant made me force another one down.

 

When we had finished eating, the sergeant gave each of us a clip round the ear and a boot up the pants to send us on our way.  Halfway home, we were all doubled up in pain, by the time I got home, the pain was unbearable.  My father asked why, and when I told him I got another harder clip round the ear, not for scrumping but for getting caught, my mother gave me a dose of the dreaded Syrup of Figs and I was sent to bed. For days afterwards I had a stomach ache and spent most of my time in the toilet, even today I still cannot eat an apple, without remembering that time and the discomfort I had.

 

When I left school at fifteen, I went to work at Fox’s woollen mill in Wellington as a lodge boy, there were four of us running messages all around the mill, when we had nothing to do, we either had to clean the numerous brass nameplates, or the mill's antique fire fighting pump, it was a fine example of the early firefighting equipment, with four solid coach wheels. The front axle was steered with a drawbar with two crossbars; four men would pull the pump to where it was needed, then they would climb onto the pump, to operate the pivoted handles to pump the water.

 

When we first started, the lodge-keeper told us of our duties, he also gave us several warnings, one of which was to be very careful when we went to deliver messages to a certain part of the mill, he said that he once had a boy start to work with him, whom he sent to the mending shop with a message, the boy was never seen by him again.

 

The mending shop was an all women’s working area, all the lodge boys would wait outside the shop, and give the message they were carrying to the first person who entered. My first trip there resulted in me being forcefully removed from the shop, I had waited outside the shop far too long and built up my courage to enter, opening the door I peeked inside and saw I had a clear run to the office.

 

So off I went as fast as my legs would carry me, then felt very proud of myself as I handed over the message inside of the office, my joy was short-lived because as I left the office, several hands grabbed me, and I was jammed upside down in a round bobbin basket and left outside; ‘trouserless.'

 

After a short time as lodge boy, I was given a job working with a chap called Alfred George, his job was the testing of new types of ropes, and equipment for the mill, these ropes went on the mules, ‘mules were the machines that span the wool into yarn’ the new ropes had to be tested for there durability, and the amount of stretch in them, to see if they were suitable for the task they had to do.

 

Alf's was a character of the first degree, and with a wicked sense of humour had me in stenches most of the time. He had been a prisoner of the Japanese for a number of years and had not a hair on his body, his stories of hardship and survival in the jungle, plus his time as captive made me glad I was just a whippersnapper.  He never did tell me what the Japanese did to him, to make him lose his hair permanently, perhaps it was too painful for him to talk about, or too horrible for my young ears to hear.  He was also the physiotherapist for the Wellington rugby club and taught me much on the subjected, I went to many games with him, as his bucket and sponge handler.

 

In these days of the early fifties, hundreds of people worked for Fox Brothers mostly married woman and young girls, there were a lot of men and boys, but we were definitely outnumbered, and intimidated by the fairer sex.  Most of the workers came from outlying villages, bussed into the factory, the same buses brought people into Wellington on Wednesday’s and Saturday night’s, for film shows at the two cinemas in town, as in those days, hardly anybody had a car, so the buss’s brought girlfriends in as well.

 

With hundreds of workers the mill had its own dining room, and a massive kitchen, the dining room also doubled as a theatre and dancehall, with Christmas parties and wedding receptions being held there too.  The raised stage was used not only for the mill band to play at dances, or the mill players to put on amateur theatricals.  Fox brothers put on live shows with professionals for their workers, Arthur Askey sang his bee song where he was one among many, then once a mouth the dance held there was the most attended, and where I met my first girlfriend but enough said about that.

 

When I was sixteen I bought my first motorbike, a B, S, A, two fifty side valve, it was an ex-army dispatch riders bike and was still painted khaki.  With spring guarder front fork and a rigid rear end, a single seat with pannier bags and leg guards, it had cost me forty-five pounds and was a real bone shaker, but I loved it and lovingly cared for it until it died a death that no amount of work could revive it.  Now I could terrorize the outlying villages, I couldn’t before on my pushbike, on the A38 between Wellington and Willand, there was a transport café called maiden downstage, the young lady I had befriended had a part-time job there on the weekends, she lived at Berlescombe some two miles from the café, and I used to ride out there to see her on Saturdays.

 

It was on one of these trips I learnt a valuable lesson about riding a motorbike, you can’t take a ninety-degree turn at full tilt, the café was only open until noon, and I was running late, when I got there she had already left on her bicycle, I had missed her by a few minutes, so racing back along the road to catch her up, I took the turn for Berliscombe too fast.  I left the road and went onto the grass, then my bike punched its way into a hedge, I came to a halt upright my face inches from the hedge, but I could not get off my bike, as the bike entered the hedge, my leg guards had folded back trapping my legs against the bike, it took me some time to free myself, then I went home to sort out the minor damage to the bike.

 

I suppose you might find this a bit sorrowful, but this incident is the only memorable thing I can remember about our brief encounter, I suppose you should remember your first girlfriend name, I can not, her name completely eludes me, so if you ever read this; my humble apologies, that is if you remember me at all.

 

I joined the Navy in nineteen fifty-six, at the age of seventeen and a half, I was sent to H.M.S. Raleigh for my training, as a mechanical engineer but we were still called stokers then, we were given the first day to make up our minds whether to stay ‘in’ or go home to mummy. After an uncomfortable night in a barrack room with thirty beds, holding thirty young strangers, some of them decided in the night, this was not the place for them to be, so they were silently whisked away in the morning, never to be seen by the rest of us again.

 

I stayed in and accepted the queens shilling, and had my identity changed, I was now Macey, H, J, RN, DK964288 mechanical engineer ‘in brackets’ (trainee) and went on to do my basic training.  I soon got into trouble with my instructors, being in the Somerset Light Infantry Army Cadet Force for so long, I did all the marching at light infantry pace, as we came to a halt, I naturally stood at ease, as was the way in the light infantry.

 

I soon learnt, from my instructor’s gentile and helpfully persuading language to get it right, the Navy way, helping my other classmates with their rifle drill and weapon maintenance; pleased some of the instructors but not all.  One day, we were in the classroom being instructed on the Bren gun, I was telling one of my classmates all about it when I heard my name called.  The instructor told me to come to the front of the class and he said, “Seeing that you have been listening to me so intently, you can tell everybody what I have just tort you about the gun and show them how it works.”

 

I had done this lecture before and got the glaring eye's treatment from him, as I told the history of the gun, where it was made and even the man who had designed it as I stripped it and placed the parts on the table.  Then picking up each piece I explained how the gases from the gunpowder worked on each part to return the firing pin, also when firing the weapon you had to physically, hold it into your shoulder, as the recoil mechanism worked so well, if you didn’t hold it tight to you it danced away from you.  When I had finished and reassembled the Bren, the instructor told me to report to the Instructor’s office and wait, I was put on the instructors report list and was brought up before the camp commander and all the instructors. 

 

They discussed my record, as though I wasn’t there, which made me feel very small, fortunately, the outcome was that I moved up a class and jumped basic training completely, later, another instructor told me that the weapon instructor was upset because I knew more about the gun than he did.

 

Although it was many years ago I can still remember, being given several pieces of metal, some were cut into smaller pieces and then filed into different shapes of different dimensions, some had to have holes in the middle; others had parallel square grooves and V-shaped grooves. The dimensions had to be lifted off a blueprint, each of us was given, the rest of the metal, we made into our tools, open-ended spanners, hammers, pliers, adjustable wrench, callipers, and chisels which we had to harden, then we were marked, on the accuracy of our work, I still have some of the tools to this day.

 

The next stage of training was learning about Admiralty three-drum boilers, which used distilled water made from seawater for the superheated steam they produced that ran the steam turbines, to drive gearboxes that turned the shafts that turned props that drove the ship through the water. As the steam expanded it lost power and was piped to lesser equipment such as reciprocating pumps, turbines that drove electric generators, then onto the galley to cook food, and the laundry for the washing of clothing. It would end up in the condensing plant and made into freshwater to be used onboard ship.

 

When I finished my engineering training, I was over a month ahead of my intake,  I had done well on the practical side of my engineering course, but my academic skills had meant I got a lower grade than I would have, they (the powers to be) decided to send me to the officer training college at Dartmouth, one of the stokers that maintained the boilers there was going on leave; I would take his place for his two-week leave. When I returned to Raleigh I was made Ships Company, and standing guard at the gate at night was terrifying, the harassment I got as the youngest there was unbelievable, and that was just from the WREN's.

 

1. M. S. Raleigh was split into two establishments, one side for the training of mechanical engineers, ME for short, although we were still called stokers, the other half was a barracks for wrens, mostly nurses from the naval hospital almost opposite Raleigh. There was a high fence separating the two half’s of the camp, with a gate in it guarded on one side by a sailor the other by a wren, with a ditch on our side of the fence, there was a bridge over it to allow access to the gate, no male sailor was allowed on the bridge if one had escorted his date home, he had to say goodbye at the foot of the bridge, that’s why it was called the bridge of shies.

 

The wrens had to enter the camp through the main gate and were only allowed to walk down the path leading to their gate in the fence if a gang of them arrived together, they were allowed to carry on by themselves, if a solitary wren turned up she had to be escorted to her gate, by one of the guards manning the main gate. I escorted a lovely nurse one sunny afternoon; she had folded her navy blue cape over her shoulders, the scarlet lining had rows of ships cap tallies sown onto it; the meaning of the answer she gave me eluded me for some time. When I commentated on the number of tallies, then asked why there were many with the same ships name, she had looked at me with soft blue eyes, and a dazzling smile then said.

 

“They don’t signify the number of ships; I have been in,” I stood there in mystified silences until she crossed the bridge, my duty was finished and she would go on alone, as she stepped off the bridge she turned and blow me a kiss, then she disappeared into the forbidden world of the wren’s quarters, and the wren gate guard was smiling at me for she had heard the question and the answer and was smiling at me trying to work at the answer.

 

I joined H. M. S. Eagle in 1957 and was aboard her when she went into dry dock at Plymouth in 1959; we spent a lot of time at sea mostly in the Mediterranean.  There where many stoker mess decks, mine was 4 E 2 which was on the weather deck level. Why I mentioned that I don’t really know, but if you were aboard Eagle you should know where that was. One day, not long after boarding, a petty officer called to me, but not by my name.  We were always addressed by our surname if they could not remember it or read it. They would call us by our second name, ‘hay you get your arse over here.’

 

He asked me why I was not at my duty station, to which I replied that I was not the man he thought I was.  Pointing to the white strip of tape sown above my pocket, with my name printed on it.  I told him my name, rank and serial number, but he did not believe me and marched me to my Divisional Officer. He at least recognised me, but to pacify the petty officer pulled my documents to show him.

 

When he had looked up my record and conceded I was indeed whom I said I was, the petty officer could still not believe it.  He took me down to where he thought I should be, and as we got to the compartment, I was confronted with the face I had seen every morning in the mirror when I shaved.  This guy could have been my twin, although you could tell the difference if we were side by side.  We were often mistaken for each other, and more than once I had to defend myself physically for something he had done.  We became good pals though; he told me he was an orphan, so I took him home on leave to meet my parents.  Much later, I wished I had never met him, as he caused me a lot of grief.

 

On hot days, the captain would stop the ship and pipe hands to bathing stations.  Those men not on duty; could go for a swim around the ship.  Boats were lowered to act as lifeguards for anyone who got into trouble.  We were in the water, happily throwing a ball around when someone shouted “Shark,” then pointed behind me.  I turned to see a fin slicing through the water towards me.  If anybody has actually walked on water, I wished he had told me how.

 

I have never been a good swimmer, but I tried, oh how I tried.  Suddenly I felt something hit my legs and I was lifted out of the water.  When I fell back, I just lay there thinking my legs had gone but felt no pain?  Then, just in front of me, this thing appeared and started to nod its head at me, making a laughing sound.  To my relief, it was a bottlenose dolphin, just playing about.  However, I did not see the funny side of this for a long time.  I sat on the guard boat for the rest of the afternoon, suffering the jibes of my shipmates.  As they played with a ball and the laughing dolphin.  “What was that smelly brown stain floating around you, Shark repellent?”

 

My favourite off-duty pastime was looking down at the bow wave.  On the cable deck, there was an opening in the bow some fifteen feet below the flight deck.  A platform protruded from the opening for about eight feet.  This platform was supported above and below by stays. Stanchion posts and chains ran around it.  Walking out to the end of the platform meant you were standing thirty feet above the waves.  I would lie for hours on that platform, with my head towards the ship, looking down at the bow wave.  Dolphins played in the pressure wave for hours, leaping and crossing from side to side it was a game I could watch for ages.

 

At night, the wave was full of a phosphorus glow, as the passing of the ship agitated plankton; it was a beautiful sight.  One afternoon, a voice disturbed my watching.  “What are you doing there?”  Looking up, I saw the duty officer on his rounds.  I stood up, answering as I saluted, “watching dolphin’s sir.”  He came gingerly out onto the platform to look for himself then, with a smile on his face, he told me to carry on with my watch.  A few days later I caught him there myself, watching the dolphins.

 

My second brush with the law occurred when I was about eighteen.  I was on leave and had just ridden up to my home on my motorbike.  It was a Saturday afternoon, and as I got closer to the house, I could see my mother talking to two men.  She pointed to me and said, “Here he is now.”  The two men came over to me, saying they were police officers and I could probably help them with there enquires.  They asked me to go to the police station with them.  I said I would, but needed a minute with my mother.

 

I opened my bag, and took out a box, and wished her a happy birthday.  She opened the box and pulled out a clock.  It was one of those that had a glass dome over it and the mechanism was visible.  I had bought it in Malta for her birthday which was two weeks earlier; I had been away for three months.  She was delighted with her present and gave me a kiss.  I got onto my bike and started the engine, telling the two officers that I would see them at the station.  I had taken them by surprises, and the officers got hurriedly into their car and followed me.  When we got to the police station, I asked them how I could help.

 

They informed me that there had been a robbery the night before.  A man had jumped onto a bus and had stolen the conductor's moneybag.  Could I tell them where I was last night at ten pm?  I told them I could not as I had no idea where I was at that time.  One of the officers said, “Oh come on, it’s you, we have an eyewitness who gave a perfect description of you and even gave us your name.  And what about that clock you have just given to your mum; that looked expensive. Why don't you own up and save us all a lot of trouble?”

 

I looked him in the eye and repeated, “I have no idea where I was last night, but I do know I was nowhere near Wellington.”  One of the officers leaned forward with a hard look on his face and said, “you don’t know where you were, but you know you were not here.  That's hard to believe.  You’re as guilty as sin, we can see you sweat.”

 

I stood up saying, “have you seen what I’m wearing?”  I had on a world war-two bomber--crew-flying suit, made of soft leather with a fur lining.  It was ideal for riding a motorbike in the winter.  I pulled off my fur-lined boots, unzipped the sides of the trouser legs, pulled down the full-length zipper in front and stepped out of it.  My navy blue trousers were tucked into my socks, so I pulled them out, letting them fall over my feet, which completely covered them.

 

Until now, the young W P C, who was taking notes, had not said a word.  She now spoke the only sensible words I had heard so far, “You're in the Navy.”  I stood in front of her in my best going ashore rig.  It had cost me three months of pay.  Tailored to perfection, it was designed to turn the heads of any young woman.  The tight jacket went from my twenty-eight-inch waist, hugging me up to my thirty-four-inch chest.

 

It was tailored in such a way, that it showed more of my white front than it should have, giving the impression of having a bigger chest than I really had.  The pale blue dickey collar gave the impression of age but was nearly new.  Taut trousers hugged me down to the knees, and then flared out to form the unmistakable shape of a bell.  They completely hid my feet and gave the illusion of my body is supported by two oak trees.  In my bag, I had a biscuit tin, which contained my cap.  This also was not Navy issue, instead of being round, it was oval.  I wore it with the front pushed up and the sides pulled down, to form a bow wave.  The bow was sewn onto the cap tally instead of being tied, and the bow itself was fashioned like a butterfly.  Instead of being over the right ear, it was over the right eye.  (The whole rig was defiantly not regulation!)

 

Placing the cap on my head, I pushed it forward over my eyes with just the right amount of list.  Looking down at her, I said the words that would forever ban me from her pen pal list.  “No, I'm the night porter at the County Hotel.”  Turning to my two accusers, I now had the confidence that my uniform gave me, and the knowledge that I had the might of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy to prove my innocence.  “I cannot tell you where I was last night, as I was aboard my ship at sea, and where that was I cannot say even if I knew we only docked at six this morning. I have just ridden up from Plymouth; I haven’t been home for three months”

 

They looked at each other, and then one of them said, “can you prove that?”  What a question! The duty roster would prove me right, as they should have known.  So I just smiled at them and said, “why don't you ring up my captain, and ask him?  There are only twenty-two hundred men on board, I’m sure he knows all of us by name!”  That's just what they did.  They did not get to the captain of course, but the duty officer put them right.

 

On my eighteenth birthday, we were in the Med.  I had my birthday run ashore in Malta, where we worked the ‘gut’ from one end to the other, not missing a single bar.  (The ‘gut’ was Straight Street.  It was half a mile long and every door, on both sides was a bar).  In the morning, I awoke in the shower, fully clothed with the water running.  When I undressed, I found a patch of tissue on my arm, and pulling it off I was shocked to find a tattoo under it.  I have no idea how it got there; I don't remember anything about the previous night.

 

On the same trip, the ship was moored off Naples, we could not get in close to shore, as it was too shallow for Eagle’s draft.  There were sightseeing trips for those who wanted them; I went on one to the petrified town of Pompeii.  Funny place! the whole town was devastated by Vesuvius, the only building left in good shape was the brothel with its mosaic wall art. Some of us bought little booklets of the artwork inside the building and the necklace of the effigy that was above the door. These were confiscated, when we returned to the ship.

 

We had some M. F. V’s from Malta to ferry us from ship to shore.  The last boat leaving the jetty to get back to the ship was at the eleven-o clock at night.  As shore leave was only until midnight, some of the lads and I made the most of our last run ashore.  We got back to the jetty at about ten, in plenty of time to catch the boat.  Having been ashore since four in the evening, we were all drunk to a degree as we climbed onto the boat and fell asleep.

 

Next morning at six we were awoken by several irate Italian fishermen trying to tell us, in broken English to get offer their boat.  Needless to say, we were in big trouble with the Navy, as Eagle was due to sail at eight o clock that morning.  Luckily the shore patrol scooped us up; they had been ashore liberating some sailors who had been thrown into the local caboose.  But to be fair the first lieutenant saw the funny side of it and gave the four of us sleeping beauties six days stoppage of leave. “Punishment will start immediately” he ordered.  We were at sea for the next two weeks.

 

When I had reported myself to them as absent without leave, and therefore putting myself on report. My Divisional Officer and Chef Stoker; had smiled as I told them of our mishap. They could do no other than put me and my companions on the first lieutenant's defaulters list, and the chef marched us in to face him. My Divisional Officer was standing beside the first lieutenant, as he sat at his desk when we entered his office. When the Chef marched us out, he told me to report to the divisional office and wait. When my officer returned I knew I wasn’t in too much trouble when he sat smiling and shaking his head then said to me.

 

“Henry you seem too slid from one shit pit to another, without too much effort on your part. One day you’re going to slip in so far, even I won’t be able to pull you out.” This officer was a gem I liked him a lot, he was the sort of man you would follow through hell and high water. Some officers I wouldn’t follow into a pub, even if they were buying the drinks. I owned him some big favours, both him and the chef. To be honest it wasn’t always my fault; I mean I was a likeable lad; I just got lead astray too easy.

 

Onboard Eagle, there was a sailmaker, and yes I asked the same question. What’s a sailmaker doing on a modern warship?  And the answer I got was who do you think makes the boat and winch covers. And what about the awnings that keep the officers and their guests cool, and in the shade on hot days.  Then there are wind dodgers for the gangplank, shocks for the gun barrels.  And all manner of covers, for this and that.

 

I met him when I was sent to him with a boat canvas engine cover in need of repair.  His workspace was a large compartment in the forward part of the ship.  As I entered it, it was like stepping into an Aladdin’s cave.  All around the bulkheads, there was a vast array of items, from small wooden carved ship figureheads to ships in bottles.  This was not just his working area, he lived here too.

 

His hammock and locker were by the door, a table and chair in the corner.  The man himself was indeed the ancient mariner; he had spent his life at sea.  He had run away to sea as a boy and had sailed before the mast.  He had never taken a wife, so he had no home but the ships he had served on.  He was a master craftsman; there was nothing he could not do with needle and canvas.

 

And the story’s he could tell, I would sit for hours just listening and watching him work.  I was sure he was way past retirement age, and the navy just kept him on, as he had nowhere else to go.  He knew all the traditions of the navy, the way our uniform had evolved from the days when the men would make their own to the ones we wore now.

 

I had always thought the black silk we wore around the neck, was in remembrance of Nelson’s death.  He told me it was just a sweatband worn around the head, to keep the sweat out of your eyes. When not in use it would hang around the neck.  To stop it getting in the way a piece of ribbon was passed through two holes in the tunic to tie the band down; it became part of the modern uniform.  I made a canvas bucket under his supervision; he also showed me how to rig a three-mast ship in a bottle. And how to splice ropes, make rope mats and tie knots.

 

He was the only man I knew in the navy, who had his tobacco ration in the form of a leaf. He also had neat rum which he kept in a jar, to water down to his taste. He had a small metal locker; he kept his tobacco pricks in. There was a row of them hanging like salami sausages, each one getting blacker as they cured. He would take down the youngest one when he received his tobacco leaf. Taking a brush he kept for the job, he would pant the leaf with neat rum. Then wrapping the leaf around the prick, he would re-lash the prick as we lashed our hammocks and hang it again in his locker. He would shave off his daily ration with a cut-throat razor, from the oldest one which he smoked in an old clay pipe. Now you know the origin of Navy cut tobacco.

 

One run ashore in Malta always brings a smile to my face when I remember it. Four of us had just stepped off the liberty boat. When a lone marine enquired if it would be possible, for him to share a gharry cart with us. I looked up at him because he towered above me, saying I had no objection but could the poor old horse pull our combined weight. All five of us climbed in and gave the driver our destination, ‘The Gut’. On the way there I asked the marine, why he was a lone ranger. He told us he wasn’t going to go ashore, and his friends had left an hour ago. He was not sure if he could find them, they could be anywhere between Valetta and Gozo.

 

As we alighted from the cart I asked this fine guardian of the quarterdeck, if he wanted to accompany us in our quest to drink the gut dry. He smiled and said he would be honoured, to join such a fine body of men such as us. So after a few stops to test the quality of the wears, of a couple of the many hostelries. We stumbled through the two half wagon wheel doors, of the Bing Crosby club. Lucky we found a table to sit the five of us and ordered a round of their finest brew. Our marine was hypnotised, by the songstress performing on the stage. He couldn’t take his eyes off the shapely leg that was visible through the long slit in her dress, or her ample bosom that overflowed her bodice.

 

She also had not missed the entrance of this tall handsome stranger, with the high boot neck collar. When she had finished serenading him, she stepped down from the stage and swung her hip in our direction. Looking at only one of us, she said in velvet breathless voice. “Is there anyone at this table; willing to buy me a drink.” The marines arm shot into the air and he snapped his fingers, then to the waiter that materialised beside him said. “Find nectar worthy to present to this goddess of loveliness. Then as there were no chairs for her to sit, he offered her his knee to sit upon.

 

She sat fluttering her eyelashes and giggled girlishly, as he showered her with praises to her beauty. When her scarlet lips whispered sweet nothings into his shell-like, he downed his drink and they rose as one. We wished them both a bon voyage and him a very pleasant voyage of discovery. As he steered her from the building, with his arm around her waist.

 

Barely five minutes had past when we all turned as one, on hearing a thunderous crash from the front of the club. There was our marine striding towards us, the doors he had crashed though still swinging. As he sat in his chair he announced he needed a drink, so I pushed my half-empty glass to him; which he downed in a single gulp. Then I ventured the question that was on everybody’s lips, “What’s up royal.” He uttered two words of profanity I can’t repeat, but the second began with a ‘B’ the first an ‘F’.

 

Then he began his tale of woe, “I got the ‘B’ in the bedroom, and got my hand in her ‘F’ pants. I came up with an ‘F’ toggle and two, so I punched the ‘B’ lights out and left the ‘F’ in a heap on the floor. He should be out for an hour or two.” We were shocked nay stunned, for all at the table thought it had been the genuine article. There was only one thing I could say at such a revelation, “five beers waiter and make them tall ones.”

 

The gharry cart drivers and disso oarsmen, of Malta, took a lot of stick from the men of her majesty’s royal navy. Quite unfairly I might add, late one night five very merry men arrived at the quayside. They instructed the disso oarsmen, to propel them to their ship. The oarsmen quite rightly informed them, that the disso could only legally carry five men one being himself. To keep within the law, the oarsman was tossed into the harbour and the five rowed themselves to their ship.

 

I will not go into any detail of the many accidents or mishaps that occurred on Eagle.  It has been over fifty years since I left her in dry dock at Plymouth so I will give you a shortlist of the things I have seen.  On one occasion we had a mass fly off of all the planes that were on deck.  The jets on the forward deck waiting to use the steam catapult.  The free take-off planes parked both sides of the flight deck waiting to taxi out to take off in turn.  There were three long-range radar fairy gannets parked on the stern.  One on either quarter with one in the middle, on the very end of the flight deck.  The jets took off and the propeller jobs started to pull out for their turn.

 

I can only surmise what really happened next but it seemed as if the pilot of the rear plane did not rev his engine enough when he releases the brakes.  All we saw was his plane disappear over the stern of the ship, as the wash from the other planes pushed him backwards.  I have seen many planes crash; a Sea Vixen came in too low and hit the end of the flight deck.  It somersaulted several times before it landed on its back in flames.  The pilot and navigator both lost their lives.  A Wyvern came in too fast.  It hit the deck very hard breaking its back.  It skidded into the island and burst into flames.  I was standing on the observation platform right above it.

 

‘Eagle’ used both destroyers and helicopters as guards for taking off and landings.  The helicopters were sea kings.  They could be used for sea rescue or with their sonar domes, could hunt for submarines.  One was flying parallel to the ship keeping pace with it, acting as a plane guard.  Something went wrong with its rear rotor.  It started to spin on its own axis and went down into the sea.  The destroyer stationed astern stopped to pick up its crew. Luckily all the crew were retrieved from the briny, but the chopper was lost to Davie Jones locker.

 

A flight deck handler walked into a spinning propeller.  It cut him to pieces; there was a rumour that he had just received a ‘Dear John’ from his girlfriend.  One of the tow truck drivers, not looking were he was going, drove onto the flight deck lift, except it wasn't there.  He dropped two decks to where it was positioned.  The plane he was towing followed him. There was an incident in the hanger when someone fired the guns on an aircraft by accident.

 

There is one incident I remember as if it happened yesterday.  I was working in the laundry at the time and was asked by one of the aircrew P O’s, to give his best uniform a special press.  He was going to receive an award or something.  I had just entered his mess and heard on the loudspeaker, a distress call from one of the pilots.

 

It seemed he was losing oil pressure and was returning to the ship.  We all went up on deck to see him return.  When we got to the observation platform we could see they had the crash barrier up, and the crash tender and crane ready.  I stood with the others looking astern; we never saw the plane just a bright orange flash as the plane blew up. A destroyer was dispatched to search for the pilot. I can not remember if they found him, but I can still remember his name, but I will not print it here.

 

We paid a visit to Barcelona and had several good runs ashore there, but we didn’t just drink all the time just most of it. Some of us went on bus trips, to see battle sites of the Napoleonic wars. We also went to a bullfight, where we got kicked out for shouting El Toro. It seemed they got as passionate about their bullfighting, as Liverpool fans do about football. I always shout for the underdog, that’s what makes me, ‘me’.

 

When we got to Gibraltar those of us that had gone on the battlefield tour, were detailed off again to volunteer to be bussed up to Cadis. Here the educating officer was defiantly in his element, as he gleefully gave us all a history lesson. About Nelson and how he trapped the Spanish and French fleets here, then, of course, the famous sea battle afterwards. I’m afraid I didn’t hear it all; one of my mates kicked me to wake me up. Just as the education officer, was finishing off his exhilarating talk.

 

Now don’t get me wrong, I was interested in all things navel. It was just that I had come off a watch in the engine room when I was collared to volunteer. I had just left the showers with just a towel around my waist when I literally run into my Divisional Officer. He was looking for someone to fill his quota when I saw the look on his face it was too late to turn and run. “Just the man, muster at the gangplank at 0-nine thirty number eights. You’re going on a nice day out.”

 

In 1959 Eagle went into dry dock at Plymouth, some of the Ships Company had drifts straight away. I said goodbye to my friends, as they left the ship for places far away. Jock was being sent to his homeland, with a berth at Rosyth not far from his home in Glasgow. Ock’ey from hull went to Singapore; Smed’s from South Shields went to Portsmouth and from there into Civvies Street. His seven years were up, and he was doing his five years reserve, from the comfort of a shore job. No amount of persuasion would entice him to stay in, as he had disliked being at sea. When we had found out, we had asked him why he had joined the navy if he hated the sea. He had given us the classic answer, “well I thought it was a good idea at the time.”

 

I was staying aboard for a short time until the dockyard took over completely. With the engines and boiler rooms shut down, donkey boilers were employed to supply steam to the ship. Now with dock worker clambering all over the ship, we who were left were moved into the Eagle suite at H, M, S, Drake hotel. With my going ashore oppo’s no longer with me, I became a lone ranger. And surprisingly, my intake of the amber nectar diminished. It was no longer as much fun being in a pub, with no one to joke with. Or having good shipmates, to take the preverbal extrusion of bodily fluids out off.

 

Most of the times I went ashore in Plymouth, was out of boredom with being in a mess deck in a stone frigate. You couldn’t wander out onto the weather deck, to watch the sunset into the sea. Or the seabirds skimming over the waves, and those loveable dolphins playing. Sometimes I would go ashore and go to the pictures, just to pass the boring time away. It was on one of these nights out; when I was stone-cold sober I got into my first fight. Well, it wasn’t a fight really; it was more a case of me staying out of harm's way.

 

I was returning to Drake and had just bought a special oggy, (Pasty) from a stall not far from the main gate. You were not allowed to carry food through the entrance to Drake, so you had to scoff it before you reached it. A few yards from the stall I came across a sailor with his girlfriend, they were having an argument. As I got close he slapped her, me being me I had to comment on his despicable behaviour. I found myself discarding my oggy to defend myself, not just from him she too swung her handbag at me. I dogged and weaved dancing on my toes, as I parried off their blows.

 

My footwork took me out into the road, in full view of the main gate. Over his shoulder, I could see the gate guard watching us, and wondered why they had not come to intervene. They let me dance for what seemed like ten minutes or so before two navy policemen came and dragged him into the guardhouse. As I entered the gatehouse, the regulating chef told me to step into his office. He closed the door and said to me. “Fighting in the street is a serious charge, what have you got to say.”

 

“You can’t really charge me with fighting chef, I was just protecting myself. Anyway, he didn’t land a punch, and I never throw one” I answered. “Yes,” he said, “I saw it all but I meant do you want to press charges.” The unwritten law in the Navy was, you never drop anyone in it so I said. “No I don’t want to take it further chef; I’ll leave it up to you if you want a word with him. As far as I’m concerned it never happened, now what were we talking about.” He smiled as he closed his report book, he hadn’t written a word down.

 

“That was some impressive footwork, some of the best I’ve seen. I haven’t had the pleaser of seeing you in the ring, how many fights have you had?” he asked. “I don’t box chef” I answered, “I’m a rock and roller. When I’m on leave my sister and I go out dancing, we jive and boggy together were pretty good at it.” “Hum,” he said rubbing his chin, “I run the boxing team here at Drake fancy joining it. You get special privileges if you’re on the team. With your footwork and me training you, we might have another champ in the making.”  “No thanks chef I’m a lover, not a fighter. The prospect of standing toe to toe with someone, and trying to punch them senseless doesn’t appeal to me at all. And I like the way my face looks” I answered.

 

“Fair enough son but if you change you're mined look me up, anybody will tell you where to find me. Oh by the way, do you know who your opponent was tonight?” he asked. I shook my head and said, “Haven’t the foggiest should I.” “Not if you’re not into boxing, he’s the lightweight champion of Devonport” he smilingly answered. As I left his office I thought to myself, Harry you're lucky to be standing and without a fat lip. I met the man himself a few days later, in the mess hall over lunch. He was standing with one of the regulating ratings, which had rescued me. I saw him say something to the boxer, and then nod his head in my direction.

 

The boxer came over and I wondered if I should put down my food tray, and get ready to dance again. He thrust out his hand and said his name, then apologized for his actions. Then he said, with a big smile. “The chef said you outclassed me in the street, why don’t you join the club I might be able to catch you in a ten by ten.” “No thanks buddy” I answered, “I’d sooner dance with ladies. If I’m going to lay down, I prefer a soft feather bed.” We left it at that, I never saw him fight and he never saw me dance.

 

When I finally left Eagle, I was posted to H M S Chaser, a submarine support ship in Portland.  I was acting leading hand now and was in charge of the upper deck watch.  My reading and writing, stopped me completing the exam and getting the grads to be full kellick.  Perhaps I was good at my work, or maybe there was nobody else; so I kept my rank as acting.  Much to one particular leading hand announce he had taken a dislike to me on his arrival from day one.  He was always encroaching on my department, trying to find something wrong. He outranked me so I could not order him out, or complain to higher authorities without seeming petty.

 

I just got on with my job and made sure my boys did theirs. We gave him nothing to carry tails about, and just ignored his presence most of the time.  Perhaps he didn’t like the way I talked down to him, instead of looking up to him. In all fairness, he was a fully qualified first class leading prate.  My four-man workforce used to say to me, ‘you’re not good enough to be a first-class leading prate but you’re very good at acting like one.’ We had a choosey job and didn’t really need all of us to do it, I think that’s why this kellick had it in for us.

 

To make sure he never found us loafing, I would send a two-man team to dip the tanks. One with a roll-up dipping tape and one with a pad and pencil, they would wander around the ship. Then visit the subs if any were tied up alongside, they could go onto subs to check the tanks as part of their job. Our favourite kellick could not, so they could have a coffee with the cook. Or if a Yankee sub was in, they could have an ice cream or two. If they didn’t bump into him, they could just keep on wondering.

 

Tony one of my boys had been to college and was good at the things I wasn’t. He used to do the paperwork for me and did a good job of it. He was not interested in rank in any form and refused to take any advancement opportunities. I kept badgering him to improve himself, but he would not. “I like it the way it is,” he told me. “If I foul up on the job under your supervision, you get the rocket up your backside not me. I like the security of standing behind you, your not afraid to stand up for our rights. And you’re not that bad to work with either, no thank you! I’ll stay as I am.”

 

The kellick’s interfering came to an end one day when the chef stoker, paid one of his very rare visits to our workspace on the upper deck. He had come to give me a prior warning, of two subs arriving in the morning. They had picked up some bad water in some foreign port; it had contaminated their distilled water tank. They had pumped the water overboard, but we would have to purge the tanks and replenish them. It would take us all day to complete the job, and as the subs were due to sail the next morning. We had to be prepared to work on until we were finished.

 

As the chef entered the kellick was standing by my desk, studying my paperwork. When the chef said to him that this was not his work area; and what was he doing here. The kellick replied, “just checking up to see if they're doing their jobs properly chef. There’s no one with any rank here to supervise them, I’m keeping them on their toe’s.” The chef went red, and blasted the kellick out of the water, “this is my department” he bellowed. “Are you suggesting I don’t run a tort ship, get out I’ll deal with you later.” That was the last time I had him interfere, in fact, he disappeared completely not long after.

 

My department was responsible for the supply of distilled water to the subs for their batteries, which we made onboard Chaser with an evaporator. We could not pump it to the sub’s, without the threat of contamination from the pump. So we gravity fed it to the tank onboard the sub, with hoses we had to keep sterile. To speed up the transfer, we would pressurize the feed tank with compressed air.  One day, we were unloading some compressed air cylinders, when one got away from us.  It landed on the jetty hitting a bollard that broke off the value and rolled into the water next to a submarine.  The escaping air acted as a jet, sending it through the water and out into the harbour.  Some fishermen in a dinghy saw it and reported that the sub had fired a torpedo at them.

 

Chaser was a large old landing craft, she was still in commission, but never once did she go to sea while I was aboard her. With her engines shut down, they kept one boiler alight to supply steam and power to the ship. It was the only department that runs a twenty-four-hour watch, the rest of us worked eight to four. Withstand easy at ten, rum up at eleven and lunch at twelve. Another stand easy at three, it was a hectic work schedule.

 

I had an old 1936 ford popular which I had paid seventy-five pounds for, and it took me two hours to get home from Portland. Every weekend I could spend at home I did, it was on one of my return journeys I almost became religious. If you know Weymouth you know there is a steep hill, with tight curves leading down to the town. It was early Monday morning and I was half asleep, I must have started dossing as I approached the tightest right-hand turn. With an eighty-foot drop on the other side of the fence, this was not the place to be asleep.

 

In my dreamy state, I remember looking at the hazy barrier, and everything seemed to be in slow motion. When through the hazes a hand appeared from my right, as though it had come in the window. The hand took hold of the steering wheel and pulled the car around the bend. I was suddenly wide awake and trammelling and thanking my guardian angel for looking at me. At muster one of the Killicks, came up to me and asked if I was alright. I was still shaken from my near encounter with death and told him of the events of that morning.

 

He was a deeply religious man, and because of this, he was well-liked for his fare handedness. He was in no doubt of the identity of the person responsible for my survival and took me to see the padre. I had contacted with the padre before, we had long discussions concerning our two faiths. Now I was here being lead up the golden path to salvation, two days later I realized it was my hand I saw through the mist. Blimey, that was a close call.

 

A few months later I had my first car accident and wrecked my car completely. Some of you might say I got my just deserts, ‘me’ well we all have accidents don’t we.

A Normal Life.

I left the Navy and got married, seven days before my twenty-second birthday in 1961.  The vicar, who married us, got quite excited when he found out our Christian names.  My wife's first names are Mary Jane, and mine being Henry Joseph.  He kept telling people that he was going to marry Joseph and Mary. I informed him that we would not be calling our first son Jesus.

 

Going for a job at a well-known Ford dealer in Taunton, the interviewer asked what training and experience I had.  I handed over my Navy papers, showing my training on petrol and diesel internal combustion engines.   They asked where I had gained this training.  I told them, on the aircraft carrier H M S, Eagle and on engines from submarines.  The interviewer looked at me steadily and said that if they ever got an aircraft carrier or a submarine in for repair, they would give me a call.  I went home and tossed the papers into the dustbin.

 

My father got me a job at the milk factory, where he worked. With my knowledge of evaporators, I was the right man to work in the milk powder plant there. Here I would be doing my old job in reverse; they turned the milk into steam. Instead of harnessing the steam they allowed in to escape and harvested the dried milk flakes. Inside a large heated stainless steel cone-shaped container, sprayers were set up to spray a mist of heated whey leftover from making cheese. The whey would almost dry immediately in the heat of the container, and fall as dry milk to be bagged at the bottom of the hopper in the room below.

 

When I had left the Navy, I had been offered a job in the Arab Emeritus doing just this, but with seawater. The steam would be piped away to be cooled and turned into freshwater. The salt was secondary and would be disposed of in several different manners. It was the same as our evaporators, but they called this process desalination. Both names were the right name for the process; you had to vaporize the water to desalinate it.  I didn’t take the job because I was getting married, and my too be wife didn’t fancy living in an Arab country.

 

The job at the milk factory would be easy for me. I had done it for so long, no one had to tell me how to do it. The sprayers were almost identical to the sprayers in the Navy; you had to adjust them to get the finest spray. In the case of the three-drum boilers, the oil droplets had to be fine so the mist would ignite immediately giving maximum heat. With the milk, it was the same, so it would dry immediately. If it didn’t you would have dried milk clinging to the sides of the container, which you had to remove and was an extra job you didn’t need.

 

 

At the interview, I had impressed the manager of the plant, with my knowledge of cheese production which I had gained from my father. And of course, the equipment I would be using was almost the same. He gave me a white pair of overalls and wellington boots, with a paper hat and took me for a tour around the factory.  I saw many old school friends and a few old girlfriends. On that tour of white-walled, and shiny stainless steel piped rooms.  When we finished our tour, in the white-tiled room where the milk powder was made. Then he handed me over to the foreman, to show me around.

 

When we reached the big round stainless cylinder; which dominated the centre of the room. I looked through the inspection port, that was next to each sprayer and said. “I think you should pull this one, the atomizer doesn’t seem to be working properly.” He looked himself and I cringed as he put his bare hand on the adjustment wheel, and gave it a tweak. “Just needed a touch of adjusting.” Then as he saw the look on my face said, “what’s the matter something worrying you.”

 

“If I’d had done that with an evaporator without asbestos gloves on, I’d have burnt the flesh of my fingers. Surely that should be too hot to handle, with your bare hands?” “No,” he said, “it’s barely warm, why should it be hot.” “When you boil a kettle it gives off steam, that’s what makes it whistle. The hotter the water the nearer it is to vaporizing if that whey is not red hot it won’t vaporize as quickly as it should” I said.

 

I mean hello knock, knock is there anybody out there, is anybody listening to me. I must be right; it's imposable for me to be wrong, isn’t it. Apparently! I was wrong, his face turned to thunder as he said. “How long were you in the navy working on this type of equipment?” “Five years” I replied. “Well I’ve been doing this job for over fifteen years; don’t tell me how it should be done.” Oh, my goodness, I hadn’t actually started working yet, and I was upsetting a leading hand already. I hadn’t meant to, I was only stating what my training had taught me.

 

The job its self was no effort at all, but eight hours in this spotless white-tiled room. With white-clothed workers, was like nothing I had imagined it would be. So after a few months, I was wondering if I had done the right thing and left the navy. I started looking for an outside job, one in the fresh air where you could see and feel freedom. The factory felt like a prison, I had worked in some tight enclosures before. But all this whiteness was driving me nuts, no wonder some of my fellow employees were uptight.

 

I did get a job outside eventually at the South Western Electricity Board, known to all as SWEB.  I worked there for four years, in the central construction department, which erected overhead cables all over the West Country.  I got a job as a land rover artic driver; these were short wheelbase land rovers with a fifth wheel. And had a twenty-foot articulated trailer, on which we carried the line poles that carried the overhead power cables.  We delivered the poles to the gangs in the field, to be erected and strung with copper cable.  Talk about a small world, I met an old adversary not long after I started. I had pulled up beside a hole in progress when I spied a familiar face. He was to his waist in a hole, now I was really looking down at the kellick.

A year passed by quite quickly because it was a pleasant job and I saw a lot of the west county. Then one day I was called into the office and offered a job driving an Allen trencher. This machine looked like a chainsaw set onto a miniature caterpillar tractor body, that was five foot long and three foot wide that stood four feet high. It would cut a trench six inches wide, and up to two foot six inches deep.  It would be used for the earthing of the transformers that were hung onto the poles, and for laying drainage pipes in the new substations that were being built.

 

It was a one-man job and I would have a Land Rover and pull the digger on its own trailer. I had to pass a test to get my track laying drivers licence, and be taught how to use a meter.  This told me when there was enough copper in the ground, to earth the transformers. It was a good job as I was virtually my own boss, I would be given a list of where the transformers were and left to do the job myself. One job was at South Molton, and I had to return to Taunton to replace my Land Rover with a new long wheel-based one.  I had got to a place called The Wishing well, near Bampton, on my way back to South Molton.

 

It was a bright sunny morning and I had stopped at the cafe there for a cool drink.  As I opened the land rover door to get out, I looked up at a small plane silently circling very low with its engine off.  It came round again, much lower this time.  As the pilot tried to land in the field behind the café, it suddenly dipped and crashed into the trees on the far side of the field. I headed to the crash site in my Land Rover; other people were running there as well.  I shouted to one climbing over the gate, to open it.  He did not stop, so I had to get out and open it myself.  I started up the Land Rover and drove across the field, stopping under the tail of the plane.  It was about ten feet in the air, held there by the thick branches of the tree.

 

Climbing onto the roof of the Land Rover, I tried to pull open the door of the plane, but it was jammed tight.  I shouted to someone, to get me a long crowbar and an axe from the back of the Land Rover.  With it, I wrenched off the hinges and pulled the door away from the plane.  There were four people on board, all teachers, two males and two females. Fortunately, none of them was badly hurt.  I managed to get them into the Land Rover and drove them to Bampton.  As they were local people they were able to direct me to the doctor's home that was also his surgery.  After seeing that the four teachers were all right, I went on to South Molton.

 

Sometime later, a letter came to the office asking for information about a SWEB Land Rover involved in the rescue of four people from a crashed plane.  I owned up to it and was told that the company magazine wanted to write a piece on the rescue, and the people involved wanted to thank me in person.  They wanted to have a reception in my honour; highly embarrassing, but they gave my wife a big box of chocolates.

 

I had bought a vesper shooter for my wife and tried to teach her to ride it. She had no confidence in herself and kept panicking whenever I told her to ride alone. I took her up onto the old Smeatharpe airdrome; ‘you could drive on the old runway then’. With all the space in the world, surely this was the place she could ride without fear of hitting anything. I was sadly wrong, she managed to run off the runway and crash into the only post on the site. She would not ride it after that, so I kept it for myself. I would load it into the back of the landrover, and use it for coming home from jobs where we could lodge out on.

 

The job at South Molton was a big area job; we had strung wire all the way from Taunton to here. An impressive span was over the Dune Valley. It was such a long span we built pylons either side of the valley and used a helicopter to take the cable across the valley. We were working our way down to Cornwall, with another S W E B team from Cornwall working towards us. As I said I rode my shooter home, instead of paying for digs. One cold dark misty night I rode it home from our work site, when I got home I could not get off my bike. I had passed through a bank of freezing fog, and my duffel coat had frozen solid. When we finally pried it off of me, we stood it in the bath to thaw out.

 

In the winter of 1964, I cheated death by the thickness of my clothes!  Two years before, I had bought a nine horsepower 1934 Singer Roadster.  It was hand-built from aluminium and wood and cost me seven pounds, ten shillings.  I had bought it from one of my co-workers; he was a powder monkey and drove a land rover compressor. His job was to blast out holes that had a rock in them. When he showed me the car it was buried completely by snow, because it had snowed heavily the night before. The old leather soft roof had collapsed under its weight, just leaving the pram hood frame standing.

 

We had to dig the snow out of the car and remove the old torn roof before we could put the key in to see if it would start. I was pleased when it started almost immediately, so I gave him the money and drove it home. My wife and I made a canvas roof, using the old torn original as a template. We spent many days hand stitching the canvas together, and when it was finished we were quite proud of our achievement.  It wasn't perfect but it did the job it was designed for, when it was first put on the car it looked nice and taut.  Then when it got wet it shrank, then when it dried out it sagged.  Being canvas it was not totally waterproof, so the water seeped into it and dripped inside the car.

 

We inquired about having a new roof made, but my wages then were about fourteen pounds a week. And that was with all the overtime I could manage to do, we couldn’t afford the one hundred and fifty pounds I had been quoted.  It was a lovely car to drive through, and we went on many outings in it. We even drove to Middlesbrough in it, with my sister and husband.

 

I was doing a job in Bristol, working on a brand new sub-station just before Bedminster. On the A 38 on the way into Bristol, I was there earthing the transformers and doing the land drainage. Instead of living in digs, I travelled the fifty miles each way in my car.  On this particular day, it was freezing, so I had dressed accordingly.  Underwear, long Johns, T-shirt, shirt, trousers, jumper, two pairs of overalls, coat, balaclava and gloves.  Overall this, I had on my old Navy deck watch duffel coat with a hood.

 

It was pitch dark when I reached Sidcot on the A38.  As I topped a hill, I saw headlights approaching me. Then suddenly they were right in front of me, on my side of the road.  I think I braked, but can't remember.  The three-ton truck hit me head-on.  All I remember was being trapped between the steering wheel column and the door.  Placing my hand behind me, I managed to release the door handle and I fell out onto the road but I could not move.  When the ambulance arrived, the driver asked where the car driver was.  The lorry driver pointed to me and said “there.”  “Can't be” replied the ambulance driver; “he could not have survived that!”

I was taken to Weston-Super-Mare hospital, where I was X-rayed and treated for shock.  The X-rays showed I had only badly bruised ribs and lungs, and I was told I could go home.  A person from SWEB had arrived at the hospital.  They were informed of my accident, and he had come to take me back to Taunton.  A nurse brought in my clothes for me to dress.  She held up my shirt, and I put my arm into the sleeve and cried out in pain. I was taken back down to X-ray again, and they found that I had broken my left wrist.  It was plastered and I got dressed again, picking up the pile of clothes that were leftover.

 

The doctor that had treated me saw me leaving and said, “That pile of clothes saved your life.  They must have cushioned the blow of the steering wheel.”  As we left the hospital, I asked if we could see my car.  A garage not far from the hospital had picked it up; I could not believe what I saw when we got to the garage.  The engine had been pushed back three feet into the car.  The piano-hinged bonnet had hit the windscreen frame; pushing it back it then had ridden up over it.  The steering column had broken away from the dashboard.  It had hit the seat I was sitting in, breaking the back off the seat and pushing it onto the back seat.

 

The chassis was bent so much that it touched the floor.  If I had let go of the steering wheel; and had not broken my wrist.  I would not have been turned and would have been speared by the steering column.  If I had been wearing a seatbelt, it would have trapped me in the seat. Instead of the wheel folding back, and going under my arm. The centre of the wheel would have hit me full in the chest, crushing my ribs and doing untold damage. As there were no seatbelts in those days, and I am here to tell you my tale of survival. I not saying that they are a bad idea, but I feel in some cases they can do more harm than good.

 

In 1965, SWEB closed down central construction, and I found myself on the dole.  In those days, fortunately, work was not hard to find.  It was not long before I was driving H G V's for a living.  That's when I met my best friend, Don Ellis.  One day, during a general conversation we started talking about Australia.  We started to wonder what it might be like to live there and decided to make enquiries at the immigration office at Australia House.  They sent us a large amount of information to look at, and a questionnaire to fill in and send back.  We sent it off more as a joke than anything else.  A few months later, we received more documents and a letter.

 

We had got through the first steps of being accepted for immigration.  The next step was to fill in a larger, more in-depth document.  It was more like your life history; schools attended and what grades we had achieved in exams.  Lists of jobs, time spent in H. M. forces, and information about our dependants.  Filling in these forms took us some time, and we were still not sure if we wanted to go, but we sent it off anyway.

 

A few weeks later, a letter arrived telling us we had a date for an interview.  Now everything seemed to go into overdrive.  We had to confirm that we would attend the interview, arrange and have a medical with our doctors. And get a medical report from him, then get signed letters from solicitors and passport photos, to prove we were who we said we were. Photostat copies of our berth certificates, for us and the boys. Affidavits that we had no outstanding debts, and therefore we were free to leave the country.

 

When the day of the interview came, we travelled up to London and found Australia House.  Meeting our first Australian ever, we had a laugh when he asked Jane where she would like to live in Australia.  Jane had only heard of one place in Australia, and that was Alice Springs.  “You won’t like it there,” he said, “It’s far too hot for you.”

 

He suggested Western Australia.  There was a logging firm at Jarradall, eighty miles south of Perth that was willing to sponsor workers to emigrate; they wanted plant machinery and truck drivers so we said yes.  All the necessary paperwork was completed and we went home to wait, but there was a hitch.  The logging firm stopped their sponsorship of new immigrants, so we were called back to London to see the immigration board again. They said if we still wanted to go we could go under the government-assisted passage scheme.

 

It would cost us ten pounds per person, but we had to stay for at least two years or pay back the full fare. There were to be no jobs waiting for us, but he assured us we would get work.  So that was it, we were going to Australia, and we had a departure date.  All we had to do now was to sell everything we could not take with us, which basically was a house full of furniture.  I contacted a firm that dealt with such things and they offered to buy the lot for two hundred and fifty pounds.  I arranged for them to come and take it all away in the week before we left.

 

The day arrived, but nobody came.  I phoned them and was told that the second-hand market for furniture had slumped.  All they could offer me now was twenty pounds for the lot. That was no good; it was definitely a ploy to rip me off.  So we went around to all the people that had shown an interest, in buying individual pieces.  Selling it bit by bit, we eventually got rid of it all and for a bit more than twenty pounds.

Off to a new life in Aus.

 

After a very tearful goodbye to friends and family, we boarded the train to London with Don and his family.  Jane was very quiet when we arrived at the airport.  When I asked her why she was so quiet, she confessed that she was terrified at the thought of flying.  Right up to the last minute, I was not sure if she would get on the plane or not.  So; there was I, boarding a plane for a strange country with a scared wife, three young boys and one hundred and seventy-five pounds in my pocket.  A very shaky start to a new life.  The flight took two days, and Jane hardly slept a wink and kept waking me up.

 

On the first night, she insisted that the plane was on fire.  She could see the reflection of the red navigation light on the top of the plane; it was shining on the spinning propeller.  Then, as we were landing at Istanbul she saw the flaps on the wing being lowered and thought they had broken off.  The most frightening thing for her was when we hit turbulence or air pockets, where we suddenly dropped several hundred feet.  And of course, there was taking off and landings. The last leg of our journey was from Singapore to Perth, and we took off just as it was getting light.  As we climbed through a layer of cloud, I will never forget the picture of that sky.  We were heading south, if you looked out of the right-hand side of the plane the sky was black and the stars shone brightly.

 

But, if you looked out of the left-hand side, you could see the rim of the earth getting clearer by the minute.  It felt like our plane was the dividing line between darkness and light.  We were cruising at thirty thousand feet, above the Indian Ocean.  Through the gaps in the cloud, you could see a very blue sea with white caps and several desert islands.  As the day drew on the clouds thinned until there were none to be seen, just sea and sky.  The pilot announced we were approaching our new home, and everyone was watching the distant red smudge through the windows.

 

The red smudge on the horizon grew larger and larger until all we could see was land.  I found out later, that we had crossed the coastline at Shark’s Bay near Exmouth.  We looked down on the lovely long sandy beaches for about two hours before we were told to fasten our seat belts for the landing at Perth.  It was 2-30 on a hot Wednesday afternoon, the twenty-eighth of February 1968.

 

We all gathered in the large arrival hall and names were called out, each being told which bus to go on until only two families were left.  We were told that there was no accommodation at Graylands transit hostel for us, and we would be going to a hotel at Cottesloe with the other family.  There were two taxis waiting outside to take us there.  The drive from the airport took us down the Great Eastern Highway and crossed the Swan River on the causeway across Heirisson Island.  The view we had of the city as we drove towards it was fantastic.  Everything looked so clean, and tall modern buildings towered above us.  We drove along Riverside Drive, which was lined with large palm trees, so different from England.

 

We passed Barrack Street Jetty and went along Mounts Bay Road, which runs along the edge of the Swan River under Kings Park.  Then on to the Stirling Highway, a few more miles and we turned off into Cottesloe.  The hotel was on Marine Parade, overlooking the sea with only the road separating it from the beach.  But, as we got out of the taxi, I asked if this was the right place.  It was not my idea of a hotel.  It was a shabby building with paint and plaster peeling from the walls and looked more like a bombed-out derelict than a hotel.

 

The other couple, Tom and Elsie agreed with me.  We would have to put up with it for now; we would sort it out in the morning. It was early evening now, and the beach of golden sand and the clear blue sea looked inviting. The boys were too tired to play, so we went to our rooms and slept.  At midnight, I awoke to find I was alone.  Jane was not in the boy's room either.  Stepping outside, I saw her sitting on a bench across the road, looking out to sea.

 

When I got to her, I found she had been crying. Looking back at the building I had just left, I did not blame her.  Sitting beside her, I put my arm around her shoulder and pulled her to me.  We sat there silently for some time, just looking at a beautiful starlit sky.

 

We were looking northwest, thirteen thousand miles away in that direction was our old home. Family and friend alike, we couldn’t just pop around the corner now if something went wrong. We would have to learn to stand on our own feet now, something I had not considered before. It was alright for me, I had left home at seventeen. Jane had never been more than two streets away from her mum before; perhaps that was why she was crying now.

 

Thursday morning we were still jet-lagged and tired, but managed to get out by midday for a short walk.  Apart from the drive to Cottesloe from the airport, our first impression of Australia was gained during that short walk.  We stepped out of the hotel into a very bright hot day, with not a cloud to be seen.  Turning left towards Freemantle, we strolled along Marine Parade.  It was our first close look at the houses, some of them plastered brick but most were of asbestos cladding.  All had corrugated iron roofs that overhung the walls to make verandas, supported by ornate wooden posts with lattice woodwork top and bottom to make fencing.  Some of them had mosquito netting all around their verandas so the occupants could sit outside their homes on hot nights.

 

They were all very picturesque in there own way, and Jane fell in love with them.  There was a feeling of space here; the houses were single-storey types but not all the same style.  You can see Freemantle harbour from Cottesloe, for it was only a few miles away.  Between is a Bay of the clear blue, sparkling water, and golden sand that had no footprints until we walked upon it.  We could not believe our eyes for we were the only ones there.  Along the shore road, there was a parking place that has a beach café.  As it was mid-afternoon it was very hot, so we went in for a cool drink.  At this point Marine Pd. runs onto Curtin Av. Sitting at the window, I could see the busy Stirling highway across the railway track that separates the two roads.

 

I could also see two large buildings; one had a large dog painted on its wall.  The other had large windows all along its length.  Asking the owner what they were got the reply “you just landed.” I nodded.  He went on to tell me that the building with the dog was the Dingo flour Co, the other was the Holden car factory.  That evening we met Tom and Elsie, in the lounge for a drink. I ordered two lagers with lime for the girls, and two beers for Tom and me.  The barman pulled them all from the same tap, so I said that I thought I ordered two lagers and two beers? He said, “That’s all we got mate!”

 

Next day, we were picked up by a minibus, which took us to Graylands hostel for a meeting with government officials.  The hostel looked like an old army camp and its nickname was Stalag Thirteen.  We had little trouble finding Don and his wife Margaret.  They were housed in a brick flat.  It had two rooms and no kitchen as all meals were provided in a large canteen, the cost of which was included in the rent.

 

Don took me to the reception office, to look at the main information notice board.  There was a list of job vacancies on it.  Don pointed to one, it was asking for cooks to work in the kitchens on the camp.  He was going to try for it, as he had been a cook in the Army.  He suggested we could both do this until something else turned up.  I could not find anything else on the board in which I had any experience, but I was no cook.  I decided to go for it too, what did I have to lose?

 

After the meeting with the officials, Don and I went to see the camp manager about the cook's jobs.  I also asked about getting out of the hotel we were in.  He gave us both jobs and said he would get my family and me into Graylands at once, as it was their policy to have workers living on site.  So now I was a cook, earning forty dollars a week, roughly twenty pounds.

 

I did learn many things in that job, like how to skin ox tongues and press them.  I became quite a good curry & soup maker too.  At mealtimes, I would make up salads for those on diets.  You could get bored eating the same thing day after day, so I dressed them up some.  I would shape the ham slices into cones and piped creamed potatoes into them.  Tomatoes and radish I would take a pointed knife, and pierce a zigzag cut around the centre to form two frilled halves.  It was not a lot but it was appreciated.

 

Cooking for fifteen hundred people was no mean feat.  Everything had to be timed to perfection.  Sacks of potatoes had to be put into the peeling machines.  On the days we had chips; the potatoes were chipped and blanched ready to be fully cooked later.  Steaks had to be tenderised by hitting them with a meat hammer, hundreds of them.  Two cooks sweated over hot plates cooking them.

 

We worked in shifts, and when I was not on duty, I went around looking for other work.  I found a few part-time jobs; delivering new cars for Holden Motors. Selling food plans door to door, in the evenings.  If you bought food from this company, they gave you a freezer to keep it in.  The money from these jobs went into the bank, as I had to build up some capital.  I had bought an old Holden car for three hundred dollars, and it left me broke.

 

One car delivery was to Geraldton, three hundred miles away.  A car transporter was going up with six cars, and I had to drive number seven.  I had to drive it with the speedometer disconnected.  The car transporters driver would carry petrol for the car I was to bring back.  We arrived at the first garage in Geraldton, late at night.  And unloaded all the new cars, and re-loaded three old cars onto the top deck and three new cars on the bottom deck, which had to be taken off at his next stop.  I would leave the one I had driven here.

 

We had started and fuelled an old car to make sure it was a goer for my return journey before loading his cars.  When we had finished loading, I waved to the car transporters driver as he left.  I returned to my car and started it up again to pull off; and switched on the headlights.  The engine stopped, I had a flat battery.  The car would not start again on the key, but luckily, there was a downhill slope so I bump started it.  Switching on the sidelights, I was relieved to find that it kept going, so I drove out of town on them alone.  Picking up speed, I tried the headlights again with my fingers crossed, and it kept going I was on my way.

 

About forty miles south of Geraldton, just off the main highway, is a town called Dongara.  As I reached the turnoff for the town, a car switched on its headlights and cut across me, forcing me off the road.  Before I could get out of the car, a gun was pushed into my ear.  And I was told to step from the car by a police officer.  He was wearing his uniform coat over his pyjamas and told me I was under arrest.  Someone had seen me leave the garage and had rung the police saying the car had been stolen.

 

I had one hell of a job trying to convince him I was just delivering the car back to Perth.  I had to get him to ring the garage owner, to prove that this car was one he was sending back.  Then I had a hard time convincing him, I had not stolen his car. Then I argued if I knew where the keys for the new car were, why then would I steal this old heap of crap.  The policeman eventually lets me go, but would not help me get the car started again.

In his words he had wasted enough time and sleep on me already, he was going back to bed I could do what I liked.  I had to wait until someone came along who was willing enough to give me a tow

 

G. S. I

 

As I have said, on my off-duty hours, I looked for other work.  Searching through the papers, I came upon an advert for an oil exploration company called Geographical Services International, known by its initials G.S.I.  I phoned them and got an appointment, for an interview.

 

The job on offer was a camp manager. Part of my job on the camp, was to keep track of the stores and reorder stock so I thought I could do this job.  I would work on-site seven days a week for eight weeks, and then have two weeks off.  My pay would be eighty dollars a week, and they would fly me there and back.  That was double the money I was earning at present.  I told them I would let them know and I went home to discuss it with Jane.

 

She wasn’t too happy that I would be away for so long at a time, but the money would put us on a good footing.  So I found myself on a plane heading for Broome, one thousand three hundred and forty miles north of Perth.  The plane landed on the dusty airstrip, mid-afternoon on a very hot day, and I was sweating the moment I stepped from the plane.

 

The airport bus took most of the passengers into town.  I found my hotel the Roebuck, as I would be picked up in the morning to be taken to the camp.  Until then I was as free as a bird, I could have a good look around Broome.  The town was not the place it is now; in fact, it was just an outback town by the sea. It was clean and well kept; at one time it used to be a thriving port for the oyster and pearl trade, but no longer.

 

I was told that buccaneers once used the area, and the hotel was named after Captain Roebuck.  There is an area called Roebuck Plain nearby, and the waters off Broome are called ‘Buccaneers Archipelago’.  As the water here is very shallow over the coral, a long pier runs out to sea for a mile, which allowed the old pearl lugger’s to land their cargo.  An old narrow-gauge rail track run down the centaur of the pier back then, I don’t know if it still douses.  The locals used the pier for fishing, and they had many small boats tied up to it.

 

As I walked out to sea on the pier, the soft sea breeze cooled me down. The temperature was in the hundreds, and the land reflected that heat.  It was still hot out over the water, but the sea didn’t throw it back at you. The water was so clear you could see the bottom, even at the end of the pier, where the depth is about thirty feet.  I stood out there for some time looking at the vast array of fish, and there were greenback turtles too, swimming around and under me.

 

About ten o’clock the next morning, a battered four-wheel drive pulled up outside the hotel with a G, S, I, logo on the side.  From it stepped a tall American, wearing a Stetson hat.  I was already waiting in the lobby, as he asked for me at the reception.

I approached him and introduced myself; he took a long look at me and asked why I was dressed in a suit. I told him that as I was hired as camp manager, I thought I had better dress the part.  A huge smile spread across his face as he said,

 

“Go and put on some shorts, and meet me at the bar.”  When I got back to the bar, the American pushed a tall glass of beer in front of me, and we started to talk.

 

“We had better get straight to the point, my name is Red and I'm the tool pusher.  That in oil slang means the crew boss, you were hired to be a camp manager, but you misinterpreted the title.  We need someone to clean up, to help the cook and to go for stores. Besides that, you will be managing to do, one hundred and one other odd jobs around the camp. I take it that they did not explain all this back in Perth, well that’s the job on offer are you staying or going back.”  I looked at him a little deflated and answered,

 

“You must think I’m a right simpleton.  But I’m here now and it’s a long walk back to Perth, so if you’re game, I’ll stay.”

 

Two hours later, we were driving along the dirt main road that seemed to go on forever.  After about one hundred and twenty miles, we turned off the highway.  Then we headed east along a track, which had been made by the wheels of their four-wheel-drive vehicles.  This was my first experience of ‘going bush’, and I found that being in the vast outback was to my liking.

 

We headed out into the Great Sandy Desert for another sixty miles or so, before I saw in the distance, what looked like a black stick.  Red pointed to it saying, “That’s going to be your home for the next eight weeks.”  It was the rig, some fifteen miles away, and was the only thing to stand out in the almost flat landscape.  Mounted on a six-wheel truck, it was thirty feet high and used twenty-foot drill rods, to drill to a depth of one hundred feet.

 

This was a seismic survey crew.  A large square was marked out by a small bulldozer, and hundred-foot holes were drilled in each of the four corners.  A central hole of fifty feet was sunk, down which an instrumented capsule was lowered.  Dynamite charges were set off in the corner holes, the shock wave would travel through the ground.  Bouncing back from the rock formations, it would be recorded by the instruments in the survey van. They could tell what mineral or hopefully oil was in the ground, by the returning echo something like sonar I suppose.

 

My duties were quite simple; to help everyone.  I had to report to the tool pusher once a week, with a list of the stores we required for him to check. The cook was in the habit of ordering Brandy for cooking!  I would then drive into Broome, and give the list to the store manager to be filled.  I would load the dry goods in the Ute there and then, and he’d give me a key to the outside freezer.  I would pick up the frozen supplies, at two in the morning.  Until then I had the rest of the day to myself and could stay in the permanently booked room in the hotel.  All went well for a couple of weeks when one day I awoke to find the land-cruiser missing, together with the cook!  Red told me to get breakfast for the men; he was going after the cook.  He returned later that night with the land-cruiser in tow, but minus the cook.

 

We were told that he was in Broome Hospital, drunk as a skunk, and had alcohol poisoning.  Red turned to me and said, “You have just been promoted! You are now the cook.”  That meant I was now earning, one hundred and twenty dollars a week.  After five more sites were explored, we had finished the contract and packed up the gear.  We drove down to Port Headland where we parked the vehicles, then flew home to Perth.

 

Three weeks later, I was on my way to Exmouth.  We were to drill a well, just inland off Sharks Bay. Oil had been located offshore near a reef; the environmentalists didn’t want the reef disturbed.  The oil company had sent us here; they wanted to know if the oil find ran inshore.

 

The site was close to the water's edge, and this time we had a much bigger rig.  It stood on a platform attached to a sixty-foot trailer and was eighty feet tall.  All the machinery to run it together with the rods it used, were all on the trailer.  The crew was bigger as well; we ran three shifts around the clock.  I was here as the second cook, but in fact, I was the cook's helper.

 

On my off-duty time, I would go fishing in the clear shallow water.  Here, a coral reef runs from the beach out into the sea, and the fish could be seen swimming close to the shore. One day, while fishing I had almost lost all my hooks, so when my line got caught in the coral yet again, I waded out to retrieve the hook.  On returning to the beach, I was preparing to cast out again and saw two sharks swim close by.  Sod the hooks from now on! Then one day the tool pusher caught me welding some old metal fencing posts together, to make a tripod to support my fishing rod.

 

“Where did you learn to weld?” he asked.

 

“In the Navy, I was an engineer” I answered.

 

“You didn’t tell me you could weld, did you tell the Perth office?”

 

“No” was my reply.

 

“We have been trying to get a welder come fitter up here, and you have been here all the time.”  So now I was not only the cook, but welder and mechanic too, and with another increase in pay.  There was only one thing wrong with the job, Jane did not like to be left on her own for eight weeks at a time.  She made that quite clear, so after I returned from shark's bay I handed in my notice.

 

“Bell Brothers.”

 

‘Bells,’ as we all called them, was a large concern running a trucking section that was split into four parts.  Local! Long-distance! Low loaders and Mining.  They also had plant machinery of all kinds, from road making to mining equipment.  Large twin-engine scrapers, bulldozers, and graders right down to jackhammers.  They also had a large staff of maintenance mechanics. 

They also ran most of the mining camps, supplying men equipment and living accommodation, cooks and kitchens.  Their mining operations were varied, consisting of limestone, copper, gold, salt, and black sand.  The biggest, however, was iron-ore, with two manganese mines, one at Meekatharra, and the other at woody woody. You won’t find that one on the map; it is above Marble bar.  Four hundred miles inland from Port headland, I know I spent a month there.  Why Woody Woody? I don't know! There wasn't a tree in sight.  The iron ore mines were Mt Newman, (otherwise, know as Mt Whale Back).  Mt Tom Price = (Hill 52), and Paraburdoo = (Hill 54), you will hear more of these mines as you read on into this book.

 

I joined Bell’s in 1969 having finished with G, S, 1.  I walked into Bell’s transport office and spoke to Owen Jones.  (He assured me he was not Welsh.)  He told me that they had just advertised for drivers, it was to be in the paper at the weekend.  But as I was there he would give me a test; he called one of the drivers to take me out. 

 

He then asked; have you driven a Mack before? I replied I have never seen one, let alone driven one.  He laughed and told Tony to see if I could drive.  The old B600 & R600 together with the earlier forward control F600 Mack’s had two gearboxes each with its own lever.  The main had five forward gears and one reverse.  The ‘joey’ box had four gears.  For everyone in the main, you changed four in the ‘joey’.  This gave you twenty forward gears and four reverse gears.

 

Have you ever heard Beethoven’s fifth, played on a gearbox?  Well, you would have that day, I was hopeless.  When we returned to the yard, Tony told Owen I could drive an artic, but the gearbox had me beat.  Owen said I would get used to it in time, and said I had the job.  I would be driving English built Foden, with an English gearbox on local tipper work.

 

I started the next Monday on quarry work, running limestone within a hundred-mile radius of Perth.  I found it hot and dusty work in that old Foden, you had to drive with the windows open and a handkerchief over your mouth.  I had been on the job for about five weeks when I was asked if I would like to go onto the long-distance side of the firm. I said I would love to; a week later I was given my first run.

 

I was to take a six-wheel Mack tipper, plus a super lift-tipping trailer to Mt Tom Price.  On the way, I was to drop off some equipment at Meekatharra.  Then on to Mt Newman, to deliver a Ute.  When I arrived at Tom Price, I would fly home on a company plane.

 

When the truck was loaded, I asked the yard foreman.  A very helpful chap called Bert Hughes, (by the way, did you see that program about young orphans from England, being sent to Australia, well, he was one of those lads!) “How do I get to Meekatharra?”  He pointed to the front gate, and said: “go through those and turn right, now on your way.”  One of the drivers told me to run out to Midland turn north and take the inland road, which was the great northern highway.  So off I trundled and did what he had said.  I had been driving for three hours and thought I must be near it by now.  The signs told me I was on the right road, but not how far it was.  I was approaching a place called Wubin; here the road turned sharp right. The road straight on was the inland road to Geraldton.

On the junction there was a cafe owned by a Scotsman, so the cafe was obviously called Jocks.  I pulled over for a break, while I was ordering I asked him how much further to Meeka.  He looked at me and said, “First time up here?” I nodded and answered “yes,” while picking up my tea and sandwich.  He smiled at me saying not far to go now, only about three hundred miles.  From Wubin to Meeka, the road changed.  It had a strip of asphalt ten feet wide, with dirt sides of about twelve feet.  If you met someone coming the other way, you went halfway off the asphalt to allow the oncoming vehicle to pass.  In two or three places, there were many miles of just dirt road.

 

Panes Find is in an area where gold had been found, and it is in the middle of no-where.  The pub is on the side of the road, acts as a landmark for it’s the only building to be seen.  If you walk into the bush you will find many small diggings, just holes in the ground with wooden tripods over them.

 

It was late when I arrived there and decided to stay the night, I did not fancy the idea of driving in the dark on a strange road.  Plus there was the possibility, of hitting a kangaroo or emu because there was no fencing.  After having a meal, I sat in the bar with the owner.  (He was, in his own words, the chief cook and bottle washer.).  He told me all about the place, how it was found and when.  He offered to take me to see the first mine that was found when I was next there in daylight.  We were to become great friends in the years to come, as later on, I would be delivering to him once a week.

 

In the morning I was up with the sun and got going, passing through Mount Magnet.  Then Cue both gold mining towns, driving for two hours I arrived in Meeka.  Our depot was situated on the south side of town, but you could not miss it as the main road runs straight through the middle of Meeka.  I had breakfast with the manager and his wife, and then unloaded his supplies and then those for the manganese mine.  The road from Meeka was just dirt, with concrete run troughs at the creeks.  When I hit the dirt road, it was quite a smooth ride.  But as I got further up, it started to get rough just like driving on a corrugated sheet of iron.  The truck axles rattled, and I was shaking so much I ached.  I found the faster I drove, the smoother the truck rode.  So it was full speed ahead and damn the potholes.

 

As I travelled north the landscape changed, from bush to vast expanses of land with sparse vegetation.  The colour of the ground changed too, it was still red but deeper with a rusty hue.  The other thing was the lack of traffic; you could drive for hours before meeting anything.  Apart from the odd car, heavy trucks were all you met, some of those being road trains hauling material for the expanding mines and their camps.  And that was just what I was doing; only I was leaving the truck as well as the goods.

 

A new road was built to reach Newman from the highway, a construction vital to bring in the equipment to build the mine and also the rail link to Port Headland.  Having dropped the trailer and got something to eat, I was told the quickest way to Tom Price was along the purposed route of the rail track.  It had been graded and built up to take the track, but they had not started to lay it yet.  It would save me some two hours, as it cut the corner taking me onto the Wittenoom road bypassing Roy Hill.

I pulled into Wittenoom and met for the first time, people who over the coming years I was going to get to know very well.  Mr Steppini, who ran the town store, came out of his shop as I pulled up saying, “I thought you where the freezer a day early.”  We did not know it then but the next time I was to see him, I would be driving the Wittenoom freezer!

 

Wittenoom was also a mining town, though you would not have known it from looking at the town.  The mine was some distance away, and they mined blue asbestos. Today the town no longer exists as it was; it has been almost wiped off the face of the earth.  And in true Australian fashion, they had a farewell party for the town and drank the pub dry.  (In fact, they had such a good time drinking it dry, they did it time and time again.)

 

After buying something to eat and drink, I went on my merry way.  Climbing up through Riotinto gorge an hour out from Wittenoom, I learnt a new bit of Highway Code.  Everybody gives way to road trains! I suppose now is a good time as any, to acquaint you with some of the unwritten rules of the road.

 

You always stop for someone if they have broken down and to leave water and food, if there is nothing you can do to get them going.  On long runs into the bush on rarely used roads, you inform the police of your destination and estimated time of arrival. When driving big rigs on dirt roads, drive on the side that allows the dust to blow off the road.  Giving oncoming and overtaking vehicles a clear view of the road.

 

Riotinto gorge is a steep climb, a single-track road that winds up through a sheer-sided cutting cut into an escarpment, and it was the only way to reach the plateau above, and Tom Price at this time.  Halfway up I heard the sound of an air-horn blast three times; I thought nothing of it.  A short time later I heard a single blast, still, nothing registered.  As I heard the next blast, the nose of a Kenworth came around a bend.  It skidded to a jarring halt, as the driver saw me.  A few choice words from him had me back up a hundred yards, to a place where he could just squeeze past.  As his cab came alongside mine he told me.

"When you are coming down you stop at the top and give three blasts.  If you hear nothing you come down, blasting once every so often.  If you are going up you stop at the bottom and blast twice, as you go up you give two blasts."  Simple, if you know the drill. 

 

I arrived at Tom Price two hours ahead of my deadline, parked the truck and had a meal.  The camp boss though and insisted I was staying to work with the truck.  But one radio call confirmed that I was to return to Perth, so I was taken out to the landing strip. I to wait for the plane, him to pick up the personnel it was bringing up.  Bells had their own aircraft and I flew back to Perth, in a four-seat single-engine Cessna.  The pilot’s nickname was Mad Max, and he lived up to it by flying close to the ground to round up a wild heard of donkeys.

 

It seemed I was to be a delivery boy, for the next few months I spent my time taking new vehicles of all types to all the mining camps. And sometimes bringing back old beat-up vehicles, of all types. I got to know my way around Western Australia very well.

 

 

Two trips took me to Alice Springs; we that is Bells were building a new road from Alice to Darwin.  I was to take a water tanker with a full load of fresh clean water there, leave it and fly home.  They wanted the water for use in the camp’s kitchen; they would be using bore water for compacting the road. I headed out on the Great Eastern Highway through Northam, Southern Cross, and onto Norseman where I stopped for the night.  From here you are on the Glass highway, the correct name is Eyre highway.  It had been nicknamed Glass highway because of all the windscreens that had been smashed along its length.

 

The Eyre Highway is or was a dirt road, which runs across the Nullarbor Plain.  It is just inland of the Great Australian Bight, a vast expanse of land with no change of scenery to keep you from getting bored.  But there were always plenty of potholes to avoid.  I was once told, if you see a smooth stretch of road, avoid it, it’s more than likely a pothole filled with bulldust.  I have seen trucks with broken springs on the side of the road, because of driving into one.

 

The only stop I can remember was at Eucla, just before the border with South Australia.  There is a large roadhouse here, with everything for the weary traveller.  I never meant to stay there, but I got talking to some drivers.  They told me of a shortcut through the lakes at that time of year, and then on to the Stuart highway.  Before I knew it, it was time for bed.

 

In the morning I got going at sunup, turning off the highway at Cadune.  Headed into the bush following the track I was told about, no signpost to tell me that I was on the right road.  And I was told there would be none.  The dust was very fine and seemed to roll away from the tyres, like water to be picked up by the vortex at the back.  Tossed into the air, it would form a huge cloud of dust.  That dust lingered in the air and could be seen for miles.

 

There were many sidetracks, but they all led back to the main road, most likely detours around bogy patches in the wet.  Climbing out of the low country the road was the normal red gravel, but it ran straight as an arrow disappearing into the distance like a red ribbon.  I had driven one hundred miles through the area they call the lakes, and I had not seen a drop of water.

 

This was now open flat plain; the only thing to spoil the view was a cloud of dust coming towards me.  It turned out to be one of Bells low loaders returning home from Alice.  We stopped nose to nose and had a chat for half an hour.  He told me where to find the campsite, but I would most likely find the men in Alice.  He also told me not to say I had come this way, as the company forbade taking shortcuts on unmade roads.

 

The most important thing he told me, was where to get a good meal in Coober Pedy.  It was dark when I pulled into the pubs large parking area.  Walking into the café, I asked if it was okay to park for the night.  I was told yes but if that thing is full of fuel, park it in the corner as far away as possible. His eye’s lit up as I said not fuel, but fresh soft sweet water from Perth. He then made me an offer that was very hard to refuse, (so I didn’t,) an evening meal a jug of beer and breakfast, for a two hundred gallon tank of water.  In the pub bar that night I was offered several pieces of opal, by some of the miners.

 

 

Some were ground and polished, others rough and straight from the diggings.  I had to decline them all, as I didn't carry a lot of money. Realising I was not in the market to buy, one old miner after several glasses of my beer showed me how to tell a good opal.  He had rings of varying value that looked the same to me until he explained how they were made.  The most important thing to do is to turn the ring, so you are looking at the back of the opal.  If you cannot see the stone, but just a black backing it is not one opal but a thin layer of good opal topped with clear or milky opal.  The black substance has a layer of silver on it. it does the same if you put it on the glass, and turn it into a mirror.  The light and the colours of the good opal are reflected in the clear opal.

 

In the morning I was up with the sun and joined the early risers for a breakfast of steak and eggs.  Most of the work is done early in the morning, as by midday it gets a bit too hot, so they stop until evening then would start again.

 

It is about four hundred and fifty miles, or if you prefer seven hundred km’s from Coober Pedy to Alice Springs.  I had about eight hours or more driving before I reached Alice, I should be there around mid-afternoon.  As I drove into Alice, it was not the town I had imagined.  I had seen the film, read the book, but it did not fit the picture I had in my mind.  Looking like any other outback town, with tin-roofed buildings lining the road.  And larger, old colonial-style two-storey building, with overhanging roofs and balconies, stood in the centre of the town.

 

The wide main street with cars and open-backed ute’s, parked noses to the curb mostly outside the hotel.  Parked with them, was a Bells station wagon and Ute.  I found somewhere to park and entered the hotel.  I did not know who I was looking for, but one word shouted had someone waving at me, {BELLS!}.  He asked me where I had parked, I was told to leave it there and go and fetch my overnight things, as they would book me into the hotel.  In the morning we would all go out to the campsite, together.

 

I had left Perth Monday morning; it was now Thursday evening, four long hot days later.  I was ready for a night in a proper bed and a cool air-conditioned room, instead of a sleeping bag on top of the truck roof.  Now don’t get me wrong, I liked to sleep out in the open.  The sky at night in the outback is so clear, you feel as if you can touch the stars.  Normally there are so many stars, you don’t see because of light pollution.  But out there in the bush they are so bright, it is never really dark.

 

All Bells solo drivers were issued with a swag, a seven-foot square of waxed canvas.  With six-foot-long by two and a half foot wide, by two-inch-thick foam mattress.  A sleeping bag, pillow and two leather belts.  There was a rack on the back of the cab, to store it.

 

Early breakfast and I was on my way, on the last leg of this trip.  Just one hundred and forty miles, to just South of Ti-Tree.  Here halfway between Alice and Tennant Creek, was to be the campsite.  I said, was to be, because at the moment there was nothing, just a large front-end loader.  A small hut, a tent and some pegs in the ground.  They had marked out the camp, as to where to put the units.

 

The camp boss told me that the company’s jet would be in on Tuesday with eight men.  I could fly back in it, or there would be trucks arriving from now on.  I could go back with one of the driver’s, and shear the driving. I said the plane if you don’t mine.  He asked, “can you drive that thing?” pointing to the cat 966 loader.  I replied I have never driven one that big, I had driven a JCB when I worked on SWEB but I was no expert.  Near enough he said, play with it for an hour then we will see if we can get some work done, and walked away.

 

The first job he wanted was an unloading ramp, a gentle slope to four feet deep the dirt piled on top at the deep end then graded back.  With no crane, we had to drag the units off of the trailers and pull them into place with the loader.  The units had large skids, attached for this purpose.  Next a deep pit, some distance away from the camp with ramps either end, the dirt to be piled on the side nearest the camp to house the generator unit.  Then there was to be a pit for the fuel tank, which had to be buried to keep it cool.

           

As I was finishing the generator pit, three trucks pulled in each loaded with units.  We backed the first trailer down the ramp.  I hooked the chains onto the first unit and pulled the generator into its pit.  On the same trailer was a twenty-foot chill room, loaded with all types of stores from potatoes to beer, its small engine running to keep the right temperature.  It was dragged into its pegged out position.

 

The second trailer held the dining room, it to was positioned parallel to the chill room some ten feet from it.  Now came the cookhouse or galley, forty feet long, one end was the servery.  Then a large deep-freezer, and at the other end, it's engine also running.  It was pulled across the ends of the dining and chill rooms.  Some side panels were removed from the galley, and then both chill and dining rooms were pushed until they locked into the galley.  Soft rubber buffers on the ends sealed the units.

 

The main part of the camp was now set-up.  There would be thirty living units in all, each with five single rooms.  Also, there would be shower and toilet units.  Two living units had arrived and in the failing light were pulled into their allotted position.  It was now after five, the generator was working and hooked up to the galley.

 

The cooks were busy preparing a meal; John the camp boss was well pleased with the way things had gone.  As we were eating our meal he ordered a carton of beer and put it on Bell’s tab.

 

Saturday we awoke to find three trucks with units that had crept in overnight, we unloaded them before breakfast, as we had been told we were all going to Alice for the festival.  In Alice, I watched camel, and donkey racing.  Also, sheep with rag dolls, tied onto their backs as jockeys, were raced.

 

But the highlight of the day I was told would be the boat race.  I laughed when I heard this.  “Where,” said I “in the swimming pool,” “no,” said they “in the river.”  The river or creek was bone dry, it looked like there had not been water in it, for years.  I got up, and walked away still laughing, and came across a happy bunch of Jackaroos.  (Australian cowboys.)

I got talking to one of them; they had come in from their station a hundred miles away for the day’s festivities.  When I told him that my friends, had tried to tell me there would be a boat race here in the river today.  He smiled and said, “that’s right sport; there are the boats down there.”  I looked to where he was pointing and saw the row of gaily-painted hulls.  I shook my head in disbelief grinning I said, “no water.”  He leaned forward and called out, “Hay Jack’O this bloke reckons there's no water in the creek.”

 

A battered Australian bush hat leaned out of the crowd.  Under it, an ebony face, with a flat nose, and two bloodshot eyes looked at me.  Then the face split into a grin, a grin that would never be used on a toothpaste advert.  “That’s because him white feller, only people in touch with mother earth can see the water.

 

The rainbow serpent, (mythical serpent from the Aborigine Dreamtime) lives upriver he drinks all the water.  When he pees, it becomes Dreamtime water.  You can’t see it but you can feel it, you walk into the creek and see.”  I just sat there, I had fallen for some things in my life, but I was not falling for this.  He got up, picking up the cool box beside him as he did so.

 

Walking into the creek he shivered, saying how cold the water was.  Then tilting the container, he made to force it under the surface to fill it.  He then staggered up to me, straining under its imagery weight.  I sat there with a silly grin, knowing full well that it was empty.  When the deluge came, it took me completely by surprise.  The shock of it left me spluttering and gasping for breath.  The water was so cold it still had ice cubes in it, plus some beer bottle labels.  I had fallen for the, ‘not as empty as you thought trick.’

 

All around me people were standing clapping, and roaring with laughter.  Some, (my new found Bells work-mates,) were rolling on the ground in hysterics.  It seemed I had become part of the day’s entertainment, but I can tell you this.  I bet I was at that moment, the coolest dude in Alice.

 

When the crews for the big race stepped into their hulls, they knelt down and pulled, what looked like braces over their shoulders.  Then holding the framework, which held the two sides together.  They stood as one hoisting the framework, off the ground revealing their legs.  Walking to the start, they formed up in line.  A gun was fired, and off they went.  The crowd went wild, shouting encouragement to their favourite crew.  Don’t ask me the rules; I don’t think there are any.  I don’t know if the winning crew was the one who past the finish line first.  Or the one, who sank the most, boats.  One boat finished in two, the stern twenty feet in front of the bow.  It came in fourth and sixth.

 

By Tuesday morning most of the camp was complete.  I was to drive a Ute to the airstrip, followed by the station wagon.  The men arriving on the plane would use it to carry their gear back to the camp.  As I was tossing my swag into the Ute, John came up to me to say goodbye.  He asked me if I wanted to change my mind, and stay to work with him.  He had said he would give Jane a job in the camp, and the boys could go to school in Alice.  At the interview to Immigrate Jane, she had said she wanted to go to Alice Springs, but I did not think she would like the heat.  I thanked him again, saying I would talk to Jane about it.

I arrived at Bell’s yard that afternoon and reported to Owen that I was back.  He told me to have a couple of days off he would ring me when he needed me.  Getting into my car I drove to Graylands, just in time for tea.  I had been away for eight days it seemed like a month.

 

On the Friday following my return from Alice, I was in the yard helping to load a freezer when I was called to the office.

 

“I need someone to take the beast to Alice Springs, the driver was due to go on Sunday but has rung in sick,” said Owen.  (The Beast was a three-axle drive, R700 long nose Mack low loader unit with a V’IO 600 HP Detroit diesel engine.)

 

“You will be taking the big twin-engine scraper, the operator will drive the service van to act as escort.”  I went to check the truck out; the scraper had already been loaded onto the five-axle sixty-foot trailer.  The wheels of the scraper were on outriggers as the scraper was fourteen feet wide.  A two-axle gooseneck dolly and a two-axle swan neck dolly were between the trailer and the unit.  That made it a fourteen-axle rig.  I had never seen the size of it before let alone driven one.  To say I was apprehensive would be putting it mildly, but one of the low-loader drivers said just steer it the rest will follow.  As I could only drive during daylight hours, we left the yard at sunup on Sunday.  A convoy consisting of three low-loaders was leaving on Monday carrying two D8 Dozers and a grader.  We had full days start on them, but they would catch us up somewhere along the way.

 

There would be no shortcut through the lakes this time and the slower speed meant it would take me longer to get there.  I had crossed into South Australia before I saw the others creeping up on me.  We all parked for the night at Iron Knob, just short of Port Augusta.  In the morning they set off before me, saying they would see me in Coober Pedy.

 

As I pulled into the pub car park I noticed one of the low-loaders was empty.  The grader was missing and there where no drivers to be seen.  They turned up as the sun was setting, saying they had just been doing a job.  It was then I realised the car park had been graded too.

 

When I got to the camp, I renewed my friendship with John. He asked did I intend to stay and take up his offer of working with him. “Sorry, mate no can do” I replied, “kid’s schooling and all that, Jane has her friends you know how it is.” He nodded and said, “Change your mind and you can give me a call.”

 

The other low-loaders drivers had unloaded and had uncoupled their dollies, loading them onto one trailer. One unit had been loaded onto its own trailer; it, in turn, had been loaded onto the other empty trailer. When I was empty, my dollies were loaded with the others, then the whole rig was driven onto my trailer. We would double man back to Perth in half the time.

 

Woody, Woody was a manganese mine on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert four hundred & fifty miles inland from Port Headland. I was sent there with an eight-wheeled International harvester tipper, towing a super-lift, tipping trailer from Perth. At Meeka I would pick up another two tipping trailers, and tow the lot to woody woody.

The trailers were partly loaded with stores for the mine, just to stop them bouncing too much. I was going there for a month to work this truck, then fly home and return to normal long-distance driving. All Bell’s drivers were supposed to do a stint in the bush. You could go almost anywhere depending on the time of year. Apart from the four different types of ore mines, there were salt flats, they would flood a large man-made lake with saltwater then let the sun evaporate it when there was a thick layer it would be harvested.

 

Then there was black sand for the glass industry, the talcum powder mine for baby’s bums, and let’s not forget the cattle & sheep stations. Hauling cattle to the railhead at Geraldton or to new pasture was a long, smelly job. Normally four trailers to a road train; twenty-five cattle to a trailer. Your speed over dirt roads would be fifteen to twenty miles an hour. Alright if you were driving into the wind. If you had a flat tyre, I bet there would be one of the cows holding something back just waiting for you to stand under them. At the shearing time, you had road trains of sheep wool.

 

Having left Meeka I had familiar roads to drive on until I reached Royhill. There I would turn north into the unfamiliar country. Marble Bar would be the largest town I would pass. It was said to be the hottest place in Australia, I did not stop to find out. Woody was a desolate place. Bell’s ran the camp and bar-come clubroom. With nowhere else to go, it was full every night.

 

Most of the workers were immigrants, here for the job only. They had come to Australia on a six-month work permit. Most of them from Italy and Greece, but there were other Eastern European countries represented. The films that were shown in the clubroom reflected this.

 

We (the drivers) worked seven days a week, thirteen hours a day for the duration of our stay. For me it would be one month, others were there for three months. A day’s work at woody woody started for us, the drivers, by getting up at four am and having breakfast by five. At that time it was for drivers only.

 

Overnight the trucks and trailers would have been loaded, and now waited in neat rows for their drivers. Twenty, eight-wheeled tippers with three super-lift trailers each loaded with twenty-five tonnes of ore hooked up to form a road train with a payload of one hundred tones a piece. On the way out from breakfast, we would pick up a box filled with a day’s rations that consisted of two pints of water, sandwiches, fruit, biscuits, and a flask of tea or coffee. Then it was finding your truck and pull out in turn.

 

There was a company rule that you had to check your tyres every fifty miles. We got around that by forming pairs, then every thirty minutes the back one would overtake the front one. In this way you could check each other’s tyres, it also made up time for us. After three hours we would stop for a thirty-minute break, which always ended up as sixty minutes. At the halfway point we would meet the twenty road trains returning to Woody and stop for lunch.

 

The road was all dirt to Headland and was rarely used by traffic other than Bell’s. Bell’s maintained the road by having two teams of two graders, one pair working from Headland the other from Woody Woody. They would meet in the middle, then grade their way back again.

Both teams would be supplied from Headland, ferried to them by the returning convoy of road trains to Woody Woody also carrying a large quantity of water for the mine and camp. The water was carried in large heavy rubber inflatable tanks, placed in several of the empty tipping trailers. On our arrival at Port Headland, we would park the trucks at the sea terminal to be unloaded overnight. Then we were bussed to the Bell’s camp at Headland where we would stay until morning when we would start our return journey to Woody Woody.

 

After woody woody

 

I had finished at woody woody I flew home from Port Headland, not by company plane but by M. M. A., known to all as Mickey Mouse Airway, its real name was Macmillan, McDouglas Airways. I was on my way home for a two-week holiday before reporting back to work in Perth. Nothing had been planned, just being with my family enjoying trips to the beach or Zoo.

 

We took in the sites of Perth. Kings Park was a place we loved to go to. It is high above the river swan and gives you a panoramic view of the city and river. We went out into the suburbs too. Some of the families we had met on the camp had moved out and settled in the outlying parts of Perth. Tom and Else Plate the couple we had gone to Cottesloe with the first day we arrived in Australia had been given a state home in Maidana.

 

Eddy Edwards, one of the Bell’s drivers, who was also a pome together with his wife lived in Forrestfleld. Frank and Margaret Barras had settled in Mosman Park. I mention these couples because we became great friends, and along with others we met later, have kept in contact with since we left Australia all those years ago.

 

On our days out and about, we looked at many houses new and old, what the area they were in was like, and if we would like to live there. You could stay at the hostel for two years. We had been there for nine months. With Jane working in the kitchens at the hostel and with the money, I was earning the bank balance was growing. Being nearly ready to bye our own home, we wanted to make sure it was in a place we liked. Jane had picked the style of the house. It was the same as Ann and Eddy’s, all we had to do now was pick the right place.

 

Wittenoom freezer

 

After my two weeks off when I returned to work. I was told to partner Tony Leaper on the Wittenoom freezer. His offsider was on long service leave and would be gone for a month. This was my first trip on a two-man truck. The truck was an R600 Mack with a dog box fitted to the back of the cab for sleeping. We would drive or were meant to drive for a twenty-four-hour duration, four on, and four off.

 

 

The Wittenoom freezer was a milk run, it had its own trailer and ‘Wittenoom freezer’ was painted on its side, but there were many stops before Wittenoom. We would load the trailer Monday afternoon with most of the goods, all labelled and in place for unloading.

 

The ice cream would arrive early Tuesday before we left. Our first stop was the pub at Panes Find. We got there at midnight, then on to Meeka for the meagerness mine and our depot. Tuckanara is halfway between Mount Magnet and Meeka, it is not a town, just a few old railway buildings. The railway had become unprofitable so the track was torn up and the men moved to other sites. ‘Mar’s’ husband retired and the railway authorities gave them the house to live in. We stopped there for breakfast although it was not actually a cafe.

 

After Mar’s husband died she turned her front room into an eating-place for drivers, not for profit but for the company. She only charged to cover the cost, so the drivers of the Wittenoom freezer kept her supplied at Perth prices. Before leaving Meeka we stopped at the flying doctor service to see if they had anything to take to any of the Stations. There was a copper mine called Therduna, that we drove into.

 

But most of the stations were miles of the road, and had forty four-gallon drums at the start of their drives; we placed the goods in them and drove on. Munderwindy was a post office relay station, as there was nothing for hundreds of miles on this road it had opened an unofficial shop, we delivered boxes of frozen pies and chocolate milk for them to sell.

 

Mount Newman camp was also on our list. It had grown since I had last been there. As it would be an open cast mine, they had started to move the top of the hill that bore the iron ore. But the railway track was far from completion. Returning to the main highway our next stop would be Ethel Creek station. It was set off the road some fifteen miles but had its own loop road that rejoined the main road just south of Roy Hill. We pulled up at Ethel Creek just before midnight and got our heads down for a good sleep.

 

An aboriginal awoke us with a mug of tea and told us breakfast was in ten minutes. Steak and eggs is a good way to start the day, but at five in the morning and still half asleep, it takes a bit of willpower. From Roy Hill it was a straight run into Wittenoom, arriving early Thursday afternoon and unloading the bulk of our load at the shop of Mr Strpine, and the pub. There was a chap there who ran a light aircraft to deliver goods to the outlying stations; we placed his stores in the shop's cold room.

 

Tom Price had got bigger and was now on the run, they had previously driven into Wittenoom with a truck to pick up their stores. We were not due there until Friday morning, so we had the rest of the day off unofficially. We climbed up through Rio Tinto Gorge in darkness, stopping at the top in a large parking area. There were a few trucks parked there the drivers sitting around the blazing barbecue that had previously been built out of rocks by other drivers to cook their food. It had become a regular stop. Tony opened the side door of the freezer and pulled a box out; it contained steaks, burgers and sausages. Form the back door or chiller part he got some eggs and potatoes, we cooked and shared them with everyone there. The beer came from the other drivers, who had been waiting for Tony to arrive.

Tony explained to me that the boxes had come from the cooks at the camps we had delivered to. The cooks had made up food parcels, for Tony to take back to Perth for their wives. For this favour they made up a parcel for Tony not realising that all the other cooks were doing the same, so Tony ended up with several boxes. Early in the morning, we headed for Tom Price and our last drop, as we crossed duck creek there was water flowing through it. Tony told me it was normally dry, it must have rained in the high country and was filtering down.

 

At Tom Price, it’s almost the same distance home if you crossed to the coast and went down the coastal highway, or back the way we had come. Because the road from here to the coast was nothing more than a cattle track, Tony returned the way we had come. When we got to duck creek it was in full flow, Tony drove into it in low gear, gunning the engine to keep the revs high. The nose of the truck dove into the water, I thought we were going right under but it levelled off with the bonnet just under the water. It looked like the bulldog on the bonnet was swimming. We arrived home Saturday lunchtime.

 

On my fourth and last trip with Tony, we were told we had an extra drop if we could get into it. They had found iron near Tom Price maybe seventy miles away at hill 54 (to be called Paraburdoo) there would be a flag on the side of the road to tell us where to turn off. The run went as normal, and we found the flag and turned into the bush. We followed the tyre marks of the survey crew for some way across the open country, passing several stakes with coloured tape tied to them to show us the way.

 

Coming to a stake with a cardboard arrow pointing into a dry creek, the writing on it said to follow the creek bed. Two to three miles up the creek there was an arrow pointing out, it was quite a climb up the bank and we thought we might belly the trailer at the top of the climb, but we were almost empty and were able to pull it over.

 

Passing through a lightly wooded area we got caught in the soft ground the wheels digging themselves in before we knew it. With shovels, it took an hour to cover less than half a mile until we sank to the axles and could move no further. There was nothing for it, but to walk the rest of the way to get someone to pull us out.

 

Luckily it was not much further, and after several miles, I reached the camp and got them to send their D4 bulldozer to pull Tony and our truck out. The camp was made up of four sleeping tents, with a larger tent to cook and eat in. Two, three-ton ex-army trucks, two Toyota land cruiser's a six-wheel drill rig, and of course the bulldozer.

 

From here it was quicker to return home via the coast road, we were told how to get there by going through a cattle station called Deep Dean. We crossed some open country until we reach the fence that separated the two stations, and then followed the fencing track until we found the gate to cross over into Deep Dean territory. Stopping at the homestead, Tony asked for permission to cross their land, it was just a formality really, an act of courtesy if you wish, for we had already travelled for two hours on their land. From here a road continued on their land as far as the highway, some twenty miles away.

 

 

Someone from the past.

 

I was in the Kelmscott pub one night, in nineteen sixty-nine having a quiet drink. When I noticed someone, taking an interest in me. He was sat several tables from me, and I noticed him studying me for some time. It was a bit unnerving to see him staring at me, and I wonder if I had crossed him in some way. Those I couldn't see how, as I did not recognise him at all. Then I prepared to defend myself, as he got up and approached me. Many years before I had been accused of a crime, that I was sure my double had committed. Was this another case of mistaken identity, was I going to have to talk myself out of this one. Or fight my way out of the pub, for something I hadn't done.

 

"I know you from somewhere!" He said with a smile on his face, as he got to the table I was sitting at. "Where do you work?" He asked, then shook his head when I said. "Bell Brothers, I drive for them." "No that's not it, where do you come from?" He asked rubbing his chin, and thinking harder." "Taunton in Somerset England," I said. And again it meant nothing to him, then he asked. "What's your name?" Then his face light up into a massive smile, when I answered him with. "Henry Joseph Macey."

 

"Your Joe Macey we were in 4E2 the stoker's mess, onboard HMS Eagle together." Hell, I had left Eagle ten years ago in nineteen fifty-nine, I couldn't remember seeing him before. But he was right I had been in 4E2 mess on Eagle, I had joined her when I had finished training in September of fifty-six. And left her when she went into dry dock, at Plymouth I think in July of fifty-nine. He also remembered Jock Gallagher Ock'ey Ockalton, Smeadly Loather and ginger Cook. My four going ashore mate's onboard Eagle, the fab five as we called ourselves. He also said he had joined the five of us, on some of our runs ashore.

 

"The six of us got kicked out of that bullfight in Barcelona, and I was with you that night we slept on the fishing boat in Naples. When we thought it was our liberty boat because it was just like a Navy M F V. Remember that night in Toulon when we had that sword fight with French breadsticks. Making out we were the Musketeers and that couple that hid us when the French police turned up. God, we had some good runs ashore, can't drink like that now mate. Two pints my limit now, she'd go nut's if I went out and got drunk without her." He laughs and looked at his half-empty glass, then took a swig and laughed again. "Wish I could turn the clock back Joe, we had some good mates in the mob."

 

I knew exactly what he meant, the mates you made in the forces. Were your mates for life, even if you never saw them again after you left the service. They would always be in your head, always there when you thought of the good times. And some of the bad, when you stood back to back defending each other. We sat reminiscing the good old days, over another glass. Telling tales of misshapes we had had, and laughing at tales of misshapes others had had. We were interrupted in our merriment when a hand landed on my shoulder.

 

"I'm an off-duty policeman, and I'm arresting you for having pornographic images." This chap standing behind me said, with his fingers digging into my shoulder.

"I've just heard you say, you have a picture of you playing with pussy. Don't deny it my wife heard you as well, so I'm also arresting you for obscenities in a public place."

 

 Simon and I looked at each other dumbfounded, then he almost fell off his chair with laughter. While I was utterly speechless, at this guys misunderstanding of what was really said. Everybody around us was looking at us, to see what the commotion was all about. And as Simon couldn't stop laughing, I had to explain to the policeman his mistake.

 

"Yes, I did say that we were talking about our old ship. And I said I had a photo taken on the flight deck, it is of me playing with pussy the ship's cat." I said it loud enough for all to hear, and the policeman's face went bright red as the whole of the pub burst out laughing. I got that photo blown up to a large print, and the pub landlord hung it behind the bar. So everybody could see Harry ( Joe Macey. ) in his uniform playing with pussy.

 

 

Onboard H M S Eagle a fleet carrier sister ship of Ark Royal in 1958.

Don a Job

 

When I reported for work after my last trip with Tony, I was called into the office to see Owen. I thought I had done something wrong, but he told me that there was four new forward control, sleeper cab Mack trucks arriving. They had arrived from the U.S. as left-hand drives and were being converted to right-hand drive.

 

These are on trial and will be two-man trucks. Three of the trucks will go onto the regular freezer runs; we are putting one on general work. If you want this one, it’s yours. We will get a driver to partner you unless you know anyone you would like to run with. I jumped straight in and said, “I know someone, my mate Don. We came to Australia together, he is a good driver and I would be happy to drive with him.

 

He has just returned from Cocoas Island where he had worked as a cook, and I don't think he wants to go back. If you have not got a trip for me today I will see him tonight and tell him to come in.” Don started the following Monday. We both worked in the yard until we were told to pick up our truck.

 

The conversion that had been carried out was not too pretty; in fact, it was an eyesore. They had removed the steering wheel from the column and placed a ninety-degree gear on it. Another ninety-degree box was bolted on the right-hand side of the cab, the steering wheel attached to it. A shaft ran between the two boxes coupled with universal joints to take up any miss alignment.

 

Removing the instrument panel they had made a box to put them in and had screwed it to the top of the dash. Foot pedals had been placed on the driver's side with rods running across the cab floor attached to the original mechanism. It was a walk through cab, the two gear sticks coming through the floor, as in the ‘R’ series, but now in front of the engine cover. I would not be far wrong if I said they had used the same chassis. The cab was set so far forward you were sitting in front of the steering axle instead of on top of it. As you went around a corner you seemed to travel sideways.

 

As I said these trucks were on trial, we had them for nine months when they were replaced with right-hand drive vehicles that had been built in the states for the Australian market. We had some trouble with the conversions, but that was Don playing about. He would sit there looking all innocent. I would find the truck wandering about as if the steering had a mind of its own. Only to find that Don had a screwdriver in one of the universal joints, but all in all, they were good trucks.

 

One of the first trips Don and I did was to take a part of a large ‘Eucla’ dumper truck to Tom Price. Yes, I said part of; it took seven trucks to haul it there. We had five of the ten wheels and tyres; they were ten feet high. Two others had three electric drive motors each. One carried the bowl that was about thirty feet by fifteen and could hold one hundred tons. You could park seven cars with ease in it!

The chassis came in two parts; the cab mounted over the ‘V’ twelve-cylinder engine that drove an electric generator and the twelve-foot wide, by the thirty-foot long mainframe. Later we saw it assembled and working on-site, it was one hell of a beast.

 

Keeping in touch with Jane while I was away was impossible. There were no telephones in the flats. The only way I could get messages to Jane was to ring the receptionist of the hostel, during office hours. But then she would only take short notes and put them in the pigeonhole we used for mail. A typical message would be, “held up by bad weather” or “be away another week.”

 

I could not even arrange a time to call Jane on the telephones in the booths outside the office, as there was always a queue. Also, the fact that Jane might not get the message until the day after I had sent it.

Being on the road you could never be certain you would be where you wanted to be at a given time. So it was, see you when I see you for the first nine months I worked at Bell’s. The only time we could arrange a time, was when I was at woody-woody.

 

One Sunday, Jane and I had a terrific row. We seemed to be having more and more lately. As I don’t like to argue, I walked out, got in the car and went for a drive. I ended up at Margaret and Frank Barras’s home, in Mosmon Park. I confided in Margaret that Jane had threatened to leave and go back home to England.

 

Margaret told me it’s Graylands Hostel; living in the camp has that effect on the wives of husbands who work away. It had happened to her, but when Frank had bought their home it had turned things around. Getting into the car I headed out to Kelmscott. There I had seen a General Agency building site at Clifton Hills. They were the builders who built the house Jane had picked as the one she wanted.

 

Seeing the agent I told him what I had in mind. He showed me where that house was to be built. It was halfway up the hill, although the front looked uphill the view from the rear was good. Saying I would take it with the approval of my wife. I gave him a cheque for the down payment, went back to Graylands, got Jane and the boys in the car and drove back to Kelmscott. Taking Jane out to see the plot where our home would be seemed to do the trick. We went out every weekend I had off to see our home grow.

 

Don and I had a flatbed trailer loaded with a five-roomed accommodation unit. We were taking it from Perth to our camp at Dampier. We had left Camarvon six hundred miles north of Perth, and it was the rainy season (the Australians call it the wet.) We knew there was the possibility of floods ahead of us but we were told to proceed and take things as they came. Two hundred miles north, we ran into wet weather. We met some traffic going south they told us that Barradall roadhouse, on the northern bank of the Yanutarra creek was cut off as the Yanutarra was flooded. They had turned around to try the inland route from Carnarvon. This route was no good to us as it ran to the east along an unkempt dirt road. It passed through Gascoyne junction, Dairy Creek, Mount Clare, Milgun, and Peak Hill then onto the Great Northern Highway at Karulundi.

Most of this road was just cattle tracks. It skirted the Gascoyne and Ashburton rivers joining the coastal highway, maybe fifty miles above Port Headland. That route would be an extra eight hundred miles for us. We were now some three hundred miles from Port Headland.

 

Wishing them good luck we carried on our way. We came to a small creek that was flooded but only by a few feet. On the northern side, there was a large parking area where we decided to stay for the night. At daybreak we set off two hours later we were in a traffic jam and had stopped twenty wagons and a few cars from the flooded Yanutarra creek, which was a quarter-mile wide, and fifteen to twenty feet deep. Barradall cafe was on the other side. Don and I always carried plenty of tinned tucker packed into metal boxes and bolted to the chassis of our truck. We had grub, we had smoke's, and we even had three cartons of grog.

 

This we were taking to sell to a friend. A forty-four-gallon drum of water was slung under the trailer. We could sit and wait for the water to go down and then we could cross. Well the days dragged by, the food went down, so I decided to try and get some fresh meat. Early one morning I set out with the rifle to bag some rabbits. Walking inland into the bush, making my way towards some dunes and looking for signs of life of the edible kind, I saw tracks of small feet and followed them. Then, in front of me I saw several rabbits; taking careful aim I missed all of them. I searched in vain to find more, so I turned to return to the truck.

 

I could see nothing of it or any sign of life at all. I had made the classic mistake of going into the bush without making proper plans. In truth, I was lost, but I told myself I could not be far away from the road. Which way, was the problem. The sun was high above, so there were no clues from shadows to tell me north or south.

 

I climbed onto the highest point I could see, but still saw nothing. If I was not to wander further into the bush, I had to stay where I was and wait until nightfall hoping to see the glow of the fires the drivers would light for cooking. So I sat and waited, but not for long. Fortunately, someone started his truck; I turned full circle and saw a plume of smoke rising into the air. I headed for it feeling much better. Having only gone a hundred yards, I topped a rise. There laid out before me was the road with the line of trucks on it.

 

I have never before, and never since been so glad to see those metal monsters. When I got back to the truck, Don asked me where I’d been. He was getting worried and was just about to send out a search party to look for me. I could not tell him how glad I was to see him. If he had not been so ugly, I would have kissed him.

 

People think Australia is flat, it’s not true. From a distance, it may look like it but the bush up close is like the sea bottom. [In fact, you can find seashells in places far from the sea]. It is ridged like the desert sand dunes. You soon lose sight of something, unless it’s on top of a rise.

 

At the creek, a rope was somehow passed across the fast torrent of water. Some stores were transferred to our side of the river, in a similar way to how we did it in the navy. By using a sort of breeches buoy. It came dangerously close to the water but did not get wet. someone suggested that he could cross by it, we told him if he went in it would be goodnight forever.

The next day, the level of the water had dropped a lot. The torrent was now just a fast flow. The rope was dropped to just above the water. Holding onto it, we waded across. Seeing us cross, one car driver decided he could drive over. He would not listen to those who tried to stop him. The water was up to the waist; we had to struggle to cross. As the car went into the river it started to float.

 

We shouted for him to open his door to let the water in, but he panicked and took his foot off the accelerator. His engine stalled and the car floated down onto the rope. It was filling with water and started to roll over and slipped under the rope. The driver got out of the window and managed to save himself. We never saw the car again, I don’t know if the driver ever did?

 

On the next day, the river was down to about three feet. The first to try to cross was a Gascoyne trader’s truck. It entered the river slowly, the water coming up to the chassis. It carried on swaying this way and that as the wheels went into the ruts the water had washed from the bottom. At one stage we thought it was going to tip over, but it made it safely.

 

After that, we didn’t want to risk a repeat of the previous day’s car disaster, so we tied a rope to the back of a truck to pull the cars over. Don and I crossed safely and carried on our way, crossing the flooded Ashburton via the bridge that had been built over it.

 

Most creeks had just concrete runs through them; they were dry for most of the year. In the wet, they flooded even if no rain fell locally. The Ashburton was the major drain off for the Hamersley range. Not always wet, but it flooded frequently. We reached Dampier with no further delay and unloaded our hut. The three-day round trip had taken seven days one way. That was the great joy of trucking back in the days of dirt roads.

 

At Dampier, we were asked if we would do a trip to the Ord River dam project in the Kimberly’s below Kununurra. [Now called Lake Argyle]. We were to take a load of oil in forty-four-gallon drums. Our trailer was covered with sand on which the drums stood to stop the bottoms vibrating, they expected a loss of about twenty, but the sand might stop further damage.

 

When we finished loading, we were to go to Port Headland to pick up some drilling rods for delivery to Broome. We arrived at Broome a day early and had to wait for the drilling crew to arrive before we could unload. I had been to Broome before so we spent the afternoon looking at the old pearl lugger that was beached by the crumbling oyster-canning factory, which was surrounded by millions of oyster shells.

 

In the evening we got our fishing lines out and went to the jetty. We fished well into the night catching many different kinds of fish, losing many more. On one cast we saw a streak of fluorescent light go through the water; Don’s line went out like lightning then snapped. We would have liked to know what it was but could only guess.

 

The next day we unloaded the drill pipes and went on our way, Don was driving somewhere between Darby and Fitzroy Crossing when he called to me asking.

 

“Can you smell anything.” I had been dossing in the bunk and it took me some time to identify the smell of hot oil. Don had stopped by now, getting out we tilted the cab and saw the engine was covered with oil.

 

We topped up the engine with oil then started it and saw where the leak was coming from. A weld on the flange of a metal oil pipe had cracked and a jet of oil was spraying out. We had two options; one, carry on and keep topping up the oil. And hope we had enough and that we didn’t seize the engine. There was a thirteen-gallon drum on the rack behind the cab. Two, sit where we were and wait for someone to come along to take a message. We decided on option two. We sat all afternoon and at sunset lit a fire to cook some food; nothing had come down the road in any direction, so we were there for the night at least.

 

In the morning we were having breakfast when we heard the sound of a motorbike but could not see one on the road. Then out of the bush came a bike, the rider pulled up and told us they had seen the glow of our fife from their station and he had come to investigate. We told him our problem to which he said he could take one of us back to the station, from where we could radio Port Headland for help.

 

Don went with him returning by four-wheel drive in the afternoon, telling me that Bell’s would fly a new pipe up in the morning. He had brought with him, curtsey of the station owner, stakes and eggs plus beer. We assumed the pipe would be flown to Port Headland then put on a northbound truck, so we would be there for some time yet, wrong!

 

About mid-morning the next day a small plane flew over us did a circuit, then as it passed over us again dropped the pipe on a small parachute. Having replaced the pipe we were on our way again. We had been there two days in which time we had seen two cattle road trains and one car, not counting the bike and four-wheel drive from the station.

 

One more thing happened before we reached the dam site. I was driving at the time and was going over a cattle grid. It looked alright on the approach, but there was a washout on the far side. I hit it at speed, the truck leapt into the air. When it landed the cab tilted forward and I was looking at Don lying in the windshield in front of me. We, or more accurately, I had not locked down the cab properly, with the result that it tilted forward. We delivered our cargo with five drums empty, most of the oil was over the back of our cab, but a good steam clean would soon remove that.  Mind you

 

I have toyed with the idea of trying to describe the scenery in which the Ord river dam was built, but you have to see the Kimberleys to really appreciate the beauty. The deep ravines that wound through the landscape and rocky stone towers carved by wind and rain through the ages.

 

The return trip was routine. Calling into Port Headland we refuelled, picked up a loaded trailer to take back to Perth, arriving there late at night having been away for fifteen days. We drove into Graylands about midnight and went straight to the shower block. From there we went our separate ways to our respective flats.

I opened the door silently with my key, undressing in the dark and went into the bedroom. Gently pulling back the sheet on my side of the bed I went to get in. A scream to chill the blood filled the air. It’s all right I said it’s me. "Who the hell are you." Said a male voice? I reach for the place I thought his throat would be but came up empty.

 

The bedside light went on and I stood face to face with him separated by the bed. I looked down at my wife but it wasn’t her. I was in the wrong flat but had opened the door with my own key? There was a loud banging on the door. Don was calling my name. I pulled on my pants and opened the door. Don came in and hurriedly told me and a very irate husband, that Jane had been given the keys to the house we had built in Kelmscott. She had not seen the sense in paying rent and mortgage so had gathered all our friends with cars and had moved out. She had been gone for a week.

 

And that’s how she met Isabel. Isabel was to become not just her best friend, but more like the sister Jane never had. She was already living at number one David Terrace. We were next door at number three. In those days the bank account was in my name. As we lived on the camp Jane did not need to buy shopping so when she moved out she had very little in her purse.

 

Halfway through the week she ran out of money and was forced to beg from Isabel. I was hardy home for more than six hours at a time. In the weeks that followed the move to Kelmscott, I would arrive at night and be gone before the morning. Everyone in the street thought I was Jane’s boyfriend, instead of her husband.

 

There was so much work at Bell’s, with the mines growing, together with the normal transport, we were kept going day and night. Bell’s guaranteed everyone one day at home a year, but they would not say which day. On one occasion Jane rang Owen in a fit of frustration to ask him if she could possibly cook me Sunday dinner as I had never spent a weekend at home since moving into our new house.

 

David Terrace runs off Lucich St. At the junction on the other side of the road, a home was being built. Into it moved Margaret and Roy Bell; they to were to become long-lasting friends. The three girls did everything together, one night they decided to have a girl’s night out.

 

At three in the morning they staggered home with the milkman, he had accessibly given them a lift on the back of his milk float from the bottom of the hill. The first I knew about it was when three drunken women staggered into my bedroom. I was rudely awakened when all three of them sat on the bed. I had to lie there listening to their burbling. I sleep in the nude and as it was a hot night I had just a sheet over me, so could not move.

 

After they’d had a cup of coffee, Jane and Isabel decided to walk Margaret home. When they finally arrived at her door, Margaret and Jane insisted they would walk Isabel home. All three ended up back at my door an hour later refusing to let anyone walk home alone. I had to get up and escort each of them to their respective front doors with all three women clinging on to one another. They staggered a zigzag course that was twice the distance, in truth they could not stand unsupported.

You may have detected a note of affection in my writing when I mention our friends. That is because we think of them as more than friends, they are in fact our family. When we moved to Australia all we knew was Don and his family, Don was my brother so to speak, the rest of our very close friends became replacement family

 

 

Our house

 

Our home was brand new and needed what a new house needs. The walls could not be decorated for some time. The garden was the builder's wasteland and had to be cleared of all rubble and tree roots before it could be turned with a spade and shaped in any form. It was hard work digging the virgin soil. Inside the house, all the floors were made of jarrah timber, a very hardwood indeed but this wood is beautiful, full of reds and yellows.

 

I decided to bond it with varnish. I spent many days well into the nights sanding the floorboards smooth. When sanded the floorboards looked beautiful, and that was before the varnish went on. I used a product called ‘Esterpole,’ a two-pot hard resin varnish. My first job was to seal in all the colours, so a light stain was painted over every inch of the wooden floor.

 

Then following the instructions I mixed some of the resin with thinners and once again painted the whole floor. This weak application soaked into the boards and sealed the stain. Now came the hard job. I had to mix part of the remaining two tins of resin and paint as quickly as I could to cover the floor before it hardened in the mixing tin.

 

This was done early on a Saturday morning of one of my rare weekends off; we then had the rest of the weekend away to give the floor time to harden. Several weeks later I repeated the process; the wooden floor now had a covering of very hard varnish that was hard to scratch. I was extremely pleased with the end result and would show it proudly to my friends. One day I returned from a long trip to find, much to my dismay, that Jane had covered it, wall to wall, with a carpet.

 

We cleared the garden and were ready to sow grass seed for a lawn. One Sunday morning we were all in the car, off on a day out. At the bottom of the estate, they had dug a trench for what I thought was a new sewer pipe. It was a large excavation six feet wide and fifteen feet deep. They had been digging it for weeks across what would be the playing field.

 

It was hard ground they had been digging, but as we passed the excavation I noticed they had found an area of white sand. I turned to Jane and casually said we could do with some of that. We drove on and I thought no more about it.  Don and I left as usual on Monday morning. Jane and Isabel went to Perth to do some shopping before picking up the children from school.

 

As they passed the excavation, Jane had a word with one of the truck drivers. She asked how far he had to take the sand. He told her they were dumping it quite some distance away. Jane said my husband could do with some sand, she told him our address and where to dump it. He said he was more than glad to help as the short distance would mean he could do more loads as he was paid by the ton

 

When Don and I returned from our trip, I found eight truckloads of sand in my back garden. There must have been eighty tons for me to spread around. Luckily I had enough sand to cover the leach drain and soak away pit top that was above ground by about two feet.

As I had said the house was built on the side of a hill. The base of the house at the front was five feet lower than the road with a 25-foot strip of land from the front of the house to the road, so the drive of two strips of concrete was quite steep. If you stood at the back of the house your head would be below the floorboards.

 

The boys and I went into the hills and filled the boot of the car with rocks. I stepped the rear garden into three layers by building walls with these rocks. A concrete patio behind the carport gave us somewhere to have parties. As the back of the house had no windows, the boys painted a goal post on the white bricks and used the flat centre-terrace to play football.

 

Buffalo grass was taken from the riverbanks. It grows like strawberry plants sending out runners that sprout roots. In no time at all, we had a lawn all around the house. Later when the film Jaws was released a twenty-four by eight-foot swimming pool was placed on the bottom terrace.

 

I bought a movie camera and projector, and on hot summer nights would show movies for our children. We bought some Disney animated films and hired others, using the back wall of the house as a screen. It became a regular occurrence, and the boys would have their friends over. Jane would make sandwiches and serve drinks.

 

Then the neighbour’s children would appear and before long we had children from all over the estate in our garden. Some Saturdays, our friends would arrive with their children. After the film shows we would put the children to bed and carry on with a party for the grownups, but no skinny-dipping was allowed in the pool – Jane’s rules. It was nice having all the kids over, but we spent most of Sunday morning cleaning up the mess they had left behind.

 

Dampier

 

Dampier was to be the outlet port for Tom Price and Paraburdoo. A string of small coral Islands formed an ark out into the bay. They built a road over the Islands to make the deep water harbour. Once again Bell’s supplied the camp manpower and equipment to do the job. Where the rail track ended there would be a marshalling yard and a large area to store the ore awaiting the ships to carry it away. Along conveyer belt from this yard would run alongside the road, to where the ships would be berthed for loading.

 

Our job along, with the rest of Bell’s drives was to deliver the material to build it. We were in and out of Dampier often in those first months carrying all manner of goods. Most of the time we returned to Perth empty, but on the odd trip, we loaded back with broken machinery or unwanted packing boxes.

 

On one trip we were told there was a water tanker to be returned to Perth as it was not repairable which was an understatement. The cab looked as if it had been driven into a wall. We loaded it by backing onto the ramp and pushing it on with a bulldozer. We did not like the way it was riding the moment we pulled away. When we got onto the uneven surface of the dirt highway it was considerably worse. It swayed and bucked so badly we had to stop to see what could be done about it.

 

It was then we found it was almost full of water, so I opened the valve to let the water run out. You could see the springs on the tanker and our truck rise as the water ran out. She rode much better after that, and we had no more trouble with it until we reached Moora. As we approached Moora, Don said he fancied a pie so we pulled off the highway and into the town. It was around ten at night as we drove to the fish and chip shop with hardly anybody about.

 

Driving down the main street as we left the town we saw little flashes of light. We looked at each other and asked “wonder what that was?” and thought nothing more of it. Some miles down the road a police car overtook us and pulled us in. I got out and asked him what was the matter, the police officer said do you know you have lights on the back of your trailer. I replied, “I hope so if I haven’t, I am breaking the law!”

 

He replied, “not trailer lights, those lights,” and pointed his flashlight at the strings of coloured fairy lights draped over the tanker. The ladder that gave access to the filling hole had pulled down every string of lights that was hung up across the street for their carnival. After we had removed the lights, placing them in his car boot, he got out his tape and checked the height of our load. He found it to be legal and sent us on our way. We heard nothing more of it.

 

 

Axles

Having delivered a load to Port Headland we picked up a return load of railway wagon axles. They had been delivered to Port Headland for the stores as spare parts. When inspected they were found to be faulty and had to be re-machined. When we left Headland we had a nicely stacked load, but some of the crates had been broken and were nailed back together.

 

One must have come apart as we travelled over the rough dirt road. We were fifty miles south of Dampier when Don thought he saw something at the back of the trailer moving. As he looked again an axle fell from the rear of the trailer and bounced into the centre of the road. Don pulled over and we walked back to the axle and rolled it to the side of the road.

 

Don reversed the truck back and I stopped him just short of it. We tried to lift one end onto the tale of the trailer where there was a three-foot gap, but we only managed to lift it about two feet off the ground. I suggested we try to roll it on with some ropes, we passed two ropes under the axle then tied them to the ends of the carats.

 

Unhooking the truck from the trailer we ran the ropes over the carats, tying them to the back of the truck. I drove forward as don watched the axle rise, but the weight was too much for the flimsy carat. It gave way trapping the ropes. After several more ideas failed, Don drove to Dampier in the tractor unit for help leaving me all the rope we had. While Don was gone I roped all the ends of the axles, to make sure they would not move and give us any more trouble.

 

It took Don almost three hours to return with another trailer. On it was a tractor crane. By driving the crane along to the end of the trailer we picked up the axle then backed the trailer onto our trailer to put it back into its crate. All we had to do now was return the trailer and crane to Dampier. That was my job as Don had fetched it. I did it as quickly as possible. Knowing it would be dark by the time I returned I made sure don had his bag of warm clothing.

 

It was indeed dark as I neared Don and the trailer. I could see where it was some distance away because Don had lit a fire; its glow could be seen for miles. As I pulled around the trailer there was no sign of Don. Stepping down from the unit, I called his name. His reply took me by surprise. He was sitting on top of the crates, shivering with the cold.

 

“Why are you up there shivering when there’s a warm fire down here?” I asked.

 

“Have you seen what's around that fire,” he called down to me. I had a closer look, the fire was ringed by all manner of insects and lizards, centipedes, scorpions, snakes, you name it if it lives in Australia it was there.

 

Driving is a dangerous job in any country, but in the days of which this book relates, the dirt roads of the outback of Australia were doubly so. With so much country one could drive for hours before meeting anyone. With the finding of iron the traffic increased to supply the mines, and their camps.

 

Later towns sprung up close by these mines, some of the traffic consisted of workers taking their cars so they would be available on site. Later when they built homes, their families would come as well. Many accidents occurred to people not used to driving long distances; many fell asleep at the wheel, crashed and were injured or killed.

 

The lucky ones just ran off the road to get bogged down in the soft ground to be pulled out when they were found. But others turned over and would lie trapped and injured for hours. At night the danger was much greater, not just for the fact that you might not be seen, but that it gets mighty cold in the bush at night. Don and I have passed many burnt out wrecked trucks and cars, most of the trucks would be recovered but the burnt-out cars would just rust away.

 

My biggest fear was to fall asleep at the wheel. Don and I made a packed never to drive if we were too tired. One night I was shattered, so I awoke Don to ask if he could drive. He said he couldn’t because he had not really slept, so I pulled over onto the side of the road, turned off the headlights and slept over the steering wheel.

 

I don’t know how long I slept but I awoke in a panic, my heart pounding. For several seconds I wrestled with the steering wheel whilst standing on the brake before coming to my senses and realised that I was already stopped. I have never slept at the wheel of any vehicle since.

 

We were in Port Headland one morning having breakfast, we had just unloaded our trailer to return to Perth. While we ate, we talked to the two mechanics that we knew quite well. They were heading south as well, but only as far as Dampier. They were going the do some work down there and would return that night. Both of us pulled out of the yard together, but they had a service van and soon left us behind in their dust. Don and I settled down to the long drive home. Just short of Dampier I saw their van lying on its side, some way off the road. I gave Don an elbow in the bunk and pulled over.

 

Their van had rolled over several times; the passenger door was open and crushed. One body lay between the road and the van. From the state of the body, the van must have rolled over him. The driver was still in the crushed cab; both were well beyond any help we could offer.

Having covered them as best we could, Don drove to Dampier, whilst I stayed to guard their bodies against any attack from animals.

 

After the six months trial of the converted F600 was over, we were told that they had ordered a fleet of the new model. They would be arriving in batches of four, our new truck would arrive in the first batch. When the day came, Owen told Don and me to get into the station wagon with two other drivers as he was going to drive all of us down to the docks to pick up the four trucks that had just past through customs. After a bit of paperwork in the dock office, we were taken to the compound where the trucks were held. Owen gave us the keys and number plates for the truck we would drive back to the yard. There was a tag on the keys with a number that corresponded to the number on the windshield.

 

 When I found the one I had the keys to it somehow looked different from the other ones. Don’t get me wrong they all looked the same, but there was a little thing about this truck that made it look different. It took me some time to work out what it was, and then I had Don’s help. The Bulldogs on the doors and above the grill was gold instead of silver. Where the others had a Thermadine badge on the grill, this one had Maxadine.

 

The inside of the cab was also different it was not a walk through the cab, the engine cowling joined the wraparound instrument panel and there was only one gear stick in a six-speed box. The gear stick had a three-way switch on the leading edge; this switch gave you low, direct and high range. A switch on the top of the gear stick allowed you to split the high range so you still had twenty-four gears.

 

When we got back to the yard, Owen told Don he had better help me change our gear over to our new truck. Don asked which one was that when Owen said the one Harry’s in he ran over to me as if he had been given a puppy. I must say I was also pleased, for it was the top of the range, with leather seats and a bulldog embossed in the backrest.

 

We had to get sheepskin seat covers because we had to peel our backs off the leather if we wore no shirt. We found it had much more power too; it pulled like a runaway train. There was more good news to come on that day. Tony and his partner were coming off of the Wittenoom freezer. We were asked to take it on; it was something I had been waiting for. A regular run, no more run here run there, we could plan our week.

 

It would also make our wife’s happy for we would be home on weekends. Monday noon saw us in the yard loading the freezer, we would not leave until early Tuesday morning but we had to see the load going on to make sure it was in the right order. The run was still the same as when I did it with Tony, but they had built a road into Paraburdoo.

 

Arriving at Tuckenera we delivered Mar's groceries, had breakfast and took her order for the following week. Having made up time on the run we stopped a bit longer and chatted to Mar. She told us of the days when the railway was running; her husband had been foreman of the maintenance gang.

 

When they shut down the track they had retired him, giving him the house and yard to live in. When I asked what he did to past the time she told me he had found gold at the back of the house and spent several hours a day out there. He never found a fortune; in fact, it was not worth the time. You could work all week to dig out a day’s pay, but it was his hole in the ground and he liked it. Later Don and I spent many an hour in that hole with nothing to show for it but a thimble full of gold dust. But it’s not the finding, but the looking that’s fun.

 

At the camps we introduced ourselves to the cooks, telling them we would carry on delivering the food parcels to their wives, of course under the same arrangements as before. From then on my wife’s food bill was cut in half. Wittenoom was a resting place for us. We always got there early spending all afternoon showering and playing pool in the pub.

 

As we got to know the people there well, we were sometimes asked into their homes for a beer or Bar-B-Q’s. When the pilot who delivered the supplies we brought for the stations around Wittenoom learned of my love of flying, he gave me the opportunity to go up with him in the light aircraft at any time to help with his deliveries. I had many flights with him, some of the time at the controls.

 

Paraburdoo had grown some now there were transportable huts and a galley. The main camp was under construction when that was done they would start to build the mine and rail link. Cutting across from Paraburdoo to the coast we headed south down the coast road. Arriving home Saturday morning, we had until noon Monday off.

 

We now settled down to the weekly routine of the run. Nothing changed too much. The road became so familiar you could almost tell where you were by the bumps. After a rainstorm, a pleasant change in the bush took place. The seed that had lain dormant in the ground suddenly sprang to life, filling the bush with colour and the air with scent as a myriad of flowers covered the red dusty plains.  Their short life dedicated to blossom and spread their seeds before the harsh sun burned them up.

 

As we travelled north, one day we passed two graders doing what they normally do. As we drew alongside one of them Don shouted, “Its Ron,” and waved at him. Ron Grieves had been a cook on the Graylands hostel with us before he moved to Geraldton. Don pulled past him and stopped on the side of the road.

 

We had a long chat and left him some steak and eggs before going on our merry way. It became a regular stop for the next few weeks, until one day we came across Ron sitting on the side of the road. He was on his own with two graders and the four-wheeled hut they pulled to live in but no van.

 

Over a cup of tea, Ron told us they had been grading the road when his mate needed to go to the loo. He had grabbed his shovel and gone into the bush, minutes later he ran from the bush carrying something he unhooked the van and drove off, that was two days ago. Ron had sent messages bypassing traffic but had heard nothing back.

 

As we left him we promised to send word to his yard at Geraldton from the post office relay station at Munderwindy. We heard later that the chap had dug up a large chunk of gold out of that hole, I bet he never used it for the reason he had dug it.

A RICH LAND

 

It seems that all over Australia there are riches to be found if you know what you are looking for. There is an army of people who go out at weekends, armed with metal detectors looking for nuggets of gold. Others go into the hills panning for gold dust in the rivers. Some spend their holidays digging for gold in the bush, using a blower to separate the dust from the gold. They are all hoping to strike it rich, some do most don’t.

           

Don and I were having a break near Cue, having eaten we wandered into some rocks to have a look around. Maybe we would find gold who would know if you did not look you would never find. We had no idea of rock formations or where gold could be located. It would have to shout out “over here” before we would find it but it passed the time just looking.

 

Don was searching in amongst the rooks and shouted to me he had found something. When I got to him he was holding a tin that had some coloured stones in, we did not know what they were and did not keep them. We replaced the tin when we left, just in case the finder returned for them.

 

Sometime much later we were driving somewhere between Mt Magnet and Meeka when our oil light came on. We pulled over to check the engine for oil and found it empty. Pouring a gallon in we check it again to find it still did not show on the dipstick. Looking under the truck we saw a puddle of oil under the engine and found we had lost the sump plug.

 

Not far from the road maybe a mile we could see a homestead, I decided to see if they had anything we could use maybe an old tractor sump plug might fit. If not I could radio for help, from Meeka. As I walked across the bush I picked up some coloured stones similar to the ones Don had found in that tin.

 

By the time I had gone halfway to the station I had a pocket full. I had on a pair of tight shorts and the stones were chafing my leg so they had to go. Keeping one large bluish stone I discarded the rest. The owner of the station could not help me, and we could not get through to Meeka but he did run me back to the truck.

 

I had forgotten all about the stone and did not find it until Jane went to wash my shorts. She liked the colour of it saying it would make a fine pendant. We had a friend who polished stones for a hobby, so I took it to him to see if he could do anything with it. He took the stone from me and looked at it, then at me saying do you know what this is. I answered no he then informed me I had a blue sapphire and a good one at that. I never found that spot again but I can assure you I looked.

 

What I did find in another place much later, was what I thought was a large piece of gold? It turned out to be a piece of iron pyrites or to use its common name fools gold. It was about a foot by six inches we used it as a doorstop in the end and had some good comments about it.

 

Later back in England Jane and I was down in Dartmouth looking around the shops, I spied a piece of fools gold no bigger than two inches it had a double-figure price tag. It just goes to show, what's rubbish in one place is money in others.

 

HOLIDAY IN GERALDTON

 

Ron and Sue Grieves invited Jane and me up to Geraldton for a two-week holiday. We jumped at the request, for we liked the family very well. Ron was now running a daytime restaurant in Geraldton, for he was a fine chef. The first week we were there he and Sue had to work, as his relief had come down with something. So we had to fend for our self, Ron’s oldest son also called Ron showed us around the town.

 

Jane liked Geraldton from the start saying she would like to live there. We gave Ron a hand in the restaurant to get him finished at night, and then we would go fishing at flat rocks ten miles south of Geraldton. That weekend Ron took us and his family out to a swimming hole near Walkaway, called Allendale pool. As we approached the place a small river run from it lined with trees. In the branches of these trees, there seemed to be hundreds of large white flowers.

 

Jane commented on this to young Ron who was riding with us, he laughed and leaned over pressing my horn. Immediately the sky was filled with the wings and calls of hundreds of the flowers that were white cockatoos. It was an amazing sight, the birds wheeled about making an enormous amount of noise. They seemed to fill the air about us.

 

As we rounded a bend the pool was right in front of us. On this side it was flat ground, the other side a sheer wall of rock rose from the pool fifty feet. You could see from the rock formation it had been coursed by an earthquake in the distant past. The earthquake had fractured the aqua-flow and the pool had formed.

 

I asked how deep is it, but no one knew. The water in the pool was surprisingly cold but very refreshing it was also freshwater. On Wednesday Ron hooked up his trailer, packed his tent, cooking and sleeping gear. For we were off to Kalbarri one hundred kilometres to the north, for a three-day fishing trip.

 

Jane, Sue and Ron's daughter would not be going they had other plans. We were to meet a friend of Ron’s who had a twenty-five feet fishing boat moored there. Kalbarri is on the mouth of the river Murchison that has a twisty narrow entrance; the reef outside protects the wide safe anchorage.

 

But to get out into the open sea you have to run the reef, you must wait just inside the reef for the swell to break over the reef then power out on the crest of the wave. Once outside and away from the shore, the deep waters of the Indian Ocean roll south in long gentle swells. The water here as in all the coast of Weston Australia is crystal clear, which means you not only see the bottom you see the fish you have caught before they reach the boat.

 

 And what fish they are, you all know the joke. “Nice fish?” “No that’s the bait.” Well, its no joke, I was putting on bait fish I would be proud to catch in England. That afternoon we caught some pretty impressive fish, grouper queenfish, yellowtail jacks, sharks, and Spanish mackerel. Spanish mackerel looks the same as mackerel you catch in England, only there five feet longer.

 

E. S. P.

 

I have never believed in anything I could not touch or see but I now believe there is a bond between two people that can tell you something is wrong. A sense of foreboding, a need to get in touch. So let me explain why I feel this way.

 

Don and I were in Meeka delivering to Bell's depot there. I suddenly had the feeling I had to ring Jane. I could not then or now explain the overwhelming urge to get in touch. In those days you had to ring the operator to get you through, and I was making a reverse charge call.

 

As my wife answered the operator, I heard her start to cry. I could get no sense out of her, just sobs and mumbles. Telling her to put the phone down and have a cigarette and a cup of tea to calm her down and that I would ring her again in half an hour.

 

The same operator put the second call through. I heard her ask my wife in a concerned voice if she was all right to take the call, then she put me through. Our car was a ford falcon five hundred, with a column gear change. The reverse was back and up second forward and up. There was a slope down to our carport from the road.

 

Jane had gunned the engine to reverse up it but had shot forwards instead. There was a four-foot drop at the end of the carport and the car ended up with its back wheels on the drive and its nose on the patio below. I had rung seconds after she had crashed !!

 

The sceptical would say, coincidence, and I would have been inclined to agree with them. If it was not for the fact of what happened, many years later when we had returned to England. In 1989 Jane and I were in Exmouth, Devon on my boat for a long weekend. Friday night we had taken the boat out to the deep-water mooring, cooked a meal and slept. Saturday was a fine hot day, so we spent most of it just offshore, fishing. Returning to the mooring in the evening, we rowed ashore to have a meal and drink and we were back on board before dark.

 

About ten o’clock the wind started to pick up and the sea got rough. I turned on the radio just in time to hear the gale warning for the lime bay area, it was too late to get off the gale was already on us. We sat out the force eight storms, being tossed about like a cork until four in the morning. Suddenly the wind dropped and the sea calmed. It felt strange after six hours on a roller coaster. Having checked out the boat to make sure we had not sprung a leak, Jane and I got some well-needed sleep. Dead on seven Jane sat up and said I have got to go home. I looked at her saying “the storms over.”

 

“It's not the storm” she replied, “something is wrong.” There was no way I could stay with her in this frame of mind. The tide was too low to return to my inner mooring, so the boat would have to stay where it was. I would have to row ashore. By the time I secured the boat, rowed ashore, tied up the dingy and got my car ready to leave, it was well past eight.

 

As we approached the roundabout by the car park in Exmouth we spotted Nicholas my number one son in his car coming towards us. I flashed my headlights and sounded my horn to attract his attention. He followed us around and parked behind us on the straight.

 

As Elaine, my son’s wife stepped from the car we could see that she was crying. She ran to Jane sobbing, wrapped her arms around her, saying words of comfort. Nicholas came to me with tears in his eyes and told me Richard (my number two son) had gone to see his granddad (Jane's father) and had found him dead in his kitchen. Would anybody like to guess what time that was?

 

 

Don in shallow water.

 

I had mentioned gravel pits before, they were used to repair the dirt roads. They could be found alongside the roads all over Australia, the depth of them varied as to the amount found. In the wet, they would fill with water, a handy watering hole for animals and a cooling off place for humans. Because of the red dust, they were always murky, you could never tell how deep they were.

 

We were travelling north one very hot day just after a rainstorm had gone through the area. Because of the heat, we were driving in our underpants. Fifty feet from the road Don spied a very tempting pool of water. He pulled over and was halfway to the pool before I got out of the truck. I tried to shout a warning to check the depth! But he had already launched himself into the air. His arms outstretched, his feet together with the arched back he held his body in the classic swallow dive. Pity they always ended in a belly flop. When the water fell back his shoulders and red covered buttocks were visible above the water, which was only six inches deep. Don wore that gravel rash for quite a while.

 

Kelmscott Football Club

 

At the bottom of the estate where they had dug the trench for the pipe was a large flat area the council had designated as a playing field. Several of us approached the council and asked if we could form a football club and use the field as our base. We would build a clubhouse from timber and plant the grass. The council said they would build a brick building for all to use, but they would let us plant the grass. We put an advert in the local paper to inform those living in the area that we wanted to start the football club for youngsters. There was a great response and we had teams from under-fives to fifteens.

 

One weekend we got all the parents together on the field to plant grass, which we had gathered from the riverbanks. And spent many weeks watering it until it covered the field completely.

 

Training the teams to get them ready to play their first games was done away from the field in back gardens. When all was ready we arrived at the field to play our first game to find a hockey game in progress. It came to pass the council had given them permission to play on the field as well. It was all settled and we got a roster worked out, for the use of the field.

 

We got our teams registered in the league, but there was a shortage of referees, so I became one. Roy Bell became a trainer and had many comments about my dark glasses and white stick. But that did not harm our friendship.

 

Having been on the Wittenoom freezer for almost a year we had never been held up and always got home by Saturday noon until one trip took us seven days to complete. It started as all the rest had, but as we drove up between Panes Find and Meeka a cyclone came inshore north of Meeka. It dropped heavy rain for hundreds of miles inland.

 

When we arrived at our depot at Meeka we were told that the road was to be closed. After unloading we walked up to the flying doctor's office, to see if there was anything for us to take when we got going. They had several packages of medicine for some stations they could not deliver because their landing strips were waterlogged.

 

So we decided to speak to the police and find out what the situation was. They were not too sure of the full extent of the flooding. Munderwindy had radioed to say the road that ran past them was boggy but had a firm base. Some stations had said no problem others had reported flooded roads. The only way to find out was to go and look.

 

We said we had plenty of food and water if we got bogged down we could eat out of the freezer. There was a discussion between our depot manager the police and the flying doctor as to the benefits of letting us go. They persuaded the police that we had the only real hope.

 

A car would never make it if the mud on the road was too deep. With our twin drive axles and two-foot clearance, we could drive our way through as long as we had traction. The flying doctor would radio our first drop with our ETA. They would radio back and so on. So we got our truck loaded with the medical supplies in the chiller part of the freezer and got going.

 

Therdoner copper mine was clear, as were the first few stations some being quite a way off the main highway. We were met at the entrances by the owners. We were also met by some we did not deliver to; they give us a mail to post on. It was not until we had driven a hundred miles or so north of Meeka that we ran into damp conditions.

 

By the time we got to Munderwindy we were down to a snail's pace and leaving deep ruts in the road. Arriving well after dark at Mt. Newman, after being bogged down for two hours and having to dig out our wheels for maybe a hundred yards we were half a day behind time.

The cook and his crew turned out to unload us and cooked us a meal. It was twenty miles back to the main road, all tarmac, so we drove to the end and parked on it for a three-hour sleep to wait for sunup. It turned out to be a good move, half an hour after we got going in the morning Don topped a rise and stopped.

 

In front of us was a puddle, you could see the road rising out of it maybe five miles in the distance. The roads were normally raised above the surrounding land by a foot or so. We could see the fence posts running in a straight-line ether side of the road. Being four feet high, you could tell the depth of the water by how high it was up the posts.

 

We judged it was only two feet at most. Don slowly drove into it keeping the truck in the middle of the posts and therefore on the road. In low gear, we made a steady bow wave as we crept forward keeping everything that could be crossed, Crossed! Climbing out of the water we gave a sigh of relief, half a mile up the road we found we were bogged down again. So it was out with the shovels and the two twenty-ton jacks, and a large slab of wood, once again.

 

Working with the two jacks, under one side of a drive axle we would raise it as high as we could. Then digging the soft mud from under it we would fill the trench with stone, brushwood plus anything we could find to give a firm base. Lowering the axle several times to pack it down, then refilling it until we were satisfied.

 

Then on to the next axle until all the wheels had been done. A trench between the drive and steering axle would be dug and filled, plus in front of the truck as far as we thought necessary. In this way, we worked our way out of the boggy area. While we were doing this we heard a light aircraft approaching. As it flew over us we recognised it as the aircraft from Wittenoom. It circled waggling its wings and then flew off in the direction of Wittenoom.

 

It was well into the night when we pulled up at Ethel Creek's entrance. There were a tractor and trailer parked across it. The road must have been too bad for us to go in, not being laid down to the standard of the main road it would be soft under our wheels. Deciding to wait until morning to unload their goods, we were about to get our heads down when we saw lights coming along the road.

 

It turned out to be a tractor from the station. They had been looking out for us and had seen our lights coming down the highway. So we loaded their goods onto the tractors and rode into Ethel Creek with them. From there we radioed the flying doctor at Meeka and reported on the condition of the road so far. We were taken back to our truck and had a sleep until dawn. The road was drying out fast with the hot sun beating down on it, but we still left ruts as we broke through the hard crust. Two hours after sunup we saw the light aircraft from Wittenoom flying towards us again following the line of the road. As it approached the pilot wiggled the wings and banked did three hundred and sixty degrees turn around us, then flew down the road a short distance. He turned and came back to fly parallel to us as low and as slow as he could then headed back to his stable.

 

 

By the time we got to Roy Hill the road was bone dry and showed no sign that there had been raining this far up, so it was full steam ahead for Wittenoom. As we pulled onto the tarmac strip to run into Wittenoom, twenty-eight hours behind schedule there were several cars parked on either side of the road flashing their lights and blowing their horns. The occupants cheered and waved as we passed, then pulled on to the road to follow us into town.

 

The first thing I wanted to do was ring Jane to let her know we would not be home on Saturday. She informed me that she already knew because it had been on the news. It appears a reporter picked up on all the radio traffic between the stations and flying doctor and as there was nothing else happening had turned it into a news story.

 

He had been in the aircraft that we had seen, and had taken photographs of us digging ourselves out of the boggy area. The road was closed for two weeks until the main roads department declared it fit for use. We could only go as far as the copper mine at Therdouna. This was only a part of our run, they flew Mt Newman's essentials by air.

 

Tom Price Paraburdoo and Wittenoom were supplied by adding a trailer to the Dampier freezer run. We did not know it then but the Wittenoom freezer’s days were numbered. The revelations about blue asbestos closed the mine at Wittenoom almost overnight and the town started to die.

 

Mt Newman was growing fast and was given its own freezer run. As it had to pass most of the drops we did on the way up they were transferred onto it. We took over the Dampier run and it turned out to be a good job. We would drop one trailer at our depot on the way into Dampier and unload part of our lead trailer. Then drive into the town to deliver to the store, and then drive around the town stopping at certain corners. The wives would come out and pick up the packages they had ordered from Perth. When we had finished in Dampier, we would go to Paraburdoo and Tom Price. Returning to Dampier to pick up the second trailer that had been unloaded and then reloaded at the depot. Then head for home.

 

PONY EXPRESS

Bell Brothers had an express service to Port Headland; the main contract was the Royal Mail. The trip was roughly one thousand and fifty miles, overnight. They called it the ‘rocket service.’ We called it the ‘pony express.’ The vans were International Harvester’s, with V8 motors and were very fast. They had to be, there were four of them. Three coming down, one going up. A driver from Perth would drive a van loaded with the mail and anything else that had to go the three hundred miles to Geraldton. There he would meet the driver from Carnarvon and change vehicles and drive back to Perth. The Carnarvon driver would return the three hundred miles to his home base, meeting a driver there from Port Headland who had driven four hundred and fifty miles. This driver would drop off the mail for Dampier and then go to Port Headland with the rest of the mail arriving in the early hours of the morning. That night they would start off again.

 

Why am I telling you all this, well there's a short story to tell, one concerning the pony express. Don and I were on the Dampier fridge run. We stopped at the Nanutarra roadhouse on the banks of the Ashburton River. It was about one or two o’clock in the morning. The rocket pulled in to drop something off I must say this was not a scheduled stop, but then we all did favours for each other, as it’s a long way to go for a small car part or the like.

 

We had a cup of tea and a chat with the driver, then he was off we followed at a more sedate pace. Just before daybreak, [the sun rises about four o’clock,] we saw a faint glow in the distance. When we got to the glow it turned out to be the ‘rocket’ with one of its tyres on fire.

 

We pulled past it, stopped and ran back to the driver who was standing some distance away from the van. He told us that there were gas cylinders in the van and he didn't know what to do. We said “let it burn,” but he was worried about the mail. Then he told us what else he was carrying. I was in the van in a flash getting out the contents.

 

When we got to Dampier we went to our depot to drop the mailbags and reported what had happened to the ‘rocket’ and then went off to unload our fridge. As we were unloading the goods at one of the corners, our manager the Postmaster and a reporter from the local paper arrived. The Postmaster thanked us on behalf of the Post Office for saving the mail and the reporter interviewed us so he could write a piece on the bravery of two Bell’s drivers.

 

A very nice piece it was as well. Pity, it was not entirely true. I didn't have the guts to tell them I had to throw the mailbags out because they were in the way, of me getting to the box of ten thousand cigarettes. Don and I decided to burn the cigarettes. Very, very; slowly.

A very bad day.

 

Bell’s liked to give everyone a change of scenery once in a while, our change was to go back onto the Mt Newman run minus Wittenoom and Ethel Creek. Mt Newman was only a twenty-four hour run from Perth. With the other drops, we were given thirty-six hours to get to Newman plus three hours to unload and reload, so the whole run was just over three days. That meant we could do a short trip to fill out the week. Mostly we had to take trailers to Geraldton or Meeka. From there they would be picked up to make up road trains.

 

We would bring back trailers that had been dropped by returning road trains. At certain times of the year, there would be trailers loaded with watermelons or bananas from Carnarvon which is where the big plantations are, because of the climate. Bell’s would load hundreds of tons of fruit onto road trains to be taken to the fruit market in Perth.

 

One of the worst days I have ever experienced occurred about a year after we changed to this run. My world and my partnership with Don fell apart one night as we drove onto the tarmac strip leading into Newman. I was driving as we mounted the black strip. As I did so, I saw a shower of sparks in the mirror. The sparks were coming from one of the trailer wheels. It could only mean one thing; we had a flat tyre that had shed its rubber cap.

As I stopped, Don sat up and asked why I was stopping. I told him, “I think we have a flat.” He said he would go and check as he wanted a pee. He climbed from the bunk, opened the door and stepped out. I sat waiting for some time, and then called out to him.

 

I got no reply, so I got out of the truck. Walking around the front of the truck, I pushed the passenger door closed to walk past it. As I did I tripped over something, falling forward I stuck my hand out to stop myself from hitting the ground. My hand landed on something soft, it turned out to be Don. He was unconscious lying on his back I tried to revive him but to no avail. I had to get help, but I could not leave him there.

 

There was only one thing to do, I had to get him into the truck, and take him into Newman. If you aren’t familiar with the forward control Mack, the base of the cab is four and a half feet off the ground. It has a three-step ladder behind the front wheel that takes you up to the cab at the rear of the door. From here you swing yourself forward into the cab.

 

I opened the door, put Don over my shoulders, and climbed the steps. Putting my left foot on top of the wheel then held onto the door with my left hand. I tried to turn and put Don on the seat, but could not. I had to try something else.

 

After getting my breath back, I got Don onto his feet and leaned him against the wheel. Bending I put my head on Don's stomach. Then slowly I lifted him until his bottom was on the cab floor, then holding him with one hand I climbed into the cab. Getting Don into the seat, I then tied him there. As soon as I got into the camp I went straight to the manager. He called out the medical team. Don was taken to the medical centre. The next day he was flown to Perth. He was unconscious for a week, and out of work for much longer.

 

I had several drivers to partner me but found it difficult if not impossible to sleep when they were driving. I found that after driving with Don for so long, it was hard to trust anyone else. The last driver I was partnered with prompted me to ask to go back to solo driving duties. He had just started on Bell’s and we knew nothing of him.

 

We had left Perth with me at the controls. After a six-hour drive, I handed over to him. I lay awake for a long time trying to relax, but I just lay there unable to sleep. All the time I lay there I kept hearing little hissing sounds. I couldn’t work out what it was. As the trip progressed I noticed that he always hung behind when we delivered to the roadhouses and he always had a small suitcase with him.

 

On the return journey, I had a hell of a time trying to get him out of one of the roadhouses. We had stopped for a meal. I wanted to get going after the meal, but he didn’t. He sat in the bar drinking. I went outside to the truck to get half an hour nap. Climbing onto the bunk I lay down but couldn’t get comfortable. The mattress seemed to be higher than usual. Lifting it I found a layer of empty beer cans. Going back into the roadhouse I told him I was going with or without him.

 

 

When we arrived at Perth I went straight to Owen and told him that I would not drive with an alcoholic. I took Owen out to the truck and showed him the cans in the bunk. We never saw the bloke again.

 

 

The fastest truck in the west.

 

I was given a six-wheel, cabover Kenworth truck, with a fixed box to drive. It had torsion bar suspension that was hard to get used to. When you went around a bend, the truck would lean over, and when you straightened up the truck would stay lent over. You had to tweak the steering the other way to return it upright. The windshield was large and made in two parts.

 

I had just been to Port Headland with a full load of beer in kegs and was now loaded with empties. This truck was fast, I was doing maybe eighty. On the side of the road, I saw a wedge tail eagle sitting on a dead kangaroo. As I approached it started to spread its wings to take off I just watched it not thinking it would fly in my direction.

 

But that is just what it did, and it hit the passenger window. The glass just folded into the cab, eagle and all. These birds have a wingspan of eight feet; it lay on the engine cover flapping its wings and beating the shit out of me.

 

Same truck, different run. I was returning from Mt. Newman empty and was between Panes Find and Wobin on the single strip of ashfelt road. In the distance, I could see a car & caravan that I was slowly catching up. The road here ran straight as an arrow for some miles so I had no doubt that he had seen me creeping up. As I finally got behind him we got into an area that went through some creeks and small hills. The road here twisted for a couple of miles before it straightens out once again, so you could see the road disappearing in the far distance. I pulled over so that I was half on, half off the ashfelt strip and waited for him to move over, but he stayed where he was. I flashed my lights and sounded my air horn several times.

 

Suddenly he swerved off to his left. I put the boot down and started to pass him. As the nose of my truck drew level with the front of his caravan, he pulled back onto the centre strip. I could go nowhere; the caravan rammed into the side of the truck and the car folded across the front of me. I was already braking, but it seemed a long time before we stopped. In slow motion, I watched the car in front of me being pushed sideways. Expecting it to start to roll at any moment, and knowing if it did the truck would ride right over the top crushing the life out of those inside. I had both hands pulling on the steering wheel, both feet pressing down on the brake, my bottom was off the seat, and I was almost standing.

 

Suddenly I realised we had stopped and was then aware of a new sound. No more grinding metal or gravel being ploughed, but a mournful wail came through the stillness. Leaping from the cab I ran around to the car passenger door. Two young girls were hugging one another, sobbing in the back seat. Whereas the mother was out of it, she had fainted and lay slumped in her safety belt. Dad sat with white-knuckled hands on the wheel still looking through the window at my grill two inches from his face.

The doors were locked. I had to bang so hard on the window for some time, I was sure it would break. He finally looked at me, but I don’t think he saw me, for he just turned once more to the view at his window. There was only one thing to do, I climbed into my truck put on full left-hand lock and backed off the car. Returning to the car, I finally got him out and asked if he or anyone else was hurt. All he said was, “where did you come from, I didn’t know you were passing me. We had the windows closed because of the air conditioning and were singing along to the tape. I must have wandered off the road and was waiting for a smooth patch to pull back on again.”

 

The car could still be driven even though the tyres were gone and the rims are worn flat. I also found out why the car stayed upright. The locking device to hold the bull bar up had punched into the car’s doors and prevented it from rolling. Surprisingly it was not too badly damaged apart from the two holes in the doors and the dents on the driver's side, plus the bent and ground wheels and the loss of the tyres.

 

We pulled the car and caravan off the road and were discussing what to do when a station wagon pulled up, the driver asking if he could help. He agreed to pull the caravan to Perth, which just left the car. I knew this road. There was a gravel pit along this stretch. There might be a place to load the car into the back of my truck. This we managed to do and I headed for Jock's cafe in Wobin, seventy miles away. When I got there Jock took one look at me and poured me a shot of whiskey. I was still shaking.

 

Death by water pipe.

 

As Dampier had grown, so did the need for water, there was a freshwater spring some 100 miles inland. It was decided to build a pipeline and pipe the water from there to Dampier. Pipes for the job were loaded onto railway wagons at Perth and shipped to Geraldton where they were then loaded onto the trailers that we would couple up as three-trailer road trains. We then delivered them to the staging sites along the proposed route.

 

The pipes were three feet across; nine pipes were loaded on each trailer. Three layers of three with curved wooden bolsters in between. I was running with one of our sub-contractors. He had been a Bell’s driver before buying his own truck. We had been good friends, he was always cheerful and when you were with him you were guaranteed a good laugh.

 

The contract to carry the pipes was for six months. We were now in the third month. We had arrived at one of the dumpsites and had taken the chains off our loads. As the crane approached the driver lifted the jib to position it ready to lift the first pipe off of my friend's load. But, the crane driver got too close and touched the pipe with the end of the jib. This shook the load and the pipe on top on the far side, fell off all we heard was the sound of the pipe hitting the ground. I shouted a warning but heard no reply so I ran to the other side of the trailer. The sight that met my eyes was horrific. My friend never knew what hit him; he had been too busy with his chains. The pipe landed squarely on him, killing him instantly.

 

A new career sellinghouses

 

Jane and I often went to Perth to do some nighttime window-shopping and took the children with us. Although Perth City centre was an 18-mile drive, it was well worth the effort. As it was nighttime, the boys were dressed in their night attire, ready for bed when we returned.

 

It was common to see couples walking around Perth in the evening with children dressed ready for bed. On warm summer night’s a walk along the riverside or into the city was very pleasant. Nighttime river trips added to the lights of the city, and the stars in a cloudless sky made the river sparkle with a myriad of reflected coloured lights.

 

Sometimes we would get a takeaway from Hungry Jacks and drive over the ‘Narrows’ bridge. We would park where we could see the lights of the city across the narrow strip of water. The Swan brewery building had an array of lights attached to it. When they were switched on, they took on the appearance of a three-mast sailing ship, and then they would change to a large ocean-going liner. A nighttime visit to the viewing area in Kings Park gave you a sight of the city dressed in all its lights.

 

Bells were finally pushing all the drivers to go as owner-drivers. I found myself without a truck, mine being sold from under me to one of them. Given jobs around the yard loading and unloading trailers, I found it boring after all the miles I had driven in the five years I had been here.

 

I was beginning to regret turning Don’s offer to buy a truck between us down. It was too late now, for he had found someone else to partner him. And he seemed to be doing well, for which I was very glad. If not a little envious, but I had only myself to blame.

 

One Sunday afternoon, I was talking to a member of the Kelmscott football club as we watched the boys playing a game. I told him I was thinking of packing the job in but did not know what I was going to do for a job. He came straight out with an offer. Have you done any selling he asked, well yes I replied I had a job selling door to door part-time when I was working as a cook?

 

Right he said we have just started a building company that is part of an estate agency. It is going to be called Sheridan Homes, would you like a job with me. I was taken aback by the offer! Then said I don’t know all that paperwork. I would like to try but I am a lousy speller and shy away from anything to do with writing.

 

“Give it a go,” he said, “we have a building site that we are building show homes on, come with me next weekend, and I will show you the ropes you can keep your job going till you make up your mind.” For three weekends I sat with him in a small caravan on the site, until they had finished the first show house. He showed me how to work out the building materials needed to build a house. How to cost the jobs that were not on the standard brochure of houses. How you could change the layout of a house, but keep it in the overall cost.

 

I must say I found it to my liking; meeting people talking to them about what they wanted in a house gave me a feeling that I was helping them. But that paperwork still had me worried, he even showed me how to get around part of that. Get them to fill out their personal details, if I had to write anything I could tell them I would get it typed out for them to sign later. John let me sell two contracts in those first weeks, he had the sales but it was a good learning curve for me. After five weekends I had made up my mind this was the job for me, and I became part of the firm.

 

I was now a building consultant, not bad after only five weekends I was an expert. The homes we built were the single story of good quality and range, with some very good designs. The most popular seller was the basic layout; three bedrooms bathroom open plan living room & kitchen, utility room double carport plus kitchen patio.

 

This design came with a host of varying facades, to suit the taste of the buyer. The most popular of these was the Mediterranean or Roman; there were others such as Mexican, Spanish, and Californian. The houses were the same inside; it was only their outward appearances that changed.

 

I took to the job as if I had been doing it for years. The hours I worked were up to me, I did most of my selling in the late evenings. At this time of night both partners were home, and most times I could get a contract signed. If you met with just one partner you would get, I'll have to talk it over and let you know.

 

As I was paid on what I sold, you had to set a target of contracts to sell to get good weeks pay. The contract was only signed when the building society agreed to the loan. To me, a contract was worth one hundred & fifty dollars, fifty dollars when the contract was signed and the hundred dollars when the roof went on eight weeks later. It was at this time the building society would pay up.

 

I worked seven days a week to start with and set myself a modest target at four a week. That would give Jane a little less than I was earning on Bell’s, but after the eight weeks, we would be on the good money.

 

At weekends I would man one of the show homes, we had several sites by now. By making appointments with the people who came around, I could sometimes see five to six clients a day. At times they would sign a contract at the show home, on their first visit. After a short time, I got clients by word of mouth from past clients, I gave a finder’s fee of twenty-five dollars for every contract signed. In this way, my modest target of four was well below what I did achieve.

 

Now the job got easy as clients came to me knowing what they wanted, having friends who had moved into homes bought through me. I took up the game of golf and played two or three times a week. I was about to tee off one day when I was asked if I would like to join some other golfers to make up a foursome.

 

As we played we introduced ourselves, one of the players asked me if I would have a drink with him after the game. As we sat in the clubhouse he asked if he could look at my portfolio of buildings as he may be in the market to buy. I agreed to let him have a spare folder I had in the car, and we made a date to play golf the following week.

 

As I drove into the car park of the golf course, he was waiting for me with his golf clubs and my folder in hand. All around the course, he asked me questions, did we guarantee our work, completion dates and a host of others. I smelt a sale in the air and went into salesman mode. You could have knocked me down with a feather when he told me he would like to negotiate a deal for six houses. After that, I would make a point of asking if a potential client played golf as it was a good place to do business.

 

Speculators with capital from club investors would build a complex of houses for sale to boost their profits. A leisurely stroll around a golf course, chatting as we played brought many a good deal one deal I remember was for fifty houses, it netted me five thousand five hundred dollars. It took six weeks to seal the deal and started me smoking again.

 

Let me explain that last sentence, I had given up smoking for two years. On the sixth week of trying to convince this agent to sign the contract, he phoned me asking if my wife and I would join him and his wife for a meal. We met at the restaurant of his choice and had a very fine meal. As we got to the coffee and biscuits, he said I see you go nowhere without your briefcase. I answered you never know when you might need it, do I need it now. He laughed then said get it out he was ready to sign. As I was getting the papers ready he took out a cigar case, I took one as he offered me the case. I was halfway down that cigar, and it was a big one before I looked at it saying I don’t smoke.

 

Once I got this first fifty-house contract built and sold, many others followed. The money was flowing into the bank balance; I was doing so well at this job. I was so full of confidence; I could not understand why the head of the company asked me to go on a self-motivation course. He would pay all expenses, for the course was for high rollers and commanded a high fee.

 

As I was now dealing with high profile businessmen he thought that the company and ultimately I would benefit from this course designed to boost the confidence and stature of the candidate. He was somewhat disappointed when I came out of the course no better than I went in. The main objective of the course was to break the spirit of the candidate, then rebuild his confidence. They could not break mine, so I stayed the same. All went well for about a year and a half then the housing trade took a dive.

 

One Monday morning we went into the office to find a note on the front door exclaiming the firm had gone bankrupt, we found this very strange as the bricklayers were still building houses. We tried to phone, but could not get in touch with the owner, I never saw him again or the money I had coming. I did the rounds of other building company’s, but most were looking to shed job’s not put on. So with reluctance, I went back to driving heavy trucks, part-time at first just as a relief driver for holidays or sickness. Then Owen came up with an offer, if I got a truck he would see I had all the work I needed.

I went for it although my heart was not into it, I had heard many stories of my old driving mates nearly killing themselves, just trying to keep their trucks or their wife’s. So I just hired one for six months, to see how I got on with being an owner drive if all went well I would buy one. I soon found out it was a cutthroat business, there were too many subcontractors looking for to little work.

 

To be honest, Owen did keep me busy in that first seven day week, I did six thousand and eighty miles all at the road-train rate. That gave me three thousand and forty dollars gross; the truck was costing me two hundred and fifty a week. The road tax at five cents per mile per trailer, for that week, was six hundred and forty. Fuel at five miles to the gallon, (now don’t quote me but I think diesel was near to fifty cents a gallon back then.) Tyre wear was equal to two tyres, at one hundred and ten dollars each.

 

That works out not bad, but you can’t keep working a twenty-hour day, day in day out. And not always have road-trains on every trip or that amount of mileage. The best-paid jobs were to the eastern states, a trip of over three thousand miles, across the Nullarbor Plain. The road was littered with the lost dreams of truck drivers, the cost of recovery or repair sent many out of business.

 

With high penalties for late delivery, drivers would push themselves and their trucks to the limit. Some drivers took to stay awake pills to keep themselves going, but in the end over tiredness lead to illness. Then they lost work because they became unreliable, the companies just turned their backs on them. They did not care about individuals; they had a long list of owner-drivers looking for work. I just did Western Australian journeys, mostly trailers to Geraldton. Returning with trailers loaded with produce from the plantations of Carnarvon, destined for Perth’s fruit market.

 

TAXI

 

We heard that some local taxi plates were coming on the market, so Jane and I applied for them. We had a meeting with the taxi licensing board and it went well. But first, we had to pass the taxi-driving test. This meant learning all the streets in the area we were to operate in. Plus all the hospitals, railway stations airports and the shortest route to them.

 

Having limited taxi plates meant you could carry passengers outside your area but had to return to it before you could pick up another fare. The city cabs could pick up in the city, drop that fare in our area and sit on our rank picking up local fares until they got one to return to the city with.

 

We passed all the tests and were told we would get the plates. Getting in touch with the Black and White taxi firm that the other local drivers ran under, we signed with them. They supplied the radio and gave us the number 36 as a call sign. Having bought a new Ford Falcon 500 we had no trouble with the car; taxis were not allowed to be too old.

 

Now we had to wait for the plates. When they arrived they were "taxi 004" - three more digits and I could have called myself "James Bond". In those days lady drivers could not drive in the hours of darkness. So I would start at four o'clock and work until eight, returning home for breakfast. Jane would take the boys to school then book on.

 

I would have a nap then do some jobs around the house. I would take over again after Jane had picked the boys up from school and work until midnight. There was not always enough work to keep all the taxis busy, so we worked a roster at night. Half the cabs would be on duty, half on stand-by.

 

It was always busy on weekends so we had our days off in the week. Later I bought a two and a half-ton panel truck and ran it as a taxi truck, being controlled by Black & White Taxis. The meters were set at the same fares as the cabs. The fare would start when we loaded the item for delivery. Once a week there was a contract with "Avon Calling," to deliver their goods door to door. Starting in the wee small hours we would muster at the railway station to await the train. Then load the boxes of cosmetics for a given area. Then race around trying to get back to the station for another load.

 

That was the hardest part of the job. You had to start with a run that was not too far from the station, but that was controlled by the chap who handed out the jobs so you had to become his friend. The trouble is; everybody was his friend!  So you had to be his dearest friend, and that cost you money.

 

I had a towbar fitted to the truck, so I could pull a box trailer. It doubled my carrying capacity on light loads; the tow bar also brought a new dimension to my work. A friend had a caravan and a boat. He wanted to take both to Albany for a two-week holiday. I said I would tow the caravan if he covered the fuel.

 

To make it pay for the day it took me; I got a load for the truck. As I would be going on Friday morning, I would have the caravan on-site and set up when he got there late Friday night. When I arrived at the caravan site, I booked the caravan in under my friend's name and was directed to his pitch. The owner of the site came over and asked if the caravan was mine.

 

I told him that I was just delivering it from Perth. The owner would be down late tonight. He then asked if I would be returning to Perth. I said yes after I had delivered the load I had on the truck. He asked me to return to the Caravan Park on my way out, as he might have a job for me. I returned to Perth towing a caravan from his park that someone had to leave behind because his car had developed clutch problems. I received quite a number of jobs from him, towing new caravans to his site from Perth.

 

The truck came in handy in another aspect. I had quite an array of thick foam sheets. These were used to protect the goods I carried, from washing machines to three-piece settees and other weird and wonderful things.

 

Roy Bell, his two sons and I plus my three boys liked to fish. We would throw the patio table and chairs in the back of the truck, along with the portable Barbie. The boys and Roy would ride in the back, the wives upfront with me. Then we would drive a hundred miles or so to a place a friend had shown us.

 

It was a lovely spot, miles of empty beach and sand dunes, miles off the main road, along with a bush track that was hardly visible. At times they all had to climb out to push the truck through soft patches. But it was well worth it, to spend a few days out with friends, fishing, eating and sleeping out in the open air. Mind you had to be friendly for we all slept in the back of the truck.      

 

Jane's best fares were Aborigines. She ran a book where they would run up a tab, paying Jane when they got their money on Thursdays. One old Aborigine woman made a regular booking with Jane to run her down to Bunbury once a month to see her grandchildren. It was a round trip of 200 miles. Jane had her share of bad fares too. A drunken Aborigine climbed into her cab and passed out. He did not have the time to tell her where he wanted to go. Jane pulled up at a group of Aborigine men, asked if they knew him so she could take him home.

 

They did not know where he lived, so they pulled in from the cab asking Jane how much he owed her. When they had set him up against the wall, one of them went through his pockets and paid her.

 

One day Jane was sitting on the taxi rank outside the railway station in Armadale. A well-dressed man got into the car, saying he wanted to hire it for the day. He was a politician from Geraldton. He had come down to see some of his constituents that had moved down to Perth. He was the only fare she had that day and he insisted on buying her lunch.

 

 

 

One fare that frightened Jane happened as she was about to go off duty. She was on her way home around five at night, just before the sun was about to set. She was asked if she could do one last job, as there was no one around to do it.

 

There was a fare at the Kelmscott Hotel and it was local. She agreed to do it but it would have to be the last and they had to tell me. I was home with the boys waiting for her to return as I had her dinner ready. About fifteen minutes after they had rung me, I got a second phone call to say Jane had called in with a "code 13". This meant she was in trouble; she had changed her channel to 13 and locked the call button down. Back at taxi control, they could monitor her on another set, but still, co-ordinate the rest of the fleet to get to her.

 

They could hear him swearing at her and threatening to kill her if she tried to take him back there. Where "there" was we did not know or care, Jane's safety was all we had in mind at present. Having got Isabel to look after the boys, I went out in my taxi truck to join in the hunt for Jane. In the meantime, Jane had kept up a running commentary on her whereabouts, by talking to her passenger.

 

She was saying things like "this is the second time we have passed the Kelmscott Hotel" and "we are heading towards Armadale again". When she saw that she was being followed by a line of taxis, she said she was going to pull into Hungry Jacks as she was hungry. He could then make up his mind as to where he wanted to go.

 

As Jane pulled into the car park it was full of taxis; she had just enough room to park. As she stopped she was out of the car and running, she need not have bothered. As she got out, twelve taxi drivers were climbing in to drag him out. They had him by his arms and legs, it was a wonder they did not tear him in half for they were pulling from both sides of the car.

 

It turned out he had been sent to the alcoholic Rehabilitation Centre just outside of Kelmscott to dry out. He had got out and did not want to go back. In his drunken state, he had threatened Jane not to try to take him back there. There was a 14" adjustable spanner in my toolbox, its new home was in the pocket of the driver's door.

 

On one of our rare nights off Jane and I went into Perth for a night out. On the way home, we had called around to Black and White Taxi Control to pay our taxi dues. The taxi firm had contracts with several nightclubs; one called Knight Club had rung for a cab to take one of their entertainers to his hotel in Cannington.

 

It was such a busy night there was not a single taxi free. As we would be going past Cannington on our way home to Kelmscott, we offered to take the fare. It turned out to be Jimmy Edwards.

 

 

HIGH SPEED

 

Perth City is always busy; it is the hub of life for those who live in its outlying suburbs. All roads radiate from its centre like the spokes of a wheel to link the outer rim, of this great City of light the home of the sandgroper.

 

 To the west, the Stirling Hwy links the city with the harbour town of Fremantle. The Great Eastern Hwy runs out though Midland to Southern Cross then onto the gold mining town of Kalgoorlie then on to the eastern states of Australia. At Midland the Great Northern Hwy begins, taking the inland route to Port Headland though gold fields and iron ore mines, it ends in the Northern Territory.

 

Albany Hwy runs south thorough Cannington Maddington Gosnells Kelmscott and Armadale before leaving the outer city limits. The Albany Hwy is a very busy road; it has two lanes in both directions for its entire length from Perth to Armadale. Princess Margaret Hospital for children is in Subiaco just northwest of the city, it is twenty miles from Kelmscott taking over an hour in normal traffic.

 

I did it in twenty minutes with the child of a friend who was going into a diabetic comer. Jane was driving the cab; I was doing a local job in the taxi track. Jane had a call to go to a friends house in a hurry when she got there the child was showing signs of parsing out into a diabetic comer she had to be rushed to Princess Margaret's.

 

They had telephoned for an ambulance but were told it would be sometime before it would be available. Jane called the taxi controller on her radio for me to meet her on the highway to take over. This I did then leave my truck was it was, we headed for the Hospital at high-speed lights flashing. The controller informed me he had contacted the police they would meet me on the route and give me an escort.

 

I had no trouble as I pasted though Gosnells and Maddington, but as I approached Cannington the roads became quite heavy with traffic. By the carousel shopping centre an idiot pulled out in front of me to slow me down, he changed lanes as I tried to pass him on the inside and offside.

 

The lights turned red at the Welshpool road intersection, as we stopped he looked back at me sticking his fingers up in the air. I had no time to bother with him I was to busy blasting my horn and waving at the motorcycle policeman heading the other way lights and siren going. He must have been given the discretion of my cab for as soon as he saw me he turned to come up beside me. Did he ask Princess Margaret's? When I said yes he pulled forward, beside the car that had been blocking me.

 

Telling him to pull the **** out of the way, he gunned his bike and we were off on a high-speed run through the streets of Perth.

 

At the roundabout, to the causeway across Heirisson Island, a bewildered motorist got a kick in his door, from the policeman when he failed to move out of the way fast enough. Every traffic light along Adelaide and St Georges Tec was on the green with a policeman at each intersection, we were doing eighty plus though the heart of the city. Swinging right at the top of St Georges Tec then left into Wellington St, two more blocks we were outside the main entrance as we pulled up a team of nurses with a gurney took the child from my cab.

 

I stepped from my car to light a cigarette and found I was shaking so hard with the adrenaline running through my body I could not hold the cigarette still.

 

We started to lose work as the city taxis from our rival company, "Swan taxi's" came into our area. They could take up clients in the city run into our area and stay there taking up local work until they found a fair to return once again to the city.

 

This was thoroughly unfair in our estimation, as we were not allowed to go into their area to work. We complained to the taxi authority but were told there was nothing we do about it as their plates allowed them to do so. When this ruling was made it seemed to us that the other taxi firm deliberately loaded our area with their taxis to put us out of business.

 

We still had our hard-core customers to rely on but found the taxi ranks full of their taxis. We had to drive the streets in our own area to take up the passing trade. It was hard to make a living this way. I still had the taxi truck to earn a meagre living, but with our earnings from the taxi being hafted to what it should be, it was time to think about selling up and moving on.

 

Kelmscott had its own volunteer bush fire brigade. As taxi drivers, we could be called to a bush fire with ease. On the way, we could pick up other volunteers. As I had the taxi truck, it would be used to carry extra firefighting equipment. With the towbar, a water tank or pump could be towed. As volunteers, we came under the control of the regular fire brigade, and they gave us the training we needed. I sweated for many hours in the hot sun, putting out mock bushfires. But I never did fight a real fire; I went to several with my truck with equipment, but never to the fire line.

 

Richard, my son.

 

The day Richard nearly drowned is a day I will never forget, we had gone to the North mole at Freemantle dock to do some fishing. I had told the boys not to play on the concrete ramps that ran down the side of the mole into the water as the bottoms were coated in seaweed and were very slippery. I was setting up my fishing rod and was about to start fishing when Nicolas came running to me. He was crying and shouting that Richard had slipped into the water, and was being carried out to sea. He had left my youngest son Stuart to keep him in sight, so we could find him easily. Nicolas and I ran along the North groin until we reached Stuart, who was pointing to where Richard was floating up and down in the fast current.

 

I had stripped off my top clothing and went into the water without stopping. I came up beside Richard and he immediately grabbed me around the neck. We immediately sank below the surface and I had to praise him off of me. When we returned to the surface I threw him away from me towards the rocks where Nicolas and my friend had to climb down to assist me.

 

After several attempts, I finally was able to throw him to where they could reach him and pull him from the water. When I scrambled up onto the rocks I was exhausted and had to be dragged up to safety. To be honest, when I saw Richard was safely in the hands of my friend, I knew that I had no strength left and could have easily been carried away by the current.

 

Where I got the strength from I do not know, all I know is it took a great effort to reach those rocks. Even then if my friend had not stamped on my left hand breaking the small finger, I would have slipped back into the water and been swept away.  As I dried Richard I must admit I was full of emotion and held him close to me when I asked if he had swallowed any water. His reply was, “no dad I kept my mouth shut.”

 

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 25.03.2018

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Widmung:
To all the friends, I've lost along the way. friends