A Fortunate Life

A FORTUNATE LIFE

JOHN WILLIAMS

Copyright © 2018 John Williams and Christopher J Williams

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-6481438-4-0

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January 2018, Cairns, Australia

Christopher J Williams here, author of Seconds from Impact and Rendition. I am John Williams' nephew and have the pleasure of introducing his autobiography.

Like John, I was born in Liverpool and spent years in Southport and also in Plymouth before coming to Australia at at 15. John left school early and signed onto the Merchant Navy in the early 50s and, later, when he was in Australia, he decided to jump ship and try life in Australia. As he'd never returned to England while I'd been growing up, we'd never met. Mum and Dad had talking about emigrating to Australia, but had not done anything about it.

In 1976, my grandfather, Joe Williams, whom I had only met once when I was around 9 or so, fell ill in Canberra, where he had been living with my grandmother, Margaret, since the early 1960s. My father, Joe, flew out to be with his father, but he had passed just before Dad could see him.

His sister, Maggie, was also living in Canberra as she had married a Brazilian Diplomat, Miguel de Almeida Ozorio, who was the Ambassador to Australia at the time and they lived in a fine house on acreage in Red Hill, with three of my cousins, Patricia, Marcos and Carlos. Dad was a Civil Servant who working the Department of Trade and, while in Canberra helping the family cope with his own father's death, he struck a deal with Miguel and commenced working at the Brazilian Embassy, as a Trade Advisor.

Meanwhile, Mum put our house near Plymouth on the market, arranged for removal of our stuff and booked us onto a plane. 'Us' was me, my younger brother, Neil, and Janet, my elder sister by two years. I recall it was a stressful time for all, but particularly Mum, selling cars, getting us onto a train to London, etc, etc. It was my first plane ride, Australia was beaches and who knew what, and I was getting out of a private, male only school. So I was excited, even if Janet, who was leaving a boyfriend behind, was not entirely enthusiastic about the trip. (She went back to Plymouth after a year, came back with new man a few years later, and has been here ever since, and with the same, good man, Jim Anstey.)

I remember clearly my new uncle John, who cut a dashing, energetic figure as he bundled us all into a big Holden Kingswood and took us to a flash hotel in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney.  I remember being in awe of everything in Sydney, particularly the sky scrapers and we also met John's second wife, Brownyn, and a wide circle of their friends.

In due course, I finished school in Canberra and joined the public service, the Army Reserve and then the Regular Army.  This was the early 1980s.  Prior to that, we saw John and his wife Bronwyn, regularly, either when they came to Canberra, or we got in the car and travelled the Hume Hwy to Sydney to stay in their quirky terrace house in Birchgrove.

As my own adult life went forward and John's experienced turbulence, eventually separating from his wife, I started to take the opportunity that he provided by having a flat in Double Bay, which  overlooked the harbour.  I remember it was a good place to meet girls and he even set me up (well I might add) on a couple of occasions. We got on pretty good, despite the almost 30 years between us. He was still a good looking man and we went out on the town on occasion and had some good times together.

When I first got married in 1990, I saw him again, but less often, as he had moved to Melbourne. I was starting to travel with work by then, so did take opportunity to stay with him, or at least have a drink, while I was there.

Later, there was a long period without contact, perhaps only through phone calls relayed to me by Mum or Dad. In part, he'd moved to Adelaide, but also because I didn't need him, had my own family and life, full of its own ups and downs.

Somewhere around 2010, my Aunt Maggie travelled to Australia to stay with my Mum and Dad in their home near Bateman's Bay in NSW. John, who was living in Adelaide at the time, in a hostel and subject to the rules of a guardian, appointed by the Public Trustee, was invited to come to the reunion. Problem was, everyone underestimated quite how difficult a train journey was when you are in your late 70s.

By the time John got to Sydney, a friend he'd met in Adelaide, Paul, had offered him a flat to stay in and, instead of getting on a train and travelling down the coast to meet his brother and sister, he had a bit of conniption in a pub (hard to say more about it) and ended up in St Vincent’s hospital. After a couple of weeks, his son helped to negotiate for his plane travel back to Adelaide and he never got to see his sister before she returned to Brazil.

Fast forward a couple of years and there I was at my Mum's funeral in 2014, seeing John again, after almost 20 years. We embraced and started a dialogue about getting him to move to Cairns, where I'd only recently settled after 30 years of working in the public sector. Six months later after negotiating with his guardian and his son, Christopher, I finally got him a plane ticket and he travelled to Cairns.

That trip was not without incident, however, as I received a call from the airline in Sydney, saying that he'd missed his connection. I pulled out my visa card and we got him into a room at one of the nearby Airport hotels and a seat on a plane for the following day.

I remember waiting for him at the airport and, he duly arrived and strolled through the gate with a backpack containing about 7 items of clothing. I said to him, where was his suitcase and he grinned at me and said he had everything he needed...

Sadly, Dad passed ten months after Mum, a sudden, haemorrhage in his brain and he never woke up. By that time, John was living independently in a flat nearby in Edge Hill and starting his new life.  As he has trouble managing his money, I have an enduring power of Attorney for John and have been paying his bills and rationing out the balance of his money, most of which he spends on cigarettes! (Not that I can preach on this subject.)

Eventually, I realised that he hadn't been managing on his own and that I'd been turning a blind eye to his not eating properly and not keeping his place clean. John took some time to understand that he needed full time care, and he's now living in a nearby nursing home, where the staff look after him very well and he is something of a minor celebrity.

John had previously published the book under the title, the Fortunate Life of a Vindicatrix Boy, and asked me to see if I could help him create an eBook.  Well, he'd lost the original manuscript so I tried scanning it and converting it to text.  Hours and hours I spent and then  I tried to get the full manuscript back from Amazon but John had lost his links to Amazon as he no longer had the email or phone accounts to prove who he was.  Eventually I was able to solve this and I've been able to resurrect and rewrite the book together with some new pictures. The book is basically as it was finished in 2005, with the addition of my forward, rewording some parts, and the inclusion of an afterword, which John has written. I hope you enjoy his life story.

As a final aside, all the royalties from this book will go to assist John in his final years and for as long as I continue to care for him.

Onto the book, and, as 'the lads' once sang:

Welcome, welcome to the Mystery Tour

Dedication

This book is dedicated to all the crews of Allied merchant vessels who served in World War II, enabling so many of us to enjoy fortunate lives at sea and ashore. I trained at the Vindicatrix Training School in Sharpness, England, after signing on with the Merchant Navy and I give a special tribute to those fine young Vindi boys who sadly lost their lives or were injured at sea.

During World War II, many Vindi boys served on ships in the Atlantic and Arctic supply convoys that were the lifelines of the Allied campaign in Europe. Of all the World War Two convoy routes, the most dangerous were the Arctic convoys. Ships carrying supplies to the Russian ports of Archangel and Murmansk had to track the hostile coastline of Nazi-occupied Norway.

These convoys had to contend with deadly submarines together with surface vessels and aircraft from Norwegian ports. During the Arctic summer they travelled in 24 hours of daylight for up to 15 days and in winter faced violent storms and gales. The worst losses suffered by a single Arctic convoy were 23 of 34 ships from convoy PQ17 in July 1942.

Crews on convoy ships had a routine for precious sleep that was dictated by the cargo they carried. With general cargo they could sleep below because they might have time to get on deck before a ship sank, with iron ore they slept on deck for if a torpedo hit, sinking was fast and when carrying a load of fuel, they slept below decks because a direct hit meant oblivion.

The last major British deployment of a large fleet of merchant vessels was in the Falklands war. It was the only way to despatch and supply an army 8000 miles away with no airstrips available. It comprised ocean liners including QE2 and Canberra, oil and water tankers, refrigerated cargo ships and even a Row-Row ferry fitted with bow doors, on which the crew kept a wary eye.

Thieves in the Night

He was standing there braced hard against the hatch, flashlight doused, removing a steel locking bar from a small wooden hatch cover, the top canvas already rolled back. It’s cargo we’re after, lads, for all the crew to share. You’re the smallest two aboard, so you’ve been chosen. We’re only interested in the good stuff, cigarettes, tobacco, grog and the like, he said as he handed us the flashlight, two sheath knives and two baling hooks.

I’ll have to drag the cover back over, but I’ll be waiting here when you get back up, he added, as he guided us into the blackness of the hold. No chance to protest, no time to question; we were the chosen ones – modern Oliver Twists – thieves in the night, slithering, crawling down into the dark, cavernous hold, squeezing between loosely packed boxes and crates. Holding tight the precious flashlight, knives and baling hooks firmly tucked into our belts, our hearts pounding and lungs gasping in the murky darkness.

Slipping, falling, sliding as the tramp steamer Coulgarve pitched and rolled.

Before I left my home in Liverpool and entered the ranks of the Vindi boys who trained aboard the TS Vindicatrix Sea Training School at Sharpness in Gloucester, I had heard lurid tales about the golden rivet, as had Dave the cabin boy. We were relieved to learn we were only to be thieves that night in the stormy Atlantic. As a Vindi boy I had learned to take the word of an officer seriously, especially after my moonlight swim from the Vindicatrix with a group of other trainees. Dripping wet and shivering, we had stood under the clock for what seemed like an eternity. It was punishment for not taking officers too seriously. Under the clock was standard punishment for errant trainees as they spent their last week in training aboard the Vindicatrix, formerly a three-masted steel sailing ship.

She'd had two previous names – Arranmore and Waltraute – before being moored as Vindicatrix in a backwater of the Sharpness-Gloucester canal.

Arranmore or Arainn Mhor is an island off the coast of Donegal, Ireland and Waltraute is the name of a famous Wagner opera character. Originally moored on the Thames, the Vindicatrix was moved to Sharpness in early 1939 because of fears that she could become a target for German bombers.

All those who trained on the Vindicatrix during war or peacetime became known as Vindi boys. While she escaped the ravages of World War II, sadly many of the boys who trained on her became casualties. Many a Vindi boy went to an early watery grave as German submarines wrought havoc on Atlantic and North Sea and Arctic convoys.

My night swim was not the first time I had been in trouble in a canal, but more of that later.

I thought I was in bigger trouble on the Coulgarve when on my first trip to sea we had been woken two nights out of Rotterdam as our ship ploughed erratic furrows in a hostile sea. A flashlight was shining in our faces as we stirred in our warm, cosy bunks, and a gruff voice, straining to be heard above the ocean’s roaring, sang out On your feet, you two – you’re coming with me. We recognised a junior officer in his twenties, stoutly built, short cropped hair, stern and impatient, beckoning us up on deck. We dressed hurriedly in the cramped, lurching space and followed him out into the cold, moonlit night. Clutching the portside gunwale, we edged our way forward along the heaving wet steel deck. As the Coulgarve lurched to starboard, we let go our vice like grip, and threw ourselves on to the top of a cargo hatch. The officer removed the steel locking bar, lifted the canvas sheet, pulled back a wooden hatch cover and beckoned us into the black hole. We dropped on to the cargo stack and began slithering down the cracks between the crates and boxes.

Our fears subsided with each rewarding find. Cartons of Lucky Strike and Camel cigarettes, pipe tobacco, finely decorated porcelain jars of assorted Dutch liqueurs, bottles of Johnnie Walker Scotch and boxes of American basketball boots. The officer was there waiting as we made our assaults on our personal Everest; seagoing porters, laden with all manner of supplies; three tortuous ascents in all. No Atlantic storm, no matter how violent, could wake us once, exhausted, we had regained the sanctuary of our bunks. The ship’s cook woke us; he couldn’t wait to get his bloody basketball boots, and the galley’s daily supply of potatoes, those bloody potatoes, sacks and bloody sacks of them.

Potatoes had loomed large in my early years, as I helped my father grow them in the back garden of our modest council house, picked countless hampers of them on cold mornings at nearby farms for pocket money and hungrily devoured them chipped and fried with battered fish religiously every Friday night. In strongly Catholic Liverpool, Friday night was fish and chips night for everyone, even us Protestants.

Friday could also see a night sky ablaze, stabbing searchlights, bursting shells and dashing tracers, as lumbering German bombers and buzzing RAF fighters locked horns. It was a big adventure for a seven-year-old on the fringe of war – close to the dead, the dying, not fully aware of what it was; scared, excited, like your first fireworks show – spectacular. Glowing hot shrapnel bounced at my feet as we stood outside our house in Longview, an outer suburb of Liverpool. Some nights I trailed closely behind my father on Air Raid Precautions duty; sometimes I was bundled hastily over low garden hedges to the high-pitched whine of bombs dropping close. My father had spent an eternity in the trenches of World War I, laying and repairing wires for field telephones with shells bursting all around him.

Coming through that, he seemed indestructible, talking of it as an adventure: seeing Europe, stealing chickens; tough Australian troops and attractive French girls.

Our family was lucky; we survived the black years of two world wars. Our council housing estate was eight miles from Liverpool on the perimeter of the sprawling Merseyside city, the road behind us the boundary of the vast country estate of Lord Derby, where the Luftwaffe sometimes dropped their bombs haphazardly as they fled the heavy flak criss-crossing the city sky.

Liverpool in the 1940s – no mean city

Dodging and weaving over the outer suburbs, they ditched their lethal payloads before turning for the long and dangerous run home. Many of the bombs fell harmlessly in empty fields and coastal waters.

The good lord’s estate was a cut above ours, but we had the best of both worlds. Family and neighbours were as close as the council houses we lived in. They stood in neat rows of four, with sitting room and kitchen downstairs and bedrooms upstairs. Each had a postage-stamp back and front garden and a neatly trimmed privet hedge. In our backyard stood a mangle for squeezing excess water out of the weekly wash, and in which kids sometimes got their fingers caught – which could explain the name. Outer suburbia had few motor cars; trolley buses and trams provided regular, comfortable transport. In a world so compact and orderly, it was difficult to comprehend the destruction and chaos sweeping Europe.

I survived the Battle of Britain, but not the battles of Lord Derby’s estates or the perils of household air raid shelters. One of his Lordship’s barbed wire fences produced a scar above my right eye and from our indoor steel shelter came a broken collarbone.

The fences were there not to repel the feared German invaders but to keep the lads of Longview from his Lordship's lush apple orchards. A nine mile stone wall surrounds the 2500 acre estate and residence, Knowsley Hall, and its scenic lake.

The Longview lads had dashed through dark, mysterious green woods, across shallow ponds and streams, with a hostile gamekeeper in pursuit, shotgun in hand. Diving head first between the lower strands of the barbed wire fence, I misjudged the gap. The gamekeeper refrained from discharging his two barrels of bird shot in our direction, so we escaped to lick our wounds and eat the few crisp, sweet apples we had salvaged during our scramble through the woods.

The woods were where we caught tadpoles, climbed trees and raided birds’ nests, piercing the tiny eggs with sharp thorns and gently blowing the embryo out to leave the fragile eggshell intact to display on a bedroom shelf. Frogs were fun to catch, and we delighted in making them jump by tickling their backsides with a piece of straw or twig. Tadpoles were transported home in jam jars to watch their development into frogs.

If we were there today we would have more than gamekeepers to contend with – we could be chased by lions, tigers, cheetahs, buffalo or elephants. In 1971 Knowsley Safari Park was opened to the public by the eighteenth Earl of Derby, the first safari park built close to a large city.

Motorists travel along a five-mile roadway through the estate with most of the animals roaming free in what is now one of Liverpool’s major leisure attractions. I wouldn’t think the kids from Longview Estate would still be climbing the wall, but who knows. We were lucky kids, city born but country bred, and the woods were our sanctuary from the ugly war that was tearing the rest of the world apart.

At home we had three air-raid shelters, the corrugated iron Anderson shelter covered by a mound of earth in the back garden, a steel cage structure inside the house that doubled as a dining table, and the backyard entry tunnel that cut through the ground floor of our house and that of our next door neighbours. Anticipating Hitler’s territorial ambitions, Britain had started producing the Anderson shelter, named after the Lord Privy Seal, Sir John Anderson, as early as February 1939. By the time war started in September, the ARP had installed one and a half million of the shelters.

The Anderson was the first to be distributed in our neighbourhood, but it afforded only minimal protection. Eventually it was replaced by the large, square steel cage in which my brother, sister and I slept with rubber Mickey Mouse gas masks always at the ready.

As the war dragged on we found the safest place was the backyard entry tunnel, with its arched brick roof.

My broken collarbone was self-inflicted. After climbing onto the plate steel top of the table shelter I dived off head first. I had just started school swimming lessons at the local pool and was practising diving. It’s the only bone I’ve broken, but I’ve been leaping headlong into things ever since.

The Anderson shelter came in handy as a hutch for our two pet Angora rabbits, Bubble and Squeak, whose names belied their nature. When expecting a litter, they ferociously chased stray cats and once attacked my father’s ankles when he ventured too close. From then on he gave them a wide berth when tending his vegetable garden. Father grew potatoes, peas, turnips, carrots and rhubarb for the family table, while I made a few shillings a day picking potatoes and peas for the wider community.

For a few months I worked in the city fruit and vegetable markets, consigning endless sacks of potatoes to greengrocers. Father’s rhubarb was exceptional, thanks to the local traders’ horse-drawn carts. Our house was in a row of five, and there was an honour system between neighbours. If a horse relieved itself in front of your house, you got to spade the spoils on to your rhubarb patch. The horses were kind to father’s rhubarb and to mother’s roses. Later in life I wondered if that’s what had created the distinctive Liverpool accent. That nasal sound, from wrinkling your nose as you shovelled up the fresh manure.

Longview boys and girls were an adventurous lot, although sex was still in the closet; there was no sex education at school, no condoms, no Masters and Johnson, no television, and nobody talked about sex on radio. Sex started and finished with the fleeting kisses of postman’s knock, just as it did in the Saturday afternoon movies. Girls were sweet, innocent, and inviolate. There was furtive whispering about feeling, but no more. Like Lord Derby’s apples, girls were the forbidden fruit, fresh skin shiny and glowing, to be admired, but not consumed. At 12 years, none of us knew why girls gave us goose bumps, except Roy, who was one of the best ‘feelers’ in the gang. He’d felt more girls than the rest of us had kissed. He may have gone further, but we never did find out.

To find out more about girls, some of us joined a local tap-dancing school, and we performed in concerts at working men’s clubs throughout the North of England. Speeding through the Lancashire night in a darkened bus, bodies got closer than ‘postman’s knock’. Hands started to roam, but only in a nice way, a sort of tentative feel. While we tap danced and fondled our way around the country giving concerts at Working Men’s Clubs, Roy continued ‘feeling’ his way round Liverpool. I had dreams of making the big time like my hero Donald O’Connor. That was not to be, but I would make it onto the stage in a different role and play a small but significant role with the biggest Liverpool act of all time The Beatles.

For the moment I was struggling with the most important thing in my life – my education. It had been a big surprise to most people, including me, winning a scholarship to Wade Deacon Grammar school in Widnes; the most surprised being my headmaster. I had not been good at studying, never seemed to concentrate much, and just thought a lot about travelling the world. I often felt the sharp pain of a well-aimed blackboard eraser.

Today I suppose I might have been diagnosed with ADD – Attention Deficit Disorder, sometimes called hyperactivity. Some doctors have said that 50 years ago children who couldn’t concentrate at school and were under-performing for their intellect would leave and work on a farm, in my case a tramp steamer. As a child in the 1940s I happily accepted the proposition that an occasional swift kick up the backside was the most effective prescription for most of us. Even being hit by a well-aimed blackboard eraser was an acceptable reminder of the need for order. When I topped the marks for the scholarship examinations, everyone I knew thought it was odd.

The school ordered a recount, but it still came out the same, so off I went to Widnes each day on a bus crowded with girls. A few other lads travelled on the bus each day from Longview to Widnes, but we were heavily outnumbered by the girls. Through sheer weight of numbers they sexually harassed the boys. With our short trousers it was easy for them and we were often groped, but we simply regarded it as part of our education.

Girls weren’t the only thing on our minds. Tobacco was another forbidden fruit; we smoked acorn pipes packed with used cigarette butts off the street. Filter tips had not been invented then, so the unsmoked butts were filled with tobacco. When the filter tip arrived it was the down-and-outs who picked butts off the street who lost out.

We played soccer and cricket in the street with two bricks for goalposts or the base of a concrete lamp post as the stumps, and between times there were steam trucks, snowmen, snowball fights, ice slides and radio. Radio was a Godsend in Liverpool during the war, keeping us in touch, keeping us in hope, keeping us entertained.

When the war finished, the docks were still there, with the overhead railway, Pier Head, the ferries to New Brighton, the Mersey Tunnel, Lime Street and the Liver Bird, but we could see right through the middle of the city. It was as if someone had pushed a giant egg slice straight through it, scraping up many of the city’s poor who took the brunt of the bombing.

When the wailing sirens stopped we were among the lucky ones who went on with life.

We dreamed up projects like the Longview Olympic Games in which 6 everyone got to carry the torch. It’s a wonder we didn’t set fire to the entire estate with those bundles of flaming newspapers. We ran in relays handing them to each other, and then chucking them away as they got too hot to carry. We staged track and field events in the street and everyone got a medal of some description, mostly decorated foil caps from milk bottles.

Parents were not amused when we stripped our bicycles down to speedway rig, but we built a real cinder race track and invited some of the country’s top speedway stars to the official opening ceremony. We ruined a lot of tyres and shoes, but it was fun, and it took our minds off girls for a while.

Bikes were our great escape. We rode up behind steam trucks, grabbed hold and let the truck drag us along. Sometimes we just ran up, grabbing a rail at the back of the truck, throwing our feet up onto a metal bar and hanging on. Getting off was tricky, with gravel rash a constant hazard. I was dragged around often in Liverpool, once with near fatal consequences, when swimming in the Liverpool-Leeds canal that ran alongside Aintree racecourse, home of the Grand National Steeplechase. I dived into the canal soon after a string of barges had passed by, unaware that a cable was dragging behind the last one. The cable caught around my feet and, terrified, I was dragged along underwater; close to panic, somehow I managed to pull clear of the cable, struggle back to the surface and gulp in some air.

My lucky escape did not deter me from going to sea, although the Merchant Navy was not my original choice. After seeing Gunga Din at a Saturday afternoon matinee I aspired to be an Army drummer boy, bravely leading troops into battle in some far-flung corner of the Empire. At the Army recruiting office I was given enlistment papers for my parents to sign, but they managed to talk me out of it and, as a compromise, suggested the Merchant Navy. As it turned out, they probably would have been happier with a drummer boy, for the British Army was a safer place to be, and they would have seen a lot more of me. In the Merchant Navy I was aboard a floating time bomb in a war zone, came close to sinking, ran aground several times, was shot at, crewed on a troopship, watched a number of old hands go troppo and spent a lot of time in sleazy bars and brothels.

In the late 40s, girls were not allowed to become Army drummers, do National Service or go to sea, so my sister Margaret also took up tap dancing. She became a talented dancer and singer and later appeared in a number of theatrical productions. When she became principal dancer at Murray’s Cabaret in London, she met her husband to be, a Brazilian diplomat. The subsequent attentions of the Fleet Street paparazzi forced them to flee the country, but that’s a later story.

Twelve weeks’ training at the TS Vindicatrix Sea Training School enabled over 70,000 teenage boys to go to sea aboard British merchant vessels during war and peace from 1939 to 1966. Boys had to pass a tough medical and for many the training course was their first time away from home. During wartime the boys were kitted out in navy jerseys and oilskins which were later replaced by two-piece navy serge suits. I joined the ranks of the ‘Vindi boys’ in 1951. Vindicatrix deck boys wore blue shirts and catering boys white; on their uniform shoulders deck boys had a