Page 19 - Demo

27see how the college would release me and so turned him down. Anyway, the captain said I could stay on as the Lamp Trimmer which was really an assistant to the boson. I was supposed to be staying at home to look after my sister Jane while my parents were away and so I went home by train, organised her to stay with a friend and raced back to Bristol. This voyage was supposed to be to Liverpool with a stop in Dublin. However, the wind and tide were against us and it took 3 days to get out of the Bristol Channel. I was now a day worker and the ships cabin boy who was about 15, and appeared to have been adopted by the STA,used to come to me in the morning and ask if I wanted a mackerel for breakfast. If I did, he caught one there and then and by the time I appeared in the galley cooked it, delicious. Because it took so long to get away from Bristol we were running out of water and so the Captain decided to divert to Waterford to resupply. As we moored up in Waterford, we were met by a lot of very worried people who asked why we had come. Apart from being called The Sir Winston Churchill, we were flying the Union Jack. A year before a RN patrol ship, The Brave Borderer, had gone into Waterford and been shot at by the IRA. The chap who did it was sent to prison but had just finished his sentence that day. Thus, our arrival was considered somewhat provocative. The boys were all told that they could go ashore but not too far away and had to be back at some agreed time. This did not apply to the sort of NCOs of the crew, namely the boson, the cook, the engineer, myself and a TWW cameraman who was filming the voyage. We decided to take the lifeboat and go down river to a pub we had seen as we sailed up the River Suir. This ended as a great night out.We eventually found a riverside pub and went for a drink. It was immediately obvious who we were, and the locals looked at us with some suspicion. It was not long before they were all singing IRA songs ac-