Page 25 - Demo

33did not have appendicitis but just wind. I cannot remember what happened to him but it must have come close to being keel hauled. I was very tired by this time but was put on periscope watch. I sat in a sort of dentist chair with foot pedals to rotate clockwise or anticlockwise. The speed of rotation depended on how hard you pressed on the pedal. Of course, it was now very dark and so there was nothing to see but I suppose that without the sonar we were deaf to surface ships and I do not think they used the radar. I had been doing this for some time, but it was hard to see how fast you were rotating. So, every so often I looked away from the periscope to look at the floor to find out. Eventually, I must admit that I shut my eyes and just slowly rotated the chair. I then became aware that all noise in the control room had stopped and wondered if I had stopped going round, which I had. A quick look at the floor and then I shook my head and started going round again. The quiet chatter in the control room resumed and they all relaxed. This was nearly the end of my time aboard and at some point later, the Captain appeared and called 60ft. This time when he stopped the stopwatch, he called out %u201cone minute! Now we are getting somewhere%u201d and looked please for the first time in a week.I enjoyed my time on board and the officers tried to show me as much as possible of what they did. I guess that they get use to the watch timings but I found it exhausting. Being squashed in my bunk and being trodden on from time to time did not help. A few days later I was back at Cranwell and resumed my flying training. At that stage in my career I had no idea that I would become an anti-submarine pilot. At some point during the course we also had a visit to the NATO headquarters that was in Paris in those days. Each day we had very boring lectures on the organisation and so forth followed by a fairly formal lunch then more tedious talks to try to stay awake through. Of course,we were in Paris and so made the most of it. One day a few of us had