Made In Hull By Maurice Fairfield Part Six - The War Part 2 (6/6)

(1/6), (2/6), (3/6), (4/6), (5/6), (6/6). Part One - Arundel Street Days Part Two - Our Terrace Part Three - The Calm before, (The Storm) Part Four - Schooldays Part Five - The War 1

Crawling into tanks, and exploring ships' engine rooms, noisy with chattering pumps and stinking of steam and hot oil. Hearing strange languages spoken and sometimes being fed with sailor's food of a richer variety and greater quantity than my mother could put on the table. Of special interest were the Russian ships crewed partly by women, many of them engineers who handled tools, and threw heavy equipment around with the same strength and confidence as their male counterparts. They ran the same risks on the icy, submarine infested seas between Hull and Murmansk as well.

It was on one of these ships that I saw a human body (a dead one I mean) for the first time since they took me to see my grandma in her coffin in the house in Arundel Street. There was a Polish ship which had been bombed at the mouth of the Humber and limped into Hull for repair. It was winter and the ships fires were out and her boilers cold. A number of men had been killed and the vessel had been cleared of bodies or so they supposed.

It fell to my fifteen year old lot to go into the pump-room adjoining the engine-room and find what my brain told me was a boiler-suit hanging over a pipe - until my vision improved in the poorly lit space and I knew what it was I had found. What I was chiefly scared by was the sudden dread that it might be my father who was away in the R.A.F. This was not rational: There was no reason why he should have been there, but I suppose the thought that he might be dead somewhere was at the back of my mind. My discovery was a disturbing experience. The face, although unmarked, had not been a pleasant sight and I knew better than most people what death was like, from that moment forward.

Copyright 2006 © Maurice Fairfield Continued soon on www.thisisUll.com......

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