Page 12 - BNVTA CAMPAIGN Summer 2020

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campaign Summer 2020
Reader’s Story by Jack Hassan
My Time On The Island
Christmas Island, Spring 1957 – Spring 1958
On completing my training with the Royal Engineers, everything over the coming weeks and months was something I definitely wasn’t prepared for!
Landing on Christmas Island at night time, the driver collecting us and taking us to Main Camp was marking something on his windscreen as he drove... Only later did I find out that he was keeping count of the crabs we were running over on our trip to the camp!
What have I done?!
I was stationed in the Main Camp as one of two engineers responsible for maintaining the 3 boilers that fed the cookhouses. I worked with a great guy called Sid Foster from Gateshead. I did visit him and his wife Fran, but sorry that we didn’t keep up the friendship...
On landing on the Island, on reporting for duties on our first day we were called Moon Men; because of our pure white skins!
It took some time to adjust to living in a tent to begin with... then we lived in the huts. There were 6 to a tent/hut and each had a pole outside it with a crab tied to the pole!
Each tent/hut painted their crab and put their tent’s name on the pole outside; our tent was “The Lea Rig” – named after a pub I drank in on Dundas Street back in Glasgow.
The Lea Rig had a Lance Corporal (in charge of the tent), 2 engineers (Sid and I, who were on 24-hour duty) and 3 stokers (who were on 3 hourly shift rotation between them). One night we were at “the pictures” and a message came up, “Will the engineers go to Boiler No.1?” and, as Sid and I got up to leave, the audience started cheering for us!
Christmas Island is actually a coconut plantation – just imagine that
we could actually climb up the trees and knock the coconuts down, split them open and drink the lovely fresh milk! In the island’s lagoon – where we could have an occasional swim, there were big puffer fish that would blow themselves up in front of you whilst you were swimming!
I was lucky that I had an outlet for enjoying myself at Christmas Island – there was a band; Bill Skinner’s Dance Band (sometimes known as The Show Band) and the leader was Sgt Bill Skinner. Bill Retty was a friend who played trumpet, and I played with him back home in Glasgow. He wrote to me quite often trying to get me to come to Christmas Island to join the band because I played the alto sax and that’s what the band was missing!