Page 118 - Michael Frost-Voyages to Maturity-23531.indd

rounds, we had missed all of the target aircraft; had it been live ammunition, we
would probably have devastated Portsmouth! This fatuous exercise enormously
entertained Tricky, especially because most of us were very seasick!

But it was not over. We were then directed to an adjacent building in which a
complex machine-gun type of weapon was replaced by a 6-inch gun. Now, a 6-inch
gun was pretty small, being the prime weapon of British light cruisers, but to us
it looked enormous, even though a large part of the barrel had been cut off. (The
largest guns of all were those of the World War II Japanese battleships Yamato and
Musashi which were equipped with 18.1-inch guns, a size difficult to conceive.)
Fortunately, we were not required to fire this horrible thing, merely to know how it
worked (and not under a hose, an experience none of us wished to repeat).

The remainder of the day was, of course, anti-climactic. A lecture on how to
operate a ship in warfare was given to us by a very erudite Lieutenant-Commander,
but the idea of how to operate in the nuclear age seemed a bit skipped-over; we
were instructed, for example, to put white-painted screens over windows and
portholes to deflect some of the blast effect of a nuclear attack, but I failed to
see how we were to be so prepared; on the ships on which I had sailed, no such
screens were in evidence, and it seemed to me unlikely that the Soviets would
give us a warning that would allow a ship’s carpenter to suddenly manufacture
several hundred of them. But I understood; Britain was often ready to fight the
last war, but never that which we were to face (except for Agincourt!).

For the most part, all this new learning was quite academic; the likelihood of
having to know how to load a Bofors, for example, was very limited. But strange
things can happen; I believe, though not with certainty, that Martin Reed, later
(in 1982) mate on Canberra in the Falklands, was on this same course. Naturally,
he would not have had to fire such a gun in anger, but it is a precept of command
almost anywhere that those in charge, while not needing to be expert in all aspects
of a discipline, should know the basics. Perhaps that is why cadets at some time
have to clean out paint lockers!

There were, of course, other things to learn. The rather peculiarly named
Efficient Deck Hand Certificate seemed easy enough to obtain (what it allowed
one to do I never really ascertained), the Certificate of Efficiency as a Life boatman
seemed to be of obvious utility (by then I had, of course, spent many hours, not
always unpleasantly, in a lifeboat) and a Radar Certificate, which, given the pace
of progress, was obsolete virtually from the day that it was granted, all served to
fill up pages in my Discharge Book (which is a record of qualifications, service in
vessels, and an alternative type of Passport for Seamen).

More importantly, the year was coming to an end. Part of the MAR exposure
to the real world was a period of overseas acculturation. The group of cadets

117