A soldier’s personal account of World War 2 from 12th December 1939 – 2nd March 1946

Part Seventeen – Caught short

We had arrived in West Africa just at the tail end of the rainy season and had barely reached the shelter of our hut before we gained our first experience of tropical rain. A storm, more sudden and more violent than anything in my living memory came crashing about us, continuous shafts of lightning stabbing through the inky black clouds and into the ground around us, ear-splitting peals and crashes of thunder and rain so dense that it restricted visibility to a few yards and filled the three-feet-deep gutters in just a few minutes to go racing like a raging torrent past the door of our hut. And in half an hour the sun was blazing down again and everywhere there was steam, rising from paths and trees and corrugated iron roofs. We found that we were in a bath of perspiration, the sweat running in streams down our faces and dripping off the tips of our noses and chins, our shirts and shorts wringing wet and clinging to our skins. And thus we sweated, day and night, for every moment we spent on African soil.

Having deposited our kit on our beds and the rain having ceased, we set out for the mess where a meal had been prepared for us. The sweet consisted of fresh fruit salad; fresh fruit which in England we had not seen for several years and there were few of us who could not resist a second helping.

That night was our first under a mosquito net and very strange it felt, like being in a cage.

It must have been in the early hours of the morning that I awoke with tremendous pains in the pit of my stomach. Suddenly, fully conscious, I realised the urgency of the situation and tried to leap out of bed. I became hopelessly entangled in the mosquito net as my plight became more desperate. Before I got half way across the hut I had made an awful mess of a brand new pair of pyjamas. When I got outside I had no clue where the latrine was, but set off in the direction in which I vaguely imagined it to be. I had absolutely no control over my bowels at all and by this time I was feeling very distressed and worried about the embarrassing prospect of facing my barrack-room mates in the morning.

I realised that verbal silence would not be enough, knowing there was plenty of evidence of my plight and no means of concealing it. I started to dig a hole with my heel and completed it by digging with my fingers and buried my pyjama trousers. It was a long time before I felt it safe to return to bed. The dreaded dawn arrived, and reveille and with it the unconcealed amusement and ridicule of my friends. But one of the Old Coasters came to my rescue. He stated quite boldly and unashamedly that it had happened to him and he prophesied that sooner or later it would happen to every one of those who thought it funny now. This was part of life in Africa – I had just been unfortunate that it should have happened to me so soon.

I spent most of the morning in the latrine until I felt secure enough to venture as far as the Medical Officer’s consulting room. He wasted very little time in summoning an ambulance and packing me off to hospital. I was terrified lest another accident should overtake me on the journey, but it was only about a ten-minute ride. And so, barely twenty-four hours in Africa, I was admitted to hospital with suspected dysentery. Actually, it turned out to be nothing worse (?) than a rather acute attack of enteritis. I had learned the hard way that if I ever go to Africa again I must be most cautious about taking a second helping of fresh fruit salad!

After I had been in hospital for about a week, I received a visit from John Humphreys who bought news that our draft were pulling out in a couple of days. It appeared that we had originally been destined for the Gold Coast, but the unit to which we were going had now moved into Nigeria, so we were now going that much further afield.

The idea of being left behind at Freetown horrified me. I realised that if I did not leave Sierra Leone with them it may be months before I saw my friends again, if at all, and I did not relish the idea of being left stranded here where I would not know a single soul. So far as I was concerned I was quite well again now anyway and I set out right away to try and convince the doctor and nurses that I was.

I took the opportunity during the Colonel’s inspection the following morning to approach him on the subject and told him the reason for my anxiety to be discharged without any further delay. He listened most sympathetically and after consultation with the M.O. it was decided that I should be discharged the following morning. The next day, after arrival back at the transit camp, I did have the opportunity of walking down to Freetown for a short sightseeing tour of the town before we left early the next morning.

We embarked on a small coastal steamer for the journey down to Lagos. It was a very antiquated tub, even hotter below decks than the ‘Highland Princess’ had been and seemed to be infested with rats and cockroaches. That night a great number of us decided we would sleep up on deck and take advantage of what cool breeze there was. Whilst lying there, before going off to sleep, I saw a rat come bounding along the deck, leaping over the long row of outstretched legs, including my own and I decided that the open deck was the best place to sleep very definitely and not only on account of the heat.

A couple of hours later I changed my mind again. As I have already mentioned, we had arrived in West Africa at the latter end of the rainy season, and in the middle of the night we were caught – literally napping – by a tremendous deluge of torrential rain and there followed a mad scramble to collect all our belongings and scuttle below. It so happened that the old tub was a coal burning vessel and we had been sleeping aft of the funnel, the breeze created by our forward motion had been driving the thick black smoke and soot down onto us and the rain had just completed the process, coating us black from head to toe.

We berthed at Takoradi for a couple of hours whilst a draft of RAF boys disembarked for their service on the Gold Coast and then on again to Lagos. As we sailed up the river towards the Nigerian capital, we again sailed past the low white buildings that housed the various Government offices and the residences of the white administrators of this British colony, the largest of the four in West Africa.

On disembarkation we were transported, as at Freetown, to the local transit camp. After being allocated to our quarters and having a meal, we were instructed to report to the Quartermaster’s Store to collect more kit. As we already had three kitbags full which we had carried all the way from the depot at Leeds, we were at rather a loss to guess what further kit we were to be issued with. We just couldn’t believe our eyes when we received two pairs of white sheets, two pillow cases, a portable canvas bath and wash bowl and an adjustable wooden frame for them, a folding camp bed, a personal mosquito net and a pair of mosquito boots. We began to wonder whether an error had been made and we had been mistaken for Colonels instead of mere Corporals. Still more did we begin to wonder how, in addition to our three kitbags, we were expected to transport all this gear!

To be continued