About the Author After a 12-year career in the Royal Navy, 18 months in the Foreign Office and six months selling semi-conductors, Norman Dabell finally achieved his dream of becoming a journalist and, eventually, an author. Following spells on weekly, then daily, newspapers he launched a freelance golf journalism and broadcasting career in 1989, during which he worked notably for BBC ‘Five Live’ and BBC Radio Ulster, the Observer, Daily Telegraph, all of Ireland’s major newspapers and Reuters news agency. Norman has also written six successful books on golf, including an entertaining memoir of a calamitous life on tour called Natural Hazard. Having hung up his laptop, he now lives with wife Sharon, also an author, peacefully (but always wary of fate) in the Highlands of Scotland. Dedication For my mother, Sheila Elizabeth. Norman Dabell P L U M J A M A N D P O T M E S S C OPING WITH CHAOS AS A SCHOOLBOY AND SAILOR BOY Copyright © Norman Dabell (2014) The right of Norman Dabell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. ISBN 978 1 78455 166 7 www.austinmacauley.com First Published (2014) Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd. 25 Canada Square Canary Wharf London E14 5LB Printed and bound in Great Britain Introduction A few years ago I wrote a book called Natural Hazard. It was a 20-year diary of an accident-prone golf writer, recounting the incidents and mishaps that befell me and all those around me as I travelled the world on the European Tour. I was notorious for my misfortune – and very occasionally fortune – and everyone wondered how so much could happen to one person. Well, being a hazard was nothing new to me. I was born a hazard. My latest account is a sort of ‘prequel’ to Natural Hazard, a memoir of the 1940s to 1970s as I first stumbled through my childhood and schooldays then joined the Royal Navy, moving effortlessly from jinx to Jonah. The story begins with a lad growing up in a rural village in the East Midlands. It wasn’t an ordinary boyhood. Havoc followed me like a trusty dog. How did I survive? Was the star I was born under a lucky star or an omen of doom? What did my relations, friends and teachers do to have such a calamitous soul thrust among them? But it is not just a litany of mishaps. Embroidered around my tale is a nostalgic chronicle. The Second World War was still vivid in the memories for many as families picked up the pieces, having lost loved ones, lost homes. My mum and dad had survived the war but they were like millions of working class parents, raising a family on very little. The house rent took up much of Dad’s pay; we shared a toilet up the yard; bathed in a tin bath once a week; walked everywhere or took a bus on rare occasions. It was tough for me. Sweets didn’t come off ration until 1953. Then there were sherbet dabs, liquorice bootlaces and gobstoppers that you could hardly close your mouth on. If pennies were short, in the summer I could go scrumping. Life had its mysteries. I wondered whether Peter Brough’s mouth was moving when Archie Andrews spoke on his radio show. And where the yellow went when I brushed my teeth with Pepsodent. Coronation Day, pancake races, Nyoka at Saturday matinee, Uncle Mac, carnivals, fairs and football with nuggs – just some of the memories of boyhood. It wasn’t all play. Sitting the eleven-plus was a trial we all had to go through. Against the odds and the snipers, I won a scholarship to grammar school. Suddenly boyhood was over. Sport, especially football and cricket, dominated my life. I discovered girls; they didn’t discover me. An eon of shyness with the opposite sex began. As I moved into my most formative years, my world fell apart. I lost my beloved father when I was 13, to leave me head of the family. Eventually I left school to join the Navy. Ah, the ‘Swinging ’60s’. The only swinging I did was in a hammock – when I could stay in it. No, it wasn’t exactly hornpipes and ‘Yo, ho, ho and a bottle of rum’ but, while we still ruled the waves, sailors did actually break in the middle of the day to drink a tot that might put the modern matelot on his back. The second part of my story is a 12-year stint in the Royal Navy – getting into scrapes from Plymouth to Bangkok. It all started like this… THE SCHOOLBOY Chapter 1 GOOD JOB IT WAS HIS HEAD As I hurtled over the brink of the pit and plummeted down into the quarry, my life, as they say, flashed past me. It didn’t take long. I was only two years old. After the war Britain was enduring painful years of recovery. I was blissfully unaware of all this, just enjoying a wonderful life as a toddler, living deep in the Nottinghamshire countryside. I had gone through my paces with my new tricycle, learning how to negotiate pedals for the first time and how to stay in the saddle. Now it was time to broaden my horizons. With my much-loved little fluffy doggie accompanying me, I pedalled down the drive. A squadron of worms had been placed across the drive’s end, a ritual whenever I was outdoors. There was no way I would go past the worms. I couldn’t stand the little blighters. This was all because my cousin Margaret had, in an act of devilment, once dropped a couple of worms down my wellingtons. It gave me a lifelong revulsion of worms. It was a brilliant system, a sure-fire way of keeping me away from the road outside the house. Well this time the worms seemed to have wriggled away. I careered out into the road, a blur of spinning legs. West Leake Lane didn’t see much traffic in 1946 and a good job it didn’t, or that might have been it straightaway. I pedalled up the lane, turned a corner and cruised into a spinney. In this spinney was a large pit where gypsum, the white plaster found in huge escarpments locally, had been quarried then taken away on the little ‘Lady Angela’ train. Suddenly I was careering downwards out of control. My feet were whipped off the pedals and over the handlebars I went, ejected into the pit. I tasted fear for the first time. Over and over I tumbled until my head smacked into a lump of gypsum. Blackness closed in. My escapade, though, had been seen by the driver of the Lady Angela, Tommy, and his fireman Snowy. They’d watched in horror as I shot past their train and disappeared over the pit. Tommy scrambled down the pit and struggled back up the crumbling face with me in his arms. I gradually came to with this sooty-faced man whispering soothing words and rubbing my forehead, by now one big lump, with the butter from his lunch box. In my dazed state I thought he was offering me a sandwich. When Tommy got me home I must have looked a proper sight, butter and blood oozing down my blouse. Mum nearly passed out, wailing about how I might be brain damaged. Snowy went up the road to the telephone box to summon a doctor. By the time the doctor arrived, though, I was on my feet, asking for my tricycle. Everyone was amazed at not only my remarkable escape from death but on my miraculous recovery. As people would say over the years: “Good job it was his head; he might have been badly injured otherwise”. It had all begun for me in that a wooded little lane near Gotham in Nottinghamshire, on November 9, 1944. The Second World War still had a way to go before its conclusion. Apparently, when I came into the world just after midnight, the doctor who delivered me said to Mum: “You know who he looks like? Just give him a cigar and he could be taken for Churchill!” At least I didn’t look like Hitler. My mum, Sheila Elizabeth, née Elliott, was a slim beauty, of Northern Irish and English stock. My dad, Neville, of French Huguenot ancestry, was a wiry, tough Englishman. They had met at Slack and Parr’s engineering company in Kegworth, where they worked on aircraft parts until Dad was called up. They were a very attractive couple, Mum resembling Elizabeth Taylor a little and Dad not unlike Gregory Peck. They’d set up home with my maternal grandparents in Leake Lane but just before I was born, Dad got his call-up papers and had to go and do his bit in India. I was just a few weeks old when I had my first narrow squeak that was a prelude to a life on the edge.