Falling Bombs and Siren Songs

By Alan Bond

Alan Bond was a child of London, shaped by the horrors of World War II. He survived the worst of the London Blitz era before being sent to live in Devon. Even though he was sent away for his own safety, life with his elderly relatives compared rather unfavourably with life among the falling bombs.

As a young man, he decided upon a career in medicine. After earning his degree at university, he followed another dream of life abroad. He settled in Tasmania to work as an anaesthetist. This new existence proved too challenging for his marriage to survive, so he started over again as a single man. But life had other plans in store for this adventurer. He met the Blonde, and his life changed forever.

Now retired, he and his Australian lady shared a time of adventure on the high seas, daring the often challenging waters of the Tasman Sea and the Bass Strait. On board their boat, a wooden cutter, they explored the beautiful coasts of Tasmania and uncovered some of the ghosts of the states colonial past.

Alan Bonds story is one of adventure, loss, and newfound love, of second chances, surprises, and dreams pursuedand achieved.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Jun 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9781452509600

Alan Bond

Alan Bond was born in suburban London on the eve of war and was later relocated to Devon to live with relatives. He earned his degree in medicine and moved to Tasmania to practise as an anaesthetist. After his marriage ended, he took to the sea with an Australian girl.

Book preview

FALLING BOMBS AND SIREN SONGS

ALAN BOND

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Copyright © 2013 Alan Bond

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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

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Balboa Press rev. date: 06/07/2013

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

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‘. . . bomben bomben bomben

auf engelland…’

song of the Luftwaffe, 1940

*

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds

The Bhagavad Gita

*

. . . the Sirens are enchanters of all mankind and whoever comes their way;

and that man who listens to their singing… . the melody

of their singing enchants him.

Homer

‘The Odyssey’

"Careless of wreck or ruin, still they sing

Their light songs to the listening ocean caves,

And wreathe their dainty limbs, and idly fling

The costly tribute of the cruel waves.

Faire as their mother-foam, and all as cold,

Untouched alike by pity, love or hate;

Without a thought for scattered pearl or gold,

And neither laugh nor tear for human fate."

CHAPTER 1

Down, down down, would the fall never end

Alice in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll

In our suburban London back garden was an apple tree, easily climbable for a three year old with a propensity for getting into trouble and able to make a start on the ascent by taking advantage of part of the wooden architecture of the new cucumber frame erected by my father; one of his last gestures to civilian life before heading off to join the war. My first Columbus-like venture into this new world waiting to be conquered occurred late one afternoon in the summer of 1940. Breathless, trembling with excitement, in the gathering dusk of an early July evening, I soon made it to the uppermost branch. Not without some trepidation about the descent, I had begun climbing down when there was an enormous explosion from not very far away. With hindsight, I imagine it was something to do with the incredibly brave men of the bomb disposal squad, Royal Engineers, putting paid to an unexploded bomb.

Startled by the sound and filled with the guilt of failing to hear the latest air raid alert, an omission which both our parents had constantly drilled into us was the equivalent of mortal sin to a Catholic (my parents were both nominal C of E, or so they claimed on census forms). The huge explosion from so nearby startled me into releasing my grip on the tree trunk. Receiving minor scratches and abrasions from the homicidal attentions of various twigs and branches on the way down, I fell, inevitably, into the cucumber frame, en route sustaining a deep laceration in the back of my right thigh from the broken glass. The scar of the wound is with me to this day some seventy three years later.

Alerted by my screams, mother came running from the kitchen. Seeing the pool of blood expanding around the wreckage of my father’s flattened but hitherto lovingly nurtured plants within the cucumber frame, she gave a cry, picked me up and, and as, right on cue, the air raid sirens sounded the second alert for the next German attack, ran back into the house to telephone for an ambulance.

With my toddler sister, who seemed never to miss an opportunity, screaming in sympathy and myself bawling in mingled shock, pain, humiliation and terror, a paediatric cacophony fit to rival the clanging alarm bells of our ambulance, we sped through the night of fire and falling bombs to join the queue forming outside the Casualty and Emergency department of the local hospital. Here, being so little, I acquired privileged status and was soon sewn back together under open ether anaesthesia, no doubt dispensed from a Schimmelbusch mask. Saved by a German, albeit a pre-NAZI variant of the species.

Looking back, I have a suspicion that the ether was probably regarded by all concerned more as a blessed relief than a surgical requirement. I daresay the doctors and nurses would have liked similarly to silence my little sister who continued bawling throughout the whole procedure. But maybe they were hoping they could leave that task to the Germans.

boat.jpg

CHAPTER 2

. . . The fresh breeze blew, the white foam flew . . .

Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

To those who use it as a highway and explore its secret places the sea has an allure, on its own at least as enchanting as any of the songs of Homer’s sirens.

Like the Blonde herself, the Hobart sea breeze is frequently a force to be reckoned with. After a sunny summer morning, it can achieve a strength of anything from fifteen to over twenty knots. Sometimes, on a windward leg it can be sufficiently strong to merit the storm stays’l and a reef in the main. In his book ‘Heavy Weather Sailing,’ Adlard Coles defines a strong wind as anything of seventeen or over knots; but then that’s in the Northern Hemisphere. A strong sea breeze is quite okay if you’re sailing a fully crewed harbour racer, not so great if you’re on a heavily laden cruising boat with a long journey in front of her. The sea breeze also tends to come in hard and fast, visible from the north as a disturbance converting the dreaming blue waters of the pre-noon Derwent Estuary into a rapidly approaching line of leaping, jumping whitecaps, tripping and falling all over each other like drunken football hooligans after a match and bringing with it a sudden chill which causes the bikini ‘clad’ girls who have spent the morning on the beach working on their skin cancers to grab for a jumper, very much to the chagrin of any perving male in the offing. What happens is that the land heats up faster than the sea until the hot air begins rising causing the cool air over the latter to come rushing in to replace it. The consequences are frequently bizarre. I have seen two fleets of racing yachts heading for each other, both with spinnakers hoisted running before the wind to descend into a state of utter confusion in the place where the land and sea breezes collide. I was once discussing the baffling predisposition of the breeze with old Skipper Batt, a hero of the days of sail and one of the most canny sailing masters the state has ever spawned.

Yeah mate, he said. "Sometimes after a real hot mornin’, she come in Big End first."

Inevitably, having decided to outwit this potentially trying head-wind by leaving early, plans started to go awry.

It began with the Blonde saying she needed to go to the loo.

The boat was lying alongside a jetty belonging to the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania. In the yacht club ladies? I suggested.

No. The cleaners will be in there. I think I’ll be okay here.

This was in the days before boats had holding tanks: You can’t, I said, scandalised. We’re alongside a yacht club jetty.

It’s okay, she replied, innocently. It’s nothing of any significance. Only a pee.

This was not her only eccentricity:

Buried deep within the labyrinthine complexities of her subconscious lay a curious instinct that drove the Blonde, whenever conditions appeared congenial, to escape the cramped confines of the cutter, ‘Solveig’s,’ bathroom to brush her teeth in the cockpit.

It would take a psychologist of the Skinnerian persuasion to inaugurate a study of pigeon behaviour as part of an experiment to determine whether this curious trait applies to every member of the female of the species, residual evidence perhaps of some primal mating drive. Although to the best of my knowledge, I don’t believe any palaeontologist has ever discovered a fossilized toothbrush among the artefacts left behind by Australopithecus afarensis or Homo erectus. At this juncture I have to register doubt as to whether even the great B.F. Skinner could teach a pigeon to brush its teeth. Be that as it may, the fact remains that whenever we were at anchor, the eccentric impulse to brush her teeth in public visited the Blonde. Equipped with brush, paste and tooth mug of water she would greet the start of the new day by hurrying out to initiate ritual chopper maintenance, the latter comprising the universal to and fro brush movements followed by the traditional spit-over-the-side ceremony, beneath the vastness of the skies above the cockpit.

The propensity to brush her teeth in the open air leads one to the addition of yet another item to the list of those strange mysteries of the sea. I submit that my postulated M.O.S is in every way comparable with that of the Marie Celeste, the Bermuda Triangle and the disappearance of the Waratah. It is, no doubt, the subject of heated debate in university departments of Philosophy and Evolutionary Psychology the world over. The new mystery of the sea, a subject already broached but, I protest, worthy of some elaboration, is this: why do Australian fishermen find the sight of a woman brushing her teeth in the cockpit of a small boat so intensely erotic? This remains a question besides which the complexities of Fermat’s last theorem pale into insignificance. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the female concerned is wearing nothing but knickers and bra, jeans and jumper, or an amorphous storm suit. The fascination seems always to remain the same.

In my opinion, which as by now you will be able to tell, is utterly valueless, it must be part of the job description. One can visualise the ad in the Sits Vacant columns: ‘Wanted: deck hand for fishing boat. Must have Freudian toothbrush fetish (essential).’

Not even Homer, that astute observer of human behaviour, mentions the sirens as brushing their teeth to lure sailors onto the rocks. All the sirens had was the power of their songs. Had they only known about the magnetic attraction of toothbrushes to the unwary seafarer, the poor darlings would have saved a fortune in singing lessons.

Despite her insistence that she was essentially a shy person, the Blonde never seemed to realise the effect of her al fresco tooth cleaning performances on the other surface inhabitants of the mighty Tasman Sea. The moment she appeared was the signal for the crew of every fishing boat anchored in the vicinity to crowd its respective decks and watch the action with staring, eager eyes, following every backwards and forwards motion of the brush like the audience at a tennis match.

While I continued checking through our collection of charts and sailing directions, she disappeared behind the door to the head.

An appropriate interval later, she returned.

I could see things hadn’t gone well. The chin was elevated, the green-blue eyes glittering, the bosom lifting and falling with the accelerated respiration of deep emotion.

My heart sank. Whatever’s the matter?

"It’s that toilet. Again."

She proceeded to explain. It seemed that, in a minor departure from normal routine, she had elected to continue being seated whilst she operated the toilet flush pump. From the picturesque description that followed I gleaned the information that she had then been the unfortunate recipient of what had amounted to a saline enema of a volume suitable for floating an American aircraft carrier.

Subsequent investigation revealed that she had a point. The toilet was indeed pumping but more as a fountain rather than an evacuation device.

Unwilling to admit to the unique picturesqueness of the phenomenon, she finished her observations with a defiant toss of the head and the announcement that she had no intention of going to Lord Howe Island with a defective toilet.

She concluded with a brief theological observation: When God gave man a thingy for peeing standing up, he compensated by giving woman brains. In your case that’s all too apparent, she added, hurtfully.

With hands on hips she delivered her final blast: I’m a woman. As if that wasn’t stating the bleeding obvious. I doubt that ever since Eve entered the retail fruit business in the Garden of Eden, anyone more filled with feminine contradictions has walked the face of the earth.

It’s okay for you, she continued. But I don’t have the same equipment. I really need that loo.

I laughed, which didn’t seem to improve her mood all that much.

Grabbing at a straw that I knew wouldn’t float, I said: There’s always a bucket and chuck it? That appeared not to soothe her much, either. In fact, if looks could have killed I’d have succumbed on the spot.

She delivered her ultimatum. If you don’t fix it, you’ll have to go on your own.

Mutiny.

Not wishing to invoke the marines I sighed, got out the tools and set to work.

The problem soon revealed itself: a torn neoprene valve deep within the bowels, as it were. Also, a long neglected task—a leaking pump handle washer needed fixing.

I didn’t want to run out of spares before we’d even departed.

Where are you going?" she demanded through a mouth full of toast and boiled egg as I headed for the cockpit.

The chandler’s.

Our ancient Holden was back at home hibernating in its garage. The walk to the chandlers took a good three quarters of an hour total there and back.

Before I had finished the job to the smouldering crew’s satisfaction following a suspicious test drive, half the morning had gone.

We celebrated the resuscitation of the toilet by a well-lubricated lunch in the yacht club’s dining room. Thus, by the time we were ready to depart, the early part of the afternoon had passed, we were both slightly pissed and the sea breeze was blowing with maniacal hostility.

The second little problem occurred in the approaches to the Denison Canal, the latter, dug by nothing more than human muscle power in the early 1900s. Or so I am led to believe.

The Blonde, dressed for the occasion in shorts and a sleeveless off-white, figure-hugging jumper was looking through binoculars. The light’s gone green she announced, happily. The bridge must be open."

I put the engine into gear and with the boat careening along at all of three knots, maximum speed under power, we chugged along the channel dredged through the shoals at the Norfolk Bay end of the Canal.

With its racing tides and shallow approaches on either side, the Denison canal is not for the faint-hearted mariner with a pitiful little engine like that with which our vessel was unhappily endowed. Nevertheless, for the little ship bound north or south it has the advantage of saving a detour of a couple of hundred nautical miles around Tasman Island and Cape Pillar at the south easternmost corner of Tasmania. Each of the two aforementioned extremities is a place susceptible to sudden strong shifts of wind, occasionally vertical up or down to the consternation of the crews of sailing vessels finding their craft either laid flat on her beam ends or exhibiting an unlikely urge to become airborne. Bitter experience has taught me to regard this turbulent part of Tasmania as uncomfortably close to a metaphor for my life:

CHAPTER 3

‘. . . caverns measureless to man . . .’

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The historian, Robert Gellately, has described the first half of the Twentieth Century as the Age of social catastrophe. Nineteen thirty six, the year in which I was born might be considered the apogee (nadir?) of the latter.

But it wasn’t my fault.

In the Soviet Union, Stalin’s paranoia was leading to the infamous show trials each followed by the inevitable guilty verdict, each such succeeded by the execution of the old Bolshevik mate he suspected of plotting against him. Like his one time comrades, the megalomaniacal dictator’s psychopathy led also to the arrest and murder of millions of the innocent inhabitants of ‘The Workers’ Paradise.’

In Germany it was the year of the Krystallnacht, the overture to the murder of other millions, mostly Jews. Also in Germany, Hitler’s new army was creating reserves of dieselene to fuel the tanks rolling off the assembly lines to equip his new panzer divisions. At the same time, in England, Sir Montgomery Massingbird, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, was agonising over the paucity of government funding preventing him from stockpiling sufficient hay to feed the cavalry’s horses.

It was during this appalling year that I entered the world, a breech presentation which accorded my poor mother three days of hard labour: not for the last time in my life, arse over tit, as family and friends have never been slow to point out. Obstetric practice being what it was at the time, having adopted such a disadvantageous posture, I suppose I was lucky to survive the short but dangerous journey from the womb into the cold hard world outside. Unremarked by history, the event took place at a hospital in suburban London on the eve of World War II, Hitler’s war. It was a mistake both in respect not only of chronology but also of geography. My parents had recently moved to Eastcote, a suburb sited close to Northolt fighter base which was destined soon to become a place of no little significance in the Royal Air Force’s struggle against the Luftwaffe.

In those last, uneasy days of peace it was very different world from now. Then, it was still possible for a toddler to lie in the lounge room. (We suburban English called it the drawing room, the name a relic, no doubt, of the Victorian ‘withdrawing room’). Reclining sullenly upon the settee (sofa) when one’s soul cried out for one to be outside building a snowman or, in summer, digging holes in father’s vegetable patch, the afternoon nap was a very much resented intrusion upon one’s liberty. During the idleness of the compulsory afternoon lie down it was still possible to hear the clip clop of tradesmen’s cart horse hooves echoing between the houses in the street outside. Coal, our sole and horribly inadequate source of winter warmth, burned in an open fire, was brought in sacks, each of two hundred weight, from a load transported on the back of a flat tray cart driven by a strong man who delivered it by carrying each on his, no doubt aching, back along the path at the side of the house, before tipping it into our coal hole. Sometimes, wonder of wonders, the flat top dray, usually drawn by two huge Clydesdales, was replaced by a hissing and blowing steam truck of the London ‘Gas, Light and Coke Company.’ At the risk of a severe telling off from mother for being AWOL, the temptation to rush outside and actually stand beside this asthmatically wheezing and hissing wonder was usually impossible to resist.

In the lengthening shadows of early 1939, my father applied to join the Royal Air Force. Although an experienced amateur pilot he was rejected on the grounds of being a ‘family man’ (my baby sister and myself, I suppose). Now a humble private in the Royal Engineers, he spent a weekend of his first leave from the army with a few of his friends, building an Anderson shelter in our suburban