“GO WEST, YOUNG MAN”: Chasing my dad Part 13

[“I’m sure I said, ‘lovely, lovely,’ several times before stepping down to put the hammock close to my face. I took a breath and caught the smell of motor oil, and hoped I hadn’t smudged my nose.” June 5, Chasing my dad, Part 12]

When Dad first went aboard the SS Silver Walnut in 1943 - a ship destined to circle Africa in about 90 days, too long for any Navy ship - he called it “a real dud.” He initial assessment may have been right.

In his memoirs, when he described stokers he met aboard the Walnut, he called them “men with brains bashed in,” perhaps a term he heard others use as well.

By the end of his tour of duty, however, and particularly as he recalled his adventures at a later stage in life, any ship was a mighty thing in his estimation. Stokers would have seemed brave men with good brains as well, I'm sure.

For example, he wrote the following in his memoirs in 1975:

"I do not know the fate of the Silver Walnut but I do know for certain she was not sunk or in the words of my dad, “She did not go to Davy Jones’ locker.” And whenever I attend a naval reunion, talk usually turns to ‘those lucky guys’ who sailed aboard the Walnut and who called her home for three months."

"I wish to conclude the story of the adventure aboard the Walnut with a poem which was sent to me by brother-in-law Arthur Catton. He served aboard a Canadian destroyer during the Korean War. The poem expresses my feeling about ships.

"I don’t care if it’s north or south, the Trades or the China Sea;

Shortened down or everything set, close hauled or running free;

You paint me a ship, as is like a ship;

And that’ll do for me."

And because Dad never saw a hammock, like I did just two short months ago in Esquimalt on Vancouver Island, that came from his ship (it included the names of all crew members, including his own), but only saw pictures of it, I’m sure, had he been there with me to smell the oil and the grease that marked the canvas (perhaps transferred there by Stoker Katanna, the hammock’s original owner), he would have felt I was holding fabric meant for heaven, and he would have called Katanna a saint, and shaken his head at the way he had described stokers when he was all of 23 years old.

He also would have been truly enraptured by the tour around the Esquimalt Naval Base.

Too bad I got to our ‘meeting up place’ 15 minutes late. I stood beside the wrong gate, about one kilometer away from the Base’s main gate, for 20 minutes or more, and would be standing there still if a young man hadn’t spotted me pacing about - as if lost and abandoned, which is only half correct.

After I landed at the proper gate, however, Intern Katie Brissard could not have done more to make me feel at home and like an honoured guest. Soon after Katie and I started our ‘walk about’ the Base, at about 10:15 a.m., April 26, I felt as happy as a clam. 

Little did I know that the ‘one-hour tour’ I had requested was a relatively flexible term, as far as my guide was concerned. I was happy, therefore, to march here and there and everywhere and look under almost every stone - for well over two hours. I have scores of photos to prove it.

[“My first photos were of the HMCS Vancouver,

a mighty ship, with a bit of rust”]

[“The ship’s insignia, spotted near the bow... I think”]

[“HMCS Vancouver and G. Harrison. ‘G’ for

‘Grateful I’m not still lost’. Peace to all”]

[“Intern K. Brissard in front of an old ship bay”]

[“The ship bay, useful and unchanged

for decades now”]

[“Many old buildings made me feel I was seeing

what my father had seen about 70 years earlier”]

[“A little old frame building made me think of

an important photo from 1945. See below”]

[“Six boys joined RCNVR together in 1941. They discharged

together Sept. 5, 1945, the day before my dad’s 25th birthday.

Dad, front row, center; in front of a white framed building”]

More to follow. 

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Please click here to read “GO WEST, YOUNG MAN”: Chasing my dad Part 12