Part of the
Acorn Archive
Hearts of Oak
Charles Lewis
Tailpieces
Written
1945
Then there is the looking
after wild birds, work for Customs. etc … Perhaps pets in the Navy wouldn’t
come amiss, as most every ship has a pet of some sort.
I have seen them from tiger
down to a mongoose; one ship had a donkey. The RN Barracks Devonport used to
have a horse on the Ship’s Books.
A ship I was in, the Seamen
had a cat and the Marine’s a spaniel dog; there was always strained relations between
– the dog keeping aft in the Marines messes, and the cat forward with the
Seamen. One day the poor old cat fell overboard; Bill the dog acted the
gentleman, for he immediately jumped overboard and tried his utmost to rescue
the cat; But, Puss wasn’t having any, for as soon as the dog got near her, she
spat and worked her paws to that extent that Bill had to give over, and we had
to man a boat and go to the rescue of our poor old cat. It was laughable to
watch poor old Bill trying to save the cat.
In another ship I was in, we
had a goat; it would eat almost anything; I had seen it eat the oily rags we
cleaned the guns with. Sunday afternoons we was in Clover, after dinner we used
to lay on the upper deck, read and sleep. Anyone who covered his face with his
paper before he went to sleep, wouldn’t find much paper when he woke up. Billy
would see to that; he would eat tobacco for pastime; I have seen him get the
baccy out of the men’s pipes whilst they have slept.
We had a dog in one ship I was
on that could do almost anything but talk – he was afraid to do that in case he
got put on the Look Out. Sometimes he would break out of the ship and swim
ashore (an awful thing to do in the Navy); next morning, when he came off in
one of the boats, the chap who looked after him would say, “fall in aft”, the
dog would slink aft, tail between his legs and head down. After questioning him
as to where he had been, the chap would say, “give him six”; as soon as he
heard “six”, he would turn forward and slink along, as before, until he got to
the Bits, which he would lay over; one man would get a rope’s end, another
would call out the number, as the man “hit” him, not hard enough to knock a fly
off; as soon as the dog heard the number “six” spoken, he was off the Bits and
around the deck barking and jumping for sheer joy; then he would come forward
and wait for a meal, which he knew would be soon forthcoming.
Raymond Forward