I’m leaving home
— 1982 —
It was my last day in the Sea Cadets before I left home to join the Royal Navy. I had just turned 16 and Great Britain had just won the Falklands War.
The Sea Cadet officers invited my parents to my farewell party at TS Caprice and we gathered in the officer’s mess for a beer. Everyone was very proud of me.
At my farewell party, Mr Hargreaves cried into his beer as he said goodbye. Mr Hargreaves had been a radio operator in the Royal Navy during World War Two and he taught me Morse code at his house on Saturday mornings. Mr Hargreaves begged me not to join the Navy. I should stay and do my A-levels and go to Cambridge, he said. I could always join the Navy later if I was still interested. But I had made up my mind. I was going to join the Navy.
Before I left home, I led a double life. At home, I barely spoke and I was always in trouble at school. I didn’t even read a book for the last two years. But in the Sea Cadets, I was the star of the show.
I won Best Cadet two years in a row and I was the only Cadet Petty Officer in my district. We had competitions against other Sea Cadet units practically every other weekend. Sailing, rowing, shooting, orienteering, pentathlon, adventure training, guard drill, PT and more with me as team captain and we won pretty much everything. TS Caprice won the coveted Burgee Award for Excellence.
At school, I was a clown and a troublemaker. I went to a fancy grammar school but everything was so easy and boring that I switched off and did no work at all for the last two years. I was always in trouble and did zero homework but I always came top of my class anyway.
Grammar School
I came first in my year and won prizes in maths and advanced maths but I couldn’t face another two years of this. I needed a challenge. I needed to get away.
At my farewell party, they gave me a bosun’s call as a farewell gift, and everyone shook my hand. My mum gave me a St Christopher for safe travels and my dad gave me twenty quid for beer.
The train for Plymouth left from Paddington Station at 9:25 am on the Third of September 1982 and I was off. I had twenty quid, a St Christopher and a change of clothes. I didn’t look back.
☕️☕️ Buy me a coffee? ☕️☕️
It won’t make me rich but it’ll make me happy.
(I promise I won’t spend it on beer!)
Chapter Two — Arriving at HMS Fisgard — is here:
Leave me a comment if you were there! Even if you weren’t!
Not good enough grades at A level to be offered a place for electrical electronic engineering degree, but had offers for chemical engineering (declined). Got on same Paddington train heading for Plymouth and HMS Fisgard.
I remember the van picking us up from Plymouth station and taking us across the Torpoint Ferry — chug! chug! chug! Might write about that next!
I’ve always enjoyed reading what you have to say. Entertaining and uncomplicated, including the philosophy!
Thank you, Marianne. You are very kind!
Excellent start! I am intrigued about what happens next but still wanting to know more about how different you were at home and school as a child.
As an aside, if an explanation about childhood comes as a result of your adventures, that would be satisfying to me, as a reader.
Thank you, Claire! I am going to go forwards and backwards at the same time. Lots more to say about childhood!
Someone from my class at elementary school said we need to have a reunion because we are all turning 60 this year. I’m suddely getting loads of friend requests (and loads of memories) from when I was 8.
That reunion could be lots of fun!
I have a friend now whom I met when I was ten. I moved away when I was 13 but we reconnected when we went to the same college. She has agreed to take care of some of my end-of-life financial business so I am grateful for that. She lives in DC so we rarely see each and text twice a year for birthdays and Christmases.
One friendship I have had for 41 years is dissolving. He doesn’t want to talk about death. He doesn’t want to hear about his behaviors that hurt my feelings. He doesn’t want to share his feelings or hear about mine. I have been thinking a lot about how friendships begin, evolve and end.
I am going to volunteer at a community garden and I hope to get a plot to grow some food for folks who need fresh veggies. So I have been thinking about Bette Midler’s rendition of “You Got to Have Friends”…waiting for my new friends to come…
I’m lucky enough to have kept lots of friends from school, despite living in California. Probably lots of reunions coming up.
I’m sorry your friend relationship is dissolving. It’s hard to lose a friend. If it’s important to you, perhaps you can find a way to make it work? If not, then maybe it’s best to just let it go.
Thank for your compassion..I reached out this morning with a email giving information about a landscaping project I know he is planning.
There is a history of Alzheimer’s in his family…could be initial stages…he’s in his late 60s. I may never know…
I remember the good times in our youth when there was fun, creativity and humor in our friendship…
What’s adventure training? That sounds fun.
It was fun!
We were a team of six and they’d drive us out into the middle of the moors on a Friday night in the snow. They’d give us a map and say “You are here. You need to walk 10 miles and set up camp. We’ll see you in the morning.”
We’d march about 30 miles over the whole weekend with stops to build a mast, rescue someone with a broken leg up a mountain, take a hypothermia quiz and shoot Lee Enfields on the range. We were experts at the river crossing!
We’d barely see an adult except at checkpoints. We won our London district competition then came second in the South of England finals!
This was the big competition every year and we’d practice for months beforehand. The gold medal at the middle top of the pic was for Adventure Training.
Hurrah! You’re a great storyteller and have had an interesting life. Thanks for letting people like me in on it.
And you say such lovely things, Janet!
Love it! You’re off to a good start. Question: who are you writing this for? Are you writing for an audience? Your family? Are you writing this for yourself as a sort of life review? Are you writing it while you still remember? All of the above?
I’m writing it for my family really — but since they never read my blog, I guess it is for passers by like yourself, Diana 😎 I do enjoy the process of writing though so I would probably write it even with no readers.
I will probably get it printed eventually so they can have a keepsake.
Just a thought:
If you could explain how you could excel on the tests with zero homework and no lab book entries, I would be very interested in reading that.
In England at the time, all your 10 years at school counted for nothing except your scores in your O-level (ordinary level) exams. These were a series of exams (2x3hrs for each subject) that you took at 16. If you did well, you did it all again at 18 with A-levels (advanced level). If you did not, you left school and got a job at 16.
It was a little bit more complicated than that (only smart kids took O-levels, for example) but we used to specialise very early. I ditched everything except for science and languages at age 14, for example. Most people only did three subjects at A-level.
Love to read your stories, we grew up on different planets but you write in such relatable way that makes me dream of my next life as a brilliant Englishman
How are you, Luis!? It has been a long time!
Let me know if you meet a brilliant Englishman. I’d like to be one too.
Well done. Getting started is never easy
Just some thoughts…ignore if they are irrelevant to your project…
What does a child want to know about a parent? What does a child of 20 years want to know, a child of 30 years, 50 years, 70 years?
When I was 10, I read many biographies trying to find out how people lived their lives. I knew already at some deep level that I did not want to follow the examples in the family. Even now I love documentaries about the life of someone. How much of their life was just following the family rut? How much did they plow their own route? Why did they live as they lived?
You write so well. Keep it up. The photos are great.
I don’t know what to do with my boxes of memorabilia so I am making a list of the items I have saved throughout my life, hoping it will be easier to toss the photos, journals, letters, etc. when the time comes. It has been an interesting process, revealing what was going on in each of the decades of my life and maybe why. I toss the things that do not bring me joy. Now I can see why some people say that writing autobiographies are so difficult and that they are sometimes incomplete resources for biographers.
Keep it coming, good reads.
Love it
I also joined Fisgard 03/09/82 and was Griffin division….East side benders !!!
I had the honour of being the first backclass apprentice into 831 entry after failing my Charlie LES exam, I didn’t even get as far as ND1 exams…. Beat that
Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
Well done, Adam! What a time it was, eh? Remember the East Side vs West Side pillow fight on the parade ground?
Where did the time go?
I wonder if you read my post about my time at HMS Fisgard, Adam.
https://www.raggedclown.com/2024/01/07/arriving-at-hms-fisgard/
Hey Kevin, I remember that like it was yesterday; bedlam!!!
Gary Brickley sent me a link to this earlier today and it’s strange to read an account of this part of our lives so many years later.
Dave Perry… were you in Frew 2, same as me? Good times, eh?
I think I was Frew 3, but can’t recall. I remember Slack (who got booted out for being scaly) and Martin Freeman were in my mess.
It was good times indeed.
Yeah, I remember Slack and I remember he was scaly. Actually, I remember a bunch of people scrubbing him with yard brooms which was a bit over the top. No wonder he quit.
Yeah — you were definitely Frew 2 (there was no 3). Good to hear from you. I went to the 40th reunion thing in Plymouth a couple of years ago and met Alistair Browne and Rupert Williams plus some others that I can’t remember.
Good to hear from you!
That’s right, there was no 3. And there were a LOT of things that happened after 5pm that were over the top and downright degrading, which I battled against and hence ended up with the Gobby Sprog Award.
I moved to the US over 30 years ago and so never made it back to the 40th Reunion, but I hear there were some familiar faces there. Would love to catch up with Sam Hubbard, Martin Freeman, Craig Towner, KP Nicholls, Dicky Noot…….guys I haven’t seen since the late ’80’s.
I recognise all those names but the only one (AFAIK) at the reunion was Sam Hubbard. I had a bunch of good friends from Collingwood who were all there and they all still see each other. It was nice to see them.
I was in the USA for 24 years. Two years on Wall Street and twenty-two in Silicon Valley. I moved back just in time for the reunion.
Where are you in the USA?