Cruiser by Mike Carlton Page B

the susso for two years when I got out here.
    I came out on the Themistocles out of Liverpool. Left in November 1933. I got out here to Melbourne, across to Launceston on the ferry, then by train to Hobart, and they met me there. I worked on my uncle’s farm, and got no pay for a while, because I was absolutely green, chopping wood and everything. I chopped my foot a few times. I said I’d have to have a weekend in Hobart now and then. He said, ‘Yeah, we’ll let you have a weekend in Hobart. Stay at the YMCA.’
    So I went to the YMCA in Hobart and there was a big sign saying ‘Wanted. Men For The Royal Australian Navy’. I couldn’t get in there quick enough, to get away from slavery, six days a week.
    Anyway, I said, ‘Can I join the navy?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, we want people for the navy. We’ve got to have a squad for Tasmania, and you’ll make one of them.’ So I did a few sums for them and then I joined the navy, at Flinders Naval Depot. When pay day came around, they put so many pound notes in my hand, I’d never seen so much money.
    I loved it. Anything better than farming. I loved it and I got on with it. I got a square meal and a few pounds in my pocket, and good mates. 1
    Jock signed up on 4 June 1934. When he passed out from Flinders, he thought about becoming a seaman or perhaps a cook, but the navy told him it wanted stokers, so a stoker he turned out to be. The name came from the early days of steam, when coal was stoked into the furnaces to fire a ship’s boilers. Naval folklore had it that stokers were all muscle and no brain; they messed apart from other sailors in all but the smallest ships and tended to stick together when they went for a run ashore in a foreign port. If there was a brawl in a dockside pub, it was a fairly safe bet there would be a stoker in it somewhere. The name lasted beyond the arrival of oil-fired machinery even though the job changed, and by 1939 stokers needed more brains and had significant mechanical skills. But they still did the dirty work.
    Jock’s farewell from Melbourne was a family affair because his brother-in-law, Arthur Close, was sailing with him. Not long after Jock had joined the navy, he had chatted up some girls in Melbourne’s Swanston Street, and the prettiest of them, Mavis Malloy, had stayed in touch. As they’d got to know each other, the Malloy family had welcomed him as one of their own, and in 1935 he and Mavis were married at a church in suburban Brunswick. Baby Joan was born in 1938. The Malloy girls must have liked a sailor, because Mavis’s sister Jean married one too. Arthur Close was not a stoker but a leading seaman. He and Jock got on like brothers and, with a bit of luck and good management, they wound up together in the Melbourne draft for HMAS Perth . On Saturday 20 May, the girls were there to see them off.
    Another man waiting in the crowd with them at Station Pier, Ray Parkin, would, in time, prove to be one of the most extraordinary men ever to wear the uniform of the RAN. Like so many working-class boys of his generation, he had left school at 14, but he was a voracious reader and a talented painter and writer, with remarkable powers of observation. He carried a small collection of carefully chosen books to sea, and the study of history, philosophy and natural science, entirely self-taught,enriched his mind. Towards the end of his years, the gifts of his intellect and his achievements in literature would win him a global reputation as a naval historian and the award of an honorary doctorate of letters from Melbourne University. But on this day he was merely Petty Officer Raymond Edward Parkin, aged 28, with the two crossed anchors and the king’s crown of his rate displayed on the left sleeve of his brass-buttoned jacket, and another crown and circled anchor on his cap.
    Ray was a Collingwood boy, the son of Arthur James Parkin, a coach and motor trimmer, and