People on shore, if they bothered to look any more, saw a common troopship thick with men, one of whom – me – had barged through the crush to the port-side rail, not having been on anything bigger than a ferry boat or a stretch of water wider than the Mersey. Steamships and small yachts on blue rippling water, wooded hillsides and succulent fields on shore, made me wonder when England – for all I thought about such a crucial part of myself – would be seen again. My observations would become blurred with the passing of time, as the carborundum wheel of an impacted past rubbed too hard against it. Such reflections only made more piquant the suggestion from that other part of me, though it was not altogether trusted, that I could not have cared less. Beyond Lee-on-the-Solent lay the buildings of HMS Daedalus where I would have done naval training and learned to fly with the Fleet Air Arm, but regret was a feeling little known, and passed like a shadow as the ship altered course to go around the Isle of Wight.
What do You think about Life Without Armour (2016)?
