Michael D.Heath-Caldwell M.Arch.

1944

Memoirs of Lt. J.A. Heath-Caldwell R.N.

H.M.S. Eaton Hall 

One afternoon at the end of 1944, me and some friends of mine were on a boat in the river. We had to have some place on the river so that we could learn about boats and how they behaved. Sailing dinghies, there were, and rowing boats, and carvel built whalers which could sail.

The River Dee was quite narrow, but you got all the more practice then having to change tacks fairly quickly if you were wanting to sail upstream sometimes. You simply had about a couple of cricket pitch widths and you had to tack all the way up. And this of course, gave you lots and lots of practice of actually tacking.

And one afternoon a friend of mine, and myself were out in one of the skiffs, we were just rowing up just to enjoy the boating on the river, and we got far away, about a mile or two up, quite near this aerodrome where the Americans had been and they had moved on, and we heard the intercom of the air field being used by somebody, and what happened was that some cadet had been exploring this deserted aerodrome and found the control tower and the position where the microphones were that the loud hailer system all around the airfield and he delighted himself I suppose magnifying his voice all the way around the air field.

The only thing was of course he was given away by this and discovered and got into big trouble and I think he got caned for that too. He was just playing around with military gear, it was all there and all in working order but there were no Americans there, or no air force personnel, they had moved on further down to the south of England. 

That would have been getting on past 1944. The war effected us in that we could not visit any ships that went to sea because they did not really want any of us to go to sea and be torpedoed by a lurking German submarine in the waters around the UK at that time. And of course the only thing was that we did manage to do some ship visiting in Manchester. We were taken in buses and paid a visit to the end of the Manchester Ship Canal which enabled merchant ships and destroyers to go all the way from Liverpool to Manchester where the ships were repaired in the dockyards there. That was fun, that was seeing what a real ship was like. 

My eldest sister of 3, Patricia Constance Mary Heath-Caldwell was well educated and in fact matriculated and thus she could have gone to any University. But after getting fed up with peeling spuds in the ATS (a women’s wing of the Army) she was sent down to Portsmouth with a group of nurses to look after civilians wounded in the air attacks on Portsmouth, a Naval Port of the Royal Navy during WWII. And she was not used to treating civilian casualties and had a nervous breakdown. And during the dreadful time for her she threw herself out of a hospital window and broke her leg, which was treated OK. And our mother, who was a doctor’s daughter from Armagh, Northern Ireland. My mother heard of a Doctor in Harley Street, London, and he believed that the hospital environment of locked doors etc was mainly responsible for lasting nervous damage, and he prescribed an injection of insulin and the patient should go home and have lots of TLC (tender loving care).

For a time she was at home with my parents in Dorset, then our grandparents had a lucky strike, they heard and contacted a family, well healed (lots of cash) who were emigrating to Australia during War time. And Pat (the three sisters were Pat, Danny and Ros) went on a fast liner to Australia and her passage paid for her by them for looking after their kids on the liner (I thought this was 1946 – ed). So she ended up in Newcastle, New South Wales and got her Australian Qualification to be a mid-wife. And just about the end of WWII she returned to the Royal Edinburgh Infirmary to get her British Credentials. Having successfully done all that she moved South to Dorset and there she brought hundreds of babies into the world. She ended her midwife career as Night Sister in Exeter Maternity Hospital and returned to Dorset where she looked after our now aging parents, till first my mother got a shock and was moved down stairs in the Pound House and died before our father did. While she was dying she had to be looked after hand and foot by my father.