Storytelling- Fred Bates

“At this time I think the AOC had had enough of my shenanigans, and court martials [sic], and what-have-you. He decided I was going to have my choice [of assignments], so I volunteered to go back on the boat that I was taken off of, and go over to England and see what I could do on the English equipment that I had been trained on.

“And I ended up in a bathroom, of all things, with 11 others. Twelve of us in the one small bathroom. So you can imagine the claustrophobia that we had.

“On third day out there was suddenly an announcement on the PA system about the canteen being open for a Sweets Parade. Everybody was to get in a queue. The canteen was in the very bottom of the boat. When we got there there was a Sergeant Major trying to keep control of this mob, and to speed things up he wouldn’t allow any partial boxes. If you wanted something, you took it by the box, how ever it was packaged.

“So we looked around for the other 11 and I couldn’t spot any of them in the queue part that I was in, so I thought I had better pick up 12 boxes – one for each of us. We got back to our little “boudoir”, (bed, bath, whatever you like), only to find that the other 11 had done exactly the same thing. So we ended up not with a few chocolates, but ended up with 12 gross of chocolates each.” *laughs*