The Belfast had had a good war record, she had a swastika on one of her torpedo tubes which was to signify that she had fired the torpedo that had finished off the "Sharnhorst", a German pocket battleship. She was also active on D Day firing at coastal defences in Normandy and had arrived in Sydney following a trip to Shanghai. She was a very happy ship and I was to get my first taste of the peacetime routine of the Royal Navy. We were divided into six watches, first and second parts of red, white and blue watches- in wartime it was four watches, first and second parts of port and starboard watches. This meant I was on duty six times instead of one in four - that meant more time off and more time ashore. I had a cushy job as an RP2. I was unique as I had a higher non-substansive rank than even the petty officers. I was put in charge of the radar sweepers which meant that I just had to report that the radar offices were kept clean. On duty and at action stations my job was DFDO or deputy fighter directions officer, this was really an officers job but I was the highest qualified radar rating on board so I had to do it. This job meant that I stood on the reverse side of a perspex screen and plotted courses of targets in reverse and wrote backwards so that the FDO on the other side could read them the right way round.
We sailed from Sydney and headed south, the wartime restrictions no longer applied and the captain (Captain Royer Dick RN) announced that we were heading for New Zealand. Interesting items of news such as the sighting of a school of whales were announced over the tannoy and we were told that when we sighted Stewart Island on the south tip of New Zealand, we rounded this and sailed up the east coast and dropped anchor in Otago Bay, the town we could see on the shore was Dunedin.
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