The Portland Bill was technically HMS Portland Bill as it was on its last journey as a troop transport before returning to SS Portland Bill general cargo carrier. She was one of the fort ships which were the equivalent of the American Liberty ships but Canadian built and each ship took about a week to build and was all welded.
When I joined her in Singapore I was told although I was taken passage to England I would be joining the crew and have to do crew work. This suited me as I had a lazy time on the Belfast and was getting a bit flabby. There was no radar on Portland Bill so I was told I would have to stand watch as lookout in the crows nest. This was OK in the tropics but I dreaded being up there in the rough and cold northern seas.
Our first port of call was Trincomalee in Ceylon which we reached in about four days. I had volunteered for boats crew and our first job after anchoring was lowering the pinnace and setting off for the shore to find the best landing place for shore leave. We had a midshipman in charge of the pinnace and he had us testing the depth with lead lines every five minutes as we approached the shore. We landed a boat load for shore-leave at noon and I had to wait till next day to see the next day to see the sights of Trinco.
Trincomalee had been a naval base for a lot of years but the settlement itself was only primitive, I went ashore with a couple of mates the next day and we walked along a rough lane to the town. Along the way we were stopped a number of times by hawkers, wanting to tell out fortunes and sell us trinkets and offering to show us a mongoose fighting a snake (they had both these items in separate sacks ready to perform). One persistent fellow was trying to sell us a rug which he kept laying in front of us as we walked along, it was almost worn out when we reached Trinco.
In Trincomalee itself there was not much to see, we had a meal in a cafe but we were upset when a beggar crawled under our table. He was terribly deformed and kept asking us for alms while we were eating, the cafe owner threw him out but it was terribly upsetting. I never enjoyed that meal one bit. On the way back to the landing base we walked through light jungle and came across a little native hut with a Salvation Army signpost asking for servicemen to call in for a cup of tea. We went in and were greeted by a white-haired old English lady who served us tea in makeshift cups (bottles cut in half by hot wire) and cakes and biscuits, there were also some English newspapers there which we read avidly. I was full of admiration for the old lady who had been out there years in that hot humid climate serving servicemen and bringing a touch of home and civilisation to a barren place. We finished our day out in a makeshift cinema near the landing stage, you could buy beer in one end of the tin hut and the screen was at the other end , what with the noise of drinking and arguing and chairs moving about, you couldn't enjoy the film much so we finished up drinking and finally I was glad to get back on the boat and go back to the ship.
We had just spent a couple of days in Trincomalee and our next port of call was Columbo, this took us a couple of days (we were only doing about 8 knots - it was a slow cargo ship) as Columbo was on the other side of Ceylon (now by the way called Sri Lanka). Columbo was a different place to Trincomalee by a long way, it was quite a large city and it had a proper harbour and docks. After we anchored in the bay I was again in the boats crew to take the ships officers ashore with mail etc. There was a proper jetty with a landing stage and from what I could see from the boat, Columbo looked to be an attractive place with plenty of trees and lawns and flowers in view.
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