Seasickness ruined my Navy career plans (From The Westmorland Gazette)

Seasickness ruined my Navy career plans

4:40pm Thursday 16th February 2012 in Opinion By Allan Tunningley

BACK in the 1960s, I flirted briefly with the idea of joining the Royal Navy - inspired by an older cousin, who was serving on Ark Royal.

I was also captivated the C S Forester’s Hornblower novels, which influenced a whole new maritime vocabulary.

So, for example, when my dad asked if I wanted to sit in the front or the back of the car I would reply either ‘fore’ or ‘aft’ depending upon my mood.

Sadly, I had to drop the idea of joining the navy after getting seasick on a sea-fishing expedition.

I decided to transfer my affections to the Army, an enthusiasm reinforced when my brother and I discovered a rusty old hand grenade among some scrap metal in dad’s builder’s yard.

Even as young teenagers, we were allowed to have airguns and we and our friends would often have mock battles (using real pellets) among the piles of timber and rickety old storage buildings.

So imagine the delight when we could lob our newly-discovered piece of ordnance back and forwards across the imaginary battlefront.

Whether the hand grenade was too rusted up to be any danger or had already been deactivated, I couldn’t say; but the main thing is it didn’t explode.

I know this for certain because I distinctly recall my brother and I having to make our own explosive sound effects.

Anyway, I soon got bored with playing soldiers and decided to become a writer, an ambition which remains very much a work-in-progress.

As part of this teenage transformation, I also became a pacifist.

In this regard, I have much to thank Prime Minister Harold Wilson for.

Were it not for his decision to resist American pressure and stay out of the ill-advised Vietnam War, I and other young Brits could have ended up conscripted and very probably dead.

Tony Blair would have done well to follow his example with Afghanistan and Iraq.