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Good Food On Board Ship

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Good Food On Board Ship

Well, we were lucky in Sioux because we had a cafeteria-style, one of the first ones, a cafeteria-style messing as opposed to broad side messing where everyone, every mess goes to the galley and gets it in a, in a dish, sort of thing, and the only, the only problem we had with, with food was we, we had stored, my, my chief was very dedicated, George van Haff, and as soon as we came into harbour, we stored ship. American stores were excellent, you know. They were, they were getting stores in like the Canadian Navy's getting now, which is really good. But he, he stored the ship and we went back out on patrol right away, and then Cayuga came out and Cayuga was, had the Captain Tees the senior commander in the, our squadron, and he said, "Well, you got, you've stored and I got more guns than you and I'm senior to you so you transfer your stores to us and we'll let you go back to Sasebo and restore." Well, that sounded reasonable enough and we transferred all our fancy American stores to him and we departed and we were gone for four hours when they came back and said, "You can't go to Sasebo. You gotta stay out here. You, you'll store off a British Cruiser." So we went and (inaudible) transferred stuff from HMS Belfast and there was sides of mutton coming up over and they were as big as sides of beef. And George van Haff said, "We took them on board off the starboard side and we walked right across the ship and threw them them in the water on the port side." Nobody in the Canadian Navy liked mutton. When we were in training, new entry training, we could tell the day of the week by the menu and I think it was Saturday we always had mutton. Well, they cook it about 6:00 in the morning and by the time they serve it at 11:30, it's all grease, you know. Just terrible. But other than that, the food was good.

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