He brought me down an old CNR bun.

I was always a nervous sort of a guy, and I felt pretty nervous going aboard the ship and all. Everybody knew, and of course I, I’ll have to say, I never lost a meal. But I didn’t feel too good for a few different days. As long as I stayed out on deck. I was used to fishing boats and so on around here, ‘cause we fished all our lives and so on. But down in the quarters, it was a different thing. There was no fresh air down there. It was all forced air and so on. And a lot of it was nerves, too. You get out there, about the second night out, we struck one of the worst nights I thought. It was a bad night. She was plowing right through it. Portholes was leaking. I forgot and put my shoes under the bed, as you would around home and I got up in the morning and they were floating around. There was water running in around the portholes somewhere, leaking. I learned after that you put them up on the rack. No, things like that, it was pretty scary. Some of the boys couldn’t, but I could sleep. I was a sleepyhead, I guess. In bed I was okay. Got up in the morning and went in to wash and shave. Got about half done washing, I got squeamish and had to go back and crawl back in bed again. We were going over to England, and there was no work much, just clean up wards and things. There were no patients. So anyway, I went back to lay down in bed and got up and finished shaving, and still went back to bed. When the corporal came down about nine o’clock in the morning, wondering how I felt, I said I felt alright as long as I stayed in bed. But when I went to get up, I got squeamish. So he brought me down an old CNR bun, dried bun to chew on, which is the best thing you got if you’re seasick. Crackers was the main issue, most of the time. I chewed on that and I felt not too bad and I went up on deck. Went in the ward to do some work, and as long as I was inside, I didn’t feel so good. I’d go out on deck, I was a little squeamish. But once I got up on deck and fresh air, I was okay. So we just worked around the morning in the wards cleaning up. In the afternoon we’re off. Spent the rest of the day up on deck pretty well.I only took training for the field, out in the field, for stretcher bearer work and so on. That’s what I took training for. I had no training for in a hospital or anything. You just learned that as you went. You went up in the ward to work, and that was it. First time they had a messy bed or something, that wasn’t so good, especially when you wasn’t feeling good. No, you wasn’t trained for that. Some of the boys worked in the hospitals before they went on the ship, but with us, we went right from the basic training or advanced training to the hospital ship. The ward I worked on most of the time was ward seven, with 42 patients. We had three orderlies look after those 42 patients. You had to go down from about here to that building out there, to the kitchen. Bring the meals up, feed them boys, take the trays back down again. You didn’t have to wash the dishes, but you had to clean the wards, make the beds. And most of them patients were, some of them were, half of them would be up patients, but after the second day out when it got rough and so on, they’d get sick and so on. Most of them were bed patients. You know, they wasn’t travelling around too much. You didn’t do much loafing around, cleaning the ward. We had an old colonel, used to come around with a flashlight and look underneath the bed to see if there was any dirt or something you might have missed. Sometimes when he stooped over, you felt like giving him a little kick, but you didn’t do that. But they really were quite fussy with keeping ... but they had to do that, I suppose, to keep it clean. But polish the brass and all this kind of stuff. So, with three there wasn’t ... But in the afternoon you mostly got a chance to have a few hours off, just to go down and have a rest once everything quieted down. But so, you had to serve the meals and you had these bed patients you had to look after, and shave people and all this kind of stuff. But, I must say, it was rewarding work as far as I was concerned. I enjoyed it doing it. It was something I never thought I’d ever want to do, but it’s surprising when you get into something, what you can do.