Dangerous Stoke Hold Makes for Jumpy Nerves

Interviewer: Stokers in the engine room were probably in one of the worst places in the ship to be.
Exactly, or the stokehold too. The engine room and stokehold, because you are down lower than anybody else, see. Yeah..
Interviewer: How does that play on the mind of the people in the engine room? How did they deal with that?
It a . . . you get sort of built up to it, like action stations. If they get a submarine ping, the action station bells would go and everybody, if you weren't on duty in the boiler room, you were you get an action station, were you were assigned to and that's where you went. But when an action bell rang and you were on duty in the stoke hole, somebody was assigned to the hatch, that you would go down to the stoke hole, to put the big dogs on the hatch. That wasn't a very nice feeling, to know that your hatch is being dogged down. They, they shut everything down, you know, bulkheads and everything. Well I , I come out of the war with a jumpers nerves, you know, if you'd come up behind me and touch me on my back, I'd jump out of my shoes. And it was because of an alertness that you built within yourself, when you were aboard ship, because of the many different sounds that you have, but there's always one sound different and that's what gives you the start. And your always on the eve of, of something happening and when the strange noise hits, you react. And I remember pretty well you feel, you feel bad when it happens, but there was a gauge glass, and when a gauge glass in the boiler bursts, its just like a torpedo bang. And she just blew and I jumped and I was halfway up on the ladder, out of the stokehold and the petty officer was on my back. Now that's as true as I'm sitting here. That’s what happened. We both shot right into a terrified scare, but once we realized, in seconds we realized what it was.