Continental code

I found it difficult to get up speed because I wasn’t musical, you see. When you have your – are you familiar with Morse code - A,B,C? We used the Continental code which was different from the American code, which you used in telegraph stations, you see, on the railways. I think there was eleven letters that were different in the Continental code that we used and the dots and dashes that were used for some of these letters were long drawn out compared to the American code. And they weren’t as speedy, you couldn’t develop as much speed as you could with the American code. An example of that would be the letter “C” in the Continental code. In the code we used, it was dash dot dash dot for C. Dah du dah du. But in the American code, it was two dots, space and dot; do du duh, you see. Well, when your developing speed . . . I mean, I tried to develop speed but I had difficulty because you didn’t have time to count dots and dashes. You had to go with the rhythm, you see.