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This, and a glut of 1950's movies for sub-aquatic intrigue, moulded in my young mind my first perception of the submarine ... It was all beautifully sanitised and innocent, as befits childhood years. Innocence, like all living things. runs its course. On a chilly Friday morning in December 1963, at the age of 15, 1 was ejected from school ... on the following Monday, laden with 'tea-can and piece', I shuffled my whimpish frame through the gatehouse of the mighty John Brown's Shipyard to be apprenticed. |
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An apprenticeship is a kind of adoption ... taken into care and taken the 'Mickey out of' simultaneously. Under the wing of these grown men, my 'real' education began. Packed into this ribbon of land, one mile long by a quarter wide, were seven thousand men ... seven thousand lives, happy, mean, bitter, talented and any other description you could think of.
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The Second World
War had finished 18 years ... the bulk of them had been in it somewhere.
Here were real stories to fire an active mind ... a vast richness
of human experience. This was more real than long division and basket
weaving and I was proud to be part of it. Around me were men who
had, in five years. seen more than most in a lifetime ... some had
sailed in convoys, others in submarines ... reality dawned and my
innocence faded.
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Shipbuilding is a no nonsense game. It is dirty, noisy and dangerous, but it has a visual richness that you can find nowhere else. The forces used to mould ships have their own intimate beauty. Rust, red lead, fire, rivets and steel ... it is the shapes and textures of this environment that dissolve into much of my work. Toiling in and around a huge mountain of red leaded steel in a hell of noise ... you get to despise it all... yet, there is a pride hard to match in any other industry. There is nothing to compare to the sight of 68,000 tons of harnessed steel slip gracefully into its element. It is a gigantic birth with all the encumbering emotions. |
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Submarine 2
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