Page 116 - KBHA BULLETIN 6

I am happy to say quite a few of the Canadian nurses came back to South Africa after the

war to settle down, marry South Africans and create wonderful family units.

Vincent Cloete

As a schoolboy I remember that every household had to practice a black-out operation on a
given evening for about two hours. All windows were to be covered with blankets or thick

material, and inspections would be made by the police. This was not a problem to

fisherfolk as we all had only oil lamps or used candles.

I was attending school at Diep River and in the afternoon there were dozens of school

children waiting for the train at Diep River station. As the train drew into the station we
could hear men singing. They were Australian soldiers filling the entire train from end to

end. They opened the carriage doors and invited us all to enter and not one scholar was left
standing in the carriage. I got in too, and I am sure it must have been the same in the other

carriages. We were all asked to sit on their laps, and one could hear them all singing the
same song from end to end.

I enjoyed the ballad they were singing and many years later, when I became interested in
tenors, one of the records I bought by Irish tenor Richard Crooks was the very same song

that the Aussies sang that day called “Little Town in the Old Country Down". These
soldiers must have come by troop-ship, which I believe was the QE1 anchored off Simon’s

Town docks, and were returning after spending a day in Cape Town. (Fig. 3.22).

After leaving school I started working at the dockyard in Simon’s Town where hundreds of

so-called “Home Agreement Men”, who came from Britain and the Far East, were now
busy repairing naval ships. Simon’s Town was the nearest place for ships to come for

repairs etc as most of the action was in the Far East and possibly dockyards there could not

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