As it was such a large ship the
movement was slow and not violent unlike the small ship I came home
in.
The normal four day crossing took us seven days and we landed
at Gloucester, Scotland, harbor in the middle of December. As we
disembarked we looked back at the ship and that was the first time we
saw the Queen in its entirety. It was huge in the brilliant sunlight.
We next had our first experience with an English train. The aisle
runs down the side of the car with small compartments on the side. We
were packed in so tightly with all our luggage that the aisle was full
and prohibited any walking around. We made part of the trip in the
daytime so we saw some of the Scottish and English country side.
On December 23 we arrived it Keevil, England in the southwest not far
from Bath. This was not an airfield, just a place to stay until we got
a base and planes. Keevil was horrible and the worst of places to
spend your second Christmas away from home. We lived in board shacks
covered with tar paper and the weather was cold and damp. We had
little stoves in our shacks but nothing to burn in them. The only
tools we had were knives so we used them to cut branches of trees and
bushes. It was green wood so we would coat the twigs with shoe polish
to make them burn. We had one large building for a mess hall with one
stove in the middle of it. Here we were served powered eggs for
breakfast every morning and they were terrible.
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