Todd war diary, 3 August 1914-29 February 1916 / Arthur Todd - Page 226
Primary tabs
Transcription
[Page 226]
a disturbed night's rest to hear the fervid remarks issuing from other cabins as to the ancestry of the man who made the rifle rack, and after all one must pay for one's education.
To the new-comer the cabins in a ship like the Sydney are intolerably stuffy, for with so low a freeboard scuttles can only be opened in the mildest of weather. The innocent fresh from the beach and used to the merchant service opened his scuttles unwarily; but a few green seas over one's bunk at three in the morning soon taught one to prefer a dry fug to cold bath. The engineers profess to pump fresh air through a ventilator into the cabin; but all I ever got into mine was the greasy smell of the engine room and lots of coal dust.
I found the ship pretty well stripped of superfluous woodwork, though not so bare as one would have expected from the tales of frightfulness one reads. All pictures and rugs were gone from the wardroom, but the pianola remained. All cabin doors were screwed off, and we lived modestly behind a curtain. My cabin alone retained its door, so that it afterwards became popular for tea-parties. People would borrow it weeks ahead. But that, as Kipling says, is another story. Some ships scraped their paintwork off and lifted the corticene off the decks. The Encounters in a reckless moment, when they sighted the tramp Zambesi and thought she was the Scharnhorst, jettisoned all their furniture, and it is still drifting ashore at Thursday Island. The Caesar, which we met later, threw her