Thread by @KeirGiles

A #VEDay75 mini-thread à propos nothing in particular.

My grandfather’s Indian passport, issued in lieu of one “said to have been lost by enemy action... not to be renewed without further proof”. This always puzzled me as a child. Why Indian? Why the doubt?

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He spent almost all of WWII at sea, and had plenty of stories as a result, all of which gripped me as a kid. Signing up with a Norwegian shipping line in Sydney in 1939 hoping to get to the UK, but not actually getting there until early 1944.

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Adventures along the way. Evacuating tanker loads of aviation fuel down river from Palembang in 1942 with the Japanese trying really quite hard to stop them. Getting it to Singapore and realising oops, too late, where now?

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The Norwegian captain who left convoys at the first opportunity feigning a breakdown because he thought it was safer plodding along on his own... and would then routinely break down for real and turn up weeks later long after the ship had been declared lost.

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Epically long journeys (not just because of that). Fremantle to Durban – 55 days. Sydney to Liverpool (when he finally made a home run and transferred to a British line) - seven months.

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Anyway, the Bombay passport office may have suspected that Grandpa was just using being sunk by a Japanese cruiser in the Bay of Bengal, and losing everything but the trousers he was in, as a convenient opportunity to acquire his first ever passport.

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And, as I discovered much later, they’d have been right. The passport was the first genuine identity document he had in his real name – not the foster name he had growing up, (possibly) not the name he emigrated to Australia with aged 16 or maybe 15.

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The pages of that passport and his seaman’s discharge books tell more improbable stories from a startling range of countries. But of all the things he saw, there was one experience that it seemed was more traumatic than everything else –

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Besides shelling, and torpedoes, and lifeboats, and being lost at sea, and occasionally in jungles, the only thing that would make him shudder to recall it 40 and more years later, and shake his head in despair at the human race each time he told the tale -

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Was his immensely long, desperate, dogged but ultimately doomed quest to find a beverage in New York City in late 1944 that was even remotely recognisable as a proper cup of tea.

10, and that’s all for now. Have some emergency coupons for a cup of tea on me./