A wave suddenly lifted us and I went down on my right hip, sustaining severe contusions and abrasions, not to mention a general shaking up. Our chief pharmacist’s mate rushed up with a tourniquet, iodiform gauze, and sticking plaster and asked me what I needed worst. Thanking him, I made my way below and moored to a stanchion for chow. I call attention to the stanchions because our tureens, containing food and silverware, were hitched to them while the rest of the food was in aluminum platters which the mess cooks surrounded as best they could with their feet and knees. Occasionally a platter would get away from our inexperienced mess cook of the Reserve Force and he would dive across the compartment to nab it, only to lose other dishes which he was safeguarding. The hungry sailors would assemble the chow again, whereupon each man would help himself and eat under whatever endurable circumstances he could find. Gentle reader, imagine yourself perched upon a camp-stool with your face to port and your back to starboard, at the seamen’s dining-table, trying to steer a bowl of soup safely into your face. The ship rolls forty-five degrees and your stool and soup bowl begin to slide at the same time. You hold the edge of the table with your left hand, clamp your spoon down hard into the bottom of the bowl to secure it, then cautiously push yourself to your feet, for the stool threatens to carry you across the compartment in a jiffy. The angle of the bowl now being constant with the relation it bears to the table, the angle described by the ship’s lurch spills half your soup. You quickly release your grip on the table edge and take the soup in both hands to steady it. This leaves the soup suspended perfectly between zenith and nadir, fixed in its relation to the bowl, if you don’t weaken. Your spoon and slice of bread have been sliding all over the table, kept from hitting the wet deck only by a wooden flange. Before you can plan a campaign to absorb the soup, your feet begin to slip and ere you can blink an eye you have slid four yards across to the starboard mess table, your feet tangled with a stool, and you bump into a shipmate who turns loose his own soup so that it fits perfectly down the back of your neck. The other day a tureen of canned salmon skidded off a near-by locker and landed under the starboard table. The mess cook plunged after it, but missed it by a hair. The tureen bounded into the lap of our Irish oiler, who shouted gleefully, as he clutched it with both hands, “I’ve got the bloody thing.” I was reminded of a fat football player receiving the ball on the kick-off in his centre of gravity and not knowing what to do with it. The ship’s swing back upset our hero and the salmon slipped away from him, landing on the locker of a gunner’s mate and spoiling a brand-new suit of liberty blues.