Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
LONDONDERRY, Northern Ireland (By Wireless) – At the new American naval base here the chief petty officers’ huts are all together at one end of the camp, and just behind them is their clubhouse, in a Nissen hut. It has just been opened.
The manager is Chief Yeoman David Hurley, who is a sort of master of ceremonies for the whole station, and a character in anybody’s country.
Hurley is an old-timer in the Navy. His sleeve has service stripes clear to the elbow. He is a good-natured guy, and he talks your head off. He has a hand in everything – arranges Sunday picnics, puts on all the movies, plans and supervises the weekly dances. He’s an arranger at heart, and he’s in his glory over here.
Last week he had three days’ leave, but he never even left the camp. One of the officers found him in a recreation hall stringing up colored pennants on wires.
“What are you doing here, Hurley?” he said. “You’re supposed to be on leave.”
Hurley said, “Yes, but all these British sailors and Irish girls are coming to a dance tomorrow night. This place has got to look nice, and if I don’t do it, it won’t get done.”
He acted very mad and persecuted about it, but he couldn’t have been pried out of there with a court-martial.
Hurley hasn’t any upper teeth. He goes around with his cap pulled down, making his ears stick out, and with his lower lip folded up over his toothless upper one. He’s a sight to behold.
He says he plays 11 musical instruments. And he is a constant actor. He’ll break into a skit on a moment’s notice. Two of his chief acts are a crying jag and an imitation of Stepin Fetchit.
Wherever he goes Hurley produces his own good time. I don’t think he even knows he’s in Ireland.
The chief petty officers had just opened their club a couple of nights before I got here, so I sat around with them one evening and thereby added a laurel to my belt of odd distinctions.
I became the first honorary member of the CPO club of the American Naval Base at Londonderry, Northern Ireland.
It was Hurley’s idea. Of course he is going to make me some kind of membership card so I can show it off around the world. It will go well with my membership in the Squaw Men’s Union of Seward, Alaska, and my vice presidency of the Rio Grande Steamboat & Navigation Co.
Twice already the Navy and Marine camp has thrown a big British-American dance. They invite all the British sailors in town. Everybody digs up a girl.
The dance takes place in the camp’s big recreation hall. The Navy has an orchestra.
There isn’t much trouble between the British and American enlisted men. What trouble there is springs largely from the fact that the Americans get more pay than the British, and that of course gets all the girls. The colleens are like girls everywhere. They like to have money spent on them.
It has got so they walk up and down outside the camp gate about the time the boys are coming out for the evening on pay day, and for a few days after. The congestion gets pretty heavy.
The boys say they like the Irish girls all right. The main trouble with them is they all want to get married. The reason for that is that they want to get to America eventually.
A lot of girls won’t waste their time on a man if they find out he’s married, so intent are they on sewing up that old ticket to America.
The other day a Marine officer was standing near a private at camp when a train went by. A note flew out the window and landed nearby.
“I wonder who that’s for,” the officer said.
“For me, sir,” the Marine said. “She’s been passing every day on the train, and I’ve been waving to her.”
So he picked up the note, and here’s what it said:
“If you’re single, call me tonight at such-and-such a number. If you’re married, forget about it.”
The Marines tell me the Irish girls are a clannish lot. There is indeed honor among girls wanting to get married. They say the minute one of them gets crazy about an American all the others lay off, and he couldn’t get a date with anybody else if he got up on a soapbox and pleaded.
The sailors, when they first arrived, threw out a lot of self-protective misinformation around town. For instance, they told the girls that any man wearing gold braid (an officer) had a contagious disease and should be avoided.
And that red stripes on a man’s sleeve (a petty officer) meant he was a criminal out on parole. But the girls soon found out the truth for themselves.
About the only way an enlisted man can get a girl at first is at a public dance or by the plain old pickup method. But this doesn’t mean they’re all of the street variety. Many swell girls have been picked up in this neck of the woods.
The officers, of course, fare better, for they have opportunities to meet girls through regular introductions.
The American officers run around mostly with the uniformed girls known as WRENS and WAAFS, and with American nurses and Irish girls whose families they have met.
Shortage of men teachers may force dropping some courses
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