Ian Moore – HMS Neptune

And when they called my name, they said, “HMS Neptune to await Submarine Training” and I thought brilliant, ok, no problem at all. What’s HMS Neptune? What type of ship is that? I had no idea (laughs) and it turned out that it’s a concrete ship.

It’s otherwise known as Faslane in Scotland, and they were going to send me up there to await a course in HMS Dolphin down here, to start my Submarine Training.

So, I spend 4 months up in Faslane while the rest of my compatriots were sailing the high seas and going out to Hong Kong and Singapore and Australia and all these other places. I was in Scotland for 4 months.

Oh, I was so hacked off it was untrue (laughs). Oh, my God, I had no idea. I mean it was good fun up in Scotland because again as a 16-year-old I was just let loose. I had no restrictions. You know I had just come out of training where it was literally Cinderella leaves so you had to be back onboard before midnight and everything was regimented and in actual fact it was a bit of a culture shock because you’d gone from everything from being, ‘You will be here at this time in this rig doing this, then you will move on to that, then you will move on to that’ and it had gone from that literally to nothing.

You had free reign.

You’d get up in the morning, you go down to breakfast, there was no onus of responsibility on you so long as you’re at your place of duty, at your workplace by 8 o’clock in the morning.