The Sailor and The Student Prince

Author’s Note: I’ll leave it to you to decide which bits of this story are true. But some of it is, and it’s probably more than you think…

You will have heard I’m sure the saying that if you are a lad in the Navy you will have “a girl in every port.” Of course in most cases that’s an exaggeration. Personally, I suspect that it was promoted as an unofficial recruitment slogan to get eager young boys to join up. 

Tom heard this slogan at some point in his teens and joined the Navy in the mid nineteen forties. Not the Royal Navy, or the “Old Grey Funnel Line,” as he and his new shipmates in the Merchant Fleet came to call it, but he joined up all the same in the middle of the Second World War. He was seventeen and fully aware that Davy Jones would be watching him as keenly as Adolf Hitler was. He became a man by offering his services to his country in her hour of need, while at the same time offering a different kind of service to the girls of the world. Well, the ones that lived in the ports anyway.

He began to enjoy his new-found role as international playboy and traveller especially after Hitler stopped shooting at him. And, with the notable exception of a never-to-be-mentioned-again incident with a girl in Singapore in 1949, who surprised him at a crucial moment in their relationship by not being in possession of the sort of equipment that he had been expecting to find, Tom remained staunchly and enthusiastically heterosexual.

Given that he was tall with black hair and brown eyes, and possessor of a manly physique – a result of his hard work as a stoker below decks – he seldom had any problems attracting members of the opposite sex. 

He smoked his Players cigarettes with a confidence that they would not only make him look like a film star, but they were doing him good at the same time as they helped him to relax. And whilst he was kind to animals (he once made the local papers in Australia when he returned to a burning ship to rescue the ship’s cat) he was more than happy to pose with a shark that the crew had netted, and take credit for having played a major part in the hapless creature’s capture. The extent of his involvement in that incident became a matter of debate for many years afterwards. 

He held his rum like any good sailor and formed life-long friendships with his fellow crewmates. Nothing was going to tie this confident young buck down. At least that’s what he thought. 

He had travelled the world on various ships and would need little encouragement to tell tales of his exploits in such far flung cities as Montevideo, Dar-es-Salaam, and Melbourne. But for all that, he met the love of his life one afternoon at a municipal outdoor swimming pool in Mill Hill. 

Her name was Sheila and she was an attractive nineteen-year old with a winning smile. She was popular and chatty and made friends easily. She was just waiting for the day that her idol would arrive on her doorstep and sweep her off her feet. Unfortunately for Tom that idol was the singing sensation and film star, Mario Lanza. She would swoon at his Caruso and go into a reverie whenever she heard such classics as “The Student Prince.” His signature tune, “Be My Love,” was of course (in Sheila’s mind), written solely for her. 

Obviously, Tom was completely unaware that he had such stiff competition for Sheila’s affections and so he made his move. After a few minutes’ conversation in which Mario Lanza featured often, Tom actually began to make an impression. After all, what did Mario have that he didn’t? Apart from money, fame and a cracking singing voice? Sheila thought about it for a while, and decided she liked this dark-eyed young man. She agreed to see him again. 

Sheila had spent the war in a small seaside town in Devon. She was a Londoner by birth but her spirit would be forever Devonian after she was evacuated there in 1940. She was too young then to understand that like her future husband and indeed the rest of her family, she was on the Fuhrer’s hitlist, but thankfully her Mother and her Majesty’s Government – in a rare moment of enlightenment – had decided that she and thousands of children like her would be safer out of his reach. So off she went with a gas mask in a cardboard box around her neck and her four-year-old hand in her mother’s, headed for the seaside.

School was fun, for Sheila, anyway. She made lots of friends and had a lot of laughs. The fact that her teachers may not have appreciated her laissez-faire attitude to education as much as she did, didn’t trouble her in the slightest. 

It wasn’t all fun though; Hitler managed to cross off her Father’s name from his list when his factory was hit by the Luftwaffe in 1943. It was hard to take for Sheila, her Mother and older brother, as it was for all those affected the same way during those dark times. But as soon as Hitler stopped throwing things at London, they returned and settled down in a house right at the bottom end of what is now the A1.

For all its deprivations, Sheila enjoyed life in post-war London. After all Mario was going to be there soon and she was really looking forward to marrying him. His picture stood proudly on her bedside table and he greeted her with his Latino smile every morning, sang to her every day through  records or on the radio, and was there every night when she went to bed. 

But Tom was not easily put off. He kept up his pursuit of Sheila. After several attempts, and with the proviso that if Mario should ever come up trumps and ask for her hand in marriage she would run off with him, she agreed to go out (or “walk out”, as the saying was in those days) with this handsome young sailor in the meantime. 

She offered the same condition for him, if Kathy Kirby ever came calling. 

By now Tom was no longer a sailor. He’d retrained as a butcher. This sudden change in lifestyle, from international traveller to working in the basement at Sainsbury’s didn’t put Sheila off though. It was a sign that things were going well between them. So well in fact that in 1956 they wed in Eastbourne and settled down to married life and all the delights and challenges that it had to offer.

And it’s fair to say that there were always a great deal more delights than challenges. Mario was always there, his smile greeting them at the end of every day, until Tom turned the picture face down before putting out the light. After he went off to work in the morning Sheila would put the photo back upright. It was probably the biggest rift between them and they learned to laugh at it. Tom felt guilty about being secretly relieved when Mario passed away on Sheila’s 21^st birthday. He vowed to himself to forget Kathy Kirby and concentrate on Sheila in her hour of grief.

The couple were blessed with two boys within the first three years of marriage and raised them to know right from wrong and to be happy. Both boys achieved that with ease. They got used to having happy parents and to the sound of Mario Lanza filling the house while Dad was out.

Frankie Vaughan occasionally got a look in, but “Be My Love” always took precedence over “Give Me the Moonlight.”

Sheila and Tom enjoyed a trip to the pub occasionally. So much so in fact, that in the late nineteen sixties they decided that they would like to have a bash at running one themselves. They retrained together as licensed victuallers and took over the running of a fairly new pub on the outskirts of Eastbourne. They had a dog, Henry, whose job it was ostensibly to act as a guard for the premises, but he turned out to be afraid of his own shadow. It was at this point that Tom expertly hid his love of animals, tutting and complaining about the “stupid Labrador” whenever his family were about, but talking to him like a baby and giving him biscuits whenever he thought he was alone.

The boys left home, as boys do, in pursuit of girls and jobs. And it was just after this when Fate looked at Sheila and Tom’s life and thought it had been too happy for too long and so did something to redress the balance. It may have been Fate, or more likely it was all those Players cigarettes, but Tom’s heart gave out one Saturday morning in 1980 and Sheila, for a while at least, was alone. 

She would eventually remarry and find new happiness, with the blessing of her boys. There would be more happy times ahead. But there would never be another Tom.

Mario Lanza still makes her smile nowadays, but it’s not his picture that stands beside her bed now. That space is reserved for an entirely different man and it doesn’t get turned down at night. It’s a photograph of a man with the love and respect of his family, despite not having money, fame, or a cracking singing voice. 

It is of course a picture of Tom. Or as I knew him, Dad.