Kipling was particularly unfortunate in her start in life. We went straight down from Glasgow to the South Coast to '"work up", which means, more or less, teaching the sailors as quickly as possible how to fire the guns, training the control teams, teaching the officers how to manoeuvre the ship when working in flotilla and so on. Now in peace time, that would take a month or six weeks, but this was war time and we had to cut the time down to three weeks.

That was about the worst thing that could have happened to us at the outset of our career. We had a very young ship's company; we had a number of officers who had had only a very short training, and we did not quite realise what troubles were in store for us through this enforced idleness. In those days one could ill afford to lose opportunities for training and what we failed to acquire in those days of comparative idleness at Newcastle had to be made up in the hard school of experience.

We went out with the cruiser Suffolk and four other destroyers of our own class when we found that we were going to bombard the air base at Stavanger. On arrival, Suffolk bombarded the air base and we steamed around to ensure that she was not torpedoed or otherwise interfered with.

I am happy to be able to say that bad as it was, it was by no means as efficient as it became later on in the Mediterranean. Well it went on until one of the German planes, a bit more enterprising than the others, came down lower with the obvious determination to drop a bomb on Suffolk. He did actually hit her.

But then it was that the Engineer officer broke the news to us that we were probably one of the first ships in the Navy to have suffered a particular kind of damage. You see, when a bomb goes off near a ship, she rises up in the water and then goes down again with a thump.

Anyhow considerable damage was done which meant another three and a half months in dry dock. This time we went down to Southampton and the sailors had a further taste of the 'fleshpots' and were not long in coming to the conclusion that life on the English sea-coast had much to commend it compared with what they had seen of life off the Norwegian!

About November, just as we began to feel that we were really sailors and that the ship was becoming reasonably efficient, a situation arose on the South coast which soon became serious. The Germans had managed to get through six large destroyers much bigger than ours, indeed about twice our size, and mounted with 5" guns instead of our 4.7", out-ranging us by some 6,000 or 7,000 yards. These destroyers were stationed at Brest. This meant that we had to have eight or ten ships standing by at Plymouth to look after them, which was no small advantage to the Germans, who occasionally came out of Brest and tried to beat up some coastal convoys.

One night we happened to be in the right place. There was a fog and at that time, of course, we had no Radar. Off the Isle of Wight we got mixed up with about four small German torpedo boats. It was a blind dog-fight with all the guns apparently pointing all over the place and everybody blazing away at imaginary shadows. At the end of it all, nobody on either side, so far as we knew, was a penny the worse.

However, after a bit the Germans began to tumble to the fact that there was a flotilla of British destroyers at Plymouth, and they did not come out so much.

It wasn't long, however, when we got a pretty considerable surprise for suddenly six shells burst very close beside us. We were very mystified at the time for we had no idea that the Germans had Radar. They had it right enough and were using it with considerable success.

They picked us up although we were quite out of sight and from about seven miles at the start, up to something in the region of 18 or 19 miles - and in spite of the fact that we were doing about 16 knots - they lobbed large shells bang in the middle of us and all round us !

One very queer thing happened on this occasion. One of the destroyers which, like the rest of us had been given a number of bearings on which to fire, either got out of position or had read their figures wrongly. Anyhow, so far as they could see, their shooting was without result. Well two years later we heard that the Germans were most perturbed about their security arrangements for on that very night a British Destroyer had mysteriously and persistently completely flattened a French village which contained the German Headquarters Staff !

Mind you, we could not see the enemy destroyers as they were below the horizon, but the Germans evidently knew they were for it, for they too sent out an urgent message to the Luftwaffe for air support.

Coming back then to the battle, the fact remains that the R.A.F. had received a signal that two of our cruisers were being attacked by seven destroyers, and here were two cruisers surrounded by seven destroyers all blazing away with their guns

Anyway, we never caught the enemy; they got into their mine area about 20 miles outside Brest, and we thought it unwise to follow. However, we had achieved fame, for the next day the "Times" published a short paragraph headed "A Brush in the Channel".