The course was 12 weeks long and in about week 10 we had exams. The big exam was  navigation theory and then meteorology. If you failed in these tests then it was good bye to air crew at least for being a navigator. I think, although not too sure, that some were allowed to go on a Bomb-Aimers course. There were tests in morse code (12 words a minute), Aldis Lamp(8 words a minute) and aircraft recognition. This latter test involved being able to recognise a plane seeing only a small part of it. The images were flashed on the screen for a second and you had to write down what you thought the plane was . There were a few failures on my course (about 10%). We knew if we had passed when we went to our bedrooms and found an L.A.C. badge on the mattress. Our Sergeant had a boyish sense of humour!! We were expected to sew the badges on ourselves although how I got my hands on a needle and thread I can't remember. My mother did the job more thoroughly when I went home on leave. The big thing of course was that from being on 2 shillings and 6 pence a day as an AC 2 we leapt to the dizzy heights of 7 shillings and 6 pence!   Some citizens were very kind at Newquay and I remember one kind soul lent us his or her splendid radiogram and a collection of classical music records (78rpm!) There were also dances to go to organised by the YMCA and other social organisations. We also seemed to have a fairly good following of pretty girls!   After the course was finished we were sent on 3 weeks leave. I must say the Royal Air Force seemed more generous with leave than the other services.

Before we went to Canada I was posted to Heaton Park in Manchester. The park was home to a vast number of airmen awaiting posting to various training schools scattered through out the Empire as it then was. Posting to Canada or America (pilots at Pensecola) was regarded as a plus, but a posting to South Africa was a no-no. We had heard unpleasant tales about the treatment of trainees by the locals, black or white. Discipline at Heaton Park was almost non existent. After parade every day we were assigned various manual tasks, which we avoided carrying out in various ingenious ways. The thought and physical effort we employed in not doing the work was greater than if we had carried out our allotted tasks in the first place! Some of us were billeted out. When I finally got my posting instructions I was given a new kit bag with some numbers and  letters on the bottom of it. When I took the bag back to my landlady she looked at the markings and said I was going to Canada on the Queen Elizabeth sailing from Greenock near Glasgow. I was alarmed, thinking that if she knew then the German Navy would also have the facts about  our Atlantic voyage. We had been told that we would be moved to our boat train early in the morning so that our movements would be secret. This was not long after January 1943, I think. Anyway when we went to catch the train at 2am we were greeted by hundreds of well wishers from Heaton Park!  My landlady had been right about  the ship, the port and our destination! The voyage was uneventful - the sea was dead calm which was a bit of a worry, the Q.E. took about a week to cross from Scotland to Halifax, Nova Scotia. The ship went at about 35 knots, twisting and turning all the time. Naturally there was no convoy. No convoy could have kept up with us. We had one minor scare when a warship came over the horizon and our gunners on the ship went to action stations. A sigh of relief all round when we saw the ship say by Aldis Lamp "What is your name?" Naturally all of us who had passed our ITW exams took great pride in reading this message! There were less than 2000 of us airmen on the ship so we had plenty of room. I got a job in the cook house with about 5 other blokes. The chef didn't want to bother with us so he told us to help ourselves to white bread and hard boiled eggs. After wartime rationing this was  a great thrill but after 3 days eating myself silly with this unaccustomed diet I felt I never wanted to see another hard boiled egg again.