From Snotty to Sub — Reading Companion

A Patchwork of Recollections

The book's structure is shaped by its unusual provenance. The editor, Elspeth Lascelles Forester, compiled the account from conversations with her son, Wolston B. C. W. Forester, during his brief leaves. The foreword candidly states that the narrative was assembled from "rough notes of conversations" and that "much of the material eventually available we have omitted from motives of discretion." This method produces a text that is episodic rather than continuous, with gaps where memory or censorship intervened. The reader encounters events through a double filter: the midshipman's recollection and the mother's editing. The result is a narrative that feels intimate but also deliberately restrained, as when the author writes that a chapter "cannot justify its title" because discussing submarines further would be "indiscreet."

The Snotty's World: Routine and Thrills

The excerpts reveal a world of routine punctuated by sudden danger. The narrator describes a typical day of "manœuvres" interrupted by a U-boat sighting: "we were going to sea for manœuvres, and soon after we had cleared the harbour some of us Snotties... were startled by blasts from the siren." The response is immediate—the ship alters course, guns fire a salvo—but the submarine submerges without attacking. The text notes that submarine warfare had become "almost a commonplace of naval existence," yet the "near presence of an invisible foe never fails to produce a considerable thrill." This tension between the ordinary and the extraordinary is a recurring note. Even shore leave is described in terms of its contrast to shipboard monotony: a long walk to a township, lunch at a hotel frequented by anglers, and a return "feeling much the better for the change."

Censorship and Discretion as Narrative Forces

The foreword and the text itself repeatedly draw attention to what is not said. The editor notes that "drastic but absolutely necessary censorship" eliminated much material. In the body of the excerpt, the narrator abruptly ends a discussion of submarines: "I regret that this chapter cannot justify its title. On mature consideration I have come to the conclusion that to dilate further on the very interesting subject of submarines would be indiscreet." This self-censorship is a deliberate narrative choice, reminding the reader that the published account is a curated version of events. The effect is to foreground the limits of what can be told during wartime, making the silences as telling as the incidents described. The book thus becomes not only a record of naval service but also a document of the constraints under which such records were produced.

Readers should approach From Snotty to Sub as a deliberately incomplete record—one shaped by censorship, discretion, and the practical difficulties of compiling a narrative from snatched conversations. The book's value lies not in comprehensive coverage but in the specific, often mundane details that survive: the taste of lunch at a hotel, the weariness of an eleven-mile walk, the "tightening of the nerves" when a U-boat is sighted. These fragments offer a grounded sense of daily life in the wartime navy, filtered through a mother's care and a censor's red pen.

That book about the midshipman stayed with me because his mother pieced together his voice from fragments, making silence feel heavy and meaningful. It reminded me of another old account, quieter in tone, where a man’s glance at wartime cities lingers long after he leaves them—there’s no drama, just careful noticing. Something in how both capture memory without forcing it feels like a hand resting on yours. My Secret Service: Vienna, Sophia, Constantinople, Nish, Belgrade, Asia Minor, etc. — Themes and Context sits the same way for me lately.