'The delirious joy of not being dead' by Julia Jones
Edward Young, pre-war design director at Penguin Books, was the first RNVR (Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve) officer to enter the submarine service. When he completed the training course and travelled to Harwich to take up his first post in October 1940 he was with two equally junior sub-lieutenants: Lionel Dearden from the RN and Jock Tait from the RNR (Royal Naval Reserve). Dearden was sent out immediately on HMS H49 , while Tait and Young joined H28 . Both were small, elderly submarines with 26 people on board and were sharing the patrol duties off the coast of occupied Holland. In his postwar memoir, One of our Submarines (1952) Young remembered 23 year old Dearden returning that first time, tired and weather-beaten. The other two were eager to hear him talk about his experience: ‘but though we had been in the same training class there was a gulf fixed between us: he had completed a war patrol and we had not.’ On H28 Tait and Young survived a depth ch...