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destroyed any pictures there were and even earlier,when Hughes went to sea, he seemed to anticipate the turn his son’s life would take when he told him never to get a tattoo because it was a sure way of identifying someone.
    My first job was bringing a ship from Belfast to Southampton. It was a scrap ship, and it was probably the best job I ever had because there was no cleaning … and it was pretty basic and simple. I then signed on to a British Petroleum boat, British Courage, a tanker going to the Middle East for oil. I sailed out of Belfast on that and it’s probably [the source of] some of my fondest memories, although the fondest of all was sailing back … after three or four months at sea with a brilliant tan, well dressed, plenty of money in my pocket, looking forward to getting home. On that trip, we went to a place called Aden in the Persian Gulf and, at the time, the British occupied Aden. We were not allowed to go into the town, so, if we wanted a drink, we had to go to a British Army camp, which we all did. And me being the only Irish one there! But there was no hostility between the people I went to sea with; most of them were English and Scottish … We had been drinking all night in this British Army camp. I got detached from the crowd I was with, and was walking across an open field outside the camp when I was attacked and pushed to the ground and a rifle put to my head. It was the British Army. Luckily, I had a Merchant Navy ID card with my photograph and name in it. I was thrown into the back of a jeep and roughly treated, initially, until they found out that I wasn’t an Arab terrorist. At that time I was very, very dark and could easily have been mistaken for an Arab … But I was brought back to the ship [and let go] .
    The British Army in Belfast [later] … called me ‘Darkie’. They didn’t have any photographs of me, but they knew of me … and the reason they never had a photograph is, when I went on the run in 1970, my father destroyed every photograph of me in the house, so any time the British Army raided my home, which was often, there was never a photograph of me there to be found. For all the years I was on the run, the British Army never had a photograph of me . There were times when I was one of the most wanted men in the North, walking past a British Army foot patrol … I don’t know whether my father had a premonition of this, but when I joined the Merchant Navy, my father insisted that I didn’t get any tattoos. It was a common thing for seamen to have tattoos and many a time I sat in a tattooist’s in Europe or the Far East, with other people [but] I never ever got one because I always remembered my father telling me, ‘Never get a tattoo, because it’s an identifiable mark’, and this is long before I went on the run. That’s why I’m saying he must have had a premonition that I was going to be on the run. And I don’t know where that came from, whether my father knew the road I was going to be taking or he suspected I was going to be taking. But anyway I never got tattoos, and they never had a photograph of me until I was arrested in 1973 .
     
     
    After the British tanker, I came back to Belfast, was at home for six weeks and then re-signed on to a fruit boat, the Carrigan Head, which went to South Africa. We sailed from Southampton to South Africa, down to Durban, and that was the first time that I saw the deprivation and the squalor and the slavery [of apartheid]. When we [sailed] into Durban, to load with oranges, there was possibly a hundred and fifty men or so, black men, all labouring, all [the loading] done by hand … I worked in the galley at that time and I remember looking out the porthole at lunchtime, all these guys sat along at the deck of the ship with milk bottles full of cold tea and whatever food they had; it was mostly bread and cold tea. And I remember feeling angry, the way these people were treated … if I was never a socialist [before] I