Just Another Friday Night In Memphis - Part 4

?the incident hadn't occurred.

I remember one Saturday night six of us lads; all in our early twenties
went ashore and headed for the red light district. One by one they
disappeared with 'ladies of the night', actually young girls, mostly
gorgeous and eager to take their money. Eventually I was the only one
left and after walking about for a while waiting for my companions to
return I succumbed myself and for the first and only time in my life I
went with a prostitute. Although I was twenty-two yrs old I was very
inexperienced in sexual matters and the girl sensed this and tried to
put me at ease but she was wasting her time, and my ?7; I was only
there because my pals were doing the same and I felt obliged to join in
and the whole experience was an embarrassment to me and I think she
felt she hadn't earned her money. I eventually found two of my mates in
a bar and whilst they described their unbelievable sexual exploits of
the last hour or so I kept my mouth firmly shut!

We finally left France and headed for Port Said at the Mediterranean
end of the Suez Canal en route for Mina Al Amadi in Saudi Arabia, just
across from Bahrain in the Persian Gulf. The first few days of the trip
were quite enjoyable, passing between Corsica and Sardinia and on past
Stromboli, an active volcano close to Sicily and Italy. By the time we
approached Egypt we were having trouble with the boilers although they
were supposed to have been overhauled in Marseilles.

We arrived at Port Said late at night and I was in my cabin asleep when
we dropped anchor off shore. I was awoken by a noise and opening my
eyes I could see it was dawn, out of the corner of my eye I saw my
cabin door opening and an Arab half-way through it, leaning over the
side of my bunk I picked up one of my boots and threw it as hard as I
could in the direction of the door. The door closed hastily and I heard
the Arab running down the companionway for the deck. It was normal
practice for the local Arabs to be allowed on board the ships in Port
Said, hoisting their little boats onto the deck and spreading their
goods out for sale. They were allowed to stay on board until the ships
reached Suez when they would get on another ship going back up the
canal. They were not given any food but curiously they were allowed as
much cocoa as they wanted; they would sleep by their goods on the deck
but were not under any circumstances allowed below decks. They were
considered to be thieves, not without reason in many cases; later that
day we got word that a sailor on an American ship a couple of hundred
yards away had come off watch and found his cabin empty, and by that I
mean everything gone even the furniture and light fittings. The only
thing left was a tubular steel chair that was jammed in the porthole.
The guy had made the mistake of going on watch and leaving his porthole
open, the Arabs would bring their boat alongside, shin up the mast and
get into the cabin through the porthole and steal everything that would
pass through the hole.

The skipper lied to the port authorities telling them we could make the
obligatory eight knots required for permission to enter the canal and
after waiting a day or two for a convoy to build up we steamed into the
canal. Ships always travel in convoy, as the canal is not wide enough
for two ships to pass; although it looks broad enough it has to be
constantly dredged as sand builds up and the only navigable channel is
right down the centre. To shorten the waiting time there is a kind of
nautical lay-by halfway down the canal that south bound convoys pull in
to and wait for north bound ships to pass before continuing.

It can take hours for the way to be clear and on this particular trip
several of us stripped and dived in for a swim. I'm not a strong
swimmer and never go to far from the safety of the ship or shore. We
had been in the water for half an hour or so when a guy watching us
from the deck saw a ripple fifty yards astern and called out to
us.

'Hey, fer chrissakes get out, there's a shark heading this way!'

The four of us still in the water panicked, me more than the others as
I was furthest from the ship. As the others reached the gangway lowered
down the side I headed for the shore. It was closest! Scrambling out I
saw a 6' shark prowling between the ship and me. The guys on deck were
throwing nuts and bolts and anything else they could lay their hands on
at it in an attempt to drive it away and after a while it appeared to
be gone. They called out that it was safe to return but I wasn't having
any of it and eventually they had to lower a lifeboat to rescue
me.

We barely made it to Suez at the southern end of the canal when our
boilers broke down and we were stranded in the Red Sea with almost no
power. The skipper radioed head office in London for permission to seek
assistance in making it to Aden for repairs but they refused and
insisted we fix the problem ourselves. The ends had to taken off the
boiler exposing the glass tubes that ran through the boiler and carried
the water for the production of steam. At the ends of the tubes are
watertight seals and these were the problem; some of them were leaking
and had to be replaced. The boiler was very hot and it would take
several days to cool enough to work on comfortably but the skipper said
we couldn't spare the time so he insisted we start repairs straight
away. Everybody on the ship had to help, engine room staff or not, and
it was particularly uncomfortable for deck hands not used to being so
close to boilers capable of producing eight hundred degree steam.
Nobody could stand the heat for long and it was decided fifteen minutes
was the maximum in any hour.

Because of the heat it was necessary to take salt tablets twice a day
to replace that lost through perspiration, this is normal procedure in
the tropics and all foreign going vessels are obliged by law to carry
sufficient supplies complying with Board of Trade regulations. These
tablets are pure compressed salt and have to be taken with water or
they stick to the tongue or in the throat, they are not particularly
nice to take and most ships carry in addition other tablets that are
coated with sugar and these are not a problem. On this ship the
officers had confiscated all the sugared salt for their own use leaving
the bare salt for the rest of the crew. (The spirit of Captain Bligh
lives on! Fletcher Christian, where were you when we needed you?) Some
crew members found it difficult to swallow the raw salt and didn't take
as much as they should have and by the time we had fixed the boilers
and steamed out of the Red Sea and into the Indian Ocean there were
sick men everywhere. Although I took the salt, after several days of
working in the engine room with steam leaking from every pipe I
succumbed to the heat and had to be carried from the engine room to my
cabin suffering from heat exhaustion. This can be quite serious, the
body shuts down and a condition not dissimilar to rigor mortis sets in.
We were still two days from port and other members of the crew took it
in turns to sponge me down with fresh water to stop me from seizing
up.

By the time we docked in Saudi Arabia I was in need of medical
attention and the purser arranged for an ambulance from the American
hospital at Al Khobar to come for me. One of the other mechanics packed
my case for me and I was carried ashore to the customs post where I was
left to await the ambulance. Most of the previous twenty-four hours I
had been drifting in and out of consciousness and was only vaguely
aware of what was going on. This condition was about to end abruptly!
Whilst I waited a customs officer went through my case and came across
a full bottle of Vodka that the mechanic had packed along with the rest
of the contents of my cabin, forgetting that alcohol is illegal in most
Arab countries. This customs officer screaming at me in Arabic and
waving a large revolver in my face suddenly brought me to full
awareness. He was in a state of high agitation and put the barrel to my
temple, I felt so ill I didn't care what he did but I suspect he would
have shot me if I had made any attempt to defend myself. I was spared
an uncertain fate by the arrival of another customs man who appeared to
be the superior officer and who spoke a little English. He insisted the
captain of my ship come ashore and give him an explanation for the
presence of the Vodka to avoid my arrest and transportation to the
nearest Arab jail. After a lengthy heated exchange between the customs
officer and the skipper I was allowed to leave in the ambulance and
taken to Ash Sharq hospital.

I was in there for a week, in a room with three other beds occupied by
a French sea captain with a broken leg, a Lebanese oil-field engineer
with his arm in plaster and, in the bed next to mine, a Saudi Negro
recovering from an operation of some sort. The Saudi spoke quite good
English and we spent hours exchanging information about our different
countries and lives. During the morning of the second day a nurse
pulled curtains around his bed and left. A few minutes later the door
opened and four smallish people dressed head to foot in a black cloth
moved silently across the room and disappeared behind the curtains. For
the next hour there was silence and then just as quietly they emerged
and left. The nurse returned and drew back the curtains and Mohammed
was sitting up in his bed smiling. Curiosity got the better of me and I
asked about his visitors and he enthusiastically explained that they
were his wives, all four of them. He told me his father bought the
first one for him for two camels and he had purchased the others over a
period of years for varying numbers of sheep. I seem to remember him
saying his religion allowed up to four wives, and he had the full
complement! He said among other things they were status symbols; the
more wives you have the higher your social standing.

The thing I remember most about my stay here was the lack of fresh
water, it appeared that to stop it becoming undrinkable in the heat,
sugar or some other sweet tasting preservative was added to it. I could
only stomach it in strong orange juice but eventually discovered that
there were no additives in the water supply to the toilet cisterns. I
resorted to flushing the toilet and holding a cup in the bowl several
times a day. This came to an end when a nurse caught me and a doctor
explained that I would almost certainly catch a serious disease from
drinking this untreated supply. There was a sandstorm blowing for the
entire week I was in hospital and on the day I was due to be discharged
I had a visit from the oil companies local agent who told me my ship
had left the Gulf for Venezuela and I could either stay in Saudi and
wait for another ship or I could fly home to England. Looking out of
the window and seeing what a god-forsaken place this was I elected to
go home and subsequently a car collected me and took me to Dharan
airport.

There was no direct flight to England for several days so the shipping
agent booked me on a flight to Beirut where I was accommodated at the
very posh Excelsior Hotel. I had never lived in such luxury in my life
and made the most of my two days there. Beirut was the most beautiful
city I had ever visited up to that time and I spent hours walking the
streets marvelling at the lovely houses. It broke my heart in later
years to see what the Arab/Israeli wars did to it, reducing it to a
bombsite. I have always looked back on the time I spent in the Middle
East as an alien experience.

Back in England I decided to take a holiday, camping in the Lake
District, I'd been there before and loved it. I used to camp on a farm
beside lake Coniston and would spend hours walking the hillsides. On
the last day before I came home I determined to walk to the top of the
mountain behind the village. It was called the Old Man of Coniston and
I had been to the top before. It took me an hour to get with reach of
the summit and I could see a lone figure looking out across the valley
from the peak. As I approached I got within about ten feet of the
person and he turned round to look at me. I was gob smacked! It was the
guy who had packed my suitcase for me in Saudi Arabia a month previous.
He apparently had left the ship at Durban and had been flown home to
attend the funeral of his mother. He lived in Manchester and had got
away for a few days before going back to sea.

My seafaring career lasted on and off for about a year, by which time I
had cured myself of wander-lust and Jean had decided she wanted me, so
I left the navy and went to work at a variety of different jobs
including, stevedore, welder, decorator, mechanic and a year working
for Marks &; Spencer as a foreman in their food warehouse in
Chelmsford.
Around this time Jean and her family moved a mile up the road from the
blacksmiths forge to a bungalow among farmland with few near
neighbours.

Jean was now working for a company in the next village and had become
friends with another girl in her office. Heather was a member of the
Chelmsford Young Conservatives and Jean joined and started to socialise
with them. Jean and I seemed to be drifting apart with her showing no
interest in me and I feeling neglected yet again. In the summer of 1968
she told me they were going away for the weekend on a Thames barge out
of Maldon and on the Friday evening I gave her a lift to Heathers house
in Chelmsford. I found out a little while later she had started a
relationship behind my back with an Irish man by the name of Eric and
had shared a cabin with him on the barge. I was devastated, she had
never shared a bed with me and yet here she was spending the weekend
with someone else! For some reason her relationship foundered and she
resumed seeing me and later in the year we went away together for the
first time. We went to Tintagel in Cornwall for a week staying at a
farmhouse, but she insisted on separate rooms making me feel once again
as though I wasn't acceptable.

In 1969 Jean and I, along with two of my friends, John and his
girlfriend also called Jean, went to Marbella for a fortnight. Yet
again Jean insisted on separate rooms and John and I shared one room
and the girls another. At the time there were currency restrictions and
British people were not allowed to take much cash out of the country,
as a consequence of this staff in foreign hotels would attend to other
nationals leaving us to last; they knew they weren't going to get tips
from us, we couldn't afford to tip! At the same time the German economy
was booming and they had money to burn and therefore got the best of
everything. Quite understandably we were pissed-off at what we saw as
bad treatment and we resented the Germans who seemed to be
everywhere.

There was a family of Germans in our hotel comprised of an elderly
mother and father of the old 'Fatherland' school and their son and
daughter-in-law, all of them big people and overflowing with
superiority and arrogance. They would swagger into the dining room and
were instantly besieged by sycophantic waiters eager to indulge their
every whim. We hated them!

John and his girlfriend seemed to be content to commute from the hotel
to the beach each day and lay in the sun between meals, but I couldn't
cope with that and so after a couple of days Jean and I started to
explore the surrounding countryside on our own. On one of these forays
we boarded a local bus to the next town. The bus was almost full and
had a standing area at the rear which was also crowded but the driver
would stop for anyone that waved him down and at the point where we
were practically in each others laps he stopped for an old man who got
on accompanied by several ducks and chickens; the locals didn't bat an
eyelid, it was obviously common practice there!

Several days later the four of us bought tickets for a bullfight staged
in a portable bullring and headlined by the most famous bullfighter of
the day, possibly the most famous bullfighter in the last 50yrs. Manuel
Benitez was better known by his 'stage' name El Cordobes, he was a
working class hero in Spain, coming from a poverty stricken background
and making it to the top of his profession against all the odds. We
didn't go expecting to like or enjoy it but out of curiosity, and at
least on my part, so I could discuss it with a certain amount of
authority. In the event I was quite disgusted with the whole thing. In
spite of Spaniards trying to make out it's some kind of noble spectacle
it is really quite sad to watch the bulls being tormented and wounded
to weaken it before the matador enters the ring and taunts the
half-dead animal finally killing it with a long sword. The 'kill' is
supposed to be executed in a precise, artistic movement reminiscent of
a kind of ballet. The sword is supposed to enter the bull over it's
shoulder, pass between it's ribs and pierce the heart but El Cordobes
made a real mess of it and the bull chased him around the ring with the
sword protruding from the bulls belly having missed it's heart.
Eventually another bullfighter entered the ring and finished it off. As
the dead bull was dragged from the ring by a tractor the crowd rose to
their feet and cheered it but when El Cordobes approached the judges
they booed him! Having my suspicions about the validity of bullfighting
confirmed I can happily live the rest of my life without ever seeing
another! I do know that aficionados of the corrida view it as a high
artistic form and believe those that oppose bullfighting are ignorant
of it's artistic merit, dismissing them disdainfully.

to be? etc.