And the driving was something else! There was an advert running on the TV in Britain some time ago, showing the Fiat factory where car bodies are driven around by automated systems, apparently to the music of the ‘Blue Danube’, with the by-line ‘Built by robots’. That was followed by a skit on the advert on Not the Nine O’Clock News with the line ‘Built by robots, driven by Italians,’ and showing a totalled car in a ditch. Well, if anything, that was understating the case. They’re bloody awful. There is no readily apparent highway code or any formalised system of driving rules or regulations – at junctions the bloke with the most nerve gets through. Sometimes.
The accepted technique appears to be to approach the junction at speed, lean on the horn and then assume that anyone else will get out of your way. Horns are used more or less constantly, to indicate almost anything – that you’re starting, or stopping, or turning, or reversing, or getting impatient, or trying to attract someone’s attention, or just because you’re bored. Obviously all Italian drivers are required to complete a telepathy course as well as a driving test. If they do a driving test at all, which I doubt. And the parking is amazing. On the road, on the pavement, on corners, on pedestrian crossings (which are universally ignored), or anywhere else, as far as I could see. The cars, not too surprisingly, are very battered.
I had hoped to be able to telephone home from Taranto, but that turned into a no-no, with a queue of about three hours from the one international telephone we were able to find. The problem is that the coins over here are so absolutely worthless that though it is possible to dial the United Kingdom from most coin boxes, by the time you get through the machine will have taken the maximum of ten coins – all it will accept – and you have to start all over again.
We walked back to the Italian naval base, intending to catch the 1850 boat back to the Illustrious. Unfortunately we missed that by about five minutes, and so we went up to the Officers’ Club, about five minutes’ walk from the jetty, to take our ease until the 1930 boat. And quite a place it was, more like a palace than the kind of structure we are used to in Britain (the Culdrose Officers’ Club was, quite literally, a shed in a field), with its marble floors, vast echoing hallway and so on. The bar was outside, on a large terrace overlooking the Mar Picco1o, and it really was extremely pleasant to just sit there, sipping a Coke (purchased, together with a beer for Paul, for the extortionate sum of 34p total) and keeping an eye open for the boat.
The trip back was just as noisy and vibratory as the trip out, but dark to boot. I got changed into Red Sea rig for the evening, ate dinner, and then sat down to enjoy the film – The Man with the Golden Gun with Roger Moore as the ageing, but immortal, James Bond. Very good value, and as entertaining as ever.
Saturday 8th October 1983
Moving Day! Not far, though. We raised the pick at about 0800, and by 0830 we were anchored again, but a good deal closer to the shoreline, so that will cut down the time taken to get ashore, if nothing else. We have now had some more or less definite news about the ship’s programme – it seems that we are now down to a single option on the lift repair, involving the manufacture of lifting chains and bars to go across the lift opening to support the lift platform, and it is hoped to start the work within the next couple of days.
We are still not sure whether or not we are going alongside, or if the work will be tackled where we are at the moment, but the definitive statement is that if the job can be done, we will sail, with the lift raised to flight deck level, on Wednesday the 12th, for Athens. If the work cannot be done, we will still sail for Athens, but with the lift simply secured as best we can get it, on Thursday the 13th. Either way, Athens here we come.
A quiet day – nothing new there – and a very good dinner (beef Wellington and Black Forest gateau) followed by a good, but extremely long, film called Barry Lyndon, a Stanley Kubrick effort with Ryan O’Neal. Most enjoyable, but I hadn’t the endurance to sit through the whole thing.
Sunday 9th October 1983
Another day with the square root of sod all happening. After lunch I went into Taranto again by boat with Mike Vine, the METOCO (Meteorological and Oceanographic Officer), and we found that it was shut. Entirely. After a walk all round it, we found that you could describe Taranto very shortly and succinctly – dusty, covered in dog shit and with cars all over the pavements.
I don’t think that leaves anything out.
The good news, however, was that I was able to telephone home, and a very clear line it was, too. A cute system. You pay over the vast-sounding sum of 9,000 lira (about £3-90), and for that you receive three tickets, a bit like very thin credit cards, each worth 3,000 lira. To make a call you put one of these cards into the phone, and a digital readout tells you how many lira’s worth of credit you have on each card. The first time you put it in, obviously, the readout says 3,000. Then you dial the number, and as the call is made the amount displayed steadily reduces. Once it gets down to about 600 lira, the display starts to flash, and at that stage you can put another card in. If you do, the display changes to 3,000 plus whatever amount you had left on the other card (say 5,600), and the first card drops out. If you finish the call and there is still some credit not used on the card, you can use the card again at a later date, so there is obviously some sort of electronic coding on the card which the telephone can ‘read’. Very neat.
Mike couldn’t get through to his wife, and so we walked back to the jetty area, intending to have a drink in the Officers’ Club before returning to the ship. A good plan, only spoilt by the fact that the bloody place was shut – presumably officers are considered to have better things to do on a Sunday afternoon than visit the club. So we wandered for a bit; Mike went back to the telephone booths, and I returned on the 1630 Liberty Boat, with no intention of ever setting foot in Taranto again.
And the funny thing is that when I got back on board, after having been talking to Mike about the ship’s future programme, with particular reference to how stuck we would be if the forward lift broke as well as the aft lift, I discovered that the forward lift had broken! Great. Now we’re really in a pickle. Obviously this has only just happened so I don’t know exactly what the intention is, but we will certainly not be doing very much flying until at least one lift is fixed, because we can’t get the aircraft out of the shed (hangar). Stand by for more news.
Monday 10th October 1983
A moderately eventful day, and a successful one from the point of view of the ship. This morning a large floating crane berthed alongside us, ready for the movement of the after lift platform back to flight deck level. Work had continued most of yesterday and a good part of last night to get the lift ready for the proposed move, positioning huge baulks of timber on the flight deck at the rear of the lift, and organising immense RSJs to carry the two block and tackle assemblies, also fairly immense, that were going to be bearing the weight of the aft section of the lift platform, while the floating crane would take the forward half. Large lifting eyes were welded to the platform itself in preparation, and everything was finally ready at just before lunchtime today.
In the meantime, diligent work on the forward lift had got that back into working order – the problem there obviously wasn’t as big as first thought.
And a little before 1400 the big lift started, inching the lift platform up by stages, varying the lift generated by the crane and the block and tackle assemblies in order to get the platform as level as possible, before finally bringing it up to flight deck level. There were hitches, of course, mainly because of the damage that the lift did in falling in the first place, which caused some jamming as it came up, but finally it was clear.
The hydraulic system which drives the keeps (which hold the lift at flight deck level) was repaired, and the lift was finally secured at flight deck level at about 1700. Quite an operation, and I think everyone is most relieved that it has now been completed – albeit at a high cost (the figure being bandied about is £30,000 for the whole operation) – and we wi
ll now be able to sail for Athens tomorrow. All that remains to be done on the flight deck is to clear away the debris, and we are even intending to fly both the Sea Kings and the Sea Harriers tomorrow afternoon.
A tricky choice of entertainment this evening, with I, the Jury on CCTV and Smokey and the Bandit II on Teleject in the Wardroom. In the end I plumped for Smokey, which is quite an entertaining film, but I have since been advised that I, the Jury (a film of one of Mickey Spillane’s many Mike Hammer books) was the better choice, as it offered all the best in Wardroom video entertainment – lots of sex and violence and a thin plot.
Tuesday 11th October 1983
And sail we jolly well did. Work continued all morning in trying to get the flight deck into a more or less usable condition for Sea Harriers and Sea Kings – obviously there were a lot of plates, brackets and so on which had been welded on to both the lift platform and the deck around the lift well, and all these had to be removed, Sea Harriers not liking pseudo ‘Sleeping Policemen’ on their take-off runs. This was achieved by about lunchtime, though the deck will obviously require a good deal more work to get the special Camrex covering replaced and so on, and we hauled up the pick and headed out of the Gulf of Taranto at about 1400.
Just to prove that it could be done, we flew Sea Harriers and Sea Kings within an hour of leaving Italian waters. This was to prove that the deck could be used, as well as to get at least a few of our pilots back into flying currency – there are a lot of rules governing flying, and one which could have affected us is the one which states that night flying cannot be carried out unless day flying has been done within a specified period beforehand. The implication of this regulation is that, for example, if we’d had a man overboard during the night, we could not have used our Sea Kings (legally) to go and look for him. In that case, we probably would have said to hell with the rule book: get airborne, but it would have been in direct contravention of the regulations.
The Wardroom film was The Battle of Britain, which is not too bad a film, I suppose, but not really my scene, so I vanished down into the CCTV studio to select some videos for my show, which will be going out to the assembled masses on Thursday evening. And so to bed, losing an hour’s sleep due to the change in time zone as we head east towards the Aegean.
Wednesday 12th October 1983
The Harriers and the Kings flew again this morning, but terminated just before lunch as we approached Greek airspace, where we require diplomatic clearance to operate above 1,000 feet. We are at the moment heading for a rendezvous with Resource tomorrow morning, after which we will pick up FOF3 and his staff on completion of the exercise before heading for Athens, where we are hoping to arrive more or less at the planned time.
We passed within about a mile of three Russian warships in the early afternoon. They were anchored at the southern end of the Aegean Sea, in a convenient area – convenient, that is, for monitoring any NATO ships which might be in the area, and also handy if they want to follow and watch any Western vessel.
We continued north-east through the Aegean Sea, making for Saros Bay, in Turkey, and dodging through the innumerable little islands in this part of the world. There wasn’t a great deal happening on board, really, either during the afternoon or evening, and I spent most of the evening after dinner playing bridge – I think about the first game I’ve played this year. My partner said it showed.
Thursday 15th October 1983
The ship came to anchor in Saros Bay (not far from Gallipoli) at about 0750 this morning, and we carried out a fairly prolonged Vertrep (Vertical Replenishment) throughout most of the day, embarking stores from RFA Resource and FOF3 and his vast crowd of minions from Hermes, which was parked a mile or so from us in the same bay. I poked my nose out to see what Turkey looked like, decided it was a bit flat and boring and also extremely chilly, and hastily withdrew. We are still in tropical rig (we donned whites before reaching Taranto), and the breeze certainly can get into some very sensitive places, especially with shorts like mine.
The flight deck crews were quite busy this afternoon, ranging aircraft for the entry to Athens, or rather Piraeus, tomorrow morning. We will be in Procedure Alpha for our arrival, which now makes slightly more sense, as we will be going alongside, I’m delighted to say. Apparently a Russian Sverdlov-class warship will be departing and we will be taking the berth it is vacating.
I did my CCTV show this evening – the last for this phase of the deployment – and it seemed to go down quite well. I will probably end up doing another one on the way from Athens to Genoa, if all goes well. As far as Wardroom entertainment was concerned, we were treated to a film of the Illustrious herself – a sort of ‘what happened in the first year’ kind of thing, which was quite entertaining and interesting. That was followed by The Dirty Dozen, also entertaining, though in a rather different way.
Friday 14th October 1983
We all had early calls this morning, in order to get everything ready for the ship’s arrival in Athens. The arrival itself was a most protracted affair – we appeared on the upper deck, in whites of course, at 0815, and we were finally secured alongside at 0945. That wouldn’t have been too bad, but there was a very chill wind indeed, and it was very uncomfortable.
As we neared the harbour entrance, we were treated to the sight of a Russian Krivak emerging, closely followed by the Sverdlov whose berth we were going to occupy. We fired a 21-gun national salute (we have small saluting guns available on 2 deck) just before entering harbour. Once inside, it was a squeeze, to say the least, and the actual berthing was quite awkward, from the looks of it, requiring tug assistance all the time, as the wind was blowing us off our chosen course. It was with considerable relief that we were finally released and could go below for coffee and a warm-up.
As a point of interest, as well as the very tight squeeze in the harbour itself, it was fairly tight outside as there was a positive flock of ships at anchor – presumably waiting for cargoes or waiting to enter the port or delayed for some other reason. As some of them were tankers, I think they might well be considered semi-permanent residents of Greece, in view of the general recession in the oil industry.
After lunch three of us decided to go into Athens to find the right hotel and have a look about. We walked to the dockyard gate, and were there accosted by a taxi driver, who subsequently took us for a ride, in both senses of the word. We told him where we wanted to go, and he said it would cost 800 drachmas (about £6), which didn’t seem unreasonable for a ride of about thirty minutes. We subsequently discovered that the correct fare would be about 400 drachmas, but at the time we weren’t to know, and we also discovered that the taxi drivers are generally honest, except, predictably enough, those who operate in the Piraeus area.
The hotel was a typical tourist/package tour hotel, I suppose, called the Hotel Stanley. Richard Noble’s wife was already in Athens (having arrived the previous evening), so he nipped away quite smartish, and Duncan Tilley and I confirmed that the reservations had been made for our respective wives. There we found the first stumbling-block, as the hotel reception (and Olympic Airways, with whom I checked) confirmed that the flight would be arriving at 2045 (at the hotel at about 2200), rather than the 1645 that we had understood from the U-Tours people on board ship. However, despite repeated enquiries, there seemed no divergence from the later time, so we opted to go for a wander round the city before returning to the ship for the official reception.
First impressions were that Athens was noisy (horns and squealing tyres, the latter caused by a very shiny and worn road surface, which seemed to be the result of the heat in the summer and sheer wear and tear), colourful and alive.
The driving was a bit Italian, though a shade less overtly suicidal, and cars seemed to be everywhere – on the roads and on the pavements. It seems that there are around 1.5 million cars in Greece, and most of the drivers would like to visit Athens by car every day, so the government has adopted a very simple method of limiting the number in the city each da
y – the cars are numbered, obviously, and those with even numbers are allowed in one day; those with odd the next. It’s still damn crowded, though.
The main means of transport, apart from cars and the ubiquitous yellow taxis, are buses, both trolley buses and the more normal diesel-powered type (and even one double-decker which I spotted). Sensibly, as on the electric train which runs from Piraeus through Athens to Kifissia, there is a single flat fare of 20 drachmas (about 15p) irrespective of distance. This system substantially reduces the queues and enables the driver to get on with the very considerable task of hacking his way through the Athens traffic without bothering about whether or not he’s given you the right change. In fact, they work an honesty system, just having a small slot at the front of the bus into which you place your fare.
This honesty extends elsewhere into Greek life, too, as we saw on our very brief walkabout. We saw a whole pile of shoes for sale, which had simply been covered over with a tarpaulin while the vendor went off for his siesta (Greek shops are open from about 0800 to 1330, and then from 1700 until about 2000) – if you tried that in London, they’d not only take the shoes, they’d have the tarpaulin as well. There were sort of Perspex cabinets as well, containing pretzels (or what looked remarkably like pretzels, albeit on the large side), and if you wanted one, you simply put the money on the top, reached in and took one out. There were odd things on sale, too – I saw a Browning machine gun (not in working condition) outside one junk shop – and the Greeks clearly believe in the virtues of the hard sell. You had only to pause outside a shop, looking at something, and you stood a very good chance of being dragged in bodily to try it on/smell it/taste it/whatever, and they also believe in haggling if at all possible, promising all sorts of ‘special’ prices.
H.M.S. Illustrious Page 11