Growing up in Lee-on-the-Solent

by John W Green

  Five days after leaving Hong Kong we arrived at the port of Nagoya in Japan. It was here, on the evening of our arrival that one of the engineering officers said to me: ‘Well Sparky, it’s about time you learnt about the young ladies of Japan and the Geisha Girls.’ A group of five or six of us, a mixture of deck and engine room officers, went ashore.

  This was to be a night of naughtiness and surprises. The first was when one of my colleagues went up to a policeman and asked for directions to ‘available girls’. The policeman didn’t bat an eyelid. He didn’t give us directions; he took us to the appropriate area. I was to learn that the profession followed by these young women was legal and checked by government officials and doctors. When we got there, the girls were sitting on verandas outside the establishments. They were not true Geisha girls with the chalky white faces, but they were dressed in kimonos and were very demure. No sordid pestering by pimps; everything appeared to be very civilised, cultured and clean. Before we went into the establishment, we had to take off our shoes at the entrance door (a bit like being back home). A deck officer, who had now taken over the role of my mentor in these matters immoral, said to me, just before we went in: ‘Don’t forget to tell them you are a cherry boy.’ I was a bit overwhelmed by what was going on and the decision about who was to go with who didn’t appear to rest with me. The floors were covered with what appeared to be rush mats. We sat in a large room, and at one stage about half a dozen of the girls stood up and performed a dance routine in a circle, imitating the actions of peasant miners, and singing the folk song Tanko Bushi.[6]

  Everything proceeded at a leisurely pace, then after a while couples began to drift off to other rooms. When it came to my turn, and I was the last, I was taken to a room scented by burning joss sticks. There was no bed, but a rush mattress on the floor with brightly coloured pillows and covers. Later when I returned to the ship and discovered what cherry boy meant ... it was no longer applicable. Sorry, Dad!

  After this it was off to Kobe, and then to Yokohama and back to Nagoya a week later. This time we didn’t need the policeman to show us the way; a different group of us went to a different establishment, but in the same area. The evening followed the same sedate, civilized procedure. However this time the other room, although it had the burning joss sticks, also had a low bed complete with brightly coloured bed linen. Now I know that you are not going to believe this, but it is true. Just after the young lady and I had got into the bed, there was a tapping on the door. The young lady said something in Japanese and the door slowly slid to one side, and into the room came what I took to be her father, mother and a young sister who looked to be no more than ten years old. One at a time they bowed to me, and in a state of bewilderment I nodded back as an attempted bow, as respectfully as I could while lying in the bed. I can’t imagine what my face looked like at that moment: guilty embarrassment would be my best shot. They quietly spoke to the young lady for about a minute, in Japanese of course, and then the bowing ritual was repeated and they left the room. My guess was that they had come into the room to say good night to their daughter and sister and, at the same time, check me out. The event severely dampened my enthusiasm but it soon became rekindled.

  After Nagoya, it was off to Osaka. From then on I restricted my trips ashore to the bars. From Osaka we went across the harbour to Kobe where we spent three days loading cargo. It was here I went ashore each evening to the same bar. When I say ‘bar’ it was more like a small café, in which the customers sat at tables alongside wall-length windows, from where it was possible to watch the world outside go by. Drinks and food were brought to the tables by waitresses, and I got to know one of them quite well. On the evening of the third day, as it was to be our last day in port, I stayed until closing time - it must have been about eleven o’clock. Just as I was about to leave, the waitress that I had got to know came up to me and invited me to join a group of them who were going to the beach. I accepted, but as I had been drinking since early evening, my recollections of the events that were to follow became a bit hazy. It turned out that there were four of the waitresses and a young Japanese chap, who may or may not have been the boyfriend of one of the girls. We all got into a car which had a bench seat at the front; the young man was the driver and two girls sat alongside him. I was in the back with the other two girls. It was a balmy night and we set off for the beach.

  All their conversations, of course, were conducted in Japanese. I had bought a Japanese phrase book when I first arrived in Japan and had learnt a few phrases. Unfortunately when I tried to say ‘I don’t understand Japanese’ I realised that I had got it wrong and it came out as ‘I understand Japanese’ which resulted in a lot of laughing and giggling. I wondered what they had been saying. Although everything was a bit hazy, I am pretty certain that when we had nearly reached our destination, because the driver didn’t seem to know the area very well, we had ended up driving along a very wide promenade style pavement alongside the beach. He managed to get back on to the road and we arrived safely. It was a brightly lit, open-fronted beach bar which was still open, and we all sat on the beach in front of the bar. From somewhere food appeared and I was given something to eat that was rolled in what I took to be a pancake, but it wasn’t. It was quite savoury though I must admit I have no idea what I ate that night. Then we all went for a swim, in the dark, unencumbered by bathing costumes. When we came out of the water, as I went to put my clothes on, they all beckoned me to follow them. We went to the beach bar, which was still well lit with more than a dozen customers inside. There was a giant open shower, almost in the middle of the room: its base must have been about five feet by five feet, and everyone - including yours truly - got under the fine spray of fresh water. There was just enough room for us all to get under the shower, but only just. Although the shower had no sides and was in full view of the customers who were sitting drinking, they hardly took any notice of the naked bodies, possibly with the exception of mine because I was the only non-Japanese person in the establishment. After the shower we all got dressed; it was still very warm, so the lack of towels was no problem. Then we all piled back into the car and they took me to the docks, where we all said our ‘sayonaras’ and I returned to the ship in a somewhat dazed state. A few hours later the ship set sail for our final port in Japan, Moji, which we reached by sailing up the Inland Sea. I said to a deck officer on watch during this short trip that I thought the scenery was really beautiful. After pointing out some feature to me, he said that this was an outstanding trip in April when the cherry trees were in blossom. From Moji, where I didn’t go ashore, when we had completed our loading, we started our journey back to India and the Persian Gulf, calling at the usual stops of Hong Kong and Singapore, with an extra stop at Cochin in India before we arrived at Bombay.

  6 www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankō_Bushi

  A Robinson Crusoe Moment

  Two days after we arrived at Bombay, things were about to change again. It was now 21 September - the autumn equinox - and I had been away from the UK for nearly five months. On reporting to the Marconi office, I was told that I had been transferred to the Padana. ‘Ours not to reason why’: my first thoughts were perhaps she might be going back to the UK. Dream on! The Padana’s call sign was HPZN, which indicated that she was not UK registered. She turned out to be a tramp-ship. This meant that she had no fixed route and went wherever a cargo was needed to be collected or delivered. She was one of the Liberty Ships that had been built during World War Two.

  SS Padana

  Unfortunately the Padana had been built for, and used on, the Arctic convoys to Russia, and she was not exactly ideal for sailing round the Indian Ocean. This meant that in a brief four months I had gone from the high life of a luxury liner to a ship that would fit nicely into a Joseph Conrad novel. It was back to the old brown-paper-parcel luggage. My cabin, together with most of the other officers’ cabins, was down in the bowels of the ship, and the radio room w
as just behind the bridge, with similar equipment to the Orna. The Padana had seen better days; allegedly she had a top speed of eight knots, but that must have been with a following wind and following current. I’m not sure that we ever achieved the dizzy heights of that speed during my time on board. Our destination was Africa, and after eight days of sailing we arrived at Mombasa. What struck me immediately was the perfume of the blossoms on the trees, which could be smelt long before the ship tied up. We were there only briefly before we sailed south, a day’s sailing to arrive at Dar es Salaam where we stayed for a couple of days before moving on to Zanzibar, which lived up to its magical-sounding name. We were anchored there for just over a week. One afternoon, during our stay, half a dozen of the ship’s officers, including me, went by means of one of the ship’s lifeboats to an island that had formerly been a leper colony: its residents had long since gone and it now was a home for several giant tortoises. We were told by a guide, who appeared from nowhere, that that one of the tortoises was nearly two hundred years old. On another day we went to another small nearby island, about a couple of miles from where the ship was anchored. We waded ashore and did a bit of exploring on our Robinson Crusoe patch. After about an hour, when it was decided to return to the ship, we discovered that the lifeboat hadn’t been properly secured, and it had drifted about 10 yards out to sea. As I was the strongest swimmer I volunteered to swim out and row the boat back to the shore. The water was beautifully crystal-clear and pleasantly warm. But, when I looked at the water as I was just about to swim out, I noticed that there was a huge shoal of small jellyfish between me and the boat. I had volunteered, so I had to go through with it. Not knowing whether they had a bad sting or not, I adopted a swimming stroke that would never win any prizes for style but it did enable me to me a clear path through the shoal and I got to the boat without getting stung. Then, using an oar, I sculled the boat back to the island - this proved to be more difficult than I had anticipated, but nevertheless I made it, then we rowed back to the ship.

  After Zanzibar the ship sailed back to Mombasa, where some of us went ashore, but there was not a great deal to do. There were a few dirt roads and a few shops together with a small bar about five minutes walking distance up a slight hill from where the ship was tied up. It was quite pleasant not to be pestered by locals asking for money, or to be approached by women offering you trips to paradise for a nominal fee.

  I’m not sure if it was a copra or sisal crop that was being harvested and loaded aboard from various ports, but for the next three weeks we spent our time shunting about between different locations including Mikandani and Lindi, where the ship actually tied up to a tree.

  It was here that I met up with a couple of chaps from the UK who were living in South Africa. Every year they left their families,for seven months at a time, to work in this part of East Africa. They were in charge of the native labour, and they earned enough in seven months to enable them not to have to work for the remaining five months. It also allowed them and their families to live quite luxurious lifestyles.

  During the first few days of our stay in Lindi, I spent quite a lot of time chatting with the two ‘stevedores’ and sharing a fair few beers with them, which I put on my tab. To return my hospitality, they invited me ashore after work one evening, to go to a local whites-only club with them. It was quite an interesting and laid-back club with a huge sawfish blade behind the bar. We sat drinking and chatting, and it got to be quite late, so the two ‘stevedores’ said I could kip-down on their sofa. Although it was late, we had a meal when we returned to their bungalow, but I declined the salad. As we were entering their place, I noticed a row of ripening tomatoes and one of the men went to one side and peed all over them. The other said: ‘he pisses on them every time we get back from the club and he reckons that not only does it water them, it gives them a special taste.’

  The sofa on which I slept was on one side of the living-room against the wall, below a fine cloth mesh-covered opening, rather than a window. In the middle of the night I thought I heard someone coughing outside the bungalow, a few feet from where I was sleeping. In the morning at breakfast I asked them who it was that I had heard coughing in the early hours. ‘Oh that would have been a leopard,’ they casually replied. I didn’t feel too casual about it, (urban leopards?).

  The two stevedores had a rather beaten-up car which they said I could borrow, but unfortunately I couldn’t drive. When I say beaten up, I exaggerate not. On the previous evening when we had gone to the club, as we were going down a hill on a dusty dirt road, the driver said ‘hold on! There’s a bit of a bump, at the bottom.’ I was sitting in the front passenger-seat. The bit of a bump at the bottom turned out to be a foot-deep ditch. I had grabbed hold of the sides of the seat, but my head hit the inside of the car’s roof with quite a whack, because although I was still in contact with the seat, it was not attached to the chassis. I went ashore with them on a further two evenings. The beers during the day were on me, and during the evening were on them. Nevertheless I didn’t take advantage of the use of their sofa, or go ‘leopard listening’ again.

  On one of the evenings ashore we met up with an Anglo-Indian chap who was allowed to use the club. He worked for an agency that was plotting the location and movement of locust swarms. He had a Land Rover which seemed to be in much better nick than the stevedores’ car. It was decided to go, in the Land Rover, to another club a few miles away - it may have been Mikandani. The appearance of the Land Rover was deceptive. It was quite dark, and Africa knows how to be dark when it wishes. Just after we had crossed a narrow elevated dirt track, about four hundred yards long across a swamp, we went up a slight incline in the track. On cresting the top of the incline, in the headlights was a leopard. The ‘Locust Locator’ braked hard but the brakes were so badly adjusted that the vehicle shot straight off the road. Although there were no seatbelts, no-one was hurt; the driver was able to get us back on to the road without too much difficulty and the Land Rover was only scratched. As we were in the back of beyond, in the dark, surrounded by jungle and with no means of communicating with anyone, it did occur to me that if we’d had to brake on the track across the swamp, it’s not certain that any of us would have survived. In the event, it turned out that the other club was not very good and we didn’t stay.

  Once the cargo was loaded we sailed to Mikandani, and at the beginning of December we went back to Dar es Salaam for two days, before making our way back across the Indian Ocean to Calcutta, calling at Cochin, Quilon, Mangalore and Calicut on the way.

  Carrying Coals To Colombo

  Calcutta was not one of my favourite places. It was certainly somewhere to go to see abject poverty, and I suspect that it still may be. The Deck officers and Engine-room officers of the Padana signed on and signed off with an unending regularity, either because they were transferred to other ships or because their ‘two years tours of duty’ had just started or ended. It was one of the second mates who had been on the Padana for some while who, on one occasion, said to me: ‘the river Hoogli is the arsehole of the world and Calcutta is a hundred and four miles up it.’ I think that he could be excused for thinking this because the Padana spent the next five months carrying coal between Calcutta and Colombo.

  It was here that the Captain, who had recently joined the ship, came up with the most ludicrous uniform idea. He told us that we had to wear a standard uniform top with a collar and tie, number ten trousers, and white shoes and socks. This was in conditions where we were loading coal and where there was coal dust everywhere - and it was hot.

  On one day during this loading session we lost some of our electricity supply. The normal means of keeping our cabins cool in the ship’s lower decks (bowels) were overhead fans; no fancy air conditioners here. Suddenly we were deprived of this luxury of blowing the hot air around. For a whole day I was stretched out on my cabin sofa in my underpants, all portholes closed and the cabin door shut. Even so, the coal dust had an
insidious mind of its own. It still managed to find a way into the closed cabin and slowly but surely deposited a fine grey film of itself on everything including me - especially me. Every two hours I would go to the shower room, thank God the showers were working, rinse off and then return to my cabin and resume my uncomfortable vigil; it was even too hot to read. After six showers, the power was restored, so that the fans could get on with their job of blowing around the hot air, now infested with fine coal dust. On that trip my cabin didn’t seem to be free of the dust until we were halfway down the Bay of Bengal.

  SS Padana in Calcutta, with me in this odd uniform

  When we were in Calcutta we tied up alongside the coal depot, where the railway trucks with their contents of coal would be unloaded. This was done by hand and carried in baskets on the heads of men, women and children - some of the children looked to be only about ten years old. At night-time I saw the workers, including the children, lie down on the tracks under the railway trucks to sleep with a sack over them, and a large lump of coal for a pillow. This was after they had worked all day carrying coal in basket on their heads. I saw this with my own eyes and can vouchsafe that it is true, and ever since then it has been a saying of mine that ‘you haven’t seen poverty until you have seen the poor in Calcutta’.