Page 152 - Michael Frost-Voyages to Maturity-23531.indd

Hospital) and he prevailed upon her to bring aboard a group of nurses for a party.
While they could not be called a group of lovelies, they were young women, all
that was really required. Comorin being a twelve-passenger hybrid (more than
that required the vessel to carry a doctor) it was equipped with better passenger
rooms than one might expect; we occupied the comfortable lounge, and though
there was no pianist, quartet or anything of that nature, dancing of a sort was
arranged, and I actually had a pleasing evening in the company of one Julie. And
as the Chief Steward was as unhappy as the rest of us with the lack of the feminine
touch, he put on some small eats that were surpassingly good; we had never seen
that sort of repast before, and never saw it again, and wondered how it appeared so
fortuitously. It did occur to me, however, that these ladies represented something
that I had not earlier considered; when there is a garrison, in any location, its
pointy end, the troops/sailors, represent a small portion of the establishment.
Given the expense of Empire, the global economic pressures exerted upon
UK, and that Harold Wilson, the new Socialist Prime Minister, was primarily
an economist interested in mundanities such as the balance of payments, and
who avoided any material support for the US in Vietnam by undertaking the
maintenance of armed forces bases east of Suez, it was evident that the need for
British troops in Malaysia was political and not military. Further, that when the
US prevailed in Vietnam (sic!), the British military presence would disappear.

Of course, events distorted the reality of political and Commonwealth plans
as predicted in 1964, in particular the sustained dynamism of a vibrant Singapore
economy, which was not really then foreseeable because the nation possessed no
natural resources, other perhaps than its geography. The world’s failure to appreciate
that the intellectual and economic skills of its leaders and inhabitants more than
compensated for those deficiencies was not unreasonable, given that comparisons
with Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia all later attested to the
vigour of the Singapore experiment. At some political cost, human capital soon
demonstrated its value, a lesson largely ignored by those slower economies.

Upon these matters we did not much dwell, particularly as far as I was
concerned, for we were now on the way home, where we expected to arrive on
my 21st – and I had already discovered that the schedule was very likely to be
maintained, unlike with Khyber and the tankers. We were to visit Swettenham
and Penang, but these were to be the last loading ports of my time as a cadet,
and with rubber being the primary cargo, our supervisory role was limited. I
did learn, however, from my brother’s letter that he had suddenly begun to use
the word ‘love’ and even marriage, far too prematurely in my opinion, though
perhaps, upon consideration, not so bad a decision, for if we went out together to
a party, he usually got the first partner-pick, leaving me in his wake.

But other events had supervened. We had heard of an incident in the Gulf
of Tonkin, just a day or two’s sailing north of where Comorin had been plying its

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