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but that as we were going to Hong Kong, that feature should be by-passed. It was
also where, upon walking ashore, I witnessed men openly walking hand-in-hand,
something that I had not seen elsewhere, but which, it was explained (correctly?)
arose from the practice of purdah, the country (a status not actually achieved by
1961) being largely Muslim. Women being thus secluded seemed bizarre, but I
had, I knew, much to learn.

Fuelling over (one never filled up with Aden’s desalinated potable water unless
one was in extremis, so we took none on) we set out over the Indian Ocean. The
next port was Penang, my first taste of the east.

The Horn of Africa obtrudes some way into that ocean, but first one passes
to starboard the island of Socotra, a large bump on the horizon that is remote,
hostile in environment and home to unique flora and fauna. I have never met
anyone who has actually been there, but it is one of those mysterious places that
one would like to see at least once in a lifetime (like Kerguelen and Pitcairn,
among others). Entering the Indian Ocean, however, meant starting the longest,
seven-day, part of the trip. Further, it was my first encounter with a monsoon.
Being December, we were outside the notoriously rough monsoon, so a relatively
calm transit could be expected.

But that mattered little. The mate, in one of his less benign moods, decided that
the time had come to clean up the paint locker. This small hellhole, situated as far
forward in the bow as one could get, contained all of the ship’s used and semi-used
paint and varnish. To say that it smelled terrible would be a severe understatement;
today, to work in such a gaseous place would simply be impermissible. In fact,
certainly in this respect, the working world has improved. The indenture system,
not so very different from today’s ‘intern’ logic, was and is inherently exploitative. In
the case of the merchant navy, cadets constituted a class of educated personnel who
worked in the same manner as certificated seamen but who were paid a derisory
sum for work that would normally have been negotiated collectively (in fact, for
officers, the Merchant Navy and Airline Officers Association did act as a partially
effective representative group, but I never heard a word from it about representing
cadets). While apprenticed, (and the P&O Group must have utilised close to a
thousand cadets) we earned ten pounds a month, supplemented by a cheque for
about sixty pounds paid at year-end (by way of forced savings), young cadets
obviously being too irresponsible to be permitted access to money as it was earned.
Our jobs included lookout duty (no sinecure, as I had learned), being helmsmen,
and scraping and maintaining decks, superstructure and accommodation. And
that, as will be seen, was not the end of it.

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