Page 51 - Michael Frost-Voyages to Maturity-23531.indd

go was a bottomless economic and political mess. Even now I recall listening to
the BBC announcing the fall of Dien Bien Phu. The import of this event was not
lost on anyone in the Empire, or the newish euphemism ‘the Commonwealth’, as
peace was collapsing in Cyprus, Aden was dissolving, ‘trouble’ was foreseeable in
Southern Rhodesia and human rights were soon to remove South Africa from
the concert of right-thinking nations. Fortunately, though, not all was dissolving;
British Honduras (known as ‘the armpit of the British Empire’) was still a stalwart
– though hardly anyone knew where it was.

But the time for reflection was soon past. I had been fortunate in having my
leave extended to May 2nd but being at home was not all that it was cracked up to
be when everybody else was living a ‘normal’ life. While I had seen and learned a
lot on my first voyage, I was hoping that a bit more would come from the second.
And indeed, it did.

Khyber departed London, destined for the same sequence of ports as on my
first voyage. Once again, the Bay of Biscay transit was horrible, but a new book
(‘The Franco-Prussian War’ by Michael Howard) leavened the time spent lying
down, and also incidentally made me realise why the French were such a grumpy
lot. But upon passing Gibraltar, the weather improved noticeably. Thereafter, we
needed only about thirty hours in Genoa, and the trip to Port Said was accom-
plished by May 16th. And now that it was May, the weather was much hotter, but
as the South-West Monsoon rains in the northern summer, the trip across the
Arabian Gulf was unexpectedly pleasant – and with no engine break-downs, it
almost felt like a cruise to the fragrant Orient.

But first, we had to drop into Colombo. This was not a part of the scheduled
cargo run, but merely a pause in the voyage necessitated by a crew change. Colom-
bo itself is an important port, if only because of its location, lying as it does between
the distant big ports of Bombay (Mumbai) to the West and Madras (Chennai) to
the east. As it was a port not normally on P&O routes, (though passenger vessels
called there with some frequency) I would have liked to see something of the place,
but the limited time in port did not allow walks ashore. The crew change (the en-
tire personnel of all three departments changed almost completely) was accom-
plished with speed, partly because there was little to take aboard, the water being
little better than the brackish stuff available in Aden, and fresh food being in short
supply even in Ceylon itself (pretty hard to imagine such a lush tropical paradise
being unable to supply every fresh food that one could wish, but this was well be-
fore improved crop yields transformed agriculture). The stay was therefore short,
and as most of the new crew were old P&O hands, despite being newly aboard, it
was quickly apparent that their knowledge of how things were done on P&O ships
greatly exceeded mine. A short but not unpleasant stay.

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