Page 83 - Michael Frost-Voyages to Maturity-23531.indd

though necessary step towards serving in passenger ships, thus destined to
eventually visit a cornucopia of exotic ports. But BP knew of nothing but tankers,
some of them being exceedingly small and dowdy coastal vessels; certainly, on
that type of ship they got home quite often, but that was, to most of us, much too
high a price to pay for that privilege.

Most interesting, however, was the tale of one of our visitors. He hailed from
Czechoslovakia and brought with him an interesting viewpoint. Obviously, given
the lack of any large body of water in the country (even Hungary merited a navy,
Lake Balaton being large enough to need some armed protection) the country
was hardly a maritime power. In fact, even when part of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, the two nations were kept away from the southern and nautical part of
the Empire because of their antipathy towards the sea, and it was only when I
read one of the obscure books in the school library that I had heard of the Battle
of Lissa. It turns out that Austria did in fact have a maritime tradition, though
Bohemia and Moravia were hardly a part of it.

But his tale was not of his good fortune in getting a job at sea; it was about
how we complained about our lives when we had so little about which to cavil.
In his country, he said, you can’t even think about ideas of freedom, the luxury
of choice of food, vacations, careers, indeed practically everything about which
he had heard we British moan, usually at great length. (This should not have
come as a surprise, at least to me, for in Hong Kong three Russian sailors had
visited Khyber and marvelled at our quality of life. We were, I recalled, suitably
chastened … but such sentiments have a limited life and soon dissipated during
a good dinner.)

We were in Abadan for only a day, thereafter, sailing a short distance to Mina
Al-Ahmadi. This is a berth, ostentatiously called a city, adjacent to Kuwait, of
which I knew little other than the fact that a family friend had been a British
Army officer based in Kuwait in 1961, when a British force had defended the
country against the depredations of the Iraqi dictator Abd al-Qarim Qassem. The
friend, whom I later met in Sussex, was singularly unimpressed by Kuwait itself,
but fortunately he had had little to do when there, the situation being ‘saved’ by
two British aircraft carriers that had provided overwhelming aerial fire-power to
the Kuwaiti forces. I recall that all he had been required to do was dig into the
sand and await trouble; it failed to materialise.

To me, Kuwait was a desolate place that typified all that I disliked about the
Gulf. But I didn’t notice, because there at the oil berth was Malwa, a Trident
Tanker (P&O) vessel. The Captains of the two ships agreed to transfer Young
and me from Mantua in exchange for two cadets from Malwa, bound for UK.

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