Danny. I cannot remember when I last posted those pictures but lot of readers may not have read that far back.
The hotel was as modern as it could be for India and we checked in. I was given the key to my room that was on the third floor and moved in. The room was good enough but the bed was as hard as a rock. A large thermos labelled ‘drinking water’ was by the bed and as it was still cold I considered that it was that days supply. I looked out of the window and to my left I could see the broad expanse of Juhu beach. Below me seemed to be the tradesman’s entrance to the kitchens. The odour of Indian cooking drifted up so I closed the window again to stop it flavouring the room. There wasn’t a shower, so I had a quick cool bath to get the dust off. After dressing I proceeded to the pool. Walking down the corridor yet another Indian woman holding a bunch of twigs melted into the shadows, it wasn’t until later that I found out why they were there.
As I passed through the foyer the Sikh doorman greeted me. A glance at the medal ribbons on his chest bore witness to the fact that he had been all across North Africa and Italy. Included was the Kenyan medal for service during the Mau Mau period. I had spent time in the Rhodesian army and the Rhodesian African Rifles had served up there during the same time. We chatted about his experiences there and as an aside I asked him why the hotel employed all these women with bunches of sticks.
They are the carpet sweepers.”
“Why don’t you get some vacuum cleaners? It would be much easier.”
“Have you any idea of the cost of vacuum cleaners in India?” was his simple reply.
We agreed that if I had any problems I would go to him. I then realised I had forgotton my licence so I went upstairs to retrieve it.
I was just about to leave when I heard a hubbub of conversation outside my window. I opened it and looked down. The lower echelons of the hotel staff were all gathered about and they were in the process of hosing down the branch of a tree that had been dragged in. This is an unusual tree planting ceremony, I thought. Two large cooking pots with rice and the meal of the day were brought out. The assembled multitude immediately plucked off the big leaves from the branch and used them as a plate to load up with food, then held it to their face and pushed the contents down their mouths with their hands. Damn all pay but at least one square meal a day was in the contract.
I went downstairs and this time there were no ghosts melting into the shadows. In the pool area I met my crew. They had already sussed out the beer arrangements and it occurred to me that Dave, our AEO, a Sgt Signaller, had been mentally strapped down to his chair.
“Don’t let him get away;” said John, “he’s our meal ticket.”
Apparently there was no effective limit on what they could put on the hotel bill for meals so Dave was going to be the official host for the crew. The other crews had also riveted their crew chiefs feet to their particular patch and they weren’t letting them get away either.
The red ball of the sun was starting to sink into the Indian Ocean so I had to accelerate my drinking to catch up with the rest. Just as it was starting to get dark we trooped into the dining room for dinner. The the crews were already there. Orders like No1 to 6 twice were commonplace which I thought was flogging the system somewhat. We ordered in the conventional way and soon found out why, the portions were minute. Unfortunately we could not order again, as this would entail a second bill. Still feeling hungry we finished; Dave signed the bill with a flourish and we repaired to the terrace.
The hotel had laid on some sort of cabaret to entertain us; the singer looked fine but had a voice like a chainsaw. The dancers, I being an expert who could see through the frills, were a bit on the plump side and their faces were camouflaged by some really heavy eye make-up. However, rippling fingers got some of the airmen started up and as some were National Service they were not communicating the appropriate form of praise that I would have expected from the Royal Air Force. Luckily the girls either could not understand or ignored it and carried on so comments like ‘getemorff’ were totally lost. The day, despite the clock advantage was starting to wear so we called it a day and went
I was awoken next morning at eight by my plotter.
“We’re just digging Dave out of bed to buy us breakfast, are you coming?”
There seemed little reason not to so I was told to be in the dining room at half past. I was slightly early so I bought a copy of the Bombay Times from reception and checked up on the war. We were not mentioned, but it appeared that the show was fizzling out. Both the foreign ministers were discussing it and it seemed that they were going to straighten out a few kinks. It was all the British’s fault. When they had mounted an expedition into Tibet they had moved the border around a bit for tactical reasons and had amended the maps; unfortunately the Chinese were still using the old copies. However the tension had eased so it appeared that we would not be staying for long. The rest of the crew frog-marched Dave in. He didn’t look very well as he had been carousing with the crew chiefs until three o’clock, which explained why there were other tables full of officers with ashen-faced SNCOs
Somebody had fixed up a tour of Bombay after lunch. Lunchtime came and another flight of Chief Technicians were frog-marched into the dining room. The nine rupees we were getting just about covered a bowl of soup. Dave was wheeled in with the rest of them. We had to sponge on the SNCOs, it would have been considered bad form to get an airman to pay. This time I decided to go local and have the curry. Have been trained at Oakington I was familiar with all the Indian restaurants in Cambridge so I was confident that I could take whatever they gave me. It was awful! It was just boiled something or other with curry powder sprinkled over the top, at least that what it tasted like.
The bus was on time and an Indian Air Force officer was acting as our guide. He must have had a degree in history or something because he gave us a complete rundown of every building of interest from when they started digging the foundations. There were obviously no preservation societies in Bombay as most were very close to collapsing. Bombay City Council, or its equivalent, had far stricter ideas about beggars than whoever ran the outskirts so there were not the tapping hands of before.
On the flight in our maps showed that there was a red prohibited circle over a part of Bombay and we were taken to this. It was a park with a fair number of trees, which were full of roosting vultures. In the middle were what looked like miniature power station cooling towers. Our guide explained that when a sect known as the Farsi had one of their number die they put the body on a grid on top of the towers. The vultures would demolish it and the bones would fall through and be collected for the family shrine. We had a look at some snake charmers but most of the cobras looked a bit dozy; my cat in Rhodesia would have had no trouble in disposing of them. It wasn’t a long tour, because of the traffic it would have taken us a week to get around the whole place. What amused me was the number of Morris Cowleys, produced in India as the Hindus
Back at the pool we found that there was a lot of chat going on We stacked up with a few beers and started to catch up with all the rumours. They were rife. 214’s bosses and Les had been at the British High Commission in town all afternoon and they were not divulging a syllable. They had nearly lost a Javelin. The pilot had pulled too much and a problem with the Javelin is that if the angle of attack is too high the delta wing blanks off the tailplane. This causes it to mush and it goes into a spin. The tailplane is invariably still blanked off so that it cannot recover. The only way to get the tailplane back into clean air is to push the nose down and by ejecting the navigator the recoil of the ejector seat achieves this when the navigator goes out. This had worked out fine and our hero was casually waving to his navigator as he drifted down to some village. The war was to all intents and purposes over so we did not expect to be there for much longer; which was just as well because some blokes were having hallucinations about sausages, bacon and eggs.
To be continued.