Call me a taxi!

 The radio underneath the dashboard crackles to life for the first time in nearly an hour.

“Vacant Mosman, Raglan – City, one.”

There is an instant cacophony of voices and static as cars compete across the airwaves for the job.

“Three-seven is on Spit Road” calls Dave, no doubt returning from one of his northern beaches assignations and likely to be no more near Spit Road than I am. A quick, “three-sev” from the operator accepts Dave’s bid.

“Spofforth and Military, three-eight.” What is Jumbo still doing on the air? He should have finished work a couple of hours ago, popped into the North Sydney Anzac for his customary nightcap and then gone home. He must have sneaked over to Oxford Street and the Thirty-Three Club for a few more and is only now on his way home, thinking to slip in a brief job to the city to make up for what he has obviously contributed to the one-armed bandits. Wendy is going to kill him. “Three eight”, comes the ever brief and soulless acknowledgement from Noel in the radio room at Crowey. He is also coming to the end of his shift and is clearly ready to call it a night. Not that anyone would ever describe Noel as garrulous even on a good day.

“Avenue Road and Rangers, Car 5”, comes the unmistakable raspy, voice of Greasy Jim. He owns a couple of trotters and would have been at Harold Park last night for sure. This is an early start for him, and he is very close – if you can believe him. He is also just as likely to be sitting in his car outside his old place in the back streets of Neutral Bay thinking this is a good way to start the day. There is a reason why he’s called Greasy Jim, and it has nothing to do with his complexion or his choice of hair oil.

I reach out and pick up the little mike hooked on to the side of the radio and press the call button, “thirty four’s on Mosman Rank.” That does it. It would not matter now if there were a vacant cab calling from outside the address, the job is mine. Being the one and only car on Mosman Rank gives me priority over all cars calling on work in Mosman.

“Three four, it’s a block of flats at 40 Raglan, one passenger going to the city, I’ll call and tell the party to come out.” It is always “the party”, never him or her or them – always “the party”.

“Got it,” I say, “on my way.” I scribble a quick “40” on the note pad pinned to the dashboard next to the steering wheel, reach up to turn off the Vacant sign and am starting the engine when the front passenger door is flung wide open. A heavy set and out of breath middle-aged man throws himself on to the front seat and slams the door. “Let’s go!” he says.

“I’m sorry sir,” I begin, “I’ve just taken a radio job, I’ll get them to send someone…”

“I said, let’s go, boofhead – NOW!”

I look around. There is not another car in sight anywhere. It is 2.30 am Monday morning, Mosman Junction winter 1972. This guy is big. Overweight, and out of breath, but big and mean-looking.

“Right” I say, “I’ll just let the base know that I’ve taken another job, so they can re-call it”

“Touch that radio, son and I’ll break your arm and kick you out of the fkn car!”

“Yeah, sure,” I respond, “OK, no worries,” thinking that now would have been a good time to have one of those floor buttons, with an open mike back to Base. Don’t think – drive.

We start along Military Road towards Spit Junction where I will have to either turn left towards the city or right to the northern beaches.

“OK, where are we going?” I ask.

“Head for Manly”, he grunts.

OK, I think, getting ready to make a right at the lights, Manly and the northern beaches, it is.

The light turns red.

“Keep going” he says, turning and looking behind us. This is getting scary. I gun the car through the lights, avoiding an oncoming car angrily blowing its horn and head down the hill towards the Spit. The guy keeps looking out of the back window.

The Spit Bridge is a single bascule opening bridge and as we came towards it a warning bell starts to ring, and the barrier begins to descend.

“Hurry”, he says, “you can beat it”

I am driving a recent model Ford Falcon with not many miles on the clock, but if we were in a McLaren, I am not going to get to that barrier.

He obviously sees it too. “Stop the car!” he says. I pull up harshly in front of the closed barrier.

Shit, what now?

I look into the rear-view mirror; another vehicle is racing towards us at speed.

My guy pulls what might be a firearm from his pocket, jumps out of the car and runs. He darts around the barrier and heads toward the bridge which, like a giant trapdoor is slowly rising. By the time he gets to the end, the bridge is at least two metres above the road deck. Without hesitating, he leaps.

I stare open-mouthed through the windscreen.

And as I sit here wondering whether this ugly prick who just called me a boofhead and threatened to break my arm made it across the bridge and is on the other side running towards Seaforth; or whether he is flailing in the water, or unconscious, or dead; or why anyway, is the Spit Bridge operating at two in the morning when it only operates during the day; or whether the party at 40 Raglan is ever going to get to the city, I ask myself a simple question.

“What the hell am I doing here? I’m supposed to be on a ship.”

---

Twelve months earlier having left the tanker Marion Sleigh in Singapore, I arrived back in Australia after my stint as third engineer. It was not my happiest assignment. Aside from the fact that the 8-cylinder Götoverken diesel engine was a bad tempered piece of work, my relationship with the second engineer was far from pleasant. I thought he was a pompous, inexperienced, English prig. He thought I was a brash, ill-mannered, Australian know-all. Turns out we were both right.

I arrived in Sydney looking for work and soon had a position as commissioning engineer with a medium-sized engineering company building water treatment plants. I love water treatment. There is something very special about working in the water industry and I’ll write another whole story on that another day.

It was a great job, with plenty of outdoor work and travel and I resolved to build a career for myself in this wonderful city. After a few weeks living in lodgings, I moved into a pre-war Federation style house in Sydney’s lower north shore, with my old shipmate, Bob and two or three other guys.

The job was good, and the living arrangements were all that I could have wished for. Bob was a bit of a hardliner when it came to cleanliness and kitchen duties, but it kept us all on our toes. I started playing a little sport and my social life began to bloom.

But something was missing. I had not left my last ship on good terms. It had been a challenging few months, and although I enjoyed the work and got on well with all of my shipmates except one – it was that one relationship that left me with a feeling that I could have and should have done better. There was still too much salt in my system, and I decided to give it another go.

There was plenty of work around for marine engineers – but I needed to wait for the right opening and when it came, I would have to be ready to leave at once. I had a good job and a good boss here in Sydney and I didn’t want to do the wrong thing by dropping everything and just leaving in the middle of a critical project so I gave a month’s notice, left on good terms and went in search of a job where I could walk out at the drop of an anchor.

One of my cricketing teammates who owned his own cab suggested I talk to his co-op at ABC Taxis. I did and within a couple of weeks, I became a cabby.

This meant passing a driving competency test and a local geography assessment. Sydney is not London, so it did not demand months of learning “the knowledge”, but it was important to know where most of the major suburbs were and how to get to the airport from any one of them. Almost everyone has a GPS these days, and it is no longer much of an issue, but in 1970 I swear there were times when it would have been easier to give a treasure map to a squirrel than to ask a taxi driver to look at a road atlas.

So here I am on a wet and miserable Sunday afternoon in October armed with brand-new taxi-driver’s licence, Gregory’s Sydney street directory and a bag of loose coins, reporting to the taxi depot for my first day as a cab driver. The depot is a small office up a flight of stairs over an Ampol Service Station just off the Pacific Highway at Crows Nest on Sydney’s lower north shore. Here’s where the managed cabs are based. Owned and operated by the Co-op, these cars are where new drivers literally find their training wheels. The operations manager, a genial man in his sixties who I will only ever know as GT provides me with a perfunctory induction, and I am on my own.

Other than the minimum required to keep them on the road, it is clear that the level given to these tired old vehicles completely redefines the words “care” and “maintain”. My car is a black Holden Kingswood that has seen a lot more miles than I have. The smell inside is somewhere between dirty laundry and a grease trap.

I am on the afternoon shift – three o’clock until changeover time in twelve hours. The company pays for the fuel, and I get to keep 40% of everything recorded on the meter plus tips. One thing that GT is very clear about is ensuring that I am aware that not only is it against the law to carry a passenger without the meter running, (a practice known in the industry as “high flagging”), but also a sin which will lead to instant dismissal. Good to know what his priorities are.

I start her up, turn on the wipers, clunk into first gear, let the clutch slowly out and drive out of the depot. The wipers scrape painfully across the windscreen leaving opaque patches and, as I enter the main road water begins to dribble through the quarter window and soon makes its way along the door panel and on to my trousers. This is going to be a hoot!

I drive watchfully up and down the highway waiting for a hail, certain that in this rain, someone is going to be grateful for a shabby-looking conveyance like mine. Is that what ABC stands for – a black cab?

I see plenty of taxis of varying colours and condition, all of which are busily carrying happy paying customers. I wonder if my Vacant sign is even working. It is.

I drive through Victoria Cross at North Sydney and pull up at the rear of the taxi rank across the road from the train station. There are four cars in front of me, a Red Deluxe, a Yellow, another ABC cab and a blue Legion at the front. After a few minutes, a man runs across the road opens the front passenger door and jumps into the Legion who starts his motor and drives off the rank. We all shuffle forward a car length, and another ABC cab pulls up behind me. I turn on my two-way, remembering that if a job is called over the radio and it’s in North Sydney, the front cab is under an obligation to take it.

I’m a couple of car lengths behind the black ABC cab which I can see is Car 35 when the radio squawks, “Vacant north Sydney to the airport.” The car at the front quickly, starts up and races off the rank leaving me the next ABC cab in the line. I pick up the mike, press the button and say uncertainly, “uh, 59’s is on north Sydney rank, but there is another ABC cab in front of me – or there was.”

“Who’s the other car on North Sydney rank?” says the operator. “Is it you, Ivan?” This is followed by a period of silence, interrupted by some unintelligible cross chatter.

“Three five, are you on North Sydney?”

“No, base”, comes a croaky reply, “I just got a fare, give it to five nine”. I watch as Car 35, does a U-turn in front of the rank and drives back down the street. The driver is a thickset white-haired man in his sixties. Puffing on a classic bulldog pipe, he gives me a wink as he drives past. His cab is empty.

I later learn that Ivan spends his shift working around the lower north shore doing local fares. He doesn’t cross the bridge to the other side of the harbour – ever.

I don’t care. This is my first hire, and I’m off to the airport. I take down the details of the address, and I pull off the rank. I may be new to the cab-driving game, but I do know where the airport is. Now all I have to do is find the passenger, apparently waiting in the rain outside a block of flats on Blues Point Road. No bother at all.

I cruise slowly the road towards Blues Point Tower, an ugly beige 20 storey apartment block which has blighted the McMahons Point skyline for the past ten years.

It’s still raining and I’m looking for someone who should be standing outside the building, or just in the lobby. I slowly drive past the address continuing to the end of the street where the road widens to a turnaround point. Not a soul in sight. Across the harbour, the wharves at Walsh Bay stand in gloomy silence while the high-rises of the CBD loom in the background, huddled together like a scrum of titans.

Through my rain-streaked windscreen, the Ferris wheel at Luna Park is dwarfed beneath the giant grey arches of the Harbour Bridge, where I should be crossing, if only I could find my customer. I turn around and head in the opposite direction, kerb-crawling beside a wall of sandstone blocks. At the end of the wall, I turn left into the driveway, and follow the road, past a large ‘no visitor parking’ sign and pull up outside the main entrance of the tower block. The place is like a morgue.

I pick up my radio mike. “Five-nine in.”

After a few seconds I hear, “Go ahead, five-nine.”

“There’s no one here, base. How long am I supposed to wait?”

“Sorry mate,” comes the reply. I can tell from the sound of the voice, that he is really not that sorry. “The call sounded like it was from a PT, so she probably hailed a cruiser.”

More static, then another voice, this one sounding like someone gasping for air. “Car five here. I just picked up a hail in Blues Point, going to the airport. Sorry about that, five-nine. Didn’t know it was a booking; just came on duty.”

This is followed by a burst of crosstalk and static. I pick up a couple of phrases, “Yeah, that’d be right!” and “nice one, Greasy” but not in a nice way, until the voice of the base operator overrides everyone, “All cars, off the air unless calling on a job! I don’t want to have to suspend someone”

“Five-nine, it looks like your car has been picked up by Car five – sorry about that.”

Phew, I am going to have to get better at this. These guys are brutal.

I make my way back to North Sydney and join the back of the rank. It is going to be a longer wait for my first fare than I had thought.

I eventually get a couple of local fares, and I am soon enjoying the pleasure of watching my meter tick over the fare at the extravagant rate of 18 cents per mile. With a flag fall of 20 cents, a trip from North Sydney to Cremorne takes me about 15 minutes and I collect 65 cents. If I’m lucky I may get a 10 cent tip. I soon learn that the flag fall is the key to success and lots of little trips, pussyfooting around the lower north shore like Ivan is one way to make a living driving a cab. It’s as boring as batshit, but Ivan does not crave excitement.

As the afternoon becomes late evening, I’m at Neutral Bay, driving along Military Road thinking about food when I see two or three ABC taxis parked outside a burger bar at the Big Bear Shopping Centre. This’ll do me. I turn in and pull up next to the other cabs. Turns out this is one of the favourite spots for ABC cabbies.

As I get out of the car, a stocky ginger-headed guy with a neat little goatee breaks away from a small group standing around eating and smoking and approaches me. “G’day” he says, “you must be the new guy who got ripped off by Greasy Jim earlier this afternoon.” “I’m Dick, Car 68. How long, you been driving?”

I introduce myself and tell him that until a few hours ago, I was a virgin. He grins and introduces me to the other guys, Moon (Car 54), Les (Car 30) and Wally (Car 19). It turns out all these guys are driving managed cabs.

I will get to know them well over the ensuing months. They are good people, with a taste for a wise crack, a few jars at the end of a shift, and rather too much fondness for the one-armed pokies at the local Anzac Club or as often as not, the infamous Club 33 on Oxford Street in the city’s Surrey Hills region. Club 33 is where the taxi drivers who finish their shift at 1 or 2 in the morning, frequently go to unwind when everything else is closed. The night shift cabbies, themselves usually a motley-looking crew, are the most normal of customers when set alongside the other patrons – dancers from Les Girls, off-duty strippers and ladies of the night, the odd gangster and off-duty or maybe on-duty members of the vice squad. They can all be seen there usually between midnight and 6.00 am when the club closes its homely and unattractive doors.

Dick is a cool dude whose usual haunt is the taxi rank outside Milson’s Point station under the shadow of the Bridge. With his short beard and classical features, he could have been a model for a sculpture of a Spartan general which would have fittingly matched his laconic wit. He works for a fleet owner out of Northbridge, who cars have been painted in the trendy new purple and white livery with a classic checker cab stripe down both sides. Like I said – cool.

This might be a good time to tell you just a little of how the taxi industry works in Sydney.

ABC is a small cooperative of owner drivers, whose area of coverage is the Lower North Shore. The cars can go anywhere of course, but radio coverage is generally restricted to an area of about 30 square miles which extends from the Harbour Bridge, north.

Cross the Spit Bridge and you are in Manly Cabs territory. Go north of Chatswood to the “wilderness” of Pymble and Hornsby, and you will spend a lot of time driving around talking to yourself, for this is Red Deluxe territory, and those guys are everywhere.

Most of the drivers are male, but I won’t finish this chapter without telling at least one story about Rita of Car 44 (“that’s my chest measurements, dearie!”).

As I become more experienced at this game, I learn more about working smarter. I really don’t want to be a pussyfooter. It’s great for old diggers like Ivan, who likes nothing better than sitting on the Cammeray rank puffing away on his pipe while listening to 2UE and waiting for a call to deliver the blue-rinse ladies to the local shops, or a doctor’s appointment, or chicken parmy and glass of Chateau Cardboard at the Leagues club; but that’s not my favourite way to spend an afternoon.

One of the first things I learn is that I need to find something better to drive than this crappy old managed cab with its leaking window, and manual gearbox with a dodgy clutch from too many hours sitting in peak hour traffic. I need to find an owner-driver who doesn’t like night work.

Trevor is one of these guys. A former banker, he took an early retirement a few years ago, cashed in his superannuation and invested in a taxi plate. This was an investment of somewhere around $30,000 or about ten times to value of the car itself. Trevor owns Car 34 and has just put on a new sweet looking 1970 Ford Falcon. In keeping with the new look among the more progressive owners, the car is white with a purple hood and the same four inch wide purple and white checker strip that the Northbridge guys like Dick so proudly sport. It is a pretty cool air-conditioned unit with a fresh new car smell a million miles from the mouldy lunch box tang I’ve been putting up with in Car 59.

Trevor is one of these guys who likes to be up and out early in the morning to catch a couple of trips to the airport, then spends the rest of the day doing small local jobs around the lower north shore before knocking off mid-afternoon and heading off to his bowling club. He isn’t a fan of night drivers who he feels always tried to rip him off and constantly leave the car stinking of cigarettes and body odour. It comes as a surprise therefore, when Noel my old cricketing mate, and the owner of Car 4 tells me that Trevor is thinking about getting another driver – presumably to help pay for the new car.

 After a chat with Trevor later in the week, he agrees to give me a trial, but woe betide if I don’t leave him a clean odour-free car for him each morning. We agree that we will change over at the depot at 3 o’clock every afternoon except Sunday and that I will have it there, freshly cleaned, with a tank full of petrol and 50% of the nights takings in the glove box ready for his 5 AM start the next day.

What could possibly go wrong with that arrangement?

Actually nothing much goes wrong at least for a few weeks. Trevor expects his pound of flesh, which means I have to keep the wheels turning pretty much six nights per week, which is playing merry hell with my social life. On the plus side, I don’t exactly have much of a social life anyway and now that I’ve moved out of the expensive and empty little flat in Mosman and taken a room in a share-house in Northbridge with my old seafaring mate Bob, I’m actually able to afford a few groceries and meet the repayments on my second-hand Futura. Things are looking up.

I’m asked if I would like to have a go at working a few shifts in the radio room and since I’m not doing much else with my Sundays, I give it a whirl.

Sundays are usually quiet and it’s a chance to get behind the microphone and see how things work from the inside. This is where I meet Rita for the first time. I’ve heard her vivid tones over the radio once or twice while driving Car 44, a cab she shares with a wimpy little man, named Bryan who is rarely seen and seems to spend most of his time working the airport. In person, Rita makes an immediate impression. The phrase “built like a brick outhouse” would be fitting – if your privy is five-foot high and just as wide.

The first time we cross paths, literally, I am halfway up the narrow staircase to the radio room, when I face Rita on the way down. “Stand aside or lose a limb!” she barks, “you’re standing between me and lunch”. I glance up and tactically retreat to the foot of the stairs and out of the doorway, while she sweeps past me like the 144 bus from St Leonards, fragments of paper and dust eddies swirling in her wake.

Her telephone voice ranges from mellifluous and appealing to that of a road gang foreman. The speed at which she switches from one to the other as she works the numerous lines coming into the control room is sheer art.

“Good evening, ABC cabs how may I help you? Oh hellooo, Mrs Smythe, how nice to hear from you. Yes of course, right away, Madam. Just give me one moment please.”

-click-

“Hi Jessie, Rita here, I’ve got that old cow from IBM on the line. She wants a car from Rose Bay to the airport. She thinks I’m her own Miss Moneyfknpenny and she’s the Queen of Sheba. Can you do it in ten? Bewdy, thanks luvvy, I owes yer one, Jess.”

-click-

“Hellooo again, Mrs Smythe. I have a car for you right now. It’s a Sydney Radio taxi, the driver’s waiting outside for you now. Thanks so much, it’s always a pleasure.”

-click-

“Bitch! She always calls when I’m trying to eat my breakfast/ lunch/dinner!”

I should mention at this point that there are few times when Rita is not trying to eat her breakfast/lunch/dinner.

But she is good at her job and is one of the reasons why ABC are the go-to choice in our little corner of the world. That, and the charm and wit of the drivers of course.

So life’s pretty good. I’m driving a cab a few nights a week, doing a few shifts in the radio room, living in the best city in the world, and one of these days I’ll get around to looking for a ship.

So here I am in the radio room – Sunday afternoon with Rita. It’s been a quiet day. Nothing much to hear over the gentle crunching of Rita’s Twisties on the other side of the desk and the occasional rustle of paper as she idly flips through the pages of Women’s Weekly. The phone hasn’t rung for at least 30 minutes and there are probably no more than 20 cars out there, sitting on ranks or cruising up and down Military Road or the Highway.

The speaker above my head crackles to life, and I hear the unmistakeable deep voice of Bogdan. “Thirty-two in.”

Bogdan has a strong Eastern European accent and speaks with all his emphasis on the last word as though he is competing to be heard over a hubbub of voices. Bogdan has been driving an ABC managed cab for years and is as reliable as the old cardigan I’m wearing as I sit across from Rita.

“Car 32, go ahead”, I reply.

“I have passenger in car. I think he die.”

Rita pauses mid crunch. She looks across at me with widening eyes, her mouth a big O.

Hang on I think – I gave Car 32 a parcel job for an accountant customer at least half an hour ago – he should be over near the airport somewhere by now.

“Sorry Bogdan, I think I missed that, can you repeat. What’s wrong?”

“Thirty-two in – I think he die, Base. He’s no breathe, he just look and not blink.”

Oh for crying out loud, what next!

“OK Bogdan, tell me where you and don’t move, I’ll get on to the police and ambulance.”

“I’m on Highway at Gore Hill. I still have M6 in car.” That’s code for he still has the parcel – looks like he got a hail and was trying to fit another job in while doing his courier job – completely against the rules, but it happens.

Another voice comes over the speaker, “Six-eight here base. I’m on the highway, I can see 32 on the side of the road – I’ll take a look.”

This is Dick, the cool guy I met on my first shift and a good mate. He normally owns works nights, but I know that today he is doing a double shift. He says he needs the money – don’t we all.

“Thanks six-eight. Park behind him and put on your hazard lights.”

While this is going on, Rita has called Triple O, told them who she is and what’s going on. If the passenger really is deceased, the car will become a police scene, and Bogdan won’t be going anywhere for a while.

A minute or so later, Bogdan is back on the air. “Thirty-two in.”

Oh my God, Bogdan, don’t wait for an acknowledgement, the airwaves are all yours. Or they should be, but no, some wag decides this is a good time to make a smart comment, “You might get a new car out of this, Bog!”

“All cars stand by, Car 30, you’re off the air for the rest of the shift. Thirty-two, 6-8 is right behind you and we’ve called the police and ambulance, now what was your question?”

“No question base, my passenger just wake up and is sick in my car. What do I do about my M6 – oh, here comes police car.”

Dear Lord, this gets worse. Rita, is trying to ring the ambulance service.

“Six-eight, are you there?”

Dick’s voice comes immediately on the line, with a loud siren blaring in the background, “Yes, Base, I’m here”

“Six-eight, are you able to take over the M6 job? Thirty-two, return to base, as soon as you can and put the car in to the wash. What’s happening to your passenger?”

“Thirty-two in. He sits in gutter with ambulance man. He need to pay.”

Just for a minute I have a picture in my head of a paramedic and this guy both sitting in the gutter – but no, that’s not what’s happening.

I give one last instruction to Bogdan to forget about the fare, and to get back to the base as soon as soon as he can – assuming the cops don’t arrest him for wasting police time.

At least it helped to pass the time on a quiet Sunday afternoon.

A little later that day, just before the shift ends I get a call from Trevor, the owner of Car 34. He usually drives the cab on his own on Sundays but today he hasn’t seen all day.

“Hey Mike”, he says, “can you do a shift tonight? I was at my nephew’s wedding yesterday and I’m still recovering from it.”

“Sure”, I say thinking there goes my evening sitting around doing nothing, “I’ll come and pick the car up around five or six and have it back in time for your start tomorrow”.

So I finish my shift with Rita, drive the couple of miles to Trevor’s place, where the cab is parked in his driveway. I pull up outside the house, and after leaving my own car in the street, collect the cab keys from the letter box where he has left them and within a few minutes Car 34 is on the air.

It is already becoming a busy evening after the slow afternoon and I am able to keep the wheels turning most of night with a couple of runs to the airport, a handful of pub and club jobs and a few runs around the city and Kings Cross.

Later that evening I catch up with Dick, Jumbo and Dave at the Big Bear for a late evening snack. Dick has had a long day which included playing nursemaid to Bogdan with his “expired” passenger.

“He looked dead for all money when I first got there, but the coppers didn’t see the funny side of it at all – neither did Bogdan, especially when you sent him off for the night. Les wasn’t too happy with you either”.

Les was the guy in Car 30 who I stood off the air for cross-talking during what everyone at the time thought was an emergency.

“They’ll get over it” I say, “at least they didn’t have Rita to deal with”.

Dick knocks off for the night, the rest of us decide to do a few more hours.

There’s still a bit of work around The Cross as late night patrons at various legal and barely legal establishments make their way home or move on to the next experience.

Now here I am a few hours later, dozing on Mosman rank thinking it’s just about time to get the car back for Trevor.

It has been a long, long day.

The radio crackles to life for the first time in nearly an hour.

“Vacant Mosman, Raglan – City, one.”

After a bit of chatter, I pick up the mike and press the call button, “thirty four’s on Mosman Rank.”

“Three four, it’s a block of flats at 40 Raglan, one passenger going to the city, I’ll call and tell the party to come out.”

“Got it,” I say, “on my way.” I reach up to turn off the Vacant sign and am starting the engine when the front passenger door is flung open and a heavy set middle-aged man throws himself on to the front seat and slams the door. “Let’s go!” he says, “NOW Boofhead!”

And so it begins...

 

...and a dash of Angostura

 I don’t normally write prefaces to my posts. Much of what I am reporting here is second-hand. While we were traversing the river for example, I spent much of the time in the engine room and often only learned from others what was occurring on deck. It’s also a good time to remind myself, that all this took place over fifty years ago.

In recalling and writing about Vietnam in 1968, I should make it clear that my visit was a morsel in time, a microscopic blip on the temporal radar of incidents. For many thousands of people however, the conflict was a series of events which changed their lives and that of their families forever. There is also no judgement here of who was right and who was wrong. There has been much written about this, and my contribution is meaningless in comparison. For those looking for further reading I would refer you to a number of excellent accounts – The Sorrow of War (Bao Ninh); The Education of Corporal John Musgrave (John Musgrave); Scorched Earth (Fred Wilcox) and The Vietnam War (Geoffrey Ward and Kenneth Burns).

I get that my writing style is often glib and facetious, and I can’t see me changing any time soon, but it is clear that many thousands of young men still remember those years differently and for them there is nothing to be flippant about.

Nothing I say here should reflect on the horror and the nightmares associated with everyone effected by this war. In researching some of the details for this chapter, I came across an anonymous post on social media which I paraphrase below.

“We must remember that these were kids, who were not expecting to be soldiers. They didn’t expect to be carrying rifles instead place of their dreams. These veterans didn’t get the luxury of innocence. They were living in a world where every step could be the last one. Where the enemy didn’t always show his face. Where fear became routine and survival became the only goal that mattered. They weren’t chasing peace—they were chasing tomorrow. While the world argued about the war, they were trapped inside it.”

Respect these veterans, on both sides of the conflict –they served and I thank them for it and I honour them for it.

It’s another long sea trip – two more weeks of four hours on, eight hours off. This time with eight thousand tons of jet fuel on board and with fuel and water tanks also full, the ship’s hull sits low in the water right down to the Plimsoll line.

We are going back pretty much the way we came – through the Arabian Sea until we pass Sri Lanka’s Dondra Head lighthouse off our port bow, continuing into the southern reaches of the Bay of Bengal, around the north of Java and into the Straits of Malacca.

The sea is generally kind most of the way, barring a rough patch in the Bay of Bengal where waves are 4 to 5 metres and frequently swamp the foredeck making access to the dining room via the upper deck walkway a formidable challenge.

We travel through the relative still waters of the Straits of Malacca, known in the twenty-first century as one of the world’s danger spots for modern day piracy, but fortunately in the 1960s and 1970s, an almost non-existent occurrence.

We burn about 25 tons per day of fuel oil, but since we topped up in the Gulf, we have plenty to keep us going so no need to stop at Singapore. We pass through the busy Singapore Strait at night, the lights of the city glow invitingly as we traverse the narrow sixty mile channel and head towards the South China Sea where we begin the last leg of our journey north. We have another 700 miles to the Mekong Delta and our first port of call, the Nhà Bè oil terminal to the south of the city of Saigon.

A day or two before we arrive, the skipper assembles everyone not on watch in the dining room to update us on our destination. HC Sleigh, the owners of Marion Sleigh have been involved in the transport of jet fuel to ports in South Vietnam for a number of years. There have been incidents where vessels in the zone have been targeted and earlier in the year a tanker on charter to HC Sleigh was hit by rifle and rocket fire during at attack on the terminal*.

There will be no shore leave during our visit to Vietnam. We will maintain sea-going watches with the engine room on Stand By at all times. We are all clearly aware that this is to be no river cruise.

The Mekong Delta consists of several rivers and tributaries extending their long fingers through a huge wetland – the rice bowl of South East Asia. The Mekong itself is one of the great rivers of the world. Starting in Tibet it travels over 3,000 miles through China, Laos, Thailand and Cambodia before discharging into the South China Sea. Our first sense is the change in colour of the ocean from a deep blue to a muddy brown, the effect of the tons of sediment which in the wet season travel as far as a hundred kilometres out to sea. It may not be of Amazonian proportion, but it is certainly striking.

A little further north another series of rivers empty into the ocean sharing a common estuary with the Delta. These are the Dong Nai and Lòng Tàu rivers and our destination as we head to the Vung Tau anchorage area at the mouth of the estuary to collect our river pilot.

My first thought as we arrive at the anchorage is that we will not be alone on our journey up river as a US Navy T2 tanker and a large Shell tanker also lie at anchor. We learn however that the process is for tankers to travel one by one, preceded by a minesweeper and accompanied by two patrol boats (PRBs) which are constantly on alert for any enemy activity from the river banks. To add to the comfort level, two US Navy Seawolf helicopters hover overhead looking on both sides of this sparse landscape for any hint of marauders.

Our 45 mile journey up river to the oil storage facility traverses the Rung Sat Special Zone along the Lòng Tàu river. This is one of the most heavily defoliated areas in the country. A large mangrove swamp, the area is used by the Viet Cong to attack shipping heading towards Saigon.

 

Huge volumes of herbicide, mostly Agent Orange has been sprayed over the area killing off over 90% of the vegetation and leaving a landscape of skeletal grey tree trunks looking like the aftermath of a raging bushfire. This is so far away from the Amazon River of just two years ago, that I wonder what the hell I’m doing here. There is no doubt the defoliated riverbanks provide a high level of visibility, but the impact from these toxic chemicals will be felt for years to come.

Our destination today is the Nhà Bè Petroleum Storage Facility, the largest fuel farm in South Vietnam, located at the meeting of the Lòng Tàu and the Soài Rạp rivers, about seven miles from Saigon.

This area is one of the most heavily defended and defoliated waterways in the country. A single rocket propelled grenade (RPG) or a rifle hit could be catastrophic.

At this time, the protection of fuel tankers in and out of the Saigon area is one of the most intense brown-water operations of the war.

Wooden-hulled minesweepers have already gone ahead of us dragging chains and magnetic cables to clear our path and as we enter the river, we are immediately attached to two patrol boats. These small armed fibreglass vessels weave in front of and behind us, using their wake to trigger any potential water mines. While all this is happening the Huey helicopter gunships provide overhead cover, providing short and long range spotters as we traverse the river.

Our US Navy pilot is in charge on the bridge and makes sure that we don’t dawdle. The engines are on Full Ahead most of the way – we are not hanging around.

After about four hours of this we approach our tanker berth at the fuel farm. This is the most nervous part of our journey so far. We have slowed down to enter the discharge area and for the next few hours we are going to be a sitting duck.

We learn that this has been a busy year for enemy attacks on the Lòng Tàu although most ambushes have been suppressed before they could score a direct hit on a tanker. The simple thought running through my head (and I’m sure I’m not alone) is, define “most”.

We are alongside and getting ready to connect to the fuel discharge lines, when our pilot gets a message to abort the unloading. There is activity on the perimeter of the terminal, and we have to move offshore to the middle of river while the
“activity” is managed.

We move offshore and are soon at anchor about 150 metres from the berth and about half a mile upstream.

Hueys are patrolling overhead and we can see that they are focussing on a target some distance away on the other side of the terminal.

So we wait.

And we wait.

Two days later we are still in the river. Our US pilot has been replaced twice and patrol boat activity to and from the ship continues during the day.

I have to say at this point, that there comes a moment when sitting on eight thousand tons of jet fuel, in the middle of the river, maybe two hundred metres or so from the action, ceases to fill one’s stomach with fear. There is only so much you can control and there is nothing that is going on at the moment that any one of us on board can control. It’s rather like being on a long flight with sustained heavy turbulence. You may grip that armrest just a little tighter but there is absolutely nothing you can do but hope this episode doesn’t feature your name.

This is also a good time to tell you about Toby, the ship’s First Mate. Toby has been sailing in tankers for most of his career. Before joining HC Sleigh he sailed with Shell Tankers, and before that Trident Tankers – the fleet owned by P&O Line and about which it is said, their dress uniform includes a sword, which the engineers use for sounding tanks.

Toby is an absolute snob. He really does call everyone “old chap” or “my good fellow”. He has a double hyphenated and ridiculous surname, and it isn’t a plum he has in his mouth when he speaks, it’s the whole bloody tree!

On top of all this, Toby is a thoroughly likeable fellow, an utterly capable sailor, and someone who never has an unpleasant word for anyone.

It is Toby who introduces me to pink gin.

Up until this point in my life, I have been more than content with Cairns Draught Beer; any other beer from any other state in Australia except that South Australian bilgewater; Frank Stinchcombe’s Cuba libres; and Paddy’s Irish whiskey. Now along comes Toby with his fancy Booths High and Dry, his quinine tonic water (“no risk of malaria old chap”) and a disgusting tasting bitter from the Caribbean called Angostura.

So here we are, in the middle of the Soài Rap River, sitting on the Boat Deck under the shade of a life boat, in the middle of a war and Toby is mixing me a gin and bitters, complete with ice and lemon as though we are about to watch the Varsity Boat Race. We hear across the water, what sounds like gunfire, but may have been thunder – I’m going with thunder. Toby leans across to me, “that sounded close, old man – can I top you up?” The only thing missing is a Palm Court orchestra and a long Panatella.

After three days at anchor, we get the word just before daybreak instructing us to return to the wharf and begin discharging. We are soon connected to the terminal and the process of unloading our precious cargo starts again. Using two of our four unloading pumps we are able to deliver about 50 or 60% of our cargo in just over four hours with no further incidents and by the time I have started my afternoon watch we are headed back into the river, shadowed again by our very welcome chaperons. As it was with our earlier trip on the Lòng Tàu, we literally race down river at speeds normally unheard of for such a narrow river passage. The sun is still quite high in the sky as we head out across the bay towards Vung Tau where we say goodbye to our pilots. We are soon out of sight of land and on our way north.

We’re still in a war zone of course and are constantly reminded of this as we head around the coast to the military base at Cam Ranh Bay and later north to Da Nang less than a hundred miles south of the 17^th parallel and the North Vietnam border.

The strange thing about all this is - I actually feel quite privileged to be here.

---

* The ship was the MV Cherry Leaf, which was on charter to HC Sleigh at the time. 1968 is regarded as the worst and deadliest year of the Vietnam War. The January 1968 Tet Offensive was a major coordinated attack by the North Vietnamese army and the Viet Cong on cities throughout South Vietnam. During that year there were over 200,000 casualties on both sides of the war.

Oil, water and sand

 

This is the thing about travelling to join a new ship. Nobody cares what time it is when you arrive, or for how long you have been travelling. You’re here now, you are part of the ship’s crew, welcome aboard, the engine room’s that way.

This principal applies even more when the vessel is in drydock and there is a shipload of stuff to be quickly done so we can get back to making money instead of spending it. I’m referring here to the owners, but it applies equally to everyone on board.

Here I am in Singapore. Behind me, an eight hour flight from Sydney to an aging and not the least bit air-conditioned Paya Lebar Airport; an interminable wait for baggage; another still longer wait while everyone shuffles through customs and immigration; and finally a wet and sweaty hour’s drive in a foul-smelling taxi (not enhanced by my personal fragrance) to the Keppel shipyard at Tanjong Pagar.

Ahead of me, the rest of the afternoon meeting my new engine room crewmates while crawling around inside the ship’s hideous and ill-tempered Swedish eight cylinder main engine which I would later come to regard with the same affection as I have for root canal surgery.

If I have given the impression that dry-dock is a pleasant respite from the day to day tedium of life at sea, then I have failed miserably. There is nothing enjoyable about life on board under these conditions. Washing and toilet facilities are not available for a start, meaning a trek ashore to communal shower and other amenities. The galley can only prepare the most basic meals. Most of the crew eat ashore and there is no such thing as a quiet night on board since round the clock activity takes place throughout the ship.

 

At last all external blasting and cleaning is complete, sacrificial anodes on the hull have been replaced, propellor and rudder inspection is finished, sea valves have been overhauled, and the seaworthy survey has been completed to the insurers satisfaction. We’re almost ready.

The watertight caissons are opened, and the dock begins to flood. The vessel gradually rises as the level in the dock approaches that of the outside seawater. As we become buoyant we gently tilt about a half a degree to starboard; a situation which is soon corrected as water is transferred between ballast tanks bringing us back to an even keel – not of course before some wag on the after deck calls out, “I feel seasick”.

We need fuel. From the drydock wharf to the quay where the bunkering barge is standing by is about a hundred metres. After a final inspection below deck, we are satisfied that the engine is ready. The second engineer stands at the controls, next to him is the fifth engineer, standing by the ship’s telegraph for orders from the bridge where the skipper and his pilot will take us out of the dock.

Brrring-ring! The big brass needle at the centre of the telegraph moves from “Finished with Engines” to “Stand By” which means gentlemen start your engine.

The telegraph’s answering ring has a softer tone as the fiver acknowledges the command moving the brass handle to line up with its counterpart from the Bridge. He makes a note in the engine room log “0700 Started Main Engine”.

The second engineer releases a handle shaped like a large brass handbrake and compressed air is introduced into the engine cylinders forcing the pistons to turn the crankshaft. He pulls on another lever with a small brass plaque beneath it with the simple phrase – START MAIN ENGINE. The fuel injectors open and fuel sprays into the chamber and the engine coughs into life.

He places his hands on the handles of a large wheel, like a steering wheel on a truck but with handles which make it easier to turn ahead or astern. He waits for the next command, his eyes scanning a half a dozen dials indicating fuel temperature, boiler pressure, engine and shaft speeds.

Brrring-ring! The telegraph dial moves 90 degrees from the Stand By position into the red quadrant of the dial – “Dead Slow Astern”.

Brrring! – the command is acknowledged – “Dead Slow Astern”. The fiver writes another entry in the log “0707 – DSA”

The second engineer turns the wheel a few degrees to his right, the gears engage and the main propellor shaft begins to turn in an anticlockwise direction. The ship shudders briefly and we feel motion as we slowly slip backwards out of the dock.

In front of him, at eye level a little cylinder turns inside a small box. The cylinder is painted with slanted red and white stripes like a barber pole and as it spins it clearly shows our direction, ahead or astern as the red stripes appear to move towards the direction of travel.

On deck, the second mate and his team are on the poop deck at the after end of the ship; the chief mate is on the fo’c’sle, and the third mate is on the bridge with the skipper.

We’re on our way. After a while the telegraph orders, “Slow Astern”. We slide out of the dock and reverse into the main waterway. The ship slowly reverses its way down Keppel Harbour towards the vacant berth where we will tie up for a few more hours as we take on fuel from the large bunker barge which is right now sitting in the middle of the channel, a tough looking little tugboat alongside it waiting for us to manoeuvre into place. We have nothing in any of our tanks except a few tonnes of ballast water. Our cargo tanks were emptied and degassed before we entered the shipyard. There hadn’t been any welding in dock, but no one wants the slightest spark in these confined spaces nor any concerns regarding toxic fumes.

Like a elegant hippopotamus, the ship starts to pirouette as she enters the open channel. There are more “Slow Ahead”, “Slow Astern” commands while she turns through 180 degrees to allow her to come alongside the wharf “starboard side to” meaning the right hand side of the ship is tied up against the wharf. The bunkering barge will tie up to our port side, as near as possible to the fuel tank connection.

Throughout this whole process the fifth engineer meticulously records ever manoeuvre including the final little jolt as the ship under the influence of an offshore wind makes enthusiastic contact with the wharf. This is recorded simple as “0734 – Bump”. Followed shortly after by “0745 – FWE” and we are indeed for the next few hours at least, Finished with Engine.

 

We will be alongside the wharf for at least six hours as we take on the 1,400 tonnes of diesel fuel that we need for our journey. As fourth engineer, bunkering is my job. Having familiarised myself with the appropriate valves and pumps, all I have to do is make sure that each of the bunker tanks is filled to its maximum operating level, and that we don’t have any spills. No one wants to be responsible for an oil slick – especially in Singapore where polluters are heavily fined. We have no sophisticated gauges telling us how much fuel is in the tank. The process involves dropping a weighted measuring tape down the dipping tube every half hour or so to keep an eye on the level and the speed of fill – not much different to checking the oil level in the car except for the consequences of a spill.

Spill-free bunkering completed and all provisions on board, we finally leave Singapore for our Persian Gulf destination about 3,500 miles to the north west. We are light ship (that is, no cargo) and weather permitting we should be able to average 12 knots, so we will be at sea for about two weeks. Plenty of time to get that drydock torpor out of our system and to relax into a sea-going routine.

There are two fourth engineers on Marion Sleigh, myself and Reg, a friendly and easy-going Sydneysider who has been on board for several weeks longer than me. Reg has the 8 to 12 watch and I for my sins am back “enjoying” the 12 to 4. There is one junior engineer, a bright Singaporean lad who shares the 4 to 8 watch with our newly promoted second engineer, David. David (never Dave) is a relatively young ginger haired fellow from the south of England. He’s a bit of a loner and throughout my six months on Maid Marion, we are never in any danger of becoming close friends.

According to the data, about half the male population in Australia were smokers in the 1960s. At sea, I would speculate that this is more likely to be over 70%. Smoking on tankers comes with its own particular rules. There is absolutely no smoking allowed anywhere on deck. Within the ship’s accommodation smoking is permitted in certain areas, but no lighters are allowed and all ashtrays must be sealed. There are certain times, such as loading and discharging cargo when smoking is not permitted anywhere on the ship – stressful times for someone with a 20 or 30 a day Peter Stuyvesant habit. Maybe I should have considered giving up.

I share the 12 to 4 watch with the 2^nd mate, a cheerful Dubliner who will frequently call me on the phone from the bridge about 15 minutes before the end of the middle watch, suggesting a wee nightcap before we retire. When this happens we meet in his cabin where we share a glass or two of his favourite Irish whiskey while listening to the folk music of Ronnie Drew and Paddy Moloney cranking out from his state of the art Philips record player. Paddy (yes I know, I know), is not a heavy drinker when judged against the standards set by a few other shipmates I have sailed with, but he has his moments. We might for example, be at anchor for a day or two awaiting a berth, and Reg and I will have joined him for a wee dram. He has been known to remove the cork from a fresh bottle of Tullamore, open the porthole and throw it through saying, “we’ll not be needing that again will we, boys?”

Unlike the passenger ships in the fleet, the obligation regarding the wearing of uniform is nothing like as severe. This does not mean that we can dress as we please. It is for example a condition that uniform be worn at all time when in the ship’s dining room or the officer’s common room. The skipper has a particular issue with engineers in scruffy boiler suits tramping around the accommodation. My first experience of this was while on my way from the engine room to my cabin at the completion of an afternoon watch. The weather was atrocious as we ploughed north through the Laccadive Sea off the coast of Sri Lanka into a nasty post-monsoon depression. The normal route from engine room to cabin would be to walk around the upper deck, just above the boat deck passing by the dining room on the outside. Not wishing to risk getting waylaid by a sudden wave, and to avoid the driving rain, which was lashing the ship, I chose to stick to the inside route and managed to pick a time, just as the ship’s captain, in full uniform came down the stairs from the bridge on his way to the dining room. He was a sharp-featured Scot who had previously spent many years on BP Tankers and until this moment we had barely exchanged a word. “Mr Williamson, is there a reason why yer oot of uniform in this place?” Nice touch, he knows my name.

“Sorry, skipper” I said, “just on my way to get changed, only it’s a bit damp on deck.” Pathetic eh?

“Away back the way ye came and get changed before coming here,” he said without the slightest hint of interest in my welfare, “This is no’ yer daddy’s yacht, laddie” .

God, how many more times am I going to hear that expression. So back I went, out on to the deck, around the front of the dining room, and back into the accommodation area on the other side of the ship.

“It would serve you right”, I muttered to myself as the rain drenched my admittedly grubby overalls, “if I was washed overboard. How would you explain that to my family?”

Aside from the unpleasant weather in the Arabian Sea, we eventually arrive at the Straits of Hormuz and are soon in the warm waters of the Persian Gulf where even this late in the year the sea water temperature is around 30 degrees Celsius.

Our destination is Bandar Mahshahr, about as far north as you can journey in the Gulf. We travel 40 miles inland along a natural tidal channel (Khor Musa). The oil terminal is remote from any obvious signs of habitation serving the sole purpose of providing an outlet for refined product from Iran’s Abadan Refinery, one of the world’s largest oil refineries and the source of our cargo for this trip.

There appears to be room for about half a dozen ships at the slender wharfs which stick out into the channel like giant bony fingers. The first berth we arrive at is free. This is also the furthest from the terminal, but we won’t be here for long – no one is planning a run ashore.

It will take about eight hours to deliver the full cargo of aviation fuel, and no one will want to hang about here. It’s hot, dusty and about as welcoming to visiting seafarers as the surface of Mars. Loading fuel almost always requires use of the terminal’s own pumping facilities, unlike discharging when we use our own high capacity unloading pumps. Less work for us to do, but there is still a need for constant vigilance and supervision – this is when the process is at its most intense.

We also need to take on more bunker fuel for the next leg of our trip. No bunker barge is required this time, we connect to the diesel discharge line from the terminal, and the fuel is pumped on board at the same time as the cargo fuelling takes place.

There will be times on subsequent trips to the Gulf, at places like Kuwait and Kharg Island for example, where we will venture forth for a few hours at local recreation facilities which provide an opportunity for a game of pool and a cold non-alcoholic beverage, but not this time.

Before the day is out, we are disconnected from the terminal and backing our way out into Khor Musa on our way to our next destination.

There are generally two kinds of merchant ships – tramps and liners. Not quite as disparaging as it sounds, tramps do not have a fixed schedule or a fixed route, whereas liners do. By this definition, with the exception of Francis Drake most of the ships that I served on during my time at sea were at some level cargo tramps. The most significant difference, particularly when serving on a genuine “go anywhere” cargo tramp is that you never know where you are going from one journey to the next.

Sometimes this is because the owners’ agents are continuing to negotiate the best source of supply, other times it may be for security reasons.

With this in mind, one can understand therefore that there had been much speculation on the voyage north from Singapore. We knew we were en route to collect a full cargo of refined product, but for much of the trip north we had no idea where our final destination would be. It could have been Melbourne, Africa or ports in Asia. It is not until we are in the Gulf a few hours from the terminal that we learn of our destination.

Eight thousand tons of jet fuel for South Vietnam – Da Nang, Cam Ranh Bay and Saigon - not everyone’s favourite destination in 1968.