HMS Tartar 4th Commission 1970 12

Settling in to life in the Gulf, it is very hot and we are on 'tropical routine' which means we start at 7am and finish at Noon with only a 15 minute 'stand easy' for a cuppa, we have found an enterprising Arab on the jetty with a little hut who sells bottles of cold pop (goffas, a goffa is a big wave) and little rolls with some kind of meat in them. This guy is straight out of a Carry On film and fits their stereotype of a dodgy Johnny Foreigner down to the ground, he was always around when we walked along the jetty on our way to Jufair offering a lift, no one took him up on it.

Jufair handled our communications so if you were not duty watch the rest of the day was yours from 12, this normally consisted of heading off to the base swimming pool and a lazy afternoon with a few beers. There was only one attractive girl at that swimming pool, the daughter of one of the army blokes, she became the girlfriend of a young cook on the Tartar, I met that very cook ten years later on my first oil platform, small world. We did make the odd trip into the capital Manama and it was just what I expected an Arab town to look like from my experiences of Beau Geste movies, walls, big gates, dusty streets, no pubs, coffee shops and blokes holding hands. As with most stops Manama had its special Naval interest, not a bar this time but little books called AFO's 'Admiralty Fleet Orders' these were small Mills and Boon sized publications which contained sexually explicit stories which would have had no problem getting banned in any civilised country.

Pool at Jufair

 One thing I did enjoy here was a trip into town of an evening for kebabs, we found a little room in a back street with wooden tables and a 'chef' cooking pieces of lamb on a brazier outside skewered on bicycle spokes, this was served with flat bread, spring onions, pieces of lemon and a glass of water, all for a dinar or less, I still long for that taste again.

 There was one hotel which we frequented now and again where you could drink, the Moons Plaza, this was quite a tad fancier than I had been used to, perhaps one of the first 'posh' hotels I ever drank in. It was memorable for me due to several things, an introduction to Canadian Club, I tried Lobster Thermidor and didn't like it, enjoyed the best chicken noodle soup I ever ate and for the first time in my life tried to sneak out without paying the bill. The idea to sneak out was John Hill's, the killick bunting (leading seaman signaller), we made our way out one at a time and took shelter outside behind a nearby wall, grinning and sniggering until two large bouncers came to the hotel front door holding a terrified Plum Humphries by the scruff of the neck with said captive pleading for us to return. Nonchalantly explaining we had popped out for a breath of fresh air we paid up, it didn't stop us going back.

JD, Plum, Me, Lil, Tomo, Lofty at the Moons Plaza.

 Most of our time though was spent at the NAAFI bar in HMS Jufair, the drinks were much cheaper and the measures were doubles, we took to drinking games, which of course were usually ruined by people deliberately getting things wrong to quaff the large concoction sitting in the middle of the table, which was fine by me. One I remember was particularly deadly, you threw a die and the person who got the seventh one, came up with a recipe, the fourteenth one bought it and the twenty-first one drank it. One particular night Dave Richmond had to drink a beverage containing a large number of clear spirits, for the rest of the evening Dave sat in a kind of coma with tears running down his face in complete silence.