Page 61 - Demo

57this was in the evening it was light throughout and after we got off another crew got on to do some day circuits.I filled in the details for a passport in a very scruffy office somewhere in London and then a bit later went back and picked it up full of visas for the Trucial States of the Persian Gulf. I was flown down to Bahrain where I spent the night. The heat was incredible, as was the humidity. The next morning, I was flown down to Sharjah in an Argosy. The Argosy was a transport aircraft that they later had decided needed to carry a small tank or something. Accordingly, they strengthened the floor andthen found it was too heavy to carry very much at all. On our trip down to Sharjah it carried a few passengers and a tiny amount of freight. When we arrived a Squadron Leader leapt aboard and shouted that he wanted my kit off straight away. The loadmaster sorted it out and finally threw my bags out. At that point a Shackleton took off. The Sqn Ldr swore and said to me %u201cYou were supposed to be on that%u201d. The detachment at Sharjah, called Mardet, was made up of 4 crews from the 3 Squadrons at Kinloss. Each crew stayed for 2 months and the Squadron that had 2 crews run the detachment. In this case I think it was 201 Sqn. We were accommodated in small metal huts with 4 rooms between the 5 officers. Luckily, they were air conditioned and bottles of water and squash were positioned on the air- conditioning unit to keep cold. An Arab lad kept them topped up and made the bed etc. Later that day the crew I was joining captained by Carl Pallister came and introduced themselves to me. The only person I knew was a young navigator, George Hamilton, who had been on a course or two before me at St Mawgan. He took me under his wing and helped me settle in.A few days later I flew my first sortie with the crew. In the Shackleton you either did the take-off or the landing and so Carl did the take-offleaving me to land later. We always flew the aircraft from the left hand seat although you could fly from the right if need be. We changed seats