Page 99 - Demo

95ron Leader sent a signal copied to our HQ to finalise the deal saying that as there was no airconditioned accommodation would they book us into a hotel. We begged him not to copy it to HMS Terror to no avail. When they got the signal, they immediately said that we were not entitled to airconditioned quarters and so could stay on base. At that point the crew decided we would rather go to Gan but there was no changing it and so we did a training sortie landing at Butterworth in the afternoon. Butterworth was a huge base that had a large military hospital for those wounded in the Vietnam war. They had Skyhawks and Dakotas I think and Bristol Freighters. When we arrived, the Australians were very annoyed with us. It turned out that they had a deal with the hotel we would have stayed in. The arrangement was that in return for the custom the hotel would make a contribution to the various Christmas parties held in the messes. We explained that it was not our fault that we had to stay on base and things became more friendly. They then said that if we got a move on we would make happy hour that started at 5pm. As we knew we could not make that we asked when it would finish to be told 9pm or maybe later. Panic over. Once we had got settled into our rooms, we found the bar and their idea of happy hour was much better than ours. Not only was there plenty of cheap beer but trays of food kept coming around. I remember one tray of enormous prawns in particular. As the evening went on, we got talking to several of the Australians including some nurses. That weekend we went into Penang and it had not changed much from what my father had said it was like when he was there at the end of the war. On the Sunday evening John and I ended up in a group which included the 2 nurses from Friday. When the bar shut, one of the girls asked for the bar to stay open which a senior officer could do. It turned out that the senior officer was the Padre and he refused but said we could go back to his room for another beer, and we duly did. During the subsequent conversations it turned out that the nurse John was chat-