The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [16]
Movement about the ship was restricted. You couldn’t just go up on deck whenever you pleased. Much like prison, you were let out for a daily constitutional and, much like prison, there was some homosexual activity too. At first I was shocked by this. It was illegal at the time and aside from the odd joke I had never encountered it in Aberdeen. Those who were ‘that way inclined’ were quite open about it. They never bothered the rest of us and people were fairly tolerant. But we were all starting to get on each other’s nerves.
My group of twenty were the only Gordon Highlanders on board. There were Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders there too, though in truth they were Lowlanders recruited from Glasgow and around their headquarters at Stirling Castle and we did not really get on. Rivalries between regiments were common, with much name-calling and ridiculous insults relating to the Gordons’ alleged fondness for sheep. Sheer boredom led to a lot of bickering on board, even among ourselves. Tempers frayed and insults flew over the most trivial things, especially in our sleeping quarters where the steel walls amplified every sound or movement. There was plenty of petulant kicking of hammocks and cries of, ‘Can you not lie still for five minutes!’
Once we arrived at Port Said approximately half of the forces on board got a twelve-hour pass to go ashore. I was not lucky enough to get one so I stayed on board sun-bathing and by now getting a good tan, looking more like a fit and fighting man every day – or so I told myself.
The following day we sailed through the Suez Canal and into the Red Sea. Going through the canal was quite an experience. We had been taught about this amazing feat of engineering at school but it seemed so narrow that you felt you could reach out and touch both sides. By now, though, the temperature had soared and some of us longed for the snow-covered north of Scotland.
Our next port of call was the British colony of Aden (now Yemen), a strategic port and prized British base in the Gulf of Aden. Shore leave was granted to those who’d had no passes at Port Said and we went ashore in groups of a dozen or so.
It was a real eye-opener. A lot of the men had only ever seen other white people before. Growing up in Aberdeen with a busy harbour, I would often see different nationalities down at the docks but I had seen nothing like this. It was an alien world. Hawkers pestered us endlessly, selling watches and other cheap trinkets. The heat was getting to me. Blond hair, pale skin and blue eyes might have been OK growing up in the cool climes of northern Scotland but in this heat I really struggled. To my untravelled eyes the locals appeared shifty and my nose recoiled at the squalid stench of open drains, strange cooking smells and the foreign spices of the place. I was happy to get back to the ship just as soon as I could.
During our leisure time on board we played deck quoits and cards and read and wrote letters back home. But after Aden life became tenser. There was a lot of activity in the Indian Ocean and we had a number of ‘musters’, fearing that German submarines were operating there. It was the first time that I conceived of any danger and felt under threat. It had all been so unreal up until then. When we arrived safely at Calcutta, the next port of call, I was again granted leave. But I was so repelled by what I saw that I declined to go ashore. It looked a filthy, dirty, poverty-stricken place. Stores were taken on and the next day we sailed out across the Bay of Bengal and down the west coast of Burma and the Malay Peninsula.
Finally on 22 December 1939, three weeks after we had set sail from Marseilles, we arrived at our destination – the colony of Singapore. The diamond-shaped