Miss Australia 1978 – Part Two of Four

Unfortunately, I didn’t have my mobile phone with me because at that stage of the rampant global advance in technology they had yet to be invented, so I found a public phone box and called Jimmy. I was told that he’d just gone out to lunch in a Glasgow pub with some very important people he was entertaining and would be back in about an hour or so or tomorrow but a note would be left on his desk to phone me back as soon as he could. There was little point in me hanging around in a telephone kiosk waiting for him so I decided it was time to put on a brave face and take on the world; well at least some of the world, and probably not Australia.

I went through all the airport procedures you had to go through in the late 1970s which didn’t include being scanned or patted down or felt up or sniffed, as they do now, but did include donning a leather aviator hat and goggles and listening out for the public announcement ‘chocks away’ rather than today’s ‘you’d better look sharp and finish your pint because your flight is boarding at gate number so-and-so’. The plane to London lifted off from the Leeds runway exactly one hour late, exactly as the departure board had promised. At Heathrow I would have exactly negative five minutes to get on the plane to Sydney. The British Midland Airways young lady flight attendant tried to cheer me up with a free coffee in a pot mug and a couple of custard creams but she didn’t have a great deal of success. In fact, all of the passengers looked a bit glum but that wasn’t surprising because they were flying away from Yorkshire to go to London.

People at the Qantas airlines desk at Heathrow’s Terminal Three confirmed that the flight to Sydney had departed on time and I had missed it but, thanks to the efficient working practices of the baggage handlers, my cassette tapes and my football scarf hadn’t. I explained my predicament and they told me that I should speak to whoever had booked and paid for the flight and that they were sure something would be sorted out.

Their best piece of advice was, ‘Go and have a cuppa tea love, and unwind a bit.’

I phoned Jimmy, hoping he had returned from the pub. Back in those days the pubs in Britain closed for a couple of hours in the afternoons so I was reasonably sure that he would be at his desk by 3:30. Unless, of course, he had gone to the Red Parrot which was in Buchanan Street (the same street as our shipping office) and which was taking part in a Glasgow City Council experiment to see if all day pub opening would be a success. Who could have ever imagined that a pub being open all day in the middle of Glasgow might not be a success? Anyway, he had been out with a couple of the company’s senior engineering officers so they had gone somewhere a bit posher than the Red Parrot and their session had ceased at a civilised time.

During our conversation we both conducted ourselves in a calmer and politer way than we had expected of each other. Having made it clear that I was a bit unhappy there followed a couple of minutes of silence as Jimmy thought about the situation and I pumped ten pence pieces into the payphone which seemed quite wasteful, especially when considering the financial difficulties that we had been told that the shipping company was in. He said a couple of words that would have cost him at least five Hail Marys had he been in Father Crawley’s confession box and then told me to go to a newsagent to buy a British Telecom phone card and call him back in an hour. For anyone less than a hundred years old perhaps I should explain that the phone card was a sort of prepaid debit arrangement that fitted into a slot in some public telephones and was slightly cheaper, more convenient and much less uncomfortable than having a pocket full of coins to feed the hungry machine with. Buying such an item from a shop meant that I would get a receipt and I’d be able to claim back on my business expenses the significant amount of money that I presumed I’d be paying for phone calls while my predicament was being sorted out from afar.

I rang back an hour later to be told, ‘Ring back in an hour!’

Another hour later I heard the same. It was repeated a fair few times with the level of my despair increasing in inverse proportion to the number of units remaining on the phone card. I could see through a window in the distance that although we were in the middle of summer it was starting to get dark outside. Jimmy would want to go home soon. I wanted to go home soon. I rang him again.

‘Phone me back first thing in the morning.’ he said. ‘I think I’ll have some good news for you then.’ The best news that I could think of at the time was that I’d be going back to Leeds and getting a job in a bank.

‘What am I going to do tonight?’ I asked in a voice in which it took no effort to maximise the pathos of.  

‘Buy some sandwiches and a couple of cans of beer, stretch yourself out across some seats and try to get a bit of sleep. You’ll need to be fresh and alert for tomorrow.’ There was another Father Crawley moment, contributed by me this time, and then the phone line went dead.

Feeling utterly dejected I did almost exactly what he said. I got four cans of warm McEwan’s Export instead of two. Buying a four pack, the promotion board in the shop stated, would save me five pence so I did this as a good turn, bearing in mind that Scottish Ship Management was ankle deep in a financial mire.

I couldn’t sleep. The aircraft departures and arrivals had stopped for the night. The airport staff, apart from a few cleaners, had all gone home. The passengers and their friends and families who were waving them off had all gone off or gone home. Other people appeared who seemed to take pleasure from mysteriously wandering around airport terminal buildings all night. They were the sort of people who I had encountered before, mysteriously wandering around bus or railway stations all night, but a bit posher. To take my mind off the awful things that I thought might happen to me during the night I started to think about the awful things that might happen to me the following day. My big concern was that any rearranged flight that Jimmy & Co managed to book for me might get me to Newcastle in New South Wales after my ship, the ^m/_v Cape Grenville, had sailed. What in the name of Evonne Goolagong would I do if that happened? I knew that once loaded up in Newcastle the ship would be heading for the Philippines. I wanted to ask the people at the Qantas airlines desk if there was a bus replacement service from Newcastle to Manila.

It was at this point that I realised that if you take the word ‘Heathrow’, change the first letter and add a space just past the middle, it gives you ‘Death Row’. So I woke up the man who worked at the all-night shop to buy a book by Spike Milligan and spent the whole night reading it. At round about half past three in the morning I laughed out loud at something he had written. Only he could ever get a laugh out of me in such dire circumstances. For that I will be eternally grateful to my dear Mr Milligan.

‘Ring back in an hour!’ a weary sounding Jimmy said when I called him at eight o’clock in the morning. It wasn’t the best news but it cheered me up because I hadn’t expected him to answer the phone at all at that time of the day. Jimmy was on the job!

‘Great news!’ said Jimmy when I phoned him on the stroke of nine o’clock. ‘I’ve got you a seat on a flight that goes direct to Sydney, taking off just before eleven.’

‘Oh brilliant!’ I exclaimed, ‘That’s only a couple of hours.’

‘Actually it’s fourteen hours’ he said, pulling the wombat’s wool rug from under me.

‘Will I miss the ship Jimmy?’

‘No,’ he said ‘It hasn’t arrived there yet. The flight time to Sydney is twenty-six hours, we’ve arranged for a shipping agent to pick you up at the airport and transfer you to where the local flight leaves from and there you’ll only have three or four hours to wait for the plane to take you up to Newcastle. That should only take an hour or so, as long as it’s not too windy. So you probably won’t miss the ship.’

Probably is such a strong word, I thought to myself as I wandered over to the shop for a pile of sandwiches because I was starving and miserable, four more cans of beer because I was thirsty and miserable and another Spike Milligan book because I was bored and miserable. Collecting a new set of travel documents from the people at the Qantas airlines desk cheered me up more than any of these other things.

I slept for a couple of hours. I talked to a man who was really upset because his flight was delayed by twenty minutes and things hadn’t been going too well with his wife just lately and she had agreed to pick him up at the airport in Cairo but if he was late she probably wouldn’t hang around because he was sure she was having if off with the gardener who only worked there in the afternoons and he’d have to pay for a taxi while she was at it with him at home in the shed. My heart bled for him (the man, not the gardener) for a couple of minutes. I went to the toilet six times, I walked full circuits of the inside of the terminal nine times, I checked the departures board eighty-seven times, I phoned my mother to tell her about the calamitous situation I was in and she asked what sort of meat had been in the sandwiches that I had bought. Don’t tell Jimmy or Jim but I used the phone card to pay for the call. Late in the afternoon I bought a copy of the London Evening Standard to see if there were any vacancies for banking staff in the jobs section. There weren’t but Heathrow Airport was looking for night time cleaning staff.

I had a window seat on the plane. I love a window seat but they could have put me in the overhead baggage compartment on this particular occasion and I would have been just as happy. In the thirty-six hours since I had left home I had travelled three hundred kilometres and only had another seventeen thousand to go. A daunting prospect but I was delighted to be on my way at last. I suspected that Jimmy and Jim were equally happy with the developments late that evening as they would be able to have at least one day off from listening to me on the phone banging on about being a displaced person having to sleep rough in the departure lounge of one of the world’s biggest airports.

What was I going to do to amuse myself for the twenty-six hours that I was to spend confined to my seat? It seemed strange that out of the window I would see the enormous expanses of the Indian Ocean and the Asian continental landmass and of space itself, but on my side of the window, where I was quite happy to remain despite the mild feelings of claustrophobia, I had barely enough space to eat the peanuts that were forced on me at regular intervals by a caring cabin crew doing their utmost to relieve the passengers’ boredom.

I spent the first hour thinking about what I could do to keep my mind active for the other twenty-five hours. My first thought was that I would deactivate my mind and catch up on some much needed sleep. Also I had half of a Spike Milligan book to read (the latter half) and I had paid a pound for a set of Qantas airlines headphones that looked remarkably like a stethoscope which I plugged into a hole in the armrest of my seat to enable me to listen to the in-flight entertainment. Adjacent to the hole there were two dials, each with the numbers one to ten embossed upon them. One dial was for controlling the volume and the other was for selecting a channel. Channels that each played exactly one-hour long audio recordings on a constant loop for the time it would take us to fly from Haringey to Botany Bay. These recordings were audio only, of course, as video entertainment back then was still only present in the mind of George Orwell.    

The channels contained some unusual stuff and the sort of thing you could only find on a long haul airline flight. Examples of the available material included funny moments with great comedians that you’ve never heard of before (or since), interviews with famous jockeys (horse racing jockeys, that is, not items of underwear), the best of Abba (so far… remembering that we were still only in 1978 so the world had yet to be subjected to Voulez-Vous and Chiquitita) and the music of Australian jazz legends such as Blind Willy Billabong and Charlene Sheepdip. Channel five was the sound to accompany a film that we were promised would be shown later in the flight but at that point was just silence. The best of television’s Coronation Street from 1967 to 1969, the greatest performances of mime artist Marcel Marceau, highlights of the 1974 World Snooker Championship and a channel entitled ‘Especially for the Kids’ comprising of sixty minutes of Katie Boyle shouting ‘now just shut up and sit still’, were other titbits of entertainment made available to us by means of state of the art technology. I hadn’t had so much fun since the new zebra crossing was opened outside the shopping centre in the fashionable Seacroft district of Leeds.

Link to part three...

https://www.abctales.com/story/turlough/miss-australia-1978-%E2%80%93-part-three-four

Image:

Every image I use is from a photograph I have taken myself. 

On this occasion – Me in the gents’ toilet at Heathrow airport trying to convert a warm can of McEwan’s Export into a decent pint.