Movie for the Commanding Officer: A fraught mission indeed!

I had made a mention of my Midshipmen tenure in Visakhapatnam in one of my earlier posts here.
 
To recap, I was appointed by the Navy on a corvette for my Midshipmen tenure at Visakhapatnam in early 1987. The corvettes were fabulous ships – sleek, fast, had a menacing silhouette; bristling as they were with weapons and sensors. The downside of a ship bristling with weapons and sensors is that each weapon and/or sensor also occupies a finite amount of space. With space being limited on a warship, striking the right balance between a ship’s fighting ability and crew comfort has always been a design nightmare for the shipbuilders.

In the case of corvettes, the judicious shipbuilders circumvented this nightmare by, ingeniously, doing away with crew comfort altogether. The officer’s bathrooms for example, had two WCs one wash basin and one shower for the 14 of us. Considering that water was typically opened for about 3-4 minutes at a time, there was a somewhat chaotic intermingling of bodies under the single shower in the bathroom. The bathroom itself was I think, 3 ft X 3 ft and hence, a version of the children’s game ‘twister’ would become inevitable if all officers were to make full use of the 3-4 minutes.  Soaping someone’s else’s posterior in the confusing mix was not altogether uncommon, with both the soaper and soapee in true naval tradition, bashing on regardless.
 
Personal spaces were similarly at a premium. The cabin for the junior most officers, one of them being me, had three bunks and two lockers for eight officers. Since snuggling two to a bunk was not to everyone’s taste, the ‘juniormost’, would find place to sleep wherever they could.

Morning times, when everyone was trying to get ready for the day together, therefore, was a Darwinian survival of, not the fittest, but the fastest. Our resourceful bearer/Man Friday, ever mindful of the need for a ‘method in the madness’, arrived at a unique solution to circumvent the general chaos. He, without too much fuss over what belonged to whom, would ready eight sets of undies, socks and vests neatly arranged in a row. The first officer ready to don his garments would choose the best looking set, the second officer the second best and so on…… The last officer as you can imagine, would be left with a unique set, where the surface area of holes would surpass that of cloth. On the plus side, these ships had great camaraderie amongst the crew, engendered in no small measure by the distinct and unique pleasure of shared underwear. I suspect that the term ‘chuddy buddies’ originated from these corvettes.
 
Coming back to water. The ship if I remember correctly had a carrying capacity of 19 tons of fresh water. If the ship had to sail, say for a week, careful rationing of the said 19 tons was inevitable. So, when at sea, bathing would stop after 2-3 days and Commanding Officers did not find it amiss if the crew missed an occasional shave. This perennial shortage of water also made use of the WC a bit challenging. Some ingenious souls got around this challenge by using sea water, of which obviously there was never any shortage. The problem with sea water, however, is that a fine residue of salt is left on the tender skin, causing some irritation. Prolonged adherence to this practice therefore, caused the practitioners to waddle around in a peculiar fashion – almost as if they were just coming from a parade where the parade commander, absentmindedly, marched them off from a vishram (at ease) stance.
 
Well moving on……. Unlike today’s days of security challenges, those carefree days 35 years ago, allowed families/guests on board ships fairly often.  Weekends especially would see a generous sprinkling of guests, families, wives and girlfriends in the ante rooms of all ships. On one such happy Sunday, our Commanding Officer had come over with his family. Now our CO was a gem of a person, a gentleman if ever there was one, kind like one’s favourite uncle, always calm and always composed. A heavy smoker, he would leave 2-3 packets of 555, in various places on the ship so that he needn’t carry them around. (Yes, smoking was allowed onboard those days, unlike today’s puritanical hell). Most officers therefore never needed to worry with cumbersome things like buying cigarettes, freely available as they were, courtesy our CO.
 
His teen daughter, you know how teens are, decided that she wanted to see a movie. The doting father, our CO, walked across to the ante room from his cabin, and asked one of us sitting there to put on a movie and went back to his cabin.
 
Now this needs some explanation. Most ships those days had only one/two VCRs and movies would be broadcast to all the living spaces and dining halls from a central location, say the ante room – via  splitters. On our ship, the CO’s cabin TV was connected to the ante room and when he wanted to see a movie he would just ask someone in the ante room to play one. Got the drift?

Now back to that fateful Sunday. One of us got up, picked up a random movie cassette titled ‘Daring Escapades of the Farmhand’ (or some such) shoved it into the VCR and resumed his drink. With the ante room TV being switched off, he could not ascertain the quality of the movie, but came to know soon enough; as suddenly, all hell broke loose.  The CO, came rushing into the wardroom, alarm writ large on his face, yelling ‘stop, stop, STOP the movie’. Puzzled, one of us got up and pressed pause on the VCR. The CO, gentleman that he was, said nothing and walked back, but his retreating walk to my discerning eye, clearly glistened with displeasure. A closer examination of the said cassette tape revealed it was one of those movies, euphemistically called ‘blue films’, which had somehow managed to squeeze itself into the video cassette collection of the ship.
 

And that was that. I do recall however, that the Captain’s wife always gave us an eye, colder than that of a dead fish, even many years later, at any social gathering. PS – Life on the corvettes in the eighties was great fun and a tenure onboard one was extremely satisfying. The difficulties such as those cited above were more exaggerations of the mind, than fact. The ships of today’s Navy of course, have come a long way and have the best of amenities needed to make life comfortable. Ample water being one. And thus, no vishram position waddles……..