As I had mentioned in "Larry Tyce and the Magnolia Tree," Larry was one of the junior seamen in our Mess (#33), the Communications Mess, on HMCS Bonaventure. In autumn 1964, the Bonaventure was visiting Portsmouth, where we tied up in the Royal Naval Dockyard.
We had been in Portsmouth several times before, and our favourite (and the cheapest!) watering hole was the NAAFI Club, about 3 kms from the Dockyard. The NAAFI was a wonderfully large eating and drinking establishment run by the Navy, Army, and Air Force Institute. It was located on one side of a large roundabout, with the WREN’s barracks on the other side. The roundabout itself was circular, with a fountain at one side and the centre covered with hedges and small trees.
One evening, after a night of drinking Watney’s Red Barrel Ale, and Rum and Blackcurrent, Larry excused himself from our table (where we were discussing the better points of several new British groups: the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Dave Clarke Five), and said he was going back to ship.
About half an hour later, a nurse from the WRENs came in laughing at the sight she had just seen in the middle of the roundabout. Evidently she had heard singing in the roundabout and, coming closer, saw a naked male splashing in the fountain, singing "She loves me, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah." She yelled, and the man ran into the bushes in the centre of the circle.
It was not a great leap of our collective imagination to realise that Larry was "drunk and disorderly." So off we went to rescue him (yet again) from himself. We need not have worried: we found Larry behind the bushes, popping out frequently to amuse a small group of WRENs that had collected to see the crazy colonial in all his splendour. We retrieved his clothes from the fountain, and helped him get dressed and back to ship without further incident.
As a "by the way," HM Dockyards in Portsmouth (called Pompie by British and Canadian sailors) is home to Admiral Nelson’s flagship HMS Victory, which resides in a dry dock which happened to be on the route from the main gate to HMCS Bonaventure. I have, of course, a story about this which I shall relate later in a piece called "Leading Signalman Sullivan’s Trafalgar: or, Sully and the Attempted Launching of HMS Victory."
- The Ancient Hippie
- Retired from 10 years in the Canadian Navy, and 28 years in the Canadian Diplomatic Service, with postings in Beijing, Mexico City, Sri Lanka, Romania, Abu Dhabi, Guyana, Ireland, Trinidad, and, last but not least, India.
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