A Traveller's Tale-Whatever Happened To Tuesday?

It was a cold, blustery August evening in 1968 as we trundled from the domestic terminal to the Qantas overseas terminal at Sydney's Kingsford Smith airport. I was perched precariously on a dozen or so canvas mailbags piled on a baggage trolley and being towed by one of the small tractors used at airports. This seemed to be the only way to prevent the smaller bags from being blown across the tarmac.

I was travelling to London, although this was not the way I had expected to begin my first overseas trip. I had been temporarily transferred to the Department of Foreign Affairs to spend a few months as a diplomatic courier flying between Canberra and London via Nadi in Fiji, Honolulu, San Francisco, and New York. I had romantically imagined myself in a trench coat, collar turned up, hat brim pulled down and a briefcase handcuffed to my wrist, just like in the movies. The reality was very different, and the phrase 'diplomatic bag' took on a totally new meaning.

If you are having difficulty remembering 1968 (or you just weren't around), it was the year Richard Nixon was elected President of the United States for the first time, the Olympic Games were being held in Mexico City and, as I flew out of Sydney, the Russians were marching into Prague to re-establish control over a rebellious Czechoslovakia.

The job was relatively simple. My bags of diplomatic mail, or whatever it was, were loaded into the safe-hand compartment in the rear baggage hold of the Qantas Boeing 707. The door was padlocked and I had the only key. My instructions were to be first off the aircraft and then to loiter in the vicinity of the hold to ensure that nobody made off with my precious cargo.

At Nadi, during my first hour of hanging around, I reflected gloomily that my briefing had not covered what I should do if somebody tried to steal my load. I decided that, if this happened, I would let them take it-I wasn't cut out to be a hero. The boredom of hanging around was broken at JFK in New York where a number of bags were exchanged with the courier from the Australian Embassy in Washington, DC. He then took over responsibility for the bags while I went in search of a breakfast that didn't have to be eaten off a tray on my lap.

While we were in the air, I could eat, drink, and try to sleep, and with never more than two dozen first class passengers on the flight, both the food and the service were excellent. Having eaten unwisely and too often, I waddled off the aircraft on arrival at London's Heathrow. After loading the bags into the Australia House station wagon that was waiting by the door to the hold, I delivered most of them to the British Foreign Office in Downing Street and the rest to Australia House in The Strand. I was then free to enjoy London for the next three days.

I had been given a shopping list by my family and spent the first day in and around Oxford Street trying to find everything they wanted. My hotel in Queensgate was near Kensington Gardens, and I was able to spend the remaining days walking around Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens (getting some much-needed exercise) and being fascinated by the Victoria and Albert and Science Museums.

On the last evening, I decided to dine near the bridge over the Serpentine in Hyde Park. A large meeting, which had been held to protest the Russian occupation of Czechoslovakia, was just breaking up as I took my window seat inside the restaurant. A motley crowd of protesters, some still waving their placards, streamed across the bridge and past my window in a seemingly endless procession. It was quite a floor show, but the second act was even more spectacular.

There was a vast charcoal grill in the centre of the restaurant, and the accumulation of congealed grease in the hood and flue of this oversize barbecue caught fire. The large West Indian, who presided over it in a spotless white jacket and tall white hat, became more and more hysterical as great dollops of flaming fat cascaded down over the steaks he was cooking. Fortunately, mine was already on the plate in front of me.

In true British stiff-upper-lip tradition, none of my fellow diners fled, and I had no intention of letting the side down. The manager wielded a fire extinguisher and soon had the conflagration under control. He was still trying to send the chef off to have his hysterics in private when two fire engines and a police car, sirens wailing, bells clanging, scattered the protesters. The firemen rushed in and seemed genuinely disappointed to discover they weren't needed, but they squirted extinguishers up the flue anyway. It was a spectacular finalé to my first visit to London, a city I came to know and love in the following months.

After a return journey to Australia during which I ate more circumspectly but less well, I had two days to spend with the family in Canberra before setting off to do it all again. I looked back on an eventful week in which, thanks to the International Dateline, there had been no Tuesday but two Wednesdays.