by James Barlow
The natural assumption that if they went ashore at all they should go together filled Dimitrios with contentment. The days and the duties would pass quickly and pleasantly, he was aware, that his only anxiety was about when the other should leave the ship.
He wanted to pin Rajaratnam down on this, to have an unwritten contract stretching ahead for a year, fifteen months or whatever it was.
‘How long will you stay with us?’ he asked.
‘Oh, I don’t know, Dimitrios,’ Rajaratnam said doubtfully.
Warmed by the use of his Christian name, Dimitrios persisted, ‘But how long would you like to?’
He did not wish to be possessive, there was only then need to be reassured.
‘They will throw me out at Piraeus,’ Keith forecast with a laugh, ‘and replace me with a Greek. That is perfectly understandable,’ he pointed out, without anxiety, too reasonable, as always.
‘But they can’t just dump you off in Athens.’
‘I hope not, indeed, but I was only able to sign for this one voyage.’
‘They must let you sign on again.’
‘It would be nice,’ agreed Keith, and that was all Dimitrios needed in comfort: Rajaratnam spoke to no one at all except him, Dimitrios, and yet felt it would be nice to sign on for the Areopagus’ next journey. This was comradeship indeed.
The Areopagus stayed in Fremantle only three hours – much to the irritation of some passengers who had been informed that she would remain for sixteen – but for Dimitrios it was like a holiday.
He strolled around the vast area of the Ocean Terminal with his friend. No one sneered at them. The stewards filled the terminal with laughter as they crowded around, sat on chairs and drank coffee, but Dimitrios did not see John. A few played football with the entertainments officer (who was not an officer, but a civilian), who was dressed in his tight pink suit . . . Keith made no observations about this. He picked up a postcard with a photograph of a British liner on one side: ‘I served on her. Very well run. The officers spoke through their noses. I used to wonder what they employed their mouths for!’
The priest was right, Dimitrios thought in exultation.
He has prayed for me.
There has been an answer.
He makes no demands. He has no needs. And I have none of him. I like him tremendously. He is charming and even cultured. He should be an engineering officer. And this hateful body of mine does not overwhelm me and shame me with need. I respect him too much to even think of bodily contact. I have not even touched his shoulder or his clothes. We make no claims on each other, and yet I would die for him.
There was an air of excitement in the terminal; it spread from passengers to crew. For they, the passengers, were leaving their own land, in white society of law and order, banks, newspapers, telephones and suburbs, for the moist green forests of unknown Asia. There was a strong galvanism and an unmistakable sensation of departing from law and order of a dull kind, orthodox morality and convention, and moving into areas where their behaviour wouldn’t be identified in quality by foreigners nor observed by any other white persons except themselves. It was like a conspiracy in which five hundred and fifty people wanted to escape for some weeks and be beholden to no one . . .
Hours later Dimitrios and Keith stood on that small portion of B Deck which was allocated to the engine room crew.
The sea was scarcely five feet from their feet. They stared unashamedly at the water and the sky. A band could be heard distantly and the smells of Greek cooking drifted to them. Life was suddenly beautiful for Dimitrios, even life in the confined space of the Areopagus’ port engine room, a crowded crews’ mess room, the cabin for four filled with human smells, and too hot for good health, and these few square yards of the B Deck.
‘You see, that is the star Alpheratz,’ Keith pointed out. ‘No. You cannot see. Look Give me your hand and I will aim your fingers.’
And this touch of the small fragile brown hand had electricity in it for Dimitrios, but aroused no lust. There was no need of whiskey and the anesthetized flesh and sordid postures in ludicrous corners of the bar with Keith. He had a real friend and no demands of that sort need ever be made by either side.
In the cabin they undressed in darkness so as not to disturb the other two engineers, but were reluctant to give up the conversation. There was the whole world to talk about and t could be done in English; there would never be any embarrassment in being overheard.
‘Will you ever get married?’ Dimitrios asked.
‘Me? Goodness, that will be a disaster!’ Keith said with vigour. ‘I suppose we shall come to it. Many children, I shall have! About eight!’
Dimitrios laughed because this seemed absurd and unlikely, and, perhaps, not intended. A sailor stirred and suggested, ‘Be quite; we want to sleep.’ And Dimitrios, having translated this for Keith, was content to lie there awaiting sleep.
He has no unkindness in him at all, he thought. His whole nature is charitable. He has no hardness in him whatever. Violence and filth would simply astonish him. It is impossible not to love him.
Chapter Ten
The Areopagus had been built in an American shipping yard in the early 1930s. She now had about her a touch of the great days of the sea, a solidity of design and style which almost belonged to 1914, most noticeably her straight bows and ‘cruiser-spoon’ stern and near-vertical funnels. Her hull and main structural components, had been riveted, not with powered tools but by hand with white-hot rivets. The welding of a ship’s hull, an unfamiliar process at that time, offered economics in weight, time and labour, and a smooth form with resultant reduction in propulsive effort, but could never equal the strength of old-fashioned individual riveting. Only now, over thirty years later, did the Areopagus begin to feel her age.
She was built to the specifications of the American shipping industry and international conventions which covered basic design, radio, lifeboats, sanitation, fire fighting, structural materials and overhauls. Her boilers, although of an older style, were at least sufficiently forward of the 1914 era to use oil, not coal. She was modern enough to have her battery of tubes for the water to pass through. It had until shortly before her construction been the feature of boiler tube batteries that they should contain the hot gasses which heated tons of static water In the Areopagus, as in all modern turbine-driven ships, the main vessel contained the flames and gasses while tubes passed the water through them. This saved an enormous amount of weight and volume. In addition, metallurgy was greatly improving at the time the Areopagus was constructed and safely allowed a substantial rise in the pressure of the steam raised, which in fact meant the capacity for work. The rise in pressure in turn allowed a reduction in the consumption of fuel for the shaft-horsepower produced.
It was always intended that the Areopagus should operate in tropical waters, and she was built with an open promenade deck (called the Parade Deck) in contrast to the liners operating on the North Atlantic run. She served her original American owners in the Caribbean until 1948. She then served in the Mediterranean under the flag of the Dutch company which purchased her. In 1961 she was bought for 3,000,000 pounds by the Greco-Australian Passenger and Cargo Line, registered in Panama, but primarily a Greek line operating between Piraeus and Australian ports, with cruises in Asian waters during the ‘off’ season.
Her gross tonnage was 23,191 and net 12,463. She had a length of 643 feet 7 inches and a breadth of 84 feet 10 inches. Her twin-screw turbines had a total thrust of 22,000 shaft-horsepower, which had given her a service speed of twenty knots (time and wear had reduced this). She stood rather high out of the water and was uncompromisingly of her time, with her centres of buoyancy and gravity (the forces acting on her from below and above) rather far apart so that her metacentre was below her centre of gravity. This inclined her to ‘stiffness’ and a tendency to jerk out of a roll to an
upright position.
Her two funnels stood high above the hull and sloped only a little, another indication of her ‘middle age.’ These two funnels were of riveted aluminium construction, 41 feet high, 32 feet long, 23 in breadth, and each weighed 29 tons.
There was a cynical tendency by some passengers to list what the Areopagus did not have. She did not have stabilizers, was without bow thrusts, her radar was not transistorized and did not include the latest anti-collision relative motion markers, which were so useful in crowded waters. She did not have ergonomic cutlery or built-in cabin furniture of plane African mahogany for the crew. Although she had been built in America she had had no air-conditioning on three of her decks and even now that this situation had been improved, the crew as well as many passengers, while theoretically having air-conditioning, awoke saturated in sweat. Nor did the crew have single or two-berth cabins fitted with washbasins and running hot water or chairs of natural beech bentwood, or wardrobes lined with washable plastic-faced fabric, or spaces for pinups. Nor were there in the crews’ quarters any special cast-aluminium berth lights or fluorescent strip lighting or bedspreads of specially woven, heavy-duty check seersucker. These things, and many other comforts, were supplied to the merchant ships of the rich countries which were finding it difficult to entice men to come to sea and work the big tankers and container ships. The Areopagus had been built at a time when ‘comfort’ was a word despised by society and by sailors themselves, who had been regarded as of the lowest status in society.
The Areopagus had an unbalanced double-plate streamlined rudder. Her steering gear was operated by telemotor, but also, if desired, by gyro-pilot equipment. Her anchors and chains were to the original American requirements, that is, three stockless bower anchors each weighing 133 hundredweight, with 310 fathoms of 2-and-three-quarters-inch-diameter stud-link special steel chain cable.
There were two radar sets in the wheelhouse, and she had mechanical sounding equipment. An electrically operated sounding machine was fitted on the bridge. In addition she had an echometer. A high-power dry-paper recorder was fitted in the chartroom. It operated in conjunction with two internal projectors, one fitted forward and the other aft. She had a gyro-compass with seven repeaters and two magnetic compasses.
Her sixteen lifeboats, eight of fibre glass construction, eight of wood, had a total capacity for 1,873 persons. Six of the boats had motors, the remaining ten were hand-propelled. Most of them had ineffective davits, which were solid with corrosion and overpainting.
She had an emergency dynamo supply in the event of a generator failure. Her wireless office contained a transmitter incorporating MF and HF W-T facilities, emergency transmitter, main and emergency receivers and also IF radio telephone facilities. A portable wireless equipment set was provided for use on any lifeboat. Someone had to wind a handle to provide power. If the ship was ever in distress and sinking, a signal would automatically be sent without the operator’s presence to shipping within a radius of two hundred miles. The same set flashed a red light and sounded a klaxon if it received an alarm signal from another ship.
There were 670 deck chairs and 104 teak deck seats sited around the various open decks.
For the Areopagus was not just a ship but a hotel.
And the problems of taking a hotel to sea were very much of a designer’s headache. A hotel on shore was connected to a large underground drainage system provided and paid for primarily by other people. The waste water and drainpipes of the hotel on land were simply, if not very beautifully, led to an outside wall and conducted down its outer surface to the ground and below. The water supply was limited only by the weather and the hotel merely needed a reservoir on the roof and the pressure of a city’s supply to fill it. There could be a limitless and complicated electric supply connected to a local main, and not likely to be torn out of it. On the Areopagus, as on any liner, the requirements of the passenger might be the same as the hotel’s client, but there was a limit to how much water could be carried or distilled. The ship could not have elastic plumbing nor could the pipes run up and down its outside surfaces, for there they would be smashed. To run them, or electric cables, out of sight would be costly and difficult for inspection and repairs. Yet there must be no failures and when the passengers turned on a switch or shower or tap or operated the toilet, these things had to function. And function they did in this hotel which pitched, rolled, twisted and shuddered, and which moved from the cold of Europe’s winter to the heat of Australia’s summer in a few weeks. The drainage problem was not easy; the Areopagus could not have an unlimited number of outlets, for every outlet was a potential inlet and thus a possible source of disaster
The engine room took care of many of these problems. It not only contained the massive but relatively simple boilers and turbines which propelled the ship but had a host of auxiliary engines and pupils to operate the domestic requirements. And these soon swamped the simple design of a functioning ship and turned the main deck and engine rooms into a chaos of noise and machinery. The ship herself, her cargo (if any) and passengers all required machinery: a heavy windlass for her anchor, winches on her poop and forecastle so that seamen could operate her mooring lines, all powered remotely from the engine room a hundred yards away. A complicated plumbing installation was vital, for the double-bottom throughout her whole length was divided into separate sections and it had to be possible to fill these through long pipelines with fuel or fresh or salt water, the seawater as ballast to maintain the trim. In every hold water collected from condensed moisture and weeping rivets, drained down to the sump or bilge, and again had to be pumped away perhaps several hundred feet through pipes and then overboard. In reverse the system had to be able to flood specific holds to douse a fire which had proved too much for steam or chemical extinguishing.
There had to be a battery of frozen piping mounted with fans if refrigerated cargo was carried, or an equal capacity to preserve the meats and other foods used during the weeks the passengers travelled. For the Areopagus did not wish to stop frequently to buy cream or receive milk deliveries. That would have been a housekeeping nightmare and involved frequent stops, which meant port charges. The Areopagus had a capacity for 1,382 passengers and even though she was only carrying 550 at present (and a crew of 452) the requirements were enormous. Like her counterpart hotel on land, the ship had a butcher’s shop, a bakery and confectionery area, a plate-washing area, a silver room and a fruit and salad area. Four conveyors operated from the dry and refrigerated storerooms and there were elevators to the pantries in the passenger accommodation and public rooms.
On a 12,000-mile journey – and many of the Areopagus’ journeys were of that distance – if she was fully accommodated (and on the Europe-to-Australia run she always was full with a load of migrants), the bakers made 300,000 rolls 20,000 loaves and 400,000 cakes. The butchers cooked 130,000 pounds of meat and poultry, representing a thousand animals and 4,500 birds, and the passengers ate 40,000 pounds of fish. They also ate 100,000 eggs, 15,000 pounds of butter and consumed ice cream at the rate of twenty gallons a day. They got through a ton of tea, seven tons of coffee, a hundred tons of potatoes and nineteen tons of flour; 2,500 packets of toilet paper, and they stared at 25,000 menu cards, printed on board. They soiled their fingers on 6,000 table napkins and dropped food on 2,000 tablecloths. Their children broke some of the Areopagus’ 20,000 glasses, 25,000 pieces of crockery, 12,000 cups and saucers and 1,150 teapots. They used 33,100 pieces of cutlery and switched on and off 4,600 light fittings, and complained through 400 telephones if anything went wrong. To cheer themselves up they made inroads on 15,000 bottles of wine, 100,000 cans of ale and puffed at one million cigarettes. They looked at some of the thirty electric clocks of the impulse type, all controlled from a master clock on the bridge, itself governed by an eight-day chronometer. If exhausted they threw off their clothes (350,000 articles were laundered on each west-to-east journey) and clim
bed between some of the 8,000 sheets carried aboard.
They were accommodated in cabins and looked after by stewards. But the Areopagus had made so many trips with scarcely a pause between each that minor problems had not been attended to. Worn carpets had not been repaired or replaced. Upholsterers and needlewomen had not been enabled to do repairs to curtains, fabrics and furniture. Each day at sea Captain Vafiadis inspected a passenger deck and himself tested the fit of drawers and wardrobe doors and the operation of taps and switches, and invariably he found a dozen a day to be attended to. But there were temporary repairs and there were others which could not be corrected or even traced until the Areopagus stayed in a harbour long enough. Sometimes they couldn’t be traced even then. Persistent squeaks at sea simply couldn’t be found by a foreman joiner in harbour. The Areopagus was old. Things were bound to squeak after thirty years of chafing. Every section of panelling had been carefully designed and fitted so that it moved in response to the ship’s working, and every joint had been permanently packed with greased felt. Otherwise the whole ship would have shrieked like ten thousand children taking their first lessons on the violin. The hardware used for fixing all furniture and fitting – screws, locks, hinges, nuts and bolts – had been of a high quality and had stood up to the hard usage and salty atmosphere for over thirty years. A million screws had been used on the Areopagus.
The construction of the cabins had involved 150,000 square feet of plywood and 17,000 cubic feet of solid hardwood timber and 65,000 square feet of ceiling panels. Almost every item of furniture had had to be ‘tailor-made’ to allow for the camber and sheer of the ship, for pipe penetration and electrical work.
