by Graham Swift
Its soggy virtues make it inimical to inspiration or cheer. It resists the sanguine and the choleric and inclines towards melancholy. A preponderance of phlegm may produce the following marks of temperament: stolidity; sobriety; patience; level-headedness; calm. But also their counterparts: indolence; dullness; fatalism; indifference; stupor.
An ambiguous humour, said to be characteristic of the insular and bronchitic English. It affects the elderly; accumulates with experience. To the sick and fevered it brings equivocal comfort. Eases yet obstructs; assists yet overwhelms. According to ancient tradition the phlegmatic or watery disposition is to be remedied by infusions of strengthening liquors. A specific in all cases (though never a permanent or predictable one): the administration of alcohol.
52
About the Rosa II
SO WE mount our bicycles and ride to Hockwell Station. Dad first, me following. We’re in time for the six-thirty King’s Lynn. The air is heavy and muggy but we wait in the stuffy waiting-room (so as not to be spied, though neither of us says as much, from the nearby watch-tower of the Hockwell signal-box). The six-thirty is punctual. We load our bikes into the guard’s wagon. The guard, one of a former ring of railway employees engaged in an illicit freight service (bagged water-fowl one way, bourbon whiskey the other) strikes up: ‘You’re Henry Crick, ent you? The one as found poor Jack Parr’s—’ But Henry Crick doesn’t want to talk. Henry Crick looks as if he’s seen a ghost. We travel three stops to Downham Market where we detrain and cycle upwards of a mile, to Staithe Ferry, on the east bank of the Ouse, in the vicinity of which we have reason to believe is anchored – and so it is, a quarter of a mile or so upstream in the middle of the tidal channel – the Rosa II.
A dredger. A mud-sucker. A sludge-extractor. A battered, rusting, sixty-foot hulk with – where on most vessels the superstructure steps down in more or less graceful, more or less shapely style towards the deck – a monstrous deformity: the befouled and beclogged bucket-ladder with its befouled and beclogged winding apparatus.
Why so evocative a name for so unsightly a craft? Why so fragrant an emblem for so noisome a task? Rosa. Rosa? Who could have chosen such a name? Rosa. Rosa II. The humblest ship has its whiff of romance. Steamers chug to exotic havens, corvettes ride out on their perilous duties (for we’re back in that summer of ’43). But a dredger, a dredger.
And who would choose dredging for their calling? Who would opt for this endless and stationary war against mud? This dredgery-drudgery, sludgery-sloggery. It would sap even the stoutest spirit. It would dull even the brightest soul.
And yet it has to be done. Because it won’t go away. It gathers, congeals, no matter what’s going on in the busy world above. Because silt, as we know, is the builder and destroyer of land, the usurper of rivers, the foe of drainage. There’s no simple solution. We have to keep scooping, scooping up from the depths this remorseless stuff that time leaves behind.
Consider the plight of Stanley Booth, dredger skipper, master of the Rosa II, who in the autumn of 1941 needs a good dredger’s mate. Someone to share his skipper’s burdens, someone to take away the weight of twenty-five years’ Ouse dredging (for Stanley Booth has no love left for his trade), to ease the toils of this rusting, lifetime’s liability of the Rosa II. Dredger’s mates come, to be sure – Stan Booth has employed over twenty. But they also go – off, now, to fight this other war where the enemy, at least, is human. They can’t stick this life of mud.
He advertises – yet again – in the Gildsey Examiner. And receives an inquiry from a Mr H. Crick on behalf of his son – a young but seemingly unpromising applicant, since the Army do not want him and he cannot write a letter for himself. The youth, indeed, turns out to be a semi-imbecile. His powers of conversation are limited (but then Stan Booth is no great chin-wagger), his mental arithmetic wanting. And yet, to Stan Booth’s surprise, he is strong and dextrous, docile and dependable; and, what is more to the point, seems to have a natural instinct for the principles of dredging.
Stan Booth is only too glad to pay his new hireling’s wages. And not only his wages but, since this lucky find looks set to stay, to offer certain sums in advance so that his young helper can buy the second-hand Velocette motor-cycle which will bear him to his labours much more promptly than the means at first employed (milk lorry to Newhithe, early bus to Staithe Ferry). And many times, indeed, the early-arriving mate dutifully starts up the bucket-ladder by himself on those days (which become more frequent) when the skipper is disinclined to be punctual.
Stan Booth is happy. His young apprentice is happy. Yes, happy. For how else explain (can it be that this new apprentice, so assiduous and reliable, actually enjoys his labours?) that strange singing, that out-of-tune yet contented wheezing which he sometimes emits amidst the clattering of the ladder and the slurp-slurp-slurp of discharging silt? (Now who ever heard of a merry dredger-man?)
So it’s not surprising that Stan Booth should quite regularly, at about the middle of the morning, feel free to leave the Rosa and its cacophonous machinery under such rapt and zealous supervision, and, taking the dredger’s dinghy (thus marooning his trusty companion) make his way to the nearest waterside pub.
For Stan Booth, too, was a drinking man …
A further ride along the bumpy, summer-hardened Ouse embankment. Past ditching works, pumping equipment, an idle bulldozer, not to mention a concrete pill-box or two, hastily erected in 1940 and now, so general opinion feels confident in asserting, unlikely to be used. Then a halt and a rapid dismounting. For not only have we drawn opposite the Rosa II, but there, standing riderless but erect on the brow of the embankment, identifiable, in fact, long before we reach it, is a Velocette motor-cycle.
So my hunch was accurate. But goes uncongratulated. Dad still wears, despite his cyclist’s flush, his witness-of-a-ghost look. We gaze down the bank and exchange significant glances. The motor-cycle keeps guard over what is clearly a makeshift mooring: two angle-iron stakes driven into the slope of the bank, ropes trailing from each. A contrivance, no doubt, of the two-man crew of the Rosa to save the trouble, during favourable states of tide, of rowing all the way from the Staithe Ferry landing-stage. And the tide is plainly favourable at present. Because the river is high, and the green-fronded ends of the ropes snake languidly into water which is uncertain which way to flow. A simple matter, therefore, to conclude that the dinghy now tied up to the Rosa’s hull, just upstream of its attendant sludge barge, is the same that but a while ago must have been tethered to the bank.
Nothing stirs on the dredger. Over an hour has passed since Dick departed, sack on back, down the Gildsey road. A trio of seagulls perches on the idle bucket-ladder. Wasting no time, Dad fills his lungs, puts hands to mouth and repeats the cry uttered from my bedroom window. ‘Di-i-i-i-ick!’ A good, professional bellow this time – the cry of a man used to hailing lighters on the mist-bound Leem, and surely audible across the water on this still and torpid summer evening. But Dick doesn’t appear. The cry reverberates as if in some empty room.
He shouts again, allowing a pause, as if planning, if necessary, on regular shouts at ten-second intervals. The three seagulls, unmoved, nonchalantly arch their wings; then suddenly take squawking to the air. And then we see him. We see, that is, a figure – and there’s no mistaking Dick’s figure – emerge from the bowels of the dredger and lumber, like some half-awake animal disturbed in hibernation, towards the nearside rail.
We can’t see his face, we can’t read his expression (Dick – expression?). But we don’t have to guess at the cause of that lurching gait or that strange lolling of his head as he stares at us across the water. He raises to his lips what can only be a bottle and ostentatiously quaffs.
‘Di-ick! Di-ick – for God’s sake, boy, come back!’
But Dick is obeying other, authentically paternal instructions. In case of emergency—
He throws the bottle, emptied, over the side and ducks out of sight, as if to fetch another from his hidden hoard. The
gulls swoop, wheel and return to their perch. The floating eyesore of the dredger, bucket-ladder raised in the non-operative position, presents to us its lop-sided, rotten-toothed grin.
Dad turns to me. ‘You have a go.’
He stands, recovering his breath, watching my own loud-hailing efforts like an instructor appraising a novice.
My cries (did you hear them, Dick?) die on the air.
‘No good. We’ll go back to the ferry. We’ll get a boat and go out and get him.’
We pick up our bikes. We mount and ride off along the bank, the Ouse this time on our left.
A ferry no longer operates at Staithe Ferry. A new three-pier road bridge, built in the mid-thirties north of the village, has made the former, centuries-old mode of crossing redundant. There remain some cottages, a boatyard, a landing-stage and, next to the old ferry point, the half-timbered Ferry Inn.
The cindered forecourt of the Inn is almost deserted, but it is well past the Sunday opening time and a grey Ford saloon parked at a careless angle and displaying on its rear seat a pair of US Air Force forage caps, suggests a roistering party of our American allies. We lean our bikes against the white-washed Inn wall – where a rust-pocked enamel sign still announces ghostly ferry charges – and make for the bar door. But even as we do so a sudden eruption of noise, breaking the languor of the evening, stops us in our tracks.
A series of rattles and grindings, a medley of explosive, mechanical retchings and hiccups issues from upriver. Followed, to the accompaniment of various raucous subnoises, by a persistent rhythmic hubbub: Chung-gha-chung-gha-chung-gha! The dredger has started. Dick has started the dredger.
We stand for several seconds on the forecourt, beneath the motionless inn sign, in frozen appreciation of this fact. Then turn again, with renewed urgency, to the door. But we do not need to open it. For who should emerge at this same moment, closely followed, in trim crew-cuts and shirt-sleeve order, by two USAAF aircraftmen, but Stan Booth, skipper of the Rosa II, bafflement on his bleary face and whisky on his breath.
He stares through us – at the source of this sound which has clearly activated even his drink-sedated senses – and only after his eyes have endorsed his ears (the bucket-ladder is dipped and turning; wisps of oily smoke are dispersing above the dredger), do they register our own gaping presence.
‘What the—?’
But – wait a moment – hasn’t he seen this man before? This is Henry Crick, isn’t it? He who on his son’s behalf— A glimmer of realization combined with a vague ripple of relief crosses the dredger-skipper’s face.
‘Mr Crick, I know your lad’s a bit—’ (he taps a plump finger to his temple in place of a word) ‘—but can’t ’ee tell a Sunday from the rest of the week?’
He stops, looks suddenly, with uncertainty, at the assembled company.
‘ ’Tis Sunday, ent it?’
We concur. It’s Sunday, without a doubt.
‘An’ ’tis him on board, ent it?’
Something in our faces is draining the relief from his.
We concur again.
‘So what the—?’
Upon the threshold of the Ferry Inn (licensee, so the inscribed lintel proclaims, J. M. Todd) Dad attempts the mammoth task of explanation. Attempts. Gives up. Grimacing and stuttering, he pushes me forward (tacitly acknowledging my schoolboy adroitness, my powers of intelligible exposition).
‘You tell him, Tom, you tell him for God’s sake.’
I open my mouth. I review in my mind a dozen possible starting-points; I foresee confusion and incredulity; I realize the utter impossibility of encapsulating, in the space of a moment, the causes of my brother’s (my whose?) presence, this August evening, on the Rosa II. I settle for succinct fabrication.
‘He’s gone barmy.’
(Forgive me, Dick.)
‘He’s gone barmy. He got himself drunk and rode off on his bike. We d-don’t know,’ (ah, truthfulness at last!) ‘what he might do.’
Stan Booth’s face darkens with a frown. Behind him the two clean-cut USAAF boys seem to puzzle over this strange English word, ‘barmy’.
Meanwhile, beside me, Dad undergoes a series of scarcely detectable yet agonizing spasms. Faced with this statement of mine, in one sense a master-stroke of quick-thinking, in another a patent evasion, a reminder of his own inability when the moment comes (that unconfiding walk on the tow-path) to speak, he can stand no more. The stretched tissue of silence and concealment gives way. He breaks down. (And so too breaks down – it won’t be patched, won’t truly be mended till Tom Crick marries Mary Metcalf – the harmonious relationship of father and son.)
All but dropping to his knees on the penitential cinders, beneath the gallows-like inn sign, he splutters:
‘And he killed Freddie Parr. You know, Freddie Parr who drowned. Killed him. Murdered him. And he’s not my son. I mean, he is my son. I mean. O God! O Jesus Christ God help me!’
His eyes moisten. A stray ghost of a breeze makes the signboard creak and lifts a strand of his thin hair.
Stan Booth draws a slow breath. The two aircraftmen (later we learn their names are Nat and Joe) adopt dumbstruck expressions, inwardly revising perhaps those guidebooks issued to US servicemen in which they are officially advised that the inhabitants of rural England are reserved and unexcitable.
No one rushes to fetch the police. No one believes him. The truth is so much stranger than—
‘You mean this guy on the boat killed a guy?’
A small roundel is stuck on the windscreen of the nearby Ford. The silhouette of a giant cactus, in blood-red, against an orange background. The legend, in turquoise: ‘Arizona: Queen of the Desert’.
Sniffing the unmistakable scent of crisis, other occupants of the Ferry Inn have emerged on to the forecourt. The pipe-sucking landlord – J. M. Todd himself. Two wizened-featured locals with the air of regular bar-haunters.
And all the time as this group-tableau forms, the noise of the dredger continues, like a tocsin. The sound which every weekday must be so familiar to the inhabitants of Staithe Ferry that they scarcely heed it – reminding them as it does that all is normal, the Ouse is undergoing its ever-needed, never-ending decongestion – now rattles out on a Sunday, when it should be absent. From which it can be inferred that all is not normal.
Stan Booth speaks.
‘Beats me. Beats me, blust it! All right, we’ll take a boat an’ go out there.’
A general movement to the landing-stage. A two-thwart rowing-boat bobs on the high water as if expressly waiting for us. Stan Booth, directing operations, takes by way of a first precaution a packet of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lights up. Camel brand: compliments of aircraftmen Nat and Joe. He puffs, eyeing the run of the tide, weighing up, perhaps, two eventualities – that a latent maniac is about to sabotage his dredger, that he’s about to lose, because of some weird family rumpus, the best dredger’s mate he ever had – then gives orders for embarkation. Dad offers to row. Stan Booth gives him a strange, pitying look and directs him towards the stern. My intimacy with events begs a place beside him. The two Americans clamour for inclusion – something, given the circumstances and the boat’s dimensions, no wise coxswain would permit. Stan Booth forbids, then yields. Only the combination of his own state of whisky-bemusement, the favourable tide, which is still just on the flood, their persistent pleas (‘Maybe you’re gonna need some help, if this guy’s, like violent’), and – possibly most important – the implicit bribery of further packs of Camels and tots of whisky, allows a boat intended to carry with ease and safety no more than three, to leave its moorings with five.
Before boarding, one of the aircraftmen races back to the parked Ford. He returns with a pair of field glasses. Black bakelite. US Air Force issue. ‘Hey, fellers, we could use these.’ He slings the binoculars by their leather strap around his neck, like a camera-primed tourist about to take a trip round the bay. Clambering into the boat, he gives a flashing grin and a jerk of a salute to Dad and me
. ‘Hi, I’m Nat Tucker, this is Joe Shulberg. We’re from Tucson. Tucson, Arizona.’ He gets out his own pack of Camels. Stan Booth spits on his palms. Dad slips the painter. We shove off.
It’s not like our little old Leem. It’s like a sea. It’s the Great Ouse, which flows into the Wash. Which once merged with the Rhine. It has a salty, unparochial tang. Viewed from a small boat veering into midstream, its banks seem far off, like miniature coasts.
We nose towards the dredger, impelled as much by the push of the tide as the labouring oar-beats of Stan Booth. The light, veiled all day by the clammy summer cloud, is starting to dim. Not that we need yet strain our eyes. For, as any boatman will tell you, light lingers longest where there’s water. It’s on land that the shadows thicken fastest. And not that we have much to look upon: the approaching bulk of the dredger (from our little boat it seems so much bigger, more monstrous than it did from dry land); the receding Ferry Inn and the road bridge behind us; to either side, the blank and cryptic ramparts of the banks, cutting out the distance as if they conceal the fact that there is nothing behind them.
A low and liquid world, a scarcely substantial world. So different (even then, errant curiosity …) from the fierce sierras, the cowboy bluffs and canyons of Arizona …
The aircraftman with the field glasses (Nat? Joe?) directs them on the Rosa.
‘Can’t see nothin’ at all.’ His face is fresh and pleased with itself.
He catches my glance.
‘Here, kid, you wanna take a look?’
Over Stan Booth’s heaving shoulders, he holds out the field glasses as if offering the eternal gum and chocolate. Grins. ‘Go ahead.’ As if I’m some goggling aborigine who’s never seen before such a marvel of the new world.
