The Stranger from the Sea

by Paul Binding

  “We entered him in our ship records as an American because that’s what he said he was, though I now have my doubts, and as a bo’sun by trade. But I have my doubts about that too. Definitely—100% certain—he’d been a bo’sun on his last ship, which had sailed up the east coast of America, from Charleston, South Carolina, to Halifax. We know that because First Mate Andersen talked to her captain in Halifax who gave Johnston a tremendous recommendation. The only reason why Johnston was leaving his command was his personal need to be back in Europe.

  “In case you’re thinking Johnston didn’t have sufficient experience for the position of bo’sun, then you’re thinking wrong. Quite the opposite; he had a great deal too much. He’d clearly dealt with stuff well outside your usual bo’sun’s duties. Twice I heard him mutter under his breath something about a certificate he’d studied for, and both times I thought: ‘You’ve been a Mate yourself at some stage!’ That’s as far as I got in knowing about his past. But I’m telling the truth when I say that I’ve never met anybody—in Norway or in the Americas—with such a store of knowledge.”

  “Explain!” I asked, intrigued.

  Perhaps if I hadn’t inquired in that manner, Hans, carried away by his own narration, would have done this. As it was, his face underwent a disquieting change, suggesting to me (who, after all, had known him less than a week) that he was made of steelier stuff than his complaisant manner might suggest. He didn’t want—or intend—to say anything more on this matter, not for now.

  “Johnston and his knowledge will not be what your newspaper’s interested in,” he said, and there was no denying the reproof in his voice. “It will want the difficulties of Dronning Margrete in the Dover Straits during the worst of the gale. Besides”—to my dismay he sank himself back in the basket-chair, and passed a hand along his brow to mop up perspiration—“I should not tire myself by talking too much of troubling things. Dr. Davies says I shouldn’t.”

  Accordingly, we paused there. Beatrice Fuller and Sarah had astonished me with their attentiveness, and soon Sarah was bringing out a jug of lemonade and a plate of sweet biscuits, which helped Hans regain his earlier energy. But when he and I resumed the interview, I learned, against the birdsong and amid the pear and crabapple blossoms, a truth which subsequent experiences as a pressman have only confirmed.

  People are neither at their most articulate or accurate when describing the extreme situations they have endured and survived. You might think they would be, but mostly they are not. The very enormity of their experiences defeats them, and maybe also they are afraid of finding themselves enmeshed in them anew and so refrain from recreating them in any circumstantial detail.

  Certainly that is how it was with Hans Lyngstrand. He gave me a bald summary of those weather conditions in the English Channel that Dronning Margrete had to face, but it scarcely differed from the versions with which I was already familiar, its language as flat, as matter-of-fact, as any coastguards’ report. And when he reached the ship’s last hours—which were of course also the last hours of many a shipmate whom he’d worked alongside and known intimately—he started speaking (it seemed to me) almost as though he were in the witness box in court, giving evidence on behalf of his Norwegian Captain, defending him from any ungenerous as well as unjust accusations.

  “Once we were in the Strait the headwind was too strong for us. Waves are more dangerous in narrows where you can’t escape them, and worse in shallow water than in deep. Our Second Mate told us that if you set St. Paul’s Cathedral down on the seafloor of the Dover Strait, it wouldn’t be completely submerged; that’s how shallow it is! Oncoming waves put dreadful stress not just on our rigging but on the whole structure of the hull, and so when that cracked and the ship sprang a leak, we were shocked but by then not really surprised. ‘The bulkhead’s gone! We must all take our chances NOW!’ our Captain cried. These are words every sailor has imagined hearing yet has always hoped he never will, especially when coming from a calm, quiet, wise man whose authority was law.

  “From that moment existence became one desperate attempt to get the scattered crew into the aft of the ship and from there onto the lifeboats. But it was impossible properly to see what we were doing, the spray was coming at us so furiously like flights of arrows in some olden battle. And the noise of it drowned out almost all of our voice. When Johnston raised his voice: ‘Stand by the boats! STAND BY THE BOATS!’ it could have been God himself ordering us.

  “I have asked myself since, over and over again, whether the Captain should have made a decision earlier to shelter our ship in some French port until the weather improved, rather than take her so exposed further to the northeast. Possibly he should. There are those, I have heard, back in Bergen who think just that. But honestly we had no indication that conditions would turn so hostile so quickly. Dronning Margrete was not the only vessel in the Strait that afternoon, not the only one to get into difficulties.

  “None of the crew gave way to fear, but some, you could tell, were desperately afraid though resolute in not showing this. For myself I felt fear coming very close to me, but I was able to resist it—somehow! Then ‘STAND BY THE BOATS!’ came Johnston’s voice again. Many of us felt our last moments had arrived, and of course, Martin, they were right to feel that. The last minutes had! Some of us noticed that the ship’s White Cat wasn’t around anymore; two of the hands tried to look for him but were unable to move on the deck it was tilting so violently one way or the other. Even though we’d been in evil seas before—including on this very voyage—a lot of the sailors couldn’t believe what was happening to them. They thought that sooner or later, things would return to normal—as they always had done before. When they saw that this time they were not going to, most of the crew turned strangely calm, and that for me was the worst thing of all. All these lively men and boys, who for weeks on end had taken all manner of risks as a matter of course, were now patiently preparing for the end of the ship—and for the end of themselves, too!”

  “And you?” I could not stop myself from asking. “Did you believe you would come out of the wreck alive?”

  Hans shook his head not so much in denial as in baffled wonderment that he, unlike others, was still among the living. “I did as I was told,” he replied. “The Captain said, stay by my side, out of his promise to Herr Strømme—so stay I did. And that put me near Bo’sun Johnston as well, and I thought: ‘That man is a survivor if ever anybody is!’ But then, to watch him dart and leap about the ship, you’d have said the same about White Cat, and where had he gone? It was only when I was in the longboat—getting thrown out into the sea and clambering back—that I doubted I’d come through, and by then I’d stopped having what you might call my normal thoughts and feelings.”

  Perhaps temporarily, briefly, he returned to this state of being, for he fell silent and I could detect his strong disinclination to continue. I must respect him. In the quiet between us a blackbird sang in the espaliered pear tree. Mrs. Noah was waiting under the wall for a moment of weakness from him that happily never came.

  I worked on my piece all next day (Sunday), harder than I’d ever worked at anything in my whole life. Folk like Sarah went to their places of worship, and a great many other Dengaters remembered to keep the Sabbath holy by keeping as unoccupied as possible. I was distinctly impressed by the copiousness of my shorthand notes (Charles Dickens would surely have acknowledged me as a promising junior colleague at the very least!), and only very occasionally supplemented them by going across the landing to Hans with further questions. Just in case I needed them again, particularly before the next issue of the paper went to press, I stacked up my notes in a pile on my desk. That contributed to the effect I desired of mine being a proper journalist’s room.

  My piece ended:

  “Mr. Lyngstrand’s happiness at having survived so terrible an ordeal has only one thing marring it: his concern for the whereabouts of the ship’s boatswain, Mr. Alfred Johnston. He would welcome news of him as he still devout
ly hopes that the dinghy conveyed him to safety, so he can once again employ his remarkable store of knowledge for the benefit of others.”

  “Shh!” said Philip Goodenough to Archie Penry on Monday morning as I was trying to get on with another piece of work while Edmund perused a further revised version of my piece. “The young prince mustn’t be disturbed; he’s busy earning his spurs.”

  “Let’s hope once he’s earned ’em,” said Archie Penry, “he’s able to keep ’em; that’s the difficult part. Especially if you’re a bit wet behind the ears.”

  They went on in this snide, stupid vein until I felt obliged to look up from my corner, screwing up my eyes to do so, for I was working in a great splash of bright spring sunshine. “I’m glad you both find me so funny,” I said. “Perhaps if you like humor so much, you should go to Dengate Pier and watch the clowns.”

  “Oh, I don’t think we need go there, Mr. Bridges,” said Archie Penry, “when you provide better entertainment free of charge.”

  Edmund’s abilities as an editor, his way of transforming the indifferent into the good, I appreciated from the first. But going in and out of his office for yet another going-over and improvement of my interview piece, under the amused gaze of the others, irked me—especially as I had to keep up a seamless good front. It turned a working-day in which I’d hoped to prove myself no neophyte but a born journalist into something of an anticlimax. But at the end of it Edmund said: “After all your good efforts, you deserve a slice of the afternoon for yourself. So, hop it now, with my blessing.”

  Well, that did make up for things a bit—though I would far rather have had my copy judged faultless. I would, I decided, walk the long way home last taken with Barton Cunningham. The Channel ahead drew my gaze with its many strong streaks of a rich deep blue; this was a phenomenon I hadn’t seen before. Young Peter Frobisher, a local lad who’d hardly ever left Dengate except for football matches in Margate, had told me this was the Spring Outburst, so familiar to me now, quite unknown to me then. The sea fills with plankton, which innumerable other creatures have moved in to feed on—sole, sardines, lobsters, even octopuses. No doubt Hans’s Alfred Johnston with his remarkable store of knowledge could have told me far more about it even than Peter.

  I passed by the Chinese/Japanese shelter, and the sight of a young courting couple—probably from a shop already closed for the afternoon—spooning on the bench made me remember those two pretty girls whom Barton and I had simultaneously turned ’round to look at. When would I have a chance of meeting their cousins and sisters, or was my life just to be confined to my own sex at the newspaper premises and at the printers’? I really might as well be confined on a ship like the ill-fated Dronning Margrete, which had foundered fatally in this very stretch of salt water on which the sun was now so benignly shining.

  By this time, I was within sight of the Royal Gardens railings. Beyond them I admired two huge horse-chestnuts—these trees, which don’t produce fruit until they are twenty years old, always suggest to me the defiance of time—their white flower-spikes already starting to rear upwards from the boughs. Within a week they would have fully bloomed, but very fine they looked even now against the new greens of the leaves and the gentle blue of the sky. How come, I asked myself once again, I had lived so many years on this earth and yet been so negligent of the wealth of trees, plants, and flowers all around me?

  A fair number of Dengaters of all ages were ambling about the Gardens in the warm caresses of the late afternoon, many peering at the progress of the bandstand-to-be, roped off from the over-curious. It was to be a proud octagon, entered via four openings in the delicate wrought-iron tracery running ’round the exterior, and surmounted by a gilded onion-dome.

  This particular afternoon (Monday, May 4) I couldn’t but be struck by a little group assembled about fifty yards beyond the gates into the park, below the nearer and taller of the two horse-chestnuts. Ten or so ragged-looking children, mostly boys, were standing in a rough semi-circle around a young woman my own age, who was apparently giving them a lecture. It being half past four in the afternoon I doubted this was a teacher with a school class, though she clearly had some kind of authority over her audience, which was attending to her with evident respect and even interest. Probably my curiosity in this open-air meeting would not have been aroused—to the point of considerably slowing my walking-pace and debating whether to go home through the gardens rather than around them—if the girl’s hair had not been so arrestingly beautiful. Appropriately enough its color was chestnut, the very hue of the conkers these great trees would produce in due season. She was wearing a light-gray velvet-trimmed cloak ending just above her waist, below which flowed the pleated dark-gray of her skirt. When her voice became properly audible, it had a bubbly, breathy confidence that quite took my fancy.

  “We call the flowers of these chestnuts ‘candles,’ and you can see why, children, can’t you?” Vigorous murmurs of assent followed. “These trees usually grow to between eighty and a hundred feet in height,” she now informed them, “this one here being probably about ninety feet tall.”

  “Yes, miss!” loudly agreed a chubby, pasty-faced little boy close to this young instructress, “ninety feet would be my reckoning too.”

  “When you look at horse-chestnuts now, so strong and huge and so much a part of these gardens, you imagine they have been in England for ever and ever. But in fact they come from Greece and the Balkans, and weren’t brought to our country before the sixteenth century. But Shakespeare lived in time to see the trees and admire them.”

  Really? I feared some of these kids might well not even know who Shakespeare was. At this point I saw the girl’s face turn in my direction. Heavens, she mustn’t catch me gawping at her! Realizing she had an observer in the vicinity, she held onto herself, wordless in mid-speech, for a few moments, like some dancer keeping statue-still in the middle of some arabesque.

  Then, somewhat pointedly as it seemed to me, she said: “Come along, children, let’s see how well you remember what I told you about the hawthorns!” and moved on several steps deeper into the Royal Gardens, her little troupe following. All except one, one of the oldest of the boys, aged about eleven, who, with a “see you on Wednesday, miss!” bolted off down the drive and through the open gates—to run slap into me.

  “Steady on! Look where you’re going, young man!” I said, in a friendly enough voice. This near-collision could be useful to me. “Whatever have you just been up to just now in the Gardens?”

  “Hearing miss talk about the wonders of nature!” came the straight, unabashed answer. “She does it Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays. Anyone who wants to can come and listen to her. On Saturday she told us about broom. Broom ain’t got anything to do with gorse, you know. They’re just both yellow. Golden-yellow, if you like.”

  “Absolutely,” I agreed. “And who, may I ask, is she? The cat’s mother?”

  “Don’t know her name, mister. We all just call her miss.”

  “That’s very forward of you,” I told him, “when you’re so young. And where might she live?”

  “Wouldn’t you just like to know, mister!”

  Clearly a more roundabout way of getting information was required, one that flattered the boy with a sense of his own importance.

  “And what is your name?” I asked, as though personally interested.

  But I’d underestimated him; this urchin was wise to my cunning. “Ain’t got one!” he said.

  “I can’t believe that. Everyone’s called something.”

  “Well, what’s your name then, mister?”

  “Martin.” I felt justified in holding back my surname.

  “Well I never! Martin’s my name too.”

  He had won—this round anyway.

  “Nice to know we have such an important thing in common!” I said, not challenging him. “Do you live ’round here?”

  “No.”

  “So where do you live?”

  “I live in Farthing L
ane, don’t I, mister?”

  Farthing Lane. Why, that was where the vehicle Mary lived.

  “And where might that be?” I asked after a pause.

  But too late! The ragamuffin had taken to his heels with the celerity I myself had possessed at his tender age. Irritated at myself I watched him turn a far corner and pass into invisibility.

  A letter was waiting for me in Castelaniene. The bold scrawling hand on the envelope I identified at once as that of my old London pal, William Postgate.

  “I promised you a visit.” I read . . .

  You secretive man you, who has let me know so little about all his doings, doubtless nefarious, down in sleepy old Dengate. I have every intention of coming down in person in the imminent future to wake you up and hear your account of them, right down to the last naughty detail. I am writing as a man on holiday before he—But whist! Not a word of what is to befall one William Postgate, Esq. Not until we meet! Meanwhile I have been tasting the pleasures of the Idle Life alongside Walter Pargeter and Lionel Cartwright—who send their regards and remember you as a bit too drunk in Soho to be able to give a proper reply to the magnificent valedictory speech I delivered—a-walking the Sussex downs (“mens sana in corpore sano,” you know) and making the most impressive strides as an artist with the old pencil and paper. Yes, I’ve executed no end of sketches of scenery, geographical and human, these last days. Leonardo da Vinci must be my middle name—or my three middle names if you insist on being pedantic. At the end of a week I shall bid my comrades a fond farewell (I trust it will be fond, though we have been argufying something terrible of late, particularly when one of us talks to a pretty girl who the others are damned sure they spotted first!) and then I shall make a solitary contemplative way north-eastward up the Kent Coast. Therefore I will arrive sometime Sunday afternoon at a certain Channel Port to see a certain young friend, living in a certain house with a certain preposterous Eye-tie name, (we are talking about Sunday, May 10, I hasten to make clear)—and I expect to stay that night either in the aforesaid house or in some palatable nearby hostelry to be found by your good self. I hope this news fills you with due elation.