Again, he nodded kindly at me and vanished. Before I had drawn three deep breaths, before even my mother could begin to speak, he reappeared and thrust a fat volume into my hands.
“Read,” he said. “Then read again. Get it into your mind.”
I have the book in front of me as I write: it is Flavius Josephus on the History of the Jews, printed by Marten Schagen in Amsterdam in 1736; Haverkamp’s edition, bound in speckled calf. I must read it one day, to appease a gentle ghost who was once the best and kindest cobbler in our Province.
My mother finished dressing my wounds in haste, then bustled about, putting all my good clothes into a bag made of carpet and filling up a little canvas bag with food.
“Now,” she said, “quick. Down to the wharf. Old Gerrit’s barge is tied up there for the night and he will be at the inn, drunken old fool that he is and a shame to his wife. Get under the tarpaulin and sleep. Not in the middle part of the boat, it is full of German coal; in the forepeak there is a cargo of Delft, your clothes will not get so dirty. Mind, when I say Delft, I talk of the rubbish they call Delft nowadays.”
Her eyes roved the room, as did mine; this time, perhaps, for the last time. From every wall and dresser, interspersed with lustrous copper-ware, twinkled the finest accumulation of blue-and-white Delft in Gelderland – and Noord Brabant. My mother had a passion for it; she would walk twenty miles through our flat countryside, divided by canals like rulers, to haggle for a fine old piece she had heard of. In the diamond-glazed corner-press were perhaps twenty pieces of the real Ming blue-and-white porcelain, some of them were of the true eggshell-ware, quite different from the so-called eggshell sold to common sailors, which my mother contemptuously called “dock-ware”. She had often told me of the long journeys by camel along the Silk Road from China of the real porcelains; their arrival in Venice (where some of the plainer pieces were “klobbered” with gilt and Venetian red over the original glaze, obscuring the simple blue brush-strokes) and so to our United Holland Provinces where the clever men of Delft had long ago imitated them almost to perfection – except that the “body” (they called it the arcanum, the secret matter) long remained a mystery, for the Chinese were as secretive about their China clay paste as they had been about the silkworm hundreds of years before; and except, too, that the slick miracle of the Chinese glazes was never quite repeatable. The old plateelschilders of Delft did wonders (and by 1720 they had winkled out the secret arcanum) but they could never quite recreate the ringing body, the succulent glazes, the delicate, off-hand brush-work of the Chinese. And they could not fool people like my mother, much as she loved the work of De Paeuw (The Peacock), Het Jonge Moriaenshooft (The Young Moor’s Head), De Dobbelde Schenkkan (The Double Jug) and all the other fine little workshops (named after the breweries they took over after the great fire of 1654 when the gunpowder-boat almost destroyed the town of Delft). Fortunately for them, there were few people like my mother. Fortunately for me, I was one of those few because, from my very childhood, she had played games with me and her treasures until I could tell pottery from porcelain with one flip of the back of my finger-nail, soft-paste from hard-paste with one nibble of the tooth, lead-glaze from tin-glaze with one caress of a wetted finger. Blindfold.
To speak plainly, I was not over-interested and had at times almost suspected that her preoccupation with pots was unwholesome, especially since my remote father sometimes gave me a moment of his time to explain that earthly treasures were but ordure and the only true riches were in the mind, where heaven existed. At my age, of course, I knew that heaven was neither earthly treasures such as Ming porcelain nor the recesses of my spiritual mind, but was contained in the bodices and drawers of young women. I am older now but I shall not pretend that I am much wiser.
“In the morning, early,” my mother continued, “I shall go down to Gerrit’s barge in the neighbour’s cart and shall explain things to him and give him some money. I shall give you some money too; not very much but enough to get you to England. I shall bring, in the cart, a chest of Delft – not of the choicest but good enough for the English. My sister’s cousin writes that in London today they are crazy for blue-and-white wares and cannot tell Wan-Li from De Metalen Pot. You shall walk around and about and listen without talking and so find out what the English will pay, then you shall take a little shop to sell the Delft from. Slowly, patiently; don’t push, don’t hawk; they will hear about you and they will come to you. The money I bring tomorrow will be enough for you to get established. If you do not whore too much, that is.”
“Such a mother as I have!” I cried with real affection, clasping her in my arms so far as the fatness of her little body permitted.
“Such a son as I have,” she said, without expression on her face, pushing me away. “Some more of this good chicken broth? No? You are a fool, where will you get such broth in England, where they eat beef rolled in suet every day? Now go, quickly, before the angry fathers arrive with dogs and whips. Go. I have to spend the whole night packing pieces of Delft in soft cloth, there is no time to listen to bad sons talking from the fronts of their mouths.”
I kissed her, picked up my bag of clothes and my bag of food and went out of the door, closing it gently. It opened again in an instant and my mother thrust a soft bundle inside my coat. Before I could ask what it was she was telling me.
“It is the blanket your grandmother wove for you before you were born. You well know that you have never been able to sleep without it. People you don’t need, not even me after the milk in my breasts dried. I understand you, my son; I looked into your eyes ten minutes after you came out of my belly. You will never understand yourself, thank God. Take the blanket and run.”
Then once again I was running, but now very gently and quietly; listening and running, running. All the dog I could hear barking was the Schipperke – “the Little Skipper” on Old Gerrit’s barge at the wharf ahead of me – and he would know me as soon as I drew near enough to speak to him and give him the piece of bread, dipped in chicken-broth, which I had thoughtfully slipped into my pocket.
He bit me gently about the ankles as I stepped aboard, then he ate the piece of bread and remembered that he liked me. I crept forward and undid enough lashings of the tarpaulin to enable me to creep in amongst the cases of pottery. The little dog, Kees – all Schipperkes are called Kees just as all dachshunds are called Waldmann – came in with me and licked my nose, while I rummaged in the food-bag. There was a little bundle of the greenish, twisted Sumatra cheroots such as my mother knew I loved, along with a box of waxed lucifer splints. I bit the end off a cheroot, moistened it carefully, relishing the treacly taste of the outer leaf, and struck a lucifer. The little dog, as quick as lightning, reached forward and patted it out. I had forgotten that all barge-dogs learn to put out sparks before they learn anything else. I tied him up with my neckerchief and fed him morsels of smoked eel while I lit another splint. There are few things nicer than smoked eel eaten with a green, sticky Sumatra cheroot.
When I had finished I pushed the little Kees out from under the tarpaulin and rested my head upon the bag of clothes. I did not hear Old Gerrit come aboard.
Chapter Two
There was a gentle but vexing schlipp-schlopping noise which annoyed me into wakefulness. “Piss off!” I said in Dutch but in a friendly way to little Kees, already intent as I was to become a dog-loving Englishman, my new life.
The noise did not piss off, nor the little Schipperke was not there licking my nose or stealing my mother’s good smoked eel. The schlipp-schlopp came from outside the fusty cell of crates and tarpaulin in which I had spent the night; indeed, it came from outside the very boat itself. We were, that is to say Old Gerrit, Kees and I were under way; we were moving down the canal under sail and as I became awake I found that I needed to be sick. Quickly. I fought my way out of the fore-peak, found a side and achieved the sickness. It was the wrong side that I had found. The side from which the wind was blowing. This was unpleasant. I made my
way aft, stumbling over things. Old Gerrit – who else? – was at the tiller with a nasty old pipe upside down in his toothless mouth. (His barge was one which still had the steer-board but he preferred to use the tiller for he was lazy, lazy.) He flicked an eye at me. His only eye.
“There is the bucket, there,” he said, pointing with his chin. I streamed the bucket over the side, cleansed myself as best I could and sat down upon the taffarel. “Taffrail” I later learned to call it: it means the rail enclosing the aftermost part of a vessel.
I had known Old Gerrit since I was a little child – say, ten years – and had always liked him: he looked like all the pictures in all the story-books. His chin almost touched his nose; he had no teeth at all in front but some, I think, at the back, for there he clenched his pipe and often, when we children teased him, munched and crunched off the end in fury and spat out a spray of clay pieces. His pipes were always very short. One of his eyes was covered with a shiny pink patch, tied on with a piece of ribbon; he once let us look underneath and wonder at the tiny wrinkled hole. The other eye was not nearly so nice: the eyeball was a rich chestnut-brown and the iris wobbled about in it like a raw egg in a bucket of blood.
“Your mother was here this morning,” he snarled. “We talked. Talked as best we could over you snoring like a sow pigging. Here.” And he kicked towards me a paper packet, a heavy one. I picked it up, looked it over carefully. It was sealed with my father’s ring and the wafers had not been disturbed.
“Why do you look so carefully?” he said. “Am I a thief to steal stivers from babies?”
“Are you?” I answered.
“Go and do something nameless to your sister.”
“I do not have a sister, Old Gerrit.”
“You are sure of that? Your father has sworn to that?”
I undid the packet. It contained one thousand gulden. I stowed them about my person, while Old Gerrit spat noisily over the side. A woman on the canal-bank berated him, calling him a disgusting old man, for the colourful spittle had landed upon her bleaching-lawn. Old Gerrit shrieked back that he had been a disgusting young man and that he saw no reason to change at the behest of fat, adulterous laundresses. Her reply, interestingly narrating his intimacies with his dog, was mercifully borne away by the wind as our boat drew a little wind and passed out of earshot. Dutch ladies are very clean and, except for laundresses, modest of speech.
“What else did my mother leave, Old Gerrit?” I asked.
“A chest of old pots for you. A few stivers for me: not nearly enough for conveying a nasty young fornicator to Rotterdam but I am no man for arguing with women.”
“No,” I said.
“Especially women like your mother.”
“Yes,” I said. “But what else did she leave?”
His eye wobbled at me menacingly for a moment and then, snarling and farting, he reached under a pile of nameless rubbish in the cockpit and fished out a big stoneware bottle of the true Z. O. Genever: this is a kind of gin but not at all like what is sold for gin in England.
“It was for me,” he said.
“Yes,” I said, gently taking it from his hand. I drank thirstily, thrust the bottle back into his hand, ran to the side and made another offering to the Lord of the Canal.
“Waste,” he said.
I drank some more; this time I kept it down and felt better.
“What is there to eat, Old Gerrit?”
What he said is not usually considered edible.
“No, seriously Old Gerrit, I am hungry – aren’t you?”
“There is a jack-pike and a perch, only a couple of days old; cook them, never mind the smell. Also some onions, you will find them.”
I found the fish – they took little finding, they almost found themselves – and the onions. Spitefully, I did not throw them over the side, I cooked them up for Old Gerrit, who grudgingly praised my deftness with the skillet. I myself ate smoked eel on good rye bread from my mother’s bag of food; capped it with another mouthful of the good Hollands and lit one of the Sumatra cheroots. Suddenly it was a good morning to be alive in; the sun sparkled on the little waves of the canal, crowning each one with a golden star, the sky was as blue as the finest Ming hawthorn-pattern jar; I had a thousand gulden in my pockets, my boots rested on a case of good Delft and before me lay adventure: London and London girls – city girls, not fat cousins and the pregnant, pudding-faced daughters of country Ridders.
Life was good. It is still pretty good but not good in the way that it was at that moment.
I was so happy that I gave Old Gerrit a cheroot: not one of the Sumatras of course but an old one from my pocket, good but a little cracked. He eyed it with disgust, crumbled it up and stuffed it into his nasty old pipe. He was famous for his ill manners.
After Hertogenbosch (“Bois-le-Duc” they still called it in those days) we had a fair fresh breeze for the Willemstad Hollandsch Diep – the nose of the barge positively “cut a feather” – and by evening we were tied up at Willemsdorp. Old Gerrit said that we would do the last leg, to Rotterdam, on the following day; he was tired and thirsty, thirsty, for I had been doling out the gin in small portions for his own good and because I, too, liked it.
I helped him with the brails – pieces of string which secured the big sail – then raced him to the inn and ordered something hot, which proved to be disgusting: sour cabbage and the belly-fat of a pig. I stayed my hunger with the speciality of the house which everyone else seemed to be drinking: rum stolen from the British Navy, served hot and spiced and with a little baked apple in every jug.
I fell in with good company at that inn; one young fellow of about my own age took my uneaten dinner and scoffed it greedily while his brother told jokes of a dirtiness then unknown to me. The jokes were very funny. When I told these brothers that I was bound for England they said that they and their father were sailing there too, on the next morning’s tide, very early. They were for Harwich but they reckoned that for a consideration they could take me to the Pool of London first. We haggled all evening, I pretending to be near destitute, and finally settled on six gulden (nearly half an English sovereign) for the passage, ten stivers (almost a shilling) for each hot meal and two stivers for every refreshment in between. I was right to trust them: thieves would not have asked such high prices – indeed, they would probably have offered to take me free, and robbed and perhaps murdered me.
By first light we three young fellows had drunk ourselves sober again and made our way to the wharf where their little ship lay, anchor a-cockbill, their father pacing up and down. To me the ship looked like the ordinary kettle-bottomed Dutch smack but they told me it was an English craft, built on the Humber: what the Yorkshiremen call a “billy-boy”. Years later I came to realise that their trade was probably that of a hoveller: one who ranges about in bad waters in hopes of finding ships in distress. Sometimes, it was rumoured, helping ships to get into distress. But they were kind to me and kept their word faithfully and I remember them with much friendship.
We got my crate of Delft aboard with exaggerated care, then my dunnage. I bade farewell to Kees and left a silver coin – perhaps I was not so sober after all – for Old Gerrit. I also gave him the old blanket of my childhood – such things were foolishness now. It would make a bed for Kees, the little dog.
To my surprise, on board the old round-ended, ketch-rigged “buss” there was the lads’ Mama: a Mama just like mine but bigger and with a better-grown moustache. She gave me a pot of coffee all to myself and a big slab of honey-cake and a smile. As I bit into the honey-cake I heard a squeal behind me and jumped around, but it was only the Mama scratching “St II” on the slate. Such coffee and honey-cake I would cheerfully give two stivers for today; indeed, I think I would give more if I had to.
All I knew about ships in those days was to do as I was told – and quickly – not to meddle helpfully without being told and, in between that, to keep out of the way, with my head low because of the boom. A man could go through his
life with three such basic pieces of wisdom; I sometimes wish I had never learned more.
Well, I did all these things: I helped with the brails and gaskets and the rest, then crouched low against the windward rail. The old-fashioned, flat-bottomed smack bounced on the water rather than floated and, when we came to the “gatt” of the Diep, and the wind was almost dead foul, she heeled over so far that I thought we were about to founder. The lads and their parents had oilskins but I had none: soon I was so drenched and cold that my chattering teeth would not have let me pray even if I could have recalled a prayer. The Mama was singing cheerily but this was of no help. After a while I crept into the “kajuit” or cuddy – a little sleeping-shed forward where my gear was stowed – and delved into my clothes-bag for some dry breeches. I also found a smelly old blanket in a hammock and wrapped myself up, feeling homesick, heartsick and, simply, sick.
Later, as I was almost becoming warm, the motion of the vessel abated and the deck became once more nearly horizontal. I came to believe that I would perhaps after all survive. One of the lads came in and hung up his streaming oilskins.
“We are clear of the Diep now,” he said cheerfully, “and we have a fair beam wind. We shall make a fast crossing. Have you been sick? No? Good. Have you any gin? You have? Very good!”
We drank a little. I had not realised that it was what I had been needing. We drank a little more. The sun began to shine, or at least it seemed so.
Later still the Mama came in with a splendid pot of coffee for me, this time with some thick slices of rye bread covered with thin, tasty slices of smoked beef. I made a face; a polite face, but a face.
“Eat!” she commanded in the very accents of my own Mama. I ate. To my surprise – and her satisfaction – I ate it all.
“That was good, mevrouw,” I said as I captured the last, errant crumb.
“For two stivers, jonge, it was very good. We are not thieves in this ship.” Seeing that I was somewhat abashed, she leaned forward and planted a great, noisy kiss on my mouth. Courteously, I did not wipe it off until she had left the “kajuit”. In a little while I went out onto the deck, where I smelled for the first time the true smell of the open sea, carried by a fresh breeze and enriched by a clean sunshine. Once again, it was good to be Carolus Van Cleef at that moment and in that year.
All the Tea in China Page 2
