Our Time Is Gone

by James Hanley

  ‘Make passage there.’

  Clouds of steam floated in the air, the air smelt strongly of carbolic, of disinfectants, of urination. An engineer smoked a pipe, leaning against the bulkhead, hands behind him, drumming upon it with his fingers. A long file of women passed him. He hardly noticed them, but other men working on a steam-pipe made a point of deliberately obstructing their passage. They had to force their way past them. Some rude remarks were passed, a woman who winked was pushed against the bulkhead. Down below rumbling sounds could be heard. Snatches of conversation rolled along the alleyway.

  ‘Dirtiest ship I ever seen. Might have cleaned her up a bit before she came in. Wouldn’t care for these women’s jobs. Muck everywhere.’

  ‘No time to clean her up. Lucky to get in at all. Chased in she was.’

  ‘For God’s sake, woman,’ exclaimed Mrs. Gumbs, ‘keep close to me, and take no notice of anybody. Watch me. I never take notice of what men say. And another thing, be careful when you come to the open hatch, or you won’t have to do any worrying.’

  They pushed on through the alleyway. It was crowded with life—crowded to suffocation. And still they came on, men, women, boys, through the half-light, along slippery decks, through the smells, the orgy of sounds that beat like great wings throughout the whole ship. Down on the lower decks men with squeegees and hoses were cleaning the top layers of accumulated filth. Nobody knew where the ship had come from. She stank. She breathed putrefaction.

  One said she had sailed in from Hell. Another said: ‘Hell is cleaner,’ and gathered into his hands and over his arms, so that the pile grew as high as his neck, pieces of bandages, dirty rags, blackened handkerchiefs, rotting socks, towels stiff as boards, belts, bundles of paper, gathered the whole festering mass and said: ‘Beats me where all the stuff comes from!’ He filled a canvas sling with it.

  ‘Keep close,’ Mrs. Gumbs said. ‘We’re all mustering on B deck,’ and still afraid that Mrs. Fury might possibly put a foot the wrong way, she hung on to her coat. Water streamed down the top decks, the scuppers became choked, and the dead water of the dock took the burden of the cleaning, of the scavenging of the filth of war.

  On B deck the women lined up and one after another they were told off to their jobs.

  Mrs. Gumbs leaned close to Mrs. Fury and said quietly: ‘Did I tell you I was going away on Saturday? Yes. Saturday to Sunday night. I’m going to Bristol. A great friend of mine, whom I haven’t seen for years, is coming home on leave to Bristol to-morrow. I thought I’d told you,’ she concluded.

  ‘No! I never knew,’ Mrs. Fury said, and said no more, for the overseer came up to the line, grabbed coats, said: ‘You, you, you. Glory hole.’

  Mrs. Fury had never heard this word before, and Mrs. Gumbs explained that they had to clean out the orderlies’ quarters.

  ‘Come along,’ she said. ‘We collect our cleaning things from the galley. What’s supposed to be a galley,’ and then she talked of Bristol.

  ‘I hope you have a nice journey,’ Mrs. Fury said.

  ‘I’m sure I will. Here’s your bucket, cloth, brush. Now we say good bye till one a.m.’

  Without another word Mrs. Gumbs passed into the glory hole and down the ladder. Mrs. Fury went to her section.

  ‘Yes,’ thought Mrs. Fury. ‘This is a dirty ship. Different to any of the others.’

  First you scraped the blood and slime and waste. Then you applied water and sand and scrubbed. You washed this away, and used soap and scrubbed again. Then you sat back on your heels and rested your back.

  ‘The ship must sail on the morning’s tide,’ the voice said, ‘and she must be clean.’

  The whole ship resounded to it, scraping, scrubbing, scrubbing, scraping. She thought of Mrs. Gumbs going off to Bristol. She felt she would like to go too. Mrs. Gumbs would see her friend there. She would be there till Sunday. No Sunday afternoon talk this week.

  Draughts of air came down through the ventilators. Wire bunks creaked. The ship’s siren blew. They were testing the whistle. From where she knelt the sounds of scraping and running water were loud in her ears. ‘Thank God Denny is not on a ship like this,’ she said to herself, and continued her scrubbing. ‘He would be furious if he saw what I’m doing.’ She swung her arm out from the shoulder, made a complete arc. The strong smell of the carbolic rose up from the deck.

  ‘Sometimes I wonder if after all I’m not a fool for doing this.’ She squeezed water from the cloth. ‘I don’t mind it. I’m used to this. I’ll just give it all up when Denny gets home, and it will have done me no harm. But I wish Mrs. Gumbs wasn’t going away.’

  She scrubbed till half-past twelve.

  Mrs. Gumbs called: ‘Mrs. Fury!’

  There she was. Extraordinary woman Mrs. Gumbs. Never looked tired, never looked hot, or flustered. She couldn’t help remarking upon it.

  ‘Well, I’ve done nothing else,’ said Mrs. Gumbs. ‘What I mean to say is that I’ve done it so long I’m quite used to it, and it hasn’t done me any harm. And I don’t think it has you, either. You’re a far different women to when I first saw you. All work’s dirty, isn’t it? Any kind of work, Mrs., and we all try to dodge it, but the fact is once you are working you’re happy. I don’t mean this kind, of course. This is a dirty ship. Never seen one like it. But it keeps your mind off things. Now let’s get some hot water for tea,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll miss you,’ Mrs. Fury said, as they went along to the galley.

  ‘Miss me? Ridiculous, woman! You won’t miss me at all. That’s the thing about you that I admire. Look at me. Suppose this friend didn’t come to Bristol. Well, I have nothing else to do, to fall back on so to speak. But look at you. Your world’s never empty, Mrs. Is it? All your family are away. You might say you had nothing. But you have, and I envy you for it, Mrs. It’s wonderful. Look the way you go off to chapel of an evening. When my world’s empty and I haven’t a single thing to do, I feel in a way that you are well off. I wish I could believe like you. But you see I was brought up another way to you. I often watch you going out of an evening, and worry or no worry, hard life or soft life, you look happier than a sight of people I’ve seen. I wish sometimes I could be like you. I do, honestly. So you’ll miss me just because I’m going away for two days, not two days really?’

  ‘I will nevertheless. Even when you’re up in your room it’s nice knowing you are there, Mrs. Gumbs. You’re the one friend I’ve got now, and I mean that.’

  ‘Well, it’s nice of you to say it. Here, give me that can. That’s it.’

  She went into the galley and made tea. They went along the lower decks, sat down on some dunnage and had their early morning meal.

  ‘I thought I’d be sick to-night,’ said Mrs. Fury. ‘It is a dirty ship.’

  ‘Nonsense! I’ve seen worse. Just think of what we don’t see! That’s what I say, Mrs. It’s what we don’t see in this awful war, isn’t it? We’re jolly lucky. No doubt this ship was full of nice young lads all gone off to fight, or it carried hundreds of them lying flat on their backs. Yes. Think of that. What you don’t see. It keeps you from being sorry for yourself. And you can be sorry for yourself, Mrs. I’ve seen it. I do hate self-pitying people, don’t you?’

  But Mrs. Fury did not reply. It was difficult to know how to answer it. ‘What makes you think I pity myself?’ she asked.

  Mrs. Gumbs shrugged her shoulders. ‘Oh, nothing,’ she said brusquely. ‘But I didn’t mean anything personal, Mrs. Lord no! And I certainly never meant to hurt your feelings. It’s my way of speaking. For heaven’s sake don’t mind me. All the same I have come across people like that and they make me sick.’ She took a very audible gulp at her tea.

  ‘I’ve never had the time for pitying myself,’ replied Mrs. Fury, and it was at once obvious to Mrs. Gumbs that she had talked too much. ‘I don’t think you understand everybody, Mrs. Gumbs, in spite of what you say. You don’t understand me, I’m sure. If I’d pitied myself I would have been in the grave years ago. And I had reas
on many a time. But you see I’ve always been able to turn the right way. I’ve lost nothing and regret nothing. I’ve always believed in God, and in His goodness, and goodness in people is something different altogether. When you have faith, Mrs. Gumbs, you have everything. You maybe don’t believe that, because you’re not a Catholic. But I do, and that’s the difference between you and me.’

  ‘And I admire you for it. Sometimes I’ve asked myself if what you’re doing wasn’t just some sort of penance or something, or just show, and I’ve thought: “Well, it’s pretty nonsensical coming down here scrubbing ships at your age. On the other hand, of course, you may want the money. Poor people are always wanting it.”’ She threw away the remains of her tea.

  ‘I’m simply an independent woman, and I’ve always been. It isn’t the first time I’ve gone out to work. And I don’t scrub here just for nothing. It means something to me. When I was a young girl my husband brought me over to England, I was no more than seventeen at the time, and I’ve spent all my life in it, and not once have I been back to my home. Well, I often think of my home and my great wish now is to go back there, and all I’m waiting for, is for this war to be over, and my husband off the blessed sea. He’s been forty-five to forty-six years on the sea, and that’s a long time, now isn’t it?’

  ‘It is a long time, Mrs. I have a habit of saying things sometimes because before I came to work on these ships I lived amongst people who listened to what I said, and never answered me back. But you have, and now I see the difference between us. Well! There’s the whistle. We must start again. Before you know where you are it’ll be daylight.’

  She disappeared behind a pile of packing-cases and was back at her job long before Mrs. Fury had moved away from the dunnage pile.

  She began to scrub again. But the deck was no longer of wood. When she looked at it it had turned itself into a green carpet, and Denny and she were walking across it, arm in arm, and a woman with a black blouse and a milk-white apron was calling to them from a cottage door. The grass was like a big pile carpet.

  In the distance there was a house with a blue door and the brass latch shone in the sunlight. Denny and she came to this door, and her grandfather opened it for them. They sat down to tea in the cottage with the blue door. ‘What a cool place,’ Denny said. She looked out through the door, watching two children carrying wooden buckets to the spring near by. A cow passed, a man behind it. A bell rang in the distance, and then an open carriage passed the door, and a very old man wearing a panama hat raised it as she called out: ‘Good afternoon, Mr. Lynch. A glorious day.’

  ‘Glorious!’ That was it. Glorious! That was the very word. Glorious.

  The woman’s arm made circles with the scrubbing-brush.

  ‘Glorious!’ she said. ‘That’s the word. The land was glorious.’

  And round and round the scrubbing-brush went, and behind her, men hammered, men sang, one laughed. And above, the deck was clean and the ship almost ready for the next voyage to a far place that was unknown.

  ‘Glorious! Glorious! It’s the name of a hymn too,’ she said.

  She wiped splashes of muddy water from her face. She moved to a new patch of deck. She hummed this hymn.

  CHAPTER XIII

  I

  ‘Don’t you think we’re lucky?’ said the man, leaning over the ship’s rail.

  The sea was blue.

  ‘I suppose we are,’ replied Mr. Fury, and watched the man beside him spit into the sea.

  ‘Luck’s everything,’ the man said, and turning away, went off towards the fo’c’sle.

  Denny Fury left the rail too, went on with his pacing of the deck. The fore-well deck was at this moment the limit of the world. He walked up and down. The enormous sun bent down its heat, and the sea trembled under the light. But the air was good. And that was what mattered to Denny Fury at this moment. One came from the heat and stench of stokehold, or one tired of the stuffy fo’c’sle and went out on deck. There, hands in pockets, one paced the clean, bare deck. One enjoyed the quiet, the good air, this reflective hour.

  Mr. Fury could count many such hours spent thus upon the fore-decks of ships. But he did not always reflect. He was a world, just as those who passed him by were worlds, and no man took count upon what he had put into a thousand hours, but what might come out of them. The sea might roll by, through great calms, or through tempests. The sun magnificently explore the many-coloured surfaces of different seas. But what mattered to Mr. Fury was that for a few hours the world of action had ceased to beat, its giant pendulum hung still, more silent than silence, and the fore-deck was the whole world to tread.

  He thought of Fanny. In the fo’c’sle, in the engine-room, and stokehold, pacing this deck. He thought of her as he lay in his bunk between the watches. He wondered about her, but did not worry. There was something so certain about her. When he came home she would be there, just as she had always been. She was a fine woman. And didn’t he know it! The substance of forty years or more they shared between them. And in his mind she had grown into something wonderful. He always told himself this. The things that Fanny had done, the things they had seen, the patience, the wonderful patience of that woman. And nothing could break her. In the reflective hour such thoughts passed through Denny Fury’s head. And this evening he wondered as he always did, but did not worry.

  Fanny was positive. She was definite. She was now grown into the most satisfying permanence. She was a cathedral. ‘A fine woman!’ he said to himself. ‘Fanny! A fine woman. It makes me wish sometimes that I could have done more.’ But then, yes, there were times when he had said he would, promised he would, and he had done them. Some he hadn’t done. And that mucked everything.

  ‘Those children,’ he would say. ‘Those children, why if I had my way, I’d have every one of them working. Good hard work won’t kill any of them. But you—you have other ideas, and you want to stuff them into their heads. Fire away, Fanny, and stuff all you like.’

  ‘Of course,’ she would reply, ‘you would say that! All right for you. Once you get on your old ship nothing matters. You’re free. Lucky you, I wish I was a man. How easy it is to talk from far-away distances.’

  Yes. They had often talked like that.

  ‘Well, what the hell does it matter now? The children are all off on their own, and now maybe we’ll be able to settle down in peace.’

  This was a thought in his head now, and it shone like a light. Be able to settle down to a bit of peace. All the struggles over. ‘Well—I don’t say she didn’t try. She did. By heavens she did. And I suppose I tried in my own funny way. But I’ve done a lot of hard work, and can’t see much for it. Perhaps when I was a younger man I might have followed her advice, got away to the States. Ah—sure what’s the use of talking now?’

  It was waste of time. Up, down, round and round he went, hands dug into his trousers’ pockets. Nobody disturbed. This patch of deck was his own.

  ‘I wonder how she’s getting on? Shifted again. That’s twice in a year, or something. Must be getting more ideas into that head of hers. Ah, sure, I’ve been a foolish man! She was too damned good for me. Ought to have married an ambassador or something, Fanny should,’stead of marrying me, an old lick-spit, with never two thoughts in his head about to-morrow! A good woman.’

  It always amazed him that through all her struggles, her patience never gave way, her faith ever held out. ‘She’s a brick and I feel god-damned ashamed of myself that I didn’t move. Bought her a hat now and again, took her to the Lyric. But what’s that? Nothing! Well, just wait. We’ll have good times together yet. I’ll make up for all this. We haven’t seen much of each other, Fanny, have we?’

  He stood shaking his head. No. They hadn’t! Well, she’d see. She’d see. He hadn’t forgotten. They were closer together now than ever they’d been. ‘But I was a damned fool not taking her out to the States at first. Here I am stuck in this bloody stokehold at the end of my life!’

  He could kick himself for all such foolis
hness, such indifference, such devil-may-care attitude towards the whole of living. One bell rang out sharp and clear. Mr. Fury made his way to the bulwarks, and leaned on them. Well, here was the place for remembering those things, for thinking and being full of regrets, over this and that, and the other thing. ‘She often thinks that all I have to do is to sail away and forget everything. Little she knows,’ he told himself.

  Sometimes he would pull one of her letters out of his canvas hold-all, and read it. There were never more than two letters. Out of the hundreds she had written him, he only had two. The others were simply rolled into balls and flung into the sea. He began to wonder if she had had any news from that solicitor chap. If she had gained a hope of seeing Peter.

  ‘A nice mess.’ This was Denny’s only comment on the whole affair. ‘A nice mess.’

  It was hard to look back now on all that struggle and waste, that obstinacy, that amazing determination that had put a halo round a lad’s head who was never meant for such things. ‘But to work! Damned hard work! That’s what he would have done had he had his road.’

  But where was he in all this, where had he ever been? Nowhere! He didn’t count. He sailed away and home again, turned up his money, a day or two of freedom, and then he was off again. It was difficult to believe that you had spent almost forty-seven years doing the same thing. ‘And you’re no better off in the end, whichever way you look at it.’

  Suddenly he laughed to himself, wondering if ever they would make that Irish trip. Perhaps it would be like that ‘wonderful cottage,’ that first John, then Peter, then all in turn had said was the one thing they wanted to get for Fanny and him.

  ‘What bloody cock-eyed nonsense it all was! The damned lot of it. Well, I’ve kept my independence any old how, and not one of them can ever say I asked them for a penny.’ Fanny couldn’t do that. No! She went down on her knees to the lot of them. Fool of a woman.

  He spat far into the sea, a dark blue sea whose surface was like glass, and upon which the sun beat and wavered. A sea like an enormous carpet, a silent sea, through which the ship passed alone, for nothing could be seen. Horizon’s line and nothing more. It was the zone of calm, of an abnormal silence. Mr. Fury turned and looked along the line of the ship. The deck throbbed under his feet from the engine’s powerful pulse. He knew that she had increased her speed. All knew, and why. His eye took in the deserted decks, the hollow corridors, the silent alleyways, and yet two days ago the whole ship had vibrated with life, fifteen hundred soldiers scattered over her decks. This morning she steamed at high speed, carrying only her crew, and a ballast of sand. ‘No doubt,’ he thought, ‘she’ll start that zig-zagging business about an hour now.’