‘Steady on, old man,’ a cheerful voice came from the back of the room and to my enormous relief, all attention swung suddenly away from me and the unfortunate Miss Davies to its owner. ‘Just give him another book, why don’t you? No need for a row.’ It was the whistler.
‘I suggest you mind your own business,’ McGrath snapped back. He shucked down his jacket sleeves with a shake of his arms, slowly and deliberately as if to re-establish just who was in control. ‘Well, Clarke. You will go and sit down and wait. I will endeavour to rectify the administrative chaos your carelessness will no doubt have left in its wake.’
Jowls shaking, he got up from his chair, presumably to go and fetch me another book and moved to pass behind Miss Davies. As he did so, he leant down to mutter in her ear, but not so inaudibly that the rest of us didn’t pick it up. ‘Bloody insolent. Nothing but a cub! Won’t last five minutes at sea.’
I had just reached my seat but had not yet sat down. I paused. I could have pointed out that I had been at sea since I was seventeen and that I had got along very well so far but given that all of this information was stored in my lost discharge book, I thought it imprudent to give him further ammunition. Especially since I assumed that he had got up to go and get me another book. But I was furious and must have looked it.
‘Don’t mind him, Mr Clarke,’ came the jovial voice again from the back of the room. ‘These officials. Spend a lot of time trying to impress,’ here he tipped his head at Miss Davies, ‘and not enough making any actual progress. They tend to be just so incredibly…’ He spread his arms, wide apart, palms up, and raised them with exaggerated resignation, ‘… officious.’ He pushed himself off the wall where he had been leaning and came over to me, hand extended. I took it and we shook. ‘Like I said, Cub,’ he winked, ‘no need for a row.’
McGrath glowered at him from behind Miss Davies and then stalked off into the room behind. He reappeared a minute or two later and went back to his desk, tight-lipped and crimson still with rage. He began shuffling angrily at his papers once more and called the next name.
‘Joseph Green.’
‘Joe,’ my ally said to me, loosing his grip and then louder to McGrath across the room, ‘Joe Green’ and he wandered over to the counter, taking his time. Wordlessly, McGrath took his discharge book and made a great show of looking it over. Finally, he gave it back and glanced down his list.
‘The Sithonia. First Radio Officer. Hoskisson dock.’
‘The Snithonia?’ Joe repeated, laughter behind his voice.
‘The Sithonia.’ McGrath growled back at him, more loudly.
At this point there was a snort of derision from behind me and I turned to see a small wisp of a man with hair stuck up all over the place, doubled up with mirth.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Arh, ’tis nothing. Nothing at all,’ he rasped, as Irish as they come. ‘She’s a real beautiful vessel.’ He crossed his arms and tucked his hands up underneath each armpit, before adding gleefully, ‘All kitted out and new, beautiful like. For sure, ‘t’ll be the most comfortable trip the lad ever took.’
Joe, hearing this exchange, grinned cheerily.
‘Snithers it is then,’ he said, snapping up his discharge book and sauntering back to the seat next to mine. ‘I might wait on here with you fellas for a while if you don’t mind. We might all be going the same way. It isn’t going to sail without me, now is it?’ he said, directing the whole piece to McGrath who was now positively emanating fury at him from behind the counter.
Jamie wasn’t called long after Joe and he too was assigned to the Sithonia as second radio officer. He didn’t seem very inclined to leave me there either for he came away from the desk and sat back down on my other side.
For as long as he could bear the three of us patiently watching him, McGrath made us wait. Arms folded, the three of us, like the three wise monkeys. In the end though, I think he was finally defeated by Joe Green’s absolute inability to remain quiet or still. He hummed. He whistled. He tapped his feet. He rapped out tunes on the chair rest. He fiddled with his shoes, his coat buttons. He emptied his pockets and chewed loudly on some hairy mint humbug he had recovered from within. Even Miss Davies’ nerves were beginning to unravel; she began to look imploringly at her colleague and then carefully incline her head towards Joe.
‘Right, Clarke. The Sithonia. Third radio officer. Let’s hope you don’t lose your way,’ was all McGrath could muster.
The Irishman behind us, unable to contain himself, was still cackling and wheezing when we left.
‘Can’t stand a bully,’ Joe said as he clattered down the stairs behind me. Out in the street, back in the sun and away from the stifling atmosphere of the office, I took a better look at him.
He was huge. Broad-shouldered and tall, he was a great big bear of a man with enormous forearms and spades for hands. I had always been considered tall but I was wiry and lithe. This bloke made me look like a reed. I guessed he was probably no less than thirty. He had large, open features, the most conspicuous being a wide, generous mouth that relaxed readily and often into a broad and easy grin. His eyes wrinkled at the temples and generally sparkled, giving the impression that he was about to embark on the telling of a particularly hilarious joke.
He wasn’t good-looking, his face was weathered and lined, but he was striking, not only thanks to his size but also to his evidently irrepressible good humour. The favourable impression he gave was capped off by a wild, unruly thatch of hair, neither fair nor brown but somewhere in between the two. Slightly longer than most men would have considered tidy, it was unkempt but not, it would appear, for want of any attempts to try and tame it. There was a vague kind of parting on one side, though what purpose it might serve remained unclear.
At nineteen, I did not yet know that there are only two or maybe three people you meet over the course of your life with whom you recognise an instant bond, an inexplicable connection. Sometimes it is evident before either one of you has even spoken and yet both of you are intuitively aware that it exists between you. Man or woman, it is not sexual, though it may not be wholly beyond the physical. It may be chemical, though more likely it is spiritual. It could be perhaps that your two souls were moulded from the same mettle and somewhere beyond all reason, the two souls recognise in one another their original kin and dance with delight at their reunion. So it was with Joe. If we had met at any point in our lives, we would have been friends.
‘What did you call me in there?’ I asked. Somehow there was no need for preliminaries.
‘When? Oh. McGrath coined it. Cub. Cubby Clarke,’ he laughed. ‘Suits him, don’t you think?’ and he appealed to Jamie who raised a quizzical eyebrow and, very unusually for Jamie, laughed.
We set off for the tram to Hoskisson dock together in inexplicably high spirits. The incident with McGrath had been distasteful but somehow Joe’s intervention had trivialised it for me and my anger and embarrassment dissolved in the midday sun. Furthermore, his natural cheeriness was infectious, giving rise in me to a kind of skittish exuberance. It was hot and cloudless, I was off to sea again with like-minded men, our ship was apparently a real beauty and I was young and eager to get going. Even Jamie was more jovial than usual.
‘We could always refuse to sail,’ he said, ‘just to annoy McGrath.’ It was within our rights as merchant seamen to turn down up to three tours of duty if we felt the ship we’d been assigned was unsuitable.
‘What, and give up the Snithonia?,’ I said, bouncing along beside them when we got off the tram. ‘Didn’t you hear what the Irishman said?’ I stopped and, throwing my arms out wide, brought my companions to an abrupt halt that they might more fully get the benefit of my best Irish brogue. ‘All freshly kitted out and new like! A beautiful vessel for sure, he said. No chance!’
‘You haven’t sailed with that many Irishmen, have you, Cub?’ Joe asked, eyes laughing.
‘Some. Why?’
‘Well, for a start your accent is God awful. So
unded like Welsh. Or Burmese. And … well, we’ll see,’ was all he would say.
The dock was humming when we got there and we wandered around a little, enjoying the general hubbub and the banter among the dockers in the bright morning sunlight. We examined other vessels and were even making jokes about the dilapidated state of some. Then I was brought up short by a laconic ‘I see’ from Jamie. He stopped suddenly just in front of me and I jostled in to him. My eyes followed his and there she was – the Sithonia. I saw too.
She was just about the cronkiest old boat I had ever laid eyes on. She looked like a salvaged wreck, cobbled back together with rusty steels and topped off with a hulking, concrete-encased bridge at the forrard end. The height of this was almost matched by a disproportionately huge counter-stern. The two seemed to be performing a precarious balancing act, plonked heavily upon the deck of a steamer whose bodywork was composed of little better than scrap metal.
The living accommodation, which evidently made up the after superstructure, was dismal, sea-stained and yellowing. The windows on the bridge and all the portholes I could see dripped greeny-brown semi-circles of corroded rust beneath them, giving the impression of extremely sad, tired eyes. At the waterline, these sagging bags of brown gave way to a general swathe of oxidisation along the whole side of the ship.
Grey and miserable, she looked anything but seaworthy and she was filthy. She was loading coal alongside and the coal dust that covered almost every inch of her could actually have been instrumental in holding her together. I could make out the tiny radio shack at the highest point above the cabins at the stern. Shack was the right word.
I turned to Joe, incredulous, but Joe was beside himself with laughter. Shaking and gulping, he was laughing like an eight-year-old whose brother has just farted in church. ‘Your face, Cub! Your face!’ was just about all he could get out and then, ‘Yep, a beauty. A real beauty!’ Despite his helpless hilarity, I noted somewhat ruefully that he had absolutely no trouble at all in capturing almost perfectly the lilting intonation of the Irishman’s amusement. He pulled himself together a bit and by way of apology, he slapped me amiably on the back and rocked my shoulder to and fro. ‘Snithers it is then, boys,’ he said again.
CHAPTER 3
JOE, SNITHERS AND ME
Even the gangway has planks missing, I grumbled inwardly as I reported for duty two days later and made my way along the corroding companionways to find my cabin. It was a two-bunk cupboard just above the waterline, in the forrard superstructure below the bridge, and there I found Jamie.
‘Jamie,’ I said, bundling my bag in through the narrow door and back-kicking it shut behind me. He was sitting on the bottom bunk polishing his shoes. He nodded, raising his eyebrows in greeting.
Taking in at a glance the limited proportions of the room, I reached to dump my stuff on the berth above him. The top bunk was the privilege of the most junior officer and that would be me. I put my hands on my hips and, addressing the top of his head, added wryly, ‘Well, you could just about swing a cat in here, I reckon.’
‘Only if it had a very short tail,’ Jamie sniffed, not missing a beat.
Without warning, the door then flew open again with such force that its hinges rattled and it clattered up against the battered old wardrobe behind it. One of its doors was already missing but a panel in the other teetered and then dropped to the floor.
Stooping to enter, Joe Green crashed in. He looked huge in the confines of the tiny, shed-like space, which barely exceeded his arm span in either direction. As usual, he was grinning from ear to ear.
He gazed about vaguely to see what he had broken and then he laughed. ‘Ah, well. The skipper said she was old. What do you make of her then lads?’
‘Pretty ancient,’ I said. ‘But sound. What else did he say?’
‘Said she was an old tramp steamer from Tyneside. Been brought out of retirement. All five thousand tons of her. Mind you, same could be said about the captain.’
‘He’s that big?’ I asked, leaning back against the bunks and folding my arms.
Joe guffawed, eyes disappearing behind his sunburnt wrinkles. A big, hearty laugh of a man, I thought.
‘No, but just as knackered. He’s an old steamer from Tyneside too. Him and his first mate. All three of them, dragged out of retirement. Need all hands on deck, just now, I reckon.’ He manoeuvred his arm around the back of the door and picked up the broken bit of wardrobe panel. He turned it over in his enormous hands and then tucked it under his arm and made to go. ‘On second thoughts, old bugger probably couldn’t wait to get back to sea after five minutes at home.’
‘With the wife,’ put in Jamie glumly and we both looked at him. I laughed but glancing towards Joe, thought I caught him looking slightly puzzled.
‘C’mon,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you where we work.’
He set off at his natural pace, which was fast, and we hurried along behind him through the labyrinth of dingy companionways and then up on to the crusty deck. He whistled blithely all the way, greeting everybody we came across as if they were old friends. Some looked rather taken aback by his familiar cheeriness and stopped to wonder if they had possibly sailed with him before but some of the older sailors did not even bother to reply. Joe was unabashed. He expected to like people and didn’t much consider whether the feeling was returned.
The radio shack was in the stern. Joe threw the door open and stepped aside to let us go in first. It lived up to expectations: that is to say, it was dank and musty and almost as small as our cabin. It was crammed to bursting with old bits of kit. On the desk a bulky, antiquated radio receiver vied with the transmitter and the dusty direction-finding gear for space. The Morse key was in among them somewhere, but there were so many wires and leads apparently coming from and going to nowhere that it was difficult at first to locate. Two or three sets of chewed-up looking earphones had been slung carelessly on top of all the chaos.
I put my hands on the back of the chair and attempted to swivel it casually. It moved half an inch stiffly and rocked a little on its base. The small table provided for our code tables slanted drunkenly against the wall.
I was flummoxed. I had been used to much more sophisticated equipment both at the Radio School and on my previous tours of duty. I hardly recognised any of this stuff and I said so.
Joe grinned, ‘Came straight off the ark apparently. Don’t look so worried, Cub. You’ll soon pick it up. Can’t be any harder.’ I didn’t really share his optimism but there was nothing else for it.
We spent the rest of the day finding our bearings on board and getting to grips with all the old girl’s idiosyncrasies. On the bridge we came across the skipper and the first mate. Captain Edwards did indeed look his age and more, though he was probably just the wrong side of sixty-five. Facially he was creased and wrinkled but his body, though small, was fit and strong-looking, with a deftness of movement that made him appear sprightly, if not young. His first officer, Walter Henderson, was much bigger than him and broader too, with a deep, naturally resonant voice. He might have overshadowed his senior officer had it not been for the evident high regard in which they held one another. They were laughing together as we approached.
Joe introduced me as Cubby Clarke and, seasoned seamen both, neither of them raised an eyebrow. From that moment on, as far as all the crew on the Sithonia were concerned, Cubby Clarke was my name. I did not mind. I liked it. It immediately made me one of them.
We finished loading that evening and, having battened down the hatches and hosed off what was possible of the ubiquitous coal dust, we were joined by the pilot. It was his unenviable task to navigate our plodding progress down the river where we were to fall in with the rest of our convoy at the mouth of the Mersey estuary. We chugged on through the increasingly congested and relatively choppy waters to our mustering point outside the Bar lightship, pausing to give the pilot time to disembark just before we reached it.
The dim lights, port and starboard side, of the cluster
ed ships winked red and green their welcome, beckoning us on as we approached to join their number in the gathering dusk. There must have been forty ships or more, each bearing a national flag from countries far and wide and all similarly daubed in camouflage or grey. Against the gloomy skyline, which was fading in the onset of the evening and blurred by misty sea spray, their varying shapes and sizes were ill-defined, meshed and intertwined, a two-dimensional collage in swathes of grey. Save for their guiding lights. Smaller than many, we huddled among them, seeking refuge from the roughening sea.
As always, the sight of such a gathering of ships, their weighty frames hustling and jockeying for position, yet apparently moving with such grace and ease in a strangely seamless, slow dance, filled me with excitement. The familiar sounds of engines humming with anticipation, horns insisting on attention and of halyards flapping and cleats shinkling in the wind: to me, they signified the calling of the ocean. I stood on the deck, eyes bright, revelling in it.
It was windy and in the waning light, the task of our escorts in getting us into order was not an easy one. Rounded up like recalcitrant sheep by three ferocious frigates and a couple of determined corvettes, each ponderous vessel had to be bullied and badgered into line, to make up the requisite five lanes of eight. Though hampered by an equally unruly sea they finally achieved what had seemed impossible, and with the raising of the Commodore’s flag the convoy began to move off.
Making Shore Page 3
