by Derek Beaven
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk about the weather. I wonder if people can ever get used to this.’
Then she laughed again. ‘I don’t mind hearing someone’s opinions.’
Peering past her, he considered the swell ahead. He pointed. ‘Here comes something!’
An irregularity in the pattern: ridges too close together; big ones, brimming, high and innocent. The ship went down in front of them as usual, and then rose significantly higher; higher, and poised. An exceptional wave began its course almost casually along the length of the water-line under them. It passed where they stood and became a huge fulcrum somewhere about the neighbourhood of the dining-room. Then the dive. The bows went right under. A rush of tide and foam sluiced off the fore-deck and drained around the tubes, bollards and hatches not so very far beyond them.
‘God,’ she muttered audibly in the moment of slack that followed – as sometimes they did when the ship seemed not to know what it would do next.
‘The seventh wave. Isn’t there something about the seventh wave? You see, I had a hunch England wouldn’t make it easy to get out. At least this much of a fight convinces me I’ve taken the right route!’
Yes, it was nice to talk to someone. She had not talked to someone, a personable young man, in fact, in her own right since … ‘I’m going out to Adelaide,’ she said firmly.
‘Oh, really? Me too.’
He was nice to talk to … Since her marriage. She had no idea. How nice it was to be spoken to as herself. Then, helplessly, from her clutch on the stanchion: ‘I’m joining my husband, you see.’
‘Ah, yes. And leaving your mother.’
‘I suppose I should be getting back to my cabin.’ She touched the place on her cheek where the wind felt almost like a bruise. The cold. And not just her cheek. Really, it got through coats and layers. It limited the time you could stay out. Or perhaps the main lounge again, Mrs Piyadasa.
‘Must you? There’s a man in mine.’
‘A what?’
‘A man. The man I share with.’
‘You have to share?’
‘Yes. Don’t you?’
‘There is another bunk. But it’s empty.’
‘You must have more clout than me. My other bunk is full of a seasick man. It’s pretty disgusting.’
‘I didn’t realise people had to share. I mean except families. Heavens, I should hate that.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘For four or five weeks, cooped up with someone you’ve never met.’
‘Yes. I keep wondering who I should have tipped, or rung up beforehand. That’s the trouble, not having the right connections or the absolute know-how. I’m sure if I did offer someone money he’d just look at me – it would be the wrong bloke.’
‘Yes,’ said Penny. ‘But he’d just look at you and then take the money.’
‘Exactly.’ He laughed. ‘I’m sorry, sir. The ship’s full. There’s nothing I can do. But thank you very much all the same.’
This laughter in the face of the sea – Penny felt slightly uncomfortable, though – over and above the discomfort of the storm, which in all truth she had briefly forgotten. But she could put no name to the feeling. She waited. She thought the man was virtually bound to ask her about Hugh next. A man would. For all sorts of reasons.
So she pre-empted him. ‘We haven’t been introduced. Penny Kendrick.’ She held on and stretched out her free hand.
‘Robert Kettle.’ He clasped hers during the transition from suspension to effort, and then drew back to his place at the rail. ‘Both “K”.’ He smiled.
She smiled back. But the ‘K’ was Hugh’s name, of course. ‘My mother owns a preparatory school in Essex. That’s where I grew up – among lots of little boys away from home.’
‘I went to one of those once,’ he said. ‘Always marching and doing drill. Present arms with miniature hockey sticks. But not for long. My parents couldn’t afford to keep me there. We weren’t really in the right league, financially. I suppose they were making a desperate bid for social—’ He failed to finish as once more the spray surprised him.
‘Oh, I see.’ Then she realised why she had felt uncomfortable. It was the way they had linked themselves through the character of an inevitably corrupt purser, or accommodation officer. It reminded her of the little boys at the school; how they sought to cope with life away from home by such creations. Everyone outside their world was an articulately structured joke. Poor little devils. One thing her mother’s school had taught her was that she did not want her boys to go away like that. And yet that was where they were now, her boys, and she was here in the midst of these unlooked-for waves talking to an unlooked-for Robert Kettle, who would probably see the point and then apologise. But I didn’t mean it like that, she found herself protesting. I didn’t want it to happen like this. This is just temporary.
And she thought of all her furniture down there in the hold, their bed and their books, and her poor violin, and the Finch-Clarks’ enormous cat in its cage.
8
‘Hey, be careful with that, kid!’ Mr Chaunteyman had given me half a crown and told me to keep his service revolver dry on deck. He was an American, Navy too – though he never wore uniform. We were going to Australia with him, Erica and I. That much was clear. I had the gun strapped to my waist. It weighed me down on my left. I had pinned on my sheriff’s star and wore my cowboy hat, which the wind now thrummed at somewhere behind my head. The cord threatened a strangle, but I would not take it off.
I had turned one side of the brim up to the crown with a safety pin, Australian style. Failing anything to serve as an authentic tin visor I was Ned Kelly in mufti, on his boat. I had stalked the heaving promenade deck for twenty minutes looking for people to shoot: possibly one or two of the Commies I had heard about from Mr Chaunteyman’s lips. Luckily the other children were not in evidence. Then I had fetched my raincoat and come forward here.
I too thought the ship would soon shake to pieces. Images of my life ran appropriately before my eyes. Scenes of home – containing unfortunate further images of death. Such scenes, for example, as had welled once from the open experiment on top of our wireless when I was little. My father placed a stout board to support the metal frame; the cathode-ray tube perched in its own scaffold. We drew the drapes across the french windows and clicked the knob. And were transfixed by scintillation.
The television was the great metal granny of all knots. But I was warned off. My father tended it jealously, as a household god. Through its face our English future brightly spilled; with its back parts he had sole communion. The private glows and buzzes, the electron lens, the HT circuit – ‘twenty thousand volts, boy, all right?’ – the decoders, oscillators, transformers and valves remained a mystery to me.
It was unhealthy, and suffered intermittent snowstorms. In the midst of them I watched cowboy fantasies: The Mystery Riders, Roy Rogers, or Renfrew of the Mounties. North American corpses were two a penny. During weekends he set up a mirror and stood behind it, twiddling, tuning, testing, to attain that fullness, unstable as the grasshoppers on Bostall Heath, of which the contraption was capable. And then one Sunday he unclipped his Avo meter. He put down his insulated screwdriver with a grunt of satisfaction. Now the confusion was of real sea, and genuine weather. A poor, monochrome vessel was beam-ended on the Goodwin Sands; it rolled back and forth inside the screen, endlessly, helplessly.
The horror rose to my lips. ‘They’ll be all right?’
‘Two of them were saved. But the captain always goes down with his ship.’ My mother’s look assumed a glassiness as she said it. I had not seen her face so before.
Thus I realised early that there might occasionally flood in a loss which was unendurable. The skipper of the Enterprise had given his body to the waves; he breathed in lethal sea water as surely as I drank my National Health orange juice.
My mother’s cousin ‘went down with the Hood’, but to that bare phrase my small imagination could attach
no picture at all. I put death in a far-off quarter, snow-bound, snow-blinded, epitomised solely by that other terrible captain: Scott of the Antarctic, whose recovered boat-coffin clung to the Embankment by Tower Bridge, and whose bereaved son painted snow-tormented birds in the screen of our television.
Then one evening Erica took me to a slide-show talk given by Sir John Hunt. It was at my school in Bostall Lane. The conqueror of Everest was some years happily returned. But Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tensing stood on the snowcap screen against a glare of magenta-blue, still planting the Union Jack. And after that I was reassured; for there was no undiscovered place upon the globe, no unexpected continent, able to surge in, disaster-filled, cannibal-fretted, sacrifice-plagued, species by man-eating species. Death was a thing of the past, and I learned to sleep by blocking it out. Until this ocean, and this storm. My beliefs heaved and bucked under me.
Regarding the Atlantic, though, I knew my father and grandfather had led charmed lives. It was Erica who had told me. Both career seamen, they were survivors of the two world wars. My grandad missed Jutland, being fortunately on weekend leave when his ship rushed hooting out of Chatham. He had already retired, and was only hooked back out of honourable discharge because there was a crisis. The worst shock he got in the war to end all wars was from a streak in the phosphorescence. Too paralysed to sing out – a potentially capital omission – he stood watch in his trance as the tell-tale slice closed and closed, aimed dead at the engine-room below him. Against the intimate torpedo there is no defence. Desperate small-arms fire would be as useless as prayer. Only at the last minute did the streak turn miraculously away, and he caught a glimpse of its dorsal fin in the moonlight; though not of its hammerhead sneer.
One of the few sailors ever to be saved by a shark, then, my grandfather Frank Lightfoot began in sail, abided in steam, and ended on shore; a charmed life indeed, if tedious. When he fell from the old Impregnable’s rigging, he was preserved by a Scotsman, who caught the youthful seat of his pants as they passed the lower yard-arm. After that he was unsinkable, undrownable, unexplodable. His recollections covered a vast red world of experience.
Such had always been the integrity of the family story. The males at sea, or foremen at the arsenal, the women at home – except in times of national emergency. We were the kind of folk who could put together a down payment, tough but reliable souls, salts of the earth. The kind who never had calamity or Zeppelins predicted for them.
Therefore my grandmother Lightfoot, not long married, with an infant, was surprised to find herself out at work and hardly in her new Co-op home at all. She was frightened too, making ammunition for the Somme. It was to keep up the payments, and do her bit while big Frank was escorting his convoys.
She had to leave my toddling aunt with a neighbour each morning and take the workers’ train from Abbey Wood. And once within the great black curtain wall of the arsenal she must give herself over dutifully to production. Extending her pretty finger ends, she picked up on each of them, including the thumbs, a cartridge-paper hat from the bench to her left. Then held them up – like a raw crown roast. She plunged them into the fish-glue in front of her on the stove. Judging the clutch to avoid a progressive cooking of her skin, she drew them out again, dripping, steaming, stinking. At last with a pianistic flourish which was entirely her own, she pressed her whole batch firmly into the empty cases, waiting at her right and newly machined – like brass lipstick holders. So each of her innocent digits made a neat bullet hole, time and again.
Erica, while powdering her nose once, had spoken of the Blitz and hiding under the stairs. But no one had actually died. They were stairs I should never see again. Nor should I ever set eyes upon the family I had been born into: immortals, familiar with weapons, innocent of death. Now we had left England, in circumstances I bluffed myself I had the hang of, and everything was new. We were wilful outlaws, pirates. The huge waves queued up in front of me. The wind tore at my hair. I stared back at the immense grey sea.
9
To put out to sea from Spain in a square-rigged ship was to swing past Africa to the Caribbean. The winds and the currents insisted. But for the English there was first the problem of our own dangerous coast, followed by the Bay. That was the trickiest part. Once an overloaded merchantman from Bristol or London got safely clear of Biscay’s lee suction, and past Cape Finisterre, the rest of the Atlantic could seem plain sailing. Barring the usual accidents and hurricanes, of course. And from the eastern seaboard of America there was one route home: on the Gulf Stream with the westerlies that bring the English weather. As far as we were concerned the Atlantic was for centuries a clockwise swirl of goods, criminals, slaves and starvelings policed by the Navy, one vast market of forces. It was a slow-motion whirlpool.
The great age of piracy lasted little more than ten years. That was in the early eighteenth century. Violent, torturing wretches, the pirates were products of the trade routes. They were its children, ex-Navy, ex-merchantman, bent on revenge. They rejected privilege, Church, State, marriage, property – they espoused instead whoredom, social equality, a kind of welfare and rough justice. They were radical mutineers, leftovers from the old days of the Levellers. Their communism foundered, as it had to, on its ultimate powerlessness.
Now, on that blasted nook of the Armorica, for all my romance of swashbuckling and daredevilry, I sensed at last the seriousness of what Erica and I had done in running away. Women and children cannot afford to split. Their mutiny comes home to roost. It began to dawn on me: Erica and I were actually mutineers to the bones, and must take whatever came to us. Yet even if that were drowning in this great swell, I knew I did not wish to return to Abbey Wood.
There was a custom in those days to keep one room ‘for best’, on the off chance of company. People were wary of trusting any show of their arrangements. This dusted sepulchre is what we are really like. Judge us by these fixtures and fittings, not the grubby cram we actually live in.
Had we been religious, we should have come back from church in our Sunday clothes, guests to ourselves almost, to eat the roast off that fine dark table in the front parlour. We were not. Our Sunday meals were, like all others, served in the cramped back room. We never went to church. We had not God but Tradition: King’s Regulations and the Articles of War.
So it was only on very special occasions we might use it. And we kept ourselves dutifully ready.
Our particular ‘best’ room functioned, then, like nothing so much as the Great Aft Cabin, waiting, ever waiting, for its true Admiral to come aboard. I was not officially allowed in, except for formal punishments: the cane was kept in a drawer. The door was always closed with the key in the lock – because the latch had gone some time during my father’s childhood, and had never been seen to. So it was bypassed, unmentionable; it became almost sacred, perhaps. There was no fire kept up in that elaborate fireplace. No point.
That room rose through the storm to my mind’s eye, cold, prim, bleaching in the wan sun which crept through the large projecting window. Raised up to the height of ‘the ladders’, our view was that same panorama of distant cranes and the Isle of Dogs. You might gaze out as if across the waters of a dull home port. In the evening a last light could sometimes strike right through to the wallpaper opposite, where above the useless piano The Fighting Temeraire hung amid the pattern of small buff flowers.
Mirrored and picture-railed, it was all a waste of space. And time. The hanging-bowl lampshade in marbled glass was two decades pre-war – the kind that marked out aged people. On the mantelshelf either side of the clock stood two lacquered bronzes of horse and tamer. Around the table in the bay window, the slim, japanned dining chairs. The chesterfield suite, antimacassar-draped. The bookcase-escritoire. The carved ivory trophies from Shanghai. The model junk, the brass gong, the shells, the Benares coffee-pot for the coffee we never drank. Against this Atlantic gale that room shimmered insistently.
Six months before, a gleaming Buick had drawn up outside in the
street. And Mr Chaunteyman, US Navy, came up the ladders and was ushered straight in.
He suddenly fulfilled us. He was the expected officer, a junior Lieutenant-Commander. That must have been how he slipped so unchallenged, even feted, past my father’s defences – who thought it was himself the American visited, the American with the matinee idol’s line moustache, like Errol Flynn’s. And Mr Chaunteyman did not have the brash crew cut of so many ordinary American servicemen of that decade. He kept a dignified shine to his thick, dark wave. Mr Chaunteyman was a true gent.
They met at a do in Greenwich Naval College, to which my father and some of his associates, as local ‘other ranks’, were invited. It was a gala occasion; my mother bought a new dress. It was a success. And they struck up a familiarity; Dave Chaunteyman impressed them with his informal style. He was in England, he said, to teach an anti-submarine course. Hey, he moved around the world a heck of a lot. He had visited before, during the war. Couldn’t get over the place. It was so staid and quaint. So small and kind of cute. And our house: smoky, homey.
My parents bathed in his attention. In the new world, said my father, social divisions were out. There was no more rationing; the war years were over. He was a civilian citizen and the view ahead would be chromium-plated, televised. Who cared for old-fashioned niceties? This was what he had fought for. Soon, in the nuclear age, there would be no need even for the dirty fabrications of Woolwich Arsenal. He might get a job over the river at Dagenham, making Fords. Own a new car. Drive to work across the free ferry. Who could tell? They were on first-name terms at once, Dave, Harry and Erica. My parents were ripe for the dazzling.
Of course my grandfather, his mind going, would first hold court when Mr Chaunteyman called in for English tea. In the heyday of empire he had been at the Spithead Review. On a later inspection he had exchanged a few words with Queen Alexandra and been brushed by the King’s overcoat. He might even sing; before he subsided into his nap. And then my father started to talk, there in the front parlour, about the real below-decks and the bloody hard world it had been. Mr Chaunteyman brought gifts and opened him up. Week by week I would hear something shocking: my dad’s own mutinous anger leaking for the first time into words.
