by Gavin Young
‘That’s Emma,’ I told them.
‘Oh? Emma! Emma!’ they echoed appreciatively. In a cloud of steam Cookie Uno and Cookie Dos left their kitchen and gazed at Emma as if she were a mermaid who might swim ashore at any moment. It was as much as I could do to keep their greasy fingerprints from blotting her out.
They were a cheerful lot, these marines, despite the long stint they had to endure on the island. Such isolation cannot have been easy for such young men. But I soon had the impression that Nuñez was an excellent commander, managing to combine authority – his deep, grating voice helped as well as his height – with a warm paternalism. I suppose he had been specially selected for the patience and self-sufficiency necessary in such a solitary post. He had humour, too, of a soldierly kind.
Towards noon, in a more serious vein, he said, ‘English kill Argentina ship Belgrano. Good. Pero, why no kill more Argentina ships?’ He added something to Engineer Menderez.
‘You know what he want to say?’ Menderez translated. ‘He want to say this: Chilean navy has a saint, its name Santa Carmen. From now the Chilean navy has two saints. The second saint is Santa Margarita.’
‘Santa Margarita?’
‘Yes! Santa Margarita Thatcher.’
‘Hey – Santa Margarita!’ Osorio patted my shoulder. ‘Buen!’
‘Santa Margarita!’ cried Gonsalves and the other marines standing round.
‘Please tell her what we say,’ Engineer Menderez continued. ‘Sergeant Nuñez says will you see her in London?’
‘It’s possible,’ I said evasively, not wanting to spoil their pleasure.
‘We called her General Galtieri’s widow,’ Menderez smiled. It took me a moment to work that out.
*
The radio from the supply ship announced that she would be back next morning, so my stay was not going to be a long one. I was sorry. I walked about the southern tip of the island as much as possible, trying to take in whatever I could of this place where I would probably never set foot again. When night fell and the lights in the hut had been lowered, Osorio mounted guard on the front door, Tony was put outside in a guard hut of his own, and the marines shed their heavy clothes, pulled on their tracksuits and climbed into their squeaking bunks.
Carlos was busy with the radio that night. In our room, Nuñez made sure that Menderez and myself were ready to sleep and then turned out the light. I drew the blankets up to my chin and closed my eyes. I felt like sleep. The wind scrabbling at my face and grabbing at my clothes all day had been tiring. One was forever having to push forward or resist being pushed forward or sideways. It was as wild as ever now. It howled and tore at the windowframes and rattled the doors. Sometimes, in a lull, it seemed to lean on the little hut like an animal of unimaginable size getting its breath back. Once again I felt it infiltrating beneath the hut – by far the most alarming thing it did. Unpleasant thoughts were unexpectedly interrupted. A great snore rose from the bed next to me. It filled the room with a shuddering crescendo. I had never heard a snore like it. It drowned out the noise of the wind. It had a deep, rather mellifluous liquid tone to it. And it was repeated. Engineer Menderez was a champion snorer and was showing his paces. It was impossible to sleep now; the snores went on and on. How Nuñez breathed on peacefully I couldn’t understand – was he deaf? Yet he was the man in charge, who must do something. Wasn’t snoring a disciplinary matter? The engineer, I thought, might easily resent any action that I, a foreign guest, might take. I tapped the iron of the engineer’s bed with my pencil. I might have tapped it with a feather for all the effect that had. I rapped with my knuckles. Yet another snore rattled the windows, and still Nuñez was silent. I drew back the bedclothes and slid my legs floorwards.
Nuñez sat up and flipped on the light. ‘Que!’
I put my finger to my lips and uttered a demonstration snore, pointing. As if in answer another Menderez snore reverberated through the comparative silence of the room. Nuñez began to laugh. The laugh started quite quietly, but grew into a colossal roar – he was a big man, after all. As he roared, sitting up in bed with his head far back and letting it rip, the engineer’s shattering snores continued, if anything louder than before.
The extraordinary racket from our room had already roused the marines lying in the bunks beyond the open door, and laughter shook the hut inside as the wind shook it from without. Several marines began grunting in exaggerated imitation of Menderez’s snores, and soon the bunkhouse sounded as if the Big Bad Wolf had penetrated a pigsty.
‘Never mind,’ I whispered and signed to the still convulsed Nuñez. ‘I’ll take a chair in the mess.’
He was out of his bunk in a flash, dragging blankets and a pillow from my bed, through the marines’ sleeping quarters and into the front room where Osorio, on guard, was sitting wide-eyed in a comfortable chair and full Cape Horn marching order, listening to the din. Tony was awake, too, and barking to be let in.
‘Ha! Osorio!’ Nuñez yelled. He grabbed a rigid, upright chair and gestured to the bewildered marine to transfer himself to it immediately. Then, still laughing, as if explaining to me something of extreme importance, ‘Osorio is pajero. Comprende?’
I didn’t understand at all. Pajero – what on earth could that mean? Nuñez had been overheard by the marines next door. ‘Pajero!’ they shouted. ‘Osorio, pajero, si.’ As for Osorio, he blushed, spread his hands and shrugged. I looked, I suppose, as baffled as I felt.
In time silence, except for the wind, fell once more on Cape Horn. Everyone slept. Even I slept, in Osorio’s comfortable chair.
Engineer Menderez apologized in the morning – to my extreme embarrassment – for his snoring. I assured him it was of no importance whatsoever. But what, in heaven’s name, was pajero?
‘Pa …’ the poor engineer stared at me as if I had turned into Margaret Thatcher before his eyes. ‘Pajero?’ he stammered, and in an urgent whisper he told me.
It was my turn to apologize. How could I have guessed it was Spanish for fu-fu?
*
I could see the supply vessel coming from a long way off: a speck no bigger than a waterboatman on a good-sized pond. I was sorry to see it, and I really believe the marines were sorry, too. The happy uproar of the night before had made us all friends, and with nothing much except routine duties and comic magazines to keep them occupied, a diversion such as my arrival must have been better than no diversion at all.
I began to say my goodbyes in the hut while some of the crates and boxes were being carried down the ragged escarpment track to the beach. I suppose the goodbyes were surprisingly unmilitary. I was hugged by Cookies Uno and Dos, one of whom spilled hot cigarette ash into the hood of my anorak so that I bore away a tiny burn mark as a souvenir. Other bear hugs followed from Osorio, Gonsalves and some of the others. The surprise came from Nuñez and Carlos. With great ceremony, grinning shyly amid cries of ‘Silencio’, they handed me a strange, multicoloured bundle.
Engineer Menderez at my elbow nudged me and said, ‘Look after it after we go.’ But I couldn’t wait to do that, and anyway I thought I knew what this present was because I’d noticed something missing from the paucity of the scene outside the hut. It was the best present anyone ever contrived. They had given me the Chilean flag from the mast by the church. True, it had been partly shredded by the wind, but not only did that not matter, it actually added something, because just by looking at it I could always recall the wind of Cape Horn. And it was not just the flag. The marines had signed their names on it – every one of them. When had they done it? It had been a great labour: it is not easy to write anything legibly on a torn flag. But these men had not only painstakingly written their names; one or two of them had drawn on it the elaborate crest of the Chilean navy as well, and a sketch of the island with its name, ‘Isla Cabo de Hornos’; and they had marked its longitude, latitude and the date of my visit. They had given it thought. And affection. There was even a special signature: ‘Tony the Dog’.
I stood there
in the hut staring at the blue, red and white cloth in my hands, stunned by this unexpected and priceless souvenir. I couldn’t speak to thank them; I could barely move. But there were shouts now beyond the door. Two marines panted in: the supply boat was entering the bay. I looked at Nuñez. He took my arm and we went outside together, skirting the boggy ground and a wired-off patch where I suspect there were mines, and stamped and slid carefully down the narrow crumbling track. Osorio took my bag and my other elbow.
The rubber dinghy soon grounded on the shore. It was time to leave. I shook hands slowly with each one in turn, thanking them carefully in Spanish. At the last minute Nuñez made a playful grab at my head as if to snatch off the sheep’s wool cap I had bought in Puerto Montt; and instinctively I ducked back to frustrate him. It is an action I have deeply regretted ever since. I should have let him have it – I realize now he was not playing, he was serious. He wanted the hat for a souvenir and I should have let him have it. I should have pressed it on him. So as I write this I can see that torn flag above my head as a triumph and a reproach. There are the names – Nuñez, Carlos, Osorio, Gonsalves and the rest, not forgetting Tony the Dog. I have had it framed and I hope it will hang on my wall for ever.
Five minutes later, the supply boat’s engines surged and we began to move across the water towards Deceit Island on our way back to Picton Island and Puerto Williams. ‘Well,’ the lieutenant said, smiling, ‘was it worth it?’
I nodded. I couldn’t trust myself to do more than that. The frozen air stung my cheeks and brought water to my eyes as I stared back at the island and that little band of men waving.
Part Four
Rolling Home From Rio
At my age and with my disposition, one gets to care less for everything except downright good feeling.
Herman Melville, aged fifty-eight, in a letter
Thirty-four
Mrs Thatcher did not slacken the grip her blockade had imposed on shipping in the Falklands area. From Chile, there was only one way to escape from the Pacific into the Atlantic – making a detour north through the Panama Canal – and from way down on the Horn I did not feel like doing that. Every shipping agent and ship owner in Chile assured me I might easily end up being stranded for an indefinite time on the wrong side of South America. Because of the only recently ended Falklands War, they said, shaking their heads, these were difficult times.
I had spent several days in Santiago after returning from Cape Horn, and after numerous cables and telephone calls I had managed at last to arrange the next part of my voyage. The Piranha, a cargo ship with a Liberian flag, would be sailing soon from Rio for Cape Town, stopping at two other Brazilian ports before making the twelve-day leap across the South Atlantic to South Africa. The company had agreed to take me and so had the master. So, after giving my thanks to Hernan Cubillos for his invaluable help, I was soon looking down on the snows of the Andes from a Lan Chile jet on its way to Rio. Before leaving Santiago I had also learned of a British ship, the Centaur, carrying passengers from Cape Town to Avonmouth in England, which appeared to have just the right departure date to take me to her first stop, St Helena, far out in the middle of the South Atlantic.
*
‘Does the master allow alcohol on board?’ I asked the Piranha’s agent in Rio.
‘I believe so. Why?’
‘You said the captain was a Dutchman and lives in South Africa. I wondered if he was a member of the Dutch Reformed Church or some puritanical sect.’
The agent laughed. ‘There’s nothing reformed about Captain Cornelius Brand, as far as I know. Oh, goodness no. Zulu crew, by the way.’
In a few days I was climbing up yet another steep companionway between cream-painted metal bulkheads towards yet another captain’s cabin. Or rather, it seemed like any other until I heard the master’s voice. The first words I heard from Captain Brand, still invisible behind the half drawn curtain of his doorway, were spoken in a rumbling, heavily accented growl: ‘And I do not care a damn what oders do on dere ships. On my ship I do what I want to do.’
I followed the agent in. ‘Captain, this is the passenger,’ he said, and Captain Brand called to a man going out of the cabin: ‘Steward, two more for lunch. Put some water in de soup, ja?’ Then he turned to me.
His hand was a bonecrusher; his handshake of welcome amounted almost to physical assault. He was tall, about fifty, lean and powerful, with brown hair slicked back close to his head. He had a face to remember. Overhung by a heavy brow, pale blue eyes seemed to crouch like small, wary animals. A large fleshy nose, curved as a scimitar, projected like a prominent part of Mount Rushmore from rough, red, weathered skin – not the face of an abstainer. His mouth was large, too, and through a ragged, tobacco-coloured moustache and ‘torpedo’ beard I could see the ugly gap where a number of front teeth should have been. His smile, however benign, was made ferocious by those missing teeth.
I watched him as he poured whisky and told the agent, ‘After dis trip, I will take a holiday. I’ve had it op to here.’ The flat of his hand came level with the bearded mouth. ‘Op to here. Or joost over here.’
‘Will you go somewhere nice?’ the agent asked.
‘Nowhere. Joost go home to my wife and do noding. Well, I’ll do someding, but I’ll not tell you what!’ He laughed and gave me a wicked wink. My first impression was of an old-style, rough-and-tumble, coarse-humoured, weather-beaten captain sipping whisky at ease in the cabin of a familiar command on a coast he knew well.
There was, however, an unusual aspect to the Piranha’s chain of command – unusual to me, at least. The chief officer, Ken Wishart, was roughly the same age as Captain Brand, with white hair and a quiet English manner – and he was an experienced master in his own right; normally he would wear four gold rings on his shoulder but now, because of his temporary position, he wore only three: the company, like many others, it seemed, had more senior deck officers than it had ships. The chief engineer and his number two were South Africans, the deck officers were South Africans of English origin, and the young engineers and cadets were a mixture of English and South African whites and coloureds; a real Anglo–South African stew. I wondered why. Later, in Cape Town, a shipping man explained: ‘South Africa is not a sea-going country. South Africans are not sea-goers. It’s not like Britain. People in Britain hanker for the sea. Seafaring there has great prestige. Here, no. South Africans think you must be a failure if you get a job at sea.’
After five minutes with Ken I knew we were going to get on. Over our first quiet drink together before sailing he said, ‘One problem here. I should warn you. There’s a lot of anti-British sentiment around on this ship. Don’t be surprised when it hits you.’
He had just told me that the white South African officers were all of English origin. Surely – ‘That’s the trouble,’ he said. ‘English South Africans are a mixed-up bunch. They don’t know rightly who the hell they are, English or South Africans. They get mocked by the Afrikaaners, of course. So they take it out on the Poms.’ He handed me a glass. ‘I’d just warn you, I thought.’
I half forgot his warning in the bustle and excitement of sailing and a turn of events that presaged dissension – or much worse – on the coming voyage. I had settled into the pilot’s cabin – a small two-bunk room behind the wheelhouse – and met my cabin steward, a shy Zulu called Reginald. Then I went down to watch our departure from near the top of the gangway. A large, fat, white man stood there holding out a hand. ‘Roy Taylor,’ he said. ‘Chief engineer.’
He was wearing a light khaki shirt several sizes too small and open much of the way down the front, hanging outside his belt; thick arms like overcooked hams stuck out of the short sleeves. He wore sandals, and above them long shorts that stopped just above fat, white knees gave him the look of a boy scout who has long since bulged out of his uniform. When he narrowed his eyes to scrutinize me through thick glasses he reminded me of Billy Bunter sizing up a new boy at Greyfriars School, and not much liking what he saw.<
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‘Very civilized hour for sailing,’ he said in a noticeably South African accent. At bows and stern, a few young white officers were watching Zulu seamen preparing to cast off.
But the hour for sailing was delayed. Soon Captain Brand was down on the deck, muttering to me: ‘De Black Gang is aboard.’
The Black Gang?
‘De customs officers,’ he explained. ‘First time on dis ship.’
And there they were, uniformed Brazilians, swarming over the foredeck, into the accommodation, here, there and everywhere.
‘Are they looking in the funnel?’ Billy Bunter grumbled.
But the officials had not come aboard in vain. Soon, there was a sudden angry jabber of voices and a swirl of men round the fo’c’sle; people were pointing and stooping and heaving. The captain was there and so was the huge-bellied chief engineer, waving his leg-of-mutton arms. Great strips of what looked like hides were being carried back towards me by a couple of young officers.
‘Fokken, stinkin’….’ I heard the captain’s furious voice like ocean thunder across the forehatch. Something bad was up. There had been a theft of cargo.
After a time the customs men left the Piranha, smiling, unconcerned, appearing to wash their hands of anything they had found that was out of the ordinary. In a moment Captain Brand, who had come to the head of the gangway to see them off his ship, turned his hard, red face to me and said: ‘De crew have stolen de hides, de cargo from Montevideo. It’s expensive leather for makin’ jackets, dat sort of thing.’ He shook his heavy head. ‘Stevedores’ thievin’ is bad, but when your own fokken crew start stealin’ it’s very fokken bad.’ He turned grimly towards the door to the accommodation. ‘Now I must give de crew a liddle talkin’-to.’
