Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  We sailed in that atmosphere of crime and betrayal. Ken told me later that the Brazilian customs check of the ship had been sheer chance, and the fo’c’sle was most unlikely to be searched in the normal way. The captain and the chief engineer were certain some of the crew were responsible, but no crewman would admit having anything to do with it. The Zulu bosun, looking agitated, was at a loss – or said he was. And there was no proof. So now the entire Zulu crew, guilty or not guilty, had undergone ‘a liddle talkin’-to’ and faced the prospect of dismissal in Cape Town. All of a sudden the atmosphere had become the worst possible in which to set off up the coast of Brazil and then start a twelve-day run across the South Atlantic.

  The chief engineer’s role during the hubbub on the foredeck had surprised me. A chief engineer, after all, is responsible for the engine room staff and the efficient working of the ship’s engines; he is not required to oversee the situation on deck or the behaviour of a deck crew. That is the business of the chief officer – in this case Ken. But Ken, though he must have been aware of this trespass, didn’t seem to worry about it; so why, I thought, should I?

  At meals I sat at a table with the captain at the head, Ken on his right side and Roy on his left. I was next to Roy and opposite Pete, a quiet, coloured second engineer. It was immediately obvious what a dominant character Roy set out to be. Between mouthfuls of food and with a cruel and monotonous persistence, he continually goaded Ken with a range of supercilious attacks on anything from his seamanship to the British royal family. It was Billy Bunterish Pom-baiting stuff and delivered sufficiently loudly to carry to the only other table in the officers’ mess, where seven junior officers and four cadets – a mixture of South Africans and Englishmen – sat nudging one another. I was surprised that such an evidently strong-minded captain as Brand would tolerate quite so easily two senior officers making mutually humiliating spectacles of themselves; yet his only reaction was an occasional amused wink at me. I thought it extremely lucky that Ken, so obviously a phlegmatic, good-natured man, refused to be provoked into anything more than an occasional gently flippant response to some gross disparagement of his professionalism, or an impatient wave of the hand if the royal family became the target. There was a self-pleasuring venom about the chief engineer’s scorn that seemed to be as uncontrollable as scalding water spouting from a geyser.

  After a meal made embarrassing by such exchanges Ken said to me, ‘Roy’s just a pussy cat underneath.’ Perhaps he was. All ships have their neuroses, I suppose, but this one had a few extra. I asked Ken about the captain’s missing teeth; the gap was so obvious and so ugly it was a wonder he didn’t have new ones fitted. Oh, Cornie’s teeth, he smiled – the chief engineer had knocked them out, in the days when he used to drink. Roy had been a terrible drinker, he said. But he and Cornie were thick as thieves – still were – and one night, when they were drinking hard together on board, Roy had said something that enraged Cornie. ‘Say that again!’ Cornie had said – and Roy had said it again.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ Ken laughed. ‘Roy’s first punch dislodged the teeth – teeth were all over the floor – but Cornie got his hands round Roy’s throat in no time and was all set to kill him – or so it seemed. Of course, they were separated.’ I tried to imagine these two men fighting like Godzilla and King Kong. Roy had given up drinking for good after that, and the two remained inseparable. As before, Cornie seemed to rely on Roy for all manner of things.

  *

  The Piranha progressed smoothly up the coast and into the mouth of the bay of Porto Albino. She was a neat, brightly painted ship. Somebody or other might be stealing the cargo, and the chief officer and the chief engineer might behave like a bad vaudeville act, but the ship herself seemed beyond reproach. This, of course, said a good deal for Captain Brand.

  ‘Cornie’ was a hospitable man under the ferocious beard and watchful eyes. At his invitation I began to take a whisky or two with him in his cabin at noon, and then he relaxed enough to tell me something of his earlier days. His father, a printer, had not thought much of a sailor’s life, and young Cornelius had to run off to sea as a deckhand at the age of seventeen. He had come, as he said, ‘op through de ranks’, determined to be an officer as soon as he saw the officers wearing a fine style in shirts. ‘I said if dey have dat, why not I?’ He was a hard worker and soon improved the quality of his shirts. His first command had been a ship plying between the Baltic and Bermuda, twenty years ago now, in the days when he had been happy to live in Holland. Unfortunately, his successful professional life was not equalled on shore.

  ‘She went and took op wid de Jehovah, y’see,’ he said of his first wife.

  ‘The Jehovah?’

  ‘Dis religious business. I couldn’t stand dat. Politics and religion – two things I cannot stand. And it was Jehovah, Jehovah all day in de house, and she tryin’ to get me involved, y’see – pouf! So I don’t go back dere. I stay in South Africa. Now I have anoder wife down dere.’ He gave me a wolfish grin. ‘Here, take a look.’ The photograph showed a handsome blonde woman.

  The Piranha slid into the little port of Porto Albino and tied up at a wharf a very short walk from the bars of the red-light district. Except for Ken – ‘I’ve seen it all and I never leave the ship unless my wife’s here,’ he smiled – most of the officers went ashore the first night. They favoured a barnlike disco full of dark-skinned ‘girls’ in spangled dresses and lipstick as red as a London bus. Metal tables and chairs scraped on a cement floor; smoke and cheap scent was the standard atmospheric mix. Urine had overflowed in the toilet and stood two pungent inches deep.

  Pete, the coloured second engineer, I now discovered, had a hankering to travel by land. Nepal attracted him. He would even have been prepared to leave the sea and get a shore job in order to travel there. He was tall, and rather grey-skinned, a prematurely balding man of about thirty with a pleasant face. He had a serious side, I think – I had glimpsed Conrad’s Life and Letters on his cabin table – but he was pathetically influenced by the young white South African officers and frequently joined them in their shrill schoolboy talk of ‘pomping’ and ‘sluts’ (South African English for screwing and girls) which, repeated ad nauseam, drove out all other conversation.

  ‘I’d like to travel and take photographs,’ he said. ‘Do you think one could become a travelling photojournalist and make a living?’

  ‘Why not? People do, you know. I’ll find out from my photographer friends, if you like, and drop you a line. Or get someone else to.’

  ‘That would be –’

  But it was no good. A young English South African who had been listening decided we were being too serious. He sidled up now with a fatuous laugh. ‘Hey, Pete, do they pomp in Nepal, do you think?’

  ‘I guess so,’ Pete said, turning and smiling.

  ‘Big, rough, pomping girls, eh?’

  ‘Ya-hoo!’ Pete cried and they went off together, sniggering.

  Drink after drink went down the hatch and things became a trifle wild. The South African who had interrupted Pete’s vision of a walk in Nepal was revealing his bare torso on the dance floor, and someone else was flashing a buttock: an impromptu male strip seemed imminent. Girls and transvestites fought over drinks, screaming and tugging at each other’s wigs, and eventually through the haze and commotion I saw Captain Brand and Roy leave the bar for another.

  I, too, had had enough. Next door I found my cabin steward at a table with a friend from the Piranha’s crew. ‘Join us,’ he called, and I was glad to. Reginald introduced his friend. ‘This is Henry. He works in the engine room.’

  Henry was thick-set and had intelligent eyes. We talked easily of this and that. Beer came, and still more, and soon Henry said, ‘I like Brazil. Black and white are about the same here.’ He looked fussed. ‘Maybe you don’t know what I’m on about. Do y’know, in South Africa, you’d have to get a special permit to visit Reg in his township outside Durban? Or me. And here we can drink together.’

  After a w
hile, he added, ‘The crew is very unhappy.’

  ‘Unhappy?’

  Unhappy, he said, about bullying from their officers. The accusations of thieving against the deck crew. There was going to be trouble for the crew when the ship got to Cape Town, he went on. Police trouble.

  ‘Be reasonable, Henry. Surely the captain has to do something about theft,’ I said. ‘How could he just let it go?’

  ‘I have written to my lawyer,’ Henry said, without seeming to hear me. ‘It’s not the captain. The captain’s fierce to look at, a lion, but he’s really as weak as a lamb.’ He knocked on the table with his knuckles. ‘It’s the chief engineer!’ he cried with passion. ‘He thinks he’s the king of this ship.’

  ‘Come on now, Henry. Let’s just –’

  He cut me short. ‘We know him, man. I tell you he thinks he’s a king.’

  *

  I put Henry’s sense of grievance down to drink – wild talk after a skinful – and went ashore alone next morning for a stroll about the town. There was not much to see. I looked for an outdoor cafe in which to sit and read in the sun, but couldn’t find one. I hoped we wouldn’t stay here long. I wanted to get on.

  I enjoyed talking to sensible Ken, sitting in his cabin surrounded by a jungle of ferns, deer-horn cactus and assorted creepers. I half expected a glimpse of exotic birds. He told me he had a flat in Durban, but had kept his British passport – not that he didn’t feel safe in South Africa: ‘I don’t think the place will blow up in my lifetime,’ he said. ‘The racial thing is very well sewn up, you know. Of course, I worry about the children sometimes, or the grandchildren.’

  Ken admired Captain Brand and regarded him as a good honest seaman. I should bear in mind, he said, that Cornie had not been overjoyed when the company asked him to take a passenger up the Brazilian coast. Across to Cape Town he didn’t mind taking me, but he had become used to having his current Brazilian girlfriend aboard with him on the coastal run – after years in these ports he had made a number of ‘sweeties’. With me on board he decided he had better leave the current sweetie ashore.

  Hearing this, I was even more grateful for the invitations to drink in the captain’s cabin. There I could sometimes spot what a lonely man he was. He was only happy at sea, he said. ‘Only a ship is important to me. I don’t trust de friends, y’see. I don’t trust anyone out of de sight. No one. If you cannot see dem how do you know what dey’re op to?’ Tortured by such self-doubt, I thought, no wonder he clings to Roy so much.

  Towards sunset the ship’s bar was crowded; the captain and Ken were in their cabins, but others were having their first drink of the evening. The looming figure of Roy dominated one end of the room.

  ‘Let’s go off to a good, quiet bar in the town,’ he said to everyone in general. ‘To sit outside. It’s hot.’

  ‘It’s odd, Roy,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t find anywhere like that in town. There’s nowhere to sit outside.’ Then, looking up, I saw the chief engineer staring at me with what melodramatic novelists would call sheer naked hate.

  ‘What the fuck do you know about it?’ he bellowed.

  The unexpectedness of it and the loathing in his voice were staggering. Total silence fell in the bar except for a giggle from one of the South Africans. Astonishment gave way almost at once with me to intense anger. I had to make an enormous effort to control my expression and to sound flippant and unconcerned, but I managed to say quite mildly, ‘Take it easy, Roy. You’re not talking to the chief officer now.’

  ‘I don’t give a fuck who I’m talking to,’ he roared, the hate still there, glaring out at me through the Billy Bunter spectacles. Then he left the bar. A long, embarrassed silence lasted while, at a deliberately slow pace, I finished my drink.

  Then Lionel, the coloured chief steward, shook his head. ‘What’s the matter with the chief tonight, I wonder?’ There was no answer, and I didn’t need one. Ken had given me a warning to expect anti-British feeling – and I hadn’t taken it seriously. I would do so from now on.

  Later, when the bar was nearly empty, a British engineer, nicknamed the Pope because of a bald patch like a skullcap surrounded by white hair, sat down by me and said quietly, ‘I sympathize. But a word in your ear. It’s no good, y’know, talking to the Old Man about that outburst of the chief’s. Like banging your head on a brick wall.’

  ‘But it’s not important, Popie. I wouldn’t want to trouble the Old Man anyway.’

  ‘You see, he’s completely under the chief’s thumb.’

  ‘Someone has told me that already,’ I said. Then, as he got me a drink, I suddenly began to wonder how I was going to stand another fourteen days on this ship.

  ‘The company wouldn’t approve of that behaviour,’ Pope said when he came back. ‘You can be quite sure of that.’

  *

  Next day, halfway to Bragança, the third officer asked me to report to the captain in his cabin. I found Ken sitting with Cornie. Both men looked grave.

  ‘I want to say somedin’,’ the captain said. ‘Please do not from now on have anydin’ to do wid de crew. You see, it is very serious when de crew begins to steal de cargo. It’s a fokken, stinkin’ business. I told dem dey should own op or dey’ll be discharged in Durban. Dey answered, “We are innocent.” Well, dis is stinkin’ lies, y’see.’

  Roy came in. I had hardly spoken to him since the incident in the bar.

  ‘Did you tell Gavin about my motorbike?’ he asked. And to me: ‘The crew threw it into the ocean in the night.’

  ‘Overboard?’ I was flabbergasted. It was an astounding thing to happen at sea. Now I understood Cornie’s grave expression. The motorbike had been lashed to a handrail on deck. Roy had put the most junior engine room cadet in charge of maintaining it and cleaning it daily. ‘Do you know who did it?’

  ‘Well, of course no one will talk.’

  ‘Dere’s no proof again, y’see,’ the captain said.

  Someone’s trying to tell somebody something, I thought. I remembered immediately my short talk with Henry, the angry Zulu, in the dockside bar. Perhaps my imagination, overheated by the incidents of the theft and the chief officer’s fury, ran away with me, because it suddenly came into my head that the crew might start throwing all of us overboard one after the other, like a maritime adaptation of the Agatha Christie thriller And Then There Were None. True, eleven crewmen were up against sixteen officers and cadets, but the crew would have the advantage of surprise. Perhaps in 1985 such thoughts seem melodramatic to landsmen, but the dockside bars of the world abound with stories of recent acts of piracy, violence and mutiny on the high seas.

  Brand said: ‘Now, look. All doors must be kept locked day and night. Drawers, too. Cupboards. Everydin’. Nodin’ is safe.’

  I had a vision of Zulus trying vainly to break open my metal case and throwing it over the side in disgust. ‘You’ve got no guns aboard, I suppose,’ I said.

  ‘Dey may have guns,’ the captain answered grimly. ‘Dey could have bought dem in Brazil.’ This old seaman, I noticed, didn’t find my talk of guns at all unreal.

  ‘Haven’t you any at all?’ It would be nice to be able to defend the bridge and the radio room.

  ‘Ha! And if I have where do I keep dem? On de bridge? And say to de mutineers when dey come, “Joost a moment please while I run op and get de guns”? Wherever dey are you would never get dem in time. Even in de cabin. Dat’s why I say simply, to all our chaps – keep away from de crew.’

  ‘At least the engine room crew are okay,’ Roy assured me.

  I thought of Henry again. Did Roy really think the engine room staff were on his side? Well, it wasn’t my business. I was only a passenger.

  None of the crew went ashore at Bragança. The bosun had been threatened and no one owned up to dumping the bike over the side so their shore leave was stopped. What were the Zulus plotting next? I was glad they weren’t a Chinese crew. If they had been, I had a feeling the chief engineer might have been stabbed in the belly with a screwdriver
– and maybe myself as well.

  ‘Perhaps things have been handled in a rather high-handed way,’ Ken commented. ‘If things go from bad to worse and there’s a strike in the engine room, we can handle that with the officers and cadets. That’s no problem. Actually, even if the whole of the crew refuse to work, we could sail the ship with no difficulty.’

  ‘Surely Pete should be on good terms with the engine room Zulus? He’s a coloured.’

  ‘That shows how little you know about South Africa, Gavin. The blacks dislike the coloureds almost to the point that they hate the whites.’

  The stop in Bragança was intended to be short – just time enough to take on a cargo of timber. The officers, with mutiny in the air, vanished ashore to forget their problems at an establishment offering a bar, a disco and bedrooms that accommodated anyone until morning. Giving it the once-over with the Pope, I tramped over a yard of flattened mud to an open-air bar where the stench of urine hit my nostrils as inevitably as lavender in a Victorian lady’s chemise. Here the captain found his sweetie waiting for him – thank God, because that cheered him up when a good cheering-up was what he most needed. He sat in the bar with his arm round her and her black shock of hair on his shoulder, his smiling, bearded lips happily exhibiting his great want of teeth.

  The odd goings-on aboard the Piranha made everyone behave in an exaggerated way. The young men, seeing their captain’s attention single-mindedly focused on his sweetie, gave way to inanity to a degee which Captains Carter or Gomersall, or even Steve Komorowski or young Graham Harris might have thought excessive. They threw away their money with the witless zest of men ridding themselves of useless currency, their shouts of ‘pomp’ and ‘shit’ filling the unsanitized air. A Brazilian doxy nicknamed ‘La Specialista’ (she specialized in short times but many of them) suddenly achieved superstar status. I wouldn’t be surprised if the bedroom block broke all occupancy records with the arrival of the Piranha. Feydeau-esque sounds of doors opening and closing might have been mistaken for the first fusillades in an armed uprising by the Zulu crew. I found myself lending money to the young officers and cadets, who were desperate to do anything rather than return to the ship before dawn.