Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  ‘I hope the Old Man won’t crack up,’ Ken said, puffing tobacco in his plant-filled cabin. ‘There are only two men on this ship who really know what a captain feels like in this situation: me and himself. A ship’s a master’s baby, y’know.’

  I did know. Still, I didn’t expect Cornie – a hard man, after all – to go berserk, although I could see his temper might give us all a very rough ride. Lionel and Popie began to go about looking decidedly thoughtful, and the Zulu crew, who had faded silently below decks after the first stranding, mostly remained there. It was the junior officers who were most vociferously affected by our sudden immobility and isolation from the shore. Shrill bursts of hysterical shouting rang about the ship. One young officer, a South African of English origin, took to hooting and barking like a dog – ‘Arf! Arf! Arf!’ – up and down the companionways. Even before the accident he had affected a mad, whinnying laugh to amuse his mates, and now they began to imitate him. Non-stop obscenities filled the officers’ bar much of the day and most of the night, and there was no one to control them. Lionel now wore a constant frown, wondering aloud where it would all end. One could only hope it would end quite soon.

  But it did not end quite soon. We waited for tugs – and waited again. How long would they take to get to us? Nobody knew. Days went by. An order came from the captain to ration fresh water: its use was now banned except between the hours of 0600 and 0830, between 1200 and 1300, and between 1700 and 2030. No one was to wash or flush a toilet except between these precise times. That was only the start. By the next day, Captain Cornie had had time to worry a little more about the situation.

  Popie came on deck with a long face. ‘More rationing,’ he announced. ‘Can you believe it? Water for only one hour in the early morning, half an hour at midday and one hour from five-thirty in the afternoon. The Old Man’s becoming very strange, if you ask me.’

  First the water, then the grog. At lunch that day Captain Brand drained his wineglass and looked round the table at us. ‘Dat’s dat,’ he said flatly. ‘No more whisky now. And no more wine. Until we are at sea.’ We nodded and smiled nervously. ‘If we ever are,’ he added in a haggard voice.

  That afternoon Lionel shook his head as we sat alone over a cup of tea. ‘Something strange is going on,’ he sighed. ‘I worry what will happen next. In twenty-five years at sea I’ve not known anything like this.’

  ‘The tugs will be here soon,’ I said soothingly, and added: ‘Anyway, the kipper fillets were good at breakfast.’

  ‘Good of you to say so. But you wait, the next thing they’ll start complaining about is the catering.’

  ‘The food is absolutely fine.’

  ‘That’s what happens when things go wrong. The food gets blamed. You’ll see.’

  ‘We’re expecting a tug today, Lionel.’

  But later that day Popie and Lionel approached me like mutes at a funeral, and Popie burst out: ‘Shall we tell ’im, Lionel? Eh? Shall we?’

  ‘Oh, go on, for God’s sake,’ I said, laughing. Popie laughed, too. ‘The tug won’t be here for two days more. That’s what.’

  So for two more long, dragging days we stared at the same bay, at the same shore, at the same wharf. People looked for ways to beat the boredom. Roy, a mountain of geniality, asked me for a book and I lent him Conrad’s The End of the Tether, not simply because the title seemed appropriate but because I thought he might appreciate the seamanship in it. He took it and thanked me, and for once we had a conversation uninterrupted by obscenities. He talked interestingly of South Africa. I had wondered what, in the maze of racial complexities, his relations might be with Pete, who shared his table at mealtimes and drank with him in the ship’s bar every normal evening at sea. What happened once they were ashore in Cape Town or Durban. Could they go to a pub together? To a theatre?

  ‘Go to a bar with Pete – to all intents and purposes, no,’ he said. ‘Nor to the theatre. Maybe to some cinemas, but not to all. We’d have no trouble drinking together in a big international-class hotel, of course. They have no rules on colour.’

  ‘What about in your house?’

  ‘The government rule is that he could come to my house but couldn’t stay the night there. But’ – he put his elbows on his desk and stared unblinkingly through his gold rims like a police inspector confronting a suspected terrorist – ‘I’d like to see the man who’d throw anyone out of my house. Pete’s the finest shipmate you could wish for. Of course, it annoys me. I don’t believe in one man one vote, and I think we need a dictatorship. But it annoys me about the coloureds, like Pete. The situation makes me feel fucked up in my mind.’

  *

  At last there was a tug. It dodged under our bows and linked up with our anchor chain and pulled us to the mouth of the bay. A blessing – even a limited move like that was a blessing.

  ‘Tomorrow eight o’clock we go to Rio,’ Captain Cornie said. ‘We’ll all be very happy.’

  ‘Above all you, I hope.’

  He gave me a wolfish grin. ‘Ja, dat’s so, dat’s so.’

  But there was no happiness for anyone next day. Someone sent a message that the tug had broken down somewhere, and it never came. The silence at lunch was terrible. Cornie’s eyes developed a pink, watery look. While the meal lasted we kept our heads down like soldiers in a trench while the ‘fokkens’ and ‘stinkin’s’ exploded round us. Next morning another tug came and pulled us about aimlessly for a while before the tugmaster informed Cornie he didn’t feel he could manage to tow us to Rio, and called it a day.

  As meal followed silent meal, I read and re-read the manufacturer’s stamp on the knives and forks – ‘Status Stainless Steel’ – and the small print on the labels of sauce bottles; ‘Mrs H. S. Ball’s Chutney’ began to mesmerize me. It wasn’t much by way of distraction, but it was something. Dinner was the worst torture. It was eaten at five o’clock in the afternoon now, by the captain’s edict, and the nights seemed endless. The bar had become intolerable, filled with a confused racket of shouts from junior officers and cassettes of hard rock. Otherwise the ship’s social life ground to a dismal halt. Ken retired into the quiet of his cabin. Jock, the radio officer, was, I presume, fiddling with his dials behind the locked door of the radio room. The Pope and Lionel watched Brazilian television with the sound off, which didn’t appeal to me.

  ‘The crew,’ Lionel said, sorting some linen in a cupboard near my cabin door, ‘they are very unhappy, Gavin.’

  I hadn’t seen a Zulu for days. ‘What are they doing – playing darts? Watching Brazilian TV?’ If I hadn’t been forbidden to speak to them I would have gone down and asked them myself.

  ‘They play cards a lot.’

  ‘I haven’t seen you near the bar lately.’

  He shook his head. ‘I can’t stand the noise, the obscenities. These youngsters don’t get enough sex in South Africa. That’s the trouble.’

  ‘No girls in South Africa, Lionel?’

  ‘Well, the girls there are choosy. And they wouldn’t choose this lot, I can tell you. In Brazilian bars, as you’ve seen, they only have to pay a girl to get it. And so when they can’t get ashore, like now, like teenage boys they go all stupid. Trouble is the Old Man doesn’t seem to mind the din.’

  ‘The Old Man has other things on his mind.’

  ‘That is indeed the case,’ Lionel said sadly.

  *

  By now I had to think seriously of dates. It wouldn’t be long before the Centaur sailed from Cape Town to St Helena, and if things had gone right with the Piranha we should have been in Cape Town already. I mentioned this to Captain Brand, who said, ‘Leave de ship here if you like, Gavin. Joost take de agent’s launch ashore.’

  ‘I’d like to see the end of this,’ I said. ‘Can I give it another two or three days?’ I reckoned I could afford that amount of time.

  ‘As long as you like. Why not see if dis next fokken tow is workin’ out?’ So I waited for the next tow.

  Next day, another tug maundered out to us
. Once more the anchor chain was attached to the tug’s stern. Now, I thought, the tug will go ahead of us, stretch the line tight and draw us cautiously to Rio. Like towing a bus with no brakes: tricky but possible, when you are a tugmaster and know how. But none of this happened. The tug shot off to port at right-angles, pottered daintily about there for a time, then, appearing to become bored, danced off back to base in time for breakfast.

  ‘I dink I am goin’ to have a heart attack,’ Cornie groaned, raising his red, bearded face to the indifferent heavens.

  ‘Tugmaster was scared,’ Roy snorted with uncontrolled contempt.

  ‘Ja, fokken, stinkin’ scared.’

  That day’s lunch was indescribable.

  At last, one day at dawn – I was learning that one day is much like another in purgatory – two tugs appeared. There was mist, rain and a noticeable swell. Once more the Piranha’s officers stumbled expectantly into the wheelhouse. Once more young Osvaldo, the interpreter, gripped the loudhailer. Once more our anchor chain was hauled up; once more it was laid over the stern of a tug and attached to its massive, swivelling towing hook. While the second tug looked on, the Piranha slowly moved ahead. Rising and falling with the swell, feeling once more the open sea under her bows, she silently approached the ocean. I saw an attentive phalanx of seagulls standing shoulder to shoulder on an exposed mudbank, like sailors lining the side of a warship leaving port; their sea-grey eyes watched us sceptically.

  Captain Cornelius stared hopefully at the tug, a smile lurking. ‘Away to sea,’ he said, rolling up the sleeves of his old grey sweater. ‘Away back to the fokken sea.’

  ‘Just think – a few days in Rio,’ Roy said. ‘Hot baths.’

  But the seagulls were right. I heard Cornie say very suddenly and very harshly – ‘Keep de anchor outside the hawse-pipe, ready to let go again!’

  I hadn’t expected quite so exact a replay. The tug’s captain was waggling his hands in some mad semaphore; the little snub-nosed tug scuttled across our bows to port and soon fetched up at the customary right-angles to our hull, where it sat bobbing and nodding like a complacent duck but incapable of pulling us in any direction we wanted to go.

  Soon worse followed. The tug let the towline go slack, but for a moment the swell drew her away from us again and the line came out of the sea in a flash, rigid, white with spray, sizzling as if it were a steaming hot iron bar dipped in cold water. Drawing taut, it snapped, and almost faster than the eye could follow it sprang back wickedly like a striking black mamba. It lashed itself against the sternbar of the tug, wrenching one heavy metal leg of it out of the tug’s deck and leaving a gaping hole in its plates. The sound was that of a blacksmith’s hammer striking a cracked bell; the effect, disastrous. It was the knell of my voyage on the Piranha.

  ‘Bedder get your bags packed, Gavin.’ Cornie’s despairing croak was barely audible above the roar of static from the handset that connected him to Ken and the anchor party in the bow. ‘Dat’s de end of de tow.’ His mouth was twisting about in the ragged beard, but when at last he said into his handset, ‘Drop de hook,’ he sounded sad and tired rather than angry; he didn’t even say ‘fokken’.

  It would probably have been a mistake to express the sympathy I felt, so I didn’t try, and when he came over to me near the chart table I was surprised to see he was smiling.

  ‘Gavin, you’d bedder leave us. You’ll be late at Cape Town.’ He made a sweeping gesture. ‘I am commandin’ a dead ship.’ His big paw pressed down on a chart, on the finely drawn swirls and meticulous depth marks depicting the details of that infernal bay. ‘I am commandin’ a dead ship.’

  He had been commanding a dead ship for three weeks.

  *

  The agent’s launch would be coming out to us in an hour or so. I went below and threw my things into my bags, tilted the last finger of gin – one I had hoarded for so long – into a tooth mug and knocked it back. Reginald, my gentle cabin steward, came in to lend a hand, and when everything was ready I gave him some money.

  ‘Tell Henry I wish him luck,’ I said, ‘and good luck to you, Reginald. I hope you get to Rio by Christmas.’ We laughed. ‘Try not to spend all your money there.’

  ‘No, no,’ he said seriously. ‘I am saving to buy some shoes.’

  Lionel was next. ‘Goodbye,’ I said. ‘If there’s anything I can do….’

  ‘If you would call my wife, she’d like to know I am all right. She’ll have read something about this in the papers back home.’

  On the stairs I ran into Henry in grey overalls, going below, I suppose, after the towline fiasco. I hadn’t set eyes on him since he’d complained in the dockside bar that the chief officer was behaving like the king of the ship. The chief’s motorbike had gone over the side a night or two later.

  ‘Goodbye, Henry.’ I smiled. ‘You’re crew. I’m not meant to talk to you, but goodbye.’

  ‘You off?’ He held out a hand and I took it. ‘You know – my lawyer? Yeah, well, I did write to him.’ He gave me a short, friendly nod. ‘We’ll see what happens. ’Bye.’

  When I wished Ken a happy tow, he said, ‘Oh, we’ll get one in the end. It’s been a bad experience for all of us. Especially for Cornie, of course.’ He sat in his easy chair, surrounded by his jungle. ‘First-rate is Cornie. A bloody fine seaman.’

  I forget what I said to Captain Brand – ‘Goodbye and thank you’ – something simple like that. I couldn’t attempt to convey my appreciation of that rough, simple good-natured seaman who, just as I came aboard, suffered some of the worst strokes of misfortune – stranding and a disaffected crew – known to a ship’s master.

  Dressed as usual in khaki shorts, Roy looked at me through his Billy Bunter glasses and smiled. A pussy cat? Ken was probably right. At the same time, Roy, like many another ship’s officer, might – as Henry alleged – have found a dreamed-of kingdom in the confined, autocratic world of ships; and, aware as he was that the most expert engineer can never become a master, might have discovered how at sea, as much as on land, the power of a grand vizier can be almost as great as that of the caliph himself. We shook hands. ‘No hard feelings,’ we said to each other, and these were all the goodbyes I had time for. The launch was waiting. Daisy gave me a hand over the side, and in a moment we were heading up the too-familiar bay towards a place I had had no desire to set foot in ever again. I took out my diary and flipped its pages. The Piranha had put in here for a short weekend at most. We had stayed for four weeks and a few days more – some of the longest days I have ever known.

  For the next two days I battled my way through the sluggish immigration system of Bragança and sank thankfully at last into a seat on a plane back to Rio. I fell asleep at once and dreamed I was at sea again on the Piranha. She was helpless in a terrible storm. Zulu deckhands were struggling to throw over the side a gigantic container of contraband potatoes before the weight of it took the ship down. I wanted to help them, but I was slammed against a bulkhead by two or three hysterical young officers screaming ‘Sluts! Sluts!’ and when I appealed to Captain Brand and Roy they only frowned and turned their backs. Just then the ship’s bows dived for ever into a wave and I was in the sea. In a moment the captain’s dripping, bearded face surfaced beside me, spluttering, ‘Fokken, stinkin’ business,’ then disappeared below the water again, leaving me fighting to put on a lifejacket that kept turning into a metal suitcase….

  I jerked awake, sweating, and ordered a double brandy to take the taste of nightmare out of my mouth. With the brandy inside me and the feel of the plane dipping down to Rio, my heart rose at once like the lark and gloried in the high places.

  After a day of relaxation in Rio I made the change I really needed – a change of continent – and flew to Cape Town, where I had heard from the agents that the Centaur was waiting to leave on schedule. Her first stop was still St Helena, and I had time enough to catch her.

  *

  As for the Piranha, she reached Rio at last and sat in dry dock while they worked o
n her bent rudder and replaced her buckled propeller blades and hammered out her plates or maybe replaced them. The Zulus had taken matters into their own hands long before that, and had gone on strike soon after I left the ship in that God-forsaken bay. Rightly or wrongly, they believed that some of their officers were bullies. They knew the accusations of stealing the leather lacked proof, and I suppose they regarded the cancellation of overtime and the stopping of shore leave as high-handed treatment. Were they right? Or had they brought it all on themselves? There would be at least two opinions about that. At any rate they had been put ashore in Brazil and flown home, and thereafter the Piranha had been worked first by the officers and later by a skeleton crew flown in from South Africa.

  Perhaps Henry’s lawyer wasn’t needed after all. It seemed to me unlikely that the company would drag an entire Zulu crew into the dock. But I don’t know. Nor do I yet know – lawyers will keep such legal pots a-boiling for years if they can – who was to blame for knocking the tail out of the poor Piranha on a pinnacle of Brazilian rock.

  Thirty-six

  I was glad that my departure from Cape Town was as unlike my attempted departure from Bragança as anything could be.

  A pink roll of cloud covered the flat top of Table Mountain that beautiful evening, a fringe of it spilling over one edge like candyfloss. The RMS Centaur was carrying a hundred and eighty passengers as well as cargo, partly destined for her first stop, St Helena, and her wide decks had a fairground atmosphere. We moved serenely towards the mouth of the harbour and took to the open sea without hitting a thing. Loudspeakers were relaying a brass band’s rendering of ‘A Life on the Ocean Wave’. Soon a demure English voice announced that dinner would be served at eight o’clock, and that this was Dusty Miller, your head waiter.