Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  Presently, across a white linen cloth, I found myself facing the captain, George Coupar, a greying veteran of south-east Asian shipping, unbearded and benign, flanked by a pair of English businessmen and their wives. The larger of the two men, with a suntan that had turned him almost dangerously maroon, soon started on the Second World War, a novel topic after Brazilian tugmasters, water rationing and stolen cargo.

  ‘… and they issued us with pith helmets. Pith helmets! So of course we knew at once —’

  ‘– you were off to Iceland.’ His neighbour, less sunburnt, managed a ventilation company in Sussex: a nice man who played the clarinet quite well in his cups.

  ‘No. Actually it was double bluff,’ the maroon man said. ‘We really went to India.’ He forked up egg mayonnaise as if eggs were going out of season. ‘I’ll never forget standing there on parade in Poona and seeing officers on horses. Officers on horses. Clip-clop, clip-clop. Riding down the ranks. In 1942, Hitler’s war. More like 1870. Made you think.’

  ‘The King’s Royal African Rifles, m’self, old boy. West Africa –’

  ‘East, surely?’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘King’s Royal African Rifles. East Africa.’

  ‘That’s right. Kenya. Abyssinia way. Place called Hargeisa. Know it? Gave me a whole bunch of Italian prisoners to look after. Imagine. No Italian to my name –’

  ‘Shipped in tiny ships to Basra –’ Maroon Face said.

  ‘Where did you go from – Poona?’ Captain Coupar put in, addressing him.

  ‘– and sure enough the Eyeties, one morning, when I woke up, had disappeared. Gone. Every one.’

  Two stories now; you took your choice.

  ‘– and up to Baghdad. Stinking hole.’

  ‘– I’m for the high jump now, I thought. So I found the local British district officer feller. Intelligent man. Knew the area –’

  ‘– didn’t know Baghdad existed outside the fairy stories –’

  ‘– “Sure to come back when they’re hungry,” he said. And he was right. Knew his onions. Soon came back in dribs and drabs. The Eyeties like a square meal, y’know.’

  ‘Don’t we all?’ my neighbour said, pouring wine all round. A quiet man with a serious yet whimsical expression, he gave me a quick wink.

  *

  In the upper bar there were unexplained pictures of governors-general of Australia round the walls; it was a cosy little place of dark wood and crimson plush and bits of brass. Elderly passengers sat over brandy, dressed for an evening out. It seemed an age since I had worn a suit and tie on a ship – at Captain Segal’s table on the Alexander Pushkin.

  The barman was short and round, and two things about him puzzled me. He was dark without looking Indian, Latin, African or Oriental; and on his lapel a name tag proclaimed ‘Brian Bar’. An unusual name.

  ‘I’m a Saint,’ he said, smiling. ‘Not, I mean, that I’m saintly, of course.’ He laughed. ‘But from St Helena Island. That’s what people from there are called.’ He spoke with a soft, attractive burr like that of Devonshire or Dorset.

  ‘And Brian Bar is your name?’

  He laughed again. ‘Well, Brian is my name, sir. Bar is my place of work.’ He tapped the hard wooden counter between us.

  ‘Nice piece of wood you’ve got here.’

  ‘It is good. I am a cabinetmaker by trade, sir. Like all Saints I like to travel.’

  ‘Will you ever go back to St Helena now you’ve seen the world?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Very few of us leave the island for good.’

  ‘It must be a good place to visit, then.’

  *

  ‘Captain Coupar and the Ship’s Company welcome aboard RMS Centaur all those passengers who joined in Cape Town,’ said the daily information leaflet pushed under my cabin door. It went on to announce: ‘Rig of the Day. The Captain and Officers will wear white uniforms during the day and Red Sea rig in the evening.’ Red Sea rig meant black trousers, black cummerbund, black tie and white shirts with long sleeves. I tried vainly to imagine Roy of the Piranha in Red Sea rig. The leaflet advertised the usual soothing shipboard things. Boat drill and the captain’s cocktail party; dancing in the Lido Lounge; whist in the library: deck quoits, Scrabble, chess and draughts tournaments organized by Jeannie, the assistant purser. Mike, the organist, would entertain in the Lido Lounge from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. By the second day, passengers needed to be advised that the navigation bridge and the crew quarters were restricted to crew only. They were also reminded that it would be useless to try to post an airmail letter from St Helena: the island had no airport.

  In the Lido Lounge a young man sat at my table, ordered a drink and handed me a card. Was he selling something? The card read:

  Congratulations!!

  You Have Just Been Killed by 44 Para Pathfinder Company.

  Thank You!

  (Families Catered For)

  It had an ace of spades on its back.

  ‘I’m Jacques,’ he said with a broad, guileless grin, and held out his hand. ‘I’ll explain.’ He was a mercenary, Belgian, but living in Paris. He was a killer, he said. He had been with South African irregular forces against the African guerrillas of SWAPO, the South West African People’s Organization fighting for the independence of Namibia.

  ‘I’ve killed a Soviet colonel and a Soviet woman there,’ he said. ‘Cubans, too.’ The Soviet colonel and the woman had been caught in crossfire inside Angola. His card was similar to others left on the bodies of dead African guerrillas.

  ‘You taking some leave?’ I asked.

  No, he was packing it in for good, he said. He hadn’t been getting on with the South Africans. No foreign mercenaries did. The South Africans didn’t make very good irregular soldiers and the mercenaries brought a lot of expertise with them and that made the South Africans jealous.

  ‘I don’t know about the South African high command,’ Jacques said, ‘but junior officers are very inflexible. Not like the Rhodesians, who are really terrific bush fighters. South Africans haven’t much idea.’ He held up both hands, palms flat, fingers together, and placed them either side of his head. ‘Blinkered. Narrow view. So a lot of us leave.’ He laughed. ‘It’s their loss.’

  Jacques’ Para Pathfinder Company had patrolled the bush, hiding all day, moving at night, using black trackers ‘Wonderful chaps. They’d say, “Oh, thirty men passed this way, going north-west, a bit less than an hour ago,” and we’d follow and find them.’

  What a world! We sat in the lounge, he drinking tomato juice and I a Bloody Mary, among middle-aged couples on holiday, on our way to a peaceful island far from everything, with that loathsome card lying on the table between us.

  ‘Take a look,’ he was saying casually, drawing out of his hip pocket photographs of captured machine guns, anti-aircraft guns, mortars, multiple grenade launchers, even tanks. ‘The SWAPO people can’t use those useless tanks,’ Jacques said. There was a picture of a black corpse and another of mercenaries smiling at the camera in front of high clumps of what looked like elephant grass.

  ‘See – all NCOs and all foreigners. From left: Rhodesian, Rhodesian, Rhodesian, New Zealand, British, Irish, Rhodesian, Belgian (ha, that’s me), Irish, Australian, Australian, American, Costa Rican (yes!), Rhodesian (he’s dead)….’ Perhaps he’d publish his experiences, he said, in France or Belgium.

  As the Centaur moved up north-west of Namibia, where the killing was still going on without him, I saw him again a couple of times during the voyage. Once we waved to each other across the Scrabble boards, and later he cheerfully raised his glass across the Lido Lounge during a dance party, while his other hand comforted a sad-looking woman with wilting shoulders.

  *

  At dinner one night an eccentric-looking woman, expensively dressed, teetered past our table, winking outrageously at Captain Coupar. ‘Yoo-hoo, big boy,’ she carolled, stopping the conversation. ‘Haven’t I seen you before? On the Orontes, wasn’t it, darling? Or was it on the What’s-it? You
’ve aged, darling.’ She leaned forward. ‘I’m cabin 205; you’ve got the master key, haven’t you, sweet?’

  The captain took it easily and went on talking to the wife from Sussex. ‘Er … so the pirates just throw a rope with a hook on it up the side of the Ship and shin up. Off Singapore there are more pirates than you’d read about in the papers there. Container ships have very few crew. So the pirates climb aboard, go into the engine room – often without seeing a soul – and take the brass fittings and instruments.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ the woman said.

  After a while I heard the serious man with the whimsical expression saying something interesting. ‘A useful experience, running a ferry service in East Nigeria, shifting a million passengers a year.’

  ‘Did you do that?’ I asked him.

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Sounds real Sanders of the River stuff.’

  He laughed. ‘It was. The Nigerian commodore was a great seaman in or out of the navy. A great character, too. He had three wives and girlfriends he rotated round his mansion and two farms. He said to me once, “Look, if we sail on the ferry to Fernando Po one day, we could sell the passengers there and return empty without anybody noticing.”’

  ‘Have you been on the Centaur before?’

  ‘No. But I own her.’

  It sounded a good conversational line.

  ‘Actually, I’ve chartered her to see if she’s what we want on the Avonmouth–St Helena–Cape Town route. My name’s Bell. Andrew Bell.’

  Andrew Bell was the sort of friendly ship-owner you would like to meet on a ship, but ship-owners usually prefer to travel by jumbo jet. At meals between Cape Town and Jamestown, the port of St Helena, I learned a bit about him.

  ‘Much of my education,’ he said, ‘came from watching shipping in and out of Sydney harbour. I was with the Blue Funnel line. I had the ambition of working in shipping ashore, but I couldn’t see how to get a good shore job at the age of twenty-one with a second officer’s ticket, so I joined the Australian Navy and wangled a commission.’

  You could almost warm your hands at the fire of Andrew Bell’s confidence. I didn’t think it would have needed much ‘wangling’ for him to get a commission in any navy. After that he’d been a management trainee with Elder Dempster; two years in Liverpool, two years in West Africa, where he’d met the Nigerian commodore with the rotating girlfriends. By 1973 he had decided to take a plunge.

  ‘I put every penny I’d saved into a 500-ton coaster. Things went well, so I bought a 1000-tonner.’ About this time he’d read a report on the need to do something about a sea supply route from Britain to the colony of St Helena, after the withdrawal of the Union Castle mail ships. The British Commonwealth Office asked him if he was interested in it.

  ‘They said they liked the look of my shipping company even though it was pretty obscure. So we raised some money and bought a ship in Canada and put her on the St Helena run. The Royal Mail Ship St Helena.’ Bell smiled. ‘Named by Princess Margaret and all. She’s making the round trip from Avonmouth to St Helena. Later she may go on down to South Africa. Or we’ll use her in tandem with the Centaur. I’m here to look things over and come to some conclusion.’

  The mad woman went by again, yoo-hooing at the captain.

  ‘When the Falklands War began, the Royal Navy called the St Helena up,’ Andrew Bell was saying, imperturbably. ‘“Taken up” was the nice official expression – like being raised up to the Pearly Gates by St Peter. She was fitted with a helicopter pad, Oerlikon guns – they weren’t used in anger, by the way – and the Royal Naval ratings were integrated with our Saints and our British officers.’

  ‘She deserves a medal,’ I said.

  Bell laughed. ‘She got a plaque instead.’ Probably he deserves a medal, I thought. For enterprise. At any rate, that was how I came to meet the founder and owner of the Curnow Shipping Company Ltd, based at the seaside town of Helston in Cornwall. I soon dubbed it ‘the greatest little shipping company in the West’.

  *

  I had written to the British Governor of St Helena some time before, and his reply had reached me in Chile:

  You will, of course, be very welcome here: bona fide travellers always are in remote small communities. They are like the lemon slice in the g-and-t, a touch of ‘zest’….

  It was an encouraging letter.

  Inevitably Bonaparte’s short stay here drew attention to the island. But much happened here before he came and more – though not enough – since. He is not a local folk hero and he is irrelevant to modern St Helena. I suspect local people resent being known for having had per force to accommodate a dangerous and ruthless ‘war criminal’ who was never recognised in his lifetime by a British Government for anything more than that. Longwood House is maintained by a dedicated and scholarly Conservateur des Bâtiments Français as a shrine.

  The letter was signed ‘John Massingham’.

  ‘He’s a very active and popular Governor,’ Andrew Bell told me. ‘Ex-BBC, I think.’

  If Andrew Bell liked him he couldn’t be bad, I thought. I saw the point about modern St Helena, but I certainly had every intention of visiting Longwood House. The Napoleonic period of European history had fascinated me from my schooldays. General Bertrand, Emmanuel Las Cases, the mystery-shrouded figure of Mme de Montholon – they were all there, flitting about under the no doubt hawkish eye of that ‘dedicated and scholarly’ French curator.

  My first sight of St Helena must have been much the same one that met the eyes of the island’s discoverer, the Portuguese navigator Joan da Nova Castella – the man who, arriving on the name day of Constantine the Great’s mother in 1502, named it after her. The island sat in the middle of the South Atlantic – twelve hundred miles from South West Africa and eighteen hundred miles east of South America – as composed as a rock in a fishpond.

  A voice was singing:

  Where be that blackbird to?

  I know where ’e be.

  ’E be up that worzel tree

  And I be after ’e.

  Now ’e sees I

  And I sees ’e.

  Bugger’d if I don’t get ’im

  With a girt big stick –

  I recognized a ragged Cornish song and it might have been a Cornish voice – or perhaps a Saint’s. At any rate, the song was cut off by the roar of the Centaur’s horn announcing our arrival to the people of St Helena. It was a great day for them. A ship only called there once every eight or nine weeks.

  Thirty-seven

  ‘I think that’s Frieda, sir,’ the boy said. ‘Or it’s Martha.’ He stooped and peered. ‘No, it’s Frieda.’ John Massingham stood with me in the paddock that lies the other side of the gravelled driveway outside the porticoed front door of Plantation House, the Governor of St Helena’s handsome residence. He regarded the tortoise at his feet speculatively. It lay there like a large boulder.

  ‘I think you ought to know who it is by now, Faron,’ Massingham said with a smile. He was a bustling man with glasses and a tendency to portliness in a Pickwickian way. With an utter lack of pomposity he had made me feel at home at once. ‘And where on earth is Jonathan? I think Mr Young should see Jonathan, don’t you?’ He turned to me. ‘Jonathan is the oldest tortoise here. He’s been here almost for ever. They’re all Seychelles tortoises, I believe.’

  ‘Napoleon knew him, then?’

  ‘No, I don’t think he’s been here quite that long.’

  The boy said, ‘Jonathan is in the pampas grass, sir. It’s a bit cold and damp at the moment. I daresay he’ll come out later.’ In his Saint’s accent I recognized once again the good, warm burr of the south-west of England.

  ‘Oh, good …. Jonathan has been here a hundred years, though, I should think,’ Massingham went on. ‘We don’t know how old he is exactly. We had an expert in reptiles out and he said you can’t date them. You know, you can’t measure age by the rings on their backs or anything like that.’

  ‘I’ve searched for Emma, si
r. She’s in some undergrowth on the other side of the lawn.’

  Taking what seemed an infinity of time, Frieda – if it wasn’t Martha – poked her leathery head out of her shell and cautiously looked around.

  ‘Do they bite?’ I asked Faron.

  ‘No. They don’t bite. They just seem to dig themselves into holes a lot of the time.’

  ‘So they can dig?’

  ‘No, sir. They don’t make holes. Frieda’s just found that hole ready there.’ Frieda looked nervous and snatched her head in sharply. John Massingham made a tut-tut noise.

  ‘Old Jonathan leaves his head sticking out all the time,’ the boy said.

  ‘Ah – he’s old and wise, so he’s not afraid.’

  ‘He’s old and wise. Yes, sir, he is.’

  *

  Stepping ashore in the tiny port of Jamestown was not just a step back into the architectural past, it was like stepping into Toy Town. Everything seemed to be at peace and in miniature, a relief after the racket of Rio de Janeiro. There was a small and simple stone jetty to disembark at. In the main street here you could have shot a film about Napoleon’s exile or the life of Nelson or the Duke of Wellington without doing much more than remove a telephone line or two.

  With Andrew Bell I had passed through a rampart, over a moat, and under a royal coat of arms and a St George’s cross into a little square, with a spired church on the right and a low, whitewashed seventeenth-century castle on the left. Here we had met Governor John Massingham in his high-ceilinged office, approached through a white arch guarded by brass cannons and then by a wide, old-fashioned staircase.

  Under the royal portraits John Massingham said, ‘It costs the British Government, oh, about four million pounds a year in subsidies to keep the island going. The RMS St Helena takes some of that, doesn’t it?’ This to Andrew, who nodded. He went on: ‘We need things here very badly. A new power station, for instance – the system is overloaded now; there’s no reservoir. A reorganized fishing industry. A secondary school. Things like that. Two million pounds would cover it.’