Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

The Pep Sirius was a four-year-old vessel of 1500 tons with a crew of four Spaniards, all short, stocky and cheerful, and six officers of whom five were Danes and one, the chief officer, was Greek. I had taken to them at once. They were all, except two, heavily bearded. The captain, Kurt Sorensen, was hardly older than the other Danes, who looked to me barely thirty, though all that golden hair may have been misleading. Marcos, the Greek chief officer, was built like a tub; his beard was bushy and the colour of salt and pepper, with salt predominating. The chief engineer, Jan, had been advised by the doctor on Ascension Island to fly home with his broken leg in plaster, but he had refused to leave his wife, Elsa, the ship’s cook. Jan spent most of the voyage with his leg up in his cabin, but joined us in the saloon for meals. His second engineer, Tom Rasmussen, a prototypically blond Scandinavian giant, managed the engine and we had no breakdowns.

  We crossed from the South Atlantic into the North Atlantic, heading for a river in Senegal. Christmas at sea and then New Year were celebrated by the Danes with the heady desperation of men who suspected that all alcohol was to be banned in Scandinavia on 2 January. Dolphins leapt joyously out of six-foot waves while inside the Pep Sirius’s neat, freshly painted hull the saloon joyously reverberated with ‘Kender i den om Rudolf’, otherwise known as ‘Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer’, ‘Jingle Bells’ and a happy jazzy Danish number called ‘From the Top of the Christmas Tree’. Elsa covered the portholes with artificial snow and stars. Coloured streamers and paper bells criss-crossed the ceilings. The drinks locker was thrown open; toasts were drunk and drunk again. I made a note of the total Christmas Day consumption of alcohol by six officers and one passenger – not forgetting that Marcos was a teetotaller. Two bottles of akvavit, two bottles of Scotch whisky and two cases of Carlsberg lager was the final tally for the day. The sickly taste of the akvavit, a rich, raw aniseed, clung tenaciously to the back of my throat for days.

  Luckily Marcos was quite prepared to spend most of his time on the bridge while the others made merry below. Sometimes he sang, at other times he drank tea and talked and I joined him to listen. He was an indefatigable artist, too. The margins of the ship’s charts were covered with sketches whose subject was always the same–parrots. The first one I saw, a parrot man in a straw hat, was drawn over part of the Spanish Sahara.

  ‘Who’s that, Marcos? A tourist?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said, shrugging. ‘It could be. Look at these.’

  From a drawer he dragged out other charts. One was of the Red Sea coast and there, around Medina, were the domes and cupolas of mosques that his pencil had made to burgeon among the arid contour lines – and big-beaked Arab parrots in headcloths were walking about, leading camels. Above Mount Sinai, a bearded parrot monk – not unlike Marcos himself – stuck a head wearing a stovepipe hat out of a monastery door. I still have a sheet or two of Marcos’s doodlings – Hebrew parrots with little skullcaps, Chinese parrots wearing mollusc hats, Indian parrots with turbans, long-nosed parrots, bespectacled parrots, even a Red Indian parrot with long hair tied with a fillet and two feathers (parrot feathers, I suppose) sticking up at the back.

  Marcos was married to a Danish woman, which is why he worked on the Pep Sirius for a Danish company. He liked Denmark, but he thought all Danes were far too gloomy. ‘Everyone is deep down a Hamlet. That’s why they drink so.’ Not that he was against drink, but he thought Scandinavians made pigs of themselves in liquor, unable to stop drinking once they had started. When, as I soon did, I came to appreciate Marcos’s humanity and humour, I also discovered a down-to-earth commonsense. The Spanish crewmen were a good lot, he said.

  ‘But why do you think we have a Spanish crew?’ he asked me.

  ‘Cheap labour?’ I said, thinking of the Filipinos.

  ‘No, no, no. I tell you. In Denmark shipping companies all employ foreign crewmen, eh? But’ – he wagged a stubby finger at me – ‘there are hundreds, maybe thousands of Danish seamen unemployed in Denmark. Why is this? Simple, my friend. Because the Danish seamen are a lot of useless, lazy, drunken bastards, always stealing, sleeping, fighting.’ He shook his great bearded head. ‘Ay-ay-ay, Gavin! You know that a Danish crew threw a captain and his chief officer into the sea – yes! In full uniform – from a Danish ferry? Ha, captain and chief officer – over the side. Po-po-po! With Danish seamen it’s that kind of thing all the time.’

  ‘What happened to the crew?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Probably nothing. Probably they sent them to some pretty girl psychiatrist and she asked them very kindly about their background. All that bloody nonsense.’

  He drew a quick irritated sketch of a parrot in a bowler hat and smoking a pipe, partly obscuring Seville.

  ‘In Denmark people won’t go ten miles to work. The unemployment wage is about eighty per cent of the working wage, maybe more. So many say, “Why work for twenty per cent? Not worth it.” So unemployment figures are not real. You know I come from Greece. It’s different from northern Europe. Poor. In the West we don’t know what life is like in the rest of the world.’ He sniffed sadly, adding a briefcase to the bowler-hatted parrot.

  ‘I am sure we don’t,’ I said. ‘I don’t think we care. Asians would trek ten thousand miles on their knees to find work; or swim in water full of sharks. Risk their lives for work.’

  ‘In Denmark,’ Marcos said, ‘nobody would go by car ten miles. But Greeks work. So do Spanish. This Spanish crew on Pep Sirius is not paid less than Danish crewmen. They are not cheap labour. But see how they are good and quiet and how they work.’

  He looked quite put out but soon he was singing again and we made more tea. While we drank it I heard a voice a long way off saying, ‘Ah Po cannot get sick. Not allowed’ – the voice of Wei Kuen telling me how Ah Po and Ching Man would have to send their new baby to Shanghai because both their salaries were needed to pay the rent of a room hardly bigger than my outstretched arms.

  *

  In a day or two a coastline appeared, and then the mouth of a river bordered by low banks and mangrove swamps. We would load a cargo for Lisbon at the little port here. Bjarne, the second officer, and Tom Rasmussen leaned over the rail, watching canoes full of waving black figures converging on us.

  ‘Take care,’ Bjarne said. ‘We’ll soon be surrounded by businessmen in canoes. Ja, I think so.’

  ‘Businessmen?’

  ‘Ja. Selling masks and heads and such.’

  The little port was a dusty market town with storks rattling their bills in skeletal trees, and grave, dignified men in long, delicately coloured robes, and handsome women with intricately braided hair. They were not wholly negroid; their jet-black skins were moulded over fine Arab bones and many of the men wore neat, closely trimmed jawline beards – they looked to me like so many Laurence Oliviers playing Othello. We loaded some sort of local seed, I think, while Bjarne was careful to keep all our doors shut against mosquitoes and businessmen. Elsa cooked sauerkraut and put out tuna fish and soused mackerel and cold pork to go with the whisky and Carlsberg.

  ‘She is a spotless cook,’ Kurt the captain said. ‘And you notice how we are not being wicked, notice?’

  ‘Wicked?’

  ‘We are not talking so dirty. Danish seamen respect women so.’ He said this with a big wink. Later he told me, ‘You can have big trouble with women on board. Big trouble, and maybe have to send one or more people home from the ship.’

  Jan, despite the plastered leg, kept a watch on Elsa, supposing one was needed. For the rest of us there were video films often starring the officers’ favourite, Clint Eastwood, and sometimes Dudley Moore. Of course, there was booze. More drinking was done on the Pep Sirius than on any other ship I had been on, no question of that. I heard the thump of a large Danish body falling inert in an alleyway late at night after a film and a few bottles, even long after the official New Year celebrations were over. Most mornings two or more of us – I have to include myself in this – silently compared bloodshot eyes, secretly yearned for t
he first lager of the day. I even heard, very occasionally, the unmistakable sounds of a late-night punch-up: guttural cries and the thud of fists on bearded chins, barely muffled by metal bulkheads. In the morning Marcos simply smiled over his tea and murmured, ‘I thought I heard some loud noises on the bridge. Danish games, wasn’t it?’ No hard feelings resulted from any of this.

  After Senegal, our clocks went back an hour. Europe was upon us again. Approaching Portugal, a slow, heavy swell got up and a cold wind; we pulled on sweaters and windcheaters. Marcos became philosophical and drew a parrot with a halo. ‘At sea,’ he said, seeing me shivering with the sudden cold, ‘you can’t always have fine weather. Life is the same.’

  Seagulls gathered over our bows.

  Bjarne came onto the bridge. ‘Why these gulls don’t go somewhere warm?’ he said. ‘If they go south slowly, in three days they’ll be in Dakar.’

  Marcos made a small adjustment in our course, ignoring this talk of gulls. ‘The West. Civilization. Where is the love? Ecclesiastes says if you have no love you are like a drum.’

  Bjarne said, interested, ‘You are a godly man, Marcos? Marcos is a priest,’ he explained to me with a wink, ‘that’s why the beard.’

  ‘I believe in the small voice inside us,’ Marcos said unruffled. ‘We can’t kill that even if we try. This continuous critic inside us.’

  The Algarve was in sight to starboard. Kurt came up shortly to say he had new instructions from the company. We would avoid Lisbon and go up to the port of Leixoes instead. After that even the company did not know where the Pip Sirius would go; it would depend on the cargo she picked up.

  ‘She might go to Watchet in Somerset,’ he said. ‘We do that sometimes. A good little port. All little ports are good in England. Your unions have killed all the big ones. London, Southampton, Birkenhead, Liverpool – all dead. In Birkenhead, you could say to a stevedore foreman you prefer this container stowed here, not there, and he says, “That’s my business. If you insist, I’m off.” And the next thing, the whole port’s out. Crazy.’

  *

  I made plans to leave the ship at Leixoes. There were forecasts of bad storms in the Channel and the Bay of Biscay and my hope of reaching Bude had gone. In this winter weather it would be absurd to attempt it even if I could find a yachtsman rash enough to try for the tiny channel that sneaked past the breakwater up to the lock gates. I would have to take what I could from Portugal for my last leg. Anything would do – I was keen to reach home now.

  A smog cloud appeared, signalling Europe. Near the coast by Oporto, Kurt said, ‘See there. The bows of the Jacob Maersk, Danish tanker – blew up in the mouth of the harbour.’ I could see the light blue shell of her ruined snout pointing skywards. ‘Terrible. The crew’s wives and children were watching from the quay when it happened.’

  Bjarne said, ‘All the engine room men were lost. Burnt. The pilot was first over the side, they said.’ I couldn’t see that the pilot had been wrong.

  We entered Leixoes harbour basin, skirting a nest of fishing boats, and at last slid alongside among a nodding cluster of high, rattling cranes. The company’s agent was here and came aboard to huddle with Kurt, bringing news that the Pep Sirius must now go to Dover. The officers took the mail the agent had brought them and quickly slipped off to read it in private.

  *

  Like the glorious answer to a feeble prayer two cables were delivered in quick succession to the Pep Sirius. They were both from Andrew Bell. The first said:

  Am trying to make arrangements for your onward passage Leixoes Watchet (North Somerset) on a Chas Willie ship, they have a regular service on this route. Unfortunately they have no spare accom – not even a spare berth. Suppose even you would prefer not to use a sleeping bag in an alleyway to complete your odyssey. Hope to have more info. Andrew Bell.

  And the second:

  Chas Willie (Cardiff) able offer you a berth on Kaina from Aveiro to Watchet. This ship was built Holland 1967 and although Panama flag at the moment was British flag until July 1982. Please let me know if you want to use her so that we can make appropriate arrangements with charterers. Andrew Bell.

  Saint Andrew Bell, I thought. I cabled back from the Pep Sirius’s agent that I was ready to present myself at Aveiro, wherever that was, at the earliest moment. While I was shaking hands with the Danes and Marcos, Bjarne came up with a final message from Andrew Bell that capped the two earlier ones: ‘All fixed. Ship sails for Boulogne, then to Plymouth in ballast.’

  *

  The port of Aveiro, not far to the south, lay across mudflats wreathed in fog. The Willie office was one of a handful of identical small huts, but it stood out from the others because over it flew the green and white flag of Wales with its red dragon and the name ‘Willie’ in black letters. The little ship lay in the river nearby. She was, as they used to say, no oil painting, but what was that to me, with ‘home’ in my game of Grandmother’s Footsteps so close?

  The white-haired Captain was a Cardiff man called Tom Newby. ‘There’s no problem,’ he said. ‘She’s not the Queen Mary. Go anywhere on her you like. Dig in. Be at home.’ The first officer and the crew were Estonian mainly, he said. But there were very few crewmen, I discovered; I only remember two or three deckhands and there certainly wasn’t room for many more.

  ‘It’s noisy, too,’ said a voice at my elbow when I was on board. Looking round, I saw a middle-aged man with a long nose the colour of a loganberry. ‘Keith’s the name.’ He jerked a finger at a companionway. ‘See my bloody little bolthole. Small? I’ll say she’s small. Just come and listen to the bloody generator next me ’ead.’ We both laughed. ‘Don’t expect no bloody washin’ machines here, Gav,’ he said. ‘It’s not that sort of ship. I can tell you. The washbasin– that’s the washin’ machine.’ He took my arm and steered me into a corner of the deck. ‘Look, the cook’s a bloody woman. Estonian. Just watch your time. This morning I came to breakfast at eight o’clock, and the old dragon refused to serve me.’

  Keith nodded his head at the red dragon of Wales flapping near the Kaina’s funnel. ‘There’s two bloody dragons on this ship, Gavin. I’m tellin’ you. Mark my words.’

  Landfall

  So He bringeth them to the haven where they would be.

  Psalm 107

  Thirty-nine

  What did the chill of a brash east wind matter now? Sula, the square-bodied Estonian chief officer, flapped his arms and scowled across the salt flats at a rising sun that looked as cold as his nose. Both sun and nose looked beautiful to me. This was the last leg; home in a few days. We stood on the Kaina’s bridge waiting to sail.

  ‘Roll on a week from now,’ Keith Lear said with a gloomy smile. It was the third time he’d said it since we’d sat over fried eggs, a rasher each of bacon, rolls and tea under the contemptuous glare through her hatch of Magda, the dragon-lady cook.

  ‘Off to Boul-og-nee,’ he said now. The long nose above his white high-necked sweater made him look like a man peering over a white wall. But we didn’t move.

  Captain Newby, relaxed in green sweater, white shirt and dark blue trousers, looked out across the flats. ‘Well, we’ll have the wind offshore. All we need is the piloté.’ We waited. He hummed a song from Fiddler on the Roof.

  One hour and five minutes late the Portuguese pilot appeared, a stout man, puffing a bit. ‘Where’s the piloté, amigo?’ Captain Newby hailed him cheerily.

  ‘Sorry, captain.’

  ‘Oh, okay,’ said Newby.

  ‘Let go forrard!’

  Boulogne, Boulogne! Roll on, Bou-log-nee.

  Through bifocals Newby’s gentle, attentive schoolmaster’s eyes watched the Kaina’s bows swing out into the stream as calmly as if he were supervising a simple experiment in the chemistry lab.

  ‘Slow ahead,’ came the pilot’s voice.

  ‘Slow ahead,’ Newby echoed, winking at me. ‘And away she goes like a scalded cat!’

  ‘More speed, captain!’

  ‘More spe
ed! Ah-ha!’

  Newby carolled over the telegraph and we twisted past idle trawlers and a brand-new, brightly painted German tanker, so modern that Newby took the trouble to point out to me the fact that her bridge could be mechanically raised and lowered to negotiate low bridges.

  ‘I remember you,’ Newby said to the pilot, ‘in the Lady Sylvia.’

  ‘Ah, yais. Laddy Sylvia. Yais.’

  The little river snaked, and soon its banks fell away and the sea advanced on us in thick, steep, rolling yellow-green waves. The Kaina began to dip and heave; I felt the planking of her wheelhouse shake under my feet; the feeling of movement, of the sea, of moving north, was exciting.

  The Kaina was a good ship for my last leg home. She reminded me of the Northgate, a Hull coaster I had boarded one January night at Fowey in southern Cornwall, aged seventeen and thrilled to be sailing up the Channel to Antwerp. The Northgate tried to drown me in the worst Channel storm for a decade and we were forced to anchor off Dungeness with a fleet of other vessels, thrown about so badly that even the captain was seasick. The Kaina was about the Northgate’s size and she had the same down-to-earth, take-it-or-leave-it look.

  Keith interrupted my reverie. ‘All right, then – let’s go and have some vino,’ he was saying. ‘And a little bit of mangare, too. If it’s eatable. It almost never is, I’m warnin’ yer.’ Keith was one of a race of congenital grumblers. Yet, however much he moaned about nearly everything else, he approved of Captain Newby.

  ‘He’s quite old,’ he said. ‘Well, very old, really. Seventy or more, likely.’

  ‘A very good seventy, then.’

  ‘Oh, very good. Marvellous for his age.’ Coming from Keith, I realize now, there could not have been a more glowing testimonial.

  Marvellous for his age or any other Newby certainly was. He was a seaman of great experience who had started out to sea as a boy in old Cardiff tramps after his father had been killed while serving in the Glamorgan Yeomanry under Allenby in Palestine during the First World War. Of course, the Royal Navy had duly grabbed young Newby.