‘Another gin, Woo, please.’ As he signed the chit, Stevenson said, ‘Only think, Sparks, you’ll have to find something else to gripe about after this trip.’
‘Oh, I reckon the wife will provide me with ample fodder for thought.’
‘Hullo, Alex.’ Mr Rawlings, the Chief Officer, joined them. He was a man of raddled good looks, his once fair hair fading, the flesh of his face slackening its hold on the skull, his blue eyes beginning a slow retreat into watery sockets.
‘Beer?’ asked Stevenson, not waiting for an answer as Woo automatically responded to the arrival of the Mate. He signed the chit and passed the glass to Rawlings. ‘I was just saying . . .’
‘He was just saying depressing things,’ interrupted Sparks, ‘and I refuse to be depressed. This may be the last voyage, but I will not allow that to disrupt my lifestyle.’
‘It must do,’ said Stevenson with a hint of bitterness.
‘Now look, Alex, these little lunch-time sessions of ours have, for years, been an oasis of civilisation in a turbulent world. We don’t want you swinging down from the awning spars spoiling things, do we, Roger?’
‘No, we bloody well don’t,’ said the Chief Officer. ‘Chap’s got to have a chota peg. Keeps the flag flying, old boy.’
Stevenson was aware they were ragging him, but he refused to be drawn. ‘Well, I find it depressing,’ he said seriously. ‘I mean in a few weeks we’ll actually be doing this for the last time.’ He looked from one to the other, expecting reaction. ‘I think it’s a bloody shame.’
Sparks sighed and put his glass down. ‘So do I, Alex, so do I. I’ve left Mary and the kids in a bungalow on the Wirral three times a year for the last God knows how many years and I’ve complained every time we’ve parted. I’ve even tried working ashore, but it was a disaster.’ He shook his head. ‘This has been my life and I’ve stuck it out and so has she, in expectation of better things at the end of it. Clearly we asked for too much. I didn’t think it would end like this either.’ Sparks buried his bitterness in his drink.
‘No, none of us did,’ put in Rawlings guardedly. ‘That’s what makes it difficult, it defies reason; it’s completely incomprehensible. Great Britain needs a merchant fleet.’
‘Not that it ever gave a tuppenny fuck for its sailors, mind,’ added Sparks. ‘Remember Nancy Astor.’ He wagged an admonitory finger and they laughed. Whatever Mrs Astor’s virtues as the first female Member of Parliament, she was held in permanent obloquy by the men of the Merchant Navy for suggesting they wore yellow armbands when landing from foreign voyages as potential carriers of venereal disease. Hers was an attitude felt to be typical of the regard the British had for its seafarers.
‘They,’ Sparks went on, referring to the fateful, unnamed but blameworthy force that might have been the shipowners, the government, the British public at large or an amalgam of all three, ‘are hardly aware of our existence, let alone our becoming extinct. Anyway,’ he made an attempt at brightening with obvious effort, ‘now I know what it felt like to be a dinosaur.’
‘I knew there was something bloody odd about you,’ joked Rawlings, signing for another round as the dinner gong sounded from the saloon alleyway.
‘Not for me,’ said Stevenson, swallowing the dregs of his beer and hurrying below.
‘That young man’s too bloody serious,’ said Sparks, accepting the recharged glass. ‘Cheers, Roger.’
‘He wants to hang loose,’ said Rawlings, imitating an American accent.
‘Well, I can see his point. He endured four years of apprenticeship, struggled to get all his tickets and then not merely the company, but the ethos of the whole fucking country tells him he’s too expensive a luxury to keep on,’ said Sparks. ‘He’s a young man, he’s allowed to be angry. Bitterness, on the other hand, will blight his life.’
‘Christ, you are philosophic,’ grinned Rawlings fatuously, stiffening as they were joined by the Master.
‘What’ll it be, sir?’
‘Thanks, Sparks,’ said Mackinnon rubbing his hands, his powerful forearms dark beneath the immaculate white of his open-necked shirt with the stiff board epaulettes bearing their four gold bars. ‘The usual, please.’
‘Gin and tonic for the Captain, Woo, please.’
‘We were just saying that young Stevenson’s future isn’t looking too good, sir,’ said Rawlings.
‘There’s no future for him or the other youngsters,’ snapped Mackinnon with a hint of exasperation at the Mate’s smooth, hypocritical tone. ‘It makes my blood boil to think what we’re throwing away. God help us if we ever get ourselves into another mess like the Falklands. We don’t have the resources to do that again.’
They were silent for a moment, considering the implications of the Captain’s comments, then Sparks remarked, ‘I suppose it all started with the oil crisis in the seventies.’
‘Yes, but you can’t blame the Tory government for that,’ said Rawlings defensively, resuscitating an old ideological war between the two of them.
‘It’s much more complex than that,’ said Mackinnon. ‘It’s partly to do with our loss of an imperial role; partly to do with the ineptitude of British shipowners in trying to carry on in the same old way, like building expensive ships and refusing to change quickly enough.’
‘And perhaps our own refusal to relinquish some of our privileges and change our work practices,’ put in Rawlings. Mackinnon and Sparks exchanged glances. Rawlings, who had swallowed the dogma of monetarist economics to his occasional embarrassment, was the most reactionary person on board the Matthew Flinders, increasingly jealous of his status as his chances of command evaporated.
‘Indeed,’ agreed Sparks, raising an eyebrow. ‘But we have been undercut by the subsidised merchant fleets of the Warsaw Pact and displaced by the rise of the national fleets of the Third World.’
‘Oh, they’ve been a bit of a mixed blessing,’ chuckled Rawlings dismissively. ‘Half of them have run into trouble due to graft and corruption.’
‘That may be the case,’ said Mackinnon, ‘but they had the effect of releasing on to the maritime market sources of cheap labour willing to put up with unsafe working practices and dubious ships. The shipowner hasn’t been so spoiled for choice since the Depression.’
‘No wonder the bastards have been rubbing their hands with glee,’ added Sparks, his socialist instincts fully roused. ‘They’ve a limitless source of cheap labour at a time when international legislation is freeing up things so that the registered nationality of a ship is meaningless.’
‘I thought you were all for the international brotherhood of man, Sparky,’ jibed Rawlings.
‘In an ideal world, that would be fine,’ said Mackinnon, backing the Radio Officer and ignoring Rawlings’s facetiousness, ‘but you ditch a national asset, which not only provides you with the fourth arm of defence, but actually earns you invisibles to set against a balance of payments deficit, at your peril. I know we, as seafarers, have to compete more than any other section of the workforce in a truly international market place, but unless you subsidise a merchant fleet, an advanced country like Britain, irrespective of its geographical identity as an island, isn’t going to have one. Not for defence, not for earning invisibles, not for anything.’
‘I agree, sir,’ said Rawlings with a mixed air of ingratiation and faint exasperation, aware that Mackinnon was ignoring him, ‘but you can’t really blame the shipowner, you know.’ He turned on the Radio Officer. ‘He has to make his profits where he can. If it’s cheaper to register a ship in the Bahamas, or Panama, or Liberia and hire Filipinos because they cost less than a bunch of Scousers—’ He looked at Woo, polishing the glasses as the other officers drifted off to their lunch. ‘I mean Eastern Steam have employed Chinese in the engine-room and as stewards for damn near a century.’
‘But they retained a genuine, philosophic interest in the ships and their employees,’ said Sparks, finishing his drink and siding with the Captain in an unusual display of loyalty to his
employers, ‘including their Chinese.’
‘That’s the first time in all the years I’ve known you that I’ve heard you say something complimentary about the shipowner,’ Rawlings scoffed.
‘But it’s true,’ snapped Mackinnon. ‘They were tough and uncompromising, and wanted only a profit. Some of them were absolute bastards and fed us shit – you both know the old story about the condemned food: “fit for cattle feed or ship’s stores” – and that’s quite true, quite true. But companies like Eastern Steam did care up to a point. You joined Eastern Steam, not some nebulous organisation called the Merchant Navy. As a navy the thing never existed, no matter how many ignorant journalists write about the QE2 being the “flagship of the British Merchant Navy”. No, companies like Eástern Steam did value loyalty and, though not really paternalistic, they looked after their employees in a generally responsible way.’ Mackinnon paused to finish his drink. ‘None of this sort of thing would have happened in Old Mother Dent’s day, I can tell you.’ Mackinnon put his glass on the bar and nodded at Woo before moving towards the door.
‘Times change, sir. Even the Old Woman would have been unable to resist today’s pressures.’ Rawlings handed his glass to the steward then turned to find Mackinnon blocking his exit.
‘She’d have found another way, mister,’ the Captain said with sudden vehemence, ‘not cast us off like rubbish!’
Mackinnon felt irritated at the small breach with Rawlings. He did not like the man, but he was a tolerable Chief Officer, efficient in a lacklustre way. In common with many of his background, Mackinnon was entrenched behind the conservatism of the 1950s; he respected order, stability, and a pecking order in society, and viewed the arrest in their erosion as a necessary brake on an otherwise undisciplined descent into chaos. The industrial anarchy of the 1960s, and in particular the seamen’s strike of 1966, had marked a low-water point in John Mackinnon’s professional life. Nevertheless, he sympathised in general terms with Sparks’s robust and committed socialism, increasingly so as he watched the demise of companies like Eastern Steam; but he had worked too hard for what he had achieved to donate it, uncompensated and unguaranteed, on the altar of socialist fraternity. The change would come by evolution, and, as far as Mackinnon was concerned, socialist government in Britain had proved the worker was as capable of being corrupted by power as king, count or counsellor. By such associations as he had enjoyed with old Mrs Dent, with Captain Shaw and through the experience of his own advancement in a capitalist trading company, he acknowledged the old order and largely approved of it.
To Captain Mackinnon, precisely because he was a seaman as well as a ship-master, the pragmatic necessity of checks and balances, of authority and underlying freedom of will, were essential foundations of civilisation.
‘Without order and discipline,’ he was fond of saying, quoting an eighteenth-century admiral, ‘nothing is achieved.’
And precisely because of this received wisdom he did not believe that society did not exist, nor (as was becoming political dogma at the time) that it was a haphazard collection of individuals. If economic reason was to prevail, it required an underlying structure upon which to work. As far as Captain John Mackinnon was concerned, the collection of ships that went under the one-proud misnomer of the Merchant Navy were as fundamental as Parliament or the Bank of England. At the point of its being declared redundant, Captain Mackinnon’s views swerved violently off what had now, distressingly, become the tracks of orthodoxy. Therein lay the roots of his dislike of Mr Rawlings.
Rawlings, though adequate enough in his glib way, was not what Mackinnon wanted in his Chief Officer. The man was facile and dutiful only to the point of routine. He was the product of the post-war age, touched by the euphoria of victory, when the Merchant Navy offered not only a way of life but an alternative to conscription. Rawlings had stayed due to idleness and a liking for a loose, mildly alcoholic life. But he had a formidable asset in his marital connections, for he had married into the hierarchy of Eastern Steam and, though he had missed a command, he remained employed until the end, unassailable and easy-going, cushioned from harsh reality.
Such a background made his politics comprehensible without making them admirable, for they were the refuge of an expedient, not a convinced, man. Nor did they make Rawlings any the more likable, thought Mackinnon irritably, as he returned to his cabin after lunch.
Mackinnon woke from his post-prandial nap at precisely 1430, as he had done every day when at sea on passage since he had had command. Excepting, of course, when fog, tempest, Act of God or any other circumstances demanded his presence on the bridge.
He began undressing, intending to go aft for a swim before having his midafternoon cup of tea, his invariable practice when in the tropics. He was a short, fit, powerfully built man whose weatherbeaten countenance ended at his neck and began again at his elbows. Around his knees he appeared to wear athletic bandages of similarly weathered skin. The rest of his body was pale and covered in dark hair. His crew called him ‘Gorilla’ Mackinnon, a soubriquet which sounded as well as it suited the Captain.
Grabbing a towel, he padded out into the blinding sunshine on the boat-deck and turned aft. To starboard the fading coast of Sumatra lay like a blue mark along the horizon, crowned by boiling white thunderheads. The ship slipped smoothly through the rippled sea as she made her way into the northern entrance of the long Strait of Malacca. Fanning outwards from her rushing bow and its white bow wave, flying fish lifted and beat their long tail fins against the surface of the water to extend their flight.
The Captain splashed into the pool with a gusto that would have done credit to a younger man. The old exhilaration flooded through him; he lay on his back and wallowed contentedly. Above him the blue of the sky was contrasted by the random passage of fluffy white fair-weather cumulus. Staring up at the infinite sky he wondered how badly he would miss this life, this pleasant solace of the ship’s routine. It suited a man of his years better than the young men, with the preoccupations of desire and ambition never out of their minds. Then he thought of the patient waiting of his wife, who had longed for this, his last voyage, for thirty-four years.
She had such plans for them both; now they had the money to do those things they had always longed to do, and the time in which to indulge themselves. They would visit Florence and Rome, spend night after night after night together in gentle intimacy unshadowed by any approaching departure to what Shelagh Mackinnon jealously called ‘the other woman’. Mackinnon smiled to himself. Eastern Steam had named their ships after masculine explorers, but they were plain bitches to their crews and seductive harpies to their wives!
Now the other woman was about to relinquish her hold upon him. This was the last voyage . . .
A testy little hope borne of anxiety that nothing should go wrong crossed Mackinnon’s mind, but he dismissed it, allowing his memory to traverse the years, reflecting on his luck, on Shelagh . . .
He had no idea how many days they spent in the lifeboat, though afterwards they reckoned it to be nine. With so few of them there was adequate water and biscuit, though the ceaseless motion of the boat induced seasickness in men who thought themselves immune. The wind remained west or south-west and when it grew strong they learned to stream a rope astern to hold the boat’s stern to the tumbling wave crests.
Moreover, Apprentice John Mackinnon was learning lessons of a more lasting nature. The sudden arousal of his young anger had provided the motivation for the stepping of the mast and hoisting of the sails. It had also usurped the leadership of Able Seaman Bird who, without obvious rancour, relapsed into a grumbling contemplation of their fate. He constantly drew their attention to the fact that their pay ceased the day the ship had sunk, excepting Mackinnon, of course, whose father’s premium paid for his training, and must be gradually reimbursed to the son in lieu of proper pay. Bird made no particular play of this difference, but beat ceaselessly upon the drum of the injustice he exposed. It was almost, the young Mackinnon tho
ught, as though Bird regretted his survival, for it put him in the position of subjecting himself to this awful inequity and he would rather have died than suffer this final humiliation at the hands of capitalism.
At the time, this revelation of the perversity of human nature seemed incomprehensible; afterwards it seemed that the ordeal in the boat was marked not by days, nor the issue of victuals by the Chief Steward, but by the thump-thump of Bird’s relentless, irrefutable polemic.
With the wind on their starboard quarter they sailed south-east amid the rain and mist of autumn low pressure. The coast, when they sighted it, loomed suddenly, terrifyingly close. Unfamiliar, its appearance was hostile, grey cliffs set about with the white pounding of breaking seas. They stood inshore and drew closer, seeing a rolling countryside and re-entrant bays, the white oblong of a farmhouse, the huddle of a village and the sharp yellow strand at the head of an inviting bay.
They drove recklessly inshore as the sun set unseen behind the grey veil of the persisting overcast. The lifeboat’s keel struck the sand with a grating, the boat broached and lurched amid a welter of breaking seas that rolled up to the high-water mark and spent their energy in a sibilant roar.
Staggering over the gunwale while the waves thumped on the bottom of the heeling boat and broke over it in deluges of bitterly cold spray, they found their legs incapable of bearing their weight and fell full-length in the shallows. After a while Mackinnon floundered ingloriously up the beach and lay gasping beyond the reach of the waves. Eventually he heaved himself shakily to his feet and found a path. Calling his intention of getting help he followed it inland.
He seemed to walk miles before, in the last of the twilight, he stumbled into a muddy farmyard and found a solitary figure scattering kitchen scraps to a bevy of hens. The girl looked up and gave a little shriek. She retreated, calling her alarm at Mackinnon’s approach. A door flew open and a lozenge of orange lamplight spilled out across the yard. It was instantly disfigured by the shadow of a large man with a shotgun.
Endangered Species Page 3
