Arthur McCann

by William Pitt

  'I give up with you, ‘said my father. 'I've tried, God knows, but I think you're a bit potty in the head. Just stay in this room and don't come out. I'm going to try and save your life. It's not going to be easy, but the disgrace of having my son executed for treason is too much for me. I'll have to try and pull a few strings.'

  I began to sob heavily. He went out of the door, the lousy swine, and I remember calling after him: ‘Dad, please ... please do your best.'

  ‘Shut up, ‘he snarled from the landing.

  'And, thanks, ‘I wept. 'Thanks ever so much.'

  That day I wrote to Mr Winston Churchill, explaining my position, but I never did get a reply. I don't know what happened to Rose. We never saw each other again. My pending execution, naturally, occupied the whole of my mind. I could not see two soldiers walking together up our street, a common enough occurrence, without fearing that they were an escort come to take me away. My father, the bastard, nurtured this terror, and made a great show, each morning of going through the post to see if a reprieve had arrived from Mr Churchill. This, I know, seems ridiculous now, but I truly believed him. I played truant from school, I think to the relief of the school, and my days were spent creeping in the shadow of privet hedges, making hiding places in all parts of the district and planning to escape by running away. Audrey, my sister, who had always despised me, was stationed near Newport and came home every night. She told me she had seen a top secret report which said that I was going to be taken to the Barracks and shot. It seems unbelievable that I was fifteen and not for a moment did I suspect their lies. But fifteen then was not like fifteen is now; perhaps I was a late developer (in some matters); we lived with bombs and air raids and moments of death, and I knew that spies and traitors were executed every day. I didn't know at what age they began shooting them.

  Then, in the middle of the night my father crept to my room and shook me. I thought they had come for me, at last, and I dived under the blankets and began gibbering my prayers for deliverance, mentioning to God that I truly loved my country and 'Our great leader, Mr Winston Churchill'. My father pulled me out and told me to shut up or they would hear me. I cowered before him.

  ‘I've arranged it, ‘he said. ‘Your escape from the country.'

  'Oh, dad,' I breathed. 'Oh, darling dad.'

  ‘Quiet,' he said. ‘I've told you I couldn't stand the disgrace. Mr Churchill has refused a reprieve, so I've got to act.'

  'You must, please,' I whimpered. 'They'll shoot me.'

  Then he told me he had arranged for me to sail as a deck boy on a ship which was sailing for Panama the next day. I was so overcome by the news that, pressing my tear-swept face to his cheek I thanked him with all my heart.

  'All right, ‘he said modestly. 'But it has cost money, you know. Just to get you aboard this ship. Have you got any money?'

  I said I had two pounds and I got this from a hiding place in my room (while he gave a little knowing snort) and forced him to take it. At six o'clock that morning I was on my way.

  My mother thought I was only going to see the ships for the day and all I took with me on that Atlantic trip was a packet of lemon curd sandwiches.

  For the first week I was sea-sick and I did not observe that the first mate had his red eye on me. Not that it would have meant anything anyway. At fifteen such things were beyond my comprehension. I only knew about Rose and myself. Relations between other men and women were still remote, and men and men had never occurred to me. When Mister Gander, the first mate, invited me to his cabin for some boxing it only struck me as being an uncommonly friendly gesture from an experienced sailor to a young cabin boy.

  I had never done any boxing, but the way I was able to knock Mr Gander about, so easily and with such power with no retaliation on his part - and he was a man of fifteen or sixteen stone and very tall - made me think that perhaps I should take it up as a vocation. It was the second best cabin on the SS Queen of Atlantis, the captain's being the best, of course, but even so there was not a great deal of room for boxing. The decor was strangely velvet and tassled. It reminded me of the small front room in my Auntie Clementine's house, when she used to tell fortunes with playing cards, apart from a framed newspaper headline above Mr Gander's bed which said boldly 'Coloured Seamen Discharged ' and which puzzled me a good deal.

  Mr Gander was there, in great white shorts, like a pair of flapping signal flags. His fleshy stomach and his wide, weak, chest, matted like a coconut, were surmounted by a red, breathless face. I thought he might have been warming up by shadow-boxing.

  'Right, shipmate, get your shorts on, ‘he boomed jovially and he handed me a pair of dirty white knicks and I took my trousers off and put them on. That he was male and so was I made it seem perfectly proper, since this was a sporting occasion.

  ‘You've got your little thing hanging down the wrong leg of your shorts,' the mate said pointing downwards. 'It should hang down the other leg.'

  He made a helpful move forward, but fortunately I made the adjustment myself with a quick wriggle of my hips. He appeared a trifle dismayed and put his boxing gloves on sulkily. They looked big and dangerous, but I was anxious to prove my manhood now that I had become a sailor.

  'I'm not much good at this, Mr Gander,' was all I said.

  'Don't worry, son,' he mumbled. 'I won't hurt you. Hit me as hard as you like.'

  I did. I threw up my right glove and caught him spectacularly on the face. Now I realize that he must have been bending towards me. He went down with a theatrical topple, knocking over a chair and lying like a porpoise across the floor.

  ‘Don't hit me,' he pleaded his gloves over his head. 'Please don't hit me.'

  'I won't, Mr Gander,' I promised unable to believe what I had done. He turned and muttered 'Oh' in a strangely disappointed way. I was prancing about, in what would have been a neutral corner, smacking my gloves together with irrepressible elation. I had knocked down a grown man with ope blow!

  The blood surged through my arms, my face felt hot. He got to his feet and I went for him again, buffeting him across the cabin, his gloves flailing wildly but only succeeding in making contact with a chintzy lamp which fell softly. The terrible thing was, I really thought I could box. The revelation of this big man cowering at the end of my paralysing gloves and crying out agonizingly every time I managed to strike him! He seemed to fall so easily, and I would dance back snorting like a little dragon, while he squirmed and begged not to be hit again. Eventually he puffed, ‘I've had enough,' and he folded me in an enormous, sweaty embrace, trembling above my head. ‘You're a strong boy,' he sobbed. 'You're a really strong boy.'

  It was all very exciting and unusual. Even I had to admit that to myself and when I told Hector, the ship's cook, he confirmed my misgivings.

  'Don't you know about fruit?' he said. 'Pineapples?'

  I was about to give him the benefit of my knowledge on pineapples when he stopped me by waving his hand and dropping his greasy face into a liquid scowl.-

  'No, I can see you don't,' he sighed. 'Can't fathom anyone putting a young lad like you on a merchant ship without warning him about the pineapples. The mines and the German submarines is bad enough, but we've always got the pineapples with us.'

  'All right. What are they ?' I asked bluntly throwing away my mental pre-war pictures of the laden barrows in Newport Arcade Market.

  ‘They're men what fancies other men. Or boys. Like most men feels a yearning towards a woman so the pineapple feels a yearning towards other pineapples.'

  The news flabbergasted me. I stared at him disbelievingly but I could see he was telling the truth.

  'But I'm not a pineapple!' I shouted.

  ‘Well ... a lad doesn't have to be one of them ... if you get me. They just hope he'll get the hang of it . . .'

  'Well, I won't,' I said stoutly, manfully, but my mind racing through all sorts of questions. 'How do they, anyway, Hector?'

  He seemed miserably embarrassed. A gob of galley fat dripped from the end of
his nose. He said he had to see to the custard in the galley. But I was almost in tears now and shouting. 'Come on, you bugger. Tell me how. Then I'll know, won't I ?'

  He couldn't bring himself to tell me. ‘They find ways,' he shrugged and went off towards his custard. I followed him to the galley.

  'But this was boxing. With gloves,' I insisted.

  'And you kept knocking him down,' said Hector stirring the yellow pond in the big pan.

  'That's right. How did you know?'

  'And he kept snivelling and moaning. Right?'

  ‘Right, Hector,' I admitted. I did not feel shocked now, just dull and hurt that my boxing match had not been what I thought.

  'Well, Mr Gander just likes being hit, that's all,' shrugged Hector. ‘It gets them in different ways. We used to have a bosun who was always putting mice down his trousers. It's just what they fancy.'

  I walked from him stunned by this revelation of theworld's weakness and wickedness. The thought that my own father press-ganged me into it was even worse. For the next week I scuttled out of sight every time I saw the mate. Once I was told to go and help the crow's-nest lookout because his eyes weren't so good and as we stood together, close against each other, in the little barrel at the pitching masthead, I was filled with terror in case this man too was a pineapple. He wasn't but he did lay his wooden hands on my young shoulder and we sang hymns together into the south Atlantic wind.

  Two nights later, the ship was torpedoed. Naked, I ran around in panic, passing others doing the same on the dark, sinking deck. Their mouths all seemed to be open but I could not hear them because the explosion had deadened my ears. There were men slithering like carcasses of meat on the deck and others were floating in the sea. I saw a man on fire and two men throw him overboard. Then I found myself, hunched and weeping, in a lifeboat jolting about in the dark ocean. I was so overcome I did not even see the SS Queen of Atlantis go down, taking with her my friend Hector and twenty-three more.

  In the night and in my shock, I knew vaguely that there were three others in the boat. The dark drifted away and one man was dead at dawn. His friend, lolling next to him, had been trying to keep him warm by rubbing him. He had rubbed the skin from his left arm and his stomach, but the man still died and he went over the side. The man who had tried to keep his friend alive with rubbing was dying himself. Even I could see that and I had no experience of death. His head went lower on his chest as the sun came up on the blue and peaceful ocean. He could not last long. And the other occupant of the boat, sitting at the tiller, unhurt, fat, naked also and with a lovely big smile on his face when he looked at me, was Mr Gander, the mate.

  Even as he gazed at me I knew I must, somehow, keep the third man alive. He was my witness and my chaperone, and he was slipping away with every growing daylight minute. I found some brandy in the lifeboat locker and got it to his lips quickly in case the mate came the length of the boat to get the bottle from me.

  'You're going to live,' I kept whispering to the man. 'Somebody will pick us up soon. You're going to live.'

  He had to live. My virginity depended on it. Mr Gander didn't seem in a hurry. He sat smiling like a child as the sun got higher. There was food and water on board, and when I told the man he was going to survive, the mate shook his big smiling head and indicated that the man had no hope. In that case neither had I.

  I shall always remember the joke Mr Gander told me while we were adrift in that lifeboat. We were both naked, and he was mad as well. I don't know whether it was the sun or the sinking or both. He was sitting at the stern all thick, red and obscene, drinking ship's rum from the boat's locker, and I was sitting at the bow watching him fearfully and he was watching me watching him too, because he realized, of course, by now that I knew all about pineapples and I knew he was not just a pineapple but a mad pineapple, and he might try to take a foul advantage of me out there in the lonely ocean, the bastard.

  It wasn't long after he had pushed my friend, the guardian of my honour, over the side. I'd kept him alive for as long as I could because he was my witness, and my only hope. All the time I kept telling him: 'There's a ship coming. There's a ship coming, mate, an American ship. I can see it now. It won't be long.' His hooded eyes tried to open for a long time and sometimes his mouth moved and I poured in some brandy from the locker at my end of the boat. His eyes reminded me of the eyes of dying sparrows I had held in our street, flickering with some faint strength and hope, and then closing over for good.

  Even after he'd died I pretended he was still with us, pouring dribbles of good brandy into one side of his mouth and hoping that the mate would not notice the stuff trickling out on the other side. I talked to him for an hour or more after he could no longer hear me or care, whispering encouragement and lies close to his ear, taking his pulse and nodding to myself satisfactorily in a medical manner before looking up and seeing the fat, mad Gander watching me and smiling.

  Eventually the mate said: 'You're wasting that brandy, darling, pouring it into a dead man. His fires are out for good. He can't hear what you're telling him. I know a dead 'un when I see him. Give me a hand, dear, and we'll put him over the side.'

  'He's not dead, and I'm not darling,' I said defiantly. I was a lot smaller than the mate and I could feel my young tears pushing into my eyes.

  ‘So sorry,' he returned with a polite, fat smile.' Nevertheless he's gone and he won't be back. Over the side with him.'

  ‘No!' I screamed hopelessly as he trundled forward. My voice emptied over the ocean. 'No, Mr Gander, he's not dead.'

  'Only sleeping,' he said piously. The man was wearing a shirt. Mr Gander stripped it from him and tore it in half, giving half to me to put across my shoulders. I did and it felt like a balm after being naked under the sun. 'See,' he said. 'I'm a sportsman, lad, a sportsman.' Then he heaved the poor man over the side with one lift of his fat arms. A red sunburn was spreading on him but it didn't seem to hurt. When he came close to my end of the boat to throw the dead man over, his big, sweating tomato face came very close and I stumbled back to the bow. Under the seat was a spanner and I was going to hit him with that if he came at me. But he smiled alluringly once and then turned his gigantic white bare arse from me and went back to his stern. The actual arse was strange really, if the situation had not been so serious I would probably have thought it was funny. The red of his back continued down to where his buttocks began and then there was a white plank across them where he had been sitting on the stern seat.

  I tried not to look at him sitting like a great lump of sealing wax thirty feet from me. I pulled my half of the dead man's shirt about my shoulders and Gander did the same. He was still swigging at the rum and I could see it oozing out of his pores as it went into his mouth.

  The sun was high and hot now. I could feel it singeing my knees and belabouring my head. I put the piece of shirt over my head and let the rest dangle around my neck and back. He was still looking at me horribly and I modestly crossed my legs closing them over the top of my private parts.

  'do you want to hear a joke? ' he suddenly howled from his end of the lifeboat. My God, you ought to have seen him then, the bit of shirt clutched around his swollen shoulders with one hand, the bottle of Captain Morgan in the other, the maddest pineapple that you ever set eyes upon.

  'A joke, Mr Gander?'

  'yes, a joke, a funny story.'

  'Well, yes. All right.'

  'reminded me, us being here like this, darling . . .'

  'Don't call me darling.'

  ‘IF YOU WANT TO HEAR IT, SHUT UP.'

  I shut up and he told me the joke. To this moment I can see him lobster-red, bawling insanely at me from the far end of the boat, with the brilliant blue sea rising and shrugging away behind him, the sky bright, full of painful sun, and nobody but us in the aching ocean. I remember his feet were swollen horribly, like big red peppers.

  'there was this ship's parrot,' he bawled. I couldn't see why he was shouting. The wind was hardly touching us, the sea
's wash under the boat was only a mumble, and there was no one else's voice to overcome. I suppose it was the sun and the rum.

  ‘Why are you shouting ?'

  'I want you to hear the bloody joke, don't i?' he bellowed. ‘i'll come up there and tell you then.'

  'stay there!' I howled back at him. 'stay there, mr gander! tell me from there.'

  'all right, shut your mouth then, this ship's parrot, see. and every night a magician used to give a show . . . '

  His head dropped forward for a moment and I could see the drink dribbling out of his mouth and on to his chest. He lifted his huge face again, trembling with sweat now, like a man from a rugby scrum. It was in his eyes and rolling from his forehead, his nostrils and his sagging mouth.

  '. . . A SHOW, A PERFORMANCE, SEE? TO THE PASSENGERS. AND EVERY NIGHT THIS PARROT USED TO SIT THERE ... SIT AND GIVE THE FUCKING GAME AWAY SEE?. . .'

  His head went down again and his chest began to heave as though he were crying. I sat still, terrified of him, and strangely, for him too. 'Wait a bit,' he whispered. 'Wait a minute, dear. It's a good story if you wait.'

  He forced himself to go on. 'the parrot gave every

  TRICK AWAY. EVERY TIME THE CONJURER DID SOMETHING THE PARROT WOULD SAY ... "IT'S UP HIS SLEEVE" OR "IT'S BEHIND HIS BACK" . . . FOLLOW?'

  'I follow,' I said. I was petrified, fascinated. I clutched the seat under me. He was rolling fatly from side to side.

  ‘HE JUST GAVE THE GAME AWAY EVERY TIME. EVERY BLEEDING TIME. THEN ONE NIGHT THE SHIP'S BOILERS BLEW UP AND EVERYTHING WENT SKY FUCKING HIGH. AND THIS MAGICIAN AND THE PARROT ENDED UP EACH END OF A BOAT LIKE WE ARE. LOOKING AT EACH OTHER, SEE? THE MAN DIDN'T HAVE ANY CLOTHES, LIKE ME. AND THE BLOODY PARROT DIDN'T HAVE NO FEATHERS, LIKE YOU, DARLING ..."