by John Harris
Then, suddenly, with the weather a West Country wetness, full of greyness and damp mist, the war sprang abruptly to life when three British cruisers ran into the German pocket battleship, Admiral Graf Spee, which had been on a raiding foray into the Atlantic, off the river Plate. Outweighted and outgunned, their superior tactics forced the German ship into the neutral port of Montevideo where, far less damaged than her smaller opponents, she was scuttled. It brought a gleam of excitement to what had become a very dull war and the only thing that bothered the Admiralty was what had become of the prisoners that Graf Spee was known to have taken from the nine British ships she had sunk. Several British officers who had been aboard the pocket battleship throughout the battle had been released in Montevideo but the bulk of the crews were known to be aboard the German freighter, Altmark, which had kept Graf Spee supplied, and Altmark seemed to have vanished without trace.
If nothing else, it made something to read in the newspapers other than the reports written by elderly journalists who filled their columns with references to ‘pincer movements’, ‘strategic retreats’ and other rubbish disguised as expertise. You could hardly say the war as a whole had wakened up, but at least something had happened and, in the inertia that seemed to have lain over it ever since Warsaw fell, that was something.
‘Makes the saddle sores easier to bear,’ Willie John observed.
By the time they applied the last lick of paint to Oulu and the old man from Bossiney applied the last tarred whipping, the lockers were full of twine, sheet metal, paint, tallow, tar and the hundred and one other things a sailing ship needed, and the masts carried sails made from weathered canvas begged or bought all over England. Stores had appeared alongside and the hold was already half-full of crates and sacks.
Finnish, West Indian and American money appeared and the neutral Finnish flag was painted on the ship’s sides. Then, during the hours of darkness, arms were brought on board and stored away, and Willie John, who had vanished to Devonport, arrived back with two telegraphists, a radio receiver and a transmitter, and the crates were hoisted aboard and lowered out of sight, also after dark while there were no bystanders to watch.
‘I didnae realise it involved work,’ Willie John complained. ‘Ma sex life’s become a disaster area just. I reckon I’m in the last eight o’ the world celibacy championship, due tae meet the Pope in the quarter finals.’
For the look of the thing, a small pink pig, christened Vera after the small pink landlady, was placed in a coop on the after deck, and finally they were adopted by a ginger cat which wandered on board, went to sleep in the captain’s cabin and resolutely refused to leave.
‘We’ll call ’im Nelson if that’s all right with you, sir,’ Leading Seaman Myers said. ‘All ships need a cat, sir, to keep down the rats.’
‘Better rate him a leadin’ seaman,’ Willie John suggested. ‘In case any more come aboard an’ need someone tae keep ’em under control.’
They were ready to leave when the Finns arrived.
The stink of cockroaches and damp was now heavily overlaid by the smell of the new canvas and Stockholm tar. Everything on the poop had been scraped preparatory for repainting and varnishing, and the wheezy anchor winch stank of new oil. The stores had come aboard – bread, biscuit, salt and preserved meat, potatoes, dried vegetables, flour, coffee, sugar, everything the ship needed, with acres of extra canvas and miles of extra rope and wire.
They were so ready, they’d all gone into town to celebrate with Snaith and Wren Dowsonby-Smith. When they returned to Oulu, there were several strangers aboard. One of them, as prepossessing as Caliban with a stubbly red beard and pale eyes, looked about eight feet tall and was built like a Percheron. He was doing gymnastics on the boatskids. Another was clinging to the rigging and a third, watched by dockworkers and what seemed to be half the population of the surrounding area, to say nothing of the crew of a police car, was balanced on top of the mainmast. They arrived just in time to see him stand on one leg, one foot in the air and begin to flap his arms and crow like a cockerel.
‘Good God,’ Snaith said. ‘He’ll fall!’
The man doing gymnastics on the boatside turned. ‘Nez,’ he said. ‘Dat bawsted not fall. He drunk.’
Seago, his face white and frozen in an expression of disgust and anger, was still staring upwards when one of the policemen approached him.
‘This your ship, sir?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you’d better sort out that customer up there. He’ll break his neck. What you do is none of our business, of course, sir, but he’s causing an obstruction and we were sent along because traffic can’t get through. You’d better get him down.’
Seago stared up the mast. The man on the top was flapping his arms and crowing again. They could hear him quite plainly. The crowd gave an uncertain titter, not sure whether to laugh or hold its breath.
‘Who is he, anyway?’ Magnusson asked.
The man swinging on the boatskids stopped what he was doing and turned to him.
‘He Nils Astermann,’ he said. ‘I Ek Yervy.’ He indicated the man on the rigging who, with bulging muscles, seemed to be holding his legs and body at right angles to the rigging simply by the strength of his arms. ‘He Nestor Worinen.’
‘What the hell are you doing aboard this ship, anyway?’ Campbell demanded. ‘What are you, a blasted circus act or something?’
Snaith’s pale cold face was smiling for the first time. ‘The Finnish members of your crew,’ he said, ‘appear to have arrived.’
Yervy grinned, came to attention and saluted. ‘Seamen, captain,’ he said. ‘Ve Finns. Ve like Finland. Ve not like Russians. Ve vant to go home.’
Seago was staring at the man on top of the mast who was pretending now to be about to dive into the sea.
‘That’s a hundred and ten feet,’ he said. ‘And there’s a lot of driftwood in the water.’
‘He no dive,’ Yervy said placidly. ‘He seely focker but he also good seaman. He no dive.’
‘Bluidy good job, too,’ Willie John grinned. ‘’Tis a messy job he’d make for the ambulance people if he hit a bit of floatin’ timber.’
Snaith leaned towards Magnusson. ‘I think you’re going to have to handle these chaps as if you’re walking on egg-shells,’ he murmured. ‘They aren’t Navy. They’re civilian volunteers.’
Yervy nodded. ‘Sure t’ing. Ve sail your ship fine.’ His smile stretched from ear to ear and, despite his size, his voice was gentle.
‘Now,’ he said. ‘Because I am gentleman, I love the lady.’
He clutched Wren Dowsonby-Smith in a bearlike grip and kissed her. As he released her, pink-faced and with her cap over one ear, Worinen leapt from the rigging and Yervy literally tossed her into his arms for a repeat performance.
As she staggered free, she saw Astermann swarming down the rigging like a monkey and took refuge behind Snaith.
‘That’s enough of that,’ she panted, pushing her hat straight. ‘I don’t make a habit of this,’ she said to Snaith, ‘and I think it’ll cost you a large gin and lime, sir.’
Four
Last-minute arrangements were made and last-minute stores were brought aboard. They were still wearing civilian clothes, and to all intents and purposes Oulu was a Finnish ship crewed by Finnish sailors about to leave for Finland. The press had not missed Astermann’s performance at the top of the mast but nothing was given away.
Marques had kept his men well under control and Snaith had been careful to send plenty of beer aboard so that the ship’s company didn’t have to use the dockside pubs where something might have been let slip. There had been no leave and they had been allowed ashore only after undertaking to remain sober and guard their tongues.
It had been a trying period, however, and it came as a surprise to find it was time to anchor in Falmouth Roads ready to leave when the word was given. Willie John was shocked. For the last few days he’d been seen around with the landlady of a bed-and-breakfast down
the road. She was called Chrissie, wore her hair so frizzed you could have pulled corks with it, and had patently false false-teeth that showed pink vulcanite gums every time she opened her mouth.
‘They look as if they were rifled off a corpse,’ Campbell said disgustedly.
‘They probably were, poy,’ Willie John admitted gloomily. ‘But ’tis no’ a matter o’ great importance in bed, iss it?’
Though Willie John’s Chrissie was far from the type who might have been invited to cocktails in a wardroom, Magnusson had not discouraged the liaison because, if nothing else, it kept Willie John out of the pubs and doing his drinking in Chrissie’s front parlour.
‘Going to marry her when we get back?’ he asked.
Willie John’s ravaged old man’s face split into a grin. ‘Not likely, poy. There’s somethin’ a bit too final for me about marritch.’
Campbell frowned his life-is-real-life-is-earnest frown. ‘Not since the war started,’ he said.
Ensign at the peak, the Erikson flag at the main truck and the Blue Peter at the fore, the ship moved slowly into the river. The tug was moving ahead and the hawser was passed, only a stern line holding the ship to the quay.
As the Blue Peter came fluttering down, they moved slowly out past Pendennis Castle and Pendennis Point to where they could see Zoze Point and Rosemullion Head and the entrance to the Helford River.
‘Let go!’
The carpenter swung at the pin holding the chain stopper round the anchor and down it went with a splash, the rattle of cable, and a cloud of rust. As the tug left and they began to breathe the southerly breeze coming up past the Lizard, they all felt better. They had long since grown tired of being alongside. Coal dust, from a tip next door, had settled half an inch thick all over the decks, coated ropes and wires with a pasty mess in the drizzling mist, and filtered into cabins and on to bunks and blankets and covered decks that were littered with all the rubbish the dockworkers had left.
Campbell had had the force pump erected and got the crew on to washing the decks at once. The Finns were good workers but the past few days had shown their poverty-stricken state. Some had no oilskins, some no sea-boots, some neither, and when Seago had allowed them money to purchase what they had needed, to his horror they had merely spent it on booze. Only a few had decent gear, and even that was patched and repatched, and blue with cold and shivering in their thin dungarees, they padded about the deck, scrubbing with coir brooms at the water gushing from the canvas hoses.
To a man they seemed to possess minds like sewers and suffered from a sort of Scandinavian melancholia. All except Yervy, who came from Åland, called himself a ‘Baltic sea Jew’, and claimed allegiance neither to Finland nor to Sweden. Because both languages were taught in the schools there, so that Ålanders were proficient in neither, he preferred to speak in a curious sailorman’s English and acted as bosun, interpreter and mediator for the rest of the crew.
At dawn next day, they began dragging the sails out of the sail locker. They were piled one on top of another like rolled carpets, the largest eighty feet across and twenty-five feet deep; looking for them by the light of a torch was like loading enormous bags of fertiliser in a darkened barn. The main royal went up first. A gantline rove through a block at the masthead was bent on to the middle of the sail and it was hoisted skywards and left hanging, the main topgallant following immediately afterwards. Men ran along the deck, holding ropes, and everybody was brought into the action, even the telegraphists, the cook and Willie John, looking like something the cat had dragged aboard. The royals and topgallants were rolled on their yards and secured with gaskets, and every available hand started bending on the great foresail.
All they had to do now was wait for final instructions, and Seago had arranged to see the SNO, Falmouth, for his orders. He seemed at times to be a little out of his depth, and the arrival of the Finns had highlighted the problems likely to be faced with men used to no discipline except the fists of mates and masters of sailing ships. With the exception of Yervy, they were all young, most of them looking no more than seventeen, but they were all tough, all a bit wild and all in the habit of using the foulest of foul epithets both in English and Finnish.
Because of the difficulties, Seago was only too glad to leave all arrangements ashore and aboard to Magnusson, who could at least lard his English with Finnish oaths. It suited Magnusson fine, because Seago had the old-time naval officer’s inability to let his hair down, and the main-deck of a 118-foot barque was hardly the quarter-deck of a battle-cruiser.
On the excuse that he had last-minute arrangements to make, he begged passage aboard the launch taking Seago ashore, because Wren Dowsonby-Smith had let it be known that she would be laying on food and drink; and Willie John – his collar grubby, his shoes scuffed, his uniform spotted with night after night of drinking, but determined like any good sailor to say goodbye to his woman – had also wangled a passage. Seago was none to keen but, with Campbell aboard, Marques trained in sail, the sea flat calm and the weather forecast good, his objections didn’t hold water.
‘There iss always Ek Yervy tae help,’ Willie John pointed out cheerfully.
Unfortunately, Ek Yervy decided to go as well, and along with Astermann and Worinen, who had always been the noisiest of the foreign element in the ship’s company, tumbled aboard the launch just as she was leaving the ship’s side.
‘They should stay aboard,’ Campbell said bitterly over the side to Magnusson, his thin face taut with disapproval. ‘We’ll lose ’em. Tomorrow, we’ll wake up and find we’re three short.’
After a fortnight of them, Magnusson couldn’t have cared less.
Seago was clearly annoyed but the launch’s owner didn’t wait to argue and they were soon several boat’s length from Oulu’s side. As they stepped ashore, Yervy insisted on buying drinks all round. In his stiff manner, Seago begged off. He looked angry and irritated and curiously grey-faced and strained.
‘You all right, sir?’ Magnusson asked.
‘Feel a bit off,’ Seago said tautly. ‘Probably got a cold coming on.’
Yervy gave the other two no chance to escape but swept them up with his fellow Finns into the first pub they saw, a small smoke-pickled place with ships in bottles and ancient swordfish snouts. The Finns went at it as if they’d been dying of thirst in the desert for a month.
‘What are we celepratin’, poy?’ Willie John asked.
‘Själfständighetsdagen,’ Yervy said.
‘What iss that?’
‘Freedom-from-Russia Day. Those Russians is all forbannad focking boggerts, and Russia is vun big skithus.’
They begged off at the fourth drink, Magnusson in a state of apprehension at the way the Finns were still sinking them.
‘Make sure you turn up for the launch,’ he said. ‘Seago’ll be narked if you’re late.’
‘Seago seely focker,’ Yervy said cheerfully. ‘He can kyss din arshålet.’
They arranged to meet outside the pub in time to catch the launch and separated. Wren Dowsonby-Smith had prepared a splendid meal.
‘If you ever decide to be unfaithful to your fiancé’,’ Magnusson said, ‘can I have first refusal?’
She was in an expansive mood. ‘Why attractive men have to waste their time going to sea I can’t imagine,’ she said as she buttoned her blouse.
Come to that, Magnusson thought, neither could he. Going to sea meant unwashed clothes, the smell of newly greased oilskins, cockroaches, the amorous squeaking of rats, bugs like ravening wolves behind the saloon wainscoting, calendars black with pencil marks to tick off the days, and wrecks like Willie John MacDonald. It meant moping waterside streets, dockside alleys, pornographic wit, pubs of heart-breaking squalor, and ill-designed, cranky vessels, meanly found and beggarly with short rations.
‘I expect it’s the call of the sea,’ she said.
Not on your life, Magnusson thought. The call of the sea was a journalist’s cliché. Most sailors stayed at sea because they
were cut off from land by their first voyage, which made them different creatures from landlubbers.
All the same – he grinned at her – going to sea also meant a wild infinity of water, flying fish, dolphins, whales and the whining of mouth organs on warm nights in the tropics. It meant Copenhagen with its tall waterfront houses; Buenos Aires on the yellow Plata and vino del pais in umbrella-ed cafés. It meant Bahia, like a decayed aristocrat; and Free-town, with the Bunce River mangroves and the pot-bellied kids on the Portuguese Steps. It meant Perim, Penang, Malacca, Yokohama, Java, the Philippines, Soerabaya, Panama and a thousand other places that shone in his mind like beacons and would still be there when he was an old man. He suspected it was the same with Willie John and even with Campbell, and guessed that Seago, Snaith and Admiral Cockayne thought of it that way, too, at times.
She said goodbye in floods of tears, but he suspected she wouldn’t miss him all that much in the end, and he set off down the hill towards the waterside. Willie John, smelling of whisky and wearing the dazed look of a cod on a slab, was waiting for him outside the pub.
‘She wept a wee bitty,’ he announced gloomily.
As it happened, it wasn’t the Finns who failed to turn up but Seago. They had a last drink with no sign of Yervy and the others, but as they came out they bumped into them on the pavement, Astermann with a large pumpkin in his arms.
‘He like pumpkin,’ Yervy said. ‘He cook for crew.’
