Long Way Place (Cannibal Country Trilogy, Book 1)

by Andrew Wareham

  Ned took his shore leave, made enquiries at the shipping offices and with the agents, discovered that he might sign on a dozen different vessels, all in need of an engineer, however new his certificate.

  By the end of the week the Star was ready to sail and he had to make his decision. He had a choice between being a junior in a passenger liner that worked the route from Australia to New Zealand, second in a tramp steamer that generally ran between Sydney and Hong Kong, wandering wherever her cargoes took her in between, or sole engineer in an aged coaster that ran from Sydney to Brisbane to Townsville to Cairns and then north into the Gulf by way of just about every wharf and quayside en route. He plumped for the coaster, the Lucy Belle, arguing that he would learn more that way, would discover any opportunities there might be in Australia as well as practising all of his newly-learned skills.

  Ned took his bag and toolbox in hand and walked into the town centre of Cairns, such as it was, three or four hundred yards from the wharf, spotted a policeman in uniform and politely asked him where he could get a room.

  The policeman weighed him up, decided he probably had a few pounds in his pocket and pointed him to the sole hotel. There were boarding houses of various levels of respectability but the hotel stated that Ned had some money, was no down-and-out desperate to scrape a few coppers together. He wanted to stay in Cairns for a while and a prosperous front might help.

  The hotel, ornate with cast-iron tracery round its balcony, served better food than he was used to and he decided that he would award himself a few days of holiday, drink a few beers and make his face known before he searched for work. He went into the bar that evening, asked the barman, who was also the manager, for a cold beer.

  “Saw you comin’ off the old Belle, mate?”

  “Made a bloody sight more sense than getting’ on ‘er ever did! You wouldn’t bloody believe it, mate!”

  “I did ‘ear tell she ain’t exactly in perfect condition, but?”

  “She’s bloody dead, mate. She just ain’t got round to sinkin’ yet – but she will! She ain’t seaworthy and I told that drunken prat of a master just that and refused point-blank to get up steam again. So the old fool put three months money in me hand and ordered me off ‘is ship. Glad to go, so I am!”

  “You really reckon she’s likely to go down, mate?”

  “Certain sure! She’s an insurance job, lay you ten-to-one on that. Master’s a drunk, mate’s a poofter got thrown out of the navy and ‘is family don’t want to know ‘im. Deckies are Irish and got nobody in Australia; stokers are half-Abo or Chinese and drunks as well, apart from one who’s off on bloody opium! She goes down there’s not a soul will kick up a stink for any one of them. The New South Wales and Queensland people ain’t goin’ to argue, because the insurance will pay for a better ship on the run.”

  In the event he had no need to look for work; it came to him. Every new face was rapidly identified in the small towns of the Far North and was made welcome or, rarely, was thrown out. Ned was known as the steam engineer off the Belle within minutes of his first appearance in the bar.

  Two days after he took his room he stood on the balcony and watched the Belle steam out, pushing through the gap in the reef at a good eight knots, the black coal smoke from her stack mixed with traces of escaping white steam, evidence that the steam pipe which he had told them was cracked had not been replaced. He shook his head, walked heavily through to the bar, asked for a beer.

  “G’day, Ned! She’s sailed then?”

  “G’day, Jim! Yeah, good luck to her, and the people on ‘er. Let’s ‘ope we see her back again.”

  “Ah, she’ll be right, but. She’s always been ‘ere, she’s too old to die!”

  “They said that about Queen Victoria, mate.”

  There was a chuckle from the dozen or so men sat about the room, mostly hands off the plantations in for the day but including a few local men on a late midday break.

  “Two to one she comes back, mate!”

  “You’re on. There’s me quid on the counter.” Ned slapped a sovereign down. The barman picked it up, glanced questioningly around the room; he had been thinking shillings not pounds. Two of the others dug deep, covered the bet between them. The cash was put into a glass and stuck at the back of the counter on display.

  “Two months, Ned? If she ain’t back then, she ain’t goin’ to be?”

  “That’ll do me, Jim. What’re you drinking?”

  Refills came in for the four of them and Ned sat down at their table as a matter of course.

  “What’re you going to do with yerself, Ned? Back to sea?”

  “Maybe, mate, but not if I can find something better. I ain’t one of these roaming sailormen by choice. I took to the stokehold to get out of the slums in England, got lucky and ended up with me ticket in steam. I can work on any steam engine and I’ve stripped down a petrol motor or two as well – there ought to be summat I can do to make a living.”

  They nodded, reading between the lines that he had had to get out of England, and respecting him the more for doing so successfully.

  “We been looking for a steam engineer to come up for five weeks now, Ned.” Jack, who Ned had met while he was wandering along the waterfront the previous day, getting his bearings, was a slightly older man than most present. “I got the boatyard, mate, and my derrick’s down and it’s a bloody nuisance! Want to come down and have a look at ‘er?”

  “Pleased to, Jack. What’ve you got in the way of a workshop? I’ve got me own hand tools, but we might need more than that on a big job.”

  “What we’ve got, you can use, mate. Do you want to come on down now?”

  Ned stood up in answer.

  The boiler was a leaky mess, rusty and dirty and showing the signs of long use and little maintenance. It took three days to strip and clean the machinery and to identify and weld a broken flange, cut a plate to stop a leak and then repack and tighten every steam joint before reassembling the whole. It stood bright, shiny and new-looking when Ned fired up the boiler.

  “Micky’s the steam man, Ned, he’ll do that.”

  “No ‘e bloody won’t, Jack! If I’ve made a cock of it, if I’ve missed anything, this is when we finds out. You step back a few yards, mate, till I’m ‘appy she’s right.”

  Two hours brought the boiler up to pressure and then Ned spent a while lifting and dropping loads and shifting the small crane up and down the fifty yards of track along the quayside.

  “She’ll do, Jack. Get Micky to grease her up once a week, mate, and check the bolts on the joints every month and she’ll be good for another ten years.”

  Jack nodded, passed the orders on to Micky, invited Ned into his office.

  “We didn’t talk pay, Ned, but I reckon two quid a day sounds about right?”

  “That’ll do me, mate. Thanks.”

  “No worries! You get any other jobs in town that need a workshop, you can use this one, any time you want, gratis. We need our own engineer up here, Ned, and we’ll all do a bit to help, if we can. There’s a dozen other jobs waiting, if you are going to stay?”

  “I’d like to, Jack – this place feels right to me. Your beer’s pretty good, too.”

  Ned did not move out of town for the first, heavy month of the Wet. There was a pair of traction engines at the brewery, stationary engines at the timber yard and a couple of warehouses, and all of the cranes and derricks in the small harbour, and none of them had seen skilled maintenance in ten years. Half of them were in dangerous condition, could have blown at any moment, needed only a little bad luck to go. When he commented he was told that one had burst the previous year, killing one man and crippling another two, but that that was what happened up in the Far North – you took your chances and hoped it would happen to somebody else.

  A mission boat from the Gulf arrived at the end of that month. It had called at Thursday Island and brought a message asking why they had seen no ship in three months – they were running short of everything, medic
ines especially. The mission schooner had seen no sign of the Belle, and had called at every wharf en route.

  The barman at the hotel handed Ned his winnings that evening, in front of a crowded saloon.

  “No thanks, mate! Blood money! There’s a dozen men went down with the Belle. Put it across the bar – drinks on them tonight.”

  There was a mutter of agreement and the word soon spread that the Pommy Steamer knew right from wrong – he would do.

  The Wet eased and Ned bought a buggy and hired a horse to draw it. He paid for a couple of lessons on how to drive and look after the animal, and he thought that he should take some basic riding lessons too, it having belatedly occurred to him that he had not the least idea of anything relating to horses. He set out on a tour of the sugar plantations, all of them having begged his presence before the crushers and boilers came into use again.

  By the time he had been six months in the Far North it was obvious that he could make a good living, that he would be able to put his money together and set up his own workshop on his own premises within four or five years and build a respectable business, but he still had itchy feet. He felt that he had still some miles to go before he reached whatever destination he was seeking.

  LONG WAY PLACE

  Chapter Three

  Ned was still a slum dweller in his mind; he belonged to the huddled streets of town, not to the open country. Even so he could see the beauty of the Far North, that land where the mountains shielded a narrow coastal plain lapped by the Coral Sea. The Barrier Reef and its shallows were not as attractive to his eye as they might have been – he had been a seaman long enough to value deep water far more - but the colours, the varied shades of turquoise and aquamarine, were worth a few minutes of his attention every day. And the mountain range to the west was always strong and bold. The richness of the land fascinated him as well. He had seen a little of the Hampshire Downs, of the pale grasslands, the wheat fields and the clumps of beeches where there was clay over the chalk, rich but sparse, and had thought that was what ‘The Countryside’ looked like the world over. The floridity of the rain forest and cane fields amazed him – the deep emeralds and golds and burnt oranges, even the greys of the parched, peeled-bark gum trees spoke of a younger, rawer, vibrant world, one that beckoned to him.

  He had no occasion to climb the escarpment and enter the Outback regions, dry and almost desert but it was, he had been told, ‘like no place else on Earth’. He had made a mental note that he should do so, ‘one day’.

  He was less enthralled by the snakes and spiders that were a part of daily life for the Queenslander. He listened to the rules, and obeyed them, sensible enough to realise that it was easy to die up here. Every time he needed to relieve himself he shuddered as he opened the dunny door and peered anxiously about him. ‘Don’t sit down until you know you’re on your own’, was graven on his mind – there were places he definitely did not want to be stung or bitten!

  “Watch out for Funnel Web spiders under the house, Ned and keep an eye out for Red Backs inside the bedroom and kitchen. Empty your boots before you put ‘em on. Don’t sit down on the verandah without checking the chairs first. Take a look inside your hat before you put it on your head. Watch your horse – if it ain’t happy, it might have a good reason for it.”

  The list was endless and the few family men worried for their children all the time, sometimes with good reason, yet, even so, none showed any wish to go back to England and very few called the Old Country ‘Home’. The Far North was its own land, a free, open frontier that was very proud of itself.

  Every boat up from Brisbane brought the most recent newspapers, dropped them in the bar at the hotel where they were read until they fell to bits or grew old and soft enough to be put to other, practical, use. Ned read of the defeat of the Russians at Tsu Shima, the utter destruction of their supposedly great fleet, worried for a while about the new power of the Japanese, who were not so far away. Then he discovered that the bulk of their ships had been built in England and the majority of their officers had trained with the Royal Navy and that they had actually had British officers on board, as ‘observers’. Nothing to concern them there – the little yellow men had been no more than puppets of the British Empire, which was entirely as it should be, after all.

  Of far greater interest was an advertisement he read a couple of years later, from the Papuan Rubber Company, formed a few years before with plantations around Port Moresby, up on the Papuan Gulf. Their trees would be reaching maturity soon and the Company needed an engineer to operate the processing plant that would treat the raw latex and ready it for shipping. The plant used steam for power and to heat the latex while treating it. The Company would pay a salary of three hundred sterling and supply housing, servants and a food allowance as well as a return ticket to Brisbane. They also offered six weeks paid leave every second year. There would be ‘opportunities’ for go-ahead young men.

  Ned talked with Jack and a few of the other old hands and together they drafted a letter of application for Ned to write out in his slow, elegant, Victorian copperplate, almost the sole fruit of his schooling and much admired by the men who watched. They did not especially want him to go – they needed an engineer too much. But it was not as if he was giving up on the Far North, if anything he was going further in – they had to support him.

  A reply came in less than a month – return of post, in effect. The Company had been most interested in Mr Hawkins’ application, would be very pleased to discuss the matter further with him. Mr Fitzgerald, general manager of the Company, was to travel north on the Burns Philp steamer next month, would be making a stop of twenty four hours in Cairns when he would hope to meet Mr Hawkins.

  Discussion in the bar brought the general opinion that Ned’s had been the only sensible application they had received, the only one from a steam engineer, otherwise they would not have been so forthcoming, would have invited him to travel down to them.

  Fitzgerald was a planter, a younger son of the Irish ascendancy who had gone out to Malaya on leaving a minor English school and had learned the trade there. He knew how to plant the trees and run a labour line but anything more technical, from accounts to engineering, escaped him. Fortunately, there was always some menial to perform the hewing of wood and drawing of water for him – lesser mortals of course, but useful in their place. He was a tall, spare, quietly spoken gentleman in his mid-thirties, had fitted into Malayan planter society but felt sadly out of place in the company of brash Australians, good-hearted blighters, no doubt, but strangers to deference and ordinary courtesy to their betters. Perhaps this chap Hawkins, an Englishman after all, would know how to behave.

  Fitzgerald made his way to the hotel, walking in the absence of hackneys to carry him the quarter of a mile from the wharf. These Queenslanders had no idea of how to treat a gentleman and he knew from bitter experience that their hotels did not deserve the name. He had stayed in his cabin aboard ship on his previous ventures into the Papuan Gulf, first-class in name if not in reality – the P and O would have wept if they had seen how passengers were treated on the coasts of Australia – but he knew what to expect in Cairns.

  He entered the hotel, was not greeted at the door, not to his surprise, made his way to the desk, announced himself to the rough in an open-necked shirt who stood behind it.

  “The gentleman from the Papuan Rubber Company, are you not?” Jim, owner, manager and daytime barman, was at his most courteous and urbane, doing his best to create a good impression to help Ned. He had changed his apron and wiped down the counter that morning.

  Fitzgerald admitted he was that man and asked whether a pot of tea might be available, it was close to eleven o’clock, after all.

  “Tea? Not much call for tea here, not as a general rule, mate. No milk, you see, or not as such, not fresh, that is. Comes out of a tin, what we’ve got, don’t do very well in tea.”

  “Ah… I do prefer lemon, in fact.”

  “What, in bloody tea?
Never come across that one before, mate. Oi, Bob! You ever hear of lemon in tea?”

  Bob ran a small fishing boat, made enough to keep himself in beer and books which he had delivered on the ship each month, was the source of all knowledge in town. He shook his head, ‘weird’, he implied.

  “No worries, mate, we ain’t got any lemons either.”

  Fitzgerald gave up, asked for a beer, was told it was on the house and was ushered into the lounge, normally used by a card school, brag, pontoon or bridge equally likely any afternoon or evening, but empty except for Ned on this special occasion.

  “I’m Ned Hawkins, Mr Fitzgerald,” he said, standing and pulling out a chair.

  Fitzgerald sat, hiding his wince at the terribly common accent and assimilating Ned’s dress. No necktie or collar; short sleeves and no jacket; cotton trousers or something like, not proper flannel, still less tweed; boots, not shoes. Impossible, but he was the sole candidate for the job who had any actual knowledge of steam. The eight other applicants had all been ‘good with their hands’ and sure they could pick up the skills they needed on the job.

  He inspected Ned’s Third Engineer’s ticket, glancing knowingly at the watermark on the heavy paper and accepting it as genuine. He read Captain Stobart’s open reference which commended Ned as hard-working, sober and intelligent. He looked Ned over, could see no signs of the drinker. Ten minutes of laborious conversation determined that he knew nothing of cricket or rugby or racing but was not a gambler. He offered Ned the job.

  “Going up on next month’s boat, Mr Fitzgerald? Sure enough, I’ll be glad to, sir. An advance, on me salary? No thanks, sir, I don’t need it. I’ve got a ‘undred or so in me pocket, enough to fit me out with the kit I’ll need, but it was a kind offer, thank you. What about tools, sir?”

  Fitzgerald was at a loss, he knew nothing about such things.