by John Harris
He indicated Old Boxer. “Scuttles ’isself with booze every time ’e goes ashore,” he said. “Fair creases me, ’aulin’ ’im about when ’e comes back. Told ’im so often, I ’ave. ‘’Orace,’ I’ve said, ‘you’re a dirty old drunkard.’”
He took another swig from the bottle. “You ain’t comin’ to sea with us, are you, lad?” he asked, and he looked anxiously at me.
I shook my head. “No,” I said, “but I wouldn’t mind.”
Yorky studied me silently. “’Ave a gasper,” he suggested.
He pushed a packet of cigarettes along the bench towards me. Then he produced a tin of tobacco and began to roll one for himself. He stared at the smoke that curled upwards as he drew the first puffs from it. “’Ard life,” he said. “Live in ’ere; y’know. ’Ell of a place in ’eavy weather. Like a bloomin’ oven in the tropics.”
“I’d manage, I suppose,” I said eagerly. I stared round at the forecastle. It was tawdry despite the white paint. There were comfortless iron bunks covered with sacking mattresses, and piles of kit lay about, dumped down by its owners before their last jaunt ashore.
“Meself, kid,” Yorky said, “my tastes run to a chip-shop or a small-’olding and a few chickens when I gets the cash saved up, but there’s no accounting for tastes.”
“I never knew you wanted to leave the sea,” I said. I was surprised, knowing Yorky’s habits.
“Always did,” he said. “Only time I managed it, though, was when I worked ashore with ’Orace, Allus do me wages in the first two nights ashore.”
“What on?”
“Same as ’im.” Yorky indicated Old Boxer, who was snoring now. “Same as all sailors. Booze and women.”
He pulled on his cigarette and stared at the deck between his feet for a while, then he spat into a box in the middle of the forecastle.
“It’s easy to get to sea, Jess, me old flower,” he said. “Make no mistake. But it’s flamin’ ’ard to get shot of it. I’ve tried. Fancied a job shoving a broom round the gutter once. But what did they tell me when I went to sign on at the Labour Exchange? ‘Says “seaman” ’ere on yer card, mate,’ the bloke said – snotty as yer please. ‘Seamen’s wanted down the docks – bad – and we ain’t no openings in the road-sweepin’ profession just now. Orf yer go.’ I didn’t – not then – but a fortnit on the dole changed me mind. Besides, it gets ’old of you. Make no mistake about it.” He spat again. “Perhaps it’s as well in the long run. Once you’ve been a sailor you never settle ashore. There ain’t a town big enough to ’old you.”
He grinned suddenly, cheerful again. “You can’t change it, mate. You never will. Just like you’ll never stop the tide comin’ in and going out and never stop the sun risin’ and the moon shinin’. When you think you’ve managed to get away from it for a bit you find yourself watchin’ a old ’at floating in the river, and you start calculatin’ which way the tide’s goin’, and afore you know where you are you’re off after it again.
“Tell you the truth, lad, I was glad to get away from that ruddy boat-yard. If I’d stayed much longer I’d ’ave looked like a flippin’ oilcan. I was that miserable for a ship. I never realised it till I got on one again. Since then,” he said cheerfully, and he’d obviously forgotten his reference to a chip-shop and chickens, “I ain’t never fancied a shore job.”
He stared at the glowing end of his cigarette for a while, then he suddenly turned his head and looked at me. His black eyes were bright and shrewd beneath his shaggy brows and he seemed to know exactly what I was thinking.
“Well?” he said. “Still want to go to sea, kid?”
I paused and drew a deep breath. Then I grinned and answered without hesitating.
“Yes,” I said, “I do.”
“And yer dad?”
“It’s nothing to do with him.”
Yorky tossed his cigarette-end into the box on the floor and rose to his feet. “Come on, then. What are we mucking about at? Let’s ’ave you along to the skipper’s cabin and get you signed on. We need a deck-boy. You’re a bit ’efty for cleanin’ closets since you growed up, but we ain’t choosey, and you might as well ship to sea among pals if you’re goin at all.”
The following morning when the Archibald Harvey headed for the open sea, chivvied port and starboard by tugs, I was on the foredeck in a pair of dungarees borrowed from Yorky.
Around me, as the town fell astern, was the banging of the winches and the rattle and whistle of blocks as the gangway was hauled inboard. As a newcomer I was told off to lend a hand with the stowing of the mooring-ropes, a humping, back-breaking, boring job that made my arms ache with the unaccustomed labour.
Yorky was on the forecastle head in singlet and dungaree trousers, more his old recognisable self with his blue suit stowed safely away for the rest of the voyage. Old Boxer was with him, silent and morose. His face was grey and gaunt and had a ravaged look about it. His expression was pinched and haggard, and he looked as though he’d a headache and a sour stomach. His eyes were glazed and taut lines were etched across his cheeks.
The rain had stopped and the skies had cleared. The day was bright but with a cold wind whipping the top of the bow wave to a feathery spray. The ship began to feel the first of the open sea as she butted her nose past the white pencil of St Andrew Light that gleamed in the sun on the bluff of headland, then she began to dig her nose into the waves. The water coming over the bows was blown by the salty gust into glittering fans of rainbow hues. I made a hurried grab at a stanchion when the decks canted unexpectedly, and my ears were filled with creaks and groans as the old ship began to pitch. Like the cries of a living creature they were.
Above and around the mastheads were the gulls, shining in the morning sunlight, wheeling shapes against the cold blue of the sky. Their wailing cries cut sharply into my brain like music I’d been hearing all my life, a symphony made up of birds’ calls and the wind’s song in the rigging, the rush of water and the sighs from the framework of the ship. A symphony that had the steady thump of engines amidships as its bass accompaniment.
Gradually the town grew smaller, but still clear and bold and white in the sunshine. I turned my face towards the open sea that stretched rolling and mysterious from where I stood to the very limits of the world.
I drew a great breath full of salt air and cleanness, and felt suddenly free of the sordidness of Atlantic Street and the drab squalor of the docks. Behind me was the meanness of people like Nanjizel and the narrow life of the printing works. I felt a queer tug at my heart for a second as I thought of Minnie, soft and warm and seductive, Minnie with the veiled eyes and the suggestion of all sorts of promises. Then I swallowed sharply as I remembered the words that had come to me as I stood outside the Steam Packet. “A kiss to make him wet his britches.” A kid going away.
Well, I’d finished with that life now. I’d thrown them all off, Dig and Ma and Minnie and Pat. I was heading for a new life, a harder life, standing on my own two feet, dependent on no one and responsible to no one.
I looked round at Yorky and Old Boxer drawing grateful puffs at their cigarettes in a pause in their work. They seemed cleaner, stronger, more wholesome men as the staleness of their port debauch was blown away by the wind. Their dulled eyes had grown brighter, and the sourness had gone from them, as the keen breeze cut into them, blowing away the cobwebs of their shore leave.
Old Boxer spoke suddenly to Yorky as they leaned on the bow-rail and stared ahead at the grey, heaving sea. “Ha!” he said. “We’ve shaken off the scent of the sewers and the stale perfume of harlots again…”
“I been with no ’arlots, ’Orace,” Yorky commented. “You speak for yourself.”
“…the odour of public lavatories and the dock pubs’ stink, and the touch of the filthy shysters who’d have a sailor-man’s soul. Yorky, we’re men again.”
I grinned at Yorky’s puzzled frown. He was an unsubtle soul, and Old Boxer’s high-flung sentiments were wasted on him.
“Ain�
��t ever been anything else,” he said.
Old Boxer turned away cheerfully then and, turning, caught sight of me down on the foredeck. He stared for a moment, his eyes peering, then he brushed a hand across his face and stared again.
I grinned at him.
He swore suddenly and came bounding down the iron ladder in two or three strides. He stopped in front of me, huge and imperious. his eyes furious in the great dark hollows that encircled them.
“What the devil are you doing here?” he demanded.
I was startled by the fury in his words.
“Working for me living,” I said. “Same as you.”
Old Boxer turned to Yorky, who’d come hustling after him. “Yorky, get hold of the pilot and tell him there’s a passenger to go ashore with him.”
“Passenger my backside,” Yorky said. “’E’s the deck-boy.”
Old Boxer whirled back to stare at me again. I was still startled by the power of his anger.
“Get back to your mother!” he snapped. “This is no life for you.”
“Don’t be daft,” I said. “I’m going to sea. I want to go to sea.”
“Oh, gi’e o’er, ’Orace,” Yorky said angrily, pulling at his arm. “What’s bitin’ yer? Can’t the lad go to sea if ’e wants, to, without a song and dance from you? ’Sides, you brought ’im aboard.”
Old Boxer stared at me for a moment longer, then he went to the ship’s side and threw away his cigarette.
“Sure,” he said, laughing as though it hurt him. “That’s all right. What am I talking about?” He squinted round at me, his face heavy and sardonic, then his features, which had been distorted with anger, were softened by a smile. It was a smile that explained Yorky’s devotion to him and made me realise why I’d always liked him in spite of his drunkenness and his weakness and his insults. A smile of sheer charm it was.
“Come on, then, lad,” he said gently. “We’ll make you into a real sailor – if you’ve got guts enough. And, by God, I suspect you have.”
Book Two
One
The tumbled white serpent that was the Archibald Harvey’s wake, that long, seething trail of phosphorescence through the dark nights, made me more of a man with every tumbling wave it covered, with every turn of the screws that caused it.
That first week aboard ship was a nightmare of scraping and chipping. The tap-tap of hammers and the screech of steel on steel seared into my brain until it became as much a part of it as the rustle of cockroaches in the forecastle and the glory-hole and the thump of engines amidships. My hands were blistered within twenty-four hours, raw with weals that sent the blood running on to my wrists and made me wince with pain every time I moved them. I painted until my hair was plastered with it, and did every stinking, filthy job there was on the ship, to say nothing of running errands for everyone who chose to ask me.
Bullying and jeers, foul language that made my ears stick out like chapel hat-pegs, and fouler reminiscences that turned my stomach made me grow up overnight. The forecastle was a dripping, heaving, groaning hell-hole when the old ship was in heavy weather, a steaming dive where the water dripped off the bulkheads as I lay shivering on my narrow bunk and watched the newly greased oilskins and dirty clothing swinging by my side. Backwards and forward, backwards and forwards they went, in jerky monotonous arcs to the pitch of the ship. It became an oven in the tropics so that we lay gasping for air in our hammocks on the deck, and the moisture burst through our bodies in beads of sweat as fast as we put it in as tea, or ran down our legs into our boots whenever we went below for a gasper. And an ice-box in winter it was, so that my clothes were never dry, and I prayed beneath my two miserable blankets for warmth and swore blind I’d never go to sea again.
But one forecastle followed another over the years as the only home I knew, beyond the lodging-houses and sailors’ hostels we used whenever we were in port. Ship after ship we tried, good and bad, according to how we’d spent our money ashore and how desperate we were to earn more. Banana boats there were, tankers out to Abadan and Curaçao, molasses ships or timber freighters. Grubby old tramps foul with the stink of guano or stuffed full of coal that crept with a sickening insidiousness into the forecastle and the mess deck and made your blankets black and left a dirty ring under your eyes.
We were caught by touts who signed us on for trips in weekly boats where the skippers wore bowler hats and the rest of the crew consisted of a boy and a dog and when we were flush enough to pick and choose we tried the fashionable liners that touched at New York and Sydney, and bobbed our heads and said “Yes, sir,” and “Certainly not, sir,” every time some pompous ass out of the first-class bar started throwing his weight about concerning the ships he’d sailed in.
I couldn’t hope to recall them all now. Only a few. The Ekaloon for instance, that took a hammering when Jerry caught the Jervis Bay convoy. The Mill Hill. She was a beauty. Sailed like a lady, she did, for all that she was only a freighter. Sweet as a bird she went. The Singaree. She twisted a warp in her on the Goodwins before they could pull her off. The Abraham Landor, whose skipper they broke for drunkenness. And dozens of others, with nothing to recommend ’em or condemn ’em, ships that just took you there and brought you back without an incident to remind you of them.
I couldn’t even remember the storms they carried me through now. I know I sampled them all. Typhoons in the Pacific that put the fear of God into you; Western Ocean gales where the waves came at you big as houses, grey and forbidding and ugly; and that particularly dirty kind of weather peculiar to the coast of England, the stuff that butts up the Channel and gets you cold and wretched and wet and makes you wish to God you’d never seen the sea.
I had it all. And not only the weather, but all the fights and all the fun that go with seafaring. It took four of us once – on the Singaree, I think it was – to pull the Fourth Mate off the Chief Cook, after a fight on deck. They’d been at each other throughout the trip over the grub, and it came to a head at last after they’d been ashore in Port Said. And there we were, the First Mate and the Donkeyman and Old Boxer and me, dragging them apart. A fat lot of good it did, too. The Chief Cook tried a carving-knife on the Fourth the following day and got a bang on the swede from a spanner as long as your arm for his trouble.
We touched at Penang, where the lighted doorways along the waterfront were noisy with the babble of voices and the grind of loudspeakers, and the heavy air was blue with smoke. We called at Saldanha with its few houses tumbledown with dry-rot and its glaring white sand that hit you between the eyes like a hammer-blow when you came out into it from the bars; at Port Suez on our way into the oven-hot Red Sea, and Panama, a steaming jumping-off spot for half the riff-raff of the world; at Rio, and Havana, and New Orleans, and San Domingo – oh, everywhere you can think of, everywhere you can get a ship in without going aground.
There were South Sea Islands, too, I remember, where Polynesian women came aboard and prostituted themselves with the crew without turning a hair, as unconcerned about it all as they were about the peacock-blue skies above them and the lazy gulls and the clear water that showed the sand and the coral fathoms down below.
But all that came later. Long before the Archibald Harvey turned her bows for home, her mastheads scrawling circles across the sky as they rolled and swayed to her pitching, I was a man. I went aboard her a lean youngster with no more luggage than I could stuff into my pocket, worried stiff because I hadn’t a bean, but I grew broad and sturdy, with the tan of the sun on me, and my face burned nut-colour with the nip of salt winds.
Placid seas that reflected the sun’s glare and howling south-easters off the Cape of Good Hope that drove the spray parallel with the tormented wave-tops left their marks round my eyes and at the corners of my mouth, the stamp and trademark of any sailor. It’s something they all have, even the longshoremen who poke about up rivers with small craft. You can spot it a mile away.
I grew in knowledge as well as in strength and size. Under the coachin
g of Old Boxer and Yorky, I became self-reliant and reliable, able to do anything that was asked me, from maintenance to stowage and back again, until eventually I was the one who went as bosun and had to push Old Boxer around.
Not that it was all plain sailing. Seafaring came easily to me, but there were days at first when, between them, they made me want to weep with weariness as they made me sew and splice and reeve until my fingers ached.
Old Boxer unearthed navigation books and Africa Pilots that hadn’t seen the light of day for years and had the green of mildew on them. Up from the bottom of his sea-chest they came, ripe with that damp smell of old books, for him to hammer the principles of navigation and maritime law into my head until it whirled. He taught me morse and the stars and how to read a sextant, how to shoot the sun and lay a course. He taught me stowage and flags and, when the rest of the crew were yarning on the forecastle in the evening sun, haggling about beer and women and ships, he’d have me sweating below deck, struggling with the curve of the earth’s surface. While I was content to be part of the deck crew, he was chasing me inevitably in the direction of the bridge and the officers’ saloon.
“God damn it!” he stormed when I protested. “You’re not going to end your days like me, rotting in the forecastle. You’re not going to sweat your time out chipping rust and hauling ropes, and going ashore after the booze and the women. You’ve chosen to go to sea but, by God, I’ll see you go to sea like a gentleman!”
Yorky was behind him in everything he bullied me into, and that odd friendship that had always existed between us grew. It withstood all the pornographic comments of the forecastle wits, a curious link that bound us together: me, a raw youngster; the fat, white little Yorkshireman with his blasphemous affection; and the corpulent, grey-haired, prematurely old man whose words varied with the days from bitterness and pent-up anger to an odd tenderness that was sometimes even embarrassing. Between us there was an unspoken understanding, despite Old Boxer’s sarcastic tongue and the chip on his shoulder that made him difficult to get along with.
