Cobra in the Bath

by Miles Morland

  With the coming of first light, the mooring rope was cast over the side and the first of many mugs of strong tea, sweet with condensed milk, was passed around. The engine was revved and the smack slipped from its mooring to butt its way down Woodrolfe Creek and towards the channel between Tollesbury and Mersea, while the crew busied themselves with preparing the webs of blocks, tackles, trawls, hoists, chains and nets. When the channel was reached the boat headed briefly into the wind to allow the big red mainsail to be hoisted and jib and foresail to be broken out. This done, the sheets were freed and the boat began to heel and gather speed as its great trapezoid mainsail, suspended on a gaff the size of a telephone pole, filled with the morning breeze. The engine was cut, leaving a silence broken only by the slop of water and the scrawling of gulls and terns. Half an hour later the oyster beds were reached, the sail dipped and the trawls cast over the side.

  I waited, enthralled by the ship’s busy-ness, careful not to get in the way of the straining tackle. When the nets finally came up, cascading water and bulging with sea life, I watched in wonder. Not all the haul was oysters. Trapped with them was a harvest of seaweed, the green-brown kind with poppable air bladders, and a wriggling mass of sea creatures. The net was opened to spill its cargo on the deck and the crew set to sorting. Oysters were thrown into different buckets according to size and type, care being taken not to mix the flat aristocratic ‘natives’, the true Colchesters, with the coarser ‘ports’, or Portuguese, easily distinguished by their deep ribbed shells. As the buckets filled they were taken down to the hold below. Fish the crew sorted without even looking at them. They kept Dover sole, and the rest, mainly flounder and plaice, went over the side.

  My wonder, as I watched and strained to keep my balance against the rolling of the boat, was tinged with fear. I did not mind the fish; they were harmless. What I did mind were crabs and starfish. One bit, the other stung. The men sensed my fear. From time to time one looked up from sorting the catch and tossed me a crab or a starfish.

  ‘’Ere, Mike, catch this.’

  In the hustle of the morning both Michael and I were Mike. We looked much the same with our freckles and red hair cut straight across the forehead, Michael but a bigger version of me. I giggled, trying not to show my fear as I flailed at the squiggling missiles, hoping to bat them away over the side before they bit or stung me.

  On our left in Tollesbury lived Mrs Wombwell, an old widow who was forever tap-tapping around to the kitchen door with her walking stick to shout at Ma, ‘Mrs Morland, I’ve just seen your boys throwing things at my cat, stealing my greengages, squashing my marrows . . .’ Her complaints were well grounded. On the other side lived the Shakespeares. Mr Shakespeare was a fisherman, and Ma asked Mrs Shakespeare, the Tollesbury gossip, to keep watch on Michael and me when she went up to London.

  Mrs Shakespeare had regarded us with puzzlement ever since the time when Ma was in London, and she had received a telephone call from someone who needed to speak to Ma urgently. When we told her she needed to ask directory enquiries for someone called Deare, as Ma usually went to see her mother – no longer Lady Hogg now that my grandfather was dead, but Mrs Deare, new wife to Nigel Deare, a retired naval commander with whom she had been carrying on an affair for years – Mrs Shakespeare snorted.

  ‘No, dear, he can’t be called dear. That’s just what you’ve heard your Mum call him. I’m not calling up the operator and asking for a dear. They’d think I was barmy. Now, think hard, boys. What’s his real name?’

  Contact was never made that day.

  Ma’s mother, the new Mrs Deare, was universally known as Sammy, a name that was as inappropriate for her as Bunny was for my father. Pictures of her as a young woman show a helmet-coiffed willowy girl of cat-like grace. Someone had decided that this sinuous creature looked exactly like Sammy the Snake, a figure in one of the earliest cartoon strips. The name stuck. Sammy she remained for ever after, although in the family she came to be known as Jersey Gran after she and Nigel moved to the island in the early 1950s.

  It was thanks to her that our first stay in Tollesbury was a short one. We arrived in 1946, and by 1947 we were on the boat back to India. My parents’ divorce had come through in 1946. Ma had not asked for alimony, but the divorce settlement required Bunny to pay her maintenance for Michael and me and to provide for our education. But no money was ever forthcoming to supplement Ma’s ten pounds a week from her father. Later Bunny married Alice, who was a rich woman, but she never gave him a penny to contribute to his children’s upbringing.

  Not long after the divorce Ma was summoned by her father to London and told that as a result of cancer he would be dead in three months; he had decided to leave all of his money to Sammy for her life, the wife who had been consistently unfaithful to him, and the weekly ten pounds would stop.

  ‘I never understood it,’ Ma told me. ‘Pa was a poppet. He was a kind and gentle man. I had never got on with my mother, but Pa and I had been close. Mama treated him appallingly. I think she probably started being unfaithful to him on their honeymoon. She certainly never looked back after that. I just didn’t understand it when Papa told me that he was going to give her everything. I was thunderstruck. There I was with two boys to support and not a penny coming in. I couldn’t even get a job with you two to look after. I think in a queer sort of way Pops felt guilty because he thought he hadn’t been a proper husband.’

  I do not remember meeting my grandfather. He died that same year. Later I learned a little of his story from Ma. As the youngest of the three Hogg brothers he had been sent out to India to earn his living several years before the First World War, while his elder brother Douglas stayed at home and became a barrister, a trade well suited to the cantankerous Ulster Hogg spirit. That elder brother later went on to become lord chancellor, like his son Quintin, Mrs Thatcher’s colleague for so many years and the first Viscount Hailsham.* Meanwhile my grandfather, Malcolm, joined the Bombay trading firm of Forbes Forbes Campbell.

  In 1914 when war was declared everyone of my grandfather’s background in India was expected to join up. He, then aged thirty-one, was a prime candidate to enlist. But, as Ma told the story, someone had to stay behind in Bombay to take care of Forbes Forbes Campbell. The partners drew straws; he drew the short one and stayed in Bombay to look after the business for the duration of the war while his partners, the winners, went off to fight the Hun and to be machine-gunned in the Flanders mud.

  He stayed on in India after the war. So few of his generation and background were left there that he rose quickly, becoming Sir Malcolm Hogg in 1920 at the age of thirty-seven and a member of the Viceroy’s Council, which ruled India. In 1925 he returned to England. Most of his contemporaries from Eton and Oxford had been killed. The few who had survived had shared an experience of which he knew nothing. For ever afterwards he felt an outsider.

  If I had been asked as a five-year-old what I wanted to do for the rest of my life the answer would have been easy: take the boat out to India and back. We always travelled on ships of the Anchor Line from Liverpool to Bombay; it was the cheapest way. They had two liners which plied the route, the Cilicia and the Circassia. No sooner had we settled in Tollesbury than we were on the Circassia, bound from Liverpool for the Bombay we had left a year ago. Ma was going out to marry JRC.

  There was nothing very big or impressive about the Circassia – it was about the size of a middling cross-Channel ferry – but to me it was the grandest boat that had ever put to sea. Though our cabin was on a lower deck, we were on the outside of the boat. That meant we had a porthole. The lower decks were cheaper, but for Michael and me being lower down was more fun because when storms came and a sea got up the cabin stewards would go around all the cabins and close the portholes, screwing them tight shut with the two big bronze butterfly nuts that stuck out above them like ears. In rough weather when the boat rolled the porthole was completely submerged in greeny-white foam.

  We ran into a huge storm two days out from Liverp
ool as we crossed the Bay of Biscay. Chairs, tables, pianos and other movables were bolted down to stop them sliding across the floor; cutlery and crockery were put in special racks to prevent them flying off across the dining room. The bars and lounges emptied as passengers crept to their cabins gaunt with seasickness. On deck a scattering of people sat huddled on the sheltered side of the boat, faces white and jaws clenched, hoping the fresh air would ward off queasiness.

  Few things are better than not feeling seasick when the rest of the world is on its knees and retching. The worse everyone else feels, the better you do. Michael and I were unaffected as the boat rolled and crashed from wave peak to wave trough. To us this was better than the fairground. We scuttled about the near-deserted boat, screaming, jumping on the furniture, sliding across the floor with the boat’s roll, nudging ashtrays and glasses so that they flew across the room on the next lurch, opening doors to allow the wind and spray to howl in and then dodging through to stand outside on the boat deck, hanging on to the rail as the boat rolled down till it seemed the deck itself would be submerged, and then with a shudder halted its downward swoop and picked itself up to roll the other way while we wrapped our arms around the rail for support.

  The trip to Bombay took about four weeks, with the Circassia chugging along at an unhurried fourteen knots around Spain, through the Straits of Gibraltar, across the Mediterranean, along the Suez Canal, down the Red Sea to Aden – our only stop apart from the canal – and then across the Indian Ocean to Bombay. I did four trips to or from Bombay between the ages of three and six: ‘home’ to England for the first time in 1946, out in 1947, back in 1949 and out in 1950 to change boats for the onward journey to Basra on the Persian Gulf. In my mind the journeys have merged into one happy odyssey. I was fascinated then by sea travel, as I have been ever since.

  *The story goes that when Stanley Baldwin plucked Douglas Hogg from obscurity and made him a cabinet member Lord Salisbury is reputed to have written to a fellow Tory grandee, ‘No idea where he found the fellow but Baldwin has discovered this frightfully clever lawyer called Pigg and put him in the Cabinet.’

  4

  Dakota to Tehran

  In 1950 Ma and I set off for Persia.

  Michael, by now aged eight, had been left behind in England to start his career at Stubbington, the ferociously tough naval prep school near Lee-on-Solent to which my father had been sent from India some thirty years earlier. We had gone down in an unprecedented family outing – Ma, I, the Gran (now Mrs Nigel Deare) and Nigel himself – with Michael to begin his years at boarding school.

  There is a photograph of the five of us standing outside the Stubbington pub where Michael was to eat his last lunch before being handed over to Mr Foster, the headmaster. Ma has a brave, fixed smile on her face; this was no day for tears. Nigel, sleekly draped in the pinstriped double-breasted suit that he might well have been born in, stands slightly apart with a roguish grin on his face. The Gran, hair coiffed in a tight helmet, three strands of pearls, a floaty couture dress, long cigarette nonchalantly in hand, stands with an expression of total distaste for everything that is going on. She has a slight list to starboard and is leaning against Nigel as if needing support for the proceedings. Michael stands in front wearing grey shorts, sandals and a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves. His body is limp; his arms hang lifeless by his sides, and his face is devoid of expression. Only one person looks happy. I stand half-hidden behind Michael, one hand in my pocket, fighting unsuccessfully to control a smirk of pure joy on my face.

  Shortly after Michael had been left at Stubbington, Ma and I travelled out to Bombay, there to connect with a boat to take us to the Persian Gulf, where JRC was to meet us. JRC was already in Tehran, having been sent by J & P Coats to penetrate the Persian market with stout British thread.

  The ship we boarded in Bombay for the last leg of our trip was the African Lightning, a rust-streaked cargo vessel with room for a handful of passengers. Why the African Lightning was making its living so far from Africa I did not know. By 1950 it tramped doggedly backwards and forwards between Bombay and Basra, calling at anywhere along the way where there were goods to offload or a cargo to be taken on.

  It had not been our intention to visit Basra, the main port of Iraq; the plan had been for JRC to meet us in Khorramshahr, the last stop before Basra, and take us on to Tehran. We arrived in Khorramshahr ready to disembark, but found no one-legged Scotsman on the quay to welcome us. Our luggage was put back in the hold and we re-embarked for Basra. I did not mind. JRC, my stepfather now, was to me a friendly uncle figure, but he had not become like a father. It did strike me as odd that Ma and I had just travelled six weeks and 6,000 miles to join JRC in a new and alien country and he was nowhere to be seen. If she was worried she gave no indication of it. I do not remember ever seeing Ma look worried.

  The African Lightning spent a few days in Basra unloading and taking on fresh cargo. In the absence of JRC we were allowed to live on board while this took place. I had a wonderful time. I sat on top of a pyramid of crates on the foredeck watching the coming and going of the vessels that populated the docks: hundreds of lateen-rigged dhows, each one packed to the gunwales with passengers standing shoulder to shoulder, some dragging goats on strings behind them or holding chickens; rowing boats like water beetles; rafts of palm trees bound together with little huts on them; tugs pulling strings of barges loaded with coal, timber, oil drums and unidentifiable lumber; coastal tramp steamers streaked with oil and rust, many with precarious lists to port or starboard; and big ocean-going cargo ships bound for Bombay, Aden or Mombasa, with their decks dominated by huge derricks for swinging cargoes into the hold.

  The big cargo boats were the ones I liked most because rising high at each stern was a four- or five-storey castle, which contained the crew’s quarters, and then, on top of that, was the bridge, on to whose open wings officers dressed in smart white or blue uniforms would from time to time emerge and stroll around in a lordly manner, before leaning over and shouting commands to the Lascars on the deck below. I longed to live in one of those crew castles, to walk on the wings of the bridge in a white uniform shouting orders at Lascars, and to travel the world on a cargo boat. As it was I sat on the foredeck with my box of coloured crayons and filled my exercise book with drawings of these ocean travellers.

  Ma was happy to leave me so well occupied. Every day she would go to the radio room, where the second officer sat dot-dot-dashing on something that looked like a stapler, to see if a telegram had been received. But none ever was. Eventually the time came for the African Lightning to return to Bombay so we gathered up our luggage and said goodbye to the boat and its officers. Then we were down the gangway and into the pull and push of the Basra crowd. Our trunks followed us on porters’ heads and into the customs hall, where we had to stand at a desk and bicker with a sweating customs man whose stomach was so large it strained against his uniform as if trying to find a way out of it. What he wanted to know was where the white woman’s husband was and what she thought she was going to do in Basra. Ma’s answers did not satisfy him. Occasionally he would point at me as if I were something Ma had brought along as a decoy and shake his head wearily.

  Finally, the purser was called from the African Lightning.

  ‘Oh ’ello, Susan. Spot o’ trouble with the customs wallah, eh? Don’t worry, let me have a word with the chappie. We’ve known each other for a long time, haven’t we, Ibrahim old sport?’

  The purser gave Ibrahim a playful poke in the folds of his enormous stomach. The two of them then went into the customs office and closed the door behind them. I could not hear what they were saying, but Ma and I could see everything that was going on since the office was half glazed to allow the customs men to sip tea and inspect the crowd without getting out of their chairs. Ibrahim was shouting at the purser. From my short experience I had noted that Arabs shouted the whole time; I was later to learn that, unlike the softly spoken Persians, this was their normal way of communica
ting and nothing to be alarmed about. While shouting, Ibrahim shook both hands rhythmically up and down in front of him as if he were trying to shake some small rodent to death. This culminated in a violent gesture in the direction of Ma and me as if he were trying to fling the now dead animal at us.

  The purser put a restraining hand on one of Ibrahim’s windmilling forearms and beckoned him with his index finger to come closer. Ibrahim leaned towards the purser, who whispered something in his ear. The purser then jerked his head towards us, acting as if we were unable to see the two of them. Ibrahim backed away, mouth open and eyebrows raised in a gesture of mock surprise, before breaking into laughter so powerful that he had to support himself on a desk. He paused for a moment and looked up at the purser with an air of ‘Tell me it’s not true,’ while the purser nodded his head vigorously as if to say, ‘Yes, really,’ at which Ibrahim slapped the purser on the back and bowed him out of the room.

  ‘Don’t worry, Susan old girl. Don’t think you and young Miles here will have any more problems. Small misunderstanding. I’ve cleared it up. It’s going to cost you five dinars for a temporary visa, and Bob’s your uncle.’

  ‘What on earth were you boys getting up to in there?’ asked Ma. ‘What were you telling that chap?’

  ‘Don’t you worry, Sooze. I know these chappies. Sometimes you have to tell ’em a bit of a story to help ’em understand. It’s all tickety-boo now. You want to give me those five dinars? I’ll take care of it for you. Don’t suppose you’ve got any dinars. Five quid will do just as well, even better.’