by Voyage East- A stirring tale of the last great days of the Merchant Navy (retail) (epub)
We taxi-danced at the Straits Cabaret and Toby’s Paradise Bar, sailors’ haunts off Anson Road and within staggering distance of the dock gate. Mike’s mood was brittle, a feigned exuberance overlying the ambiguous emotions left by Mrs Saddler who had disembarked that afternoon. There was too, the matter of that letter.
‘He’s no innocent,’ said Mike, watching Sparks dance with a Chinese girl.
‘I told you, he’s got a steady girl at home. I think they’re engaged.’
‘Why the hell did he come to sea, then?’
‘Romance…’
‘Bullshit. You should know better than that.’
‘Don’t be so cynical. We all have to unlearn the lessons of our education.’
‘Disillusion instead of a degree, eh?’
‘Something like that. More beer?’
‘Why not…’
We ended the night at Bugis Street, an area of open-air eating places. It was long past midnight and the clientele were almost all drunk. A few sober people had emerged from the popular midnight movies, but most were seamen from the merchant ships, matelots from the naval base at Sembawang, airmen from RAF Changi or squaddies from the garrison who still maintained a supporting role for the government of Lee Kwan Yu in his Confrontation with General Soekarno. Blue Funnel officers patronised the tables run by a short sighted, thickly bespectacled Chinese known to us (without malice) as ‘Four-Eyes’. We made quite a party; next to us were two old shipmates of mine from Cyclops and one of Mike’s then on the Ascanius. They had a drunken Norwegian in tow.
‘You from Blue Funnel ship, Ya?’
‘Yes…’
‘My name Per, I come from Trondheim. I too work on ship with blue and black funnel. We say “Black and blue, nothing to eat and plenty to do”, hey? Ha, ha!’
‘What ship?’
‘Talisman.’
‘Ah Willie Wilhelmsen, eh?’
‘Ya, Bastard Wilhelmsen, no focking good. British ship good, eh?’
‘No ship good, Per,’ said Mike. ‘All ship’s focking bad, okay?’
‘Okay, Skol…’
‘Skol…’
This conversation was shouted above the general din as we fought off a succession of ploys to separate us from our money. Toy-sellers, taxi-touts, shoe-shine boys and watch-vendors (from whom a superb looking ‘Swiss’ watch could be obtained for 12/6, 62½p) pleaded their respective causes. Flower sellers and Indian palmists importuned us and we were plagued by small Chinese boys who, for loose change, would thrash us at noughts and crosses.
We ate… God knew what we ate, but we told Sparks it was steak and we were past caring. So was he, for he could hardly take his eyes off the silk-clad visions who wandered among the tables soliciting outrageously. Their faces were painted, their breasts jutted provocatively and their long legs flashed through the slits in their cheongsams. I knew Sparks was drunk enough to succumb.
‘D’you fancy them?’ Mike asked, halting one of them beside our table. ‘Hi, honey. D’you fancy a cherry boy?’ Mike indicated Sparks, who in the glare of the electric lights was flushing violently. The whore rubbed her hip against his bare arm.
‘Hey, cherry-boy? Really? You real cherry-boy?’
Her voice was husky, but the face, though heavily made up, had an odd, youthful innocence, the dark almond eyes and a wide, well-formed mouth smiled intimately. Her pink tongue flickered over the gloss of lipstick.
‘What’s your name, honey?’ Mike asked.
‘Lola, sailor boy… Lola!’ She flourished the last syllable and turned back to Sparks. ‘You want a good time, Cherry-boy? Lola show you the best…’
‘Oh, you’ll get the best, Sparky, the very best number one dose of clap.’
‘No!’ Lola swung round. ‘Lola clean girl…’ She had never ceased to undulate her body sinuously against Sparks, whose senses were reeling irresistibly. Mike’s joke had gone far enough.
‘Okay, Mike, let it go at that.’ I’d expected some sort of argument, but Mike acquiesced with a shrug. ‘Go on Lola, no business tonight… hey, Four-Eyes, tell Lola to go away…’
Four-Eyes rushed up solicitously and shooed Lola away. She protested, screaming imprecations at us. Sparks’s face displayed a chain of conflicting emotions: regret, relief, embarrassment; but no one at the other tables took any notice and Mike had sunk into a sudden introspective mood.
‘You had a lucky escape there,’ I said lighting a cigarette.
‘She was very…’ he searched for a word.
‘Erotic.’
‘Yes, erotic.’
‘You’re right about that, but it would have made you feel a bloody fool if you’d gone off with her.’
‘Why?’
‘She was a “he”, not a “she”; a kitai, a sexual ambivert, a transvestite, a hermaphrodite. At best a woman locked in a man’s body, at worst a raging queer… sorry.’
The colour that had so quickly mounted up to Spark’s face, as swiftly drained away.
‘It’s all right,’ I went on, ‘we all make the same mistake, you’ll find a lot of that sort of thing. Unfortunately they don’t prepare you for it at school.’
‘Jesus Christ, I think I’m going to be sick…’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, no!’ Mike stirred into life. ‘Don’t spew. Come on, let’s go.’
We arrived at the foot of the gangway at the same time as Embleton. The seaman wore working clothes and carried a pot of black paint which he tried to conceal from us, but we were not interested in him, only anxious to get Sparks aboard and into his bunk.
I was on deck again at dawn. Shaking the fumes of debauch from my head I recalled Embleton and his paint-pot. Its purpose slowly dawned on me as I stared ahead at the stern of the American ship. There I saw he had completed the work left unfinished by her own negro seamen. The Isbrantsen freighter now bore the name Flying Arsehole.
‘Oh, shit…’
I took myself aft, as though some guilt attached to my person, leaning on the rail and trying to gather my fuddled wits. From across the narrow waters of the harbour which had been named after Sir Henry Keppel, the naval officer most responsible for clearing these waters of pirates a century earlier, came the scent of vegetation. Oleander? Flame-of-the-forest, hibiscus or frangipani? The green island beyond the narrow strip of water kept its secret, but I was reminded of the note Columbus made when he first smelt the forests of the Indies: ‘Oh, the smell of the mornings.’
The City of Angels
There were other nights ashore, for we remained four days at Singapore. They were mere candle-burning forays into the darker side of life, purchased at the expense of sleep, antidotes to our peculiar existence. Most of us remained faithful to whatever we believed in.
‘Listen,’ I overheard the Purser say to Sparks on the morning after his brush with the kitai, ‘forget it, you’re suffering from alcoholic remorse… look, if you were at University you’d be expected to be shacked up with a sociology student.’ To the sober, self-contained and discursive Purser, sex and students of sociology were one and the same thing. ‘Just forget it.’
But Antigone had not brought us here for such philandering, however amateur. We were here to work, and work we did, from 0700 to 2300 daily, the mates relinquishing the deck at midnight to the Senior Midshipman. The other apprentices assisted with the cargo work, sitting for hours in the ’tween decks, ensuring the cargo was not broached. ‘Cargo-watching’ was the ultimate in boredom, a thankless task in the dreariest of surroundings; this was not what Conrad or Stevenson had promised, sitting glaze-eyed, guarding a stow of pilferable goodies. For us of more senior rank it was an endless patrol of the deck, a climbing down and climbing up of hatch ladders, of wrangles and disputes over damage and dunnage with gang-leaders and foremen, of searches for lost bits and pieces, the location of over-stowed items buried thanks to Liverpool’s slovenliness. All these varied chores made up our work, a sweaty, exhausting contrast to our lordly hours on the bridge. For those four days we to
ok bites out of the ‘general’ with which our ’tween-decks and holds were filled, landing cartons and boxes, cases and crates, drums of cables and drums of chemicals, bags and bales, cars, lorries, personal effects, spirits, beers, foodstuffs and odd pieces of machinery. We loaded little. A small consignment of silvery tin ingots for Kobe, assiduously tallied in and stowed no more than five tiers high lest their weight prove too much for even Antigone’s massive scantlings. There were a few more odds and ends of coasting cargo for Bangkok and Hong Kong.
On the second afternoon of our discharge I was accosted by a short, bristling rooinek in the khaki of the British Army. On his bare, thick-set and tattooed arm he wore the heavy leather wrist-band and Royal arms of a warrant officer. He regarded my stinking, sweat-stained K.D.’s with professional disapproval.
‘Duty officer?’ he asked, his nose wrinkling.
‘Yes. You’ve come for the trucks?’
‘Three-tonners’ he corrected punctiliously. ‘Yes.’
‘They’re in Number Two. This way…’ I led him forward, along the centre-castle.
The Mate, in whites, was already there, leaning on the rail and talking quietly to the senior tally-clerk, an elderly Chinese with a sunken chest beneath his cotton shirt and a distinguished, professorial air. He had a habit of ubiquity, the Mate; one rarely found he was not at the point where, at any given moment, the most exacting critic would have said he should be.
‘Ah, the Army’s here.’ He held out his hand.
We had ‘married’ the wire runners from all four well-guyed derricks at Number Two hatch in a double-union purchase known as ’Frisco-rig. There was much shouting and hand-waving from the foreman. Above us the winch controller jerked his levers and the winch-drums revolved and stopped, revolved again and took up the strain. In the contactor house, against which we leaned and which controlled the circuitry to the derrick winches, the breakers tripped in and out with a furious clicking. The wires drew tight and the derrick heads quivered as the guys took up the load. The first olive-drab monster rose slowly, then up and over the side where a corporal and a pair of squaddies awaited it.
‘There’s still plenty going on, then?’ asked the Mate as the empty slings came back aboard for the second three-ton truck.
‘Oh yes,’ replied the soldier. ‘The Navy have most of the fun, but our boys are at it in Borneo. On the Kalimantan borders there’s plenty going on…’ He deliberately echoed the Mate’s euphemism and fished in a breast pocket that strained above his barrel chest. He drew out a wallet and extracted a black and white photograph. It showed two decapitated heads, their mouths filled with their own genitalia.
‘Jesus Christ!’ The Mate turned away.
‘Don’t you believe it when they say the Dyaks have given up headhunting,’ he said, amused at our lily-livered disgust.
‘See this gentleman gets his trucks,’ said the Mate, turning away.
‘Oh, there’s plenty going on, all right,’ said the rooinek, tucking the picture away as if it showed his family, quite unabashed by the Mate’s contempt. He leaned over the hatch, one glossy boot on the rail. ‘Plenty.’
The Mate returned to his interminable paper-work. Chief Officers of cargo-liners rarely went ashore and, while the junior officers and seamen were on the tiles, while the Old Man played golf and the Chief Engineer went shopping for his apparently rapacious wife, the Mate sat worrying at his desk. Antigone’s Mate was a dedicated man and upon his shoulders fell much of the burden of the ship. For himself it was the heavy price he paid for his impossibly romantic love of the sea-life, the satisfaction of a job well done. But it was a price that might bankrupt the soul.
In the engine-room things were no better than on deck. The Chief had kept his threat: the engineers were ‘doing a unit’. This meant a complete overhaul of one cylinder of our main engine. It was hot and heavy work, carried out under the active direction of Willie Buchan, our Second Engineer. A Glaswegian Scot of apparently flabbily obese proportions, Willie Buchan possessed a strength that reminded one of a Japanese sumo wrestler. Beneath the pale acres of rolling fat lurked a muscular power of awesome proportions that came into its own when such a job was in hand. Sweat poured from Willie and his team as they toiled in ‘the pit’, their own name for the engine-room, and he would brook no interruption to his task once it was under way. Intermittently the Chief would pace the upper gratings and stare down as the chain blocks rattled and the head was lifted from Number 5 piston. Piston rings were replaced and the cylinder liner calibrated for wear, the bottom end of the connecting rod opened up and the shell-bearings checked and renewed if necessary. Given the size of such a ‘unit’, great skill was required and the work was arduous, all the engineers taking part, with the exception of a junior reserved for over-night watch-keeping and responsible for running our auxiliary generators. Whilst engaged upon such a task the engineers ate in a messroom, not the saloon, still in their sweat-soaked boiler suits and ready to turn-to when the indefatigable Willie commanded. After dinner in the evening, however, their day’s labour at an end, their thirsts were prodigious and they resumed next morning with the aching heads of the damned.
It was at this point that the Mate decided to give our hitherto reluctant motor lifeboat a chance to prove itself. He announced his desire to lower it into the water of Keppel harbour at breakfast one morning, sparking off a row that first ignited Willie Buchan, eager and ready for another day’s toil amid his machinery.
‘But we’ve had the thing running in the davits…’ he protested, ‘an I’ve more important work tae do down below.’
‘There’s nothing more important than the boats, Willie,’ said the mate reasonably, his elbow across the back of his chair, his body turned to address his colleague at the next table. The rest of us waited, all conversation suspended in anticipation of collision between deck and engine-room, oil and water. ‘You can only run the thing for a wee minute in the devits…’
‘Aye,’ countered Willie sharply, ‘but it’s the starting that was wrong. It’s okay now…’
‘No, we’ll put the boat down this morning, give it a good run.’
‘But I’ve plenty o’ work for my lads to do…’
‘We only need one of them, Willie, away now…’
‘I’ll see the Chief then…’
At that moment China Dick waddled into the saloon. His Tiger stood by his chair and tucked him in to the table. He cracked open his linen napkin and stared round the saloon, sensing something ominous in the unusual silence and the exaggerated attentiveness of the stewards as they padded round, apparently oblivious to the disagreement between Antigone’s great men, but in fact eager not to disturb the progress of the burgeoning row.
‘Well Mister,’ China Dick said as the Mate turned and bid him good morning, ‘little problem, is it?’
‘No problem, sir,’ said the Mate smoothly, ‘I’ve just asked Willie to lend us an engineer for an hour this morning. Want to lower the motor-boat and give her a good test.’
‘Good idea, Mister,’ approved China Dick, looking up from the papaya the steward set before him. ‘I’m certain the Second’ll have no objection to that, eh, Mr Buchan?’
‘None whatsoever, surr,’ replied Willie venomously as he bent his head over his wheat-cakes. His staff mumbled an unenthusiastic greeting to the Chief Engineer who, too late to rescue his beleaguered department, wanted the Old Man to accompany him on a shopping expedition. Mike volunteered to take the boat away. Again, there seemed in his eagerness that febrile quality that stemmed from his parting from Mrs Saddler.
The muted disagreement at the breakfast-table was a prelude to the main action of the morning. As the motor-boat splashed into the harbour Billy, the Fourth Engineer, bent over the starting handle. The lowering party and others, with nothing better to do, leant over the rail high above. Billy had one hand on the handle, the other on the decompression lever. Suddenly he flicked the handle over. The engine kicked inertly back. Wrapping a rag round the handle, B
illy repeated the procedure; again the engine refused to fire.
Unwisely Mike, sitting aft with his hand expectantly on the tiller, made some comment. Flushed and sweating in the heat Billy turned.
‘It worked all right in the davits,’ we heard him gasp angrily.
‘It’s supposed to work in the water,’ goaded Mike. ‘You’re supposed to have fixed it.’
‘I have fixed it,’ snarled the exasperated Billy, trying again with venomous energy. This no more prompted the engine to oblige than did the stream of advice now descending on his head from the Chief Engineer at the promenade-deck rail. Manfully Billy bent to his task again, fuelled by a sense of injustice and a blinding hangover, working himself into an apoplexy as a huge blister rose on his palm.
‘Oh fuck it!’
He collapsed, staring at the engine; the whole boat’s crew sat as though stupefied. From above, we all stared down too and even the Chief Engineer was reduced to silence. The boat’s skids ground gently at Antigone’s plating; it was a moment of intense anti-climax.
‘You’d better take out the injectors and…’ Mike began.
Billy spun on Mike who still sat coolly on the after gunwhale. ‘What the fucking hell d’you know about bloody diesel engines? Eh?’
‘About as much as you do, by the look of it.’
Billy rose, the starting handle in his fist, his face suffused with anger and exhaustion. He took half a step aft as we all watched, fascinated. With resourceful insolence Mike drew the heavy wooden tiller from the rudder stock, beating it lightly into the palm of his left hand. Billy seemed to hesitate, though afterwards he said he lost his footing on the bottom boards and was going ‘to beat shit’ out of Mike. The hiatus was only momentary, and was ended by a bellow from the boat-deck where, at the forward end, China Dick stared grandly down at the little drama.