by Voyage East- A stirring tale of the last great days of the Merchant Navy (retail) (epub)
‘Hook that boat on, Mister, and hoist it up at once!’
The boat was returned to its chocks and the Chief himself joined Billy for an hour. During the afternoon it was lowered again and started first time. Mike adopted an air of triumph when it was learned that a change of injectors had cured the problem.
Later I bore the brunt of Billy’s hatred for the deck department. He was understandably upset, almost weeping with rage in the intensity of his emotion. ‘Look,’ he said, with a pleading desperation, ‘I told the Chief the boat needed new injectors the last time it played us up.’
‘Don’t worry about it Billy,’ I consoled; it was not my problem and I could be detached.
‘You don’t believe me, do you? You bastards are all the same.’ By which I knew he referred to deck officers.
‘Yes, of course I believe you. Why shouldn’t I?’
‘No you fucking don’t…’
And we left it there, for there was no point in pursuing it. We had split into the ancient, antipathetic factions of oil and water which, as every seaman knew, never mixed. The thing would fade away in time, meanwhile it rumbled on over cans of beer drunk in our separate ghettos.
As the period of our stay at Singapore drew to its end the Mate’s anxiety began to get through to us, for it was essential that we did not over-carry cargo, that every item consigned for Singapore was discharged there. Each compartment, from strongroom to holds the size of a parish church, had to be thoroughly searched before departure; neglect might lose us customers and bring the opprobrium of Head-Office upon our heads. The indifferent quality of the Liverpool stow made thoroughness very difficult, though Bob and I, in the company of the Midshipmen, clambered about the nooks and crannies of holds and ’tween-decks, our torches focusing on the marks of discharge and, where these could not be seen, turning over heavy boxes, or dragging cases aside to check. We discovered the hidey-holes of British dockers, little gambling and drinking dens set up behind false stows of cartons where broached whisky from ‘accidentally’ dropped cases ended up. Usually such jerry-built dens collapsed soon after our departure from the Mersey. As we left each successive discharging port the mass of debris, of broken cases and shredded cartons, of spillages from torn sacks, of broken dunnage, cargo mats, shattered lavatory pans or broken bottles increased, a scene of wasteful chaos that was given the occasional delightful spicing of a turd, or the dark dried stain of urine.
Rain deluged our departure. Banks of cloud rolled across the Singapore Strait from the Rhio Archipelago on the far side. As the clouds covered the sky the world darkened. The high, equatorial sun was eclipsed and water fell in large drops, not the sleeting, wind-driven, stinging rain of temperate latitudes, but the overwhelming, vertically-falling downpour of the tropics. The boat-deck awnings sagged under it, the water-ways ran like streams and the gurgling scuppers could not carry it over the side fast enough, so that shallow ponds rushed across the deck as we began an easy roll. Lightning flashed and rumbles of thunder came from high above. Occasionally there was a sizzling crack and the retina received a fleeting impression of jagged brilliance arcing from sky to sea.
On the bridge we peered into the deluge, looking vainly for the stream of ships dotting the radar screen. Out of the sodden air a large fruit bat flapped across our bow, nearly a yard from wing-tip to wing-tip. And then we ran out from under the cloud and the ship was suddenly steaming in the heat as the sun blazed down upon us again. A dark pall rose astern, a great cumulo-nimbus boiling upwards into an anvil-head high above. Abruptly the heavy traffic of the Strait revealed itself and China Dick handed the ship over to the Second Mate. I lingered to watch another elderly Battle-class destroyer cut suavely across our bow, HMS Barrosa heading for the Johore Strait and the Royal Navy’s base at Sembawang.
We swung north from the lonely rock lighthouse on the Horsburgh Reef, turning up the Malay coast and into the South China Sea, passing over the wrecks of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse. The rain clouds remained over Malaya and we ran into a north-easterly gale which brought with it misty conditions and a sudden chill. For two hours one morning I watched a beautiful falcon, blown offshore and confused, flailing about the ship. The gale affected us too, for we missed the tide over the Bangkok bar and after a passage of three days anchored at Ko Sichang.
The following morning we embarked the pilot, weighed and passed the bar, entering the Maenam Chao Phraya and threading our way between dense mangrove trees and lush and variegated jungle. Creeks winding into the interior lined with atap huts roofed with the nipah palm leaf, left fleeting impressions of the amphibious people who fish and trade on the Maenam. For them the river was highway and food-source. Curious narrow launches, propelled by outboard motors consisting of long impellor shafts, zipped beneath the overhanging fronds of the trees along the margins of the river. Passengers sat in sedate tandem, so narrow were these craft, beautiful young women in sarongs and blouses on their way to the markets and shops of Bangkok. Heavier lighters churning the muddy water astern of chugging tugs brought teak and minerals to the deep-water merchantmen loading further upriver, and fishing sampans bobbed indifferently as our wake tossed them, their occupants busy with the ceaseless business of the hunt, casting their nets for the ugly inhabitants of this thick, eutrophic stream.
At Samut Prakan we passed the Thai Navy at its moorings, diminutive antique-looking warships shaped for river and coastal work with the appearance of shrunken iron-clads of a pre-Dreadnought era. Four hours after passing the bar we dropped anchor and swung alongside, veering our cable to check our otherwise headlong progress against the wharf at Klongtoi, a few miles below the city-centre. Within minutes we were swarming with Thai coolies, small, handsome men whose muscular backs bore the intricate blue tattoos of Bhuddist prayers. Barges and junks crowded alongside us and our derricks were winged out, butterfly-fashion, to discharge overside onto quay or lighter. Klongtoi was a small wharf, compared to the long frontage of Singapore; village life went on around us and just beyond the godowns of the wharf the omnipresent jungle crowded in on us as it did beyond the anchorage in the river. We shared the place with two of A. P. Moller’s blue-hulled Maersk ships and a Norwegian of the Hoegh Line.
‘Don’t go near the Mosquito Bar,’ I heard the Mate order one of the Midshipmen, ‘not with those bloody Scandahooligans in port.’
‘No sir,’ I heard the Midshipman reply with patent insincerity.
‘Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you…’ I heard the Mate sigh despairingly, the moral welfare of his charges beyond his control.
We discharged throughout the night. Hot, windless and oppressive, one felt the teeming jungle was almost palpable in its influence, stirring the darker passions of men. Sleep was in vain, for the night was alive, not merely with the clicking and clatter of winches and the blue fires sparking in the contactor houses, the shadowed slings of cargo jerking over the side to the accompaniment of shouts and commands, the electric glare of the lights and the violent shadows they threw, nor the stinging bites of mosquitoes; all these would have been bad enough without the fact that at Klongoi there was another distraction.
Swarming up mooring ropes hung over the quarters, nimble as monkeys they rose out of their boats to gather on the poop, incongruously dressed in party frocks or sarongs, their high-heeled shoes between their teeth, in a parody of piracy. They were young, pretty and compliant, and they vanished into the Chinese quarters amid excited chatter as the grinning greasers and firemen bore them off after a brief haggling.
‘Jesus Christ!’
The Junior Midshipman stood open-mouthed at the sight.
‘Get yourself down Number Two hatch, son, if you don’t want a dose to take home to your mother.’
The Mate prowled, chivvying the Third Mate and his watch, shaking his head at the irresponsible folly of mankind while screeches and giggles came out of the seamen’s accommodation as the tide of harlotry rolled forward. I met him coming up the ladder from the centre-castle.
‘No sir, I can’t sleep. Besides, there’s not much point.’ I looked at my watch. ‘I’m on deck at midnight.’
He grunted. ‘We should start loading during the night…’
We discussed the cargo already alongside, an excuse for lingering with prurient curiosity, looking aft from the shadows of the boat-deck and affecting to ignore the calls from the boats that were still approaching the ship from the darkness of the river.
‘How the hell do they do it?’ He stared at a boat load of women who made suggestive gestures, rubbing their breasts and jerking their fingers in explicit motions. ‘Needs must when the devil drives,’ he answered his own question. ‘You know, I recall hearing of a ship where the Old Man refused to let ’em aboard. The coolies walked off and wouldna work the cargo… some sort of a Mafia I suppose.’
‘Life’s pretty cheap…’
‘Aye, but what about them.’ He nodded indignantly at the seamen’s house below us, immediately abaft Number Four hatch. ‘Half of them are married.’
‘They’ll take the usual precautions.’
The Mate snorted. ‘A condom and the application of an anti-V.D. kit? Don’t be bloody daft, Laddie. Most of them won’t know which way is up in a couple of hours.’
We were riveted in fascinated disgust. Both of us stood looking down on the ship, stirred by similar compulsions to our shipmates’, restrained by fear and our sobriety. Our self-righteousness brought little comfort. Indeed, I felt the Mate to be disturbed with real pain.
‘Don’t forget you’ve a girl…’ he left the sentence unfinished.
It was a long night. The heat, my own desire and tiredness combined to produce a savage mood.
‘What’s the Mosquito Bar, sir?’ asked the young Midshipman as I inspected the floor of dunnage being prepared in Number Two ’tween-deck for the reception of our first parcel of homeward cargo.
‘You’ll find out,’ I snapped unkindly.
I caught Mike creeping along the boat-deck, his fist holding the brown arm of a girl with almond eyes which seemed to my fevered brain to glow in the night.
‘Oh, for God’s sake Mike, you’re a glutton for punishment aren’t you?’
He winked mischievously and jerked his head for me to follow. Inside the alleyway he lifted the latch on Sparks’s cabin and gently pushed the girl inside, closing the door behind her.
‘Sailor’s dream,’ he whispered.
‘That’s a bloody awful thing to do.’
‘You are a fucking prude. Have a beer.’ He put an iced can of lager in my hand and I sucked gratefully at the thing. I lit a cigarette and Mike consulted his watch. ‘Five minutes and he hasn’t chucked her out.’
‘Perhaps he’s still asleep.’
‘That wee lassie would wake a corpse.’
‘How old was she?’
‘About sixteen.’
‘Good God!’
‘Terrible isn’t it?’ But it was only amusement that danced in Mike’s eyes.
Towards dawn the ship slept, satiated; except, that is, for the watch and the working of cargo. We began to load; heavy billets of teak into Number Two, bound for London and Rotterdam. The scent of the wood’s oil permeated the ’tween-deck, slowly overcoming the less savoury smells accumulated there. Dawn found us hot-eyed, stinking of sweat, watching the blowzy exodus from the accommodation that revealed the extent of the night’s dissipation. The exhausted Midshipman stared again, his tired eyes forced open by the spectacle.
‘Post coitus omnes triste est.’
He stared at me stupidly. ‘What?’
‘What sir,’ I said. ‘My Latin may be poor, but that’s no excuse to forget these formalities. Would you like to turf all those ladies out of the sailors’ cabins?’
He stared again, uncertain whether I was joking. The Bosun saved him the trouble. We could hear his voice haranging the crowd.
‘Come on you buggers, turn-to, now… Roberts you dirty bastard, what would your missus say if she could see you doing that? Get out!’ He shoo-ed the last of the girls onto the deck where they stood scratching in the dawn.
‘Come on,’ I said to the Midshipman, ‘let’s find our reliefs.’
I was in the bathroom naked before I realised the occupant of the other shower was female. We blinked at each other. She was covered in soap, white whorls rubbed around her lithe golden body and under her arm-pits and breasts in a primitive and erotic decoration. Black hair was coiled above her head and she was luxuriating under the cascade of water. I recognised her as the girl foisted upon Sparks. I stepped into the adjacent shower and ignored Sparks’s indignation when he came to see if his bedfellow was all right. It occurred to me, as I lay on my bunk, that I might visit the Mosquito Bar when night fell again.
* * *
Less than a hundred yards from the Klongtoi wharf, the Mosquito Bar was set above a row of shops, reached by a low verandah from the dusty street, a long hall of a place, dimly lit and raucous with the pop music that united a generation across most of the world. In and out of the pools of light flitted the slinky forms of the whores, slender figures with extravagant breasts sheathed in the shimmering cheap imitation silk of cheongsams, drenched in perfume, erotic, pervasive and shamelessly salacious. They minced on preposterously high heels which lecherously distorted their legs, setting their hips wiggling lasciviously as they moved to and fro in an irregular arousing promenade.
We sat at tables, laagered for defence, ship by ship, abandoning our restraint as the rounds of iced beer slithered down our eager throats. Sparks had come with us and was very quiet. No one mentioned the events of the previous night; even Mike held his peace. The brave among us danced, the watchers taking bets as to the true sex of our partners, for here too the sexual ambiverts gathered to prey upon the frustrated, and we fought off the combined assault of two ‘girls’ who showed an interest in the Junior Midshipman. The continuous accosting, the shameless eroticism, the repetitious spectacle of sinuous and writhing bodies eventually dulled the nerve-ends with its fatuity. A rising tide of noise and aggravation further down the hall signalled trouble and Mike ordered our departure. We stumbled out into the cool of the night.
‘That,’ I remarked to the Junior Midshipman, ‘was the Mosquito Bar. Not somewhere you would wish to find your sister.’
‘Save yourself for Japan,’ said Mike, negotiating a tamarind tree with some difficulty. From behind us came the sound of breaking glass and a cheer which seemed to slide into a glissando of shouts and screams.
‘What’s that?’ asked the Midshipman.
‘The Vikings,’ said Mike, ‘intent on rape and pillage.’
‘Rape and pox, more likely.’
Both the Midshipman and I were exhausted at dawn, for we had returned to the deck at midnight. It proved an unpleasant watch with trouble among the seamen, Embleton getting roaring drunk and picking a fight with Wakelin which had to be broken up in a storm of abuse before a wide-eyed and half-naked audience of whores. As the sun rose, setting fire to the mangroves across the river, the cicadas started their chirruping, a noise that subsided into the back of consciousness so that in recollection it seemed made by the sunlight itself.
The boy was stupefied with yawning. ‘Go on, buzz off to bed.’ He nodded, yawning still, his mouth in a rictus of exhaustion. ‘By the way, the Purser has organised a trip round the temples this afternoon. You’d better go; you’ll have nothing to tell your parents if you don’t. I doubt you’ll be writing home about the Mossie Bar.’
‘No… yes, I’ll go.’
We went, a party of us in two taxis, awkward as tourists, ashamed of our lack of culture and largely ignorant of Buddhist rites. At Wat Traimit, the temple of the Golden Buddha, we stared in awe at the five and a half tons of solid gold fashioned into the lotus image of the Buddha. Souvenir stalls marred the sanctity of the holy place, though devout Thai monks moved about the impassive face of the benign image among the whorls of joss-smoke that rose lazily
fragrant in the still air. At Wat Pho a massive bronze image reclined, covered in gold-leaf and threatening to burst from the confines of its pavilion, like some Oriental Gulliver. The Buddha was surrounded by other statues and images; one wearing a top-hat was pointed out to us, without provenance, as that of Marco Polo. Coming out of the bloom of the Wat Pho into brilliant sunshine, we passed the tall phallus of a stone lingam.
‘Bloody appropriate,’ muttered the Purser drily.
Most impressive was the shrine of the Emerald Buddha, set within the precincts of the Royal Palace. Under a sky of oppressive cobalt, the air stirred by a slight breeze, we approached the temple to the faint, insistent tinkling of tiny wind bells set beneath the steeply angled green-painted eaves. Red tiled roofs sloped down in the direction of the four winds of heaven from a central spire of white and gold, their peaks terminating in scimitar finials. The gable-ends were studded with coloured glass and mother-of-pearl, aflame in the fierce sunshine. Huge tusked and glaring devils guarded the approach with sabres, their armour and face-masks white and blue and gold.
After this dazzlement the interior was suddenly dark, the air heavy with the scent of joss-smoke. As our eyes adjusted we became aware of the barefoot padding of silent monks in the saffron robes of the novice; devout Thai youths serving a brief monastic apprenticeship with the begging bowl. The thick coils of incense led one’s eyes upwards to the glowing murals depicting scenes from the Buddha’s life until, with the burst of revelation, one saw the Emerald Buddha, a serene jade figure at the summit of a great dais. From this cascaded a torrent of silk upon which lay the golden bowls and flowers and smoking joss sticks of the devout. The Buddha was dressed ritually by King Bhuimpol and sat smiling impassively over our infidel heads.
We returned to the ship through the teeming suburb of Dhonburi, shopping at the stalls that crammed the crowded streets, buying mangoes and a stinking durian which tasted of nectar to slake our thirsts. After the subduing influence of the temples, the strident tumult of the streets was almost welcome.