by Voyage East- A stirring tale of the last great days of the Merchant Navy (retail) (epub)
It was unfortunate that I was fiddling with my radio in an attempt to pick up one of the pirate radio stations then abounding, at the same time as Mike made his link-call. I could not avoid hearing his side of the transmission. The experience was devastating; whatever the man’s weaknesses I liked him, had lived with him for over four months and knew him well. Notwithstanding the dislike Sparks felt for him, I do not think even he would have wished for what happened.
I cannot reproduce the conversation, even if I wanted to, for it was the demolition of a whole person, a fragmented dissolution in which I heard only Mike’s responses. Into my mind’s eye came the image of his beautiful wife. The nub of the matter was that she did not want him home, that there was someone else and that his approach was a potential embarrassment. I wondered if Sparks, signing off with Portishead at the end of that desperate conversation, was able to resist an exquisite feeling of revenge, for Mike had pleaded with his wife, abased himself in an attempt to persuade her to change her mind. She would not, and I, guilty of eavesdropping, hardly dared to face him over the dinner table.
But betrayed he was a better man than when seeking his own petty revenge in an affair with Mrs Saddler. Pared to the exposed nerve, his self-control was masterful. I knew then that he would not give up the sea. His time for choosing was over; the decision had been made for him.
* * *
All trace of the gale had vanished by the time we were abeam of Ushant. The sea rolled glassily past us, curling only where the hurrying bow slashed through it. Sea and air temperature coincided and thick, nacreous fog-banks enveloped us. It could not have occurred at a less convenient moment in our voyage, for traffic bound from the Mediterranean towards Liverpool, Glasgow, Dublin and Belfast crossed the routes in and out of the Channel, the main artery between London and the great European ports and the United States of America. Added to this stream of ships the milling fishermen only complicated the radar picture presenting itself to the Old Man.
But he would not slow down. He had a cargo to deliver and a tide to catch, and while we doubled our watches and posted our lookouts, while the siren blared mournfully into the dripping atmosphere and we used our ears as much as our eyes, he sat hunched over the radar screen, sipping endless cups of hot, sweet tea. Occasionally he would emerge and order an alteration of course. Antigone would list to the application of her helm, steady for perhaps ten or twenty minutes, then swing back onto her proper heading. We neither saw nor heard anything, for he confided little, aware that he bore sole responsibility for his flagrant flouting of the International Regulations. Yet no-one wanted to delay our passage, so our faith in him was absolute. He came out on the bridge-wing once during my watch, in the mood for a moment’s respite. I think he had been huddled over the radar then for about thirty hours. A mug of tea steamed in his hand and he stretched like an animal.
‘Still thick as a bag, sir,’ I said conversationally.
‘Aye.’ He paused and fixed me with a speculative eye. ‘D’you remember those Korean fishermen?’ he asked.
I recalled the tough men in the rocking boats that we had passed on our way to Hsinkiang. ‘Those bastards deserve every penny they get,’ the Mate had said then, and I knew now that he felt he had earned his own place in the long tradition, and had proved he possessed the toughness he had admired in them.
By noon we were west of the Scillies and the breeze came out of the north-west to disperse the fog in half an hour. Gannets skimmed low over the rising sea, and fulmars quartered it on their motionless wings. Herring gulls swooped in to sit attendant upon the flat mushroom-vents that topped our sampson posts, ruffling their feathers and letting forth the shrill wah-wah cry of their species.
‘Sound like bloody naval officers at the bar,’ quipped Bob, relieving me.
We picked up the Smalls lighthouse in the sunshine of a late April afternoon. Its red and white tower and the pale blue hills of the PreseliMountains beyond were the first sight of home, just as they had been the last. By the time I went on the bridge for the evening eight-to-twelve watch we had just rounded the Skerries, carrying the flood tide into Liverpool Bay. The Old Man, refreshed after a sleep and a shower, was already there and we leaned on the bridge rail in our old intimacy, though I was sensitive enough to the greater gulf that now existed between us.
‘Enjoyed being Third Mate?’ he asked me.
‘Yes. I think so. And you?’
‘Being Master?’
‘Yes.’
He sighed, took his pipe from his pocket and tamped it down. With deliberate slowness he lit it.
‘Difficult to say,’ he said. ‘Difficult doing nothing…’ He paused, and I sensed a climax to our intimacy, a reflection on the friendship we had formed. The burden of responsibility he bore sat well upon his shoulders; he had come through his first trial successfully, and yet he could talk of being idle. I caught a gleam in his eye. ‘Look,’ he said, staring to port, and I became aware of a strange luminescence in the sky to the northward. Ahead, just over the horizon, the sodium-glow of Liverpool lit the clouds, but this was something different, something different even from the last glow of daylight fast fading astern, a deep crimson infusion radiating upwards from the northern horizon.
‘Well, I’m damned,’ he said beside me. ‘It’s an auroral glow… never seen one so far south before. You wouldn’t see that if you were ashore.’
Between his two remarks lay the paradox of our existence.
* * *
We berthed at Gladstone Dock, embraced by the locks and then by Liverpool’s grey and uninspiring dockland. The squalor of our surroundings mocked the pride of our arrival. Why had we painted and prepared our ship for this indifferent landscape? What was this place called home? Where was the welcome, the fatted calf and red carpet? What were these intrusive blue-uniformed rummagers that rifled our cabins in the name of Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise? Even the suspicious Chinese did not subject us to these humiliations.
‘Bloody class warfare,’ raged the Purser.
‘This is where I came in,’ said Bob, handing me a last and excess can of beer.
‘How’s Mike?’ I asked.
‘All right. Why?’ I explained, glad to confess the crime of spying.
‘Jeeesus. Poor bastard.’ Bob frowned. ‘That’s why he was muttering about volunteering to do the coasting.’
‘Yes, I expect so…’
Whatever happened to us, the life of the ship went relentlessly on.
‘Hey, Dick, I want you to meet Julie.’ Sparks invaded my cabin, a pert and pretty blonde in tow. He was smiling happily and holding her hand.
‘Hullo, Julie.’
‘Hullo.’ We shook hands and I looked at Sparks. Our eyes met and it was clear his nightmare had passed. She was already telling him of a ‘Fab movie at the Empire,’ and I felt him sucked ashore and whirled into the life of Liverpool that had been spinning its merry-go-round way in our absence.
‘Perhaps she’ll let on who she’s been seeing while he’s been away,’ said Bob as they left us. ‘Do him good.’
‘Well youse fellows, Wullie’s fur Glasgie toon…’ The Second Engineer came in holding out a pudgy paw. ‘Ah’m off fur true love…’ He winked at me and I recalled his farewell from Akiko.
‘Some buggers have all the luck.’
‘If it can happen to a fat slob like me it can happen to youse fellas. Sayonara.’
‘Cheerio.’
‘Och, where’s the skipper? Is he away hame tonight?’
‘Haven’t you heard?’ Bob said. ‘They’ve confirmed his promotion – for the coasting voyage anyway. He’s closeted with the Shipping Master and the Commissars. They’re trying to get Embleton off the hook.’
‘Bugger Embleton.’ Willie Buchan looked askance at a blue boiler-suited rummager who peered suspiciously into the cabin as we tossed the last beer can into Bob’s rosy with a defiant clatter. ‘Right, then.’ He moved his bulk into sudden activity. ‘Ah’m bound fur Bearsden.’ And elb
owing the inquisitive rummager aside, he puffed away.
We paid off on board, in the saloon. The ship had passed to the care of the Company’s shore-staff. One by one we began to drift ashore. The Bosun was anxious to get the first train to Holyhead and Chippie to be the first into the nearest pub on the Dock Road. The seamen, strange in their shore-going clothes, picked up their discharge-books stamped with the normal ‘V.G.’ and left in groups. Some had their homes, with waiting wives and families, the younger their mothers. One or two would make their way to the Sailors’ Home, a fortress in Canning Place with the interior design of a prison. Here in a lonely room they would board until their money was spent, and then ship out again, living lives of singular barren pointlessness, sufficient unto themselves alone. The Chinese ignored this exodus of their European shipmates; for them the round of coming and going went on. It was the end of our Board of Trade acquaintanceship. A similar indifference existed on deck, where the Liverpool dockers peeled back the tarpaulins and opened the hatches to begin their systematic ravaging of our careful stows. To them, Antigone was just another China Boat and we were mere birds-of-passage, drifting our way home to be met by our friends: ‘Hullo, how are you? When are you going back?’
We left Mike on deck, his lonely isolation complete. He raised his hand in farewell, his face blankly unhappy.
‘Poor bastard,’ commiserated Bob.
‘Poor Mike…’
On the quay the four Midshipmen were piling into their taxis. Only the first-tripper looked back. His face was leaner than when we had crouched over the bucket of filthy dock water and watched the silver hydrometer spin and bob.
We met the Purser, a bundle of documents under his arm.
‘What happened about Embleton?’ we asked as we dragged our gear along the deck.
‘Bloody class warfare,’ he called back, and hurried off.
Bob looked at me and shrugged. ‘Come on.’ We struggled down the gangway to the waiting cab. Getting in I chanced to look up. Behind us came the shipping Master and the Marine Superintendent together with a representative from the Seamens’ Union. Clearly Embleton’s fate had been decided one way or another. The Old Man was seeing them off, wearing his usual preoccupied expression. He caught my eye and nodded a farewell, one of those men who, as Conrad put it, ‘live on illusions which somehow or other help them to get a firm hold of the substance.’
But was that substance really tangible? Had not Conrad with his gloomy foresight already sensed the core of disillusion: ‘the seaman of the future shall be not our descendant, but only our successor… History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced.’ The Old Man’s private tragedy was that he was ideal for a calling that was already passing into history. He could exist only as long as Antigone existed; as long as Britain could afford the profligate waste that attended the carriage of general cargo in open stows.
I waved farewell and climbed into our taxi.
‘Lime Street Station,’ we commanded the taxi-driver, and fell back into our seats as he let the clutch in. A fine rain began to fall as we turned the corner of the shed and lost sight of the Antigone.
Eager now to be off, we bent to the prevailing breeze of corruption; two ten-shilling notes slipped beneath our baggage passes and Customs clearances were expertly palmed by the policeman on the dock-gate. Refusal to comply with this ‘perk’ meant one’s personal effects were spilled out and rummaged in the rain.
‘I don’t know what the hell they think we’re going to smuggle in,’ remarked Bob as the cab jerked forward, avoided a lorry and accelerated down the Dock Road. ‘Got to keep us in our place, I suppose…’
‘Class warfare,’ I said, thinking of the Purser.
‘Fancy a last drink at the station?’
‘Why not?’
The end was anti-climax. We slipped home unnoticed. Britain turned no hair at our arrival, just as she has turned no hair at our extinction.
First published in the United Kingdom in 1988 by John Murray Publishers Ltd
This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by
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Copyright © Richard Woodman, 1988
The moral right of Richard Woodman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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ISBN 9781788636216
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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