The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  Returning to Liverpool, he succeeded in securing a berth on the SS Baltrover. ‘I walked on to a ship and the man said “fine”; I didn’t realise he was just the man on the gangway.’ He was readily signed on, somewhat to his surprise, but soon found out why. The ship, a tramp, smallish at 4,900 tons and built in 1913, had been commissioned twice as a merchant cruiser, in 1914 and in 1940. Pre-war she had been sold to the United Baltic Corporation in London for cruises from England to Gdynia and Gdańsk on the Baltic. ‘It had a terrible list and was very very slow; it was chartered by Furness Withy to do the Atlantic runs for which it was entirely unfitted.’ Six years later, in reminiscent mood, talking to a war hero on a yacht in the Aegean, Freud said that when he signed on the ship’s mate told him: “This trip will be the making of you, my lad. You can’t tie a clove hitch yet, but when you get back to England you will be a man.’4

  The ship’s log shows that the voyage began, technically speaking, on 7 January 1941, and that Freud enlisted on 5 March, as an ordinary seaman.5 He was the youngest member of the crew of about sixty men. ‘The Baltrover, I discovered, didn’t carry deck boys and had a terrific job getting crew. It took passengers and was slightly more comfortable than most, so it was the commodore ship when we went out. The ship was manned for the Baltic run, when the war broke out: half British and half Balts – all the fire people in the engine room were Balts – and when the ship was in British waters they were given the alternative of being interned or working at full pay as prisoners on the ship. Going out with all those Estonians in the engine room: imagine the atmosphere when we were being bombed.’

  The rest of the crew were housed in the fo’c’sle, where Christie the bo’sun dared not enter. ‘It was pretty anarchic there. Christie, a last-minute replacement, had a wooden leg with a doorstopper on the foot. He used drawing pins to keep his sock up.

  ‘I thought I’d been brilliantly clever to get on to this ship and, until I started working, they thought they’d been quite clever to get me.

  ‘I worked on the ship when it was in port for two or three weeks; I was set to watch the cargo being loaded as they thought I was the most honest person. One of the sailors said, “Look, I’ll give you a tip. There’s a lot of drink in this cargo and they all have these knives. Unless you split one of these cases open and share it among the dockers who are loading they will DO you with one of these. That’s why there are so many people with missing arms and legs around.” There certainly were, so I said thanks, opened a case, gave them one each and thought I don’t see why they should have them all. So I put six bottles of Drambuie into my sack, which I thought would be nice for a rainy day.’

  He didn’t have to stay on the ship when ‘working by’ and, as it happened, social life came his way. The show Sweet and Low, with Hermione Baddeley, was in Liverpool and a member of the cast, Joy Penrose, sent a telegram to the Baltrover saying, ‘Hope you can meet at 8 at the Adelphi.’ News of this assignation at Liverpool’s poshest hotel spread and Freud was stuck with a lah-di-dah reputation. ‘Such a thing had never happened,’ he said. ‘“Fucking drink in the Adelphi?” they jeered. “Oh yes, you’ll be late at the Adelphi.”’ Off he went, determined to impress the touring company. Up Lime Street he strode in his seaboots, the Liverpudlian song ‘Maggie May’ running through his head:

  She pox’d up all the sailors

  From the skippers to the whalers …

  She’ll never walk down Lime Street any more …

  ‘In my seaboots I came into the Adelphi and into the bar where only men were allowed (apart from Hermione Baddeley and Joy Penrose) and got almost as much attention as I wanted. I thought I was living it up and they thought they were seeing life.’

  On the night of 12–13 March the Luftwaffe attacked Liverpool. ‘It was very exciting. Planes came and sprayed the docks with firebombs and in my special boots I had to kick them off the deck. Absolutely marvellous I thought this. So exciting.’

  Two days later, with a cargo of Drambuie and shoes (‘booze and shoes: to stop thefts they sent left feet only and the next trip sent right feet’), the Baltrover set out under Captain Wells as commodore ship of Convoy OB.298: thirty merchant ships and eleven naval escorts. Sailing at the speed of the slowest, ‘absolute crocks, less than walking pace’, they took over a fortnight to reach Halifax, Nova Scotia. There they berthed for a week, then went on to St John’s Newfoundland and back to Halifax before returning to Liverpool.

  The crew did not know what to make of Freud. There was his black and white towelling gown. ‘I’ve always liked these gowns: “Sheikh of Araby”, they called me, and “Jack Shitehawk”, as I ate so much (it’s their word for vulture).’ Another name they gave him was Lucie Walters. ‘They were puzzled, but they were all right, they just couldn’t understand what I was doing there. During a storm they’d say, “This isn’t the fucking Adelphi Hotel.”’ He soon had to defend himself from their attentions. They took to waking him up every two hours when he was off-watch. ‘Coming off watch at three in the morning, to sleep in a tin bunk, someone would come in and stick a cigarette on my neck – they had saltpetre cigarettes that would burn even in the wind – and say, “Time you had a pee.”

  ‘Some of the sailors were in the most terrible state. One way of getting money was to get money for gear after you’d been torpedoed: they’d taken the money and not bothered to get the clothes; they thought they were on a winner. In the freezing cold I was the only person who had two jerseys and boots.’ They were curiously competitive. ‘When the men got drunk they started doing very complicated knots: showing off. And everything they despised, which was to do with learning, it suddenly came out.’ They suspected Freud of signing on in order to write a book.

  He had brought paints with him in his sack, imagining he’d have a fair amount of spare time. ‘I hadn’t taken much, but I brought the paints: absolutely mad. I had some very strange assumptions.’ His inks came in handy though. ‘They were useful for tattoos. Several of the crew wanted to be done. We discussed the designs. It depended on them what I did: birds and fish, hearts and arrows. Some had “love” and “hate” on them, and people and fiends. The scab forms and then you rub ink in. Indian ink came out a very deep blue.’ Some he drew. John Boeckl, a pensive twenty-three-year-old Czech seaman from Kobe in Japan, went into the Swift layout pad, and one day, after carrying food for the umpteenth time from galley to fo’c’sle, Freud did the cook from memory, unshaved, cigarette in mouth and cap on head in a collapsed state. A more elaborate drawing of the ship’s gunner in a duffel coat was possible because, being assigned to the ship by the Royal Navy, he had to have his own quarters under the deck hut housing the four-inch gun.

  Naval Gunner, 1941

  Like Maldoror, Freud watched ‘the living waves, dying one upon the other, monotonously’, saw the seas fancifully addressed by Lautréamont (‘Ancient ocean: you resemble somewhat those azure marks to be seen on the bruised backs of cabin boys; you are an enormous bruise upon the earth’s body’) and, like Masefield’s Dauber ‘drawing the leap of water off the side’, he drew the lifting sea, a patch of it, mid-distance. ‘With semi-dolphin. I did report a submarine but it was a whale fin and I got a bollocking.

  ‘One or two of the men had been on the clippers and they’d say, “I’ll show you how to fucking draw,” and they’d do a thing with all the rigging.’

  For a few days it seemed that this convoy experience would be uneventful, at least in newsreel terms. Then, suddenly, on the fourth day out there was violent, close-up action. ‘On the first or second day the German planes saw us and on the third or fourth day there was this raid. When we were attacked we could see the tracer bullets and the plane was so low you could practically see the grins on people’s faces, like in a comic. When at dawn and dusk the German planes circled the convoy, we sent the message “identify yourself”. Instead, they swooped low over the convoy dropping bombs. The ship behind us was hit. It was a tanker.’ Laden with ammunition (not oil) for Singapore th
e Benvorlich was attacked near Bloody Foreland, at the dispersal point where the convoy was to divide: part continuing to Halifax and part to Gibraltar. ‘Two lifeboats got away and then the whole thing went up into the air, the entire ship. Bits of the ship and bits of people rained all over and there was a cloud, like an atomic cloud – in fact years later, when I saw the atomic pictures, they looked very familiar – and then the ship was blazing and exploding as the fire got into the hold. Explosions followed by explosions, getting higher and higher: it must have been ammunition, which you don’t expect in a tanker. Not surprisingly, after that, the morale on our ship was very low.’

  Just about the only shipmate Freud got on with was Boeckl, the Czech who, obliged to do so by Ship’s Rules (‘The one to which communications should be made in the event of the death of the Seaman’), gave his home address as Kobe. ‘He spoke German and knew poetry; he knew Goethe and could talk about it.’ Boeckl was an able seaman and well able to look after himself. ‘He was sitting in the fo’c’sle with stockings for his girlfriend and holding them up and stroking them and no one tried to pick a fight with him. He kept to himself with a grey box which he fiddled with all the time.’ This aroused suspicion, making him and Freud the ship’s two oddities.

  Although the cargo was destined for New York, the Baltrover was too decrepit to pass inspection there so they unloaded in Halifax. For two days before docking Freud had been excused duty. This was recorded in the log – 29 March: ‘Ship’s surgeon says he has tonsillitis and sore throat and is unwell. Temp. 30 3:Ln Freude O.S. Ref LOI8 improving but still off duty.’

  Were he to slip off to New York, now was the opportunity. Getting Boeckl to keep an eye on his things, maybe for good, Freud went ashore, spent a day wandering around in the wet and a night in a freezing YMCA air-raid shelter. This was misery enough to convince him that desertion wasn’t a good idea, so he returned to the Baltrover only to find that he hadn’t been missed. ‘Sailors were often away overnight with their whores.’ His possessions however had already been distributed among the crew and it was two days before he saw the consequence of that. ‘I couldn’t put two and two together. The men, lots of them, couldn’t turn-to, they were feeling so ill. All the bottles of Drambuie had gone and they said the bo’sun, who had already been fined for being drunk and for bringing on board intoxicating liquor, had been sniffing round my sea-bag; so I jumped on the bo’sun, who had this terrifying syphilitic nose, and it was only by pressing his ear against a steam pipe that I managed to get away. He was really horrible. He used to threaten us. He’d say, “I’ll kill you’s all, and if I can’t kill you with my bleedin’ hands, I’ll kill you all with fuckin’ work.”’

  This went down in the ship’s log in summary form. ‘J. Christie was drunk again and creating a disturbance in engineer’s alleyway. Fine ten shillings.’

  ‘The bo’sun was frightened. He was supposed to inspect the fo’c’sle but as he never dared go down there in fact he never saw my sea-bag. Anyway, of course, the men had taken all the Drambuie and drunk it. Afterwards, on the way back, they said, “What’s this stuff, this Drambuie?” I said, “Oh you wouldn’t like it; it’s an acquired taste,” and one of them said, “We fucking acquired it.”’

  Alerted perhaps by the rumpus, Higgins the Second Officer became suspicious of Freud’s papers and reported him to the immigration authorities, who came on board to check. ‘He said I was an odd bird and what was I doing on board ship? He thought I might be some sort of spy because my birthplace was Berlin and my date of naturalisation – 1939 – was highly irregular because no one was naturalised at that time. Higgins had an odd attitude to me. I felt that, much as I liked being misunderstood, he actually couldn’t understand and vaguely looked to catch me out. He did more than his duty; and certainly duty couldn’t explain my presence.’

  As it happened the Canadian authorities were quick to confirm that Freud was a certified British subject, which, if anything, increased his peculiarity in the eyes of the crew. They noticed that unlike most of them he didn’t go off to the brothels where women, tagged ‘White Boots’ and brought in from Montreal, serviced shore parties. ‘No money. I was told once (by the Head of Medieval Antiquities at the British Museum) that Furness Withy arranged that when you had a whore you gave them a chit to get paid by the office. That was in London. One of the sailors was in America, he was having a whore, she was reading a newspaper and she looked up over it, put down her paper and said, “Limey, have you slimed yet?” Well, even he thought that a bit rough.’

  Cold-shouldered by his shipmates, in Halifax he wandered around the streets on his own, bought himself a dark-green corduroy cap with flaps and went to the cinema. They were showing the Preston Sturges comedy The Lady Eve, with Barbara Stanwyck as a cardsharper’s daughter and Henry Fonda as the innocent son of a millionaire. He enjoyed it but when he got back to the ship they asked him what he had been up to and he was caught out. ‘I said, “Oh, I found a marvellous girl: we went to the cinema.” But it turned out that some of them had been in the cinema, sitting behind me, and had noticed that I was on my own.’

  He tried bluff. ‘You just didn’t see her: she was very small.’

  ‘Did you go with her?’ they asked and all he could say was – very Henry Fonda – ‘A gentleman’s lips are sealed on this subject.’

  ‘They took me less seriously after that. I felt badly about it. I thought I’d better give up lying in future.’

  After about a week the Baltrover was directed southwards and around Cape Sable to St John, New Brunswick, to pick up loggers for service in Scotland, recruits to the Newfoundland Forestry Unit set up by the Ministry of Supply early in the war: a consignment of boys, ‘illiterate and very wild’. Freud liked them. Newfoundland girls, he had discovered, knew how to read and write but boys didn’t. He especially liked the Eskimo ones. The mate set them to painting everything on the ship that could be painted. Then they went back to Halifax. ‘The thing that terrified me was tying up the ship. It was explained to me why so many dockers had arms and legs missing, chiefly legs: they had been hit by these wires. So I used to go and hide when the ship docked.’ Three of the crew deserted; two of them were caught and put back on board before the convoy sailed.

  On the voyage out Freud had found that his left hand, injured when he went through the glass door of the Matthäikirchstrasse apartment, felt the cold particularly acutely. Off Newfoundland, heading into the Arctic, winter temperatures resumed. ‘Every time I put my rag in the bucket for a few seconds it was frozen.’ Set washing the winches he would be swept off his feet; looking up he’d see the steersman smile, the joke being that he had deliberately steered into the swell so that a wave would slosh him across the deck. ‘Three watches (nine or twelve men) meant that they had to do my work virtually. The watches were eight hours on four hours off all through the day and night and, each separate watch, one had to steer and one was the lookout man and I can’t remember what the third one was. I was useless.’

  He carried food from galley to fo’c’sle, scrubbed, sluiced, cleaned and greased the winches. Once, just the once, he was told to man the wheel and, failing to grasp why it took so long for the rudder to respond, he steered the ship off course. ‘Steering only reacts fifteen or twenty seconds after you’ve turned the wheel, so by the time that you have realised you’ve done it wrong it gets worse and worse. I was doing my absolute best but the crew thought that I was deliberately swinging the lead. They thought I was a joke. Sometimes they thought that it wasn’t a very good joke, that I was endangering them.’

  The convoy to Liverpool was sent on a zigzag route taking thirty-four days at a maximum speed of nine knots. In those weeks, April to May, nearly 200 merchantmen were sunk; it was one of the worst periods for losses in the Battle of the Atlantic and although the Baltrover reached home waters unscathed it was to find Merseyside being blitzed night after night, leaving nearly 2,000 dead and 75,000 homeless, so for several days they had to lie at anchor outside the dock
s.

  By then Freud had had enough. He went to the ship’s doctor, a twenty-six-year-old whose first experience of convoy this had been. ‘He was called Tapissier and was known as Tap. My larynx was bleeding, I was pretty weak; I had a fever, not high, but quite high, and so he signed a release. When I went to the mate he thought I’d swum ashore to get a doctor’s certificate: he couldn’t believe a ship’s doctor had done it because they’d had such trouble getting men.’ He didn’t tell the mate that he still couldn’t tie a clove hitch, and if he had been made into a man by his shipboard experience, nobody mentioned it.6

  Fifty years later, at the time of his exhibition at the Liverpool Tate in the Albert Dock (by then transformed into a marina and cultural centre), Freud had a letter from Dr Tapissier’s widow saying that he had often told her how good the young Freud’s drawings had been. He was touched. ‘I wrote to her and said that if it hadn’t been for him I’d still be on that ship. I was terribly lucky: within three months of my leaving the merchant pool was formed, so anyone leaving a ship was automatically drafted on to another ship. Before then it wasn’t part of the services. Otherwise I’d have spent the rest of the war at sea.’7

  Discharged on 22 May, his ability listed as ‘Good’ (which meant below average) and his general conduct as ‘Very Good’ (ship’s log 132840), Freud left the Baltrover to find Liverpool dramatically altered. ‘Lots of places had gone, just during these months.’ Indeed Liverpool had suffered far more that month than had the convoy. Half the berths in the docks had been destroyed.

  Exposure to strafing, violence and extreme cold did not harden Freud appreciably; nor did being pestered and humiliated. He didn’t respond when, sixty years later, a former shipmate invited him to a reunion. ‘The man said, “I wrote to your brother but got short shrift.” Part of the reason for a reunion is to see that everybody has changed more than you, and I’m quite sure I haven’t changed at all. Nor did I want to talk about old times. New times is what I want to talk about.’ He had spent less than three months at sea. ‘It wasn’t long; it just seemed long. It was so unlike my life, it stuck out in a particular way.’ Masefield’s Dauber, bullied and harassed and attempting to prove himself, fell to his death. Freud happened to have survived.