So where has all that taken me? · · · · · · · · Nowhere. · · · · · Where I was before? · · Perhaps. · · · · · Nowhere. · · · · · · · · Here.
Here, my knees jammed against the bunkside, my back braced against the sternside, rolled and pitched, dropped and bottomed, flung and held in three dimensions by the nomadic sea’s subtle kinesis.· · · · · · · · Time? Watch affected by falling about on the bridge yesterday? Says eleven, just after, still going, could be right, cannot see the chronometer from here, no: is Festy in the bunk underneath, up, lean, ooooooh, sickwave, no, rest, head must rest, be at rest, not move. The unlit lamp, brass, in its gimbals, working like a consciousness. After discharge the extinguisher must be washed out carefully with fresh water, using at least two changes. Could call Festy? He would not like to be woken. Anyway, if he’s there, what would it prove? Little: it might be any time during his off watch, any time between six and twelve in the morning, in which case he would not like my waking him. Or he might just be resting, catnapping, between hauls, at any time, which would not help me at all, which would merely mean I had woken Festy in the middle of the night, perhaps, or at some other very inconvenient hour of the eighteen he is on watch, of which he snatches a few down here, in his bunk, a Third Hand’s privilege, I suppose, very few of the deckies do anyway, they wait between gutting and hauling up in their messroom, playing dominoes sometimes, with the others, the fireman, whichever one is off watch. But Festy would tell me, if he was awake, Festy would tell me the time, for he does speak to me readily, Festy: I liked him from the first, when we first started rolling, as soon as we were out in the river, and I first felt sick, it was Festy who found a bucket and put it on the floor by the bunk under mine, and lashed it with string, very neatly, and told me everything on a ship had to be lashed, you lashed everything, and I said I wouldn’t get down to it soon enough from the top bunk, couldn’t I have it up here with me, I’d be sick before getting down to it, and Festy said, You’ll get down to it quickly enough. And I did, yes, spewed up my hard green pear, the only thing I’d eaten recently. · · But I shall not worry Festy now, raise my head, see if any of the others are here, reading perhaps, to tell me the time, confirm that told by my suspect watch: the aluminium-painted radiator, the globular lights, down, no Scouse directly across, his bunk rumpled: further, yes Johnny asleep, back towards me, dead to the world, he has no watch: anyway. I cannot see the chronometer on the bulkhead, too far to lean out for my sickness, an inconvenience of this bunk, again, in order not to become sickened, worth it, no, all I can do is assume my watch is right, that it is after eleven. · · So: I should rise, ha, lower rather, to the floor, she seems to rock as bitchily as ever, not so much here as she did across the North Sea, perhaps, no, but badly enough. · · We eat at twelve, I could just reach the bridge by then, stay on the bridge, then eat, perhaps I’m hungry, yes, up then! · · · · · · · · Everything takes twice as long, merely putting on trousers, easier than my sweater, though, have to hang on by one hand while trying to drag on my trousers, but at least this is possible, whereas pulling the purple over my head, with one hand on the bunkside, seems for long periods impossible, so that I shall soon have to consider sleeping in my sweater, as I now sleep in my pants, and shirt, change them only when the ship is still, which is never, the ship is never still, but when it is still, comparatively, then I change, or when I can stand the stink no longer, which is oftener, change my pants once in three days, perhaps, used to change oftener, every day, on land, ah, when it could be done without thinking, now everything has to be done with so much thinking, and with taut effort, and one hand always for the ship, for her, for hanging on as she bucks, and the floor comes up and drops away again, and the matting slides from under my feet, and I thresh around to hold, tighten my fingers against the mahogany bunkside, hold like hell as she bucks, she bucks, and the floor drops away from me yet again, like a hangman’s trap, no, that is too extreme, find another image, no matter, what use are images anyway? For one thing simply is not another: and this is the floor of the after crew quarters, right in the stern immediately above the screw, the transom cabin, they name it, with a sloping floor, which tilts itself to avoid the screw, to leave room for the screw, to allow the screw due freedom in its pursuit of screwing, or whatever: I do not really know why they had to make the floor of this transom cabin higher towards the stern, have a drop of perhaps a foot or nine inches from the stern some ten feet towards the bow: I know the words, I usually find the right words, it is the reasons I am lost on. But for whatever reason, the floor of this my cabin slopes, cants, careens, inclines, which makes a disorientation extra to the hazard of her movments, which are inconvenient enough, for me, and surely no little less for the others, the other four who share this space with me, allow me to share it with them, though they put up with much, with many inconveniences, are not sick, though they grumble, and swear every other word, literally, a reaction to the harsh conditions, their speech reduced to words on paper would read near to meaninglessly, would present great problems in its transcription, if anyone wanted to transcribe it, it would be better not CRAANGK! Hauling, yes, I’ll go up on to the bridge for this haul, that is, I’ll try, try to reach the bridge, for this haul: I missed the first haul yesterday, You’re the first pleasuretripper I’ve known to miss the first haul, said the mate, and I said I was ill, so I was, that nothing mattered, not even the first haul of my first trip, my only voyage, and I took Duff up again on calling me a pleasuretripper, I who am here to work as hard as anyone, at my own task, and am suffering more than most, am not at any pleasure I know of, but no, they persist in calling me the pleasuretripper. · · · · So up, up the companionway, the ladder, holding the handholes in the teak sides tightly, through the hatch hanging on to the vertical brass bar, right: what’s this on the cream walls of the alleyway, brown, smearing the painted surface? · · Blood, yes, it’s blood, it can’t be human, can it, no, it’s where they brush, from the gutting, where their bloody smocks smear against the sides, their rubber smocks all gory with the lifeblood of fish, with their guts, their entrails: for which I feel no disgust, though I would not touch the walls of the alleyway, but however, I feel no repulsion against this random blood-decoration, against these gut murals, but though I would not touch them, I cannot help it, she throws me, restrains me, pitches, so my squeamishness is irrelevant. · · Cook and the galleyboy working hard, there must be a meal soon, yes, my watch must have been right, yes, good, on, through the bloody alleyway, to a door, a space, I’ll breathe a moment, the air is good for my seasickness, almost as good as sleep, far better than pills. · · The sea, the land in the distance: honed to one general level by glacial action, but broken to the sea in fissures, clefts, valleys, defiles, abscissions, cracks, gorges, rifts, ravines, gullies, and crevasses: defined by snow at the highest, snow whiter than the line above it, of cloud surely, of some alteration in the atmosphere attributable to it and not to the sea: as the sea is lighter than the thin grey layer up to the snow, which merges into the sky where there is no snow, where the valleys fall, the gullies fission, the firths no doubt lance into the land: the land, which does not reassure me as we trawl parallel to it, be it Norway or Russia, Finnmark or the Ribachi Peninsula, the foreign friendly land in the distance seems less real, so small in relation to the bland sky and the vehement sea: yet I would rather it were there. · · New wood, hard wood, hardwood, looks like mahogany, but surely not: handrail, new wood, new brass fittings, on the boat deck level of the bridge, one stage down from the bridge, strong, robust handrail, yet it was smashed last trip by a wave, a great wave to smash this and twist the wroughtiron stanchions, the violence of a sea that it should be capable of such damage. · · They haul, they haul, they haul! The winch groans like some great beast condemned to labour, is barely under restraint, and seen from here on the bridge
only between gouts of steam, but heard, heard constantly as a great gnashing of steel dentures, the warp too heard creaking and writhing in travail as it bends itself to the winch’s ferrous will. · · Below me, at the aft gallows, three men wait, at the fore gallows another two and Festy, Third Hand, all six watching, relaxed. The winch note rises and falls as the otter boards weave, weave below the surface, I imagine, great half-ton plates of oak and iron which hold the net mouth open, skid their shod heels along the ocean floor: they break the surface suddenly, the aft one just before the other, and Festy shouts: the winch slows with always surprising obedience, and the dogchains shackling the otter boards are transferred to the gallows by men’s vulnerable hands. Another yell and the winch sucks and gasps steam, the grooved drum slips and then grips the warp, and up come the bridles, the dan lenos: then, with a shock that staggers the whole ship, the ground line is dropped heavily over the side, on to the deck, so suddenly, the great iron balls, bobbins they call them, with thick oak washers, as well, worn black rubber-tyred wheels two feet in diameter. I wonder this too does not wake me when I am in my bunk, the ground line thundering on the deck, I wonder why it is only the release of the towing block that wakes me: nearness, obviously, it must be the nearness, the towing block is nearer, right above my head when I sleep, if I sleep. · · The men give no sign of eagerness, of expectation, not looking to see if the cod-end floats, too busy almost to look at the sea, the great running cables and loose fittings being all their care, for their own safety, for the protection of their hands and lives from the vicious friction of the running warp and the deadly weight of the swinging shackles. · · But she does float! The sudden sky of gulls, yawking, drop and fly to a red-pink disturbance on the surface of the sea: the deckies take no notice still. Along beneath me they haul now hand over hand at the net, eight of them doubled at the heavy brown mesh: and the head line with its tethered aluminium spheres is shortly over the low bulwark, Duff hooks at something, leaning apparently beyond his balance over the side, they stop handhauling, someone shouts, and the winch clanks slowly, not straining, to send one line vertically along, a single float attached to it, towards the fore gallows. Now they watch, now they watch! The winch takes a sudden strain, slows, makes up, and by the fore gallows the cod-end of the net appears, narrow-necked like a pear, swings inboard against a cork-protected cable, dripping, tight with fish, pinkish red, silver, black, shining, olivegreen. One redfish, eyes bursting, mouth an oval of overstrain, makes good his way through an interstice just a few seconds too late, thumps down on the deck, kicks once, and lies still. Festy steps into the pen, under the shaking wet cod-end which is lined with slimy cowskins green-blue from soaking in bluestone, with a ritual jerk undoes the one knot which keeps the catch confined, and the pens are suddenly alive with a mercury-like mass of fish, bucking and mouthing, start-eyed and helpless, sliding on top of, writhing under and over each other, Festy up to the knees of his waders in fish, fish, fish, as he now again ties the single knot in the delivered cod-end, shouts, and the net returns to the water to begin once again a descent to the sea-floor. · · · · · · · · The skipper does not endorse my enthusiasm for the catch, even though it is larger than the two I saw yesterday. I begin to understand him as a professional pessimist, I begin to wonder what size the cod-end would have to be to draw enthusiasm from him, to raise him from the set anxiety shown in his eyes. His dedication since we started fishing is complete. It would be too much to say he is a different man from when we were on passage, but certainly he now has little time for conversation, or anything but searching for fish. But he does come to dinner, now, when they have finished shooting, he takes his chance, the more or less coincidence of the end of shooting with dinnertime, on this one day. He does not say much at dinner, nevertheless. The mate, Duff, makes up for him, talking nearly all the time, a great stream of East Anglian composed of opinions, almost all of them intelligent, about an enormous number of things, mixed with dirty jokes and scabrous reminiscences and sea stories and fights in pubs and catches he has made. We eat thick soup, savoury flavoured, I do not know what flavour, perhaps it is pea, or oxtail, but the colour suggests neither, and I enjoy it, I hold my plate, the heavy thick white soup-plate, like the others, compensating with no little concentration for the roll of the ship, spilling only twice, as she bucks untowardly, and try to show at the same time the interest I do have in what Duff is saying. The Chief sits next to me, and says as little as the Skipper. Perhaps he is as preoccupied with his engines as the Skipper is with fishing. A onesided conversation as we start upon the dozens of thin slices of beef, the potatoes, the diced swedes in abundance. Duff sloshes soup over it all from an enamel jug, a rough, noisy feeder when he is not talking, tells me This is the life, and Wouldn’t you like to do this for good, Three square meals a day which don’t cost you anything, All the freshest purest air one could want, The Sea the greatest purest element, Freedom from nagging women. . . . · · They call him Duff, the Skipper tells me, and I learn by example as he starts into the great sultana pudding we have next, because this pudding they call duff, and they call East Anglian men Puds because they eat so much of it there, in East Anglia, they don’t know why, nor do I. Duff used to fish from Lowestoft for the herring, the herring he still calls the finest fish to be caught, but there is more money in the distant-water haddock and cod, even in the redfish, which some call seabream, or berghylts, or soldiers, or just those red bastards: and so the Lowestoft men are Puds: the mate is the only one on board: Duff by extension. · · I slop the enamel jug of custard inadvertently as I pick it up, she lurches as I take the weight and I stub the rim on the fiddle, on one of the raised wooden partitions of the table which keep the food from sliding too far about. A fair proportion of the custard finishes in my plate, the tilt was in an appropriate direction, I am fortunate at least in the small accidents, or is it unfortunate, to be having them at all? Nevertheless I enjoy duff with custard on it, thick doughy duff, crumbly towards the outside, and just made moist by the custard enough to avoid clogging the throat, and then the little bombs of sultanas which explode sweetly and fruitily and unexpectedly in my mouth every so often, quite frequently, in fact, for he is no niggard with his sultanas, this cook, as indeed he is not with . . oh, ouh, ough! Out! Out, that’s why I sit near the door, rush, hold it in, through the door, into galley alleyway, hold it in, hold, ouh! Along, bloodsmeared, hold gut, over step, out, can’t worry, ouh, she pitches, ouh, stomach retches, hold, ah taffrail at last, over, ouuuuuuuh! There goes my dinner, staining white a few fluid inches of the vast sea, ah, but I did enjoy that dinner, that I now spew up, oh, what point, ouuuuuh, more, that must be all, my stomach must be next up, or so it feels, and the headache comes as well, worse, cold taffrail under my hands, now I notice, cool my head against the pitted red steel, stained with puke, ah, the all-cleansing sea will wash away my, · · the blood on my hands, the · · puke, · · · · · Lie down, · · should lie down. · · Yes, · · relief at failing to stay up here. · · · · · Yes, · · door, alleyway, avoid fishguts this time. · · Down steps, so narrow, steep, brass-treaded, wooden, down. · · One of the firemen waiting to come up, never talks to me, nods and grins, perhaps at my white face · · my sickness, the firemen have their own cabin, two of them, almost it is a cupboard, not a cabin, for two to sleep in. · · Watch the jute on the floor, for safety, unsteady. · · · · · It hits me like this, my gut strains towards my throat and pains me for hours, constantly, really, at the base of the ribs, my head beats, thunders. · · · · · It is almost beyond, now, one pull and rest, stand on the seat, hand on the bunkside, pull, not on the brass rail, curtain rail will pull away, aah! Yes, beating, head, gut, and heart, aaah, no, again! Yes! Just be, build up pillow, mattress feel as though stuffed with hay, but comfortable, or straw, or grass. · · Take sweater off to pillow, no, too troublous, aaaah, t
urn, rest, think, sleep, think, half-sleep, think, work out, think, perhaps sleep, think. . . .
Trawl Page 3