Trawl

by B. S. Johnson

  Three parts of a moon tonight. · · · · · The sea swells and subsides, swells, swells, subsides, swells, subsides, subsides, subsides, swells again: impossibly consistent, constantly varied, continuously backing, sliding, rolling, foaming, breaking: perpetually owning and destroying, breaking down and synthesising, accepting and enfolding, encompassing and losing, giving and demanding in return, drawing. . . . · · · · · · · · A far-side bridge window frames a rectangular selection for my vision: a screen of stars and sky unrolls upwards as she rolls, ends to give place to blackness starred and streaked with the luminous foam: which in sequence on the reverse roll has the stars return, now rushing downward like pinpoint lemmings to the sea, over the teak cliff. · · · · · No one on the whaleback, rarely is, it seems: once or twice, rigging the cod-end derrick while we were coming through the fjords, they went up on the whaleback: not that any man would be there from choice as she dips her nose into a sea and it breaks hugely over the bow rail, one section of which has been bent by some great earlier sea. The spray over the whaleback tonight reaches the pounds where men stand gutting in their smocks and oilskin souwesters: it is rough tonight, force six, they tell me, just bearable for fishing. They stand there stolidly, ripping and severing, pitching the disembowelled fish into the washer: and then the military progress down the chute. · · · · · Duff’s watch, but the Skipper is here as well: he hardly seems to sleep at all. Even when I come up here in the middle of the night, the Skipper is still inevitably here, in his high chair, the green squiggles of the fishfinder cathode repeated distortedly in the mirror of the bridge’s shiny ceiling. He talks to me as he watches, tells me of his boyhood in Ireland, his sailing out of Dublin at fourteen, fishing, and of his rise despite himself, almost, to command this trawler: of his fears that one trip he just will not find fish, that he will lose his touch, though he has a great reputation for finding fish if there are any to be found: of how other skippers have been emptied out of their ships, emptied out is his phrase, by the owners after unsuccessful trips. The Skipper is a hunter and a gambler, guessing and watching and feeling where the fish may be, his only written guide a notebook which records for years before what he has caught, and exactly where, at each time of the year. Most sane, most calm. Even when he swears it is sanely, calmly: Roll you bastards! he’ll say to the seas, and if they could feel this it would hurt them far more than Duff’s or Festy’s comprehensive sexual and blasphemous imagery. The Skipper I have heard raise his voice only when men’s lives were in danger: from the bridge starboard windows he keeps a watch on their movements as we haul, and shouts through the hailer down whenever someone seems about to put himself in jeopardy from the warps, or the great links of the dogchains holding the otter boards. He has never lost a man overboard, unlike most skippers, nor had one really seriously injured, on his ship. He tells me about his family, promises to show me photographs of them he keeps down in his quarters. He tells me how before the war they threw scampi back, except for some they cooked in a bucket for themselves, as there was no market for them. He tells me he goes every year to Dublin for a holiday, where the Metropole in O’Connell Street serves a most excellent plate of scampi, or Dublin Bay Prawns, as the Irish will have them. He tells me of the day they were buzzed by a Russian helicopter in these waters and shortly afterwards saw an irregular mass of flame shoot at great speed above them: and heard it some considerable time after it had passed them. A Russian missile of some sort, on its way north to the testing ground in Novaya Zemlya, so it seemed. Suddenly he is tense. I feel this rather than see it, on the darkened bridge, glance at what he has seen: another trawler is cutting across us, on a line that will take her very close, a Norwegian stern-fisher, very new, all her deck lights far brighter than ours across the narrow sea. The Skipper does not give way: she passes relatively safely: and suddenly Scouse shouts Her gear’s up! And there is no more tenseness. If she had had her trawl down, it is likely ours would have fouled it: but she was between hauls, and I can see the ramp at the stern up which the cod-end has been hauled. Duff talks to me about her design, saying they are still experimental, stern-fishers, but he does not really express an opinion: probably the benefit from not having to haul the net in by hand would be only marginal, would relieve the harshness of trawling very little. · · · · · I lean again on the brass rail in the posture my body knows very well, now, relaxes comfortably into, which takes account of every movement of the ship except the very worst. There is a moderately heavy cross swell, and for the first time I do not object to the constant movement: not that I enjoy it, for I do not, but I can accept it now, even anticipate it most of the time, becoming acclimatised, no, becoming a seaman, or so I hubristically pride myself. · · · · · · · · Duff tells me he caught the cook in the galley this morning crimping a meat pie with his false teeth, and asked him if he hadn’t got a proper tool: Yes, said the cook, but that I keep for making holes in doughnuts. I laugh, yes, laugh a lot, then think it is a told joke, but nevertheless Duff enacts it very well, I cannot find fault with his telling. In any case, he theatrically withdraws into the chartroom, ducking his head to avoid the lamp in gimbals, leaving me laughing. · · · · · Scouse too tells jokes, leaves his bar to lean on the one next to me where Duff was, asks me What is the proper length for ladies’ skirts? I cannot guess, he gives me little time to guess, before telling me A little above two feet, and laughs himself far more than I do, who laugh only at his laughing at such an Edwardian Xmas cracker joke. Scouse mistakes my laughter for enthusiasm and plies me with others: What is the difference between a tree and an aeroplane? I refrain from telling him the obvious, out of sarcasm, my sarcasm is beside the point, here. And there is a satisfaction in knowing the answer to questions, being told the answers, to any questions: not knowing answers, however banal or guessed at already, is frustration, is incompleteness, is to be avoided. So, One sheds its leaves and the other leaves its shed! Scouse roars, and I do too, entering into his spirit, reflecting at the same moment on the length of time since any aeroplane left any shed. This one’s intellectual, says Scouse, Should suit you, you’ll know the answer to this one: What was the difference between Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth, Queen Elizabeth the First, that is, not the one now, it wouldn’t work if it was the one now? And is delighted at my ignorance as, after the briefest of pauses to establish it, he says: One was a wonder and the other was a Tudor! And I really laugh this time, mainly because three years doing a degree in English had not enabled me to make a guess nearer than that indicated by the subjects’ respective sexes, or sex, since some will have it that Shakespeare was a woman, and yet others that Queen Elizabeth (the First, of course) was a man. Another, says Scouse, roused now, What is the difference between a thought, a sigh, a motor car, and a monkey? I shake my head, accepting my ignorance, not having any idea what could conjoin these disparate objects. Ah, says Scouse, A thought is an idea, a sigh oh! dear, a a motor car too dear, and a monkey you dear! I laugh as before, but Scouse suddenly feels he might have offended me by calling me dear, that I might think him queer, or bent, so he hastens to tell me about his wife, to assure me that none of the things I have heard about sailors at sea happen on this ship: and indeed I have seen or heard nothing of the sort, there is no atmosphere, no hint of anything homosexual, on this ship. Scouse was married two years ago, and has no children: I try bloody hard every time I’m home, he says, But so far no luck. On his last ship, he became stuck in a cycle of three-week voyages that meant every time he was home his wife had the painters in: I felt like bloody Dracula, he says, in this Liverpool accent. And since trawlers are turned round in less than sixty hours, it gave them little chance, Scouse and his wife, less than the best chance, of her conceiving. The only way for the cycle to be broken was for him to leave that ship and sign on another more propitiously timed. In any case, Scouse seems to think the move was a good one, as this Skipper, he nods and lowers his voice,
catches fish far more consistently than his last one did. This last time home, Scouse tells me, his wife having been told by other fishermen’s wives that three in the morning was the most favourable time to conceive, she was setting the alarm clock and waking him up for it. · · · · · The ship-to-ship phone burbles our name, twice, briefly, and the Skipper leaves his seat to lift the receiver from the rest where it vertically hangs. It is a nearby vessel belonging to the same owners, and the Skipper gives him the size of our last haul. I notices that he underestimates it, Thirty baskets, he says, when, from what I have been told, I can judge it to have been nearer forty. There is this rivalry between ships, each captain for himself since each is paid directly proportionately to the amount of fish he catches: so when they are on fish they keep quiet about it. Whereas the ships of other countries co-operate much more closely: when one trawler of a Russian fleet finds fish, for instance, he radios at once to all his sister ships and the fleet joins him to trawl the area clean. Not that we are at the moment on any large quantity of fish: the fishing is mediocre, not good, not bad. It is now about an hour since we hauled, and they have nearly finished the gutting: so that the deckies will have a good hour before the next haul in which to relax in the warm mess, eating if they wish from the cheese and oddments the cook leaves out for the watch every night. I remark on all this to the Skipper, who tells me of the harvest years just after the war, when the seas had hardly been trawled for five years and were crowded with fish, or so it seemed, of how one haul at this time would not be gutted before the pounds would be overflowing with the next, men working every second of their eighteen hours’ watch: tells me how skippers would in these circumstances give their men a four hours’ break to sleep, and then put the clocks forward two hours and delude them into thinking they had rested twice as long: and how there was no need for such deception now, when every year less fish was brought to market, when more and more countries increased the numbers of their fishing fleets. · · · · · We listen in to, eavesdrop on, a long, boring, almost oneway conversation about cars, on the ship-to-ship shortwave radio. Some captains yatter all bloody day and night, says the Skipper. But he keeps it on, listening to this man’s sporadic and repetitive accounts of an accident with his Zephyr: the other captain to whom this man is speaking hardly replies at all. In the background pop music can be heard, and I ask why the deckies do not have it on our ship: They don’t need it, says the Skipper. · · · · · On to the deck below a strange gaunt figure, out of keeping in a naval greatcoat and peaked cap, wanders, the long spout of an oilcan protruding from one sleeve, as though in place of a hand. Without looking up he goes to the great steam winch below us, directs the spout and ejaculates oil into the womb of the slowly hissing machine. Then he turns and returns, an old man for this life, the Second Engineer. A curiously bizarre incident, the oilcan a bizarre instrument with which to minister to such a monster. · · · · · · · · I hunger for fruit. We have fruit only for Sunday tea: last Sunday tea we had tinned peaches, the only Sunday I have been aboard, but these are so little like real fruit, tinned peaches, at least unlike the acid biting that I require at the moment, of a good apple, or an orange, or I could even welcome a lemon, as it is, that tinned peaches seemed not really fruit at all, though I did eat them, several helpings, hoping they would stay down, but no, I was sick immediately afterwards, as so often: up came the tinned peaches with the pork and stuffing we had, too, Sunday at sea is like Xmas, every Sunday at sea: but up it all came. Relief that I have now gone a day and a half without being sick, perhaps I have grown used to it, at last, have found my proverbial sealegs. Certainly I anticipate the movements of the ship far better, now, and though I always feel as though I might be sick, I can fight the feeling, and win, and not be sick. · · · · · I sit in the wireless room, with Molloy. He says little, Molloy, but what he does have to say is interesting. Of being shipwrecked on a desert island, yes, in the Pacific, in the war, and being rescued by a negro. The chair I sit in rocks and slithers to the limits of its restraining tether. Apart from this movement, being in the wireless room with Molloy is not like being on a ship at all, here is the place on the ship least like being on a ship. · · · · · · · · But I hunger for fruit. I mention there not being much fruit in our diet to the Skipper, who looks at me, then says there is an orange on the ledge in his day cabin which I can have. He always brings ten pounds with him each trip, he says. I am grateful, decide at once to have it now, and leave the bridge on the lee side, another indication of my new seaworthiness. Down the bridge ladder, holding firmly to the rail as I have learnt to, everywhere, through the brass-fitted teak door, out of the weather, past the gyro steering unit nodding away to itself on the top landing of the scuttleway: and through into the Skipper’s quarters. The finest part of the ship, soft seats round two sides of the day cabin immediately below the bridge, curtains at the portholes, carpet, furnished incongruously like a perhaps lowermiddleclass best sitting room. I see the orange, and take it, a medium-sized one, not South African, I am relieved to see, which means I have avoided a moral dilemma in which I would have had to concede a principle. · · As I leave the Skipper’s day cabin I decide to eat my orange by myself: and the only place I have found on this ship I can feel I am by myself is on the boat-deck, at the stern. I move straight out from beside the Sperry, therefore, along past the engine room skylights, the galley funnel, self-inflating liferafts, past ventilators and the jury steering gear, the lifeboat falls, to the rail at the very stern. Ah, I see now, how could I have not seen it before, that this is where the emergency exit from my cabin comes out, the escape from the transom cabin. · · The moon a pendant—orange: stars like—no easy image to hand. Perhaps this will be the night I see the aurora borealis. Both hands are needed to peel an orange, so I lock one leg through the lower rail for purchase against the pitch and roll, bite the skin near the starred dimple, and spit the piece into our wake. The other pieces I also throw into the sea, watching them sink and vanish into the yellow-green foam, then sometimes bob up yards farther on: pleased that I can do this at sea, unguiltily, whereas on land it would be unsocial: the sea takes this rejectamenta as all other, and assimilates it: this orange peel will be broken down into its constituent elements very rapidly, before anyone could ever see it, in the sea. I think. · · Ah, a good orange! A fine orange! Juice, a minimum of stringiness, a most welcome orange! Eat all edible pieces, waste no tiny piece, a precious orange! How welcome, how satisfying, how depressing it will be when I have finished it! Yet I was warned that I would miss fresh fruit, and therefore ought to take some with me by the official who dealt with my application to come on this trawler, who agreed to let me come on this voyage, at the same time as he told me I would find the ship’s tea strong and liable to react strangely on my stomach. Very accommodating, this man, and these owners, to let me come, to provide me with seaboots and oilskins, a donkey’s breakfast to sleep on, yes, very kind. · · And a taxi arranged to meet my train when I came up, in the middle of the night, for she sailed on the morning tide at four, on the thirteenth, as it happened, though not on a Friday, a Thursday, the thirteenth of October, at four in the morning. I had like a condemned man my last good meal on the train coming up from London, a good meal indeed as train meals go, with a friendly waiter who had few people to serve and who gave large portions if they were wanted, as they were, by me, thinking this was the last meal which I was fairly certain I would not see up again, for it would be digested more or less by the time the ship sailed some seven or six hours afterwards. And the taxi-driver very friendly, as well, used to these night calls to take men to ships. I don’t know how they stick it, he said, of trawlermen, I’ve been out as far as the Spurn light vessel and that was enough for me. He said the men born, drawn or forced into such a job were rough: indeed, there were known to be at least two murderers, discharged after their sentences, sailing from this port. He lit a ciga
rette and then put it out almost immediately, saying he smoked too much as a result of being given tips in the form of a packet of unexcised twenty by men off the trawlers. · · That conversation, that journey through the well-lit, ordinary, and deserted latenight streets, dominated by the dark Italianate outline of the tall tower, I remember well: perhaps I noticed it particularly because things familiar all my life as a city-dweller I was no to see again for three weeks, was leaving behind one life, what I had known as life, for something entirely different, something, a set of circumstances and an environment, completely foreign to me: where no one I knew, no part of my past life, could reach me, since I had told no one where I was going: I was then somewhat uneasy as I was driven in that Consul towards a ship of which I knew only the name, about to make a voyage I knew not where, since I was told the Skipper alone decided this, and often only at the last minute: a voyage whose duration was uncertain within a few days of three weeks. · · And as we turned along by the North Quay there were the trawlers waiting, tied up, first a grey, clean modern one, then another showing up whitepainted in the quayside lights, and farther on a dark, rusty-black trawler. O, let it not be that last one! something said in me, and with the first real apprehension—not for going to sea, but for going to sea in that dark ship—I felt the car not stopping at the first, nor the second ship, and I wished it then to continue past the third; but the taxidriver was braking and peering at the name on her bow, and then said this was my ship: my apprehension was released by knowledge, by the acceptance of the known after the dismay of the possible. · · Only her bow, her bridge, and the boatdeck stood above the quay edge. I waited in my heavy coat, carrying a suitcase and a duffel bag, wondering where I boarded her. I could see no ladder and no gangway. Then someone shouted at me, and I saw a light just where the curved rusty rail of the ship touched the quayside, and went there, and there was this small whitehaired old man, shining a torch up at me and saying, You the pleasuretripper? I supposed I must be: the name of the ship was right, anyway: so I handed him my bags, which he took without grace, and I stepped across and down what looked like castiron gratings on to the deck. It was very dark in the shadows where the quay lights did not reach. The old man led, shining his torch on the deck behind him, along the deck, pointing out I should be careful over the high step of the door openings, into a passageway. Immediately I began to feel cramped, for I had to carry one bag in front of me and one behind, and either shoulder banged against the sides as I went. There was one light in a door off this passage, and in here the old man went. I was glad to put down the bags and feel freer in the opening, which I could see was the galley: long coalfired ovens with special divisions on the top to prevent things sliding about, obviously: I had suddenly a vision of a pot of boiling liquid flung over a cook by the action of the ship, a realisation of the hazards of cooking at sea. The galley was lit by a single carbide lamp which hung hissing from an H-girder: it was made of copper, with the ship’s name on a brass plate soldered to it, and had a straight spout on the end of which the brilliant white flame stood. Seeing me look at it, the old man said there were no lights because the steamer had not yet come aboard to raise steam and start the generator. The galley was warm, and well-kept. The old man told me he looked after this ship while she was in port, more or less lived on her as a kind of caretaker while she was not at sea: he had sailed in her until he retired a few years before. He had with him another man, about fifty, perhaps for company. They showed me the lavatory, and they offered me tea, for which I was grateful: it did not taste as strongly as I had been led to expect, was quite pleasant, though a different drink due to the evaporated milk with which it was made. They did not seem curious as to why I was going to sea: which fortunately saved me inventing reasons: I could not just say, I want to give substantial yet symbolic form to an isolation I have felt most of my life by isolating myself in fact, by enacting the isolation in an extreme form, by cutting myself off as far as possible from everything I had ever known before. The old man’s mate said, I don’t envy you your job, there’s a force ten gale warning out for the Orkneys. I asked whether that would be on our way to wherever we were going, and they said it might well be: last trip the Skipper went to Iceland, his catch made £7,000, and he might well go there again: or to the Barents Sea, or Bear Island, in either case probably going up through the fjords. Before I could ask where exactly these places were, the old man said, You’ll be sick. I told him I had tablets for seasickness. They’ll be no use to you, he said, You’ll be sick until you bring up your green bile, you’ve got to bring up the green bile that’s been there maybe since you were a child. And once that green bile’s gone, you’ll be all right, he said, and his mate too said, You’ll be sick, but you’ll fooking eat afterwards! Doctors recommend sea voyages for bringing up the bile, said the old man, Once you’ve brought up your green bile you won’t get TB, nor cancer of the stomach, nor any trouble with your gut at all. I had apparently chosen a bad time of year: the autumn equinoctials had well started, and a hurricane which caused damage on the coast of Florida had moved across the Atlantic and was blowing itself out in the North Sea. That was why we should probably go through the fjords. You can get dirty books in Norway, said the old man’s mate, With girls in their natural state, though the words are not in English. Then he seemed anxious I should not believe all the bad stories about trawlermen which he was sure I had heard: though they got drunk on shore and did some damage, they were not anything like as bad as they were made out to be. Suddenly the lights went on, and mate says the steamer is aboard. It was nearly midnight, and I said I would like to try to sleep a little before we sailed. I don’t know where your bunk will be, said the old man, But I’ve put the box with your bedding and stuff in it down in the transom cabin. I told him I had understood I would probably have a bed made up in the Skipper’s day cabin, and the old man said in that case he would take me up to the chartroom where I could stretch out on a seat and sleep till the Skipper came: which would be about three. After he had left, I went for a walk alone, feeling the deck under my feet, the clean wooden boards lined with pitch, and then up on to the whaleback, a word I knew, and relished, and could now put a place to: looked again at the two trawlers tied in front of us, and at the low buildings on the quay: then went back, feeling very tired, to the chartroom. · · · · · The Skipper startled me awake when he came into the chartroom. I introduced myself, thanked him for agreeing to have me on this voyage. He was not unfriendly, but not friendly: spoke little: firmly indicated I was to sleep in the transom cabin aft with the deckies, which was not welcome to me since I had been hoping for something more private, more comfortable: but I was prepared to accept hardship, had prepared myself for it, so was no more than disappointed. I found my kit in a big cardboard box in the biggest of the three deckies, cabins, bunks for six, right at the stern. Seven or eight deckies sat around, some drinking; others dropped in from time to time, talking of what they had done when ashore. A short, not quite tubby man of forty-five or so took me in hand, kindly, Festy, the Third Hand, found me an untaken bunk, cleared it of clobber—old seaboots, canvas bags, rope, a small torpedo-like thing—and helped me to place my donkey’s breakfast in it. I climbed up into the bunk, noticing at once and using the ventilator, directing the aluminium spout from the trunking on to my face. There was a small shelf on the bulkhead side: here I thought I would keep my pills, dramamine and aspirins and so on. And a pencil. I took a dramamine tablet. The deckies were not drunk, but certainly had been the evening before, were morose now, yet in good spirits, paradoxically. They talked of Mick, who had sung at a nightclub, central teeth to the canines missing, and another man who claimed to have started a fight at a dancehall. Yet again they were concerned for me to know, like the old man, that they were nothing like as bad as their reputation, plied me with drink as if to enlist me. Stagg, in particular, more drunk than most, nearly an old man, kept telling me almost aggressively that he was not a drunken troublemaker like
I thought all fishermen were, and had to be reassured by Mick and Festy that I did not think badly or him, and even if I did, who cared? As soon as we began to move, I went up on to the bridge: out of interest and also, sentimentally, even fearfully, to take my last sight of land for three weeks, as I thought. Not that the land was much like land as I had always known it: docks and gantries and sea walls and flat, flat, flat. The Skipper said nothing as I came, nor while I was there: he seemed to concentrate almost over-intensely as he took us slowly out of the basin and through dock gates not so very much wider than the ship. In this he was aided by two or three men on the whaleback, the great figure of Duff amongst them, ordering and swearing, glancing up at the Skipper from time to time. The deck was lit, well but not brightly, and several men were tidying, one swearing at the fishlumpers who had left the ship in such a mess. Stagg came on to the deck, old and somewhat unsteady, to be sent back by Duff as not being needed, or perhaps because of his age, or because of his state. Once we had passed the dock entrance there was nothing to be seen but lights: and, though we had begun to feel only the slight swell in the river mouth, I already sensed that my balance was not as certain as it was and that headache which is still with me began, is part of the seasickness and of being at sea: so I went off the bridge, excusing myself to the Skipper, down off the boatdeck, to the rail, hanging on to the safety line, where I stood hoping the air would cure my incipient seasickness, or at least postpone it: where Scouse found me, and talked, was friendly, told me which the various lights were at sea and on shore: every second I felt more and more sick, the nausea hung in my head lower and lower every moment: would reach my gut soon: did: I rushed away from Scouse, half apologising, glad I knew where the lavatory was, pleased that I had had the foresight to have asked the old man just where it was: where I collapsed over the pan, knees on the dirty wooden grating, retching, felt some part of me just below my solar plexus trying hard to force its way up my throat: and spewed just a trickle of acid spittle into the bowl: and, worse than I had expected, this retching continued, though I brought nothing up, had nothing it seemed which I could bring up, except my solar plexus, or whatever it was under it that was loose, or seemed so, and which now began to pain me every time I heaved. I saw no sense in being there and heaving nothing, and I wanted to lie down, remembered it did help, or was supposed to help, lying down. As I thought, I’m glad I’ve been sick. I’m relieved all the wondering whether I would be or not is over, for it’s bloody awful but it’s not unbearable, intolerable, I can stand it, I do still want to stay, I am going on this voyage and I am not going to try to back out now, or regret it. How did I manage that companionway down to the cabin? Fell most of the way, perhaps, but climbed into my bunk determinedly enough. Festy underneath said Eat something, and Johnny opposite said Eat, eat for it, eat for crissake. And all I had was a green pear bought in the market the afternoon before I came, one pear out of three pounds, which were all I could carry, ludicrously small amount now I think of it, they were all gone in four days, those green pears, spending but a brief while doing me hardly any good. · · The last fresh fruit until this orange, which was valuable, so valuable, that now I know I can do without more until we return, know that I have come that far, have gained that much control, will not have difficulty in not bringing myself to beg another from the Skipper. As I can stand standing here on the cold boatdeck, as long now as I choose, bearing the cold, bearing the wind, bearing whatever weather.