by Tim Pears
On Benbow, it was mostly cards and other games. Able Seaman Victor Harris was another diver, whose first words to Leo were, ‘Why aren’t you sporting a gold ring in your ear, Lofty, like most of you West Country boys?’
Victor Harris gave Leo this nickname and was the only one to use it. Victor told the boy that he had no interest in diving, and like any sensible sailor did not enjoy being in the water, but took the extra pay, for his ambition was to save enough money to buy his own public house back home in Cardiff once his stint in the Navy was over. He’d been robbed blind in this war, he said, for sailors’ pay had been fixed, yet prices had gone up and his family was in penury.
‘Penury,’ Leo repeated. ‘Is that a village between Cardiff and Swansea?’
Victor Harris laughed and said that they would get along, and so Leo made his one friend on Benbow, a friendship that consisted mostly of ragging each other.
‘Our neighbours,’ Victor complained, ‘who avoided conscription, have jobs in munitions and get massive wages from overtime.’
‘What are you moanin about?’ Leo asked him. ‘You married blokes get your separation allowance, don’t you?’
Victor admitted this was true.
‘And don’t the government give you a load more money just for havin begot children?’
‘I get six bob a week for the wife, two bob a week for the first nipper, two bob a week for the second. But the rest?’ He scowled. ‘I only get a bob each for them, Lofty.’
Victor Harris had various rackets for making money. One was a small unofficial dhobi or laundry firm. He paid boys to wash men’s clothes. A stoker hung the laundry in the engine room when he went on watch, and took them down again, all dry, when he came off.
Victor’s chief money-making venture was the game of Crown and Anchor, played on a canvas board he could roll up in a moment. On it were painted six squares, in two rows of three. The top middle square had the symbol of a crown, the one below it an anchor. The outer four squares featured an ace of each suit of cards: clubs, diamonds, hearts, spades. Victor ran the board. He had three dice, each with the six symbols upon its six sides. Players put as much money as they wished on any square. If any of the dice landed with the corresponding symbol uppermost, the player would get their money back, and the same again for any or every die.
Leo acted as Victor Harris’s scout or lookout. His friend was a genial huckster who jabbered the entire time the game was played. ‘Come along now, lads, here we are again, the Old Firm. Put your money where you like, the choice isn’t mine, is it? It’s yours. The more you put down, the more you’ll pick up, think about it. If you don’t speculate you can’t accumulate, can you?’
It was incredible that Victor wasn’t hoarse after a game. The Welshman reminded Leo of Henery the gypsy hawker, when he’d lived with the Orchard tribe, who’d turned the act of selling into a kind of seductive song.
‘Come on over, lads. Come yere in a rowboat and go away in a flagship. That’s it, smack it down, lad, on the spade there, the stoker’s friend. There’s a lot resting on the sausage, now, let’s roll the dice and see what we get, shall we?’
Victor paid Leo two bob to keep watch, though to be on the safe side he also paid off ship’s corporals. Leo asked Victor how he knew he’d make money when it was all a matter of luck which way the dice fell, unless he had some knack or trick in throwing them.
Victor said it was a simple matter of odds, of course. Of probability. He was astonished to find that Leo did not know what he was talking about.
‘One roll of a die, Lofty, you’ve got a one in six chance of any particular side ending face up, haven’t you?’ he said. ‘I roll three dice, each with six sides. You’ve got six squares on the board. You can calculate the probability. It’s mathematics, see, Lofty? If you only roll the dice a few times pretty much anything can happen, can’t it? But the more games you play, the closer the actual result will be to the probability.’
‘Do you know what that is?’ Leo asked.
‘I do.’ The Welshman had an intense look in his dark blue eyes.
‘Are you going to tell me?’
Victor Harris took a deep breath and puffed up his chest, in the self-important manner of one about to deliver words of wisdom.
‘All I’m saying, Lofty, is this. That couple a shillings I give you – don’t play the game with it. You may win a little, but you’ll more likely lose a lot.’
‘And you say you know how much but won’t tell me … and you expect me to believe you?’
Victor frowned. ‘Players take away ninety-two point one per cent of what they put down,’ he said. ‘So what does that leave me?’
Leo lowered his head, shifting his gaze from Victor’s, the better to do the sum. Then he raised it. ‘Seven point nine per cent,’ he said.
Victor nodded. ‘You add up all the little stakes the lads put on. I take seven point nine per cent of them. Or thereabouts.’
‘I suppose it adds up,’ Leo said.
‘Well, Lofty, there’s a nice pub in Tiger Bay the wife’s got her eye on.’
The hands on board the ships in Scapa Flow shared the morose observation that the Orkneys liked to give a man four seasons in a single day. Most days of the year. The morning could begin wet, clear to a blustery noon, turn warm in an afternoon sun and freeze by nightfall, with hailstones thrown at those on watch. The seemingly ubiquitous wind kept blowing away the prevailing conditions and replacing them with something else. The Gulf Stream, a warm ocean current that travelled from the Gulf of Mexico, brought humid air that kept the winter climate milder than for other regions of the same latitude, yet summers were little warmer.
The Flow was a bleak immensity of water, surrounded by low, barren hills. The spanking wind gave an edge to a long summer’s day, and turned into gales in winter. They blew in carrying salt from the sea, and men on deck had to yell to each other to be heard. Though snow was rare, when it did fall the wind blew it into drifts against the gun turrets. The winter days were short and mostly wet. But Leo did not mind the changing weather. With few companions on the ship, he looked outward and felt less imprisoned by their confinement than most. There were frequent, vivid rainbows, and clear nights when the aurora borealis flooded the sky. The first time Leo saw it he thought that the powers of the heavens had been made manifest. That he would see the Son of Man, coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. But other men on watch told him that the Northern Lights were caused by electrically charged particles from the sun reacting with gases in the atmosphere. A natural phenomenon, no more, no less.
The only weather that irked him was the damp sea fog, or haar, that settled on the Flow, erasing the distinction between ships and sea, enveloping all in a grey cloud. For then he could not watch gannets diving after fish, or shags bobbing on the water.
On one such day, a Sunday afternoon, he sat on the upper deck and Victor Harris sat beside him. Without particularly meaning to, Leo took up smoking while with his friend. He gazed into the fog and wondered if they could be sure they were still in the Flow, since they could not see another ship nor any landmark. Victor said perhaps they had been marooned, and were drifting, and would do so for eternity. He rolled a cigarette and lit it.
‘You do not take Communion,’ Leo said.
Victor glanced at him and said, ‘I do not.’
‘You do not believe in God?’
Victor looked at the boy and smiled. ‘Does it bother God if I do or I don’t? Is He not indifferent? Anyway, He done His work here so long ago, He probably couldn’t find His way back to this earth if He tried.’
Victor blew out smoke and looked skyward and cast about the clouds or beyond them.
‘He’s forgot us, see, Lofty, and when He comes back He’ll find what we made of His garden, won’t He?’
‘You think He’ll come back?’ Leo asked. ‘On the Day of Judgement?’
‘A course He’ll come back. Why else would He create this world if not for the ghoulish
pleasure of seeing what a mess man’s made of it? That’s His scheme, is the way I see it. He travels through the heavens making worlds, making men, or beings like ’em.’
Leo pondered this idea. ‘How will we know when He’s come back?’
Victor did not answer for a while. He closed his eyes and smoked. Perhaps he was trying to work out how to make the sublime explicable to this boy. When he opened his eyes, he grinned. ‘That’s exactly what I was wondering, Lofty,’ he said. ‘How will we know? In what form might God appear?’
Leo said, ‘When Christ was risen, his own disciples did not recognise him. Two a them met him on the road to Emmaus. They told him all about Jesus of Nazareth, a great prophet, who had been condemned to death and crucified. They thought he must be the only visitor to Jerusalem who did not know of all the things that had happened in these days. They presumed he were just some stranger. He spoke to them then of the prophecies concerning himself, he interpreted the scriptures to them, but still they did not know him. Only after they reached Emmaus and invited him to stay with them, when they sat at table, he took the bread and blessed it, and broke it, and gave it to them, only then was their eyes opened and they recognised him.’
Victor nodded. He had not known his young friend to be so talkative before, nor their conversation so solemn.
‘They knew this was their Christ, the son of God, and at that very moment of their understanding what did He do? He vanished out of their sight.’
Victor smiled. ‘You was listening pretty closely to them Bible readings, Lofty, weren’t you now?’
‘I always wondered about that story,’ Leo told him. ‘How could two of his own disciples not recognise the risen Jesus? They’d seen him not three days before.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Victor, ‘even though there he was, right in front a them, because their brains could not believe in a dead man being resurrected, so their eyes could not see it.’
‘Yes,’ Leo said. ‘That is possible. But I do not think so, for Mary Magdalene and the other women had already informed them of the empty tomb. And Jesus himself had foretold, in Galilee, that he would be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again. No.’ Leo shook his head. ‘They was prepared for his appearance before them. I believe they did not recognise him because he had changed his form.’
‘He was in a different body?’
‘Yes.’
‘That is possible, I suppose,’ Victor said. ‘That is possible.’
‘But if they could not recognise him, their companion, how can we hope to recognise God Himself, whom we have never seen after he abandoned us for a thousand years?’
‘A hundred thousand, more like,’ Victor said.
They watched the sea mist drifting before them. Other men strolled across the deck. Victor stubbed out his cigarette.
‘Back in nineteen hundred and four,’ he said, ‘on my first long voyage, we rounded Cape Horn and came up into the Pacific. Lofty, you think the North Sea’s big, lad, the Pacific is vast beyond imagining.’ He spread his arms out wide to help the boy understand how immense was this vacuity. ‘You look and see nothing in any direction, nothing, for hour after empty hour. Back then I didn’t just think, “God has left the world,” I thought, “He’s never been here in the first place.”’
‘How then,’ Leo asked, ‘did the world come into being?’
Victor shrugged. ‘They say God was the word and the word was God but who spoke it if not man? I do not know, Leo, but the ocean was vast and empty and I thought the world was too. I mean that there were men and trees and mountains, and trains and chimneys, and chairs and spoons, I could go on, but empty of meaning. You catch my drift? Devoid of intent. Of reason. I was on lookout one day and there I was, gazing out at this empty ocean, dwelling on such matters … it’s what you do, isn’t it? Wondering, trying to figure out this world … when suddenly I saw something.’
Victor fanned his fingers and pressed his hand against his forehead, to shield his eyes from the sun while concentrating on what he had seen.
‘It was in the water, beneath the surface but not far down. It come up to the ship and then past, right close.’ Victor ceased speaking, engrossed in the memory for a moment beyond the recounting of it. ‘A whale,’ he said. ‘A huge one, the first I’d ever seen. It glided past us like … I don’t know, a fleeting vision, almost beyond our comprehension but available to us if only we kept our eyes open. And just because I was on lookout I saw it, alone out of six hundred men on board.’ He chuckled. ‘I don’t know if the whale saw me. We passed each other and then it was gone but I saw it, and I thought perhaps there were more. If we are alert, and lucky, we might see them, we might not.’
‘You took the whale to be a sign from God?’ Leo asked.
Victor frowned. ‘That’s the problem with you boys weaned on the readings a scripture. You think there’s answers, and they will provide clarity.’
‘So it was not a sign from God?’
‘It was something that happened,’ Victor said. ‘And it made me consider wider possibilities than I had before. It was a spur to my mind. Perhaps it come from my mind.’ He laughed again. ‘Who knows what we are capable of, eh, Lofty?’
‘Who knows indeed?’ Leo agreed. ‘We may be an old species nearin the end a days, or we may be a young species with heaven on earth ahead of us.’
Victor nodded. He began to roll himself another cigarette. ‘Who can say?’
They sat and gazed out into the Flow. The sky was brightening, the mist lifting. A cormorant flew out of the mist and was just as quickly swallowed up by it again. Victor lit his cigarette.
Twice a week, dances were held on the upper deck of Benbow. The band played for an hour, from 6 p.m. The men danced in pairs, one taking the woman’s part. They did the valeta, the two-step, lancers. Many men did not dance but stood and watched. On occasion Leo was one such. He listened silently as the other spectators made ribald observations, to cover their confusion.
*
As a rest and a change from the fleet routine, ships were sent in turn to anchor for a few days off the north shore of the Flow. Normal duties were performed in the morning, but at noon a make and mend was granted. Then men could sail or fish or visit the shops in Kirkwall or otherwise do as they pleased.
Boats ferried them to the shore. Leo did not join his fellows but walked off alone. He headed inland along lanes that wound round bleak farms in the open, rolling landscape. There were few trees except for odd specimens around some of the settlements. Coarse-haired little sheep and squat cattle and small, round-bellied ponies inhabited the wind-ridden pastures. There was little cereal grown that he could see.
When he spotted, in a field to his right-hand side, a boy on a white pony coming towards him, it seemed for a moment like some uncanny vision, that Leo was seeing himself as he once was, cantering across the grass out of the past. The sun shone but the breeze was cool, yet the boy wore no shirt. He rode bareback, jouncing off the horse’s spine. As he neared the wall between the field and the lane, the boy turned the young horse and rode along in a wide curve around the field, jumping the horse over fences each made from two long rough poles crossed over, like a flattened letter X.
The horse was a white filly. She had long legs, unlike the other, sturdy ponies Leo had noticed on the island. She did not look strong enough to pull a cart. The slight boy was about as much weight as she looked able to carry. Maybe a saddle as well would have been too much. She was spindly, but fast. The boy hung on as he disappeared over the rising ground.
When they reappeared, Leo had climbed the wall and jumped down into the field and was waiting for them. He waved the boy over. The rider slowed the filly and walked her warily over to the tall young sailor.
‘What are ye doin in our field?’ he asked.
‘That there’s a fine animal,’ Leo said.
The boy halted the pony a yard or two away. ‘Aye,’ he said, in a voice as yet unbroken. He had red ha
ir and pale skin. He turned the horse. Should this stranger make an untoward move, he could gallop away.
‘You ride her well,’ Leo said. He judged the boy to be eleven or twelve years old. He did not speak or otherwise respond to the compliment but sat upon the white filly, waiting to be released.
‘The race is on next week,’ the boy said, ‘and I plan to win.’
Leo asked what race this was. The boy could not believe the seaman had not heard of it and told him it was the highlight of the annual county show. Leo asked if only lads rode. The red-headed boy said men of any age could but the smaller they were, the faster, so riders were mostly young. There was one dwarfish old man who raced every year. He’d won two or three times long ago, but he must be in his thirties now and in the boy’s opinion would never win again. ‘It’s my turn now,’ he said.
Leo could not tell how deep the boy’s bravado went. Was it sincere or merely superficial?
‘Do you wish to ride faster?’ he asked.
The boy gazed blankly back at him. Perhaps the question was too difficult. Then he nodded.
Leo stepped forward slowly. He spoke to the horse, and stroked her neck. Then he looked up at the Orcadian boy and said, ‘You’re holdin her back. You wants to sit higher up, on her withers. She’ll fly as swift as a winged beast, if you can bear it. Do you reckon you can?’
The boy had been gazing at Leo with his blank expression. Now he smiled. ‘Aye.’
‘My name’s Leo Sercombe,’ he said, raising his hand to shake the boy’s, who said that he was called Jamie Watt.
And so Leo had the boy sprint the filly, and each time encouraged him to ride a little forward, as he himself had once done. He showed him how to use his knees, and to loosen the reins. He explained that these were not principles of equitation but skills he himself had discovered by chance.
The Orcadian boy galloped the horse across the field and came back beaming. ‘It’s brilliant,’ Jamie said. ‘She’s so speedy, I can hardly hold on to her.’