by Rick Stein
I got a job working my passage from Auckland to New York on a German freighter. The Cap Finistere took up to 12 passengers, and I was ensconced with an Irish carpenter called Jim in one of the passenger cabins. Another was occupied by a horse-trainer called Milton who had four racehorses housed in wooden stables on the deck. The cargo was wool and deep-frozen New Zealand lamb which, rather depressingly, was going to be used in the States as pet food.
The night before we sailed, Milton and I went to Ma Gleason’s, a well-known maritime dive. We drank much but there were very few women there. I wandered into another bar: I could hear music and see that it was filled with girls. I asked one to dance and all was going swimmingly, except that I made the fatal mistake of thinking like a fox in a hen-house. A well-travelled backpacker once said to me, ‘In any community, however rich or poor, find one girl you like and stick with her. If you flirt with lots of them you’ll be without a girl in a bed.’ And so it turned out. I was told to get lost.
Returning disconsolate to the Cap Finistere, I heard the sound of a party aft. It was filled with girls and soon, beer in hand, I was chatting to a Fijian nurse. I was enormously encouraged by the fact that she spoke to me first. She had a forceful animal quality. Sex was never discussed: it was a natural thing to take her back to my cabin. Awakened in the morning and having indulged a little more in the fun of it all, I suddenly realised that such frolicking in a guest cabin might not go down too well with the captain and chief engineer whose quarters were next door, so I asked her if she’d mind terribly if I asked her to go. She didn’t. It was the sort of uncomplicated carnal experience every young man dreams of. The only thing that I regret is that Jim was in the bunk below all night and was not amused. I am appalled to this day to think of my insensitivity but at that time I never thought about him.
A friend of mine, Richard Blight, used to be an engineer on merchant ships. He had what I would call a sallow complexion and always looked like he was wearing a thin film of oil. I wouldn’t have thought of this without my month in the engine room on the Cap Finistere. In another life I would choose to work in a big engine room. It was fearfully hot and oily but the engine room was rather like a kitchen. The crew were nice to me, and cheerful, and I love machinery. In Auckland harbour only two of the Deutz diesel generators were going, and various pumps, but as we prepared to leave the main engine roared into life with a thunderous power, heat and noise that was thrilling. There was a hiss of compressed air that used to start the pistons moving, then an explosion as the compressed fuel fired, then a rapid clatter as the engine started. Thick black smoke would pour out of the funnel, soon disappearing as it all warmed up.
My job was to help the first engineer strip one of the generators. At the same time the entire engine room was repainted and I had a second job of removing spare cylinder-head bolts from the propeller shaft tunnel. These were in brackets all along the tunnel. It was icy cold and damp with a narrow walkway between the sloping keel of the ship and the revolving shaft. I could hear the bilge water swishing below the steel plates on which I was walking. Not somewhere, I remember thinking, you’d want to be on the way to Murmansk in the Second World War with torpedoes around. I had to cradle each bolt in my arms and carry it to the lathe in the workshop, then the lathe operator would machine a tiny amount off each one till it became silver and like new. The ship was going back to Hamburg for a refit, so I couldn’t quite understand why they were taking so much trouble to smarten everything up. But they were German, and one thing I learnt on that trip was they do things well. A couple of days into the voyage the whole crew shaved their heads. These days it’s not surprising but at the time of the cult of The Beatles haircut it was weird. Lots of, yes let’s face it, rather square-headed Germans with white scalps. They were good fun. We drank an awful lot of Holsten together. I liked their cigarettes, HB filters, which tasted Continental to me, as did their food – lots of sausages, smoked ham, sauerkraut and schnitzels.
It was early February and when we sailed into Norfolk, Virginia, it was freezing. The transition from summer in New Zealand caused me a lot of depression because I realised I would soon be leaving the warm certainty of the ship for the cold and uncertainty of the shore. ‘Sitting on the dock of the bay wasting time…’ Otis Redding’s song on a jukebox in a bar in the docks in Norfolk filled me with unease. It was even colder when we docked in Philadelphia. Finally we were sailing up the Hudson River into New York with dirty snow all round. I stood on the deck inside the black funnel of the Cap Finistere looking out at the Statue of Liberty on the left and planes landing at La Guardia airport in the distance and felt deeply uneasy. Music always seems to carry so much more meaning at such times. I can’t listen to ‘Love is Blue’ by Paul Mauriat without recalling that panic. But it also gave me a sort of romantic objectiveness about my lonely situation, about to set foot on a strange, icy continent. This wasn’t helped by the crew who told me that the New York docks were really dangerous. I walked down the gangway on to the quay with my new backpack bought in New Zealand, feeling sure I was going to be robbed as I trudged the half mile to the road and scuttled cravenly into a taxi.
New York, for me, turned out to be a bit like Midnight Cowboy: cold, not enough money and the YMCA, where the only men that you got to talk with seemed to want to share a room. I fled south where it was warm. I got on a Greyhound bus for Winston-Salem. I chose Winston-Salem only because the journey was long enough to give me a night’s sleep. I’d been stunned by the price of accommodation and decided I’d be better off with my $99-for-99-days Greyhound ticket, sleeping on the buses. I worked out that I would need to travel 500 miles to get a full night’s rest, so began to plan late departures from central city bus terminals. If I’d known about Edward Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks’ I might have enjoyed the comparison – if I hadn’t been so serious.
As I child, I’d hero-worshipped Americans. As a teenager, I’d felt that American culture ran in my veins; cowboys, Texas, Hollywood, singin’ the blues, Elvis … but the reality I experienced on this first visit was so bleak that my childish enthusiasm seemed like daydreams on another planet.
I spent the next fortnight in Florida, New Orleans and Texas trying to find company and succeeding only in attracting homosexuals and cursing myself for being so naive as to think that the naval officer I got talking to in Miami was just interested in casual conversation with a travelling Englishman or that the middle-aged man in Houston was not letting me sleep in his apartment just because I was tired and needed a shower. I talked myself into believing that Mexico was where I really wanted to be. America felt like one big highway; I was on buses all the time and I missed human contact and the homely conviviality of New Zealand. If you’ve got very little money, America is a scary place to be.
My experience of Mexico was better because I knew I was in a third-world country and had fewer expectations. The people understood poverty: one woman offered me money for the bus fare. I had started hitch-hiking again, and was grateful to meet people through doing it. The Mexican hotels were cheap and many were also used by prostitutes. Not that I realised this – I was always amazed by the amount of comings and goings in the night and the appalling state of the toilets next morning. I drank Carta Blanca beer and tequila with lime and salt in cantinas which were really rough places where the pissoir was part of the bar with just a little partition up to waist height. In Tampico, oppressed by loneliness, I went down to the docks and found a British Harrison Line freighter and was invited to come aboard. I spent a couple of days with the crew, drinking on board and in local bars. Needless to say there were lots of local girls who inflamed my lust but I couldn’t conquer my caution. On the way back to my hotel, where I was in a room with no windows and barely enough space to walk between the bed and the wall, I was propositioned by a prostitute in a doorway. I was incandescent with desire but when she dropped her opening price of 25 pesos by half I was convinced it was dangerous and forced myself to go back to my foetid cell. I’ve never forgot
ten that encounter, the road not taken. When I’m feeling critical about myself, it epitomises my over-cautiousness. When I feel good, that refusal reinforces how fundamentally sensible I am.
I have to question what I thought I was up to at the time. Why was I doing this? What did I hope to get out of it? Certainly I had very little money, but I could very easily have cabled my mother for some to be sent to Western Union. I was trying to act like a manly Ernest Hemingway character, when all the time I was on the run from the memory of my father and the cliff.
After a very gloomy and solitary week things took a turn for the better. I was sitting in a cafe thinking about a third-class bus fare to Mexico City and listening over and over again to a song called ‘The Disadvantages of You’ by a band called The Brass Ring when a boy of about 18 started a conversation with me, practising his English. In my diary I wrote,
In any other situation I would have had very little to do with Arturo being in my opinion rather a loud mouthed little squirt. Small thin with a type of un-handsomeness of face which is not ugly but full of that type of arrogance which comes from being the only son in a family who’s [sic] elevated position in the community is without question. But Arturo was very kind and liked me and you cannot but like that in a person.
He looked after me for three days and took me to meet his parents who put me up in their hotel in the town. He even took me to the town brothel, but it was shut. We went shooting at a friend’s ranchero where I marvelled at the simplicity of the farmhouse – just two adobe huts thatched with palm. I noticed a bedroom with handmade wooden beds covered by multicoloured Mexican blankets, hard dirt floors and the ochre plaster on the walls slightly crumbling around the wooden frames of the glassless windows. No ceiling, but the thatch tied down with leather straps to the crooked rafters and just a gun and cartridges propped up in the corner. We shot red and green parrots, taking turns with the one ancient 12-bore, and drank glasses of warm frothing milk straight from the cow. Needless to say, I was worried about getting TB from the milk. Many years later I read Scenes from a Clerical Life:
‘The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us – and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us – and we only know them when they are gone’
I bumped into two Englishmen, Derek Scott and Ian Stewart, who were on their way to Acapulco. They had a car and asked if I would like to share the costs – and my life lit up. I had found companionship. Derek, Ian and I spent all day on the Acapulco beach, only repairing to a restaurant called the Students International in the early evening to eke out a beer or two. Our diet consisted mainly of frankfurters and sweet American-style sliced bread which we bought at the supermarket to save money. Every day I sat on the beach near a restaurant where Americans were being served whole grilled red snapper with sliced tomatoes, chillies, spring onions and crispy thin chips. I had rarely felt so hungry. The smell of fresh grilled fish skin, and chips cooked in clean oil. It was enough to imprint on me a sense of the excitement of eating right there by the waves.
I stayed in a cheap hotel in the old part of town. It was a brothel too but I didn’t realise that till I took back a French–Canadian called Lise and the concierge demanded ‘15 pesos for the girl’.
I couldn’t believe my luck to have begun a relationship with Lise who was small, dark-haired and very pretty in a pouty sort of Brigitte Bardot way. She was from Montreal; it was her Frenchness that really attracted me, and of course her accent. It made me feel very grown up to be stepping out with a French girl whose priorities in life were looking elegant and finding good food. When we went out to restaurants she paid.
Lise talked about food all the time. She understood the difference between corn and flour tortillas. She knew what guacamole was. She taught me to love tamales. One night we met up with officers from a French Navy frigate anchored in Acapulco Bay and we went out to dinner with them. I ate enchiladas stuffed with chilli, tomato and beef with a salad with salsa rioja, and was transfixed. It wasn’t just the food – it was the dazzling French officers in their blue and white uniforms, and it was Lise. All these worked together to position food a lot higher in my list of priorities.
The Students International, where I first met Lise, was run by a young American ex-student called Scotty. It was cheap and filled with young people, mostly Americans. It did indeed attract students, mostly well-educated ones, and the conversations ranged far and wide, including literature, Aztec history and the Mercedes that Jerry, not much older than me, had driven all the way from San Francisco. One of the Mexican managers introduced me to the Spanish poet Lorca and his poem ‘A Las Cinco de la Tarde’, and so taken was I that I actually went to a bullfight in Acapulco to experience the flavour of Lorca’s Spain.
When Lise left, I accompanied her to the airport in the early morning. There were black vultures on all the telegraph poles along the road, which in retrospect seemed a harbinger of not such nice things to come. I decided to sleep on the beach. Derek and Ian had been doing that ever since we arrived. They had a large American car, a Dodge Dart convertible, with front seats that tipped so far back that they formed passable beds. There was no room for me, so I tied my backpack to the steering wheel and put my sleeping bag on the sand next to the car. It was my sense of caution – for which I have so often castigated myself – that made me tuck my diaries, my passport and my dollars into my sleeping bag. Next morning the backpack was gone. My whole trip gone: photos, camera, radio, clothes, letters, books. Gone.
In the Students International, Scotty said was I was very lucky.
‘Lucky!’
‘Yes. If you’d woken up and seen someone stealing it, you’d have gone for him and he’d have killed you.’
I left Acapulco with Derek and Ian. We were heading for Mazatlán in the state of Sinaloa, just opposite the tip of Baja California. We’d heard that there was good surf and good beer there. I was in a state of shock about the loss of my backpack. I bought a change of clothes and a small blue duffel bag to put it in. As the effects of the theft of the luggage began to wear off, a new and unfamiliar emotion began to take hold: liberation. Never before had I considered the implication of the Latin word for luggage – impedimenta.
VII
After I said goodbye to Derek and Ian, I took buses through Oregon and Washington State all the way to Vancouver, and found myself in a basement flat with a bunch of dope smokers. There was a track on the stereo by a band called Love. It was clearly, I thought, written by someone on marijuana. The first line was, ‘Oh, the snot has caked against my pants’.
I was shocked at the lyrics and all those drugs. It was one of those occasions – like first registering the blues at my school – when I was aware that my taste in music would never be the same again. Within six months, Love’s album Forever Changes would be my most treasured LP, closely followed by The Doors. I would also be enjoying the occasional joint while listening to Disraeli Gears.
At the time, though, I didn’t want to know. It was 1968, and I must have been one of the few 21-year-old boys in the whole of the United States who had never even experimented with dope.
I was heading to Montreal, where I spent a week in a flat belonging to a friend of Lise’s. It had no furniture except a bed with no bedding so I laid my sleeping bag on it. There were no curtains either, but it was warm and I was back with Lise. Our love-making was a little compromised by the lack of sheets and the brightness of the room, but it was either that or a sofa in Lise’s parents’ tiny house and no sex. By then I hadn’t enough money for any hotels at North American prices. I had come to Montreal out of love for Lise. Now, my love for Cornwall was taking over. It wasn’t Lise’s fault. She couldn’t have been more attentive and generous and, needless to say, the cooking at her parents’ place was spectacular. I can still remember the daube her mother made. But the foghorn on Trevose Head was calling me to a misty summer day and I had to get back.
Coming home to Cornwall felt like Odysseus returning. My Penelope, Gill, was o
ff with the suitors. The chaste idol, to whom I had written so many long, intense, carefully censored letters, had grown up. I was delighted for her. I was returning to where I was happiest. My mother was overjoyed. She had bought every LP by The Seekers while I was away; they had kept her closer to me. My sister Henrietta was back for the summer holidays, waiting to go to university. She had changed completely since I had last seen her. Then as a schoolgirl, shattered by our father’s death, she had been dispatched to a school in Switzerland and had loathed it so much that my mother sent her to do her A levels in London where she’d grown up too. She looked fabulous, she wore great clothes and was very trendy. Shops such as Bus Stop and Biba were flourishing and girls were very chic. If she hadn’t been my sister, I would have been too nervous to talk to her, but she was and she had lots of pretty friends and she loved me. The sun shone every day. I was the most interesting person at the pub.
At a little club called Rosehill, I met a pretty blonde called Terri, who introduced me to Jill Newstead. Terri was much more talkative than Jill but it was Jill I fancied. She wasn’t tall, which appealed to me, and, as we used to say in those days if we were being polite, she was ‘very well put together’. She had long dark hair and beautiful blue eyes. I asked both girls to my delayed twenty-first. It became a party of trying to get off with Jill. The evening was, as my mother would have said, ‘an absolute riot’. We did indeed take to each other happily and Jill and I were inseparable for most of the summer.