Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  Mildly surprised but unshocked, I twisted my head towards the clock: ‘No time … very late … sorry.’ My second refusal of such services in two days began to make me feel unreasonably prudish – quite unnecessarily, because I had created no embarrassment or resentment. A friendly pat on the shoulder conveyed ‘Okay’, and the trim, tracksuited figure led me back to the darkened room, an armchair and more China tea. There, Ah Po sat mesmerized by an advertisement on the TV for a watch so encrusted with jewels that it might have made a Hong Kong millionaire blink. Swathed in toga-like towels, he looked like a young Roman senator from some Mongolian corner of the Empire. He waved to me flamboyantly, and other Chinese faces turned my way and smiled.

  ‘Good?’ Ah Po said.

  ‘Good.’

  We sat at ease, side by side, watching Chinese-speaking animated cartoons which eventually changed to football. Ah Po reached over and patted my hand. Now he was my proud and contented host.

  *

  But I was going to sea. I had to bring myself to say goodbye to Wei Kuen, Ah Po and their wives. To Thomas Dor I did so by telephone because he was tied up with his teaching schedules. ‘So long,’ he said. ‘Don’t wait too long to return. I’m too goddam old.’ For our last evening, the others wanted to hear ‘real’ music for the first time, and Wei Kuen chose – in preference to the knockabout music hall spectacular I had suggested, not knowing what was best – a concert of popular Chinese orchestral music by the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra.

  The concert hall was as big as a large circus tent and nearly full; the music was evidently as popular as it claimed to be. Applause followed the vigorous cadenzas that flew from the muscular fingers of a Japanese lady soloist, who braced her short legs like a golfer addressing a long tee shot upwind. When the first chords of the ‘Butterfly Lovers’ violin concerto – a Hong Kong Chinese composition – flowed around us, Shun Ling dabbed her eyes happily, and Ching Man sniffed and was comforted by Ah Po.

  The programme was full of butterfly words: ‘Colourful Clouds Chasing the Moon’, ‘Fishing Boats at Night’, ‘Little Stream’. A programme note for ‘Red Bean Song’ said, ‘A girl is thinking of her lover and hoping that, in his absence, he may be reminded of her by the red beans that grow everywhere.’ The ‘Red Bean Song’ threw Ah Po into ecstasies of nudging and winking, his smile twitching rapturously; and a dab of moisture appeared under Wei Kuen’s left eye during the harp solo in ‘Fishing Boats at Night’, which received an ovation.

  It was a good way to round things off.

  Arm in arm on the way back to the Luk Kwok, Wei Kuen said quite fiercely that we must do this again – I must return. Shun Ling’s eyes blinked agreement behind her fishbowl glasses, and Ching Man turned up a beaming face. ‘Rove-ree!’ said Ah Po, imitating Wei Kuen’s English, and banged his head against mine as a sign of affection. In my hotel room, Ah Po as usual immediately turned on the television: even the stuffed woodcock on my desk looked down its long beak disapprovingly. And so, as we said our farewells behind the windows with their sad, wintry view of the harbour, the TV screen showed an advertisement for an expensive French brandy. A delicate, disembodied female hand, its wrist encircled by a diamond bracelet, lifted a glass of rich, amber liquid towards the camera’s eye….

  At this moment of goodbyes and inappropriate brandy advertisements I realized that, since my arrival at Kai Tak airport in rain and gloom, I had strayed into lives as strange to me as scenes on a Chinese screen. Something of my dejection had left me, and I had the four smiling people before me to thank for that. But what was in store for them? Would 1997 prove to be for them the Year of Wrath? Or a year like any other? They, like Sergeant Lim, were poor and vulnerable and faced a possibly menacing and at any rate inescapable future in Hong Kong, yet their unconscious dignity had made my personal gloom feel trivial, even unseemly. Dogged courage, diligence, humour – those were the sparks of life in these four bright handfuls of dust. They had very little, but they had Character – ‘the eternally valuable element’ (I forget who called it that) beside which everything else wears out. They were going to need it.

  I took them down to the front door. In the street, they looked back and waved. I waved in reply and went rapidly back into the hotel. But a feeling of loss made me run out once more and we waved to each other again, back and forth, until they turned the corner.

  When they had disappeared I walked to a bar, the first bar I saw. It was called the Old China Hand. Among false beams, tobacco smoke and pint glasses of draught beer, white men looking like off-duty policemen or sailors on shore leave played darts with Chinese men who spoke with Anglo-American accents and might have been bank clerks or hotel receptionists. I ordered a beer. At the last moment of parting, Ah Po had slipped a scrap of paper into my hand. Now I sat down and read it: ‘I will save to buy a flat in Hong Kong. If I have flat in Hong Kong, you need not worry about when you are old.’ It was signed, ‘Your son, Ah Po.’

  Presently, I opened my notebook to write a close to this first phase of my new Odyssey. Flipping back through the pages, I came across a barroom song I must have jotted down some time before in a Wan Chai pub similar to the Old China Hand. I read it again now, remembering that it went with a well-known hymn tune, although which one it was escaped me for the moment.

  Me no likee Blitish sailor.

  Yankee sailor come ashore!

  Me no likee Blitish sailor,

  Yankee pay one dollar more.

  Yankee call me, ‘Honey darlin”,

  Blitish call me ‘Fuckin’ whore’.

  Me no likee Blitish sailor.

  Yankee, won’t you come ashore?

  Yankee always wear Flench letter,

  Blitish never wear fuck all.

  Me no likee Blitish sailor.

  Yankee, won’t you come ashore?

  Yankee sailor fuck and finish,

  Blitish fuck for ever more.

  Me no likee Blitish sailor!

  Yankee, won’t you come ashore?

  It wasn’t Kipling, but it brought me back into the no-nonsense world of ships and seamen. It reminded me just how near I was to launching myself once more into a world unknown to me except in years of reading. Tomorrow – tomorrow! – my mid-sea course, like that of the south wind, would be taken

  Over a thousand islands lost in an idle main,

  Where the sea-egg flames on the coral

  and the long backed breakers croon

  Their endless ocean legends to the lazy, locked lagoon.

  That was Kipling and the recollection of it made me close my notebook, drink a last whisky for luck, and walk across Hennessy Road to the Luk Kwok, oblivious of the wet, greasy streets and the falling drizzle, my mind afloat on sunlit seas that stretched as far as imagining could follow.

  Six

  David Walker had written very clearly on a piece of office paper: ‘Chengtu Buoy A8, 1700 hours, 1900 hours, 2300 hours, Blake Pier.’ This meant that the walla-walla, or sampan, that effected a water taxi service from the shore to the ship set out at those hours from that pier, almost opposite Swire House. But when I walked in the rain to the pier, a little before 1900 hours, I found a confusion of sampans bobbing and rolling in the darkness. Blake Pier is quite long and has a leg to it like a letter L. Sampans came and went from a number of waterlogged steps, where huddles of seamen of various nationalities waited to be taken off to ships in the harbour. A wind blew; it was raining hard. Where was the walla-walla for the Chengtu?

  By 1930 I had decided that it wasn’t coming or that I had misheard some instruction from David Walker. None of the Chinese whose unsmiling heads poked out of the office kiosks at the entrance to the pier knew anything about the Chengtu. So I searched around and found an old man and a boy on a sampan that danced alongside some slippery stone steps, bargained with them for a minute or two, agreed to pay 30 Hong Kong dollars, and at last we swayed away in a roaring cloud of oil fumes across the choppy waters of the harbour.

  Buoy A8: Chengtu wa
s there, only partly visible, her foredeck and the forepart of her accommodation and bridge wings illuminated by the arc lamps on her derricks, the rest of her in shadow. A modest-sized container ship with pleasant lines, she lay in the rain, nuzzled by barges like a sow with piglets. The walla-walla rose and fell at the bottom step of a steep gangway slippery with rain, and I wondered how I could lug my metal suitcase up there. Luckily, a Filipino seaman appeared almost at once, peering over the rail, calling ‘Ok-aa-ee!’ A dark, stocky figure in a lumberjack’s plaid shirt descended the gangway, grabbed the case as if it were a matchbox and shouldered it up to the deck. I tossed some money to the old boatman and followed the Filipino up the gangway with my zipbag. The walla-walla disappeared in sheets of rain.

  Ships at rest in harbour are cold, indifferent things. They can seem positively hostile to strangers. The first thing to do is to find the chief officer or the captain. You need to explain your presence. Probably you have to sign a waiver, exempting the shipping company from any responsibility should you fall down a companionway and break your neck. A cabin is a refuge to dump your bags in. Once you have a bunk, you somehow feel safe. Someone must show you to it, whatever it is – the owner’s cabin, a pilot’s cabin, or a cubbyhole somewhere to accommodate a supernumerary officer.

  The trouble is that when a ship is in port a temporary chaos usually reigns aboard her. As I manhandled my suitcase from deck to deck, interlopers from the shore – large men made larger by padded windcheaters, their battered Chinese faces crowned by white or yellow hard hats, customs officers, watchmen – jostled me on the narrow stairways and blundered against me in the alleyways. As usual on a night before sailing, most of the stewards were ashore; there were dirty sheets on my bunk when I found it at last – steered there by a Filipino mess hand in a singlet with a 7-Up can in his hand – and used towels in the shower. At such times, you’re relieved if a kind chief officer takes time from supervising the loading of the ship to offer you a beer from the refrigerator in his cabin, or in the ship’s bar, if there is one. The chief officer appeared in his cabin – at last – wet, in white overalls. The Chengtu had her bar, and without hesitation he hurried me to it. ‘Jim Bird,’ he said, laying his hard hat and gloves down on one of three or four orange bar stools. The bar looked onto the foredeck; it had a settee and, on the bulkheads, prints of old Hong Kong and a wooden Papuan mask it would be better not to meet on a dark night. ‘Glad to know you.’

  Jim Bird was a good sort of man to meet on a rainy night in a strange ship. Dark-haired, relaxed, good-humoured and well-named – he was as chatty as a mynah. He looked a bit like one, too, hopping about, cocking his head to one side and fixing me with bright, friendly eyes. He talked rather like a ticker tape flashing out the latest stock market reports. Loading would soon stop – or at least it should – and resume early tomorrow morning. We should sail about eleven o’clock. Captain was ashore, but would be back soon. Julian Gomersall by name. Filipino crew. Not a bad lot. What about a beer? A San Mig or an Aussie Four X? Make yourself at home. He left me with the beer and peace of mind, and soon I heard his quickfire voice addressing the Chinese stevedores on the foredeck among the containers.

  I wandered out on deck myself and watched derricks swinging 20-foot-square containers onto the forepart of the ship. The rain pelted down; the decks were slippery with it. The open hatches gaped blackly in the dangerous shadows thrown by the huge metal boxes. Gently, meticulously, the Chinese stevedores eased them into their slots. How easy to be nudged down a hatch; or have a hand pulped. A slip on the greasy deck, a moment’s inattention – that’s all it needed. Why weren’t people crushed to death all the time?

  The captain came on board quite soon; a tall, youngish man, with a neat, fair beard and a pleasant, decided manner. He was welcoming. ‘Weren’t you on the Hupeh?’ he said. ‘With old Ralphie?’ I admitted that, two years before, I had sailed from Manila to Hong Kong in the China Navigation’s vessel Hupeh, and recalled her – and Ralph Kennet – with affection. It was pleasant to be on another ship from the same company; the same family, so to speak. Pleasanter still to know that in a few hours I would be on the way to the South Seas.

  Not much later, lying on my bunk, I heard someone strolling down the alleyway outside, and a voice singing:

  Father’s got an anal stricture,

  Mother’s got a fallen womb….

  The tune was that of a well-known hymn – the Old Hundredth, I think. I fell asleep happy, as I always am when safely in a berth and we sail next day.

  *

  Next morning, my notes recorded:

  Three blasts on a ship’s hooter. The captain on the bridge: ‘Hard a-starboard! Slow ahead!’ We move. 11 a.m. as Jim Bird had forecast. The second officer said in a Geordie accent to the pilot: ‘Chengtu. Bound East to Wewak.’ The pilot is a Chinese dressed in a dark suit and striped tie. He might be a commuter hitching a lift to an office, not a man taking an expensive ship out to sea through cluttered corridors of shipping.

  Captain G. comes out to me on the bridge wing, pointing, ‘There’s the old Hupeh. Not ours any more. We’ve sold her.’ Ah, yes; I recognize the long, satisfactory silhouette, the familiar high-flared bows I first saw in Manila harbour. A Panamanian flag flies at her stern now, I’m sad to see. Sadder still, she is getting a new name. I can see the last letters of her old one, U P E H, not quite painted over. ‘Looks like a real ship, doesn’t she?’ Gomersall says. Yes, she does; because she’s not a container ship. Say what you like, container ships, however sleek, are less like ships than floating boxes of red, yellow and blue children’s bricks.

  Chengtu – our sleek box of bricks – swings behind the Ibn al Nafees, a grey and white bulk carrier, registration: Doha. Once more, as I had so recently done from the old Shanghai, I watch the skyscrapers, the proud symbols of affluent Hong Kong, slide grandly by. Level with Star Ferry: ‘Full ahead.’ Is Wei Kuen, or Ah Po, or Thomas Dor looking out to see us pass? A crag with a Union Jack on a tall pole. A golf club with red roofs. Fishing vessels; sampans with cold men in greasy coats and chow-like dogs with curling tails barking at us from their slippery decks. Silently, the islands draw aside to let us pass, green with grey ribs of rock and scree, like Scotland. You expect to see sheep.

  Now into the widening sea, heading SE. ‘Midships steady.’ Chengtu begins to nod her head, to quiver with excitement like a horse released from confinement in a paddock onto open downland. The South China Sea, in friendly mood, meets us with a gentle swell, a strong hand, cradling and lifting our bows. The green water, frothing alongside, begins to hiss, ‘Come south … s-s-south … s-s-s-south.’

  When I introduced myself to the second officer he winced away, saying, ‘Excuse me,’ not offering his hand to shake but showing me instead a white lump of bandage over the tip of his middle finger. ‘Caught it between a container and the spreader,’ he explained, ‘on the Chengtu’s last voyage.’ A spreader is the rectangular metal frame that clamps onto container tops and lifts or lowers them.

  ‘Nail gone?’

  ‘Nail?’ He held it up with a resentful expression. ‘The whole tip’s bloody gone.’ He seemed remarkably unconcerned. He told me that the first officer had broken an arm and one or two ribs and damaged his left leg in a fall down a hold on the same voyage. ‘I thought he was a goner.’ The second officer’s name was Ken Hindmarsh, a young Geordie with rust-coloured shining hair and beard and appropriately pallid skin.

  The Chengtu carried eleven officers and thirteen crew. At the first midday meal I met the chief engineer, Tony Darby, a grey-headed man with a belly like a cheerful Buddha, grey moustache and a Yorkshire accent, who, like Captain Ralph Kennet of the Hupeh, came from Don-caster, which is how he pronounced it. As the Filipino steward carried in steaks, the conversation turned to what I came to recognize as a familiar topic at sea – the dehumanizing of life at sea by containers, computerization, cost efficiency. Ships don’t linger in port as they used to. Shore leave is minimal, perhaps merely
time for a beer. Schedules are calculated in hours, not days.

  ‘No, sea life is not what it used to be,’ said Tony. He shook his head. In the old days, too, the senior officers had their own stewards, and ships had crews of sixty men, not twelve.

  ‘You could join the Merchant Navy and see the world once,’ Jim Bird said. He poured a liberal dollop of salad cream over his steak.

  ‘Salad cream on steak! Christ Almighty!’ Gomersall cried in mock surprise. ‘What an abominable taste!’

  ‘Do you mind?’ Bird said smoothly, and went on: ‘Now a ship can be into a port in the morning and out again in the evening. All sorts of exotic-sounding ports and never a chance to see them. That’s why young men don’t want to join as they used to. Join the Navy and what do you see? You see the sea.’ He poured more salad cream. ‘We’re bloody tram drivers, that’s what we are.’

  ‘You’ll be in bloody hospital if you go on eating like that,’ Gomersall said, winking at me.

  I mentioned the second officer’s mutilated middle finger. ‘Caught by the container,’ said Gomersall. ‘It came off in his glove. The mate – not this one’ – he flicked a thumb at Bird, who smiled and said, ‘Oh, thanks’ – ‘brought it up to him still in the glove, with ceremony like, as if he were serving him a perfectly cooked boiled egg, and said, “Your finger, I believe.”’

  Darby broke in, with relish, ‘Down in Australia the other day they were moving containers in a hold with a fork lift truck, and they didn’t see a young cadet between the side of the hold and the container.’ He brandished the ketchup bottle. ‘A nice lad. It crushed him. Cr-oo-shed ’im.’ Glog-glog-glog – the ketchup slopped thickly like blood onto his plate. ‘They heard the screams, but it was too late!’