Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  Shem, the mate, like the chief, is tubby, unbearded and very black. After breakfast, he sits on the steering gear housing, silent, frowning and threading fish hooks, and sways about alarmingly much of the time, as if drunk – which he can’t be because he is a Seventh Day Adventist. The rest are Anglicans, I think, including Reginald, a greaser who is strangely clean for a greaser, and who moons about like a bewildered phantom everywhere but in the engine room. Reginald’s long, mournful face is as expressionless as a watertight door. His attention focuses exclusively round his shiny metal pipe which he jams in his mouth unsmoked (pipes seem de rigueur on the Ann – only John the captain and Jehovah don’t smoke or chew tobacco). Seated on deck, Reginald stares at the sea. ‘Like one?’ – I hand him a biscuit. His eyes turn to me like grey pebbles. He slowly takes the biscuit – looks at it closely, tries to bite into it, fails, breaks its, eats the smaller bits. When I mention his trance-like condition to Captain John, he says enigmatically, ‘Oh, he’s got his pipe.’

  Under my yellowing pillow I found a book. Called Health and Happiness, it was published by Inspiration Books, Phoenix, Arizona. It was an Adventist publication, which is mysterious because George was an Anglican, or so he said. The book was full of instructions for good conduct. About dress, for example:

  The Bible teaches modesty in dress. ‘In manner also, that women adorn themselves modest apparel’ (I Tim. 2:9). This forbids display in dress, gaudy colors, profuse ornamentation. device designed to attract attention to the wearee is to excite admiration, is excluded from the modest apparel which God’s word enjoins….

  Another serious evil is the wearing of skirts so that their weight must be sustained by the hips. This heavy weight, pressing up on the internal organs, drags them downward, and causes weakness in the stomach.

  For some time, I tried to grasp the physiological sense of that passage, but failed. Other passages spoke of everyone’s ‘sacred duty’ to cook ‘healthful’ food: ‘Cheese is wholly unfit for food.’ The book had no time for drinkers –‘A steamer is run aground and passengers and crew find a watery grave. When the matter is investigated’ – this was stated as an inevitable rule of life at sea – ‘it is found that someone at an important post was under the influence of drink.’ These words were underlined in red pencil. A stamp on the title page said the book belonged to ‘Kopin Adventist School’. Never mind: the book had nothing to say against stealing.

  *

  The rain hammered down, raising steam from the surface of the sea. The second morning, James looked all in. ‘The captain gave me a choice of places to sleep last night. The minuscule floor of the wheelhouse, the sodden deck over the stern, or the crew’s food-encrusted dining table again. I didn’t fancy the wheelhouse with Jehovah breaking wind there at the wheel, picking his nose and flicking it all over me, so I took to the table again.’ He looked bleary, like a tramp after a hard night on the Thames Embankment.

  ‘James, I hope you’re going to get used to this.’ I was feeling thoroughly guilty now about my comparatively luxurious cabin. Should I offer to lend it to him every other night?

  ‘Oh, yes, I’ll get used to it. It was just the noise last night –! Jehovah came down later, crashed into the galley door and banged about, gulping handfuls of rice and tuna, slamming the fridge door, and pouring water down his throat like a sanitary inspector pouring disinfectant down a drain.’

  ‘Poor Jehovah. Poor you.’

  ‘Do you know, when he switched the light on in the galley, there was a bloody great rustling as an army of feeding cockroaches dashed into dark corners to hide.’

  I sneaked into the galley myself to have a look at it when the cook wasn’t around. I found no army of cockroaches, only half a dozen or so grazing in the sink, who looked up uneasily and waved their antennae at me. I had time for a glimpse of the contents of the fridge – two filthy fruit juice cartons, some mouldy bread, a half-eaten tin of butter, half a coconut, and a good deal of grime – before the mighty bulk of the cook suddenly and silently filled the doorway. He stared at me with his knife in his fist; I muttered something placatory and slipped past him, feeling like a schoolboy caught in an orchard. I hurried to my cabin and returned with an armful of tinned food and rice in a paper bag. Laying it all before the cook, as if I were a terrified devotee assuaging a sulky god, ‘Please take what you want,’ I said, with a weak smile. He accepted the offering with a grunt but no more, and slowly stacked the tins on a shelf; while his back was turned I left him again. After the Dwarf and Jehovah, I mentally added a new name – the Cannibal Cook.

  Bathing on the Ann was done in a bare room with a pump and a plastic bucket encrusted with heaven knows what. I pumped water into the bowl and sluiced it over my head, while my feet slid around on the tilting floor. The doorknob rattled unceasingly as members of the crew tried to get in to take their turn – to give them their due, they loved washing. My thoughts turned to school bathrooms I had known, and foot fungus. The toilet required skill. It seemed essential not to sit on the discoloured, violin-shaped lavatory bowl fixed low in the rust and dirt of a bulkhead. You tried to straddle the rim of the bowl without touching it, like a jockey standing in his stirrups, but it took a champion jockey’s strength in the thighs to maintain this half crouch for more than five minutes at a time, particularly when the deck was corkscrewing under you like a temperamental racehorse. Sometimes I just squatted there in agony, paralysed by cramp. I am sure these few days of exercise put an inch on my thigh muscles, even though I learnt to take some of my weight off them by clinging to the heavy pump-handle with which the toilet was flushed. It was not a place to loiter in and read a book. I paused only long enough to scatter quantities of Harpic – even on myself – and fled from the tiny, smelly sweatbox like a bow-legged submariner leaving an escape hatch, exhaling with a whoosh the breath I had held while inside it until I felt my lungs would burst.

  Among these seagoing, churchgoing teetotallers James and I were properly circumspect about our drinking. When the mood for a tot was on us, we retired discreetly behind the dingy curtain of my tiny cabin – it was far too hot to shut the door – to sit sweating side by side on the bunk over pegs of my gin or his whisky out of plastic mugs.

  James had been at Eton and had come out to the Pacific for the adventure, I think. He had done quite a lot of adventuring already, and it was experience that had made him more nervous than I was of the rumours in Honiara of the cyclone ahead. He had spent ten weeks in a rust-bucket not unlike the Ann, puttering about Pacific islands at one to five knots, a slave to the whim of storms and half-cock engines.

  ‘Why do you do it, James, if you fear and dislike the sea?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ he said – and I, who fear the sea without disliking it, could understand.

  He had travelled a good deal in pursuit of what he called ‘The Old Buffers of the Islands’ – retired Europeans who still cling, like elderly crustaceans, to the edge of the Pacific lagoons rather as the survivors of the British Raj cling to their bungalows in Simla or Hyderabad. To his surprise, he had found many of them rather dull – ‘as boring as old men in a golf club’. They seemed to have spent all those decades between house, office and club never meeting anyone or hearing anything of interest, or not remembering if they had. They hadn’t had much to do with the natives either. Nevertheless, he might write a series of articles on them some time, if he found enough material.

  It was not a sense of adventure that had brought James aboard the Ann, but the need to get to Suva to claim a hefty refund on a ticket from an airline that might be going broke. In any case he was an admirable companion, easy-going and humorous, and to my relief he bore no grudge for my occupation of George’s cabin. He did, however, suffer from a permanent itch to read the ship’s barometer. Having done so that first morning, humour left his face. ‘It’s fallen to a thousand,’ he told me gloomily. Anything below a thousand millibars, I knew, meant trouble ahead – very likely a typhoon, or cyclone as they were called
in the Pacific.

  I looked nervously at the sea. The swell looked harmless enough at present, and the sky was an amiable blue, lightly scattered with clouds. John the captain was unconcerned. ‘It should be a good voyage,’ he said in his calm voice. The Ann was a tiny little thing, but in a cyclone a small ship can sometimes be better than a large one – a big, long ship could find herself suspended by a wave fore and aft and then her midships, unsupported, would go – snap! Of course, it would be very uncomfortable and dangerous for the Ann to run into a cyclone. (Quite an understatement, I thought.) Uncomfortable – oh, yes…. About the falling barometer, he replied, ‘To me it still says a thousand and four. If it had fallen more, we would be feeling a strong, bad wind, y’know. And we’d see a line of cloud over there’ – he pointed to the north-eastern horizon. That sounded reassuring.

  But James was not in the mood for reassurance. ‘This awning won’t last long in a 175-mile-an-hour wind,’ he said in graveyard tones, jerking a thumb at the plastic covering over the stern.

  ‘I believe you’re trying to worry me, James.’

  Ulawa Island in the Santa Cruz group was our last call before the long hop to Fiji. We had to come in for official ‘clearance’ before leaving the Solomons for good, and anchored some way off a tiny wharf in a horseshoe bay. A customs man in shirt and trousers and a uniformed policeman stood watching us from the shore, surrounded by a small group of men and women.

  I found Jehovah at my elbow. ‘Ooh, boss,’ he said, lasciviously darting his tongue around his great lips and pointing at the women. ‘Let me spy for lady.’ He swivelled my glasses wildly about, before focusing on two girls. ‘Ooooh, look, look, I see lady,’ he cried, exploding into wild laughter, and began frenetically to pick his nose with the fervent concentration of a pauper delving for buried treasure. It was an hour before our business with customs was complete. We left as white lightning flickered on the rain around us, and seagulls came to inspect us like vultures sizing up a dying sheep.

  We moved into the wider ocean.

  Jehovah was at regular, screaming verbal odds with Daniel, another deckhand, a Seventh Day Adventist like Shem. From time to time shrieks of glee and falsetto cries of anger, delight or pain – who knew? – arose from the crew’s cramped and airless quarters, causing the Dwarf to deepen his habitual frown, take his pipe from his bearded lips and look vengeful.

  These disturbances reached unusual Crescendos when either Jehovah or Daniel had to shake a leg to take his turn on watch. I found Jehovah glumly nursing a bruised cheek. ‘What’s the matter, Richard?’

  ‘Daniel he killim me.’

  ‘But why he hit you?’

  ‘I pull him penis,’ Jehovah unsmilingly replied.

  On another occasion, James said he had jumped off the crew’s dining table in panic, woken by howls so inhuman that he feared a mutiny had occurred, or that the Cannibal Cook had run amok. But there was no blood. Only Jehovah – who had decided once again to wake Daniel for duty by roughly seizing his genitals. Daniel had been serenely dreaming, flat on his back, snoring and defenceless, in nothing but a pair of moth-holed purple briefs, and the screams were appalling, James reported. That seemed a very serious escalation of the conflict. There appeared to be growing reason to suppose that before long Jehovah would kill Daniel, or vice versa. But George, the genial third mate, reassured us: it was all in good fun, he said. ‘It’s love,’ he shrugged, indifferently.

  Despite the running battles I got along well enough with Jehovah and Daniel. Jehovah was glad to wash my shirt and towel, and I gave him tinned sardines in return. His relations with James were less amicable. Early on in the voyage he mistakenly thought that James had laughed at him – he had happened to pass near us as James made a laughing reference he wrongly thought was an insult. He had turned on James, a mask of fury, pointed to the mug in James’s hand, and shouted, ‘You drunk! Drunk!’ After that, whenever he was obliged to share the forehatch with him, James was likely to wake up to find himself edged onto the deck by the battering ram of Jehovah’s outsize buttocks. James took this with complete equanimity, only remarking, ‘Jehovah’s last name is Matangi. That means “strong wind”,’ adding, ‘appropriately enough.’

  Squalls multiplied over the North Fiji Basin. As if mellowed by the visit to his home village, the Dwarf, who had showed a distant contempt for his two white passengers, now showed pity. When the awning proved utterly inadequate in the rain, and the great downpours engulfed us on deck, he invited us to sit in his two-windowed cabin under the bridge. It was the Ann’s best cabin, modest but larger and lighter than the captain’s – for another thing, it contained the only chairs on the ship. His kindness came with a warning. We should expect bad weather two days out of Santa Cruz, he said, puffing darkly at his thimble-bowled pipe. It was usually bad there, he said. This led James to tell us about the storms on his only other rust-bucket voyage.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I took to my cabin,’ James said, ‘in terror.’

  ‘As bad as that?’

  ‘Well, Christmas and New Year had just passed and the Polynesian crew celebrated on the ship’s grog, and just went wild.’ The Dwarf removed the pipe from his bearded lips to purse them in disapproval.

  ‘And you didn’t join them?’ I asked.

  ‘Good God, no! I locked myself in and listened to the uproar raging up and down outside.’

  With a quick movement, the Dwarf smashed a cockroach on the bulkhead with his sandal.

  ‘Well,’ James went on, ‘just then the tail of a cyclone caught us good and proper. Big seas, breaking right over the old ship; a lot of rolling and pounding. One result – we had ten extra weeks at sea – ten. Phew!’

  ‘And the crew in the cyclone?’

  ‘They just went on raging up and down. I suppose the booze made them impervious to everything.

  ‘Odd thing,’ James went on, ‘before the cyclone a big bird, a booby, flew up from nowhere and perched on the winch forward. It must have been very tired, because a member of the crew just walked up and banged it on the head with a piece of rubber piping.’

  ‘You killed it?’

  ‘We cooked it.’

  Here the chief emitted a bark of unbelief or, possibly, of contempt.

  ‘Very nasty, too,’ James said.

  ‘To kill a booby or an albatross is almost a criminal act,’ I said severely.

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘James, you’ve heard of the Ancient Mariner? Terrible things happen if you kill an albatross.’

  ‘No wonder the company went broke soon after.’

  All three of us laughed now, watching raindrops like bullets bouncing off the Pacific.

  ‘Boobies,’ the chief engineer murmured to the smoking thimble of his pipe. I decided to assume the remark was not addressed to us.

  *

  On this noisy shipful of mission boys a passage in Asterisk’s Isles of Illusion came to mind à propos religion. Asterisk had decided to catechize his kitchen help, a ‘cheery ruffian’ and a mission-bred Christian. He did so thus:

  ‘Time you altogether dead-finish, Nirawa, where you go stop?’

  ‘Me no savvy, master. Missie [missionary] he speak body belong me go in ground, wind belong me go up-tree [on high, aloft, etc.]. Me think he speak altogether gammon too much. Me think time me fellow dead-finish me stop altogether same pig.’

  Jehovah happened to prance up to me on deck as I was examining a copy of St Mark’s Gospel I had bought in the Christian Bookshop in Honiara. In pidgin, this was entitled Gud Nuis Bulong Jisas Krais – Mak Hem I Raetem, and it began, ‘Hem nao Gud Nius bulong Jisas Krais, Pikinini bulong God.’ John the Baptist eating locusts and wild honey became: ‘Kaikai bulong hem, girshopa an wael hani.’ In pidgin, for the appearance of Jesus before Pilate you read: ‘Nao olketa soldia i tekem Jisas i go insaet long haos bulong gavna Paelet’; and for the crucifixion: ‘Olketa i nilam Jisas long Kros.’

  ‘Ha, you reading Holy Bible, master?’ Jeho
vah said. He was munching a mouthful of biscuits, and crumbs shot out between his great organ-stop teeth like soft shrapnel.

  ‘Yes, Richard,’ I said. ‘You are a Jehovah’s Witness, aren’t you? A pious man. Are there many in the Solomons?’

  ‘Oooh – many. Many Seventh Day Adventists, too.’

  He seemed vague about details of faith. ‘Adventists no eating meat and no eating fruits,’ he said indifferently. ‘Jehovah’s Witnesses eating meats and fruits.’

  Jehovah’s thick, wide lips opened and closed on an unceasing stream of utterance, often nothing more than abrupt, birdlike squawks – ‘eeh! eeh!’ When not in use his jaw hung open like an unlatched trap door. Now, leaning his ample buttocks on the ship’s rail, he was in danger of toppling backwards into the sea.

  ‘Hey, Richard,’ I said. ‘You fall in the sea, you drown. See this – “Jisas hem i wok abaot antap long wata”. You can’t walk on water, Richard – can you?’ I asked, and he staggered away, giggling.

  James had never stopped checking the barometer. It eased gradually down – it was at a thousand millibars again now. Long, slow, swells began lazily to lift and lower the Ann, almost to lull her with loving care – but this cradling movement, John the captain explained calmly, signified a distant but rapidly approaching menace. The languid swells were caused by some severe disturbance of the ocean many miles away. Soon James ran down to where I sat sweating on the forehatch, trying to catch a little breeze, and spluttered out more upsetting news still. The hourly radio weather reports from Hawaii were warning of not one cyclone, but two. The first was the one we had heard of in Honiara, gathering its strength south of us near New Caledonia, and expected to move north. Hawaii’s latest discovery was lurking somewhere near the Gilbert Islands, apparently deciding to swing south. We stood a very good chance of being caught like a very small nut in an elemental nutcracker halfway between the Santa Cruz group and Fiji, a very large area of ocean devoid of the smallest piece of land.