Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  ‘I’ve never been buggered about by the Russian captains and pursers,’ he said. ‘Never. They’re very businesslike. They need to be. They earn a lot of hard currency with these cruises. And there’s the prestige of having these big ships with the hammer and sickle on them going all round the world.’

  He raised a smile and a beckoning finger for Ludmilla to bring us the same again. ‘Don’t get me wrong, old boy. I’m not a Commie. Far from it.’

  ‘I didn’t think you were, somehow.’

  ‘Frankly, y’know, these Russians don’t give a damn about anyone’s politics on these ships – except their own, of course. No one talks politics. It’d be out of place, anyway. I get on very well with Russians on a business basis. We drink together. A man like Captain Vitaly Segal is simply a good sailor as far as I’m concerned.’

  Ludmilla breezed up and laid two brandies down in front of us. ‘Thank you very much, m’dear,’ said Eric, smiling at her, and she gave us both a warm smile back.

  Across the bar a tall man with strong straight-back hair the colour of gun metal, a white military moustache and a fierce red face was playing cards with a good-looking woman and a couple I hardly noticed. He looked like C. Aubrey Smith as Colonel Sapt in the film of The Prisoner of Zenda, about to see Rudolph crowned king of Strelsau if it was the last thing he did.

  ‘Cheers, old boy,’ Eric was saying, raising his glass. ‘We might go up to the White Nights later. I think I ought to show you that.’

  At the door of the White Nights nightclub, a fat old man with a paunch said pleasantly, ‘Good evenink. Your first night on this ship, I belief. Most extraordinary. Pray may I ask you who gave you the go-ahead to come aboard?’ He paused. ‘You haf permission been granted, I suppose, ja?’

  Would this never end?

  ‘Mr Young is with me,’ Eric said, pushing ahead.

  Provoked, I smiled at the man. ‘Actually, it’s very simple … as long as you don’t spread it around. The captain and I were at school together. That’s why I call him Vitaly.’

  ‘At school together …?’

  We left him with his mouth open.

  The White Nights was better lit than the Pago Bar had been and far better aired. Soft taped music filled the plushy little room: a tiny bandstand at one end, a bar discreetly lit by pink neon at the other, a dance floor, tables and chairs, curtained windows in between. We had a drink or two. People came and went. A few danced. Eric indicated a female singer, accompanied by a pianist, who was singing ‘Embraceable You’. ‘Ricci from Lancashire,’ he said.

  Two hours later I was glad to get to bed. I seemed to have floated from one universe into quite another within a very few hours.

  *

  ‘Have you not heard the singer in the White Nights?’ It was the pleasant-looking lady at my new table in the dining room. ‘She is good. But she weeps a liddle.’

  She was Austrian, she said, from Vienna. The girl with the sweet face and short gold-blonde hair was her daughter, Margit. They were nothing like the interrogators of the night before. Nor were the other two at the table, a young German couple called Pieter and Karol. I explained my sudden presence and added a bit of last night’s dinner conversation.

  ‘Pay no attention,’ the mother from Vienna said.

  And Pieter nodded. ‘There are some pretty funny people aboard.’

  Karol said quietly, ‘This lady has had a very great misfortune.’

  I looked at the Austrian. She was embarrassed and murmured, softly, ‘No, no, no.’

  ‘Ja. Her husband….’

  She finished the sentence herself. ‘It is true. My husband died on this voyage. Some weeks ago. Just before Madang in Papua New Guinea. It was very sudden.’

  Karol said, ‘There was a … a burial at sea.’

  ‘Yes, at sea. My daughter came out by plane immediately and met me at Madang. My husband used to sit where you are sitting.’ She was quite composed. She just thought I might as well know.

  The girl said, ‘Mamma wanted to continue her voyage. It is better.’

  ‘I am sure it is,’ I said.

  ‘Many people come on these trips to die,’ Pieter said when mother and daughter had left us. Then he and Karol rose, too, smiling, ‘Now we go for a tiring morning of Scrabble and such.’

  Perhaps I would choose a cruise ship to die on, I thought. No fuss, no mess – a quiet splash in the ocean at three o’clock in the morning.

  Thirty

  I was drinking coffee next day with Eric Hart at his desk in the cruise director’s office when the door opened and a large, sixty-ish man with flowing locks came in accompanied by a tall woman. They stood just inside the door.

  ‘Good morning, excuse me and my wife, please. Oh, Eric, we thought maybe you are wanting some news from the Falkland Islands. I believe you have no radio.’

  ‘Quite right, quite right, old boy,’ Eric said. He dropped the monocle from his eye.

  ‘Ah – then we can tell you. I am afraid – very bad news.’ The man shook his head with a sort of Schadenfreude, like a sadistic doctor announcing a terminal disease. ‘Several British warships sunken. One aircraft carrier gravely damaged. British forces trying to land on the islands also badly damaged.’

  His wife turned her mouth down at the corners. ‘We feel you should know, Eric.’

  They disappeared, leaving Eric and me to stare at each other in dismay.

  ‘I say, old boy,’ after a moment. ‘Seems pretty bad, eh? Bit of a British balls-up, that’s what it sounds like.’

  ‘It may not be accurate, Eric. We don’t know where the news comes from. Let’s just wait and see what comes next.’

  ‘Right-o, old boy. We’ll let each other know.’

  On the sun deck elderly Germans of all shapes and sizes lay or sat on long chairs in the sun, gossiping, playing cards, reading or knitting. I took a chair and opened Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle.

  ‘English?’ A rumpled old German lying in a deckchair hailed me. ‘I like Englishmen. My sister married one. Lives now in Maidenhead. Tudor-style. Very nice.’ He at least was not going to give me hell. He travelled a lot, he said, painting, showing his work here and there. Modest stuff. He would have a little show on board in a day or two.

  He had had a rough war, he said later, but without the least rancour or self-pity. Just matter-of-fact.

  ‘The Russian and Polish fronts. At Monte Cassino I was also. Then the Americans made me their prisoner in Holland.’ He laughed. ‘I was a tank driver. The American soldiers came up to me and said, “Hands up, you goddam fucking Nazi.” So I put my hands up double quick, ja? The tank drivers wore uniform black like the SS. So I threw it away – ach!’ He shook his head. Now he lived some of the time in the Richmond Hotel in Paris. He knew England and liked America. ‘All that fighting for nothing.’ I saw his exhibition in the saloon: pale water colours of Penang, beaches in Sri Lanka, junks in Hong Kong, Indian fakirs – and a sketch of a fat German sunbathing entitled ‘Deutscher fakir’.

  *

  As the days went by the weather changed, becoming grey and perceptibly harsher. There was appreciably less sun, and the high winds at night had a cutting edge to them far sharper than the winds that rattled the bamboos at Tolu’s house. The sea took on a bleak look and I felt the Pacific I knew was dying under the huge, thrusting keel of the Alexander Pushkin.

  Days are long on a cruise ship – at least they are to me – in spite of all the arrangements to keep passengers amused. It was lucky I had brought my own few books; in the ‘Kalinka’ shop everything, reasonably enough, was in German. The only author I recognized was Ambrose Bierce but his solitary book was translated as Die Spottdrossel and I couldn’t read it. Bookholders attached to the bulkheads near the stairs offered free copies of Lenin on Cooperation, and L.I. Brezhnev’s To Stop the Arms Race; To Prevent Nuclear War; To Start Disarmament, but I couldn’t get far with them. Dancing lessons were available, and Pieter and Karol were enthusiastic learners. I watched one of their energeti
c – almost erotic – tangos in the saloon; they waved to me when I applauded. There was wine tasting, too. People became muzzily chatty on Russian wines called Zinandali and Mukuzani, and I realized that many of the passengers were ordinary, amiable folk. Some foolhardy souls, of course, overdid the Ararat brandy or the deadly Peper or Ochotschnitschji vodka and spent the next few hours hanging over the ship’s rail. Unfortunately these did not include our self-appointed war reporters.

  Nearly every morning that smiling German couple put their heads round Eric’s door. ‘You have heard the news? Five more warships sunken. The Canberra badly hit. Thatcher is now having to send urgently heavy troop reinforcements.’

  I felt puzzled and anxious, and even Eric’s high spirits waned. In our gloom we sought the seclusion of the Friendship Bar and the attentions of the glorious Ludmilla. When she took her time off, the young barman, Dmitri, would play videotapes of Tom and Jerry cartoons, howling with laughter until Ludmilla came sailing back and turned them off with a grand, contemptuous gesture, like a duchess putting the cat out. Eric and I agreed that the war news must be Argentine propaganda from Buenos Aires Radio, but we couldn’t be sure. And after a few days the Germans added a still more disconcerting clarification of their source – ‘It is hunky-dory from the London Defence Ministry’s mouth, you can be sure!’

  ‘What on earth’s happening?’ Eric asked. ‘Looks bloody bad, old boy.’

  ‘Search me.’

  Without any other source of news, what were we to think? Eric had no radio – ‘Never had such a thing, old boy. To tell the truth, I was never much good with electrical gadgets.’ The Russian officers, presumably, knew what was happening; the electronic equipment on a ship like this could pick up details of a tribal war on Mars. But understandably no one else was regaled with the news from Radio Moscow – this ship was rigidly non-political and Eric was adamant that it was more than his job was worth to question the captain about how Britain was doing in the Falklands War. I saw his point.

  ‘More British troops killed. Troopships sunken. Many dead. A disaster. You have our wishes….’ As the daily litany of catastrophe continued we realized that if there really had been a terrible débâcle in the South Atlantic there would soon be a violent crisis at home – if indeed there hadn’t been one already. In imagination we saw Thatcher falling; Parliament in uproar; the country in economic ruin; riots. It would be a hundred times worse than the aftermath of the Suez fiasco. At this point thoughts of the final dissolution of Britain drove us back to Ludmilla.

  ‘Thank God you’re here, old boy.’ Eric said over his brandy, fiddling nervously with his bow tie. ‘I don’t think I could have borne all this uncertainty alone, surrounded by bloody-minded Germans.’ But he was the first to admit that almost any shipload of passengers – of any nationality – can be an appalling handful. ‘The Brits can be bad, too,’ he confessed. ‘They can be disgusting, actually. On the Baltica the British passengers marched round the deck singing “There’ll Always be an England”. The Russians looked at them as if they couldn’t express their contempt. And by the way, old boy, so did I.’

  ‘I never knew West Germans felt such an affinity with the Argentines, Eric. Did you?’

  ‘Well, I think they are Bavarians, old boy, some of them. Brought up around Hitler’s place – Berchtesgaden, was it? They’d have been between twenty and thirty years old during the war. Perhaps one or two were Hitler Youths. They wouldn’t care for the British anyway. Remember, we sank their Grand Fleet off the Falklands in 1915. Drowned their Admiral Graf von Spee – remember, old boy? The word “Falklands” might trigger some nasty ideas about us in German minds.’ I had forgotten that story of a long time ago, a brave one for both sides. Perhaps the spirits of von Spee and his British adversary, Vice-Admiral Sturdee, were among us.

  On the third night Eric and I went to the White Nights nightclub for a late nightcap and Ricci, the singer, came to our table when her act was over.

  ‘You are a couple of darling Englishmen to turn up and clap. Keep the flag flying, eh?’ Ericoffered her a drink and when it came she said, ‘Cheers! I must say cheers, mustn’t I, love? For the old country’s sake, darling.’

  ‘Won’t you sing some more?’ Eric said.

  ‘I’m only expected to sing twenty-five minutes and that’s it. But to meet an Englishman, what a treat. You know what I really want to sing for you – “My Old Man Said Follow the Van”. But we’ve got all these Germans, that’s the trouble.’ She waved at a large woman in a caftan at the bar, and called to a man at another table, ‘Hello, Heinz. That last song was for you, love.’

  After a while she said, ‘I don’t go much on some of these Germans – though Heinz over there is all right. Some are all hoity-toity; they think they can say anything they like to me. Ridiculous cheek. See that fat old girl in the caftan?’ She jerked her head towards the bar. ‘In good old showbiz language, she’s a bike, darlings. If ever I saw one. And I did.’

  ‘A what, m’ dear?’ Eric asked.

  ‘A bike, love. You know – something that’s always getting ridden. Get the joke? Sorry about that.’

  Ricci was attractive, though no longer in her first youth. She had been through the mill, she said. ‘The north-east of England, Birmingham – oh, I love Birmingham – and Manchester. And South Wales. I’ve had some good times in Swansea and Llantrisant. And Porthcawl, too.’ Another drink came, and in a while she said, ‘Oh, all right, darlings, I’ll sing just one. You’ll probably go to sleep.’ But she sang Jerome Kern’s ‘My Bill’ very well, accompanied by her French pianist.

  ‘You darling Englishmen. And I’ve got the toothache as well.’ After a lot more talk: ‘You will come to see me, won’t you, in Cardiff or anywhere? At the stage door.’

  ‘We’ll come and buy you lots of drinks,’ I said.

  ‘That’ll be lovely. Well, people will know my name. You can ask. Including Lord Delfont. That’s Bernie Delfont, you’ve heard of him, love. He knows me all right.’

  ‘I’ll give a good rap on your dressing room door,’ Eric said gallantly, twirling his monocle.

  She lowered her eyelashes and her voice. ‘I’ll bet you will, you old love.’

  Ricci was a good person to meet in the White Nights at the end of a long day’s war reporting from cold-eyed Germans. She, too, had had a ‘Falklands incident’. ‘Bloody cheek! Two Germans, man and woman, came up to me and said, “What is it about the English! Why do they always want to fight someone?”’

  Eric spluttered, ‘Damned sauce!’

  Ricci laughed. ‘I gave him sauce, don’t you worry, my darling. I said, “Oh – so Adolf Hitler was a bleeding pacifist, was he?” They were furious. Said they’d boycott my next show. As if I cared.’

  ‘She’s got plenty of pluck, Ricci, hasn’t she?’ Eric said with warm approval as we went to our cabins. I had to agree she had.

  *

  I had forgotten about the magician whom Diana, the beautiful New Yorker, had said on my first evening on board was her husband. A few nights later, there was Mo performing in the ship’s cabaret. He was good – or rather, they both were; they called their act the Molins, producing budgerigars and rabbits from unlikely places and making them disappear again in an impressively casual way.

  Mo came from Reading, and his real name was Maurice Weller. He had once been a professional footballer, he told me, but was badly injured somehow and drifted into magic – that was the way he put it. He and Diana had met while he was touring the Bahamas, entertaining passengers on a different cruise ship. ‘She was a nurse,’ he said, ‘and I had quite a few problems with my health just then – sore throats, cut fingers, a nail in my foot. Diana was always getting my trousers down to give me injections. Well, after a while we bloomin’ well had to get married.’ He laughed.

  The whole act was like a family affair. Showing me round their cages below decks, Mo spoke, to the birds and animals as if they were his children.

  ‘He’s a funny chap, that white rab
bit there. Fred. He’s been a bit too nervous up to now. Oh no, I never give rabbits aspirins, though some people do, and I never clip the birds’ wings neither.’ Mo stroked a pair of budgies, one purple, one white. ‘They were born in Hong Kong. And these two, look,’ he added fondly, ‘they were nothing more than eggs last time we came through the Panama Canal.’ Apart from the budgerigars and the rabbits, there was a full dovecot. ‘Java doves,’ Mo said. ‘Wonderful birds, quite hard to find. They’ve no nerves, y’see. You wave newspapers at ’em, clap your hands under their beaks, anything. It’s like training police horses. I’ve had ’em eight years. I spray ’em with a little spray now and again. To kill the mites, y’know.’

  *

  We were getting near South America. The mornings were misty now. Booby birds began to appear round the ship; dozens of huge white creatures gliding sedately or folding their wings and diving into the water like collapsed umbrellas.