Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  ‘Small navy ships – they were my lot in the war – the Second War, mind. Minesweepers, corvettes, torpedo boats – that sort of thing. In ’43 I was around the Middle East a lot – Tobruk, Mersa Matruh, Port Said. I was never sunk. Luckily.’ He laughed and gave a little whistle. ‘Phew! 1943. Forty years ago and it doesn’t seem like it. Yet it’s all gone, hasn’t it, that forty years? In a flash. Frightening, really. The Royal Navy sent me to Hamburg at the end of the war to try to get the port running again. Terrible mess, it was. Took two years.’ Even while reminiscing, he stooped his white head over the auto-pilot, checked the compass bearing, ran his finger over the chart. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, peering into the radar, ‘I tell young men to make the most of their time – it’ll go like a flash, I say, although you don’t think so now. That’s what I tell ’em. Remember how the weeks at school used to drag?’ Newby went on. ‘You thought term would never end!’ He was never still … pacing … snatching up binoculars to stare at ships … checking … checking. Forty years ago he had been a man at war in the Middle East. Forty years ….

  ‘Ay, you thought the months would never end,’ Tom Newby said, bending over the chart.

  *

  As the Kaina ploughed northward towards the chillier Biscay seas the imminence of home drowned any anxiety about the weather, a feeling heightened by the homely good nature of the men around me. Above all, by the way they talked, keith sprinkled his conversation quite unself-consciously with English rhyming slang – ‘Harry Tate’ and ‘China Plate’ both meant ‘Mate’, and ‘Jack the Ripper’ meant ‘Skipper’. When I asked the skipper himself how he’d describe the present bumpy sea, Newby replied, ‘Oh, I’d say it’s “rather rather” at the moment. Slightly better than “rough”.’ And looking astern at a smaller, Russian ship making heavy weather he said, ‘I think we’ve got the legs of the Sovietsky, eh? Ay, I think so.’

  Frank, the second engineer, was another sceptical veteran of years in ramshackle ships. His looks reminded me of a rough-and-ready version of the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland: a doughy face as deeply creased as a crumpled pillow; thick eyebrows rearing up like questing black caterpillars; quiet, unenvious eyes. After the first day, we met regularly in Keith’s cramped, noisy berth to drink his vino or my whisky. Frank drank nothing. ‘Old Frank’s had half his stomach cut out,’ Keith explained. ‘Ulcers. All the rotten food he’s eaten on ships. There’s cooks on ships as cooks nothing but fried stuff. All fried. Or boiled. Terrible. Rots the stomach after years of it. It rotted old Frank’s.’

  ‘Tha’s right,’ said Frank in a matter-of-fact tone.

  They suited each other like a stage partnership. Even in the short time I was on the Kaina I came to recognize a scene or two from their act. Frank would forever wipe his thick glasses, play-acting crotchety, complaining, ‘Ah can’t see a bloody thing,’ and Keith would laugh at him, ‘’Course not. They’re coated with dirty bloody grease from your bloody engine room’ – or words to that effect. ‘Fook off.’ That was Frank’s way of signing off.

  They were delightfully, seedily British, almost of an earlier, harder, less neurotic age. From their bad teeth and unhealthy complexions to their coarse, deadpan humour, from Frank’s baggy, wide-stitched cardigans and old stained grey trousers to Keith’s dark blue pea-jacket and old-fashioned sailor’s blue cap, they called to mind stories by W. W. Jacobs of foggy ports and erring captains ‘daughters, and lines by Masefield on tramps in dirty Channel weather carrying cargoes of ironware and cheap tin trays. They brought back to me an early twentieth-century world in which sailors still carried ditty-boxes and parrots in cages; a world of greasy mess room plates, the cook’s thumbprint in the gravy, piled with fatty pork and waterlogged spuds and peas that had first been dried like dead men’s eyes and then drowned like unwanted puppies; of thick chunks of bread called ‘doorsteps’ smeared with beef dripping; of suet pudding called ‘Spotted dog’ you could have thrown overboard and anchored a Swansea collier to. A dingier world, maybe, but not one that, compared to today, need feel ashamed of itself. This was the way to come back to Blighty. Not on some spick-and-span, soulless, automatic container ship.

  ‘We’ll have to see what Biscay will do with us, eh?’ Keith said. ‘Can be bloody awful. Just my luck. But y’ never know.’

  In the event, the much-feared Biscay was little more than a cold, grey, bumpy pond. From the course pencilled daily by the captain or the mate on the wheelhouse chart I watched our progress across that temperamental chunk of water, from the north-west corner of Spain to the great lion-head boss of Cape Finisterre that guards the approach to the English Channel. I inspected the barometer for disastrous falls, searched the skies for malignant clouds, but the waters of Biscay continued ‘rather rather’. Through the monotonous hiss of our unexceptional bow-wave, France and Boulogne drew nearer.

  ‘Bou-log-nee. I must be up early to see that approach,’ said Keith. ‘“Not a whore in the house washed and the street full of randy sailors.”’

  ‘What on earth is that?’

  ‘Search me. Just a seaman’s expression meaning “very early”.’

  *

  So many ships were dodging about in these cluttered seas that we seemed to be part of a northbound convoy; an unmistakable sign that home was near. I began to feel impatient for the end, and understood why Wordsworth wrote an irritable poem about being sidetracked to Boulogne when he was particularly anxious to return to England –

  Why cast ye back upon the Gallic shore,

  Ye furious waves! a patriotic son

  Of England – who in hope her coast had won,

  His project crown’d, his pleasant travel o’er …?

  Up the Channel. Beacons and buoys and the skinny arm of a sea wall: Boulogne wavered before us in a haze. Tom Newby said to Keith at the wheel: ‘Keep her straight, if you have the strength. Oh, I forgot, Gavin. Don’t bother to wear a bow tie with your suit when we arrive. It’s not Sunday, don’t forget.’

  ‘You’ll be putting up your gold stripes, though?’

  ‘Oh, ay. The steward’s polishing ’em now.’

  We advanced on Boulogne behind a huge tanker, Calliope E.

  ‘Last time I was in Boulogne,’ Newby continued, ‘it was the first day of the liberation of the port from the Germans. I remember standing on the jetty watching the first Allied cargo ship coming in. She hit a magnetic mine and up she went. Pilot killed, and the captain. Two bodies in the water.’ He examined the sky. ‘Mild, isn’t it?’

  In a fine aura of spray, a cross-Channel hovercraft – the ferry from England – contoured the swell ahead of us, sidling into the opening between the nutcracker jaws of two harbour walls. Beyond, the dockside cranes of Boulogne nodded their heads as if performing some solemn ritual for the church on the hill. Suddenly my mind saw England, and the London I left for Shanghai. How easy it would have been to leave the Kaina here and buy a ticket on a Channel ferry to England. There was no need to go all the way to Plymouth, after all. But it would have been a poor, half-cock ending. Anyway, I was not in a mood to abandon ship.

  Boulogne was a long walk away from the wharf, so we ate on board. A damp, vegetable smell drifted from the galley in the sweatbox of the mess.

  ‘I’m bloody glad I’m not married to bloody Magda,’ Keith said over chicken, potatoes and cabbage. ‘I’d soon be doin’ time for bloody murder.’

  Framed in her serving hatch, Magda the cook stared at him through the steam as if she might cut off his head.

  ‘You thing!’ she shouted.

  *

  That afternoon, because everyone else was busy, I found myself alone with Magda in the galley, cadging an extra cup of tea.

  ‘No. I do not like working on ships,’ she said tartly when I asked her. ‘But there’s not so much work ashore.’ Her English was perfect and her accent barely noticeable.

  ‘It’s the people,’ she said. ‘Just a lot of drunks.’

  ‘Lonely?’

  The question s
eemed to surprise her. ‘I have crosswords. Sometimes reading.’ She put a piece of toast in front of me and added a lump of butter. ‘I speak languages. English, Estonian and German, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian, too.’ The kettle whistled.

  ‘When I came three weeks ago the kitchen was very dirty, smelling. Men are dirr-ty pigs. They just want to sit around and drink beer.’ She spoke roughly but there was the hint of a smile now. She poured boiling water into a teapot.

  ‘Keith says –’ I started.

  The smile vanished. ‘That thing!’ she snapped and whipped the butter dish back into the fridge, slamming the door.

  *

  Captain Tom Newby said, ‘I don’t expect you’ve ever met Estonians before. There’s quite a community of them in Cardiff. They’re all right. Only thing, they’ve not much sense of humour.’ He smiled. ‘Magda’s a bit, er, abrasive, of course. But she’s a good cook.’

  We were sitting in Newby’s odd coffin of a cabin. ‘We should be away to Plymouth tomorrow some time. The forecast says force six to seven south-westerly gales, so we’ll be lucky to make it alive!’

  His mother-in-law would be a hundred and three in June. ‘She could read and hear and watch the telly until a year ago. Her hundredth birthday was a great party. Dozens of cards – one from the Queen, of course.’ He himself had retired from the sea after the Hamburg experience, but even now, he said, he liked to take temporary command of ships like the Kaina – just for a few weeks, not more. You need money to keep an old mother-in-law.

  Keith, Frank and I made our way over an obstacle course of concrete moles, cement barriers and a busy main road to the hovercraft terminal’s snack bar for a beer or two and a stretch of the legs. ‘Ha,’ Keith said, looking at a chef stirring soup with a cigarette in his lips. ‘Fag-ash soup! I’ve had that many a time on ships.’

  Three beers later I mentioned the gale warnings. ‘We’ll be shaken to bloody bits,’ said Keith.

  ‘She might even fall apart,’ Frank said.

  Keith looked at him. ‘Well, one thing – you’d be drowned in the bloody engine room, like a rat in a fookin’ trap.’ He raised his beer can. ‘And serve you right, you measly old bastard.’

  ‘Ah’d coom oop and claw yer fookin’ down with me, youse ….’

  They narrowed their eyes at each other affectionately and laughed. The tannoy was calling passengers, in French and English, to present themselves at emigration control. The fourth beer came.

  ‘Well,’ Keith said, watching the hovercraft moving sedately down its ramp to the sea, ‘it’d make a dramatic end to your book.’

  ‘It certainly would.’

  Frank made the face of a drowning man. ‘Glug, glug!’ he said.

  Next morning, with dew on her hatches, the Kaina moved out of the brownish haze of Boulogne’s industrial zone and followed the breakwater round to the flashing white light at its tip. Our course lay across the Channel, then down the English coast, westwards, towards Devon. Past the flashing light the Kaina began to rear and sway. Seagulls screamed at us as though we were mad.

  ‘Steady the Buffs.’ Captain Tom Newby moved swiftly about the bridge, from automatic navigator to radar to chart, singing ‘“Oh, the hee-eells are on fay-ah with the sound of mew-sic ….”’ Then: ‘How about some Rosie Lee? Settles the stomach, tea. The weather’ll be “rather rather” to “rough” today, I really do think.’

  *

  Alf Sula raised his round white moon-face from a plate of bacon, a mug of tea beside him. ‘I’ve got some pictures,’ he said, groping into a wallet. ‘Good old friends.’

  One photograph was of a happy reunion. Round a table, laughing men and girls leaned towards the camera’s flash.

  ‘Estonian. 1951. A reunion in London. There’s me. That one’s a ship’s captain now. That one’s in Canada. That one … I don’t know.’

  The small, sad pile of photographs lay beside his plate of bacon rinds. I saw two kids in cowboy hats; his sons. ‘They’re nineteen or twenty now. They still speak the old language.’

  Magda listened from her hatch, craning her neck, her expression almost tender.

  *

  The weather, after all, was kind. Rain and sea water swept us from bows to stern and mist hid the cliffs of the English coast, but there were no gales, even though it was evident that my final landfall was not going to be blessed with even the palest of welcoming suns. Instead there were BBC news bulletins and Coronation Street on the ship’s telly. I thought of other, less appealing, signs of home. Newspapers, for instance, their pages crammed with the trivia of a self-pampering society – yet another inquiry into teenage sex; a breathless report on next summer’s swimsuits; and columns filled with the petulance of a people who feel cheated because their affluent life falls short of perfection.

  Keith confessed, ‘I’m in what is commonly known as a Kiss-me-arse Latitude, when you’re just about to pay off and you’ve got to the stage when you don’t give two monkeys’ fucks for anything.’ He stopped and gave an exaggerated start of alarm. ‘Oh, God, Francis, what ’ave you been doin’?’ Frank’s dishevelled head had suddenly thrust towards us round the door.

  ‘Playin’ pontoon in t’engine room.’ Frank grinned and went on: ‘’Ey, ’ave you ’eard this one? The man says: “Look, missus, ah’d like a good goose for Christmas, wouldn’t you?” She says: “Ooh, yes, ah would.” So ’e says: “Well, take yer knickers off!”’

  ‘Time we parted, Frank,’ Keith said sadly. ‘Oh, Francis, Francis, I do worry about you. I really do.’

  *

  Parachute flares trickled down through the mist over a British warship off the Salcombe River, reminding me of the Falklands. A sleek white motor yacht with a smart yellow funnel danced by and two men in smart caps and a woman in a heavy sweater waved. They looked cold and damp.

  ‘Lovely summer’s eve,’ Tom Newby said. ‘Rig of the day on arrival: Red Sea rig, eh? Red Sea rig. Any sign of the Plymouth pilot?’

  Keith, at the wheel, said, ‘He’s just been on the radio saying, “Berth at once. Pilot at the breakwater.”’

  ‘Oh, ay. Jolly good.’

  Round the point at the approach to Plymouth odd puffs of cloud hung about like gunsmoke. A long breakwater cut the harbour entrance in two.

  ‘Where’s the piloté? Where’s the piloté?’ Newby sang out to no one in particular, and soon a jolly pilot with a Devon accent was stamping about the bridge. Under his direction we moved on towards Georgian houses, church steeples, the Hoe, and the black gun slits of wartime bastions on the slopes above the harbour.

  ‘Stop ’er. ’Ard a-port, sir.’

  We turned, very slowly, into a dock that seemed unusually narrow.

  ‘’Ard a-port, is she? The tide’ll bring ’er round.’ We edged further into the dock, almost shaving the rust off the sides of a Greek freighter.

  ‘Give ’er a bit of starboard, sir. Just a bit. She’ll do the rest.’

  At the entrance to the little dock was a high dead wall with a gate in it. Rain stood in oily puddles on the cobbles. In the late January afternoon drizzle everything looked very old, tired and dismal. In what other life had I dozed in the sun by that grave on a hillside at Hiva Oa? On what planet had Emma, on a sugary beach with a red hibiscus in her hair, yearned for New Zealand, and Amosa, the wood demon, darted through the giant colonnades of Mount Vaea, calling until the forest echoed like an aviary? Where had I seen the Snow Queen’s Palace and the windswept isle from which Tony, the shaggy dog of Cape Horn, had tried to repel single-handed this British invader?

  For the last time I heard ‘Finished with engines’ – and as usual it sounded like a death sentence. Old Tom Newby looked at me in wonder. ‘Gee whizz!’ he said. ‘We made it.’

  *

  From Plymouth there would be a general dispersal. Captain Tom would go to Cardiff by train after what might prove to have been his last voyage – who could tell? ‘I wouldn’t mind, Gavin. No, I wouldn’t mind. Depends a bit on the old mother-in-law.
A hundred and three! Just imagine.’

  Sula, Magda, and the others would stay with the ship and after a day or two spent loading china clay they would go south with her again to Morocco; with any luck they would find a bit of sun and good cheap wine.

  Frank would go with them. ‘Well, joost for now,’ he said.

  Barry, the young ordinary seaman, was off by train to Liverpool where his family was waiting to give him a twenty-second birthday party. There was to be a train to Liverpool for Keith, too, taking his dicky heart back to Moreton on the Wirral. He’d be walking his dog on the promenade in a day or two, unable to take his eyes off the sea he so loved and hated. ‘Gettin’ shot of this old rattle-trap, thank Christ!’ he crowed to Frank and me.

  ‘Ah’ll be seein’ youse back at sea in no time flat,’ Frank assured him amiably. ‘Ah’ll fookin’ bet yer that.’ In a cloud of fond obscenities, they scrubbed and dressed up for the farewell night’s run ashore.

  ‘Come on,’ said Keith knowledgeably. ‘The Breakwater Inn’s the best place. No trains to catch tonight.’

  I realized that for the first time for what seemed like a decade I was in no hurry to go anywhere. Oh, no – no trains tonight. Time enough to catch a London express tomorrow.

  It turned out to be a remarkably decorous farewell to a year of travel halfway round the world. We drank beer and then whisky in the Breakwater Inn, creeping, with the publican’s permission, into a small back room to escape the noise of a pop group called the Spare Parts.

  ‘I’ll give ’em spare parts,’ said Keith. ‘They should send ’em to the Falklands.’

  ‘Falklands, hell! Argentina more like,’ Frank growled.