But it wasn’t all over yet. The two young men who had been Yoshi’s accomplices were taking her death very badly. Before I could stop him Sparks had snatched the laser pistol from my sash. And he took his revenge. Oh, yes, Kitty, I know that I’m still here, but he took his revenge. He turned the destructive beam of the weapon onto the machine that had sent his lady back into the Past, to when and where she had met her death. He paid particular attention to the controls that she had installed. And I did not stop him. I did not try to stop him. It was better that Yoshi’s knowledge died with her. The Present may be bad enough, but tampering with the Past would almost certainly make it worse, not better. The mere fact that we are here and now is proof that on this Time Track things have been working out not too badly.
“Having known a few Australians, including yourself,” said Kitty, “I still think that a Japonified Australia might have been an improvement.”
“You’re entitled to your opinion,” said Grimes stiffly.
Around the World in 23,741 Days
IF ANYBODY CARES to do his sums he will discover that this opening paragraph is being written on my 65th birthday and that when I made my own calculations Leap Years were taken into account. Sixty-five is, I think, as good an age as any for an autobiographical exercise. It is supposed to be retiring age—although the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand retires its people at the age of sixty-three and writers, of course, never retire. Come to that, I seem to have been on the Company’s pay roll for quite long periods each year since I was turned out to grass. Still, sixty-five is a good vantage point from which to look backwards over the years and the miles. Such a lot has happened in the last six and a half decades and so much of it has been of absorbing interest to a science fictioneer. And so much of it all has been incorporated into my own writings.
My quite notorious unrequited love affair with airships, for example . . .
One very early—but remarkably vivid—memory I have is of a Zeppelin raid on London during World War I. can still see the probing searchlights, like the questing antennae of giant insects and, sailing serenely overhead, high in the night sky, that slim, silvery cigar. I can’t remember any bombs; I suppose that none fell anywhere near where I was. It is worth remarking that in those distant days, with aerial warfare in its infancy, civilians had not yet learned to run for cover on the approach of raiders but stood in the streets, with their children, to watch the show.
I remember, too, the British dirigibles R33 and R34 which, in the years immediately after the (so-called) Great War were almost permanent features of the overhead scenery; the country town in which I spent most of my childhood—Beccles, in Suffolk—was not far from the airship base at Mildenhall. A little later, after I had commenced my seafaring apprenticeship, I saw Graf Zeppelin, then maintaining her regular trans-Atlantic service, a few times.
I have other aviation memories too. As a very, very small child I watched from my perambulator the British military aeroplanes—the old ‘flying birdcages’—exercising on and over (not very far over!) Salisbury Plain. That was just prior to World War I. During World War II, home on leave, I watched fleets of heavy bombers streaming east to hammer German targets. Also, while on leave, I once again experienced air raids on London—including, towards the end of hostilities, those by the V1s, the flying bombs, and by the V2s. Quite a few people were inclined to get hostile when I was enthusiastic rather than otherwise about these latter weapons, claiming that they were, after all, no more (and no less) than working models of moon rockets.
War rockets—much smaller ones, of course—were among my toys during a long spell as armaments officer of a troopship. I liked them, of course, but they never liked me. Whenever I had occasion to use them the most horrid things would happen but never to the enemy . . .
But autobiographies should start at the beginning.
I was born on March 28, 1912, in the military hospital in Aldershot, England. If anybody should ask what a seaman was doing being born in an army hospital I can only reply that I wanted to be near my mother. My father, as a matter of fact, was a soldier in the Regular Army. He was one of the first of the many killed in the First World War. I have no memory of him. Nonetheless, as the inheritor of his genes, I owe very much to him. Had he lived in a slightly later period he would certainly have been a fan, possibly a science fiction writer himself. I still recall my discovery, in the attic of his parents’ house in a village called Brampton, in Huntingdonshire, of a trunk full of his books. Without exception these were all early science fiction and fantasy—the old, yellow-covered Hodder & Stoughton paperback editions of Rider Haggard, the Strand Magazines with serialised Wells and Doyle and another long-defunct periodical called The Boys’ Own Paper with SF serials by lesser but still readable authors.
My father was a professional soldier and I became a professional seaman but, had he survived that utterly stupid clash between rival imperialisms, we should have had very much in common.
After my father’s death in action my mother, with my younger brother and myself, went to live with her parents in Beccles, a small, quiet town on the River Waveney. I was exposed to education there and some of it must have caught—a smattering of mathematics sufficient to enable me to navigate a ship, a rough working knowledge of the principles of English grammar. Even now I feel slightly guilty when I, knowing full well what crimes I am committing, split an infinitive, start a sentence with a conjunction or finish one with a preposition.
My first school was the Peddars Lane Elementary School. In those days the free schools in England did little more than to prepare their pupils for entry into the lower echelons of the work force at the age of fourteen and to teach them to fear God and honour the King. Fortunately it was possible to win a scholarship to an establishment operating on a somewhat higher level. This I did, gaining entry to the Sir John Leman Secondary School. In the 1920s the secondary schools did not quite have the same status as grammar schools which, in their turn, were socially several notches below the private schools and the “public” schools. The class system of the England of those days was rigidly stratified. Nonetheless the Sir John Lemanites did tend to put on the dog, considering themselves a cut above the students at the local grammar school. After all, our swotshop had been founded way back in the days of Good Queen Bess by one of her merchant knights . . .
But I’ve said before—and I say again—that those who say that their schooldays were the happiest days of their lives either are bloody liars or have very short memories. Still, as most of us do, I got by. I was a dud at sports and, to this day, regard the sports pages of the daily and Sunday newspapers only as convenient wrapping for the garbage and save on the electricity bill whenever any sporting event—even cricket!—is shown on television. Luckily, too, the Sir John Leman School, although it had its football* and cricket events, never took sport seriously. It was known as a “swot school,” the accent being on education.
My pet subjects were English, in which I always came top in examinations despite my vile handwriting; chemistry, in which I always came top in the practical examinations and second—because of my vile handwriting—in the theoretical ones; mathematics, geography and history, in all three of which I made consistently high scores. In those days there was no biology and physics was no more than instruction in such abstruse subjects as mechanical advantage. I was always bottom in scripture—schoolboy gropings towards an agnostic viewpoint were not encouraged—and very near the bottom in French. (To this day I have an intense dislike for that language.) However my consistently good marks in English and the various sciences ensured my steady upward progress.
Almost my final memory of the Sir John Leman School is that of a crucial point in my life. If I had not been brainwashed by my reading of English school stories, in which the myth of schoolboy honour was always perpetuated, if I had not assumed that Miss Deeley, the science mistress, would do the right thing by her teacher’s pet, my subsequent career would have been entirely different. I sh
ould not, at this moment of time, be sitting in my caravan on the premises of a nudist club on the outskirts of Sydney writing this. I should never have experienced the very real joys and the occasional terrifying responsibilities of sea-going command. My World War II service would have been entirely different; should I have been a soldier, an airman, a back room boy? Probably I should have become a writer, a science fiction writer, but the Rim Worlds would never have been shown on the star charts of our mythology and Commodore Grimes, that twentieth-century Anglo-Australian shipmaster displaced in Time and Space, would never have inflicted his prejudices upon readers in just about every country from Japan to the Soviet Union, the long way around the world. There might have been a Doctor or Professor Grimes, chemical engineer of the far future turning base metals into gold or water into wine or whatever . . .
But to return to Miss Deeley and my first—but not my last—Big Black Mark . . .
There was a very important examination Those who passed would move up one form to sit for Matriculation the following year—and with Matriculation there would be the chance of a university scholarship. Those who failed to make the grade would have to stay put for another twelve months, to try again I knew that I should make my usual poor showing in French and Scripture. I knew that I should do well enough in my good subjects to achieve promotion Unfortunately (fortunately?) I was not yet wise in the ways of the wicked world.
(Am I now? Mphm?)
As I’ve already said, chemistry came in two parts: theoretical and practical. Theoretical Chemistry examination consisted of the working out of complicated (for those days) equations. Practical Chemistry was much more fun. Each candidate was issued with his own vial jar or dish of some fluid, goo or powder and was required to carry out standard analytical procedure to determine the composition of the test specimen. Acid or alkaline? Soluble or insoluble? Flammable or nonflammable? And so on and so on and so on.
In the laboratory were the usual benches, each with its two sinks, its pair of Bunsen burners, its duplicated vessels and instruments. During the examination, presided over by the science mistress, there was to be no, repeat, underscore and capitalize—NO—talking.
We all collected our specimens and took them to our benches, lit up our Bunsen burners. I was just about to apply heat to a small sample of the goo that I had been given when my benchmate—a rather dim lout called George Martin—looked apprehensively at the dish of blue powder that he was supposed to analyse and whispered, “What do I do with this?”
No, I didn’t make the obvious rejoinder. I merely whispered back, “Shut up, you bloody fool!”
Miss Deeley—as I recall her she was a bespectacled, dried-up, spinster schoolmarm—pricked up her ears and demanded, “Were you talking, Chandler?”
I admitted that I had been, thinking that the clot Martin would at once confess (a) that he had initiated the conversation and (b) that I had given him no advice as to what to do with his specimen. But he remained silent. So much for schoolboy honour. Nonetheless I was not worried. I knew that Miss Deeley knew that I was the form’s star chemistry student and would not be asking anybody’s advice on how to carry out a simple task of analysis.
I had a shock coming. Oh, I was top in Practical Chemistry as always but all my marks were stripped from me because I had broken the No Talking Rule. This meant that owing to my extremely poor showing in my two unfavourite subjects—scripture and French—I should not be moving up a grade but would be obliged to mark time for another year.
Looking back on it all, putting it down on paper, I have suddenly realised that for many years I have thought of Miss Deeley—when I have thought of her—with unjustified harshness. I remember how more than once, as a subordinate, I have had my decisions overruled by superiors and how, as master, I have, at times, overruled my officers. Had Miss Deeley been in a position of overall command she would doubtless have conducted an enquiry and ascertained who said what to whom, and why. I think now that she was not allowed to do so and that it was the Headmaster, “Baddy” Watson, who was the author of my downfall. As well as acting in a supervisory capacity he conducted the Scripture classes and, furthermore, took them seriously. I must have been his bete noir. And then he was presented, on a silver tray, garnished with parsley, the Heaven-sent opportunity to smite the youthful infidel hip and thigh. He took it.
Not for the first time I say, with heartfelt conviction, “Thank God I’m an agnostic!”
Digressing slightly, now and again I argue with Susan, my second wife, about religion. She is an atheist. She accuses me of being, in my heart of hearts, religious in spite of my professed agnosticism.
I suppose that I am, really. I admit to being a Mobrist. MOBR is an acronym: My Own Bloody Religion. Take Swinburne’s “Holy Spirit of Man,” add Wells’ “Race Spirit,” flavour with infusions of Darwinism, Marxism and Buddhism, put into the blender, switch on and leave well alone except for, now and again, adding other ingredients such as Forteanism. And, even, Vonnegutism. So it goes.
Picking up the main thread once more—I did not matriculate. So I did not get the chance to sit for a university scholarship. So I did not become—as otherwise I probably should have done—an industrial chemist.
The prospect of having to seek for employment in a small country town in the England of the late 1920s did not appeal to me. Had I been in the possession of at least the matriculation certificate things would have been a lot easier; as it was my smatterings of education fitted me only for a job as an office boy or something similar. The only avenue of escape from the town—and from that stratum of society into which God had seen fit to place me—was the sea. So it was that shortly after my sixteenth birthday I was apprenticed to the Sun Shipping Company—called by its maritime personnel the Bum Shipping Company—of London.
Pause for the filling and lighting of my pipe and for reflection. Is this, I ask myself, the autobiography of a writer or a seaman? But the sea has been my life for so long and, as the late and great John W. Campbell once told me, my stories are “costume sea stories” rather than real science fiction. If I had not become a ship’s officer and, eventually, master there would have been no John Grimes. If I had not served on some of the less pleasant trades of the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand there would have been no Rim Worlds.
When I first went to sea I was not yet a writer although I had become an avid reader of science fiction. I had discovered Wells in the school library. There were my father’s books. There were the cheap Woolworth’s editions of Jules Verne. There was Hugo Gernsback’s Science And Invention with its Ray Cummings and A. Merritt serials and then, when Gernsback realised that a lot of readers were buying his first magazine only for the fiction, there was his new venture, the amazingly durable Amazing Stories.
I was hooked, from my early teens onwards, but it would be quite some time before my own private vision of the future would include a picture of myself as a science fiction writer. The pinnacle of my ambition—one never attained—was the captaincy of a Big Ship. I have served in such as an officer but have commanded only relatively small vessels.
In the 1920s—and the procedure is probably much the same today—entry into the British Merchant Navy could be made through a variety of channels. If your family was well-to-do you went to one of the posh pre-sea training schools: HMS CONWAY, HMS WORCESTER or the land-based Nautical Academy at Pangbourne. The big liner companies recruited their cadets from these. If your family was not well-to-do application was made to the Shipping Federation and if that body was satisfied that you had attained a reasonably good standard of education you were apprenticed to some tramp company as an STS—straight-to-sea— officer candidate. You could, of course, start your seafaring career on the lower deck, beginning as deck boy, rising to ordinary seaman and then to A.B. (able bodied seaman) and then, once you had completed the mandatory four years’ sea service, sitting for the Certificate of Proficiency as Second Mate of a Foreign Going Steamship. Even though the Merchant Navy is far les
s class conscious than the Royal Navy the percentage of officers who have “come up through the hawsepipe” must be about the same in both services.
My first ship was Cape St. Andrew, a coal-burning tramp steamer of about eight thousand tons’ deadweight capacity. Her owners named their vessels after headlands around the coast of South Africa, in which part of the world they had commercial interests not directly connected with shipping. They owned coal mines in Natal; whenever possible we bunkered with the Company’s coal. They owned a crayfish canning factory, but this delicacy was far too good for the likes of us. They owned, too, a jam factory in England, and their canned conserves and preserves, definitely not in the luxury class, were always to be found in the storerooms of their ships.
Somehow I’ve gotten on to the subject of food so I’ll stay on it for a while. Today’s seamen take for granted things that, in my early days, would have been regarded as the wildest luxuries. Very few tramp steamers were equipped, in the ’20s and ’30s, with domestic refrigeration. They had, instead, a huge icebox on the poop which, prior to departure from a port, was stocked with blocks of ice and with fresh meat, fish and vegetables. For the first week the food would be quite edible. By the end of the second week it wouldn’t be so good. During the third week people would be ignoring the meat and making do on boiled potatoes. Eventually the master—those old tramp captains really had their owners’ interests at heart!—would reluctantly order that the remaining contents of the ice box be sent to feed the sharks and that the preserved foodstuffs be broken out. At first the canned meats and fishes would be, relatively speaking, gourmet fare but, before long, everything would taste of tin.
Other delicacies would be salt horse straight from the harness cask (salt beef, actually, pickled in brine) and dried, salted cod. These were not as bad as they sound. I am always disappointed by the sea pie cooked and served in modern ships in which fresh meat is used. A real sea pie consists of layers of salt meat, sliced potatoes and sliced onion encased and cooked in a suet dough—a sort of savoury steamed pudding, actually. It is good. And the salt cod, which is procurable even now, I still enjoy.
Gateway to Never (John Grimes) Page 60