Then there was “gallery.” This was marmalade. The legend was that the marmalade supplied to ships—to tramp ships especially—was made from the sweepings of orange peels from the galleries of theatres and music halls. It may well have been true.
But it wasn’t the nicknames that, at first, put the apprentices off their food. In that ship we messed with the officers, at the foot of the long saloon table. The master sat at the head, of course, and carved the joint. I still haven’t made up my mind regarding Captain Puzey. Was he a seaman who owned a farm (run during his absences by his wife) to supplement his salary or was he a farmer who came to sea to make the money to save his farm from bankruptcy? He rarely wore uniform and, whilst the ship was in temperate waters, clad himself in a sort of Farmer Giles outfit in rough tweed, complete with leather gaiters. And how did he (at first) put us off our tucker? Easily. Whilst carving the joint he would discourse learnedly upon the many and various diseases to which whatever animal it was that we were supposed to be eating was susceptible.
The vessels of the Sun Shipping Company carried lascar crews, recruited in Calcutta. As a result of this I acquired a taste for curry that persists still.
But life at sea isn’t one long Cook’s Tour unless you’re a cook yourself (or Captain Cook). I was supposed to be learning the seaman’s trade, not eating my head off. It has been said (probably it is still being said) that tramp steamer apprentices are no more than cheap labour; legally speaking they are (or they were, in my early days) apprentice seamen, not apprentice officers. Nonetheless, as well as chipping and scraping rust, washing paintwork, polishing brass, cleaning bilges and all the rest of it they are trained in the real seamanlike arts such as rope and wire splicing (this latter very much a lost art these decadent days!). They are required to study navigation, signaling, meteorology and all the rest of it.
One thing still sticks in my memory, still slightly rankles. As I have said, the vessels of the Sun Shipping Company carried lascar crews who were, of course, Moslems. If we were in any Asiatic port during a Moslem public holiday we, the apprentices, would rank as officers, not crew. If we were in any port during a Christian public holiday we would rank as crew, not officers. On the other hand the Chinese carpenter, who was a follower of Confucius, got all the holidays . . .
Oh, well, old Chippy was worth a damn sight more to the ship than we were. A fascinating character who claimed—truthfully, I think—to have been a pirate in his youth. (Piracy on the China Coast persisted until the Communists brought their own brand of law and order to China.) And he was certainly a bigamist in his later years with one wife in Canton and another in the Chinese enclave in Calcutta.
Cape St. Andrew was a round-the-world tramp rarely returning to England. Calcutta was not officially her home port but she seemed to be there more often than anywhere else. Her main employment was the Calcutta coal trade—black diamonds from the Bengal mines to the small ports on the West Coast of India, to Colombo in Ceylon (as it was then called), to Madras on the East Coast, and further afield to Hong Kong and Whampoa, which was an anchorage port halfway up the Pearl River to Canton. (Attempts at piracy were still quite common on the Pearl River but nobody bothered us.) During my apprenticeship I was only in Australia once; we loaded a cargo of grain in Fremantle for Calcutta. I was only in the U.S.A. once; we loaded jute in Calcutta for New Orleans, then cotton in Houston, Texas, for Kobe, Osaka and Shanghai. (This, to date, has been my only visit to Japan but, as my Japanese fans are promising a Rim-Con in my honour I shall probably revisit that country, as an author rather than as a seaman.) Even though we seemed to steer clear of Japanese ports we were frequent visitors to Shanghai, usually with cargoes of sugar from Java. It was on one of these voyages that I was under fire for the second time in my life. (The first time, of course, was during that Zeppelin raid on London in World War I.) The Sino-Japanese War had broken out. (Or it may have been one of the preliminary skirmishes.) We were proceeding down river. There was an artillery duel between Japanese cruisers and the forts at Woosung. We had to pass between the combatants. The ships courteously ceased fire until we were clear, the forts did not. The trajectory of the projectiles was high enough so that there was no real danger but it wasn’t a very pleasant sensation to hear those shells whistling overhead. (The next time that I was under fire I was aboard the vessel actually being shot at, but that was many years later.)
There were voyages to Rangoon and other ports in Burma to load rice for Java. There was a voyage to Odessa, in the Black Sea, to load or to discharge something or other; I forget now. My main memories are the bitter cold—it was midwinter—and of the International Seamen’s Club where, bribed with music, rye bread and sausage and excellent heavy Ukrainian beer we listened to the usual Marxist propaganda spiels. Actually it was all just the same as the Church of England’s Missions to Seamen with alcoholic beverages served instead of tea.
It was in winter, too, that we were in Trieste, in the Adriatic. The main memory is of the bora, the bitterly cold wind that sweeps down from the Italian Alps. A lazy wind, somebody said. It’s too tired to go round you so it goes through you.
As well as the Calcutta Coal Trade there was the Calcutta Salt Trade. Salt, manufactured from sea water, was loaded either in Aden, at the entrance to the Red Sea, or Port Okha, on the North West Coast of India. Loading completed, the hatches would be sealed by the Customs. Discharge was at the Salt Moorings, river berths in Calcutta. Every ounce of the precious commodity would be weighed and tallied out under customs supervision and, at the close of each day’s work, the hatches would be resealed. The rate of discharge depended upon the briskness or otherwise of the salt market. The reason for all this red tape was that in those days, the last years of the British Raj, salt was the one thing that everybody, no matter how poverty stricken, had to have and the customs duty on salt was the only way to ensure that the entire population contributed to the upkeep of the British administration and military forces in India.
So my apprenticeship went on. Apart from being shot at (well, over, actually) in other people’s wars and the occasional China Sea typhoon it was a relatively quiet life. Finally, our time having been served, the other three brats and myself were shipped home as passengers from Calcutta in one of Harrison’s cargo liners. (The Harrison Line was one of the companies maintaining a regular service between London and Calcutta.)
With others in the same age group but from varying backgrounds—tramps, liners, oil tankers—I attended the King Edward VII Nautical School, which also had boarding facilities, to complete my studies for the Second Mate’s Certificate of Competency and managed to convince the examiners that I was a fit and proper person to hold such a qualification. Shortly thereafter I re-entered the service of the Sun Shipping Company as third officer.
I was still reading all the science fiction that I could lay my hands on but never dreamed that I would one day be writing the stuff.
My new (?) ship was Saint Dunstan. Actually she was owned by the Saint Line, which was a subsidiary of the Sun Shipping Company. She was old, old and scruffy. (Cape St. Andrew, a new ship when I joined her, was by comparison a luxury liner.) She didn’t get round as much as Cape St. Andrew did and, as I recall it, spent practically all her time on the Calcutta Coal and Salt Trades. I swotted hard and passed, in Calcutta, for my First Mate’s Certificate of Competency without having to go to school first. (Actually the “First Mate’s Ticket” was little more than a recapitulation of second mate’s work with the addition of Ship Stability, applied hydrodynamics.)
It was while I was in Saint Dunstan that I somehow got bitten by the writing bug and, in Calcutta, purchased my first typewriter, an ancient but serviceable Remington portable which lasted me for many years. (I got bitten by other bugs, too. I sat down on a wicker-seated chair in the shop to try the machine out before buying it and the bed bugs in the wicker work had a real feast on the backs of my legs; it was during the Hot Weather and I was wearing shorts.) And yet I had no burning desire t
o become a science fiction writer, or any kind of fiction writer. My ambition—a weird one, I admit now—was to become a freelance journalist. I did succeed in selling short articles and occasional light verse to newspapers and to the British Nautical Magazine. None of this output has, so far as I know, survived. This is no great loss.
When the term of the ship’s Articles of Agreement ran out I was among those officers who had no desire to sign on for another three years. I returned to the U.K. from Calcutta in a Brocklebank liner and, the times being what they were, found it hard to obtain suitable employment after I had taken a holiday. Nonetheless I did not regret leaving Saint Dunstan. In my career I have served in three outstandingly scruffy ships. Saint Dunstan was the first. Then there was the Shaw Savill Line’s Raranga, one of the last of that company’s coal burners, of which vessel I was second officer during the latter part of the Second World War. (But Raranga I rather liked. Apart from anything else she gave me the inspiration for “Giant Killer.”) Finally there was the Union Steam Ship Company’s Kaimanawa, of which I held command. Although she was oil-fired she was one of the last of the company’s steam—as opposed to motor—ships. She had been built during World War II and looked as though she had been built during World War I. Her accommodation was primitive. Her hatches leaked. Her steam winches were so noisy as to make thought—let alone speech!—impossible during cargo-handling operations.
To return to the period immediately after my return to England from the Indian Coast . . . Times, although improving, were not yet good. For a while I, with two other shipless officers, was a tally clerk at Ford’s Dagenharn plant in Essex. Then, my mother and brother having moved to that island, I was a kennelman in Jersey. (The British Channel Island, not the American state.) I must have learned quite a lot. In later years, when I was chief officer in the Shaw Savill Line, people shipping small animals out from England to Australasia would try to get them on to whichever ship I was mate at the time.
Then Shaw Savill were wanting officers. First they were asking for people with Master’s Certificates who were from either Conway, Worcester or Pangbourne. They lowered their sights a little when none were forthcoming and asked for Master’s Certificates only. They lowered their sights still more, their new requirements being First Mate’s Certificates and Conway, Worcester or Pangbourne. Then it got down to First Mate’s Certificates only. So it was that I signed on the old Pakeha’s books as fourth officer.
After Pakeha there was the relatively new motor vessel Karamea. In those days the Shaw Savill Line, like the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand, favoured Maori names for its vessels although the “ics” (Coptic, I think, was the first) were beginning to creep in. It was while serving in her that I married for the first time. And it was in her that I was under fire for the third time, this being shortly after the outbreak of World War II.
War was declared shortly after we sailed from Wellington, New Zealand for England with a cargo of refrigerated foodstuffs. Immediately we, although a merchant vessel, came under the orders of the British Admiralty and were told to continue our voyage to the U.K. via the Panama Canal but to put into Kingston, Jamaica, to be equipped with guns and for convoy assembly. We put into Kingston, waited there for some time for our armament, which we never got, and eventually sailed as part of a small, unescorted for most of the time, unarmed convoy.
There was the Royal Mail cargo liner, Loch Avon. Her master was a captain in the Royal Naval Reserve (Retired) so was Convoy Commodore. Karamea’s master, Teddy Grayston, was a Commander R.N.R. (Rtd.) so was appointed vice commodore. There was a Union Steam Ship Company’s vessel (I forget her name; she was with us only until we were clear of the Caribbean then proceeded to Canadian ports independently). There were two French ships: Bretagne, an old, twin-funneled passenger liner and Oregon, a modern motor vessel similar to Loch Avon and ourselves.
Whilst still in West Indian waters we had our first scare but were very relieved when the submarine sighted turned out to be an American one. We were, of course, listening to every news broadcast and it seemed that the first outburst of German submarine activity was over. We dared to hope for a quiet voyage home.
Meanwhile, Teddy had us on a war footing. Normally in merchant vessels the fourth officer keeps the chief officer’s watch for him but I was put on day work as navigator, signals officer, black-out king and anything else that needed doing. There were four cadets; three of these were junior watchkeepers and the other one was my sidekick.
The convoy steamed steadily east, in line abeam, Karamea leading the port (but nonexistent) column, then Loch Avon, then Bretagne, then Oregon to starboard. Still there was no word of enemy submarine activity. But it was too good to last.
First there was a message from the British tramp steamer Stonepool. I remember it well for its chutzpah. It wasn’t a plaintive squeal for help, it read: “Am engaging enemy submarine.” But Stonepool had guns. None of us did. Stonepool, as a matter of fact, won her little battle.
The next message received by our Sparks was even more frightening. Emil Miguet, a large French oil tanker, had been torpedoed and abandoned by her crew. Furthermore, this had happened directly ahead of us on the course that we were making. The commodore reasoned, as I think that anybody in his position would have done, that the German submarine would, by now, be we away from the scene of the crime. He did not order any deviation from the convoy course. During the remaining hours of daylight, however, we carried out a heavy zig-zag and were ordered to resume this at first light the following morning.
At about 0200 hours. we passed the still-burning wreckage of Emil Miguet I didn’t see it myself as I had turned in on completion of the day’s duties, leaving word to be called at 0500 hours. so that I could obtain a morning star fix. I was called much earlier, by the second officer. ‘‘Wake up, Four Oh! A position, quick, for Sparks! Loch Avon’s been torpedoed!”
Loch Avon, I learned later, had used an unshielded, all-round Morse lamp to make a signal to the other ships of the convoy regarding resumption of zig-zag, thereby attracting the attention o the officer-of-the-watch of the surfaced U-Boat which, actually, was directly ahead of Karamea. She positioned her self to fire a torpedo, successfully, and then, fortunately (for her) saw us bearing down upon her and put on a burst of speed. Our chief officer saw the submarine making off to starboard. His peacetime reaction was to alter course to port, to avoid, not to go hard-a-star board to ram. It was indeed fortunate that he did alter course (although an alteration to starboard would have been better) as a torpedo hurriedly fired from a stern tube missed our stem by inches.
It was quite some time, however, before we were able to hold any sort of post mortem on the morning’s disasters. My first job was to run up a dead reckoning position and take it down to Sparks in the radio office. I returned to the bridge to find that the Old Man, in his capacity as vice commodore, had ordered the convoy to scatter. We maintained course as we were heading for the rendezvous position with a promised destroyer escort. Oregon cleared away to the south’ard and, we finally learned, made it safely to port. Bretagne, that poor old coal burner, plodded along behind us, sparks cascading from her twin funnels, dropping slowly astern.
Daylight came in slowly. The horizon was hard enough for me to get sights of suitable stars and to calculate our position. After Sparks had sent this off I returned to the bridge and was pottering around in the chartroom when the chief officer called, “Hoy! Four Oh! Signals! Bretagne’s using a daylight Morse lamp!” Then, as I picked up my binoculars and stepped outside, “No, by Christ! It’s shellfire!”
Shellfire it was: pale flashes all around the bridge of the old, gray ship, and then the slowly climbing column of water and smoke as a torpedo hit her amidships. There was another flash-range-from a low, dark, almost invisible shape and a shellburst well short of us.
Teddy Grayston altered course to put the submarine right astern and ordered our engineers to give us maximum speed. The U-Boat fired again, and again, correcting t
he range. All that her gunnery officer had to do to score a hit was bracket—and all that Teddy had do to bugger the bracketing was alter course towards each fall of shot. Meanwhile the second and third officers were in charge on deck, getting the boats swung out and stocked with extra blankets and provisions, getting some cases of gold bullion that were among our cargo out of the strong room and putting these in the boats, even placing the two little dogs that were also part of the cargo into the lifecraft. These tasks completed all they had to do was to keep all hands under cover.
By this time the sun was well up and, as chance would have it, directly on the port beam. I got out my sextant and took two good shots. It was an old but very good instrument, and heavy. When you are taking sights under fire a heavy instrument is advantageous rather than otherwise. The shaking of the hands is minimised. By sheer good luck we were steaming directly along a position line, which meant that any help steaming or flying along this same line would be sure to find us. (For some reason we, on the bridge, were sure that our rescuers would be Coastal Command’s Sunderland flying boats; we were well within their range.)
I gave the new message form to Sparks then returned to the bridge. The shelling was continuing, with every miss a very near one. But there were other smells beside the acridity of exploding lyddite. The cooks were busy making steak and egg and bacon sandwiches— and nobody thought of sending any up to the people who were doing all the work.
My readers will know that Grimes is, now and again, referred to as Gutsy Grimes, the nickname derived from his appetite rather than his courage. There is, I suppose, something of me in Grimes. Anyhow, during a slight lull in the shelling, I asked the Old Man, “Do you think I might make some tea and toast for us all, sir?”
Gateway to Never (John Grimes) Page 61