Otherwise

by Farley Mowat

  He laughed. ”Ah then, Captain, perhaps I can show you what little I know of navigation.”

  So during the homeward voyage I had two things to help me distance myself from my bleak and bloody memories. I was re-entering a world shared with the Others, and I was being inducted into the mysteries of how seafaring men found their way across trackless waters.

  On November 4 the skipper rolled out a chart of the entire North Atlantic. Touching the points of his dividers to Bishop’s Rock in the Scilly Isles, which were then abeam of us, he explained:

  ”Here we will take our departure from European waters. North latitude 49 degrees and 50 minutes, west longitude 6 degrees and 27 minutes. We will steer now a great circle course for Belle Isle, 1,823 nautical miles – that is 2,096 landsmen’s miles – to the westward. If the weather behaves and the Chief keeps his machinery working, we should raise Newfoundland in seven days.”

  He paused to ask: ”What do you know of the sextant?”

  When I admitted I had never even handled this fabled instrument, he set out to teach me how to use it. Every day thereafter, weather permitting, I reported to him or to the first mate on a wing of the bridge to be shown how to ”shoot the sun” or, at night, to take a sight on Polaris, the North Star.

  I was not an apt pupil. When plotted on the chart, my results often put our vessel so much as a hundred miles off course. Once I put her a hundred and sixty miles inland – on the Greenland icecap.

  The skipper did not give up, although the mate did. After the Greenland fiasco, the mate told me with painful honesty:

  ”Better you stay on land, Kapitan. I wash my hands.”

  There would be times later in life when I wished I had listened to him, but by then I was following a different drummer.

  The first day out of sight of land broke warm and clear with a brisk nor’wester making Blommersdiik kick up her heels. The bosun set his deckhands to checking the hatches and making everything secure in case ”it come on to blow up dirty.” As I watched the oilskin-clad seamen putting extra lashings on the miniature sub marine and the massive bulk of the V-2, I wondered what the bosun might be thinking about them. Later on I asked him.

  ”Tell you the truth, Cap’n, if ’twas me, I’d-a cut them fuckers adrift and pitched them overboard. Subs and rockets! Maybe not the worst things we ever invented but, by Jesus, pretty fucking near!”

  I spent most of that day watching birds: fulmars, Manx shearwaters, kittiwakes, jaegers, and even a great skua. To see them was exciting, but I was surprised at how few of each kind there were. The vast sweep of sky and water surrounding us seemed relatively empty. I mentioned this to van Zwol at supper. He was a while replying.

  ”I wondered if you’d notice the lack of birds. There’s only a drift of them now. Handful of chaff in a gale, you might say. Six years ago starting an Atlantic crossing you’d have seen rafts of them on the water or flying around the ship thick as snow.

  ”Not long after the war started their numbers began falling. I didn’t give it much heed until one day in 1942 we were steaming over the Grand Banks after a U-boat pack had caught a convoy there.

  ”The water looked as smooth as cream though there was a good sea running. But it wasn’t cream – it was bunker oil. All the way to the horizon. And it was lumpy with dead and dying birds coated with oil.

  ”There was every kind, though most seemed to be eiders and murres. The few still alive were starving or choking to death.

  ”I knew, of course – what seaman didn’t? – that tankers laden to their marks with crude and refined oil were going down every day all over the world. Men were being lost by the hundreds, but until then I’d never given a thought to what else was being lost. Millions of birds. Tens of millions maybe, killed by oil.

  ”That wasn’t the whole of it. Pretty well everything in and under the sea was getting hammered. Whales and porpoises used to be common on the Western Ocean but by ’43 they were mostly gone. Whales give off an echo the asdic and sonar operators on naval vessels can’t tell from a submarine, so every time they got a contact, over would go the depth charges. Planes spotting the wakes of big whales at the surface would drop bombs on them in case they might be subs. I’ve even seen a cruiser with eight-inch guns shelling what any fool could tell was a whale. And coastal command planes regularly used them for target practice.

  ”Dead whales bloated up like blimps and stinking rotten were a common sight. Live whales were something we hardly ever saw, and don’t see now.

  ”Even that wasn’t the worst of it. When something big blew up, like a ship laden with munitions, the shock would kill everything in the water for miles around and, I don’t doubt, for miles below. After a depth-charge attack by the navy on a sub, I’ve seen the surface white as winter fields with dead fish floating belly-up.

  ”Men, too, of course. One fine summer day in the North Sea we picked thirty-seven men from a big freighter out of the water. They were all wearing life jackets and from our deck looked unharmed. All were dead save two. Those two lasted a few hours in our sick bay. Our third mate – he was our ‘doctor’ – called me down to see them.

  ”When their ship was torpedoed the escorts had dropped depth charges all around her hoping to get the sub. Those poor chaps hadn’t had time to launch their boats so they’d just jumped overboard and were all in the water when the charges started going off….

  ”The bottom half of their bodies looked like they had been run over by a steam roller.”

  During the war at sea more than twenty-two hundred merchant ships were sunk in the North Atlantic alone. Many thousands of human beings lost their lives. The destruction wrought upon oceanic life defies comprehension. No merely human nightmare could begin to encompass its catastrophic magnitude.

  November 8 found us being bludgeoned by a full nor’west gale some 390 nautical miles from Kap Farvel, the southernmost tip of Greenland, and 432 miles east of the Strait of Belle Isle. By noon Blommersdiik was making very heavy weather of it. Towering greybeards were bursting clean over her bluff bows and water was running so deep and fierce over her open decks that Roy, Spike, and I were effectively marooned in our cabin all that day and most of the succeeding night.

  I was convinced the V-2 and the submarine would be swept overboard, but no, when dawn came again they were still with us though they had a different look. White-streaked with salt, they seemed to have been shriven of their aura of death and destruction. Perhaps they were undergoing a sea-change, even as I was.

  The following day we entered the Labrador Current and the temperature dropped ten degrees, bringing a change in our avian escort. Jaegers vanished to be replaced by a scattering of sooty shearwaters, a greater black-backed gull, common murres, and dovekies – sparrow-sized seabirds that flew like bullets so close to the surface they seemed to be running on the water as storm petrels do.

  As I tried to plot our position on the chart by dead reckoning (it was too foggy to get a sight with the sextant), the skipper came and looked over my shoulder.

  ”If you are not sure where we are, Captain, you must ask the birds. The black-back out there, and the murres will tell you we are closing with the land. Yes, just as they told old-time sailors who came to fish on this side hundreds of years ago with no sextants, charts, and, more often than not, not even compasses. Often all they had was the lead to find the depth; a chip of wood, a piece of knotted string, and a sand glass to estimate their speed; and the fetch of the seas so they could steer a course. But always they had the birds.

  Those old fellows kept their eyes peeled. Ja, they had to, or never would they have got home again.”

  I took special mental note of the emphasis on keeping one’s eyes peeled if one was to find the way home. For that, of course, is what I was trying to do.

  – 14 –

  WINTER OF MY DISCONTENT

  I came on deck on November 10 to find Blommersdiik almost abeam of Belle Isle, that massive granite plug in the strait of the same name. I was almost
home. The black hills of Labrador rose distantly off the starboard bow, and off to port snaggle-toothed Cape Bauld, the northeastern tip of Newfoundland, thrust out of the sea.

  As the bleak indentations of Château, Red, and Forteau bays along the Labrador coast slowly fell astern, the Strait of Belle Isle funnelled us into the mediterranean sea that fifteenth-century whalers knew as la Grande Baie and we now call the Gulf of St. Lawrence. We continued unhurriedly into the estuary of the great river which would take us another thousand miles westward, deep into the vitals of the continent. Blommersdiik was bringing me home, not with the ferocious abruptness and soul-shattering immediacy of a jet airplane but gently, gently, giving me time to become aware of just how far I had gone astray.

  Our voyage ended on November 15, when a tug nudged Blommersdiik into a berth in Montreal harbour. Canada was indifferent to our arrival. Although I had not expected a hero’s welcome I was a bit chagrined that nobody was on the dock to welcome us. However, when the ship’s agent boarded, he gave me a wire from my father.

  DESOLATED UNABLE MEET YOU STOP APPARENTLY NEITHER DEFENCE HEADQUARTERS NOR GOD KNOWS WHEN YOUR SHIP DUE STOP WE AWAIT YOUR CALL.

  There was also a telegram from Major General Howard Graham, deputy chief of the General Staff at National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa. Graham had been the lieutenant colonel in command of my regiment when I first joined it in England in 1942, and he had been one of my father’s friends in Trenton between the wars. His tele gram, however, did not sound a welcoming note. Marked URGENT, it ordered me in no uncertain terms to notify the general’s office IMMEDIATELY REPEAT IMMEDIATELY UPON ARRIVAL CANADA.

  With some trepidation I called National Defence HQ from a dockside phone and after considerable telephonic shuffling was connected to the general.

  ”Damn it, Mowat! Where in hell have you been? Never mind. Catch the night train to Ottawa. Be in my office by 0900 tomorrow. See to it!” with which he hung up.

  So it was that I spent my first night ashore in Canada sleepless in a crowded train. Next morning the general kept me standing at attention in front of his desk until the red-tabbed staff officer who had escorted me in to the holy of holies departed, at which point Graham favoured me with a sardonic grin and a greeting.

  ”You may sit down now, Mowat. Colonel Harrison sent us a radiogram saying you were on your way but you’ve been so long overdue it was thought you and your load of nuts and bolts must have sunk. Not such a bad thing if you had. Somebody has incurred a shipping bill with the Holland-American Line for 76,000 dollars without, so far as we can see, any authorization. Treasury Board is having conniptions.”

  He paused to let all this sink in.

  ”To be frank, you and your freak show are likely to be as popular around here as the proverbial skunk at a garden party. War’s over, you know. Government doesn’t want to spend another dollar on it. Even the war museum wallahs want no part of your caper – afraid they might have to pay the shipping bill. Nobody will touch your stuff except some bods from Defence Research who say they’ll take your rockets. But what’s to be done with all the rest … and you … I really don’t know.”

  He shook his head.

  ”Suppose you tell me just what you’ve been up too, eh?”

  I told him as much as I thought he ought to know. When I finished he seemed bemused.

  ”Where’s that shiny-faced kid who came to us in England? Turned pirate, by the sound of it. Treasury will have you hanged if ever they twig to what you’ve been up to. Well, me lad, you’re still a Hasty P so I suppose we’ll have to try and save your bacon.”

  By the time I got back to Blommersdiik, her hatches were off and unlading was well under way. The V-2 had disappeared. When I asked Roy about it, he shrugged.

  ”Dunno, sir. Couple of scruffy-looking civvies showed up with a lot of official papers. The stevedores got the V-2 off the boat quick as a wink and loaded onto a flat car heading for points east – or maybe west. Anyhow, she’s gone.”

  If the boffins had been quick on the uptake, we were not far behind. By that evening Roy and Spike were on a train bound for Roy’s home in Nova Scotia, and I had boarded one for Toronto. But not before an affecting parting from Blommersdiik.

  Captain van Zwol took me into his cabin, poured me a glass of schnapps, and gave me a gift – a lovingly polished sextant in a teakwood case. He had received it, he told me, from the captain of a Norwegian freighter he had rescued after the freighter hit a mine in the North Sea.

  ”All that poor man saved when they jumped into the boats was his dog and his sextant. He gave me the sextant because he said we had saved a life – not his – his dog’s! The sextant must have meant a lot to him, but his dog meant more. I have had his sextant ever since, but I have my own and I have no need of two. Take it, for when you go to sea in your father’s redningskoite. Now, skol … until we meet again!”

  My parents were waiting at Toronto’s Union Station. They drove me to Richmond Hill, where a now-aged little dog, Elmer, welcomed me as if I had never been away. Home was much as it had been, and my father and mother seemed largely unchanged though slightly time-worn. I, on the other hand, felt massively out of place – a stranger in what once had been, if briefly, my own space. Years later Angus would recall my return.

  ”Elmer recognized you because, I suppose, you still smelled the same. Some things never change. Helen and I pretended we knew you but the truth was we hardly knew you at all. You were familiar in the sort of way a picture of an ancestor may be. The face is recognizable but you know nothing of who or what lurks within.”

  I kept no written record of my three weeks’ disembarkation leave, which may have been as well because my emotions were in such turmoil that any attempt to have rendered them into words must have resulted in incoherent ramblings. My memories of that time too are vague – perhaps mercifully so.

  My father’s were much more focused.

  ”The return of the prodigal was not an unmitigated success. Your mother was in myopic ecstasy, of course, and I was happy but confused. You – well, to coin a phrase, my son, you were not yourself.

  ”I thought I knew what you might be going through. When I returned to Trenton in 1919 with my smashed arm still in a sling and your mother engaged to someone else, I may have had as jaundiced a view of the civilian world as yours. As Elmer might have put it, everything smelled wrong or, as old Sam Johnson would have insisted, everything stank. I felt like some sort of Rip Van Winkle who, expecting to awaken safe in his own bed after a particularly bad nightmare, wakened instead in an unfamiliar place surrounded by people who weren’t as he remembered them.

  ”When you came back to us we put on our bravest faces. We smiled a lot though in our heart of hearts we were crying for you because, as we knew (or at least I knew), you weren’t really with us. You were facing the chill reality that nothing was as it had been when you went away. Or ever could be again.”

  What I recall of those bleak days in Richmond Hill was a dreadful sensation of disassociation from everything I had known and been before the war. It wasn’t the obvious differences that got to me. I could deal with the fact that most of the girls I had known were now married, about to be married, or had moved away. And that many of the boys were missing, maimed, or dead, while those who remained were preoccupied with trying to establish themselves as cogs in a structure that was essentially alien to me.

  This I could handle. What I could not deal with was the realization that all the ephemeral things those of my generation had shared – dreams, ideas, objectives – had lost their power to bind me into the cohesive entity that is one’s tribe.

  People attempted to reassure me but, though they were well intentioned, they could not reach me where it mattered. We no longer shared common ground. I found myself becoming ever more desolately aware that soldiers who had survived the war were now something of an embarrassment to their country.

  There was not even much comfort to be had from the company of others of the affl
icted – other ex-servicemen and women. Although all of us were recently arrived from Mars, we were now strangers even to one another on an alien planet.

  By the end of the first week of my leave, I felt that if I had ever belonged here, I no longer did. The temptation mounted to do what many ”returned men” did do – hit the bottle. Fortunately for me an alternative distraction or, as it may be, a source of solace, existed.

  A large framed photograph of Scotch Bonnet under full sail dominated the mantelpiece in my parents’ living room. One evening I drew my father’s attention to it.

  ”You know, Dad, I spent a lot of time over there dreaming about Scotch Bonnet, and thinking over what you wrote to me – that when I got back home I could take her on a voyage any place I chose and let the sea wash the war out of my system. I think I’d better take you up on that.”

  His measured reply knocked the wind clean out of my sails.

  ”Sorry to hear it, Farley. That would be a bad mistake. It would be running away, you see. What you and all the others like you need to do if you are going to survive and heal is, in a manner of speaking, go straight back into the trenches – the civilian trenches – and apply your energies to getting a firm grip on peacetime life. Make a place for yourself. You’re twenty-four now and you’ve wasted enough time, or had it wasted for you. But if you work hard enough and get yourself well enough dug in, the day will come when you can safely take time off to sail away into the blue. And when that time comes, Scotch Bonnet will be yours.”

  My sense of having been let down was monumental. I did not argue with him or even discuss what he had said for fear of what I might say. I did what I had done in earlier years when overwhelmed by a perceived injustice: I retreated to my bedroom.

  During my absence overseas Helen had preserved this room and its contents as they had been at the time I went away. She had been a meticulously successful curator. Redolent of the presence of my younger self, my bedroom showed no evidence of the passage of time, no patina of dust and cobwebs. Had it done so its effect upon me might have been less powerful. As things were, when I entered that room I fell into time’s vortex.