The captain grunted. “You know my views about Ackroyd. He’s no loss.”
“I agree, sir. But we canna sail wit’oot a radio operator.”
“Get down to the Marconi depot as soon as you’ve fed and see if they’ll let you have an operator right away. Tell them it’s urgent. I’ve no desire to miss the tide tomorrow with Sir Brian making his first trip. When you’re a captain, Mr. Andrews, you’ll realize what a nuisance a board of directors is.” And he glanced at me down the table.
“Aye, aye, sir. I’ll go straight away after me food.”
He wasn’t gone more than an hour and when he returned even his dour Scots features had a smile of triumph on them. “We’re in luck,” I heard him tell the captain. “I’d scarce had time to explain what it was I wanted when who should walk in but a sparks looking for a berth. Good fellow, too, by the look of it. Had his right hand blown off in a dive-bomb attack on a convoy during the war.”
“First time I ever heard of a one-handed sparks,” replied the captain. “But I suppose they pass anyone these days.” _
“I dinna ken anything aboot that, sir. But we got a sparks.”
I slung my hammock, sorted out my things and fed Nick some milk and fish scraps. Then I went to the galley again, for Old Walrus had promised me a cup of cocoa. He was a garrulous old fellow and while I sat drinking the hot, sweet liquid he told me tales of strange ports, lost islands, shipwreck, and war. When I finally stumbled to bed it was nearly midnight. As I passed the captain’s cabin I heard him say, “Seems like an unlucky trip, Mr. Andrews. Four men not reporting for duty is serious.”
“We could sail shorthanded,” the mate suggested.
“Not with a director on board,” was the answer. “Looks as though we’ll have to miss the tide.”
In my cabin I found the second engineer had returned. He was lying on his bunk fully clothed and snoring heavily. Nick sat, silent and watchful, in the corner under my hammock. The second engineer stirred as I closed the door and blew heavily through his nose. Then he sat up with a grunt and stared at me. He was a small man with a large head that was completely bald. “Go away,” he said, and fell back on his bunk sound asleep again.
I undressed and then slipped out into the alley that ran past the cabin doors. At one end it opened on to the deck with a glimpse of the dock lights and the endless movement of the river. At that moment a man paused in the entrance. “Who’s that?” It was the captain’s voice from somewhere above my head.
“Jennings, the new sparks, reporting for duty, sir.”
I have a vague impression of a big man, standing in silhouette against the lights of the river. He seemed to fill the narrow entrance, a bundle tucked under his arm and something dark sitting on his shoulder, its slanting blue eyes blazing in the darkness.
“What’s that you’ve got with you?” asked the captain.
“My cat, sir.”
“Too many cats on board already,” Captain Legett said. “You’ll have to leave it ashore. I’m having no menagerie aboard my ship.”
The man swore softly. “My cat goes with me or I don’t ship,” he answered.
“We’re a God-fearing company aboard the ‘Sally McGrew,’ Mr. Jennings,” the captain said. “No swearing, if you please.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” It was a soft, cheerful voice. “And my cat?”
“Very well, Mr. Jennings. You’ll find your cabin on the starboard side. Number four.”
The big bulk of the man moved away from the entrance and again the narrow rectangular gap showed me the docks and the river.
When I got back to my cabin, I found Nick with his back arched and his fur all ruffed up and I wondered how he knew that another cat had come on board.
We sailed with the tide the following morning, Sir Brian Fawley coming aboard just after we’d finished breakfast. He was older than I had expected; a short, thickset man with a big stomach and thinning hair. He wore dark, city clothes that were creased and baggy. He didn’t look much like an explorer. And yet, as he came heavily up the gangway, he gave the impression of a steam roller. His round, solid head was thrust forward on its short neck and restless gray eyes, almost lost in creases of fat, took in the ship at a glance. One of the crew took his bag and he stood there at the top of the gangway, his short legs straddled apart, his head thrust forward, surveying his ship. His eyes suddenly darted in my direction. “Your name Keverne?” he demanded. His voice was harsh and peremptory.
“Yes, sir,” I replied.
He gave a grunt. “Come and see me in my cabin in an hour’s time,” he said and turned abruptly and marched for’ard to the bridge.
Hardly had his baggage been got aboard than a tug came fussing alongside. The first of the barges was floating downriver on the outgoing tide as the hawser was got aboard. A wintry sun was raising a haze on the water. The tug gave one short, abrupt hoot. The river mud churned at her stern and the wharf slid away from us as the “Sally McGrew” was towed out into midstream. Then the decks vibrated gently to the beat of the engines and Tower Bridge slipped slowly astern until it was lost in the river mist. We were on our way, outward bound.
I stayed up on deck, watching the docks slip by on either side and the bustle of traffic coming and going. I was fascinated and filled with excitement. This was the life
-
I’d dreamed about—Thames barges with their brown sails, big freighters steaming slowly in from foreign lands, the fussy impatience of the tugs, and myself on the deck of a ship bound for South America. The deck plates trembling under my feet and the swish of water at our blunt bows was all pure magic to me.
Shortly before ten I went below and knocked on the door of Sir Brian’s cabin. When I entered I found him in the midst of changing. He faced me in an old blue jersey from the bottom of which his shirt tails and a pair of light blue pants protruded. “Don’t stand there gaping,” he snapped. “You’ve seen a man half-dressed before, haven’t you?” He pulled on a pair of corduroys. His hands were big, their backs covered with sandy hair. “So you’re the boy that knows where the Cocos Island treasure is, are you?” He suddenly fixed his little gray eyes on me. “Well, forget you ever heard about it. Treasure’s a thing that goes to men’s heads. And if Captain Legett ever found out who you are I wouldn’t be surprised if he dropped you overboard. So keep a hold on your tongue and try to forget you ever got into a scrape before you came aboard. Now take my compliments to the captain and ask him if he’ll join me in my cabin for a moment.”
I hurried out of the door, closing it softly behind me. I’d never met anyone like Sir Brian before. That abrupt, pugnacious manner had me scared. After I’d run the errand to the captain, I went below to the comforting warmth of the galley. From Old Walrus I learned how we had managed to catch the morning tide although four of our crew had been missing. “It was a lucky day for the captain when Mr. Andrews signed on the new sparks,” he said. “Four of the crew missing and one of the company’s directors coming aboard. That’s bad—bad for any skipper, me boy. When the owners are aboard, no skipper wants anything going wrong like that. They say Sir Brian has joined the board to put new life into the old company. I wouldn’t know about that. But he looks a proper tartar to me. An’ I wouldn’t have been in the skipper’s shoes for anything if we’d been delayed.” He scratched his nose reflectively. “Drunk I suppose they was,” he rambled on. “Drunk or—well, never mind about that. Before breakfast this morning, it was. Another few minutes and the skipper would have throwed his Bible overboard and let go with a few oaths. But this new sparks, he says quietlike that there’s one or two of the crew of the ship he last served on looking for berths. He’s not ashore more than an hour and back he comes with four men, all real sailors. Tough-looking, but they know their job and they don’t grumble. Leastways, they didn’t grumble when the porridge was burnt.” He chuckled. “Though one of them swore something horrid, so that I had to take it upon myself to warn him about the captain being a God-fearing man.”
The crew I accepted in the same way as I did the bridge, the mast, and the single funnel. In that first impression of a new life it was impossible to distinguish them as individuals. They were just a motley crowd of strange faces. Some had beards, others were growing them—all were dressed in dirty, greasy seamen’s clothing.
As the first day ran into the second and the coast of France came and went, I found more and more to do. When I wasn’t getting meals or clearing them away or tidying the cabins and the saloon, there was always plenty to watch on deck, or I’d go below to the galley and listen to Old Walrus rambling on about the ships he’d sailed in and the strange places he’d been. And then there was Mr. Jennings—Sparks.
The other officers ignored me. The captain, when he wasn’t on the bridge, would retire to his cabin and as often as not, when I took in his drink of an evening, he’d be sitting with the Bible in his hands, his thin lips moving as he read aloud to himself. The chief and the second engineer and the first and third mates played cards endlessly. Sir Brian kept a great deal to his cabin, poring over survey maps which I could see at a glance showed huge, trackless country massed with mountains. Every morning before breakfast he’d be up on deck, walking endlessly round and round the ship, his small eyes blinking in the sunlight that grew more and more powerful as we thumped our way steadily sou’wes’ across the Atlantic.
But Sparks was different. In the light of day he proved even bigger than he’d seemed in that first brief glimpse I’d had of him. He had great, powerful shoulders and a big, florid face with a pair of amazingly blue eyes that seemed perpetually laughing at the world. He was always cheerful, which for a man with only one hand seemed to put him above the others. His right hand wasn’t repulsive either. He wore a brown leather glove to hide the stiff, artificial member.
The first day out he looked across at me as I sat silent at the end of the dinner table and said, “Like to look over my radio equipment, Keverne?” He didn’t call me “boy” like the others, but Keverne—and my heart warmed to him.
That visit to the wireless room was the first of many. But I remember it chiefly because of that strange cry I heard as I knocked at the door. For one awful moment it reminded me of the night when the ML crashed on the beach at Dungeness and something went streaking past me into the pandemonium of the night. I hesitated. But I told myself not to be a fool and went in. Sparks was seated in front of his desk, the radio equipment massed in front of him. He looked up and smiled amiably. “Come in, Keverne,” he said. “Come in and shut the door.” Then his eyes narrowed sharply. “You look as though you seen a ghost.”
“I—I thought I heard one,” I said nervously.
I was closing the door and I spun round, for I’d heard it again—harsh and penetrating like a buzz saw.
He roared with laughter then. “Not afraid of a cat, are you?” he asked, and he was laughing so much the tears ran down his red face. “Look—here’s your ghost.” And still laughing, he bent down and scooped up a small, fawn-and-black animal with staring blue eyes. “There,” he said, putting the animal down on his desk. “It’s only my cat. Never seen a Siamese cat before?”
“No,” I answered. And then added, “Are there many of them?”
“Lord, yes,” he said. “They’re getting quite popular now. Look, see the kink in her tail? That proves she comes of good Chinese stock, direct descendants of the cat that saved the life of the God, Buddha.” I looked into the animal’s strangely flecked eyes and shivered. They stared at me, unwinking. And it seemed to me there was all the wisdom and all the wickedness of the world in their china-blue depths.
He put the animal down in a chair. “You’ll get used to her,” he said.
“What’s her name?” I asked.
He laughed. “She has no name. I whistle—like this,” and he gave a queer, fluting whistle and the cat leaped on to his shoulder. “She’ll come only to me. She won’t come for anybody else. And she won’t be fed by anyone else. So what’s the use of giving her a name, eh?” And he roared with laughter again. “Now it’s time for me to get the news. It’s the Grand National today and they’ll want to know in the fo’c’sle who’s won. That’s all they think a radio operator’s for, now the war’s over.”
I soon got used to the Siamese cat, for I was often in the wireless room. It was in the afterdeckhouse—a small room, little bigger than a cabin. Down one side ran the operator’s desk, the Morse key bolted to the outer edge, the sending and receiving sets backed against the wall. Main switches were under the desk; and on the wall, facing the operator, was a large, brassbound clock with red hands to mark the two hourly silence periods of three minutes each. On either side of the clock were the licenses for the radio equipment framed in oak. There was one porthole giving a view to starboard past one of the lifeboats. The other side of the room was filled by a day bunk with cupboards under it.
As for Sparks himself, I found him the most friendly person on board. And he was as popular with the crew as he was with the officers. The men themselves would often come up and chat with him. The captain, I know, spoke to him about it—I had it from Old Walrus, who knew all the gossip of the ship. But Sparks got away with it and the men still came.
Between the wireless room and the galley I got to know most of the crew. They ceased to be just a part of the workings of the ship and became individuals. One or two stood out from the others. There was Maynard, who was always in the galley, always whining for a little extra. He was a small, wizened man, the skin of his face and temples shining as though polished with pumice stone because some disease had got rid of all the hair growth. He would get very excited when Old Walrus cursed him. Another who was always hanging around the galley was a Welshman called Taffy. He, too, seemed perpetually hungry. Said his appetite was due to the fact that he starved for ten years as a kid in the Rhondda Valley. And often up in the wireless room I’d find Sax, a big, fair man who talked interminably of life in the Antarctic with the Norwegian whaling fleet, and Roberts, a wiry little Scotsman with two rabbity teeth protruding over his lower lip. And there was Gault, a young, shifty-looking fellow who’d joined the ship a year before at Shanghai and who, before we were three days out, had tried to slash Maynard with a razor.
They were a rough crowd, but I had too much to occupy my mind to worry about that. And whenever I’d nothing to do, I’d be up in the wireless room myself. I’d sit there for hours, watching Sparks as he worked the Morse key with his left hand, his useless right hand lying on the table in front of him, stiff and motionless in its leather glove, the fingers strangely crooked. Sometimes, when he wasn’t busy, he’d explain the instruments to me and teach me to send out Morse. At other times he’d help me with my studies, or just sit quietly stroking the blue-eyed cat and telling me tall stories of things that had happened in faraway countries.
And all the time we butted our way through the long Atlantic swell. It grew steadily warmer until daylight merged into darkness the moment the golden rim of the sun had dipped below the horizon. Then the Southern Cross was blazing low in the warm, pulsing nights, and flying fish skimmed round us, flitting like little silver bats from wave top to wave top.
Sir Brian was more often on deck now, sitting in the stern with nothing on but a pair of dirty shorts, sunglasses and an old, floppy hat, fishing endlessly. I remember the first day he baited the big shark hook with a lump of meat. The crew gathered round in silence. And when he hooked on
e about ten feet long, the crew gave him a big cheer and hoisted the ugly-looking brute inboard with a will. That night we had shark steak. After dinner when I took Sir Brian his drink as usual he looked up from the map he was studying and said, “Well, how are the studies going?” He seemed in a genial mood.
“Quite well, sir,” I answered. “Sparks is teaching me Morse.”
“Sparks, eh?” He nodded. “A good type. Knows how to handle men. I could have used a man like that.” He paused, gazing at me hard out of his gray eyes. “So you’re going into the Navy?”
I nodded.
“Not a bad life.” He gave a sort of grunt. “But not my cup of tea. No initiative required. Used to be. But not now. Radio has brought the Admiralty on to every commander’s bridge. No Nelsons need apply now.” He rubbed his fingertips over his smooth chin, glancing up at me sideways with a little, pouting smile. “If I were a youngster with a sense of adventure—know what I’d do? I’d get out into the New World.” He pulled a big map off his bunk and set it on his knee. It was a mass of towering peaks. “That’s where I’d go,” he said, tapping an area that was blank except for a mass of contour lines. “To South America. To the Andes. The old world’s dead— finished. Overdeveloped. Overpopulated. They’ll spend men’s lives like water squabbling over what their ancestors have built up. But here—” and he banged the back of his hand against the mountain peaks, “here there’s nothing— no towns, no railways, no roads, just mountains. And under the surface, everything that the world wants: base metals, precious metals, everything. A man who started young could do here what Rhodes did in South Africa.” He tossed the map back on to the bunk. “Doesn’t that stir your imagination?”
The unexpectedness of the approach took me by surprise. All I said was, “My father was in the Navy.”
“Good God!” he exploded. “That’s no reason to become a cipher for the rest of your life. Learn to think for yourself, young man.” He leaned over and stretched his stubby fingers out to the bookshelf above the bunk. “Here, take this,” he said, handing me a book. “Maybe you can spare time to glance at it when you’re tired of poring over the problems of navigation. Don’t worry about the south of Chile. Read about the Atacama Desert and the wild stretch of the Cordillera around the peak of Llullaillaco. I know a secret river there and gold where mining is impracticable at the moment. Just think what could be done if the river were diverted to the desert and if transport could be got into the mountains. Learn to dream a bit, instead of plodding along in your father’s footsteps.”
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