Slow Boats to China

by Gavin Young

  That night the hotel room was hot and airless. I dreamed I had to catch a train in Cairo, but great heaving crowds blocked the streets and I couldn’t make the taxi driver go faster. The train was going to Aswan and Port Sudan; I had failed to find a ship through the canal. This train went only once every two weeks, and it was obvious I was going to miss it. I woke up in a panic.

  In the morning Ahmed Bey said, ‘A French ship is expected in the roads today. Noon, probably. We’ll ask her captain about you. She’s going to Jedda. Don’t move from your hotel room, please.’

  At noon he telephoned me at the hotel. ‘I have spoken to the captain myself. He was not willing at first. He is not stopping at Suez, and he must go to Aqaba, too. But I said we could get you off in a launch at Suez so that he wouldn’t have to stop. Then he said he had no accommodation, but I told him you would need no more than a chair on deck – anything – so he agreed. We’ll get clearance from the police and immigration. Can you come to the office at two thirty?’

  In the Aswan Shipping office, Ahmed Bey handed me a letter: ‘Give this to the captain.’

  The letter said:

  To the Commander, M/V Patrick Vieljeux, Port Said.

  Dear Sir,

  We have to advise you that arrangements will be made to our Suez office to arrange for Mr. G. Young’s disembarkation at Suez. Please see that he will be ready on the gangway on his arrival there and oblige.

  ‘Ali, my clerk, will take you,’ Ahmed Bey said. ‘Be ready at six o’clock at the hotel entrance. Give me your passport, and I will send it by messenger to our agent in Suez.’

  It was difficult to express enough gratitude. ‘Without you – you and Captain Rashad….’

  ‘Well, it would have been much more difficult,’ Ahmed Bey said with a smile.

  *

  Ali’s launch swept up the canal northwards towards its mouth. The sun had long gone down, and the water glistened like wet oilskin under the bright lights of the harbour and the waiting ships. The French freighter loomed unbelievably high as we swung between her stern and the two giant hawsers that held her to her buoy. I saw her name above me, Patrick Vieljeux, and, under that, the word ‘Dunkerque’.

  We came alongside the gangway, and Ali, standing in the launch’s bows, made her fast. I followed him up the stairs with my anorak and leather bag; the launchman followed me with my metal suitcase on his shoulder. A steward met us at the top and said, ‘Bon soir.’ Up an outside companionway and into the superstructure of the ship. Inside another door, and then, after whining up a deck or two in a lift, we crossed a spacious landing with a wide staircase. On one bulkhead was a Picasso print, on another a Bernard Buffet reproduction of flowers in a vase. Over the stairwell hung a large photographic blow-up of a seventeenth-century engraving featuring a windmill, horsemen prancing, wagoners in white hats and a town on a river.

  Ali halted before an open door labelled BUREAU DE CAPITAINE and knocked on the lintel. A tall, heavy, grey-haired man in white shirt, shorts and stockings came slowly into the opening. He stroked a close-clipped beard, looked momentarily puzzled, and said, ‘Ah, vous êtes le monsieur qui….’ I introduced myself and thanked him for agreeing to take me. ‘Non, non. Plaisir. Come in, but give me one instant, please.’ For a few minutes he and Ali talked business. The captain moved and spoke slowly and deliberately, as if he had just woken from sleep, which he might have while waiting for his ship to be allowed to move off with the southbound convoy. Later I found he always talked and moved like that, but his sleepy look was deceptive. Whatever his manner, the captain of the Patrick Vieljeux was wide-awake. There was also a stateliness about him that reminded me of a middle-aged actor in the Comédie Française; without difficulty one could imagine him in a seventeenth-century cloak, breeches with ribbons at the knee and a wide lace collar: tall, upright, magisterial.

  ‘Two more crew lists?’ he was saying to Ali with the mildly puzzled air of a schoolmaster who has just been informed by a prefect that today is Tuesday, not Wednesday, and that the subject is divinity, not applied chemistry. For a while he riffled through his papers, making a dive or two to fish others from a drawer. Finally he handed over a fistful of documents, and Ali disappeared.

  The captain put on half-moon glasses to read Ahmed Bey’s letter. ‘No problem. Now, I have no passenger space, you know,’ he said in an accent as pronounced as Charles Boyer’s. ‘Mais….’ Leading me down an air-conditioned corridor, he cautiously opened a door. I saw a cabin larger than my room at the Holiday Hotel: two bunks, a large wood-framed porthole and a massive wooden wardrobe. An electric iron sat on a sideboard and an ironing board lay on the floor. ‘Alors, this is all….’

  ‘I was expecting a simple chair on deck.’

  ‘Oh, that’s not good. This cabin is only for the pilots – if it is necessary.’

  ‘You mean a pilot may come and sleep in the second bunk?’

  The captain smiled. ‘En principe, the pilot should not be sleeping. He has to avoid hitting the side of the canal.’

  Back in his cabin, I explained why it was that I particularly wanted to traverse the Suez Canal by ship, and he understood immediately. ‘You will want to see the ship moving through the canal, is that it?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Of course. Come.’

  We climbed a stairway to the bridge, one floor above the captain’s cabin in the enormous superstructure. The bridge – the SALLE NAUTIQUE, a metal sign said – of the Patrick Vieljeux was staggeringly large, or so it seemed after Al Anoud. It was as big as a large living room; too big to encompass in the present half-light. The captain pulled open the door that kept the air-conditioned climate inside the wheelhouse, and we stepped out onto the starboard wing over the water, a long way below.

  A ship was moving up the canal towards us. ‘The convoy is passing from south to north,’ said the captain, pointing to it. ‘We will not wait too long now.’

  ‘Is that the first ship in the convoy?’

  ‘No, the quatrième. Four since eleven hours. One every ten minutes. It will take time. Let us see…. Three and a half hours all together.’

  ‘How many ships in our convoy ahead of us, Captain?’

  ‘On ne sait pas.’

  The northbound ship moved past us, a huddle of light moving against the more numerous harbour lights of Port Said, which were so bright that they blotted out the stars in a perfect sky.

  ‘You must get some sleep as we wait. You may not sleep much when we go through the canal. Come up here any time. See the steward if you want anything. Oh, may I give you this?’ He handed me a card.

  Jean-Noël Visbecq,

  Capitaine au Long Cours Commandant

  Société Navale Chargeur Delmas-Vieljeux

  Avenue Matignone

  Paris 8e

  Then I drank a tot of whisky from my father’s old flask, lay down in my clothes and went to sleep.

  *

  When I awoke it was 2.15 a.m. I found Captain Visbecq on the bridge, a cigarette hanging from his wide lower lip.

  The pilot had appeared too, a thin, dark man with a black moustache, peering through the windscreen of the bridge with a thermos flask on a ledge in front of him, a large jar of Nescafé, a container of sugar and an electrically operated bullhorn.

  ‘Allons-y.’ The captain began switching off all the ship’s deck lights, pushing small levers at a switchboard – snap … snap … snap – until only the navigation lights and a powerful searchlight remained. ‘We are going to be a little late,’ he said. ‘There are four ships in front of us. Seven to ten minutes between each of us is the rule. Now we’ll start getting into position.’

  A red star on a white funnel – a straggler from the south–north convoy – passed, while those ahead of it began to disperse toward fifteen different destinations in the Mediterranean or across the Atlantic.

  ‘Are there always delays?’

  ‘And not much sleep.’

  ‘Do you sleep at all during the crossing?’


  ‘I may doze in the chair in the radio room, but something could happen. One ship ran into another two days ago, from behind, and, if there’s fog, we must stop and pull to the side.’

  The Patrick Vieljeux, Captain Visbecq told me, was a family name, and the vessel was one of thirty belonging to the family’s company. She was six years old, 1600 tons, built near Marseilles, registered in Dunkirk. ‘A good ship,’ he said.

  At night the beautiful old façade of Port Said looked even more theatrical. The palm trees like mop-haired sentinels, the neat box-topped trees, the arched, high-shuttered windows and the slim stems of pillars supporting verandas and balconies seemed to be waiting for scene shifters to clear them away. Like a one-eyed giant, a lighthouse glared around the harbour. From the Patrick Vieljeux’s dominating bridge I could see the distant necklace of lights along the road to Damietta and Alexandria on which my taxi had rammed the rock.

  Near Ahmed Bey’s darkened offices beside the blue and green cupolas of the Canal Authority Building, the ferries to Port Fuad were still loading passengers and cars at 3.00 a.m. Presently the shoreline began to close in as the waterway curved gently eastwards like a black scimitar. I could see the ship behind us adjusting its searchlight, stabbing white light at us across the water, and behind her the smaller lights of other vessels of our convoy moving after us, keeping their distances.

  A little launch had guided us to the last of the harbour buoys; now it dropped back and curved away into the darkness. Ahead a pair of lights – red and green – the first of the many that point out the narrowness of the canal, like cats’-eyes on the verges of a main road. The mouth of the canal seemed incredibly narrow. A hundred metres? Less? The Patrick Vieljeux was a colossal steel camel about to be threaded through the eye of a needle.

  My notebook reads:

  Now the red light is behind us, and Patrick Vieljeux – God bless Captain Ismail Rashad and Ahmed Bey for it! – is inside the Suez Canal! My Becher’s Brook, my first dreaded obstacle, is slipping past in the darkness below me in a double chain of red and green light. By tomorrow night, I am certain of it now, I shall be through the Suez Canal.

  A young officer brought me a mug of Nescafé from the bridge. I raised it to him and, grinning like an ape, said, ‘Salut!’

  Nine

  The wing of the Patrick Vieljeux’s bridge, as high as a four-storey house, looked down on an avenue of red and green lights as straight as the Champs Elysées. A road ran along the canal on its west bank, but few cars moved on it at this time of the morning. We moved so silently, engines humming, so faintly that we could hear cocks crowing in the villages on the shore.

  Once in the canal, Captain Visbecq drew a large white hand over his beard, yawned and said to the pilot, ‘I am going to my cabin now. Call the mate if you need to.’

  I stayed on the bridge watching our high bows stalking two white eyes, the stern lights of the ship ahead. Delicate ripples fanned out from bow and stern to caress the canal’s verge and then subside without fuss on the placid surface of the waterway. Oil is partly responsible for this serene passage through such narrow and confined waters; its slicks lie on the canal like the rainbow coils of a sea snake.

  The night became colder, and a mist began to lay a low smokescreen. The beam of our headlight reflected back off the mist wall, and lights of the vessels following us became wavering spokes of white seen through gauze.

  At 4.55 a.m. I went below to sleep. Once I woke up and realized that the ship had stopped. I woke again at 8.25, splashed water on my face and climbed to the bridge. The sun was already quite high, and the heat of its rays warned of a sticky day to come. It was bound to be hot; we were passing down a narrow funnel of warm water between sand and lagoons, patches of reed and swamp. Captain Visbecq was on the bridge and nodded good morning. A cigarette hung from his lip and on his head was a white tennis cap with a long jutting peak of green Perspex.

  The first officer, a youngish, fair-haired man, asked me if I’d like breakfast, and an officer with a beard led me down a few decks to the officers’ dining room, where a steward was laying out bread, jam, butter, jars of Nescafé and instant Eurotea (new to me) on a long table. Yesterday’s menu propped against a kettle announced: ‘Déjeuner – Salade de Tomates, Sole Meunière, Gigot, Pommes Boulangères, Dessert. Dîner – Potage, Pizza Napolitaine, Boudin au Four, Pommes (Fruits).’ Not bad at all.

  ‘En principe, the first officer said later, ‘the canal takes fourteen hours, but it depends on the punctuality of the daily northbound convoy. If it is on time at the Bitter Lakes, we shall pass directly down to Suez. If it is late, we must wait for it in the Bitter Lakes.’

  From my notebook of the Suez Canal passage, I recall Captain Visbecq instructing me that pont means deck (not bridge). Château means the superstructure housing the crews’ and officers’ living quarters. Salle nautique, he explained, was the enlarged wheelhouse, which contained not only the wheel and helmsman but radar, chart room and other automation.

  At El Qantara the pilot said, ‘The Egyptian army crossed the canal here in 1973.’ I could see the barbed wire and thirty-foot-high bunkers, like crude sand castles not yet crumbled away, and even a few anti-aircraft guns poking their rusting snouts toward the sky.

  According to his memoirs, President Sadat had sat in a bunker like these on the day of the attack, sipping tea and puffing his pipe, watching his soldiers race down to the canal and push their boats into the water, shouting, ‘Allahu Akbar!’ In a few minutes they stood once more in Sinai.

  I had a more distant memory of this place. In 1947, before Nasser, I had arrived in Egypt by troopship from Glasgow with an army draft. Our destination was Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee, and we passed through El Qantara because it was a railway junction from which a major line shot north across the Sinai desert to Gaza and Palestine. As a teenage officer, I had been particularly instructed by my superiors to make sure that our soldiers’ rifles and equipment reached Palestine in the possession of their rightful owners. This stern instruction was not easily carried out, for half the population of Egypt seemed to be singlemindedly engaged, day and night, in desperate schemes to part the British army from its basic equipment. A rifle laid carelessly down for half a second instantly vanished. Railway stations were popular with the Egyptian snatch-and-run experts, who had become amazingly agile, daring and successful with constant practice. Large groups of bored and restless soldiers, sometimes waiting for hours for a train, became less vigilant, even falling asleep, as time passed. A junction like El Qantara was a thief’s paradise.

  Going north by train from El Qantara, we were packed for the long, slow desert journey into hot railway carriages with sealed windows, overflowing into the corridors and the guard’s van. Doors remained open to admit at least a minimum of air. Egyptian scalawags, a grinning lot in torn and dirty robes, perched dangerously on the metal platforms, even astride the swaying metal buffers between the carriages. With infinite patience they would edge gradually closer to the open doorways and the belts of webbing and their valuable attachments that the soldiers had taken off for greater comfort.

  The flicker of a dark hand was all you might have seen. You heard only a soldier’s startled yell. Two sets of equipment had vanished into the moving carpet of the desert: .303 ammunition in clips, bayonets, water bottles, mess tins, razors, toothbrushes, needles and thread, towels, undershirts and underpants, shorts, socks and perhaps a handful of pornographic pictures obtained from a persuasive Egyptian with a Scottish name near the gates of the transit camp in Suez. Two sets of equipment gone, and two guardsmen with hairless cheeks staring at each other in shock. ‘Fuckin’ ’ell, mun, he’s nicked me bloody webbin’ – the lot!’ And to me, ‘Me webbin’, sir, it’s gone. Some wog….’

  Leaning on the bridge of the Patrick Vieljeux I could still hear the shock in the young Welsh voices and the rattle of the train. Now I stared down into the water of the canal, borne smoothly past the colossal sand bunkers (like the relics o
f some modern Ozymandias), the bombarded villages, the rusting snouts of guns, the scene of two great offensives and a hundred artillery duels. The distant image of that train journey from El Qantara and of myself, skinny, itchy with prickly heat and eighteen years old, found its sole reflection in my own mind.

  ‘Français! French! Ça va! Ça va!’ The canal spread itself at Ismailiya like a boa constrictor that had swallowed a sheep. On the bank a mosque, a church and a smart new-looking hospital appeared. Then a newly made beach on a spit of land, with a newly painted café, tables, yellow and red umbrellas. Families picnicked, young people swam, children ran about shouting.

  ‘Français! Ça va!’ the swimmers called from the water near the Patrick Vieljeux. The French officers, including the captain, eagerly crowded the starboard wing of the ship and waved at the girls. Excitement even emboldened one of them to snatch up the captain’s binoculars and peer at the bikinis on the little beach.

  ‘Ouf!’ – the captain shrugged – ‘Pas grand’ chose!’ but he went on staring.

  ‘Can’t we stop and get wet a bit?’ someone asked him. ‘Non!’ Captain Visbecq snatched back his glasses in mock indignation, crying, ‘Hey! My glasses, paid for out of my own pocket, non?’ and he too peered down at the girls waving from shore.

  We dropped our first pilot here, an unobtrusive man. Now a Nile-bred Napoleon – a short, abrupt man who wore, oddly, a pair of white gloves – replaced him.

  Date palms, wheat fields; to the west, the oasis of Ismailiya. For a time the canal twisted and turned uncharacteristically. Through the tubular spars and derricks of the Patrick Vieljeux I saw wastes of the Sinai desert.

  ‘Droit senk. Zeero. Comme ça.’ The new pilot spoke French to the helmsman, but talked sharply to Captain Visbecq in English. ‘Close the bridge door,’ he ordered. ‘Your air conditioning is working, no? Why waste it?’ The captain raised his eyebrows mildly and stuck another cigarette in his lower lip without comment. A startled young officer closed the door.