There was no ‘First-class to London? Yes sir!’ but a pudding-faced stare and cash slapped down to emphasize that the ensuing silence could go on for ever for all he cared. A Force-Niner pushing from behind had made a hard ride up Channel, and meant no easy job sliding into that concrete embrace of mother earth. You can push around the shoulder in the wind’s teeth, but it’s another matter when you get kicked at speed like a football to make that turn to port through the eye of a needle. But the Old Man had done it as he always did. They were in, and he was out, had chosen to make his last trip at fifty. From now on land and idleness would be his lot, and he anticipated filling the emptiness with only the good things of his choice.
You could laugh at dirty weather on land, watch its worst from behind the glass of a train window. He set his cap on the next seat, folded his mackintosh and put up his cases. The padded shoulder-bag containing sextant, deckwatch and short-wave radio, needed no more but never to be parted from, stayed by his feet.
He couldn’t read with his mind on the spin and half-way round the ratchets, even Our Mutual Friend and only a third through the tale. His bald dome with border of reddish hair shone with raindrops on the window glass. He saw his face and didn’t much care that he considered it ugly, especially the wide, somewhat flattened nose, broken while boxing and again in a shindig with one of the crew as second mate.
The train ran through darkness and he cupped his hands on the glass to look at stars in the clearing sky. The stars are dead but give light, yet never quite dead because they guide us at sea. Not everything is death. Not all is without purpose, not even me, though I’m damned if I know at the moment what it is.
In spite of a few trips around the islands of Central America his face was pale. Beer-smelling breath bounced, so he pressed the black flake into brown straw between his fingers and filled his pipe.
There was no one to think about except his aunt, who had lived in a large flat in Madeira Square. He had first climbed the stairs at fourteen, to stay a few days after she had written to the orphanage that she was his aunt and had better see him. He felt he had climbed more steps in that building than he ever had at sea, and wondered how she had managed as a woman of eighty. Age must find strength, ashes of heart and muscle proving that all isn’t over by a long shot. On his last visit he adjusted his cap, and pressed the bell which he remembered had been sticky as if someone had previously called with jam on their fingers. Most were elderly people, and the stairs smelled of dog and cat piss rather than of cooking food.
But she could see the sea from her lounge windows. ‘I got your Marconigram, so knew you were on your way. Probably saw your ship as I was having breakfast!’
At the end of every voyage there was no one else to visit. As a young man he had dreaded seeing her though called just the same, but got berths that kept him longer and longer away. Then he wondered and worried as she aged, and tried not to be more than three months absent, expecting every sight of her to be his last. Each time she kept him a full minute at the door as if to remind him that if it weren’t for him she would still have a sister, and he should never forget it.
At the first visit from the orphanage, she had been in her forties, a big old woman trying to frighten him. She had always kept him waiting, yet he never missed seeing her when ashore, which puzzled him often enough, except there was no one else to call on. If she hadn’t existed, any other country in the world would have had as equal a claim to be called Home as England.
In the Western Approaches he would get the Sparks to send a telegram via Land’s End Radio, as if such personal signals were vital for the ship’s navigation, or part of his own safety precautions. He didn’t know why, but the closer he came to shore the more he knew there was no option but to visit her. When on watch he allowed himself to think of nothing but the ship, so he was happy not knowing. Otherwise he slept, or listened to music in his cabin on the hi-fi system Clara had given him, one of the birthday gifts since he first went to sea, each preceded by a greetings telegram telling him what to expect. Wherever he was, the message and the package always found him, and during the war they waited at the company’s office.
2
At fourteen, stiff in his orphanage clothes and smelling of his own strong soap, he had stood in her large sitting-room among plush furniture, pictures and knick-knacks, and a cage of bright yellow birds that never stopped calling and whistling. He had wavy gingerish hair and soft brown eyes, a few freckles on skin that was otherwise pale. He couldn’t look directly at her, his cowardice remembered yet at the present time understood.
She sat in an armchair, and left him standing for half an hour. The tall pendulum clock which told him so was the only object he felt humanly close to. The birds talked to the room and to each other, and the woman who was supposed to be his aunt would never speak at all, so it seemed, though she looked at him.
Beyond the bay of the big second-floor window where she made him stand (and he wondered afterwards, remembering the way she was looking at him when he had the courage to glance at her, whether it hadn’t been some sort of plan) he could see a sheet of grey flat water down the square and across the promenade which seemed to lift like a hillside as if some barrier on the beach was stopping it rushing into the streets and destroying the town. The sight was scary, but there was nothing else worth looking at. A wide high sea expanded across the world with no land beyond. He stared as long as he thought his eyes were not getting crossed, hoping that when he turned back to the clock at least another minute would have gone by.
The water was the English Channel. He knew it from geography, and that France lay on the other side, but he imagined the sea went right to the South Pole across thousands of miles of ocean that got dark at night and had shining stars over it. There were lit-up ships there, liners, merchantmen, tankers and tramp steamers, and when you got to the ice you would find men fighting with giant whales as in Moby Dick, and when God wasn’t for them He was against them, and from within the hidden nine-tenths of an iceberg lurking underwater, He rose up to destroy men in order to show them His power while Jonah sat in the whale’s mouth and looked on in awe yet wondered whether to come out and take a chance on life.
The favoured victims struggled in a fearful sea of grey waves. There was daylight but no sky. The only colour was blood when harpoons struck and the sea monster struggled and died, or the great ice-saw of an iceberg’s side ripped the life out of ships and men, as in the grey engravings of a ‘Penny Dreadful’ yarn. He watched it from the window, then opened his eyes wider to see whether or not it had happened, and saw only the calm sea and, some miles out, several steamers. The superstructure on one ship was so high he thought it a white building on the coast of France. He made up his mind during that half hour what course his life would take, and he knew he would never alter it.
He would go to sea. With neither father nor mother, he would become a sailor and live on a ship.
‘Did you hear what I said?’
‘No, Aunt Clara.’
‘I said don’t they ever let you sit down at that orphanage? You can sit down, if you care to.’
He chose one of the hardest chairs, as if a sailor wouldn’t want anything softer. ‘They do at meals, and in class.’
‘Not on that one. It isn’t strong enough for a big boy like you.’ She pointed to a sofa whose curved legs, he said to himself, looked as if they wouldn’t support his big toe. But he did as he was told, sitting stiffly in his walking-out suit, and enclosed within his own carbolic whiff, at which she wrinkled her nose. ‘We shall have to do something with you.’