‘I’m afraid it’s gone,’ I replied, almost bashfully.
‘Jesus,’ said the Mate. ‘Because you’re English you think you can lose my hammers. I’ll take it off your pay.’
When, months later, I got to Australia and collected part of my pay, amongst the deductions for cigarettes and so on made by the Captain, was my little hammer.
‘You are zorry, I am zorry,’ said Sedelquist, when the Mate had gone, looking at his beautiful dungarees covered with red lead.
My morale, which had been dropping since I arrived in Belfast, fell to new depths. But I was learning. I vowed that I would never again, whilst in the ship, be sorry for anything, and apart from some lapses I managed to keep this resolve. I had been outraged by Sedelquist’s action in rushing on deck to tell the Mate what had happened. Years of school life, happily behind me, told me that by schoolboy standards, Sedelquist had ‘sneaked’. At my prep school he would have been sent to Coventry. Here I seemed to be in danger of suffering the fate which should have been his.
After some hours on the freezing platform, during which I brooded on these questions and hit viciously at the ship’s side, a whistle blew. It was the dinner hour. Sedelquist swarmed up his rope with agility. Pride prevented me from asking his help. I had never been very good at climbing at school and I had always loathed the glib, bouncy, P.T. instructor who used to disport himself on the comfortably thick ropes in the gym. This rope was different. It was two-inch manilla and very greasy. With great efforts I rose seven or eight feet and then slipped miserably down again. My second try took me higher but I could not see how I could climb out over the flared bow.
I managed to get within an inch or two of the lower rung of the rail and then I was back on my platform, almost in tears. I considered jumping in the dock and swimming or shouting to attract attention. Neither of these courses really appealed to me. Eventually I managed to traverse the side of the ship and reach the platform beyond Sedelquist’s. Here I got my foot in a hawse-pipe and reached the deck easily.
Dinner was over and the ‘Little Dutch Mill’ was being played when I arrived. I was greeted with derisive cheers. I had learned another lesson, not to be late for meals.
‘You are zorry,’ said Sedelquist, ‘and you are noh strong.’
There was no reply to this and I got on with the cold remains of the dinner which I had begged from the Cook and which seemed unaccountably good.
Although my popularity was at a low ebb, it received a tremendous fillip the next day, my third on board, a short period which already seemed to me like an eternity. The coal supplies were low and we were replenishing them from the shore. I was therefore rather dirtier than usual and was looking forward to a bath at the Salvation Army Refuge, of which I thought very highly, having had a hot one for next to nothing the night before. I was standing at the rail when I saw a very fast and luxurious sports car nose its way along the dock and come to a halt by the ship. There was a flurry of skirts as the occupant emerged, and a distant vision of legs of timeless elegance as a woman, clutching a splendidly unpractical hat, came up the gang-plank.
Naturally all work on board ceased, and the crew gave themselves up to an orgy of speculation. There was a short interval before she appeared by the mainmast, escorted by two Mates (the First having just joined); both wore social expressions and braid caps which they had put on with miraculous speed. According to Sedelquist, they kept their hats handy in the officers’ lavatory for just such an emergency. I was not used to the Second Mate in this new social role, but by now I had recognised the visitor and was not as surprised as the rest of the crew when I was called aft.
The visitor was a great friend of my parents, called Lucy, whom I had always worshipped from afar. Whenever possible I would refer to her as ‘my aunt in Ireland’, but it was only practicable to do so when she was not present and to people who did not know her. I had been debarred from any other pretence by my extreme youth. Now, here she was, dressed in black, the most elegant woman in Ireland. I must have looked pretty bad, because her first words were: ‘Och, Eric, come away home now, your mother’s crying her eyes out.’
‘I’m afraid I can’t, Lucy,’ I said, lying bravely. ‘It’s tremendous fun really, and I’m not always as dirty as this.’
‘Can he come home with me?’ she asked the Mate, who was goggling.
‘We stop work at twelve o’clock on Saturday. He must be on board by six o’clock on Monday morning.’ I really thought that he was going to choke as the words came dragging out of his boots.
‘How sweet of you,’ said Lucy, going over him with a lovely smile. ‘I’ll pick him up here. Now, can he please show me the ship?’
I didn’t think that even Lucy could pull this one off but she did, inserting a parenthetic: ‘Perhaps you could come too. I am sure Eric knows very little about it.’
Both Mates escorted her to the car when she drove away. It may have been autumn in the York Dock, but over the deck of the Moshulu hung the expensive scent of springtime.
The boys crowded round. Just like school again.
It was Sedelquist who led the interrogation.
‘Who is hee?’
‘She’s called Lucy.’
‘Hee is very good. Hee is your friend?’
‘She’s all right,’ I parried.
Sedelquist persisted: ‘Hee is your girl friend.’ I pondered this, wondering why he had not said boy friend. I thought too of my diminished status, all the mistakes I had made in three short days: If we did not sail soon I should be a laughing-stock.
Sedelquist was about to ask the same question again.
‘Hee …’
‘Well, sort of,’ I said. ‘She’s a sort of aunt.’
Whatever the Scandinavian interpretation of ‘aunt’, it satisfied everybody. I was ‘noh strong’, but Lucy was my aunt and in the dark days to come, before I became ‘you strongbody’ and could take it out of other people, it was the respect that the crew had for her that kept the mass of them on my side whatever violent battles I might have to fight individually.
On Monday morning I was delighted to find that two more ‘foreigners’ had arrived on board and had been allotted to the starboard fo’c’sle. One of them, George White, was a tall thin young man from Massachusetts; the other was a young Dutchman called Jack Kroner who spoke fluent English. Both had signed on as apprentices, but Jack, who had been to sea before, had very sensibly evaded the premium which my father had been required to pay on my behalf, by arriving unheralded at the ship and striking a bargain on the spot.
Belfast after dark, into which we used to sally with Vytautas on modest porter-drinking expeditions, was a strange city, like a studio set for a Hitchcock thriller and equally deserted. The rain shone on the cobblestones and the wind howled down the dismal thoroughfares, rattling the glasses of the gas-lamps above our heads.
The only people we ever encountered off the main streets were numbers of apparently able-bodied men who would emerge from the shadows outside public houses and demand money. If not satisfied they would become abusive. One of the Finns who was being repatriated became so enraged by their attentions that he picked one of them up and threw him bodily into a glass shopfront. His departure was delayed for some days by this act, but he was saved from serious consequences by his ignorance of English and the ingenious plea put forward on his behalf that he had misunderstood the nature of the importunity. The four of us never had any compunction about refusing these requests