In addition to her other duties, Beryl was also the cook, and John and I tried to recompense her in some way for her labours by being the washers-up. We sometimes offered in a half-hearted way to do something about the cooking, but she really did not trust us with the stoves, and often when something went wrong with them, we were suspect, either for having pricked them too much or not enough, during the night watch. We also took one extra three-hour watch each, so that Beryl could be free for meals and get a good sleep in the afternoon. John and I took three three-hour watches, and Beryl two, making twenty-four hours in all. Our watches always came at the same time, so that we were able to get accustomed to the hours. Beryl had the twelve to three watch at night, and always said that she preferred it, although most sailors think that it is the worst one. Even when watch-keeping was not necessary, whoever would normally have been on duty was responsible for the running of the ship. We knew automatically who had to turn out to stop a rattle or correct a course.
Now as John looked aft from the shelter of the doghouse, his eyes wandered over what he could see of the ship, he was always in search of something that he might do to improve her. Although she wasn’t his, he made himself part of her, and she always came first with him. Generations of his family had followed the sea, the hard sea of Cornish fishermen and Grimsby trawlermen. Salt water was in his veins, and I sometimes wondered whether he wasn’t sired in it.
He looked behind him at the clock. ‘What does the log say?’ he asked.
‘Fourteen miles.’
‘Good lass; seven knots. I streamed it two hours ago. Keep it up.’
‘Are you going to turn in?’
‘No, it’s nearly tea-time. Those pills are good. I don’t feel a thing.’
‘Nor do I, but I’m going to have another tonight for luck.’
‘Directly I get a chance, if it isn’t too rough, I might take these doors away and put in washboards. They let too much wind in. What do you think?’
‘Too much water too, sometimes. Is Beryl asleep?’
‘No, here she comes. My, my!’
Beryl appeared in the hatch opening. She is inclined to let herself go over useful sea-going dresses, and I saw that she had already decided that it was cold enough for the ‘Southern Ocean Cruising Rig’, a combination woollen suit made up in the McLeod tartan, with a built-in belt, and a sliding hatch behind. It was practical, warm, and bright; bright yellow and black.
‘How are we doing?’ she asked now, that many times repeated question. I told her and she went down to make tea, and John went with her. I watched a squall dragging over the sea towards us and wondered whether it would hit us or pass behind. A few shearwaters were swinging low over the waves, but I could see no albatrosses. John stood up again and passed me a mug of tea and a slice of fruit cake. I thought that everything was very good, and best of all the fact that we were really off and laying the miles behind us. I imagined the string of dots, the daily positions, growing across the chart. 6,700 miles to Port Stanley: 67 perhaps, 67 little crosses, before we arrived. We might be there in time to send a cable for Clio’s birthday. Sometimes the crosses would lie close together on the chart, and sometimes they would stretch out across it, reaching for the harbour on the other side, but the time, I knew, would pass quickly as we settled down to our sea-going routine, and cups of tea would follow cups of tea, at about this time, on each succeeding day.
The cat arrived suddenly on the bridge-deck. When any of us came on deck, we came up slowly and deliberately, taking careful hold of first the edge of the hatch and then the shrouds, but the cat used to arrive with a single spring from the chart table, so that she seemed to fall from nowhere, as light as a windblown leaf, on to the deck. The preliminaries seen from below were not so graceful. She would stand on the chart table swaying to the roll, and craning her neck as if she hoped to see where she might land, and trying to make up her mind to jump. The backstage view of her shaggy little backside, as it disappeared over the step of the hatch, couldn’t compare with the arrival of the ballerina as seen from the stalls in the cockpit. She stayed with me for a moment or two, but it was too cold and rough for cats, and she returned below again.
John relieved me at six. He had had his supper and I had mine as soon as I got below. We tried to have all our meals by daylight, in order to save kerosene, and when we were keeping watch we were always ready to turn in when we could, so that the day consisted of watch-keeping, eating, and sleeping, with only a little reading before we fell asleep. As soon as washing-up was done, I opened my stretcher cot on the port side of the main cabin, and unrolled my sleeping bag and climbed in. The bunk on the other side was full of twice-baked bread, which we found didn’t go mouldy, as long as it was kept in the open. We had sixty loaves.
If the bread did go bad, we had a stove in the main cabin for baking, and also for heating: a blue enamel coal- or wood-burning stove, with a good oven, but only under certain conditions could we persuade it to burn at sea without smoking.
I lay in my bunk now and tried to sleep. The water was rushing past the planking at my ear, a sweet trickling, talking sound. Soon I heard Beryl getting out the navigation lights. She lit them, waited for them to warm up, and then handed them up to John. Probably we would use them only on this night, as from now we would be off the traffic routes. Last she lit the stern light and John tied it up on the mizzen-boom gallows, a white hurricane light which never seemed to blow out, and which showed up better than the red and the green. We did not shield it from forward for this reason.
Pwe came into my bunk and sat right up by my face, her whiskers tickling my cheek, and purring loudly. She was really glad to be at sea again. It was a life that she knew and enjoyed. I think that she felt she was mistress of the ship and the people in it. One of us was always petting her or playing with her, and she seemed to think that we were hers to do what she wanted. Beryl thought that John and I teased her too much, but from the scars on my hand and sometimes my nose, I seemed to be the one who suffered. She got John once when he was teasing her, and he cut her dead for a week, and though she gradually won him back, she never used her claws on him again.
At about a quarter to nine I swung myself out of my berth and lowered my feet on to the seat below it. Then reached across to the brass pipe in the centre of the cabin, which holds the sliding table. When not in use, the table is slid up and fastened close under the deckhead, out of the way, and the pipe is used to grab on to when one is moving in the cabin. Holding on to the edge of my berth and the brass pipe, I stepped down and made my way aft. There was an oil-light burning in the cabin and another oil-light in the forecabin, where Beryl was sleeping. Both were turned down and dim, but they were there in case of some emergency.
When I looked out of the hatch, I could see John hunched over the wheel. Behind him the stern light flickered and flared, and outlined his broad figure, enlarged by an extra jersey under his oilskins. Tzu Hang seemed to be going at a tremendous pace, and the night looked very dark and wild. ‘How are we doing?’ I shouted up to him.
‘Doing well,’ he shouted back, ‘fifty-six miles on the log. Pretty cold. No hurry.’
‘Any lights?’
‘Yes, you can see Glennie Island light just abeam, and Wilson Promontory ahead, only the loom of Wilson Promontory though.’
‘What are the bearings?’
John checked the bearings by looking over the compass, and I marked our rough position on the chart. We were just beginning to cross the Bass Strait. I pulled on my oilskin jumper and my oilskin trousers, and then my coat and my red sock over my head, and climbed up on deck. I sat down beside John until my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness.
‘I think that the