4

That morning on the bus I knew I’d be taking the day off work. The disastrous effect of absenteeism on national industry didn’t worry me. It was a clear summer morning, mist rising off the seaside lagoons, gulls gliding on a gentle wind – too good to spend sweating over hot steel in a foundry. As the bus page 236 passed by the works I could see the fennel growing in the yards and plumes of smoke against the black ramshackle roofs. They were getting ready for another day, without me. I sat back from the window in case Old Voss was watching with an X-ray eye from his office window, then straightened up again – after all, I was human, over twenty, and free to stay or go. The thought gave me a sudden feeling of recklessness and power.

In the town the streets were almost empty. The water-truck had been through, and the gutters were still clean and dripping. I walked down by the wharves to look at the ships. There were only a few tugs, like bedraggled ducks, moored at the land end of the main wharf, but further out lay a Home boat riding on the water. I could see a gun turret at the stern and the strange blunt antennae of radar. I strolled towards her, eating my sandwich lunch and throwing pieces to the gulls that dived and squabbled in the scummy green swells. The dark blue uniform of a policeman showed for a moment from behind a shed. I turned back towards the gate. I never feel really happy when the cops are around.

A sense of depression stayed with me as I went up town again. Tomorrow I would have to tell the foreman that I’d been off colour. He’d believe me, but it was a shabby kind of lie. And one of my mother’s friends might see me in town and mention it to her. The town began to shrink from a place of freedom into its more ordinary appearance of a concrete jail. I stopped by the Crown Hotel and rolled myself a cigarette. It had just opened. A girl knelt scrubbing the steps. The shining swing-doors beckoned me in.

The barman was polishing glasses. ‘A great day’ – the phrase was worn and meaningless, what he had said a thousand times before – ‘You going out to the trots?’

‘I might.’ I bought a handle of beer and drank it slowly, discussing the chances of various horses whom I did not intend to bet on. Then an old man with red-rimmed eyes and a shrivelled face shuffled in. He knew the barman. Soon they were talking about Harry who had died and George who had gone up north. I could drink and think in quiet.

After five beers my sourness had gone and I was no longer conscious that I was wearing working trousers. My face in the bar mirror seemed mysteriously handsome, the face of a Don Juan or a young genius gone to seed. The bar was filling up now – business men having their morning quick one, old soaks feeling the tide rise again after the night’s dryness. The sun glittered on the coloured rows behind the barman’s head. I was ready for anything. Then the swing-door creaked to let in a stocky red-faced youth in a leather coat and a sailor’s jersey. He propped himself on the bar and ordered a double rum. The English burr in his voice was a current of sea wind. I remembered the Home boat down at the wharves, tall and self-possessed beside the scrubby tugs.

I was wondering how to speak to him without seeming off the beat when he saved me the trouble. ‘Got a match, mate?’ he asked. I gave him a half full page 237 box and told him to keep them. ‘Have a rum,’ he invited. ‘This muck goes through you like a dose of salts.’

I finished my beer and joined him. He stood with his coat open, one foot on the brass rail. His eyes were a hard blue, set far apart, with high cheekbones and eyebrows slanted a little. He drank his rum neat as if it were lemonade. As the drink loosened his tongue he became more talkative. Peter Johnson was his name, he told me, from Manchester. He had spent eight of his twenty-four years at sea, but was still an A.B. ‘I’ve not got the college education,’ he said. ‘But I can splice a wire cable and take my turn at the wheel with any man. The Old Man logged me half my pay for coming on board drunk, but he can’t say anything about what I do at sea.’

He had been torpedoed once in the North Atlantic and spent twelve hours in the water, and had seen the backside of every port from Aberdan to Buenos Aires. To his family, it seemed, he was a black sheep. His mother, the ‘old lady’, had never been able to forgive him for being a jailbird and having his name in the papers. He had been arrested for stealing radios – the old Jewish proprietor of the shop had rung the police when he came back from lunch to find Pete heading out the back door, blind drunk, with the last of twelve radios on his back. He had a girl in England and another in Sydney. Some of his worries seemed to hinge on keeping them both ignorant of his whereabouts; but his strongest attachment seemed reserved for a cabin boy who had come on to the ship out of an orphanage. ‘That boy loves me,’ he said. ‘When I was in the D.T.’s in Aberdan he looked after me better than a woman could. It’s no good me getting married. I’m married already. I’m married to the sea. I can’t get away from it. Every trip I reckon it’s the last time, but I always get restless after a month on shore and sign on again. You want to be a sailor, Jimmy. It’d make a man of you.’

By twelve o’clock my head was swimming. Each time I shut my eyes I fell down a shaft towards the centre of the earth. Pete was less drunk. ‘Come and have a binder,’ he urged me. ‘I’ve not had a real feed since yesterday.’ I let him lead me into the street. The movement and fresh air sobered me a little. We found an upstairs grill room and sat down to slabs of steak flooded with Worcester sauce. I was happy again, though cased in glass that might splinter at a touch. Sweat was standing out on Pete’s forehead. ‘Come down on the boat and meet the boys,’ he said. ‘We’ll go back to the boozer afterwards. The old girl sails tomorrow, and she’s short-handed. You can sign on as a deckhand.’

The idea seemed an excellent one. To cut clear from the whole tangle of shore life, mother, father, job, morning and evening anxiety. The world I had been used to drowned in an always widening wake. I could go in the clothes I stood up in. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’

Pete paid for the meal, hauling a wad of notes out of his hip pocket, and we climbed down the stairs to the street again. A curdled pale sky stood page 238 over the sunny buildings. Above bungalows roofed with corrugated iron the dark green bush belt slept like an animal. The town had never looked more beautiful to me.

Down at the wharves a fresh wind wrinkled the harbour water. I remembered the policeman. ‘Maybe they won’t let me come on board,’ I said.

‘We’ll dodge up when there’s no one round,’ he said. ‘The bloody bosun’s the only man likely to squeal.’

As we went up the steep swinging gangway, I felt I was leaving my life behind me, coming into a new dangerous world. Wood smell, tar smell and paint smell. A blast of music came from a radio in the fo’c’sle. The officer superintending the loading of cargo took no notice as Pete led me forward. We entered a narrow corridor that led us to the crew’s quarters. Three men were eating at a wooden table – one horse-faced and wrinkled, who spoke with a Yankee twang; one a tough-looking curly-headed Irishman; the last a huge Swede, who said nothing but lay back looking out the porthole, chewing slowly at a hunk of dried beef. A boy was washing himself in a bucket by the door. Pete introduced me. I could feel their slightly hostile scrutiny. The drink was wearing off, and with it my sense of confidence.

Red, the Yank and the eldest, offered me a seat and a cup of black coffee. I sat down and warily rolled a cigarette. The sour hot coffee bit angrily into my guts. The small room oppressed me. This was a strange world, a jungle almost, where a knowledge of Dylan Thomas would count for less than nothing. Only the quick blow and natural cunning could give security here.

‘You ever been to sea, boy?’ asked the Irishman.

‘No, he hasn’t.’ Pete answered for me. ‘But he’s thinking of signing on for this trip.’

‘You’ll find it pretty hard. You’ve got to be tough to make a sailor.’

The boy looked up from his bucket with the pale eyes of a lizard on a wall, gaunt and fair, out of a world in which he was Pete’s wife, not by choice but because life went that way. Something of the hardness of iron flaked with rust and scraped and painted again was behind his look. Suddenly I knew that I would never sail with them, tomorrow or any other day. I got to my feet. ‘I’ll have to see a cobber up town at four,’ I said – and then to Pete – ‘See you tomorrow maybe, before the ship sails, same place.’

I walked quickly down the corridor and out to the head of the gangway. As I climbed down to the wharf a cloud came over the sun, darkening town and harbour. My head ached and my legs were tired as I went on towards the bus station.