A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby

A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby Eric Newby A collection of writing from Britain's best-loved travel writer, ‘A Merry Dance around the World’ is the culmination of a lifetime of adventure.A collection of writing from eleven books by Britain's best-loved travel writer, A Merry Dance around the World is the culmination of a lifetime's adventures, from the birth of Eric Newby in 1919 at the 'ghastly hour' of 3.45am, to Herculean cycling escapades in his seventies through the wiles of the Irish winter. An astonishing catalogue of disasters and misunderstandings, Newby's compassionate grace and sharp wit ensure that every adventure is as charming, hilarious and wild as his last.Including extracts from his masterpiece of love and courage in wartime, Love and War in the Apennines, travelling epiphanies against the breathtaking backdrop of A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush and the memorable excursions of the long-suffering and truly heroic Wanda Newby on bikes, in boats and planning daring prison escapes. A brilliant introduction for any Newby newcomer, or handy collection for the intrepid Newby veteran traveller, A Merry Dance around the World is a whirlwind tour around the globe, guided by the forefather of the modern comic travel book. A MERRY DANCE AROUND THE WORLD THE BEST OF Eric Newby Contents Cover (#u51c75be3-04a6-5c96-ad96-8e8569c659bc) Title Page (#u2583f230-4b1b-5b27-a3e0-df5ff0ff226e) First Steps (#u9f59d038-7554-53a0-a901-7d10f3f50b4b) In and Out of Advertising (#u01b3ea61-2259-592b-9c1b-78b952e465ee) Around the World in a Four-masted Barque (#u66a01266-2a5d-5be6-92da-eab1f4317e43) A Short History of the Second World War (#u7b1b1bc4-07a0-5c08-8538-3e36713b4e9e) Rag Trade (#litres_trial_promo) Birth of an Explorer (#litres_trial_promo) Ganga Ma: Mother Ganges (#litres_trial_promo) Around the Mediterranean (#litres_trial_promo) On and Off the Trans-Siberian Railway (#litres_trial_promo) A Long Bike Ride in Ireland (#litres_trial_promo) At the Foot of the Apuan Alps (#litres_trial_promo) Plates (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) First Steps (#ulink_5eec4608-31cc-51dd-8c89-fb0ee330b495) BIRTH OF A TRAVELLER Births, Marriages, Deaths NEWBY. – On the 6th December at 3 Castelnau Mansions, Barnes, SW13, to Hilda Newby, wife of Geo. A. Newby – a son. IN THIS EXTRAVAGANT fashion – altogether it cost 50p ($1.95) (#ulink_89954067-ec7b-5318-b343-48bac1345592), at a time when Lady Secretaries with shorthand and typing were earning around ?3.50 ($13.65) a week – my arrival was announced on the following Tuesday, 9 December, in The Times and the Daily Telegraph, two of the daily newspapers my father ‘took in’ at that period. The other was the Daily Mirror, then a rather genteel paper, which he ordered for my mother, but never looked at himself, and which she passed on to the cook/housekeeper when she had finished with it. From then on it was also passed on to a nurse. At 3.45 a.m., the ghastly hour I chose, or rather the doctor chose, for my arrival – I had to be hauled out by the head – conditions must have been pretty beastly in Barnes. It was a dark and stormy night, with a fresh wind from the west whose gusts would have been strong enough to blow clouds of spray from the big reservoir (which was opposite our flat by the bridge and which has now been filled in to make playing fields for St Paul’s School) over the pavement and right across the main road (which was called Castelnau but which all the inhabitants knew and know to this day as Castlenore) as it always did when the wind was strong from that particular quarter, sometimes, but rarely at 3.45 a. m. wetting unwary pedestrians and people travelling in open motor cars. And it was certainly dark, although the moon had been up for more than thirteen hours and was only a day off full. It would be nice, more romantic, altogether more appropriate for a potential traveller, to think of myself arriving astride the Centaur, and, Sagittarius being in the ascendant, perhaps carrying the latter’s arrows for him, as we moved across a firmament in which ragged clouds were racing across the path of a huge and brilliant moon; but it was not to be. It was ordained that I should be a child not only of darkness but of utter darkness, of ten-tenths cloud. When it dawned, the day was even more rumbustious than the night. And when the sun rose, just before eight o’clock, like the moon, it remained invisible. Thunderstorms visited many parts of the country, accompanied by hail, sleet or snow and west or north-westerly winds which reached gale force in high places. In Lincolnshire, the Belvoir Hunt, having ‘chopped a fox’ in Foston Spinney (seized it before it fairly got away from cover), ‘were hunting another from Allington when scent was totally swept away by a tremendous rainstorm’. ‘Flying Prospects’ on my birthday were not good, according to The Times. It is now difficult to imagine that a pilot, or even a passenger, might actually buy a newspaper in order to find out whether it was safe to ‘go up’, but it must have been so, otherwise there would have been no point in publishing the information at all. ‘Unsuitable for aviation or fit only for short distance flying by the heaviest sort of machine’ was what the communiqu? said. ‘Sea Passages’ were equally disagreeable. The English Channel was rough, with winds reaching forty miles an hour, and there was extensive flooding in France. But if the weather was disturbed that Saturday, it was as nothing compared with the state of great chunks of Europe and northern Asia. In spite of the fact that the advertising department of The Times had chosen this particular Saturday to announce ‘PRESENTS SUGGESTIONS FOR THE GREAT PEACE CHRISTMAS’, on it Latvians were fighting Germans, on whom they had declared war a week previously on 28 November, and so were the Lithuanians. In Russia, on the Don and between Voronezh and Kirsk and in Asia, beyond the Urals, along the line of the Trans-Siberian Railway, where typhus was raging, Bolsheviks and White Russians were engaged in a civil war of the utmost ferocity. Meanwhile, that same Saturday, while their fellow countrymen were destroying one another, with their country in ruins and becoming every day more ruinous, Lenin and Trotsky and the 1109 delegates of the Seventh All-Russian Congress of Soviets passed a resolution to the effect that ‘The Soviet Union Desires to Live in Peace with All Peoples’. On that day, too, Lenin told the Congress that ‘Communistic Principles were being utterly disregarded by the Russian peasantry.’ That day, too, much nearer home, while I was taking my first nourishment, as it were, in the open air, French Army units with heavy guns were rumbling across the Rhine bridges in order to force the Germans to ratify the peace treaty which they had signed at Versailles in June; and in the same issue of The Times which carried the headline about ‘THE GREAT PEACE CHRISTMAS’, there were other headlines such as ‘GUNS ACROSS THE RHINE’ and ‘WAR IMMINENT’, although who was to fight another war with millions killed and wounded, armies in a state of semi-demobilization, and millions more dying or soon to die from sickness and starvation was not clear. Nevertheless, that weekend, the only thing, theoretically, that stood between the protagonists and another outbreak of war, was the Armistice, signed in a French railway carriage parked in a wood, thirteen months previously, so that, equally theoretically, it would simply have meant carrying on with the old one. That weekend, too, the Americans quitted the peace conference. There was, altogether, a lot about death in the papers that Saturday. It was as if Death the Reaper, an entity embodied by cartoonists in their drawings as a hideous, skeletal figure, and it would have been difficult to have lived through the last five years without thinking of death as such, had become dissatisfied with his efforts, had once again sharpened his scythe and was already cutting fresh, preliminary swathes through the debilitated populations of the vanquished powers, as if the great influenza epidemic, which reached its peak in Britain in March 1919, and which altogether killed more people in Europe than all the shot and shell of four and a half years of war, had not been enough. In Britain, that Saturday, things were rather different. Bank rate was six per cent, exports were booming. On Friday, the US dollar closed at $3.90 to the pound. The only disquieting news that morning, and that was more or less a rumour, was that there was a possibility of a number of pits being forced to close in the South Wales anthracite fields. Altogether, for many people that Saturday, life seems to have gone on much as it had done before the Deluge. Giddy and Giddy, House Agents, offered a luxuriously furnished town house, facing Hyde Park, with thirteen bed and dressing-rooms for ?26.25 ($102.40) a week. Harrods announced Laroche champagne, 1911, the last vintage generally available (shipped) since the war, at ?6.50 ($25.35) a dozen. Very old vintage port (Tuke Holdsworth) was ?4.50 ($17.55) a dozen. Not advertised in The Times or the Daily Telegraph, but still listed in Harrods’ enormous current catalogue, (and for some years to come) under ‘Livery’, were red plush breeches for footmen. Domestic servants were still comparatively inexpensive, although more difficult to find, than they had been before the war. That Saturday Lady Baldwin, of 37 Cavendish Square, advertised for a housemaid, ‘five maids and a boy kept, wages ?28-?30 ($109-$117) a year’. And there were vacancies for live-in under nurses, at ?25 ($97.50) a year, the price of a high-class baby carriage of the sort that my mother had acquired for me. That Saturday, too, wholesale garment manufacturers, at what was, and still is, known as ‘the better end of the trade’, the sort of firm my father was a partner in, were advertising jobs in their workrooms for bodice and skirt makers at around ?2.50 ($9.75) for a five and a half day, forty-nine hour week (8.30 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. week-days, 8.30 a.m to 12.30 p.m. Saturdays), ?130 ($507) a year, which made the 5op spent on announcing my birthday seem hideously extravagant. That Saturday some London fashion houses, including the then ultra-fashionable Lucile, in Hanover Square, were advertising for ‘Model Girls’, in emulation of Paul Poiret, the Parisian designer, who had just returned from the army and for the first time showed clothes on living models. A sketch in The Times that Saturday shows that clothes were good-looking, if not positively saucy. Dresses, according to their fashion correspondent, were ‘d?collet?, sometimes dangerously low’, in brilliant colours, with tight, mid-calf-length skirts. Jet was high fashion for the evening: embroidered on coloured velvet, used for making girdles and shoulder straps. Feathers, which had been used for years for making headdresses for evening, were being replaced by flowers, ‘as little like nature as possible?’, although another couple of years were to pass before the Importation of Plumage (Prohibition) Act became law. The ultra-fashionable were already wearing the long, skimpy jerseys which were to become a sort of hallmark of the 1920s; but there was nothing about them in the papers the day I was born. Yet in spite of all this display of what an American politician described as ‘normalcy’, ‘The Great War’, as it would still be referred to by the British far into the next one, although over, must have seemed terribly close to most people, as it still must do today to anyone reading some of the classified advertisements which appeared in the quality papers that Saturday. The request for a lady or gentleman to play once a week at a th? dansant in a hospital for shell-shocked officers. The offers to keep soldiers’ graves trimmed and lay headstones in the neighbourhood of Albert, Bapaume and P?ronne – the dead had not yet been gathered together in communal cemeteries. The endless columns of advertisements inserted by ex-servicemen, under ‘Situations Wanted’ (there were 350,000 of them unemployed), part of the huge citizen army of the still living that was being demobilized into a world in which, in spite of there being whole generations of dead, there was not enough work for all. Such advertisements, inserted by ex-officers, warrant officers, petty officers, NCOs and men of superior education (the labouring classes did not advertise their services in this way), were some of them despairing, some of them pathetic, some of them hopeless: EX-SERVICE MAN. Loss of right arm, seeks situation as Window Dresser or Shopwalker. DEMOBILIZED OFFICER. Aged 21, 4? years’ service [my italics]. Good education. Left school to join up, therefore no experience. Accept small salary until proficient. Will anyone lend DEMOBILIZED OFFICER, DSO, just starting work again, ?5000 ($19,500) for one year? Highest references. Applicant desperately pressed by money-lenders. No Agents. Write Box J.28. Money-lenders were so numerous that they had whole classified sections to themselves. Most of them offered ‘immediate advances on note of hand alone’. Their advertisements make repulsive reading, even across such a gulf of years. A far more prominent advertisement than any of these announced the setting up of what was called the Bemersyde Fund, opened by the Lord Mayor of London and the Right Honourable Lord Glenconner, ‘to acquire the estates of Bemersyde from its owner and have the same conveyed to Field-Marshal Earl Haig, a member of the well-known whisky distilling family, as a personal gift from the people of the British Empire – the consideration for the purchase being ?53,700 ($209,430)’. Altogether – leaving present for the headmaster (the Estates of Bemersyde), although he had not been a very good headmaster, the boys (or what was left of them, for it had been rather a rough school with a lot of mud in the playing fields) now going out into the world to seek their fortunes – there was a distinctly end-of-term feeling in the air. But in spite of this there was no singing of ‘Lord Dismiss Us With Thy Blessing’ as one would perhaps expect on such occasions and as there was at the schools I later attended. Possibly because the only songs the boys knew were not hymns but songs that had become dirges: ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’, ‘Tipperary’, ‘It’s a Long Long Trail A’Winding’ and ‘I Don’t Want To Join The Army’. Even the Ministry of Munitions and the Admiralty were selling up. That day and every day there were offers for sale by auction of aerodromes, enormous munition factories, equally enormous hutted camps, and of minesweepers, motor charabancs, fleets of ambulances, ships’ boilers, railway engines, enough barbed wire to encircle the earth, millions of cigarettes in lots, miles and miles of ships’ hawser, inexhaustible supplies of bell tents, cereal ovens, lower fruit standard jam, wicker-covered stoneware jars, torpedo boats, with and without engines and part-worn and unworn issue clothing, etc., etc., etc., so inexhaustible that many items were still being sold off twenty years later on the eve of the next world war, when the whole stocking up process began all over again. Everything, except projectiles and the means of discharging them, was open to offer and even these would eventually come on the market, but for export only. In fact the world was changing with a rapidity that would have been unbelievable in 1914, even though it was still possible to buy red plush breeches for footmen and under nurses could still be acquired with comparative ease. Yet it was, one sees in retrospect, only a temporary acceleration. If it had continued at the rate envisaged in 1919 man would probably have stood on the moon by 1939. That afternoon the muffin man ringing his bell went down Riverview Gardens, the side road outside ‘Ther Mansions’ as the local tradesmen who dealt with my mother called them, in which there were other blocks of flats, carrying his muffins in a wooden tray covered with a green baize cloth, which he balanced on his head; and the lamplighter came and went on his bicycle (lighting-up time that evening was 4.21 p.m.), lancing the gas lamps in the street into flame with a long bamboo pole. And so ended my birthday. For all concerned it had been a jolly long one. The truth is that babies do not like travel, and I was no exception. Babies are unadventurous. Babies act as grapnels to prevent ‘the family’ dragging its ground. That is why they were invented. Perversely, their desire for fresh horizons comes much later when they have already begun to ‘attract’ fares, and can no longer travel free; by which time they are no longer babies at all. I remember the Isle of Wight as the place where I first sat in the side-car of a motor cycle, at Easter 1923, but much more I remember it as being the Place Where God Lived, although this was later, some time in the summer or autumn of 1925. It must have been during one of those interpolated holidays my mother was so adept at arranging at an instant’s notice if my father had to go abroad without her, on the grounds that a change of air would do me good. He often used to go to Holland to sell enormous coats and costumes to the Dutch. With her she took her sister, my Auntie May, who loved travel, however banal. On one occasion we made an excursion to a place near the middle of the island and some time in the afternoon of what I remember as a very hot day we arrived at our destination, a village of thatched houses that were clustered about the foot of a green hill, on the summit of which stood what seemed a very small church. (#ulink_95e632aa-ab07-52fb-83c7-2539c5c2f0f4) From where we stood it was silhouetted against the now declining sun, the rays of which shone through its windows, producing an unearthly effect. There was no time to climb the hill to the church and have tea as well. If there had been, I am sure that my mother and my aunt, both of whom were interested in ‘old things’, would have done so. Instead, we had the tea, in the garden of one of the cottages, and while we were having it I heard my mother and my aunt talking about the place and how nice it was, which they called Godshill. I was very excited. Godshill. If this was Godshill then God must live on it. God to me at this time and for long years to come was a very old, but very fit, version of Jesus and much less meek-looking. He had a long white beard, was dressed in a white sheet and was all shiny, as if he was on fire. He also had a seat in the front row of the dress circle, as it were, so that he could see immediately if one was doing wrong. This was the God to whom I prayed each night, either with my mother’s help or with whoever was looking after me. ‘Does he live on it?’ I asked my mother. ‘Yes,’ said my mother, ‘that’s where he lives, darling, on top of the hill.’ I was filled with an immense feeling of happiness that this radiant being, whom I had never actually seen but who was always either just around the corner or else hovering directly overhead but always invisible, should live in such a shining, beautiful place; and I asked if we could climb the hill and see him. Unfortunately, the train was due and we had to hurry to the station. I cried all the way to it and most of the way back to Bembridge. I never went back to Godshill and I never will. I can remember, in July 1923, being carried high on my father’s head through the bracken in the combes that led down to the beaches on Sark, and once having reached them I can remember falling down constantly on the rocks and hurting myself, I considered, badly. And it was on Sark that I had my first remembered nightmare, in the annexe to Stock’s Hotel, a charming, ivy-clad, farmlike building. I awoke screaming in what was still broad daylight with the sun shining outside my first-floor room in which the blinds were drawn, to think myself abandoned to a dreadful fate by my parents who were dining only a few feet away in the hotel, certain that I had ‘gone off’ to sleep. It was a nightmare of peculiar horror, because it was founded on fact; so horrible and at the same time so difficult to explain to anyone that for years I dared not confide the details to anyone, and to my parents I never did, although it recurred throughout my childhood, together with an almost equally awful one about falling down an endless shaft. WESTWARD HO! In 1925, when I was five and a half, we embarked on what, so far as I was concerned, was the most ambitious holiday I had ever had. In summer my father took a cottage at Branscombe, at that time a very rural and comparatively unvisited village in South Devon, between Seaton and Sidmouth. It promised to be a particularly exciting time as my father had decided that we should travel there from Barnes by motor. This meant that most of our luggage had to be sent in advance by train from Waterloo to Honiton, a market town on the main line to Exeter; at Honiton it was picked up by a carrier and transported the ten miles or so to Branscombe by horse and cart. Others taking part in this holiday, although they did not travel with us, being already foregathered there, were my Auntie May (the aunt who had accompanied my mother and me on the memorable visit to Godshill) and her husband, Uncle Reg. Before the war Uncle Reg had worked as a journalist in Dover on the local paper and in this capacity had been present in 1909 when Bl?riot landed on the cliffs, having flown the Channel. During the war he had been in the navy in some department connected with propaganda. Later he became editor of the Gaumont British Film News. He was very urbane and elegant. He was later on good terms with the Prince of Wales for whom he used to arrange film shows at Fort Belvedere, and for the Royal Family at Balmoral. For these services he was presented with cufflinks and cigarette cases from Plantin, the court jeweller, as well as other mementoes. He preferred to be called Reginald rather than Reg, but no one ever did so. They put up in the village pub where we, too, were to take our meals. The third party was made up of three fashion buyers for London stores, Beryl, Mercia and Mimi Bamford, all of whom were friends of my mother, particularly Mimi, and their mother. All three were unimaginably elegant, often almost identically dressed in long, clinging jerseys and strings of amber beads, and they were surrounded by what seemed to be hordes of extremely grumpy Pekingese who did not take kindly to the country. Their mother, who did not take kindly to the country either, was even more formidable. She owned a Boston Bulldog called Bogey, which had had its ears clipped, a practice by then declared illegal. Like her daughters she was immensely tall, and must at one time have been as personable as her daughters, but even I could recognize that she was incredibly tough, if not common. ‘She didn’t ought to ’ave ’ad ’im,’ was the comment she made about me, by now a boisterous, active little boy, to my Auntie May while we were at Branscombe, ‘she’ being my mother; an anecdote that my aunt eventually told me, which she did with an excellent imitation of the old lady’s gravelly voice, having put off doing so until only a few years before her own death in 1974 in order, as she put it, to spare my feelings. Neither Beryl nor Mercia nor their mother ever went to the beach, or even set eyes on the sea, the whole time they were at Branscombe. For Beryl and Mercia the seaside was Deauville. What Branscombe was to them is difficult to imagine, or they to the inhabitants. Only Mimi relished the simple life. The journey to Branscombe, a stately progression, took two days. At Branscombe, behind the Mason’s Arms, the pub which stood next door to the cottage my father had taken for the summer and of which it formed a part, there was a yard surrounded by various dilapidated outbuildings and a piece of ground overgrown with grass and nettles which concealed various interesting pieces of rusted, outmoded machinery, the most important of which was an old motor car smelling of decaying rubber and dirty engine oil. The stuffing of what was left of its buttoned leather upholstery was a home for a large family of mice. This yard was to be the scene of some of the more memorable games I played with my best friend in the village, Peter Hutchings, whose mother kept a grocery, confectionery and hardware shop on the corner opposite Mr Hayman, the butcher’s. It was from Peter Hutchings, who was killed while serving as a soldier in the Second World War, and whose name is inscribed with the names of fourteen other village boys who died in the two great wars on the war memorial at the entrance to Branscombe churchyard, that I learned the broad local dialect which was so broad that by the end of that first summer at Branscombe no one except a local inhabitant could understand what I was saying. ‘Sweatin’ like a bull ’er be,’ was how Peter Hutchings described to me one day the state of his sister, Betty, confined to bed with a temperature, and it was in this form that I passed on this important piece of news to my parents. There in the inn yard, in the long summer evenings, we used to sit in the old motor car, either myself or Peter at the wheel, taking it in turn, the driver making BRRR-ing noises, the one sitting next to him in the front making honking noises – the horn had long since ceased to be – as we roared round imaginary corners, narrowly missing imaginary vehicles coming in the opposite direction, driving through an imaginary world to an imaginary destination on an imaginary road, a pair of armchair travellers. In the back we used to put Betty Hutchings, if she was available, who wore a white beret, was placid, said nothing, apart from an occasional BRR, and was in fact an ideal back-seat passenger. Sometimes, if we felt like doing something ‘rude’, we used to stop the car and pee on the seats in the back, and Betty would pee too. This gave us a sense of power, at least I know it did to me, as I would not have dared to pee on the upholstery of a real motor car belonging to real people. Less courageous than my wife, who confessed to having peed on the back seat of a ‘real’ very expensive motor car stopped outside her parents’ house at her birthplace in the Carso, and smeared it with cow dung. When we got tired of driving our car we ourselves used to become motor cars, tearing up and down the street outside making BRRR-ing noises of varying intensity as we changed gear, disturbing the elderly ladies who used to sit at their cottage doors making Honiton lace, pillow lace, appliqu? and guipure, the principal manufacture of the village. Close by, over the hill at Beer where there were stone quarries, the quarry men’s wives had made the lace for Queen Victoria’s wedding dress in 1839, something that was still talked about in the neighbourhood more or less as if it had happened yesterday. It was these hideous BRRR-ing noises that no doubt prompted old Mrs Bamford, whose cottage also faced the main street, to utter the words, ‘She didn’t ought to ’ave ’ad ’im.’ But all this was in the future, that first day of our holiday. The next morning I woke at what must have been an early hour and, obeying some mysterious summons, dressed myself in the clothes that I had worn the previous afternoon – white shirt, shorts, socks and white sun hat (I couldn’t manage the tie unaided), brown lace-up shoes from Daniel Neal’s in Kensington High Street (soon to be replaced by hobnail boots, bought for me at my earnest request so that I could be a real country boy, which took me ages to tie) and my pride and joy, a hideous red and green striped blazer with brass buttons that I had persuaded my mother to buy for me, much against her will, from Messrs Charles Baker, Outfitters, of King Street, Hammersmith, so that I should look more like what I described as ‘a real schoolboy’ rather than an infant member of the kindergarten at the Froebel School in Barons Court. As school blazers were not made to fit persons as small as I was, when I was wearing it my short trousers were scarcely visible at all. Not even Messrs Baker appeared to know which school it was, if any, that had red and virulent green stripes as its colours. Then, having picked up a stout stick that I had acquired the previous day, I stole downstairs and let myself out into the village street which was deserted as it was Sunday morning. At the side of the road, opposite what I was soon to know as Mrs Hutchings’s shop, a little stream purled down from one of the side valleys, one of several such streams that, united, reach the sea at Branscombe Mouth; and there, under a brick arch, it issued from a pipe which supplied this lower end of the village with water, before burrowing under the road to reappear once more outside the shop. From here it ran away downhill over stones along the edge of a little lane with an old, ivy-clad wall on one side of it, chattering merrily to itself as it ran over the stones in a way that seemed almost human. Here, in this narrow lane, the water had what looked to me like watercress growing in it, and it was so clear and delicious-looking that I got down and had a drink of it, only to find that it was not delicious at all and that it had a nasty smell. Later I discovered that Betty Hutchings used to drink from this crystal stream if she was not watched which was probably the reason why she sweated like a bull. I continued to follow the stream, racing twigs down it, until it vanished into a sort of tunnel from which proceeded a delightful roaring sound. At the other end it emerged beyond a wicket gate to flow more placidly under a little bridge and in these calmer waters I spent some time stirring up the bottom with my stick and frightening some water beetles, the air about me filled with the droning of innumerable insects. From this point it ran to join the main stream in the middle of the valley and here the path turned away from it to the left beyond a five-barred gate which, because I could not open it unaided, I squeezed underneath, to find myself in a beautiful and what seemed to me immense green meadow, hemmed in by hedgerows and huge trees and filled with buttercups, while high above it to the right were the hanging woods we had seen the previous morning from the car, the open down above them alive with gorse. At the far end of this field the now augmented stream was spanned by a small wooden footbridge with a white painted handrail. When I eventually reached the stream, in spite of all these distractions and making a number of more or less unsuccessful attempts to spear on the end of my stick some of the older, harder sorts of cow flop in which the field abounded, and launch them into the air, the water tasted even funnier than it had done in the village outside Mrs Hutchings’s shop and I stung myself on the nettles getting down to it. Beyond the bridge the path continued uphill, dappled with sunlight under the trees, and here the air struck chill after the heat of the meadow. Then it dipped and suddenly I found myself out in the sun on the edge of an immense shingle beach which had some boats hauled out on it, and in my ears there was the roar of the sea as with every wave it displaced and replaced millions upon millions of pebbles. To the left it stretched to where a cluster of ivy-covered white pinnacles rising above a landslip marked the last chalk cliffs in southern England; to the right to the brilliant red cliffs around Sidmouth; and beyond it, out to sea, on what was a near horizon, for there was already a haze of heat out in Lyme Bay, I could see the slightly blurred outlines of what Harry Hansford, the local fisherman who lived opposite the blacksmith’s shop, would soon teach me to identify as a Brixham trawler, ghosting along under full sail. ‘Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise – Silent, upon a peak in Darien.’ Many years were to pass before I read these words of Keats, but when I did the memory of that morning came flooding back. There was a sound of feet slithering on the pebbles behind me. It was Kathy, my mother’s help, panting slightly, as she had been running. ‘Whatever did you do that for, Eric, you naughty little boy, without telling me?’ she said. ‘Your mum’s ever so worried, and your dad, too. He’ll be ever so cross if he finds out where you’ve been. You’d better keep quiet when you get back. I’ll say I found you in the field.’ Together, hand in hand, we went back up the hill towards the village where the church bells were now beginning to announce the early service. LANDS AND PEOPLES By the time I was eight years old, apart from a visit to the Channel Islands in 1923, I had never been out of England, not even to visit Scotland, Ireland or Wales. Yet, in spite of this, I already knew a good deal about these places and their inhabitants, as well as the wider world beyond the British Isles. This was because, some time in the 1920s, my parents took out on my behalf a subscription to The Children’s Colour Book of Lands and Peoples, a glossy magazine edited by Arthur Mee, at that time a well-known writer who was also responsible for the to me rather boring Children’s Newspaper, which I had given up buying in favour of more trashy, exciting comics. Lands and Peoples, according to the advertisements which heralded its publication, was to come out at regular intervals and when complete the publishers would bind it up for you to form six massive volumes. What excitement I felt when Lands and Peoples came thudding through the letter-box, in its pristine magazine form. To me, turning its pages in SW 13 was rather like being taken to the top of a mountain from which the world could be seen spread out below, a much more interesting world than the one my father read bits out about from his Morning Post to my mother while she was still in bed, a captive audience, sipping her early morning tea. Lands and Peoples was addressed to ‘The Generation whose business it is to save Mankind’ – mine presumably, although I had no suggestions to make about how it should be done. ‘We are marching,’ Mee wrote, an incurable optimist, apparently envisaging a pacific version of the Children’s Crusade, with the children waving white flags instead of brandishing crucifixes, ‘towards a friendlier and better world, a world of love in place of hate, of peace instead of war, and one thing is needful – an understanding of each other … it is the purpose of this book so to familiarize us with the lands and peoples of the world that we can cherish no ill-will for them. We are one great human family, and this is the book of our brothers and sisters.’ I never read the text. All the efforts of what was presumably an army of experts in their various fields, painfully adapting their ways of writing to render them intelligible to infant minds, were totally wasted on me. All I did, and still do, for I still have the six volumes, was to look at the photographs, of which there were thousands in black and white besides the seven hundred or so in colour, and read the captions and the short descriptions below them of a world which, if it ever existed in the form in which it was here portrayed, is now no more. What I saw was a world at peace, one from which violence, even well-intentioned sorts, such as ritual murder and cannibalism, had been banished, or at least as long as the parts kept coming. In Merrie England, donkeys carried the Royal Mail through the cobbled streets of Clovelly, milkmaids in floppy hats churned butter by hand in the Isle of Wight, swan uppers upped swans on the River Thames, genial bearded fishermen in sou’westers mended nets on the Suffolk coast, town criers rang their bells, and choirboys wearing mortarboards, using long switches, beat the bounds of St Clement Danes. In the Land of the Cymry, which is how Lands and Peoples described Wales, ancient dames wearing chimney-pot hats stopped outside their whitewashed cottages to pass the time of day with more modern, marcel-waved neighbours, and cloth-capped salmon fishers paddled their coracles on the River Dee. In Bonnie Scotland, brawny, kilted athletes tossed the caber, border shepherds carried weakling lambs to shelter from the winter snows, women ground corn with stone hand-mills in the Inner Hebrides and, far out in the Atlantic, on St Kilda, the loneliest of the inhabited British Isles, men wearing tam-o’shanters and bushy beards were photographed returning homewards with seabirds taken on its fearsome cliffs. In the Emerald Isle, bare-footed, flannel-petticoated colleens drew water from brawling streams, or knitted socks in cabins in Connemara, while little boys in the Aran Islands wore skirts to protect them from being kidnapped by the fairies. Further afield, as I turned the pages, covering them with Bovril (for one of my greatest pleasures was to go to bed early with Lands and Peoples and at the same time eat Bovril sandwiches), I came upon Czechs and Slovaks and Hungarians wearing embroidered petticoats irrespective of sex, and incredible hats – in Rumania there were men who wore garters with little bells on them, who looked like sissies to me. I also saw fellers of proud giants in the Canadian forest; savages of New Guinea – their hair plastered with grease and mud; Jews in Poland – a new state with a glorious past; sun-loving Negroes in South Africa; happy Negro children romping in the ‘Coloured Section’ of New York; Kirghiz tribesmen on the ‘Roof of the World’; Orthodox scholars wearing arm thongs and phylacteries studying the ancient laws of their people; penguin rookeries in the Great White South; geishas negotiating stepping stones in Cherry Blossom Land; hardy Indian women on beds of nails at Benares; laughter-loving girls of the Abruzzi; Flemings and Walloons – little Belgium’s two sturdy races; Macedonian women weaving fine cloth with deft fingers; haughty-looking redskins decked in eagle’s feathers and wampum; Germany – rich country of an industrious nation; and so on, and so on. Everywhere in Lands and Peoples there were photographs of schools and schoolchildren; ruinous-looking schools in which little Negroes were learning to add up, schools in Japan with the pupils marching round in circles dressed in military-looking uniforms, clinical-looking schools in the United States in which the children were being inspected for dental decay, children brandishing enormously long slates in Burma, memorizing the Koran in oases, going to school in wheelbarrows in China, learning to read in lonely Labrador and being bastinadoed in Persia, one of the only examples of violence in the entire work. That children had to put up with going to school in other countries besides my own I found encouraging. And here at home they didn’t have the bastinado, even at Colet Court. Each time I got through all six volumes of the Children’s Colour Book of Lands and Peoples I began again, in much the same way as the Scotsmen of Bonnie Scotland, sturdy independent folk, who painted the Forth Bridge, would start all over again as soon as they had applied the final brush strokes to that miracle of Scottish engineering. At St Paul’s I became a Scout in order to avoid being drafted into the Officers’ Training Corps, the OTC, which would have meant wearing an insufferably itchy uniform that was blanket thick. As a Scout I learned to light a fire with one match and to use a felling axe without dismembering myself. On Saturdays we engaged in bloody night battles with other troops of Scouts in the swamps of Wimbledon Common. In the holidays we went camping in the beautiful parks of gentlemen’s country seats. Because I got on with Jews – I still do, I think they find my lack of subtlety restful – I was given command of a Jewish patrol. One of them, who was as prickly as a present-day Israeli, refused to wear Scout uniform and appeared at our open-air meetings wearing a double-breasted overcoat, a bowler hat and carrying a rolled umbrella. Another, who used to charge his mother half a crown to kiss him good night, was always loaded down with silver. On one occasion, when there was a danger of our losing one of the outdoor games known as ‘wide games’ (which necessitated covering large tracts of ground on foot) another member of my patrol whose family owned a huge limousine in which he used to arrive at wherever was the meeting place, summoned the chauffeur who was parked round the corner, and six scouts whirred away in it to certain victory. In the spring of 1936, when I was sixteen years old, my father announced that, as it appeared unlikely I would pass the School Certificate Examination (the then equivalent of O-levels), in mathematics, a subject in which it was obligatory to pass, he had decided to take me away from St Paul’s at the end of the summer term and ‘put me into business’. I did fail. I was sorry about this decision. I was good at English, History, even Divinity, and I had dreamed of reading History at Oxford. Apart from an innate inability to cope with mathematics the only disadvantage I laboured under at St Paul’s, and being a Scout made not the slightest difference, was that I had a curious sense of humour which meant that if anything came up in class with a suggestion of double entendre it caused me to dissolve into hysterics, for which I was punished, sometimes quite severely. In other words I had a dirty mind. For instance, on one occasion, when we were reading Scott’s Marmion aloud, it became obvious to myself and everyone else in the classroom that by the working of some hideously unfair natural process of selection it would fall to me to read a completely unreadable part of the romance in Canto Two, entitled ‘The Convent’, which concerned the blind Bishop of Lindisfarne. And you could have heard a pin drop when I got to my feet. ‘No hand was moved, no word was said Till thus the Abbot’s doom was given. Raising his sightless balls to heaven …’ was all I could manage before going off into peals of mad laughter and to be beaten by John Bell, the High Master, a hedonist who showed in as marked a way as possible in the circumstances where his sympathies lay by beating me as hard as anyone else sent to him for punishment, and then giving me a shilling. I have never forgiven Scott. (#ulink_ce7de623-9c0d-56d3-a8b4-b53b53edad50) All sums of sterling have been converted from pounds, shillings and pence to their decimal equivalents and to American currency of the time. (#ulink_8f12840e-00ff-54c1-906f-023f39919e4b) It was originally intended that the church should be built at the foot of the hill near the site of the present village. However, when work was begun on it, the plan was vetoed by a band of local fairies. As a practical expression of their objection whenever the walls reached a particular height they proceeded to knock them down and carry the stones up to the top of the hill where they rebuilt the walls, after which they danced round them in a ring. After this had happened three times, the workmen who had on each occasion been forced to demolish the walls, carry the stones back down the hill and then build them up again in the low ground, lost heart and decided to build the church where the fairies wanted it to be built. As a result of this wise decision there was much jubilation among the fairies and when the church was finally completed they held a great f?te on top of the hill to celebrate their victory, the sounds of their revelry being audible at a considerable distance. In and Out of Advertising (#ulink_8e18f66b-a4d9-5051-8b0b-2e2226a286cb) IN THE SUMMER OF 1936, my father took me away from school and put me into a large, West End advertising agency. Two years later, on the day we lost the Cereal Account, I finally decided to go to sea. ‘You’ve ’ad it,’ said the Porter with gloomy relish as I clocked in a little after the appointed hour. I was not surprised. My father had known the Chairman, George Wurzel, in his earlier, more uncomplicated days and had placed me with him in the fond belief that the sooner I got down to learning business methods the better. By now they were beginning to feel that they might have been wrong. Wurzel’s had long held a similar opinion. Since I had ridden a bicycle into the office of Miss Phrygian, the secretary of the managing director, they had been more than cool. Julian Pringle, the most rebellious copywriter Wurzel’s ever had, bet me that I could not ride it round the entire building without dismounting. The coast had been clear, the numerous swing doors held open, and the bicycle, which was being sketched for the front page of the Daily Mail, borrowed from the Art Department. I had started my uneasy career in the Checking Department at the age of sixteen. Miss Phrygian had escorted me there. On the way we passed the Porter’s cubby hole; inside, half a dozen evil-looking messenger boys were waiting to take blocks to Fleet Street. There were more seats than messenger boys and I found Miss Phrygian casting a speculative look at the empty places. For a moment I thought she was going to enlist me in their ranks, but she must have remembered my father’s insistence on the value of the business methods I was going to learn, and we passed on. In the narrow, airless transepts of the Checking Department, where the electric lights burned permanently, I thumbed my way through the newspapers and periodicals of the world to make sure that our advertisements were appearing on schedule and the right way up, which they failed to do quite frequently in some of the more unsophisticated newspapers from rugged and distant parts of the globe. Some of the advertisements had to be cut out and pasted in a book. We always cut out Carter’s Little Liver Pills, but I never discovered the reason. Turning the pages of thousands of newspapers day after day, I accumulated knowledge of the most recondite subjects – croquet matches between missionaries in Basutoland, reports of conventions of undertakers at South Bend, Indiana, great exhibitions for tram ticket collectors in the Midlands – the world spread out before me. When I was not speculating about what I read, I would fight with Stan, a great dark brute of a boy, one of the two assistants in the Department, to whom I had become quite attached. Both Stan and Les, the second assistant, called me ‘Noob’. ‘’Ere, Noob, what abaht a pummel?’ Stan would croak invitingly, and we would pummel one another until Miss Phrygian banged furiously on the frosted glass of her office door to stop the din. From time to time we would be visited by the Contact Men who dealt personally with Wurzel’s clients and handled the advertising accounts. They would stand gingerly in our den and turn the pages of the glossy magazines with beautifully manicured fingers. They were all youngish, perfectly dressed in Hawes and Curtis suits, and they smelled of bay rum. The amorous complications of their private lives were hair-raising. One of them owned a Bentley. They all wore clove carnations every day except Saturdays when they were in tweeds and went to the ‘country’ around Sunningdale. I always felt a clod in their presence and for some time after their visits disinclined to pummel. More popular were the visits of the typists. Wurzel’s was run on pseudo-American lines and had a splendid collection. Two of the most popular were Lettice Rundle and Lilly Reidenfelt. Lilly was the more provocative of the two. It was generally conceded that Lettice was the sort of girl you married and had children by after trying Miss Reidenfelt, who was expected to run to fat. When Miss Reidenfelt entered the Checking Department, Stan, the Man of Action, would be stricken dumb and with eyes cast down would trace bashful circles amongst the waste paper with his toe. Les, Socialite and Dreamer, knew better how to please, and, more forthcoming, usually succeeded in pinching her. At such times what little air there was would be so heavy with lust that I would develop an enormous headache of the kind usually brought on by thundery weather. When Miss Reidenfelt had finally minced away inviolate, Stan would fling himself at the piles of newspaper in the steel fixtures and punch them in torment, crying: ‘Oh, you lovely bit of gravy.’ With such experiences behind me it was easy to believe the Porter when he said I was going to be sacked, and when I went into the main office through the swing doors in the reception counter I was filled with strangely pleasant forebodings. By this time the place would normally have been a Babel, but this morning the atmosphere was chilly, tragic, and unnaturally quiet. Lettice Rundle was having a good cry over her Remington and the group of young men who handled the Cereal Account were shovelling piles of proofs and stereos into a dustbin and removing their personal belongings from drawers. Years later I was to witness similar scenes in Cairo when Middle East headquarters became a great funeral pyre of burning documents as the Germans moved towards the Delta. But this was my first experience of an evacuation. It was easy to see that besides myself quite a number of people were about to leave. Those remaining pored over their tasks with unnatural solicitude and averted their eyes from their unfortunate fellows. I had no personal possessions to put together. My hat was in the cloakroom where it had remained for two years. I had never taken it out but sometimes I dusted it, as Mr McBean from time to time checked up on the whereabouts of the more junior and unstable members of the staff by identifying the hats in the cloakroom. This was my alibi; with my hat in its place I was permanently somewhere in the building. Before they left I asked them why I had not been sacked with the rest of them. Robbie only called you ‘old boy’ in moments of stress. He was reluctant to answer my question. He called me ‘old boy’ now. ‘Well, old boy, they did think about it but they decided that it cost them so little that it didn’t make any difference whether you stayed or not.’ I was furious. The Porter had been wrong and I hadn’t ‘ad it’. I was perhaps the only member of the staff who would have actively welcomed the sack. Wurzel’s was a prison to me. All the way home in the Underground I seethed … too unimportant to be sacked … At Piccadilly the train was full but the guards packed in more and more people. At Knightsbridge two of them tried to force an inoffensive little man into the train by putting their shoulders to the back of his head and shoving. Someone began to Baa loudly and hysterically. There was an embarrassed silence and nobody laughed. We were all too much like real sheep to find it funny. At Hammersmith where I emerged sticky and wretched from the train, I found that we had been so closely packed that somebody had taken my handkerchief out of my pocket, used it, and put it back under the impression that it was his own. I bought an evening paper. It had some very depressing headlines about the breakdown of Runciman’s negotiations at Prague. The next day I went to Salcombe for my holiday. During that fortnight while swimming in Starehole Bay I dived down and saw beneath me the remains of the four-masted barque Herzogin Cecilie lying broken-backed, half buried in the sand. On my way back to London there was an hour to wait for the connection at Newton Abbot, and wandering up the hot and empty street in the afternoon sunshine I went into a caf? and wrote to Gustav Erikson of Mariehamn for a place on one of his grain ships. I never went back to Wurzel’s. Around the World in a Four-masted Barque (#ulink_17244d05-8f77-5a52-9cb7-85c1d690842a) WHEN I RETURNED from my holiday, events started to happen with increasing momentum so that I began to feel like the central figure in one of those films of the twenties, in which the actors flash in and out of buildings in the twinkling of an eye. With suspicious promptness a letter arrived from Gustav Erikson in Mariehamn, in which that man of iron told me to get in touch with his London Agents, Messrs H. Clarkson of Bishopsgate. Captain Gustav Erikson of Mariehamn, ‘Ploddy Gustav’ as he was known more or less affectionately by the men and boys who sailed his ships, was in 1938 the owner of the largest fleet of square-rigged deep-water sailing vessels in the world. The great French sailing fleet of Dom Borde Fils of Bordeaux had melted away upon the withdrawal of government subsidies in the twenties; only two barques, Padua and Priwall, still belonged to the once great house of Laeisz of Hamburg; Erikson remained. He was not only the proprietor of twelve four- and three-masted barques, he also owned a number of wooden barquentines and schooners, the majority of which were engaged in the ‘onker’ (timber) trade in the Baltic and across the North Sea. There were still in 1938 thirteen vessels entirely propelled by sail, engaged in carrying grain from South Australia to Europe by way of Cape Horn. There were other cargoes for these ships: timber from Finland to East Africa, guano (a sinister kind of bird dung) from Mauritius and the Seychelles to New Zealand, and very rarely, for the two remaining German barques, cargoes of nitrate from Tocopilla, Mejillones, and other ports on the Chilean Coast to be carried round the Horn to Hamburg. But for the most part the outward voyages from Europe to South Australia round the Cape of Good Hope and across the Southern Indian Ocean were ballast passages. Grain was the staple cargo. If that failed most of these thirteen ships would soon be rusting at forgotten anchorages. The survival of the big sailing ships in this trade was due to several favourable circumstances. Grain was not dependent on season, neither was it perishable. In the primitive ports of the Spencer Gulf, where the grain was brought down from the back blocks in sacks, steamers found it difficult to load a cargo in an economical time. Although at some ports there were mile-long jetties, in most places the grain had to be brought alongside the ships in lightering ketches and slung into the hold with the vessel’s own gear, which might, and frequently did, take weeks. But a sailing ship run with utmost economy and a low-paid crew could still in 1938 take six weeks to load her cargo of grain, reach Falmouth or Queenstown for orders after 120 days on passage and still make a profit on a round voyage of about 30,000 miles, the outward 15,000 having been made in ballast. At the time I went to sea Erikson was sixty-five years old. Unlike most twentieth-century shipowners he had been a sailor with wide practical experience before he had become a shipowner. At the age of nine he had shipped as a boy aboard a vessel engaged in the North Sea trade. Ten years later he had his first command in the same traffic and then, for six years, he had shipped as mate in ocean-going ships. Between 1902 and 1913, when he finally left the sea to concentrate on being an owner, he was master of a number of square-rigged vessels. If I had imagined that Clarkson would be impressed when I approached them, I should have been disappointed. I was one of a number of Englishmen who applied to join the Grain Fleet every year, and Clarkson could not know that I was to be one of the last. From this small mahogany-bound office, saved from being prosaic by the numerous pictures of sailing ships on the walls, they looked after the destinies of practically every grain sailer in the world. Even the Germans came to Clarkson. In 1937 they fixed the high freight of 42s 6d a ton for the Kommodore Johnsen. Most cargoes were for British ports and Clarkson fixed the freights. Erikson was well served by them. I learned some of these things from a little white-haired man, who said that to make the voyage at all I must be bound apprentice and pay a premium of fifty pounds. He made no suggestions except that I would probably be better advised not to go at all. I left Bishopsgate with a form of indenture which among other provisions stipulated that my parents were to bind me to the owner for eighteen months or a round voyage; that if I deserted the ship in any foreign port my premium would be forfeited; that if I died or became incapacitated, a pro-rata repayment of premium could be claimed; that I should receive 120 Fin-marks (10s) a month, and that I should be subject to Finnish law and custom. This document my father reluctantly signed after hopelessly trying to discover something about Finnish law and custom. I remember that he was particularly concerned to find out whether the death penalty was still enforced and in what manner it was carried out. Even more reluctantly he paid out ?50 and sent off the Indentures with two doctors’ certificates attesting that I was robust enough for the voyage, and one from a clergyman which stated that I was of good moral character. By this time I began to feel that I was destined for Roedean rather than the fo’c’sle of a barque. Then, towards the end of September, I received a letter from the owner’s agents telling me to join the four-masted barque Moshulu which was discharging its cargo of grain in Belfast. S/V Moshulu, East Side, York Dock, Belfast 26 September 1938 Dear Mummy and Daddy, … I was up on deck on the steamer from Heysham about 6.30 just in time to see the terrifically high masts of the Moshulu rising high above the dock sheds and looking very cold and remote in the early morning. After breakfast in the steamer I took a very ancient taxi that was practically falling to pieces to the ship and when it arrived alongside it was so big that I felt like a midget. It is more than three thousand tons and is the biggest sailing ship in commission in the world. I went up a gang plank and spoke to a very tough-looking boy with slant eyes like a Mongolian who was oiling a donkey engine, and asked him if he would help me with my enormous trunk. He picked it up, having made threatening gestures at the taxi man who was trying to overcharge me, and carried it up the plank on his back all by himself! Meanwhile, sacks of grain were being hoisted out of the hold and weighed before being taken ashore and into the sheds – altogether the ship brought back more than sixty-two thousand sacks from South Australia on this last voyage and was a hundred and twenty days at sea, which is rather slow. A hundred days from Australia to Britain is good, anything under a hundred, very good. Then my new friend, Jansson, who comes from the ?land Islands, took me into the starboard fo’c’sle where I am to live until the watches are appointed, which will be on the day we go to sea. It is about thirty feet long and about thirteen feet wide, with wooden bunks from floor to ceiling, one above the other, like coffins with open sides. I am not sure how many but will tell you later. The boys seem pleasant enough, but not exactly gushing. About three-quarters of them speak only about a dozen words of English and some of those are swear words, which is twelve words more than I speak of Swedish which is the language in which all orders are given, rather than Finnish, which would be too difficult for non-Finns, I suppose. Swedish/Finns from the ?land Islands and Finns make up the majority of the crew. They gave me some coffee and then I was told the second mate wanted to see me on the bridge deck, which is amidships above the fo’c’sles, where the ship is steered from, not from the poop. He was a pale, thin fellow and after asking me my name suddenly said, ‘Op the rigging!’ I simply couldn’t believe this. I thought they would give one a bit of time to get used to being in a ship. I was wearing my Harris tweed jacket, grey flannel trousers and those leather shoes with slippery soles which I took the nails out of because I thought they might damage the decks! He wouldn’t allow me to change, not even my shoes, just take off my jacket and shirt. I was in a sort of daze. I swung out over the ship’s side and started to climb the ratlines, wooden rungs lashed to the shrouds which hold the mast up, quite wide at the bottom but only a few inches wide when you get under what is known as the ‘top’, where it was difficult to get feet as large as mine on to them. The top is a platform and to get on to it I had to climb outwards on rope ratlines, like a fly on a ceiling, and when I got on to it, looking down I almost fainted. I thought this was enough, but ‘Go on op,’ he shouted, and so I went on ‘op’ by rope ratlines, some of them very rotten after the long voyage – you have to hold on to the shrouds, not the ratlines, in case they break. These ratlines ended at the cross trees, which are made of steel and form a sort of open platform, like glass with my slippery shoes on, a hundred and thirty feet up with Belfast spread out below. ‘Op to the Royal Yard,’ was the next command. This was forty feet or so of nearly vertical and very trembly ratlines to just below the Royal Yard, the topmost one, on which the Royal Sail is bent at sea. Here, there were no more ratlines, and I had to haul myself up on to it, all covered with grease from something like a vertical railway line [a mast track on which the yard is raised and lowered by a halliard] on the face of the mast. This yard was about fifty feet long, and made of steel, like all the other yards and masts. It had an iron rail along the top [a jackstay] to which the sail is bent and underneath it is a steel footrope [the ‘horse’] on which my shoes skidded in opposite directions, so that I looked like a ballet dancer doing the splits. At the yardarm I was – I learned the heights when I got down – about a hundred and sixty feet over the dock sheds, which had glass roofs – what a crash, I thought, if I fell off! It was better looking further afield. There were marvellous views of the Antrim Hills and down Belfast Lough towards the Irish Sea. Back at the mast, thinking thank goodness that’s over, I heard the mate’s voice telling me to climb to the very top of the main mast [the main truck]; but I couldn’t do this with such slippery shoes on, as there were only two or three very rotten-looking ratlines on the stays [seized across the royal backstays], and then nothing but about six feet of absolutely bare pole to the cap. So I took off my shoes and socks, which were even more slippery than the shoes, left them on the yard and then shinned up, past caring what happened, more frightened of the mate than anything else, until I could touch the cap which was like a round, wooden bun. This cap I have discovered is nearly two hundred feet above the keel, much higher than Nelson’s column [which is only a hundred and forty-five feet high]. Now he was shouting to me to sit on the top; but I would have rather died than do that and so I pretended not to hear him. When I got down he was angry because he said it was unseamanlike to take off my shoes and socks, and also that the shoes might have fallen and injured somebody. I think the part about sitting on the cap must have been a joke, because he never mentioned it and none of the others have done it. Then he sent me to clean the lavatories; but I was allowed to change first. My trousers got awfully dirty with Belfast soot up in the rigging and will have to be cleaned. I am not writing this to worry you but only because I feel that I will be alright in the rigging from now on. It was probably a good idea to get it over. Anyway, it is much better than cleaning the lavatories. Please do not send anything but letters and money as I have no room for anything in my bunk except myself. This evening we are going ashore for what the boys call a ‘liddle trink’ at a pub called the Rotterdam Bar, a farewell party for the boys who are leaving the ship and going home. I never imagined that one day I would go to a pub called the Rotterdam Bar and be a sailor. All my love, Eric S/V Moshulu, Belfast II October 1938 Dear Mummy and Daddy, We are now loading ballast, mostly rock and sand used in blast foundries, and paving stones and the best part of an old house. Altogether about fifteen hundred tons. There is bad news about George White, the nice American boy. He fell into the hold through the tonnage opening in the between-decks below Number Three Hatch when there was no ballast in it and broke one of his legs and various other things, so he won’t be able to sail with us. I’ve just spent a wonderful time with Ivy [a friend of my parents] and her husband at their house. The butler, called Taggart, brought me an enormous breakfast in bed and all my clothes were laundered for me, goodness knows how in the time. My other friends are Jansson, the boy who put my trunk on board, a Dutch boy, called Kroner, and a Lithuanian named Vytautas Bagdanavicius, who sailed on the previous voyage. We go to gruesome pubs and drink porter, a weak version of Guinness and we eat fish and chips and go to the Salvation Army Hostel for wonderful hot baths. Don’t worry about mean night adventures in the streets. They are much too wet, and we haven’t got any money. The only one who tried a Matros, an AB [able-bodied seaman] got a nasty disease which he is treating himself, with a syringe. I wish he was elsewhere … All my love, Eric This letter is from my father and is dated 16 October 1938. It was sent to Belfast but, having arrived too late, was forwarded to Australia. My dear Eric, I feel that you are on the eve of your departure for the open sea, and so I take leave to bid you a fond farewell. You have chosen a difficult job and are beginning life again on the bottom rung. I enclose a German Text Book for Travellers which may help you with some words you have forgotten. I could not get one in Swedish or Finnish and I did not think Norwegian would be much good. That fellow with the venereal disease sounds a rotten blighter. I should complain to the captain about him … Good luck to you, my dear boy, and a safe journey. Your loving father. PS. Your mother is writing separately. We sailed for Australia on 18 October 1938 with a crew of twenty-eight. At two in the morning on 11 December, fifty-four days out from Belfast when we were in Latitude 39° South, Longitude 9° East in the South Atlantic, our watch was called on deck to square up the yards and sheet home the fore-and-aft sail on the port side. There was a new movement in the ship now: she was rocking slightly from stem to stern. ‘Kom the V?st Vind,’ said Tria as we ground away at the Jarvis brace winches. By noon that day the westerlies were blowing strongly, lumping the rollers up behind. This was a memorable day because we ran 293 miles, and Alvar dropped our dinner on the way from the galley. On the 13th we crossed the longitude of the Cape of Good Hope and entered the Southern Indian Ocean in 40° 33’ South Latitude. Whilst running eastward we edged south to 42° and finally to 43° 47’. Sometimes the West Wind blew strongly, sometimes we were nearly becalmed. Always the drift was carrying us eastwards, thirty to forty miles a day. In the course of this outward voyage we only made one landfall, Inaccessible Island, one of the Tristran da Cunha group. By five o’clock that evening Moshulu was sailing fifteen knots. The wind was on the quarter and there was a big sea running. When Sedelquist and I took over there were already two men at the wheel. (Sedelquist was helmsman and I was help wheel.) ‘Going to be deefecult,’ he said in an unusual access of friendliness, as we stumbled out on deck, immense in our thick pilot coats, ‘going to be von bastard.’ We took over from Hilbert and H?rglund, a wild-looking but capable team. Although it was quite cold with occasional squalls of hail, I noticed that their faces were glistening with perspiration in the light of the binnacle. ‘T?rn om,’ said Sedelquist, as he stepped up beside Hilbert on the weather side. ‘T?rn om,’ I echoed as I mounted the platform to leeward. ‘Ostsydost,’ said Hilbert and then more quietly as the Captain was close by, ‘proper strongbody for vind, Kapten.’ The ship was a strongbody too, she was a fury, and as soon as we took over we both knew that it was going to be a fight to hold her. Sedelquist was a first-class helmsman – very cool and calm and sure of himself. I too was on my mettle to give him all the help I could, not for reasons of prestige but because a mistake on a night like this might finish us all. Being at the wheel was a remarkable sensation. It was as if the ship had wings. The seas were big, but they never caught up with her to drag at her and slow her down. Instead they bore her up and flung her forward. Steering was very hard work; heaving on the spokes, at Sedelquist’s direction, I was soon sweating. There was no time to speak, nor was it permitted. Only when I made 7 bells at half-past seven did Sedelquist shout out of the corner of his mouth: ‘Oh you noh, Kryss Royal going in a meenit.’ The Captain, the First Mate, and Tria were all on deck, the Captain constantly gazing aloft at the upper sails. At a quarter to eight with our trick nearly over, when I was congratulating myself that we had come through, we suddenly lost control of her and she began to run up into the wind. ‘Kom on, kom on,’ Sedelquist roared, but it was too late. Our combined strength was not enough to move the wheel. Moshulu continued to shoot up, the yards began to swing, a big sea came over the waist, then another bigger still. There was a shout of ‘Look out, man!’ Then there was a great smashing sound as the Captain jumped at the after wheel and brought his whole weight upon it. Tria and the First Mate were on the other side. Spoke by spoke we fought the wheel while from above came an awful rumbling sound as the yards chafed and reared in their slings, until the ship’s head began to point her course again. The danger was past, but as the Captain turned away, pale and trembling, I heard him sob: ‘O Christ.’ Suddenly I felt sick at the thought of what might have happened if she had broached-to. ‘O Yesus,’ muttered Sedelquist, his assurance gone, ‘I tought the masts were coming down out of heem.’ The clock in the charthouse began to strike. Before it had finished, more than anxious to be gone, I had made eight bells, but the Mate was already blowing his whistle for all hands. The Captain had had enough, and before Sedelquist and I were relieved at the wheel the royals came in, all the higher fore-and-aft sails, and the mizzen course. It was now 8.30 p.m. Between 4 and 8 Moshulu logged 63 miles, and the same distance again between eight and midnight. ‘GOD JUL’ For many days we had been thinking of Christmas, which this year fell on a Sunday. There had been a good deal of grumbling about this in the fo’c’sle, but even Sedelquist, who knew his rights, and was always threatening to complain to the Finnish Consul over imaginary infringements, wasn’t able to suggest any satisfactory plan for moving Christmas Day to the following Monday in order to get an extra day’s holiday. In the week before Christmas I was ‘Backstern’ (#ulink_116bde7c-44fb-5eed-a540-7a6861aadc4d) for the second time on the voyage. My job was to wash up for the twenty occupants of the three fo’c’sles whenever mine was a working watch. Kroner performed the same service when I was free. Besides being a romantic, Kroner was a great grumbler and every day he told me I had forgotten to dry the dishcloths in the galley. Every day I told him the same thing. Very often, on the occasions when we did remember to hang them over the range, they were knocked down by the coal-carrying party and trampled in the coal-dust. Kroner drew my washing-up water; I drew his. To get sea-water for washing-up I tied a rope to a bucket, stood in the lee rigging of the foremast, and dropped it into the sea. B?ckmann had been the first person to do ‘Backstern’ in our watch and he had cast a new teak bucket into the sea on the evening of our spectacular dash into the Atlantic. With Moshulu running thirteen to fourteen knots it was lucky that he had not known how to attach the rope to the bucket in a seamanlike manner; if he had, the tremendous jerk when it fetched up at the end of a lot of slack would probably have pulled him over the side. As it was, the knot came undone and the bucket sank before the eyes of the First Mate and the Captain, who were interested spectators. I had been charged for a hammer. B?ckman was put down for a teak bucket. With the water safely on deck my troubles were not over, for it still had to be heated over the galley fire, and if the ‘Kock’ didn’t like you he would move it as far as possible from the hot part of the stove. Like all cooks he was subject to sudden glooms and rages. It was unfortunate that he had taken a dislike to Kroner, who had been rude to him about some bacon instead of keeping his mouth shut and throwing it over the side, but he had nothing against me. Thanks to the ‘Kock’s’ misplaced malevolence, Kroner enjoyed a week of scalding and abundant water whilst I suffered lukewarm water one day, total loss on another, and on a third found a long sea-boot stocking stewing merrily away in a bucket topped with a yeasty-looking froth. The washing-up basin was a kerosene can sawn in half, the sharp edges beaten down so that it looked like some revolting curio from an oriental bazaar. These were the days before detergents, and their place was taken by sand, with some ropeyarn as a scourer. The everyday work on the ship had already battered my hands beyond recognition so that they resembled bloodstained hooks; and now the salt water penetrated cuts and scratches, making them swell and split. There was a vivid and appropriate name for these sores which never seemed to heal. It was an unspoken rule that the ‘Backstern’ washed up first in his own fo’c’sle in case he was called on deck by ‘tv? vissel’ – two whistles. After the port side was finished, he washed up for the starboard watch. Then for the daymen amidships. Theirs was a gloomy hole, without ports and filled with stale cigarette smoke, its only natural illumination a skylight, rarely opened, shedding a permanent dusk into it. To one side was a tiny rectangular table piled high with the most ghastly debris of apr?s d?jeuner: islands of porridge; lakes of coffee in which cigarette ends were slowly sinking; great mounds of uneaten salt bacon; squashed putty-coloured fish-balls, and, in the tropics, almost phosphorescent herring. At other meals mountains of bones and a warm feral smell made the fo’c’sle more like a lair of wild beasts than a human habitation. On the Monday of Christmas week washing-up had been terrible. There was heavy rain and it had come on to blow hard. ‘Like sonofa-beetch, like helvete,’ said Sandell as he came from the wheel. I was pressed for time as I had second look-out, which meant washing up three fo’c’sles in less than an hour. Kroner, the damn fool, had forgotten to put the drying-up cloths in the galley and there was only one tin of hot water instead of three. To make things worse the ship was heeling at such an angle that it was impossible to stand upright. I tore the tail off a good shirt, wedged the kerosene can against the rim of the table, and put each wet irreplaceable piece of crockery in the locker as I washed it. When I finished I took them all out, dried them, and put them back piece by piece. Around me the bunks were full of men trying to sleep, but the ship was a pandemonium of noise, the wind roaring in the rigging, the footsteps of the Officer of the Watch thumping overhead, the wheel thudding and juddering, and the fo’c’sle itself filled with the squeaks and groans of stressed rivets. From the hold came a deep rumbling sound as though the ballast was shifting. I dropped a spoon and five angry heads appeared from behind little curtains and told me to ‘Shot op.’ Eight bells sounded and it was my ‘utkik’, the hour of lookout on the fo’c’sle head. There was a fearful sunset. The ship was driving towards a wall of black storm cloud tinged with bright ochre where the sun touched it. About us was a wild, tumbling yellow sea. South of us two great concentric rainbows spanned the sky and dropped unbroken into the sea. At intervals everything was blotted out by squalls of rain and hailstones as big and hard as dried peas. It only needed a waterspout to complete the scene. Soon I became clammy and forlorn, gazing into the murk. It was dark now and the rain was freezing in the squalls. Above the curve of the foresail everything was black, and from the rigging, right up the heights of the masts came the endless rushing of the wind. To warm my hands I pushed them into the pockets of my oilskin coat and found two deep cold puddles. In one of them was my last handkerchief. After an hour of ‘utkik’ I in my turn became ‘p?pass’, the man who called the watch on deck if it was necessary and woke the next man relieving the helmsman. During my spell on the foredeck there were ‘tv? vissel’. Welcoming the opportunity to exercise my frozen limbs I flung open the fo’c’sle door and screamed, ‘Two vistle, ut p? d?ck’ in the most hair-raising voice I could manage. Inside, water was swirling pieces of newspaper and bread about the floor. It broke over Yonny Valker and Alvar, those primitive men sleeping down there, awash and shining like whales. The other five members of our watch were dozing perilously on the benches. Everyone was fully dressed in oilskins, too wet to get into their bunks. The oil-lamp was canting at an alarming angle and B?ckmann hit his head on it as he started up from the table. He didn’t feel anything because he was still asleep. One by one the others lurched out of the fo’c’sle, and as they encountered the blast on deck they cursed the owner for owning Moshulu, the Captain for bringing us here, the Mate for blowing his ‘vissel’, and me for being ‘p?pass’ and hearing it. Little Taanila was at the wheel, clinging to it like a flea, while the Mate tried to prevent it spinning and hurling him over the top on to the deck. ‘Tv? m?n till rors,’ shouted the Mate, and B?ckmann went as help wheel to Taanila. ‘Mesan,’ said the Mate and we tailed on to the downhaul of the largest of the three fore-and-aft sails on the jigger mast. It jammed, but we continued to take the strain. Suddenly it broke and we rolled in a wet heap in the scuppers. ‘That ploddy Gustav,’ said Sedelquist, speaking unlovingly of the owner who was reputed to be very close with ropes. ‘He vonts—’ By Friday the rain was wearing us all down. Breakfast was terrible. Black beans and fried salt bacon from the pickle cask. The margarine and sugar had both given out on Wednesday. We were ravenous and talked of nothing but food. But at noon Sandell reported that the hens had disappeared from the henhouse and that the Cook was making huge puddings. I saw them myself when I was fetching the washing-up water. They looked like sand castles. We were agog. At last it was Saturday, 24th December, Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve was the principal Finnish celebration. It was our free watch in the morning, and now came the opportunity for the great ‘Vask’ in the slimy little ‘Vaskrum’; but the joy of putting on clean clothes was worth the discomfort. Even Yonny and Alvar had a ‘Vask’, and some of us whose beards had not been a success shaved. Then we put on our best clothes: clean dungarees, home-knitted jerseys, and new woollen caps. B?ckmann even put on a collar and tie. This was too much for the more rugged members of the watch, and a committee was formed to discuss the question. They were very serious about it and decided he was improperly dressed for the time and place. Nevertheless he continued to wear a tie, and presently I put one on myself, with a tennis shirt and flannel trousers with the mud of Devon lanes still on the turn-ups. It was wonderful to wear clothes that followed the contours of the body after so many weeks of damp, ill-fitting garments. In the splendour of our new robes we slept till noon. Then, except for wheel and look-out, work ceased for everyone. Like the apprentices in A Christmas Carol preparing the warehouse for the party, we put the finishing touches to the fo’c’sle. B?ckmann washed the paint with hot water and green soap. I removed a large number of bugs from the bunkboards and drowned the eggs. Taanila scrubbed the floor; Hermansonn polished our door-knob, while the others removed horrid debris from the unoccupied bunks and shook all the blankets on deck. The floor and tables were washed with hot soda and burnished white with sand. Then we sat down and looked around at what we had done. It did seem more like home. It would need to for tonight to be a success. ‘Like home,’ said Sedelquist. ‘Like hell.’ At half past one I threw the last lot of washing-up water over the side. My week of ‘Backstern’ was over for a whole month, and I was heartily sick of it. Cleaning the ‘skit hus’ was preferable. From three until four I was at the wheel. The wind was ENE and the ship steered herself except for a slight touch from time to time. The afternoon was cold, the decks were deserted. Everyone was below having haircuts, shaving, trimming beards, or squeezing pimples. Just before I was relieved the First Mate came on deck. A startling transformation had been effected in him. He was no longer grimy-looking; the ginger beard and moustaches that had given him so much the appearance of a Cheshire Cat had disappeared. Instead he was very stiff and self-conscious in a gold-braided reefer suit, his head bowed beneath an enormous peaked cap, also gold-braided, on which was pinned the white house badge, a white flag with G.E. in black letters on it. With dismay I realized that without the beard his was not the sort of face I cared for at all. Indecently bare, it was shorn of its strength. I think he realized this, for he giggled, almost apologetically. This moment marked the beginning of a certain coolness in our relationship. ‘Coffee-time’ brought the first fragments of a great avalanche of food. On Saturdays the bread was always different; today it arrived in the shape of scones. There were a great number, they were very good, and we ate the lot in seven minutes. As the dinner hour approached the agony of waiting became almost unbearable. We roamed about the fo’c’sles like hungry lions. Outside, the rain beat down on the deck. The weather had broken up soon after five, but the wind blew steadily and we were all confident that there would be no work on deck unless it shifted. Otherwise the ship would carry topgallants and topmast staysails throughout the night. When it grew dark, at seven o’clock, ‘tre vissel’ summoned all hands. We crowded the well-deck. Looking down on us was the Captain, all braid and smiles; the First and Second Mates, less braid and fewer smiles; and Tria, no braid but more smiles than all of them put together. I had never seen such splendid uniforms. The Captain made a little speech. Addressing us as ‘Pojkar’ (Boys), he wished us ‘God Jul’ and told us to come aft to his saloon after dinner. When he had finished we tipped our caps to him, mumbled our thanks, and made a rush below. Two sheets were produced and spread on the table. We gathered all our lamps and lanterns and hung them round the bulkheads. The food was brought in from the galley. Great steaming bowls of rice and meat; pastry, sardines, salmon, corned beef, apricots, things we had forgotten. A bottle of Akvavit and the set piece, a huge ginger pudding, its summit wreathed in steam. There were maddening moments of delay while I took what proved to be a series of unsuccessful photographs. Then we made a dash for the table. From then on there were few sounds other than the smacking of eight pairs of lips and an occasional grunted request to pass a dish. We had been hungry for weeks and now our chance had come. After the traditional Finnish rice-porridge I worked through potato pastry, chopped fish, and methodically round the table to the ginger pudding, which was sublime, the zenith of the evening. Alvar, appointed wine steward, circled the table allowing us half a mug of Akvavit each, and the starboard watch, who had already eaten, came in in bunches to cry ‘God Jul, Pojkar!’ When the others had given up, Sandell and I were still plugging on steadily. He turned to me, his face distorted by a great piece of pudding, a little rice gleaming in his black beard. ‘To spik notting and eat, is bettair,’ he said and carved himself a slice of Dutch cheese. We all loved one another now. Even Sedelquist offered me an old Tatler containing a photograph of the Duchess in Newmarket boots and raincoat at a very wet point-to-point. ‘Oh, say you. I think he is fon in bed, yes?’ ‘No.’ I took a good look at the Duke gazing myopically over her shoulder before I remembered that Sedelquist always got his genders mixed. Each of us had been given a green tin of Abdullah cigarettes. Shaped to fit the pocket, they held fifty; on the lid, in large letters, was inscribed ‘Imperial Preference’. There were additional charms: each one contained a coloured picture of a girl in an inviting posture, more accessible than the Duchess. After dinner brisk business was done in exchanging one for another, and Sedelquist emerged with the best collection. Although I didn’t really like cigarettes I smoked half-a-dozen in rapid succession in order not to miss anything. From the midships fo’c’sle came the sound of a Christmas hymn being sung rather well in Swedish and we all went to listen. The singers were seated with their backs to the bulkhead near the Christmas tree which ‘Doonkey’ had made from teased-out rope yarns. There were five of them sharing three hymn books and they all sang with great earnestness. Among them were Kisstar the Carpenter, the light of the oil-lamp softening the deep lines on his face; Reino H?rglund with his great black beard; and Jansson, thick-lipped and tousled. Half of the fo’c’sle was in shadow and I stood in darkness by the huge trunk of the mainmast; next to me stood Yonny Valker, hands clasped before him like a peasant before a roadside altar. We were all very homesick. At nine o’clock we queued up outside the Captain’s stateroom to receive our Christmas presents from the Missions to Seamen. This was the first time I had seen the Officers’ quarters, which seemed very warm and substantial compared with our own. From somewhere the almost legendary wireless was emitting dance music with the background of peculiar rushing and whining sounds that accompany music across great expanses of ocean. Whilst we waited in this unaccustomed place I noticed with envy the magnificence of the washing-up arrangements, the scullery with an elaborate draining-board, and the abundance of dry dish-cloths. I thought then how easy it would be to provide something similar for the fo’c’sles, how much saving of time. When it was my turn to enter the ‘Great Hall’ I felt very serf-like and nervous, but my premonitions were soon dispersed. Inside it was all red plush, banquettes, and brass rails, very like the old Caf? Royal. I almost expected to see Epstein instead of the smiling and very youthful-looking Captain seated at the mahogany table, his officers around him. He held out a hat to me, full of pieces of paper. The one I took was Number 7. ‘Number 7 for England’s Hope,’ said the Captain, and the Steward who was kneeling on the floor surrounded by parcels handed me the one with 7 on it. I wished everybody ‘God Jul’ and backed out of the stateroom in fine feudal fashion, stepping heavily on the toes of the man behind me, and dashed eagerly back to the fo’c’sle to open it. Inside the paper wrappings was a fine blue knitted scarf, a pair of grey mittens, and a pair of stout brown socks. When I picked up the scarf three bits of paper fell out. One of these was a Christmas card with ‘Jultiden’ in prominent red lettering on one side and on the other, in ink, ‘och Gott Nytt ?r, onskar Aina Karlsson, Esplanadgarten 8, Mariehamn.’ On the other two pieces was the text of St John, Chapter 20, in Finnish, and the good wishes of the Missions to Seamen who had sent the parcel. Right at the bottom was a hand mirror and comb. I thought of Aina Karlsson knitting woollies with loving care for unknown sailors in sailing ships. We all eagerly compared our presents. Some had thicker garments, some larger. Sedelquist said that the Mates had already appropriated the best, but no one paid any attention to this. Among us Taanila had the finest haul – a woollen helmet that pulled over head and ears with a long scarf attached. It made him look like a fiendish Finnish gnome. In the midships fo’c’sle there were two miserable people, Essin and Pipinen. Essin, the Sailmaker’s assistant, had broken one of his molars in the general struggle to eat everything within reach. He now lay groaning in his bunk, his face swathed in mufflers. I tried to plug the cavity with gutta-percha, which on the advice of my dentist I had brought with me in anticipation of such an emergency. It had looked easy in Wimpole Street when he demonstrated how to do it: he put a little vaseline on a plugger, heated the gutta-percha and popped it in the hole. Now, overcome with wine and food, in a swaying ship, by the murky light of a hurricane lamp I felt like a tipsy surgeon about to perform a major operation. Worse still, the patient kept flinching and I dropped a blob of bubbling hot gutta-percha on his tongue. He leapt into the air screaming and three boys had to hold him down while I tried to push a cooler piece into the hole. But it would not stay in, and I gave him an overdose of aspirin and hoped for the best. The operation had not been successful. Pipinen, the other casualty, had cut his hand badly while opening a tin of apricots and Karma, the unpredictable Finn, was fixing it with fathoms of bandage. Hilbert told me that Karma would not cut the bandage because he had bought it for himself. When I left, Pipinen’s hand was as big as a football and Karma still had yards left. I went in search of my bunk. It was 9.45. By some miracle I was neither ‘rorsman’ (helmsman), ‘utkik’, nor ‘p?pass’. I crawled into my bag and slept dreamlessly until four in the morning, when a voice cried ‘resa upp’; but Sandell closed the curtains and I slept on until half past seven. There were loud cheers when I woke. I had slept ‘like sonofabeetch, like peeg in straw’. Ten hours – the longest sleep I ever had in Moshulu, or anywhere else. I was quite thrilled. On Christmas morning the weather was cold and brilliant. Big following seas were charging up astern in endless succession. They surged beneath the ship, bearing her up, filling the air with whistling spray as their great heads tore out from under and ahead to leave her in a trough as black and polished as basalt except where, under the stern post, the angle of the rudder made the water bubble jade-green, as if from a spring. From the mizzen yardarm, where I hung festooned with photographic apparatus, I could see the whole midships of Moshulu. On the flying bridge above the main deck the Captain and the three Mates were being photographed by the Steward, solemn and black as crows in their best uniforms. Rigid with cold I descended to eat Christmas dinner, for which the ‘Kock’ had made an extra sustaining fruit soup. For breakfast we had had Palethorpe’s tinned sausages which were very well received; at ‘Coffee-time’ apple tarts and buns but not enough of either; and for supper, rice, pastry, and jam. At four a.m. on what would have been Boxing Day in England we were setting royals once more. The party was over. Eighty-two days out from Belfast we anchored in Spencer Gulf in south Australia, having sailed 15,000 sea miles. We were three months in Australia. At first sweltering at anchorage waiting for a freight to be fixed, so that we could load a cargo of grain somewhere in Spencer Gulf, which runs up into the heart of the wheat belt, then, when hope had almost been given up of fixing a freight for any of the ships, and we had visions of sailing home in ballast or being sold with the ships like a lot of slaves, all the ships got freights and Moshulu was ordered to load a cargo at Port Victoria on the other side of the gulf at ?1.37?6 ($6.34) a ton – in 1938 she had loaded nearly five thousand tons at ?2.06 ($10.30) a ton. The Spencer Gulf was a hell of a place, wherever you were in it in summer, plagued by flies and an appalling wind as hot as a blast furnace which poured down through it from the deserts of the interior, causing Moshulu and other ships to drag their anchors. To go ashore, we rowed and sailed eight miles to Port Lincoln and eight miles back. I found a lot of letters waiting for me and I sent my parents a telegram which read ‘Muscular, happy, penniless’ and got some money by return. We sailed from Port Victoria at 6.30 a.m. on 11 March 1939, our destination Queenstown in southern Ireland (now Cobh), for orders, by way of Cape Horn. We were, in fact, taking part in the 1939 sailings of what was known as the Grain Race. This year turned out to be the Last Grain Race. On the second Friday (having crossed the 180th meridian – the international dateline – there were two Fridays), running the easting down, Moshulu’s noon position was 51°S, 176°W, 13 days and 2440 nautical miles out from Port Victoria. In 23? hours she had sailed 296 miles, the best day’s sailing with cargo she ever had with Erikson. (#ulink_4db7a01e-880f-5c89-9980-eedcecc869a4) At 5.30 in the morning, Moshulu, still carrying her upper topgallants, began to labour under the onslaught of the heavy seas which were flooding on to the deck like a mill race. It was quite dark as six of us clewed-up the mizzen lower topgallant, and although from where I was at the tail of the rope I could see nothing at all except the hunched shoulders of Jansson ahead of me, I could hear Tria at the head of the line exhorting us. The sail was almost up when the wind fell quite suddenly and we all knew that we were in the trough of a wave far bigger than anything we had yet experienced. It was far too dark to see it at a distance, we could only sense its coming as the ship rolled slightly to port to meet it. ‘Hoold …’ someone began to shout as the darkness became darker still and the sea came looming over the rail. I was end man. There was just time to take a turn with the clewline round my middle and a good hold, the next moment it was on top of us. The rope was not torn from me; instead it was as though a gentle giant had smoothed his hands over my knuckles. They simply opened of their own accord and I unravelled from it like a cotton reel from the end of a thread and was swept away. As I went another body bumped me, and I received a blow in the eye from a seaboot. Then I was alone, rushing onwards and turning over and over. My head was filled with bright lights like a by-pass at night, and the air was full of the sounds of a large orchestra playing out of tune. In spite of this there was time to think and I thought: ‘I’m done for.’ At the same time the words of a sea poem, ‘ten men hauling the lee fore brace … seven when she rose at last’, came back to me with peculiar aptness. But only for an instant because now I was turning full somersaults, hitting myself violently again and again as I met something flat which might have been the coaming of No. 4 hatch, or the top of the charthouse, for all I knew. Then I was over it, full of water and very frightened, thinking ‘Is this what it’s like to drown?’ No more obstructions now but still going very fast and still under water, perhaps no longer in the ship, washed overboard, alone in the Southern Ocean. Quite suddenly there was a parting of water, a terrific crash as my head hit something solid, and I felt myself aground. Finding myself in the lee scuppers with my head forced right through a freeing port so that the last of the great sea behind me spurted about my ears, I was in a panic that a second wave might come aboard and squeeze me through it like a sausage, to finish me off. Staggering to my feet, my oilskins ballooning with water, too stupid from the blow on my head to be frightened, I had just enough sense to jump for the starboard lifeline when the next wave came boiling over the port quarter and obliterated everything from view. Swinging above the deck on the lifeline with the sea sucking greedily at my seaboots, I began to realize what a fortunate escape I had had from serious injury, for the alacrity with which I had leapt for the lifeline in spite of the great weight of sea-water inside my oilskins had convinced me that I had suffered no damage except the bang on the head. The sea had taken me and swept me from the pin rail of the mizzen rigging, where I had been working, diagonally across the deck for fifty feet past the Jarvis brace winches, on the long handles of which I could so easily have been speared, over the fife rails of the mizzen mast, right over the top of No. 3 hatch and into the scuppers by the main braces outside the Captain’s quarters. ‘Where you bin?’ demanded Tria accusingly, when I managed to join the little knot of survivors who were forcing their way waist deep across the deck, spluttering, cursing, and spitting sea-water as they came. ‘Paddling,’ I said, relieved to find that there were still six of us. ‘Orlright, don’ be all bloody day,’ he added unsympathetically. ‘Tag i gigt?get. One more now. Ooh – ah, oh, br?ck dem.’ ‘What happened?’ I asked Jansson. ‘That goddam Valker let her come up too mooch,’ said Jansson. ‘I bin all over the bloddy deck in that sea.’ The fore upper topsail was the most difficult. All the buntlines jammed and more than half the robands securing the topsail to the jackstay had gone. The outer buntline block had broken loose and was flailing in the air, so that when we reached the lowered yard eighty feet above the sea, we hesitated a moment before the ‘Horry ops’ of the Mates behind us drove us out on to the footropes, hesitated because the bunt of the sail was beating back over the yard. The wind was immense. It no longer blew in the accepted sense of the word at all; instead it seemed to be tearing apart the very substance of the atmosphere. Nor was the sound of it any longer definable in ordinary terms. It no longer roared, screamed, sobbed, or sang according to the various levels on which it was encountered. The power and noise of this wind was now more vast and all-comprehending, in its way as big as the sky, bigger than the sea itself, making something that the mind balked at, so that it took refuge in blankness. It was in this negative state of mind that could accept anything without qualm, even the possibility of death, that I fell off the yard backwards. I was the last man out on the weather side and was engaged in casting loose a gasket before we started to work on the sail, when without warning it flicked up, half the foot of a topsail, 40 feet of canvas as hard as corrugated iron, and knocked me clean off the footrope. There was no interval for reflection, no sudden upsurge of remorse for past sins, nor did my life pass in rapid review before my eyes. Instead there was a delightful jerk and I found myself entangled in the weather rigging some five feet below the yard, and as soon as I could I climbed back to the yard and carried on with my job. I felt no fear at all until much later on. It needed three-quarters of an hour to make fast the weather side. Time and time again we nearly had the sail to the yard when the wind tore it from our fingers. My companion aloft was Alvar. ‘What happened?’ he said when we reached the deck. ‘I fell.’ ‘I din’ see,’ he said in a disappointed way. ‘I don’ believe.’ ‘I’m damned if I’m going to do it again just because you didn’t see it.’ ‘I don’ believe.’ ‘Orlright,’ I said. ‘The next time I’ll tell you when I’m going to fall off’ ‘Dot’s bettair,’ said Alvar. At noon on Saturday, the 25th, our position was 50° 7’ S, 164° 21’ W. In the 23? hours from noon on the 24th Moshulu had sailed 241 miles and made 228 between observed positions. Her previous day’s runs were 296 and 282, but the violence of the sea and the necessary reduction in canvas were slowing her increasingly. The barometer fell and fell, 746, 742, 737 millimetres. The sun went down astern, shedding a pale watery yellow light on the undersides of the deep black clouds hurrying above the ship. It was extremely cold, colder than it had ever been, blowing a strong gale, force 9. Big seas were coming aboard. I felt very lonely. The ship that had seemed huge and powerful was nothing now, a speck in the Great Southern Ocean, two thousand miles eastwards of New Zealand, three thousand from the coast of South America, separated to the North from the nearest inhabited land, the Cook Islands and Tahiti, by two thousand miles of open sea; to the South there was nothing but the Antarctic ice and darkness. She was running before seas that were being generated in the greatest expanse of open ocean, of a power and size unparalleled because there was no impediment to them as they drove eastwards round the world. She was made pygmy too by the wind, the wind that was already indescribable, that Tria said had only now begun to blow. We rounded Cape Horn on 10 April, Easter Monday, having sailed more than six thousand miles, and were fifty-five days to the Line. We were one day ahead of Parma’s record-breaking passage of eighty-three days from Port Victoria to Falmouth in 1933. That year she had been thirty days to the Horn, twenty-five to the Line, but in 31°N 47°W our luck deserted us and we failed to pick up the strong westerlies we needed to beat her. On 9 June at 8 p.m., ninety days out from Port Victoria, we raised the Fastnet Rock, fifteen miles to the north-east. We had smelt the land for days. The following morning and until evening we were becalmed near the Rock. Five men rowed out to us from Crookhaven, near Mizen Head, nine miles. The Captain made them drunk on rum and we left them drifting into the sunset in the direction of the New World. (More than twenty-five years later I got drunk in Crookhaven with the survivors of this long row.) Then a breeze came up and took us ghosting along the coast of Southern Ireland, past Cape Clear. Nothing could have been more beautiful to us than this country at this moment. The following day at 5 a.m., the wind shifted from NW through W to WS W, the best sort of wind and we squared away for Queenstown. At about eleven o’clock we took a pilot from a black and white cutter, heaving-to for him to come across to us in a rowing-boat. Then both watches went to the fore braces, boarded the fore tack and began to clew up the remaining course sails, before racing aloft to see which watch could be the first to furl the Main and Mizzen. We won, in the port watch. We came to anchorage off the narrow entrance to Queenstown under a couple of topsails and staysails. It was twelve o’clock ship’s time on Saturday, 10 June 1939, and we were ninety-one days out from Port Victoria, having sailed a round voyage of more than thirty thousand miles. The Pilot told us that we were first home, and although we did not know it at the time, we had won the Last Grain Race. On the 19th June Moshulu was ordered to Glasgow and a tug was sent to tow us. It seemed an ignoble end to such a venture. On the 21st the tug appeared. ‘Kommer bogserbaten,’ everyone said. The ‘bogserb?t’ took us out into a nasty sea with a head wind in which we only made 5 miles in an hour. Steering behind the tug on a dark night in the Irish Sea was as bad as anything in the West Wind and much more dangerous. At last on the 27th June we were warped with infinite difficulty into Queen’s Dock, in Glasgow. ‘Coming again?’ asked the Captain some days later, after some good parties, as he inked in my discharge as Ordinary Seaman and handed over some fragments of pay. ‘Make a man of you next time.’ ‘I’ll think it over,’ I answered. My trunk was loaded on to a taxi. Suddenly those of the crew still on board seemed remote and once more strangers. Now we were turning through the dock gates into the main road where the trams rattled and swayed. I looked back at Moshulu whose masts and yards towered above the sheds in the June sunshine. I never saw her again. (#ulink_36e80254-b7c6-5503-bcc1-608671b65622) ‘Backlagsman’ – Mess man. (#ulink_8c3f6042-a2a8-550c-8544-ad41d16cae77) When running to the east in southerly latitudes a day, noon to noon, is about 23? hours. A Short History of the Second World War (#ulink_47ce75ca-96df-51f9-9a5c-41178aedb2e1) ONE MORNING IN August 1940 ‘A’ Company, Infantry Wing, was on parade outside the Old Buildings at the Royal Military College, Camberley. Company Sergeant-Major Clegg, a foxy looking Grenadier, was addressing us ‘… THESE WILL BE NO WEEK-END LEAF,’ he screamed with satisfaction. (There never had been.) ‘That means no women for Mr Pont, Mr Pont (there were two Mr Ponts – cousins). Take that smile off your face Mr Newby or you’ll be inside. Wiring and Demolition Practice at 1100 hours is cancelled for Number One Platoon. Instead there will be Bridging Practice. Bridging Equipment will be drawn at 1030 hours, CUMPNEE … CUMPNEEEE … SHAAH!’ ‘Heaven,’ said the Ponts as we doubled smartly to our rooms to change for P.T. ‘There’s nothing more ghastly than all that wire.’ I, too, was glad that there was to be no Wiring and Demolition. Both took place in a damp, dark wood. Wiring was hell at any rate and Demolition for some mysterious reason was conducted by a civilian. It always seemed to me the last thing a civilian should have a hand in and I was not surprised when, later in the war, he disappeared in a puff of smoke, hoist by one of his own petards. In June 1940, after six months of happy oblivion as a private soldier, I had been sent to Sandhurst to be converted into an officer. Pressure of events had forced the Royal Military College to convert itself into an OCTU, an Officer Cadet Training Unit, and the permanent staff still referred meaningfully in the presence of the new intakes to a golden age ‘when the gennulmen cadets were ’ere’. ‘Ere’ we learned to drill in an impressive fashion and our ability to command was strengthened by the Adjutant, magnificent in breeches and riding boots from Maxwell, who had us stationed in pairs on the closely mown lawns that sloped gently to the lake. A quarter of a mile apart, he made us screech at one another, marching and countermarching imaginary battalions by the left, by the right and by the centre until our voices broke under the strain and whirred away into nothingness. Less well we carried out a drill with enormous military bicycles as complex as the evolutions performed by Lippizanas at the Spanish Riding School. On these treadmills which each weighed between sixty and seventy pounds, we used to wobble off into the surrounding pine plantations, which we shared uneasily with working parties of lunatics from the asylum at Broadmoor, for TEWTs – Tactical Exercises Without Troops. Whether moving backwards or forwards the TEWT world was a strange, isolated one in which the lunatics who used to wave to us as we laid down imaginary fields of fire against an imaginary enemy might have been equally at home. In it aircraft were rarely mentioned, tanks never. We were members of the Infantry Wing. There was an Armoured Wing for those who were interested in such things as tanks and armoured cars and the authorities had no intention of allowing the two departments to mingle. Gradually we succumbed to the pervasive unreality. ‘I want to bring home to you the meaning of this war,’ said a visiting General. ‘In four months those of you who are not RTU’d – Returned to your Units – will be platoon commanders. In six months’ time most of you will be dead.’ And we believed him. Our numbers were already depleted by a mysterious outbreak of bed-wetting – an RTU-able offence. In a military trance we imagined ourselves waving ashplants, charging machine-gun nests at the head of our men. The Carrara marble pillars, which supported the roof of the chapel in which we carried out our militant devotions, were scarcely sufficient to contain the names of all those other ‘gennulmen’ who, in the earlier war, had died in the mud at Passchendaele and among the wire on the forward slopes of the Hohenzollern Redoubt. They had sat where we were sitting and their names were set out in neat columns on the pillars like debit entries in some terrible ledger. This dream of Death or Glory affected our leisure. Most of us had passed our formative years in the outer suburbs. Now, to make ourselves more acceptable to our employers we took up beagling (the College had the Eton Beagles for the duration); ordered shirts we couldn’t afford from expensive shirtmakers in Jermyn Street and drank Black Velvet in the Hotel. The snugger pubs were out of bounds for fear we might meet a barmaid who ‘did it’. No one but a maniac would have wanted to do it with the one at the Hotel. The bridging equipment was housed in a low, sinister-looking shed near the lake on which we were to practise. This was not the ornamental lake in front of the Old Buildings on which, in peace time, playful cadets used to float chamber pots containing lighted candles – a practice now forbidden by the blackout regulations. It was an inferior lake, little more than a pond; from it rose a dank smell of rotting vegetation. Inside the shed there were a number of small decked-in pontoons and strips of heavy teak grating which were intended to form the footway. Blocks and tackle hung in great swathes from the roof; presumably they were to hold the bridge steady in a swiftly flowing stream. Everything seemed unnecessarily heavy, as though it was part of the gear of a wooden ship-of-the-line. There was every sign that the bridge had not been used for years – if at all. The custodian, a grumpy old pensioner rooted out of his cottage to open the door, confirmed this. ‘What yer think yer going to do with it, cross the Channel?’ he croaked. The Staff Sergeant detailed to instruct us in the use of the bridge was uneasy. He had never seen anything like it before. It bore no resemblance to any kind of bridge that he had encountered. ‘It’s not an ISSUE BRIDGE,’ he kept repeating, plaintively. ‘Gennul-men, you must help me.’ We were deaf to him. The Army had seldom been kind to us; it was too late to call us gentlemen. Finally, after rooting in the darkness he discovered a battered manual hanging on a nail behind the door. It confirmed our suspicions that the bridge had been constructed at the time of the Boer War. No surprise at the Royal Military College where a whole literature of the same period – text books filled with drawings of blockhouses with corrugated-iron roofs; men with droopy moustaches peering through loopholes; and armoured trains that I associated with the early life of Mr Winston Churchill – were piled high on the tops of cupboards in the lecture rooms and had obviously only recently fallen into disuse. With the manual in his hand the Sergeant was once more on familiar ground – if one can use such an expression in connection with a bridge. His spirits rose still further when he discovered that there was a drill laid down for assembling the monstrous thing. ‘On the command “One” the even numbers of the front ranks will about turn, grasp the Caissons with both hands and advance into the water. On the command “Two” the odd numbers of the front rank will peg out the Guys, Retaining Caisson. On the command “Three” the even numbers of the rear rank will pick up the Sections, Decking’ … and so on. On the command ‘One’ the Caisson Party, of which I was one, moved gingerly into the water, which was surprisingly warm. Some of the more frivolous cadets began to splash one another, but were rebuked by the Sergeant. After some twenty minutes all the Caissons were in position, secured by block and tackle. ‘Caisson Party, about turn, quick march!’ To the accompaniment of weird sucking noises we squelched ashore. ‘Decking Party, advance!’ The Decking Party staggered forward under its appalling load. Standing on the bank, with the water streaming from the bottoms of our trousers, we watched them go. ‘It all seems rather pointless when we’ve already walked across,’ someone said. ‘Quiet!’ said the Sergeant. ‘The next cadet who speaks goes on a charge.’ He was looking at his watch, apprehensively. ‘Decking Party and Caisson Party will retire and unpile arms,’ he went on. We had already performed the complicated operation of piling arms. It was one of the things we really knew how to do. ‘Now then, get a move on.’ We had just completed the unpiling when Sergeant-Major Clegg appeared on the far side of the lake, stiff as a ramrod, jerkily propelling one of our gigantic bicycles. Dismounted, standing half-hidden in the undergrowth, he looked more foxy than ever. He addressed us and the world in that high-pitched sustained scream that even now, when I recall it at dead of night years later, makes me come to attention even when lying in my bed. ‘SAAAAN ALUN!’ ‘SAAAAH!’ ‘DOZEEEE … DOZEEEE … GET THOSE DOZY, IDUL GEN-NULMEN OVER THE BRIDGE … AT … THER … DUBBOOOOL!’ ‘SAAAAH!’ shrieked Sergeant Allen and wheeled upon us with a face bereft of all humanity, ‘PLATOOOON, PLATOOOON WILL CROSS THE BRIDGE AT THER DUBOOL – DUBOOOOL!’ Armed to the teeth, bowed down by gas masks, capes anti-gas, token anti-tank rifles and 2” mortars made of wood (all the real ones had been taken away from us after Dunkirk), we thundered down the bank and on to the bridge. The weight of thirty men was too much for it; there was a noise like a succession of pistol shots as the Guys, Retaining Caisson parted, the central span of the bridge surged away and the whole body of us crashed into the water. It was like the end of the Gadarene Swine, the Tay Bridge Disaster and the Crossing of the Beresina reproduced in miniature. As we came to the surface, ornamented with weed and surrounded by the token wooden weapons which, surprisingly, in spite of their weight, floated, we began to laugh hysterically and what had begun as a military operation ended as a water frolic. The caissons became rafts on which were spread-eagled the waterlogged figures of what had until recently been officer cadets, who now resembled nothing more than a band of lascivious Tritons. People were ducking one another; the Ponts were floating calmly, contemplating the sky as if offshore at noon at Eden Roc … Gradually the laughter ceased and a terrible silence descended on us. A tall ascetic figure was looking down on us with a mixture of incredulity and disgust from an ornamental bridge in the rustic taste. The Sergeant was saluting furiously; Sergeant-Major Clegg, foxy to the last, had slipped away into the undergrowth – only his bicycle, propped against a tree, showed that he had ever been there. The face on the bridge was a very well-known face. Without a word General de Gaulle turned on his heel and went off, followed by a train of officers of high rank. His visit had been unannounced at his special request so that he could see us working under natural conditions. What he must have thought is unimaginable. France had just fallen. It must have confirmed his worst suspicions of the British Army. Perhaps the intransigence that was later to become a characteristic was born there on that bright morning beside a steamy little lake in Surrey. For Sergeant Allen the morning’s work had a more immediate significance. His career seemed blasted. ‘You’ve gone and done me in,’ he said sadly, as we fell in to squelch back to the Old Buildings. In the autumn of 1941 I arrived in the Middle East from India. There I joined the Special Boat Section, whose job it was to land from submarines on hostile coasts in order to carry out acts of sabotage against railway systems, attack enemy airfields, and put ashore and take off secret agents. Members of the SBS had also made sorties into enemy harbours with the intention of sticking limpets (magnetic mines) on ships at anchor and blowing them up. My interview for this job took place on board HMS Medway in the harbour at Alexandria, the depot ship of the First Submarine Flotilla which provided the SBS with transportation to its target areas. The interviewer was Roger Courtney, the founder of the Special Boat Section, an astonishing officer who had been a white hunter in East Africa and had canoed down the Nile. Over his desk was displayed a notice which read ARE YOU TOUGH? IF SO GET OUT. I NEED BUGGERS WITH INTELLIGENCE. This notice made me fear that I would not be accepted, but I was. I spent the next few weeks at the Combined Operations Centre at Kabrit on the Suez Canal, learning to handle folboats and explosives, how to sink shipping, and how to blow up aircraft and trains or otherwise render them inoperative. Learning to sink ships involved swimming at night in the Bitter Lakes – which lived up to their name in the depths of winter – covered with grease and wearing long woollen naval issue underwear, and pushing a limpet towards whichever merchant ship lying at anchor had been chosen as the target, the limpet being supported by an inflated car inner tube with a net inside it. This was Britain’s primitive equivalent to the highly sophisticated two-man submarines of the Italian Tenth Light Flotilla, which in December that year succeeded in entering the harbour at Alexandria and exploding charges under the battleships Queen Elizabeth and Valiant. Both ships were disabled and put out of action for months, seriously affecting the balance of sea power in the Mediterranean. On my first practice attempt I was sent to attack a Dutch merchant ship at anchor in one of the Bitter Lakes. I reached it, thinking myself undetected in brilliant moonlight but wondering how anyone on board could possibly fail to hear the noise made by my chattering teeth. To set the limpet in its correct position on the ship’s side it was necessary to dive deeply and as I did so I found myself enveloped in the contents of an entire Dutch lavatory pan which someone with a grotesque sense of fun and a remarkable sense of timing had released by pulling the chain. ‘Better luck next time, mynheer,’ a voice from the deck said as I came up spluttering. ‘I should joose a dark night, if I was you, and dry not to make so much noise, even if it is so cold.’ Next door to our camp at Kabrit was David Stirling with his SAS, Special Air Service. As his success and power increased, David sometimes gave the impression that he was contemplating a takeover bid for SBS. We used to make use of some of his training facilities – he had a testy genius in charge of his explosives department, a Royal Engineer called Bill Cumper. He also had a lofty tower from which embryonic parachutists were expected to launch themselves parachuteless, and they also had to jump off the back of trucks going at about thirty miles an hour. His camp was definitely no place for the chicken-hearted. There was also a band of anarchists from Barcelona whom no one knew what to do with. They had murdered so many Egyptian taximen and buried them in the sand, instead of paying their fares like any normal persons, that it was now almost impossible to get a taxi from Kabrit to Ismailia and back during the hours of darkness, which was a bore. One day, having climbed this tower to admire the extensive view and counting myself lucky that I was not called upon to jump from it, I was about to descend by the way I had come when I heard the voice of one of David’s sergeants from far below say in Caterham (#litres_trial_promo) accents, ‘No officer or man, sir, who has ever climbed that tower, has ever walked down the stairs! Once up there you have to jump, sir!’ So I jumped. I had no choice, and because I had not learned the basic facts about parachuting (which was not a condition of membership of the SBS), I hurt myself. That winter, as part of a detachment of SBS, I was sent to Tobruk to operate with a flotilla of motor-torpedo-boats. While we were there four of us received orders to report without delay to the Directorate of Combined Operations at GHQ in Cairo; its Director was an excellent sailor, popular with the SBS, named Admiral Maund. We reached it late in the afternoon of the day we set off from Tobruk, after a hair-raising drive of more than four hundred miles down the desert road, or what was left of it, in a thirty hundredweight Bedford truck. At the DCO we were only asked if we possessed prismatic compasses, and told to report to the Naval Officer in Charge, NOIC, at Beirut without delay. Before the shops shut in Cairo that evening I bought two guide books, one to Palestine, the other to Syria and the Lebanon, and The Quest for Corvo, by A. J. A. Symonds. Early on the morning of the second day out from Tobruk, we arrived at Gaza: we had covered about eight hundred miles since setting out from Tobruk, which was not bad, considering the terrible state of the desert road. Then we were in Palestine and suddenly it was spring: the countryside in the coastal plain was a green paradise with burgeoning fields of wheat and barley; meadows and gentle hillsides were scattered with wild flowers; and everywhere there were groves of lemons and oranges, of which we bought whole box-loads, afraid that this other Eden might be only a temporary phenomenon and might be succeeded by yet another dusty wilderness as we drove northwards. After the Western Desert, where it was still winter, after Sinai, where we had lain shivering in the cold grey hours before the dawn in the duffel coats we had wangled from the navy, to be in Palestine was to be born again. Armed with the guide book to Palestine, I was able to persuade my companions to make a number of short detours from the main road in order to visit places, some of which I had learned about in Divinity at school, none of which I had ever expected to set eyes on. By this time, as a result of haggling for boxes of oranges, shopping in Tel Aviv, which I thought had a distinctly Eastern European air about it (although I had never been to Eastern Europe), visiting ruins, in fact generally behaving in a thoroughly unmilitary way, some of the impetus had gone out of our expedition. When we reached Caesarea the sun was setting, drenching everything, including the remains of a Roman aqueduct which stood among the dunes that had engulfed what remained of the ancient city, in a brilliant ochrous yellow light. Waves were breaking over the remnants of the ancient harbour works, and down on the foreshore where the air was full of flying spume, a man on a camel, dressed in rags which were streaming in the wind, was the only other human being in sight. It was here that I began rooting about underfoot with a stick, turning up potsherds and iridescent fragments of what may have been Roman or Byzantine glass. In the meantime, whoever was driving kept the motor running and a brother officer shouted as he had done all day whenever I had found a ruin to my taste, ‘For Christ’s sake get a move on, Eric, we can’t stay here all bloody night!’ while the sergeant cried rather more plaintively, ‘Oh, do come on, sir!’ The next day, the third since leaving Tobruk, we drove on northwards. At Acre we looked down into a dungeon in which the despot Jezzar Pasha, who had successfully defended the place against Napoleon, used to pelt his prisoners with cannon balls through a hole in the ceiling. It was a tough campaign. In the course of it Napoleon ordered the mass executions of prisoners by firing squads. As we flashed by on what had been the Roman road to Syria we saw milestones, inscriptions recording innumerable wars and conquests, fragments of altars, gaping catacombs, plundered sarcophagi and other ruins of the past. At Beirut we received from the NOIC the details of Operation Aluite. To us Operation Aluite seemed pretty defeatist. It implied that a German advance into Syria through Turkey, a recurrent British nightmare, one brought on by the continued presence of von Papen as German ambassador at Ankara, would be followed inevitably by the Allied evacuation of Syria and the Lebanon, probably that of Palestine, and eventually, by implication, that of Egypt. In an endeavour to stem such an invasion a great fortress was being built near the port of Tripoli, north of Beirut, where the northern arm of the Iraqi pipeline came in. In the event of such an invasion being successful, it would be the task of the SBS, working from Cyprus, if Cyprus had not itself fallen, to act as guerrillas and sabotage the German lines of communication. In anticipation of such a disaster, we were to sound every inlet in which a clandestine landing could be made, to map the hinterland leading up to the main road and the railway, and to make an assessment of every bridge and other important installations with a view to blowing them up, on the two hundred and fifty miles of coast between the Turkish-Syrian frontier and the Lebanese-Palestinian frontier, north of Haifa. We were also to seek out suitable hiding places for caches of explosive and ammunition. All this had to be done without the knowledge of our French allies in these parts, which seemed impossible. In order to assist in the concealment of such dumps, an enormous quantity of artificial, lightweight rock of the same colour and texture as that found on the coasts of Syria and the Lebanon had been manufactured from papier-m?ch?. What conclusion a wandering goatherd or even a German feldwebel would come to when he found himself walking on artificial rocks made from papier-m?ch? will never be known as they were never put to the test. ‘Personally, I think the whole thing’s rather a waste of time,’ the NOIC said, ‘although you should have fun. Nevertheless I don’t envy you. As you know, the Free French have only recently taken over the country from Vichy and some of the permanent members of the administration are thoroughly untrustworthy and hostile and loyal to what they call “La France de la Metropole”. The coastguards are said to be particularly trigger happy. If they shoot at you I should shoot back and ask questions afterwards. Oh, and take plenty of rubbers and pencils.’ The following morning the four of us, including the sergeant who had said ‘Oh, do come on, sir!’ in such a pained voice, now himself transformed into an enthusiastic ruin-fancier, left Beirut in the thirty hundredweight truck to start work on mapping the section of coast south of the Turkish frontier, while others began on the coast south of Beirut. We had been given enough money to enable us to live off the country without having recourse to other military organizations, so much in fact that we decided to take with us a Sten gun as well as pistols, just in case there were robbers about. All that day we drove north, crossing the Nahr el Kelb, the Dog River, guarded in ancient times by a savage dog with a bark so loud that it could be heard six miles off. In its gorge, where it entered the sea, we saw inscribed slabs recording the passage of Egyptian Pharaohs, Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks and Romans, the Emperor Caracalla and the Third Gallic Legion, British and French troops in July 1918, and a triumphant one recording the entry of the French into Damascus in July 1920 when they expelled King Feisal and the Arabs. Seeing these great steles I realized that we were just another band of marauding soldiers. We saw the ruins of ancient Byblos, the principal city of the Giblites, claimed by an ancient Greek, Philo, to be the oldest town in the world, with a square Crusader castle above it on a hill, ruins among which we later lived for some days while making our survey. On the outskirts of Tripoli work was proceeding on the construction of the fortress, which looked pretty feeble to us, and all along the coast hordes of men were working away on the Naquara-Beirut-Tripoli railway which we were already making plans to destroy. The next weeks were the best that any of us had so far experienced in the course of the war, and the best that many of us were ever likely to experience: swimming about in lonely coves, taking soundings with long canes cut in some convenient plantation; pacing out base lines and using our compasses to make triangulations across the fields of wheat and barley; searching out caves and rock tombs, in which the coast abounded, that might serve as caches for explosives; swinging about like apes among the girders of railway bridges; meeting primitive-looking goatherds, one of whom, a rather elderly Sunnite Muslim I found sitting on a rock, had been an itinerant pedlar in the United States before returning home to marry a Syrian girl, a marriage which he said he had arranged by post. In the course of our travels we encountered a remarkable diversity of religions and nationalities. There were Alawites, Druzes and Ismailites, whose religions contained elements of Muslim, Christian, Indian and Persian beliefs. There were Armenians who had either been deported from Turkey during the First World War by the Turks or who had left it of their own volition to avoid being slaughtered – it was some Armenian Orthodox Gregorians who invited us to a village near the Turkish frontier for a play in Armenian lasting eight hours, which was a kind thought but a great trial to all of us. There were Armenian Catholics and Maronites and Greek-Catholic Melkites and Syrian-Catholic Syriacs and Chaldean Catholics and Roman Catholics and Greek Orthodox and Syrian Orthodox, which included Jacobites and Nestorians, and there were even some Protestants. There were Sephardic Jews and there were Sunni and Shiah Muslims, the latter so fanatical that if they were forced to feed an infidel they destroyed the crockery as soon as the visitor had departed. And in Syria there were some very odd people indeed, whom we never saw, called Yezidis, who believed that God had passed the administration of the world over to the Devil, which on second thoughts did not seem odd at all. None of these conflicting sects seemed particularly fond of one another. One night we slept among the ruins of Marqab, one of the castles of the Knights Hospitallers. Built of black basalt and reached by a spiral track nearly four miles long, it occupied a fantastic situation, high on a spur of an extinct volcano. It looked impregnable but it had finally been captured by Qalaun in 1285 after a forty-day siege, although it had food supplies for five years; but even so it was a much better site for a fortress than the one that was being built down the hill in Tripoli, as good as Monte Cassino, and as difficult to take. In its chapels, halls and passages and on its circuit walks, sheep and goats wandered. It was cool up there and we built a great fire in one of the rather smelly halls. We thought the flickering of the light on the walls and the giant shadows highly romantic until we were infested by bats, attracted by the flames, which were so numerous that they eventually forced us to retreat to one of the roofless towers. There we passed the rest of the night free of them and the rotten-chocolate smell of their excrement. We used to start work as soon as it was light, then rest in the heat of the day. We had soon lost most of our external military characteristics. Down on the shore, under the mountains, it was much too hot to wear anything but shorts and sandals and straw hats, and the sergeant acquired a long, lean hunting dog. We were dressed like this, the sergeant with his dog on a rope leash and carrying the Sten gun, the others armed with pistols and the long canes we used for taking soundings, when one morning the Duke of Gloucester, on a tour of inspection with a convoy of military big-wigs, looked down incredulously on us from his motor car as he whizzed past, covering us with dust. During the hot, midday hours we used to sprawl in the shelter of an ilex or an over-size boxwood tree in which the coast abounded, more often than not surrounded by ruins – we soon learned that the ancients had already identified for us all the best landing places, however insignificant. There we reclined drinking wine, eating chickens we had bought from some cook shop, carving up big loaves of bread that looked as if they might have been baked by Phoenicians, dreamily listening to the droning of unidentifiable insects, the shrill screaming of the cicadas or the endless din set up by the frogs in some nearby marsh, and sniffing the pungent smelly maquis. We worked at Ibn Hani, a place lost among olive groves, where there were the remains of a temple and an amphitheatre, and at Ras Shamrah, the site of Ugarit, a famous city of the Phoenicians but with origins far older, going back to 5000 BC, perhaps further. Much of Ugarit was buried under Ras Shamrah, but a French expedition had continued to excavate it until the war put an end to their labours. Now it was completely unprotected – there were no custodians to harass us – and unvisited. In places one could look down, strata on strata, fifty feet or so, through different levels of civilization to where people had lived who had worshipped Baal, the God of Rain, and Dagon, to levels at which the inhabitants had had relations with Egypt and Crete in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries before Christ; to where later, in the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries, they had installed sanitation and constructed burial vaults; and to the level where, in the thirteenth century, the Mycenaeans had lived in it until its final extinction by some peoples of the sea in the twelfth century. It was here at Ras Shamrah that, scrabbling among the rubble in the fearful afternoon heat with my stick, keeping watch while the others slept, I discovered two exquisite miniature bronze bulls which subsequently reached England, only to be stolen from over a fireplace in a drawing-room while we were having a Christmas party. On Saturday mornings we used to return to Beirut in pursuit of pleasures to which the ancients themselves were no strangers. Together with the officer who, like me, had been attracted by two Greek girls from Athens, I used to put up at the St George Hotel, where they continued to stay. We saw nothing of the city. Once or twice we all four lunched together at a restaurant perched on the cliff overlooking some impressive offshore stacks called the Grottes des Pigeons. Another time we went to the mountains and stayed in a village. For the rest of the time we sunbathed with them on the hotel beach, swam, made love, drank, sunbathed, swam, made love, ordered up club sandwiches and so on until at dawn on Monday morning, I used to board our vehicle to cries of ‘Oh, do hurry up, sir!’ and roar away for Ras Shamrah, Tartus or wherever we happened to be making our maps. We were completely exhausted, unlike our partners who, unknown to us, had other bedfellows of a more senior, stay-at-home kind during the week. We had met our match, we both agreed, in these girls, who, for us at least, did everything for love. After this extraordinary, almost dream-like interlude in our military careers, we all returned to the fields of action from which that fickle goddess Fortune had fancifully removed us. However, before doing so, we delivered to the DCO by way of the NOIC the final instalments of our labours which, altogether, were of almost encyclopaedic proportions. This mass of material, flavoured with a surprising amount of newly-acquired culture – the reports of the cultivated and gallant sergeant made particularly good reading – had an extremely short life. Consigned to the most secret archives, the whole lot was used a few months after we delivered the final sections to stoke the already huge funeral pyres of documents that were on no account to fall into enemy hands – although what use they would be to the Germans with Egypt already in their hands it was difficult to imagine – pyres which created a dense pall of smoke over Cairo in that summer of 1942, when it seemed more than probable that Rommel would arrive in the city in person. OPERATION WHYNOT We were captured off the east coast of Sicily on the morning of the twelfth of August, 1942, about four miles out in the Bay of Catania. It was a beautiful morning. As the sun rose I could see Etna, a truncated cone with a plume of smoke over it like the quill of a pen stuck in a pewter inkpot, rising out of the haze to the north of where I was treading water. There were five of us. Originally there had been seven, but one, a marine, had had to be left behind on the submarine and another, Sergeant Dunbar of the Argylls was missing, killed, wounded or captured, we none of us knew, lost among the coast defences in the dunes. We were all that remained of M Detachment of the Special Boat Section. Three officers, of whom I was one, Corporal Butler of the South Lancashire Regiment and Guardsman Duffy of the Coldstream, one of the smallest sub-units in the British Army, now about to be wiped out completely. About eight o’clock we were picked up by some Sicilian fishermen who hauled us into their boat like a lot of half-dead fish. They were surprised. We were thankful, although we knew that we would now never make the rendezvous off Capo Campolato which had been fixed for the following night if we failed to reach the submarine by one o’clock on the morning of the twelfth. I remember lying among the freshly caught fish in the bottom of the boat, some of them exotic, all displaying considerably greater liveliness than we did, and discussing with the others the possibility of taking it over and forcing the fishermen to head for Malta, 120 miles to the south, for the boat had a sail, as well as an engine. And if we had been in a war film made twenty years later this is what we undoubtedly would have done, but we had been in the water for nearly five hours and were very cold and could hardly stand. Besides, the fishermen were kindly men. They thought that we were survivors from a torpedoed ship and they gave us what little wine and bread they had with them which amounted to a mouthful each. To them the war, as they made clear by various unequivocal gestures, was a misfortune which had brought misery to everyone and, as far as they were concerned, had seriously restricted their fishing. The idea of using violence against such people was unthinkable. And even if we had decided to try and take over the boat it would have been impossible to get away. It was one of a fleet of a dozen or so whose crews now brought them alongside so that they, too, could view this extraordinary haul. We were prisoners without, as yet, having admitted the fact to ourselves. It was too soon. Everything had happened too quickly. On the afternoon of the tenth, immediately before we sailed from Malta, we had been given the bare, gruesome bones of what had been christened Operation Whynot. For the flesh we would have to rely on some last-minute aerial photographs of the target which were still in the darkroom and which we would have to study when we were submerged. We were told that we were going to attack a German bomber airfield four miles south of Catania in Sicily which was expected to have between fifty and sixty JU 88s on it on the night of the eleventh, and destroy as many of them as we could so that they would be out of action on the twelfth and thirteenth when a British convoy essential to Malta’s survival would be within a hundred miles of the island but still beyond effective fighter cover from it. There would be no time for a preliminary reconnaissance. We had to land and go straight in and come out if we could. The beach was heavily defended and there was a lot of wire. It was not known if it was mined but it was thought highly probable. The whole thing sounded awful but at least it seemed important and worth doing. Irregular forces such as ours were not always employed in such ostensibly useful roles. We travelled to Sicily in Una, one of the smaller submarines. Her commander, Pat Norman, was a charming and cheerful lieutenant of our own age. I was already in the conning tower and we were just about to sail when a steward came running down the mole brandishing a piece of paper which, after having received permission to climb into the conning tower, he presented to me. It was a bill for an infinitesimal sum for drinks which I had ordered in the wardroom (our hosts, the Tenth Submarine Flotilla were so generous that it was almost impossible to buy them any). Apparently the others had already been presented with theirs while I was elsewhere. Actually, I had been attempting to dig down to my kit which had been buried when a large bomb had fallen that morning on the great impregnable-looking Vaubanesque fort in which we were billeted and destroyed my room. No one, including Norman, had any money on them. Like me, none of them had thought that they might conceivably need money underwater. ‘I’ll pay you when I get back,’ I said, airily. ‘There’s nothing to worry about. I’m attached to the Tenth Submarine Flotilla.’ ‘That’s what they all say, sir,’ he said, gloomily. ‘Military officers attached to the Tenth Submarine Flotilla. And then we never see them again, more often than not. I’m afraid I must ask you to give me a cheque, sir.’ I told him with some relish that, if he wanted a cheque from me, he would have to shift some tons of masonry in order to find one. ‘No need for that, sir,’ he said. ‘I’ve brought you a blank cheque. All you have to do is fill in the name and address of your bank and sign it.’ Even then it seemed an evil omen. It would be tedious to relate the details of the voyage. They were the same as any other for passengers in a submarine. The wardroom was so minute that apart from the times when I emerged to eat and discuss our plans, such as they were, and pore over the aerial photographs which had been taken from such an altitude that they needed an expert to interpret them and we soon gave up trying to do so, I spent the rest of the time lying on a mattress under the wardroom table, a place to which I had been relegated as the most junior officer of the party. I shared this humble couch with Socks, a dachshund, the property of Desmond Buchanan, an officer in the Grenadiers who was one of our party and who had persuaded Pat Norman to allow him to bring her with him because of the noise of the air-raids on Malta which were practically continuous. (‘I wouldn’t dream of leaving my little girl here. Her nerves are going to pieces.’) From time to time Socks went off to other parts of the submarine, from which she returned bloated with food and with her low-slung chassis covered with oil, a good deal of which she imparted to me. But on the whole it was a cheerful journey and we laughed a lot, although most of it was the laughter of bravado. We all knew that we were embarked on the worst possible kind of operation, one that had been hastily conceived by someone a long way from the target, and one which we had not had the opportunity to think out in detail for ourselves. I felt like one of those rather ludicrous, ill-briefed agents who had been landed by night on Romney Marsh in the summer of 1940, all of whom had been captured and shot. By four o’clock in the afternoon of the eleventh we were in the Bay of Catania, about a mile offshore, and Pat brought Una up to periscope depth so that we could have a look at the coast. He got a bit of a shock when he did. He had come up in the midst of a fleet of Sicilian fishing boats and they swam into the eye of the periscope like oversize fish in an aquarium. Raising the periscope he was lucky not to have impaled one of them on the end of it. Nevertheless, with what I thought an excess of zeal, he insisted on giving each of us an opportunity to look at the coast which we did, hastily, before causing Una to sink to the bottom where she remained for the next five hours with everything shut off that might produce a detectable noise. It had not been a very successful reconnaissance; but there had been nothing to see anyway. With an immense sun glaring at us from behind a low-lying coast, the shore had appeared as nothing more than a thin, tremulous black line with a shimmering sea in front of it. We surfaced at nine o’clock and the four folboats were brought up on to the casing through the torpedo hatch without their midship frames in position, the only way we could get them through it, and we then carried out the final assembly. It was not a very dark night, but after thirty-six hours in artificial light underwater it seemed terribly black until we became accustomed to it, when it seemed altogether too bright. To the north we could see the lights of Catania and to the west the landing lights of the airfield. Planes were coming in to land a couple of hundred feet above our heads, and when they were directly above us the noise was deafening. The wind was on-shore and there was a nasty swell running which made the launching of the canoes over the bulges difficult with the tanks blown, and the loading of them once they were in the water even more so. One canoe was so badly damaged getting it into the water that it had to be left behind, together with the marine who was going to travel in it. He was very disappointed at the time. How fortunate he was. ‘Rather you than me, mate, but good luck anyway,’ were the last words addressed to me by a rating as he threw me the stern line; then we set off in arrowhead formation towards the shore, if three canoes can be said to constitute an arrowhead. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/eric-newby/a-merry-dance-around-the-world-with-eric-newby/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.