A Traveller's Life (9 page)

What can I say after all these years of my first visit, and the last for what proved to be many years to come, to the ruins of Bindon Abbey, a Cistercian monastery, destroyed after the Reformation in 1539, coming eventually to the Welds of Lulworth by purchase from an Earl of Suffolk, to whom it descended from Lord Poynings, who received it at the Dissolution? When I saw it as a still-small schoolboy it was as it had been for centuries already, the remnant of a ruin, most of which had been carted away to build other buildings, of which little more than the foundations remained: no cloister, no nave, no refectory, no dormitory, a few bases of columns, a few tombs, everything eaten up by ivy, or strangled and convulsed by the roots of trees, hidden from the outside world by woods.

What do I remember most? The open sarcophagus in which Clare, one of the arch prigs of English literature, laid Tess; the bases of the columns, the ivy-clad outlines of the abbey, vaguely delineated? Much more than any of these I remember the vistas of the long ponds in which the monks may have bred their carp, the sound of water running through the sluices, the rustle of the leaves and the melancholy, even angry, cawing of the rooks, galvanized into activity by Fred with his appalling megaphone.

But what I remember more than anything was the feeling of the actual, physical presence of the monks themselves, who had been dead for more than three hundred years, as I walked the paths alongside the dark waters, until the sound of Fred's motor horn and my mother's cries of ‘Eric, where are you?' brought me running back.

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.

My childhood was at an end. I had no complaints. I had been an only child and what was certainly an excess of loving care and attention had always been lavished on me. I had found it difficult to excuse my parents' visits to me in their motor car with Lewington at the wheel when I was away camping, something my fellows did not let me forget. It is true that I suffered from a sense of inferiority, an inability to be ‘good at figures', as my father put it, and a marked reluctance even to attempt to row seriously and be chosen for the school eight and row at Henley, for which I had both the style and the physique, having learned to row before I learned to scoot a scooter. These were the only fields in which my father really wanted me to excel, fields in which I, too, would like to have excelled but somehow felt incapable of doing so. Thinking about them I felt like the man with the inferiority complex who is told by his consultant that he really is inferior. There was no one else I could blame. I was only sorry that I had disappointed my father. My mother didn't care whether I excelled in them or not.

During eighteen months spent learning business methods, I survived several office purges of the kind that take place frequently in advertising agencies when they lose an important account. I survived them not because I was astute but simply because I was paid so little as ‘a learner' that there was not much point in giving me the sack. However, when the agency lost an important breakfast cereal account, and when all my best friends went overboard with it, I decided that I too wanted to go overboard with them. I had had enough of learning business methods.

That August in 1938, with an international crisis building up in Europe over Czechoslovakia and the Germans mobilizing, I went on holiday to Salcombe in south Devon. Diving in Starehole
Bay near Bolt Head, I saw what remained of the four-masted Finnish sailing barque
Herzogin Cecilie
of Mariehamn, which had crashed into the Ham Stone in April 1936 with a cargo of grain from Australia on board, eventually becoming a total loss. And on the way back to London, while changing trains at Newton Abbot, I wrote a letter to the owner, Gustav Erikson, in Mariehamn, asking him for a place in one of his grain ships.

To become an Erikson apprentice I had to be at least sixteen years of age (birth certificate required), of strong constitution (two doctors' certificates), and of good moral character (one clergyman's certificate, which he signed without setting eyes on me). If I died from natural causes, by falling from the rigging, or by being washed overboard, my father would get back a proportion of the £50 ($250) which he paid to make me an apprentice. I was also to be subject to Finnish law and custom. My wages were to be 150 Finmarks a month, at that time the equivalent of 50p ($2.50). Even the captain only received about 4000 Finmarks (£20 or $100).

On 16 September, at the height of the Munich crisis, the day after Chamberlain visited Hitler at Berchtesgaden and a week after the French had called up their reservists, by which time it was beginning to look as if it was not going to be a particularly good year to be at sea in an engineless sailing ship, my father received the following letter:

H. Clarkson and Company Limited

52 Bishopsgate,      

London EC2.          

15 September, 1938

George A. Newby, Esq.,

Messrs Lane and Newby,

Wholesale Costumiers

   and Mantle Manufacturers,

54, Great Marlborough Street,

   London W1.

S/V
Moshulu
.

Dear Sir,

We now have a letter from Captain Gustav Erikson advising us that he wishes your son to join this vessel which is discharging at Belfast on the 26th September.

If you will now send us the £50 [$250] premium, we shall send you a contract for his service in this vessel …

As your boy will be arriving in Belfast in the early morning on the steamer from Heysham he will be able to go direct to the ship which is discharging her cargo in York Dock.

Yours truly,                            

For H. Clarkson and Co. Ltd.

A. S. Calder                           

The following is a letter from Mr W. H. Eyre, otherwise known to his associates as ‘Piggie'. Solicitor, notable oarsman (he rowed in the Thames Rowing Club crew that won the Grand Challenge Cup at Henley in 1876), Mr Eyre was an old friend of my father.

Rye and Eyre,

Solicitors,

Golden Square,

London, W1

12 September, 1938

Dear George

… it surprises me that Eric wants to be a sailor, and I do strongly hope that he will reconsider it, as I am certain his mother is
sure to miss him dreadfully
, as you will also. You say he is to be apprenticed, but I think he would give it up unless the conditions are very far better than I can remember when I was a small boy of the voyage out to New Zealand, and two years later when we returned in a seven-hundred-ton barque, a most stormy voyage which lasted nearly six months! We were nearly wrecked coming round Cape Horn (southernmost tip of South America), and had to put in at
the Island of St Helena for provisions. I was nearly ten years old then, it was 1858, and my brother and I used to go up the masts and out on the yards and do a lot of little odd jobs for the skipper and the mates. We knew every rope in the ship and lots of ‘shanties'. The apprentices' life was a
very hard one
and the poor fellows used to get a rope's ending from our severe old skipper (a very painful operation), but I suppose there will be nothing like that on the ‘line' you mention. But he will be away continually, and subject to continual risks so, as he is your only child, I do hope that you will arrange for him to have a trial voyage before he becomes bound to serve five years, or whatever the term is. Talk it over with Mrs Newby and then, both of you, do all you can with the boy. Surely if he does not like commerce there are many occupations in which he would probably do well. You might even article him in some good solicitors' firm where he would get plenty of time for rowing and all other amusements whilst serving his time – or a chartered accountant is a good ‘trade' to learn, as they are fit for all kinds of well-paid Government and other posts. As are also properly trained engineers, either civil or mechanical – but you probably know as much or far more than I do about starting a clever young fellow in life.

Forgive my bothering you with all this but I cannot help feeling very strongly that, for your's and his mother's sake, he should be kept in England.

The next letter is from Mimi, ex-fashion buyer, the sister of Beryl and Mercia Bamford, and one of my mother's greatest friends:

Barton-on-Sea, Hants

Friday, September 1938

Dear Pom [an abbreviation of my mother's maiden name, Pomeroy]

I have just been talking to Beryl and Mercia on the telephone
and Beryl told me Eric is going to sea. Pom, dear, I can imagine how you feel, but you have always been a sacrificing soul, and this may seem like the
supreme sacrifice
; but you can and will do it you know, Pom, and it thrills me to think of the life he will lead and what he will see of this world, and I can sympathize with Eric. He was always an ‘adventurous spirit', always full of zest and a great little reader, with such imagination. Do you remember that odd-shaped stone he found when he was quite small, with holes in it at Branscombe, which he said looked like a ‘prehistoric aunt'. If the opportunity comes his way he could even be a great traveller and writer. Give him my love and tell him he must take some good reading with him. I enclose a little something for this.

What times we live in, but what fun we've had together!

We've just had our gas masks fitted. Should there be air raids with Southampton and Calshot round the corner we're not in the safest place; but where is safe?

Don't take the parting too badly, old girl. He has his life to live, and what a father and mother he has had, and what a childhood!

Yours ever,                 

Mimi                       

Here is my first letter on board ship to my parents: eighteen years later this and subsequent letters to them provided me with the necessary material for the opening chapters of
The Last Grain Race
:

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 [made by Louis Vuitton and bought in a second-hand shop, for £4 or $20]. 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 Åland 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 Åland 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                                     

The following day, 27 September, the Royal Navy was mobilized. However, cleaning what had become ‘my lavatories', taking further steps in the rigging and over the side chipping rust from the hull most of the day, I had little time for reflection about what was going on in the world outside. And as soon as I stopped work I immediately fell asleep.

S/V
Moshulu
, East Side,
York Dock,
Belfast

29 September 1938
¹

Dear Mummy and Daddy,

… I will try and give you some idea of what life is like on board a sailing ship in port, from the point of view of a humble apprentice.

At 5.30 in the morning the boy who is night watchman kicks open the fo'c'sle door, shouting ‘
Resa upp, resa upp
!' so that you think the Last Judgement has come. If you don't ‘
resa upp
' he rolls you backwards and forwards as if you were a pudding. This sometimes leads to a fight breaking out, as there are some very quick-tempered people on board. Eventually I climb out of my coffin – they are about seven feet long and about two feet high and the crew fit them up with various mementoes and curiosities to make them more homelike, such as assegais [the ship had been to Portuguese East Africa on the last voyage], horrible-looking souvenirs made from Australian wattle wood, pictures of girls, mostly film actresses. I have put up a picture of a very luscious-looking girl from
Esquire Magazine
and pretend she is my girl-friend which, almost unbelievably, everyone believes. I have to make as brave a show as possible being the only Englishman on board, although there is supposed to be an American coming, which would be nice.

Then after drinking coffee, quite good, with condensed milk, and eating bread baked on board – very good – having forced one's way into damp dungarees and boots, we all go out on to the deck which is slimy and dirty, where we wait with the boys from the other fo'c'sles for one of the mates to tell us what to do.

The first two mornings I cleaned the lavatories. They have no
running water even if there ever was any, so you have to haul up water from the dock and then use an iron rod to ram up and down them. The only way to use these lavs is to stand on the seat, which you are not supposed to do; but you have to. I had a fight because of this – ‘Take dose bloddy boots off,' someone said when they found me standing on one of them. The doors have no locks on them, just like school. I wish Daddy had not insisted on my being so regular in my habits.