Down to the Sea in Ships (22 page)

‘Are you diving in the port?'

‘In the industrial area. Measuring depth for concrete.'

‘No point telling you to keep warm, is there?'

‘I have four layers! Underwear, jumpsuit, woolly bear, diving suit. Like the Michelin Man.'

The strike has been called off. Igor's taxi turns up in the mid-afternoon. Igor is from Ukraine. He loves Putin and he hates the BBC.

‘Liars, liars, liars!' he jeers.

‘Do you think I am a liar?'

‘I don't know.'

‘I'm not. And nor are the men and women in the BBC, my friends and colleagues, who risk their lives to tell you the truth. Just because you don't like what they say . . .'

‘Agh!' Igor sneers. ‘This is all shit.'

‘It is NOT shit! How can you sit here in your taxi in a Western democracy where we don't kill journalists, where we don't defraud our elections, where a vote actually means something, and support a monster like Putin who put that scurvy, lying, homicidal, disgusting, torturing, murderous, megalomaniac wanker Ramzan Kadyrov in charge of Chechnya?'

Igor permits himself a near-smile. ‘You are right about Kadyrov.'

By the time the lorryways open into a single broad square in a wasteland, where the superstructures of ships appear like space stations on a barren planet, we have become something like friends.

‘Nuclear power station,' he nods. The heads of the cooling towers are capped in low cloud, as if they are pumping out the sky.

‘That's nice.'

‘Not Chernobyl,' he says. ‘We were very lucky wind was blowing away from town.'

Igor thinks Belgium the best country in Europe. On this, too, we are implacably opposed.

His destination is a building like a broken brick, set in a moonscape. It seems empty but for a desk and a security door and a rough-skinned young man behind the desk.

‘
Nastravia
,' says Igor, with a charming smile, his first, and goes.

‘
Maersk Pembroke
?' says the young man. ‘Are you crew?'

‘Sort of.'

‘Ah yes,' he smiles, ‘straight through.'

A minibus waits in the rain. The other passenger is an extraordinary figure in seaman's gear. He wears a yachting cap and donkey jacket, sports a white beard and carries an attaché case. He must be a diamond smuggler. The bus tears past the
Maersk Essex
, one of the world's biggest and ugliest container ships. Then we pass a really rotten-looking ship, so low in the water her deck is level with the quay. She weeps rust. She is a mess.

‘Oh God, not her,' I mutter.

Frankly, she looks dangerous. Now we approach a fine big ship, registered in Monrovia. The diamond smuggler disembarks the bus, turns up his collar against the rain and begins to climb the ladder. Apart from the power station, the chemical clouds and the desolation of containers there is nothing for the eye anywhere. The bus turns and heads for the rotten ship. It stops and the driver invites me to alight. We have found the
Maersk Pembroke
.

They seem to be having some trouble bringing her alongside. Is she aground? Ropes trail uselessly in the muddy water. Stevedores stand around smoking. Up above, in the rain, heads peer over the sides of the bridge wing. The bridge wings are open to the elements! I start to smile.

Her keel was laid down in 1997 and she was named P&O
Nedlloyd Sydney
, a proud member of the then recently combined fleets of Britain's P&O Containers and Holland's Royal Nedlloyd Lines. She is beautiful in the pictures of her pomp, with her white superstructure, her black hull painted red below the Plimsoll line, and an elegant poop and stern, which now look perilously close to the water. Her parent company was the third largest cargo shipping line in the world: much of the
Sydney
's business was in the southern oceans. Her senior officers were Dutch, naturally. In 2005 Maersk bought P&O Nedlloyd for over two billion euros. The
Sydney
was rechristened
Maersk Pembroke
. Only two of her Dutch officers now remain: the Captain and the chief engineer. The ship's repaint job, an all-over coat of Maersk Lines' light blue, never very convincing, one feels, is a disgrace now. Thumped, rust-pored and tug-bashed, her undercoats and previous livery show through in Rothko patches.

She does not berth so much as decide she is near enough. Apropos of nothing she vomits hot spray in a lateral jet from a concealed pipe somewhere in the superstructure, catching me with a steamy, greasy blast. You cannot help laughing. Faces smile from the deck and the crew wave and call out. They have been anchored in the Steenbank Roads for the last two days, while the Captain emailed me counselling patience and we all waited for the pilots to call off their strike.

It was difficult to know whom to curse. The pilots are well paid. They retire at sixty-two. The whole world is taking a cut of some sort at the moment, except for the rich. The strike was never going to win anything; it was gesture politics and they must have known it. My time trickled away and my funds diminished with every night in the vile Etap hotel, and why oh why could the pilots not just accept the increase in retirement age to sixty-four?

On the other hand, the pilots do a dangerous, difficult and crucial job, and who would want their grandfather scaling the sides of ships in the freezing storms of the North Sea winter at the age of sixty-four? Why oh why could the wretched Belgian government, or whatever passes for it, not back down? And so I seethed, and forgave everyone everything the day the strike ended and I received the message from the agent, a young Belgian named Arthur, that the ship would be alongside from 4 p.m., and that I was welcome to join her. I could have hugged the young man in reception at the Etap. I could even have hugged Igor.

Agent Arthur looks ill but a lot of Antwerpers look ill. It must be the weather and the season. The stevedores do not look healthy but they seem indestructible, in the way of stevedores. The only man among us who appears thoroughly well, in the very pink, is the pilot. He is leaning over the rail of the ship gossiping with a camera crew, who are filming him for this evening's local news. He looks amused, very smart in expensive foul-weather gear, and tough. He gives brief, wry answers to the camera.

According to the authorities of the Port of Antwerp, the strike, which lasted three days, cost a million euros an hour. Fleets of ships backed up in the Channel anchorages and global schedules went to pieces, leaving shipowners liable for compensation. The Swiss shipping company MSC announced it was switching its entire operation to Rotterdam, thereby jeopardising two thousand Antwerp jobs. The pilots returned to work. They had successfully extracted a promise that a committee would be formed to study the problem of their retirement age. So it goes.

The young Filipino chief officer, Erwin, invites us aboard. After Sorin's height and authority Erwin seems too young for his role, but though shy he is firm and self-contained. Agent Arthur and I follow him through a hatch into a sheltered area with duckboards on the deck. There is that smell of institutionalised cooking again, and diesel. All the air inside reeks softly of diesel but the
Pembroke
is not bunkering, she just smells. We descend a stairway to where a pirate-proof gate stands open. In a small room beyond this is the Captain. He seems to take up half the space.

‘Pete Koop!' he cries.

With a big smile a bigger hand shoots out. We shake. His eyes, an indeterminate grey, are very keen. His smile has teeth under a grey moustache. He has a round strong frame which fills the white uniform shirt, on which a faded yellow stain looks as though it has defied a few washes. A fifty-euro note shows through the top pocket. There is proper old gold braid on his shoulders, four stripes and the loop. He is in his early sixties and quick; he makes it seem the age to be. He is humorous and chatty.

‘So we will meet in the bar,' he says, ‘at six thirty, before we go down.'

There is a moment of wild hope. Have the Dutch won an exemption from the abstemious Danes?

‘For a
drink
, Captain?'

‘No! No. First they took away the beer. Then, in 2008, things not so good, they took away the soft drinks!'

Instead of a lift there is an unenclosed and airy iron stairway. You need a bit of strength just to open the door on deck one. Constant draughts patrol this stairway in whistles and moans.

My cabin comprises a lumpy double bed, a non-functioning strip light with exposed bulb over the pillow, desk, chair and a brass-rimmed porthole. The Captain appears, apparently delivering a letter to the electrician's cabin next door. He looks queryingly at me as I look queryingly at my cabin.

‘Captain! Can I get to the bridge?'

‘Yes but only at sea, it's locked when we're in port.'

‘Can I go out?'

‘Only where you came in.'

‘Is there internet?'

‘Not really! Well, yes, sometimes, a bit.'

‘Can I smoke?'

‘In your cabin, on the bridge if the officer of the watch doesn't mind, and in the bar.'

We warm to each other: he sees I like her and he likes her very much. Captain Petrus Paulus Maria Koop comes from a Catholic family. His father was a bishop in Brazil. Petrus was selected for the seminary, did a bit, got out and went looking for a ship.

‘I always wanted to go to sea,' he says.

His ship was launched in eastern Germany in 1998, but her architects and designers must have acquired their principles in an earlier era. When I succeed in gaining entry to the navigation bridge I find a room like a seventies space mission; form is placed at the complete service of function, but function is rendered in pleasingly human terms. There are two soft seats either side of the central control console, with seat belts. After the
Gerd
's austere standing spaces and multiple computer screens this seems both superannuated and decadent. Apparently we are slightly longer than the average wave length: riding them will be entertaining, but the thought of seat belts rather alarms.

‘So we go up, up, and down down!' says the Captain, grinning like a shark. She is 210 metres long so he must be talking about mighty waves. Force eight to nine is forecast.

‘What are we carrying, Captain?'

‘Well, we don't know, but definitely expensive cars – they don't want someone driving them on and off a car carrier. And milk and cheese. We take our milk and cheese to Montreal and bring their milk and cheese back.'

Similarly, he says, countries swap hifis and electrical goods.

‘We take Philips and Grundig and Bang & Olufsen to the East and bring Sony and Hitachi back.'

If global trade is a question of swapping brands across the oceans it is no surprise it is faltering.

‘On the way back from Halifax we bring live shellfish. Lobsters. Two tanks in forty-foot refrigerated containers. The crew must check them every four hours.'

Nestor Loste, the electrician, my neighbour in the next cabin, will risk his life climbing a ladder while freezing gales threaten to throw him tumbledown to the heaving deck to make sure the poor buggers are still alive
every four hours
? The Captain smiles at my incredulity.

At quarter past six we meet in the bar, preparatory to ‘going down'. Two Europeans sit with the Captain under strip lighting in the mess which adjoins the bar. The room is bare but for three pot plants and a few chairs. The bar makes a recessed and inviting cove of warm lights and colours, opposite. Its walls are decorated with the ship's battle honours, plaques and photographs presented to her on the occasion of her first visits to various ports. None of them refer to the ship by her present identity. The effect is a small and surreal display commemorating the first arrivals of a ship named P&O
Nedlloyd Sydney
in Portland, Hong Kong, Seattle, Barcelona, Southampton and Auckland.

A small case contains three coins and an inscription: ‘A Guilder, a Pound and a Mark were placed under the keel at the Keel Laying Ceremony 3rd November 1997 to wish the ship a prosperous life'. The following year, according to another notice, the MV P&O
Nedlloyd Sydney
was christened by her ‘Godmother', a Mrs Gail Fletcher. All this ceremony, recalling the Peninsular & Orient Line's traditions, which go back to the company's founding in 1822, comes to an end with a laminated notice run up by someone on a computer.

‘Welcome to the Beer Museum', it begins. ‘Historic Facts: 1st April 2007, A sad day in the history of shipping. It was the day that Maersk Line forced ex PONL ships to implement “Zero Alcohol” policy. On display are two rare items of alcoholic beverage, as was enjoyed by staff, officers and crew after a hard days work. Please, do not touch the items on display. Look at them and let your mind wander to days of ships with happy crews. Free admission.'

‘It was a very social place,' the Captain says, ‘before.'

Our assembly in the adjoining room is a strange mixture of awkwardness and charm. Because the bar serves no drinks no one has anything in his hands. There are no snacks or anything that can be asked for, passed or partaken. There is no moment at which the ritual naturally ends. In a lull in the conversation Captain Koop jerks his hands, drums them once on his seat and says ‘OK! Let's see what we have tonight!'

At this we rise and descend six floors to the dining room. The high spirits which accompany this descent are partly a function of relief at escaping from the mess, a room which seemed to solicit awkward silences, and partly due to the anticipation of food. In the bar, often, we sit in each other's company and wonder what to say.

This first night, though, is a joy. Pieter Mulder is the chief engineer. Unlike his peers on the
Gerd
he also wears full uniform. Johannes, a tough-looking Dutchman, our mechanic, never does. Pieter is a sweet, gentle man with the kind of face you want to see smile and laugh, which it does eagerly, sympathetically, at the least excuse.