Down to the Sea in Ships (23 page)

‘I wanted to join the Dutch navy,' he says at dinner, ‘but they said I was “not assertive enough”.'

‘You're too nice, clearly,' I say, angry on his behalf.

Johannes – Jannie – is another kind man, eyes bagged like a smoking dog, gentle and possessed of a great store of stories, one of the best on the ship. His English is an embarrassment to him so many of these come out in Dutch, engrossing the chief and the Captain.

‘I speak Indonesian,' he explains, ‘but I never sailed with Filipinos before and I can't get their language at all. What is it, a mixture of Spanish and Chinese?'

Dinner begins with an atrocious soup, salt solution with coloured lumps. Things pick up with the main: perfect broccoli, roast potatoes with rosemary and lamb chops.

‘Annabelle has done well,' the Captain pronounces. Our chief cook is not a man – the first woman the Captain has ever sailed with. Our chief steward, Mark, evidently works out. He is constantly smiling, friendly and so generous with his sing-song deference you almost feel uneasy. It takes me two days to stop him calling me ‘Sir' and get him on to Horace instead.

The Captain has a rather old-fashioned approach to the division of rank. He expects to be waited on well. Mark obliges. The formality is of a piece with the uniforms and the ritual honouring of the past. In the age of the liners, crossing the Atlantic was a serious culinary experience and a great social occasion, part trial, part triumph. In the 1890s Cunard was pleased to offer its first-class passengers ten meals every day. A typical menu ran:

Before breakfast: grapes, melons, etc.

Breakfast: ‘Almost anything on earth'

11 a.m.: Pint cup of bouillon

Noon: Sandwiches carried about the decks

1 p.m.: Lunch

3 p.m.: Trays of ices

4 p.m.: Tea

5 p.m.: Toffee or sweets carried round on trays

7 p.m.: Dinner

9 p.m.: Supper

That ‘Almost anything on earth' was not a whimsical proposition. Before the age of luxury sea travel ended in the 1960s, an American oil magnate, travelling on the
Queen Mary
, took seriously the menu's urging not to limit his choice to the listings, and asked for rattlesnake steaks for four.

‘His order was gravely taken, and his party was served eels in a silver salver borne by two stewards shaking rattles. There were sixteen kinds of breakfast cereal every morning, and each liner, on each crossing, carried fifty pounds of mint leaves to make mint juleps.'
¹

From the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, war years excepted, the ocean liners ruled the Atlantic. They were the biggest, regularly the fastest and certainly the most luxurious passenger ships ever seen. On the maiden voyage of the
Normandie
in 1935 the suite of the wife of the French President, Madame Lebrun, was guarded by a sailor with a pike. Crown Prince Akihito of Japan won the table-tennis tournament on the
Queen Elizabeth
. The Duchess of Windsor ordered the colour of her suites in advance. She liked electric greens and blues. On the
Pembroke
we have no mint, no juleps and no pikes, but we do dress for dinner, or at least shower for it, and there is royalty at the Captain's table.

A portrait of Queen Beatrix of Holland overlooks us from the bulkhead. She is smiling kindly.

‘She's much better looking than those miserable royals who watch over you on Danish ships.'

Roars of laughter greet this sally, encouraging further forays.

‘Since our Danish friends – invited us to join them . . .' Pieter says, shaking his head. All three mourn the Maersk purchase of Nedlloyd. The Old Days were clearly more fun here too: how much more fun will become horribly clear. I congratulate them on their potted plants, which line the windows. The Captain pretends he has never noticed them before.

‘Aren't they all dead?'

‘No,' Pieter says, ‘but look, they are all trying to get out! They are trying to get to the kitchen!'

And they are, they all strain towards the door. We find this very funny. There is also laughter from the kitchen, and from the crew mess beyond. You can hear men singing, and strange, eerie piano music playing. She seems a happy and haunted ship. The cranes have only worked for an hour or two but already we are higher in the water. The Captain says she is never fully loaded on this run because of minimum draughts on the St Lawrence River. She was built for the South Pacific, he says, Australia particularly, hence the open bridge wings – the part of the bridge which extends as far as the side of the ship. When you manoeuvre a ship close to shore, or if a boat comes alongside, you have to stand on the wings to see what is going on. Doing that on this run will be bitter. The Captain has seen a hundred shores from up here. He was first mate on her before he got his master's ticket and command.

‘Have you met John? He's a character,' says Pieter.

‘Oh he's quite a character,' the Captain chuckles. Jannie grins and shakes his head.

John Holmshaw, the second mate, is a Geordie. We snap together in the corridor like old friends. A fellow Brit! What a treat. John is tall and broad, a fine fighting outline overlaid with softness. The expression is warm and friendly, humour in the eyes given an exclamation mark by a wayward tooth. He can look unbelievably shabby, a sea tramp, or surprisingly smart in uniform. His legs seem permanently bent at the knee. This gives him a miraculous, shuffling stability. He immediately informs me that he is the best paid second officer in the fleet.

‘Ah've got a master's certificate, like, and they want me to sit for chief officer, but naa, ah don't want to. Too much work. Ah'm happy with second.'

A lot of John's conversation is conveyed with gestures and expressions. His face is compelling, with appealing eyes below black, once-thick hair and above a chin of two pendulous bulbs. He shows me a picture of Theresa, his girl, who spends part of her time on the Tyne, waiting for him at his place in South Shields, and part of it on the Gold Coast of Australia, where she has a house. John's favourite picture of Theresa has her sitting on a bed in a cell, behind bars.

‘Locked her in,' he burbles happily, ‘so she'll be waiting for me when I come home.' Theresa is blonde and beautiful and she gazes at John's camera with utter love.

John's cabin, next to mine, is worse than any teenager's room. It looks as though it has been shelled. Everything is broken. The drawers under the bed are held shut, or perhaps together, by gaffer tape. An extraordinary thing like an art installation dangles from the air vent in the ceiling, apparently an unsuccessful attempt to block it, giving the impression of a giant dressing hanging off a wound.

John says we may do a Great Circle to avoid the storms. In any case we will pass far north of where the
Titanic
foundered, in April 1912.

He has been thirty-two years at sea and he collects disaster stories. John's stories should be heard in a Geordie accent. They are accompanied by an intense, assessing gaze on the part of the teller. His eyes search your expression for gratifying signs of horror, distress and amazement. Within about five minutes of meeting John I am engrossed in the fate of a ferry making a run from Savannah, Georgia, up to New York.

‘The Captain dies, so everyone moves up. But they didn't know their jobs. A fire breaks out in the bow, right, and the chief officer, who's the Captain now, increases speed. Increases! So of course the flames blow back over the ship. People tried to get out of their cabin windows but they didn't quite fit, and that's how they found them . . .'

I feel a bit sick. John continues.

‘There was a British ship on the River Plate passing a tanker in fog. And they touch, you know, and fire breaks out. The air rushing to the fire causes a vacuum. Seventy-two people died. Asphyxiated. The tanker crew survived by jumping into the water on the opposite side.'

‘Christ.'

‘It's my job to show you the lifeboats and things but there's no rush,' he says.

‘John, if anything happens I'm sticking to you.'

He shows me the controls on the bridge as if at some point I will be taking over. My favourite detail is a piece of A4 paper mounted on the chart table, a hand-drawn map labelled NEWARK. Red crayoned arrows coming up from the south turn left short of the Statue of Liberty, encounter a felt-tipped green TUG, pass a tank farm and a football field, turn right, avoiding New York container berth, which is marked with a cross, before turning left and coming to rest at the foot of a sketched aeroplane on the runway at Newark airport. Whatever else happens, the
Pembroke
will always be able to find her way there.

I go up and down the ship after this, doing my washing and feeling her spirits. She may be at the furthest end of the aesthetic spectrum from the tall ships Chateaubriand describes, but she is still a sentient structure, invitingly higgledy-piggledy. There is a library of near-smashed paperbacks. Hammond Innes, Ken Follett, James Hadley Chase, Clancy . . . You feel she has been lived in and loved in and loved.

‘She has been all over the world,' the Captain said, and the bow shows it. Driving through westerlies and pushing through ice up the St Lawrence, she is down to her bare iron.

‘If we can do without an icebreaker we will but sometimes you hit it and it does not move,' said the Captain.

¹
Terry Coleman,
The Liners: A History of the North Atlantic crossing
, Allen Lane, 1976.

THE PILLOWCASES SMELL
of old sweat, the sheets of unwashed men and tobacco. You wake to reeks of diesel. The ship gently lists as containers are loaded, rising from the deck and approaching the level of my window. If only one could disable the ventilator the diesel fumes might be stemmed. I resolve to sleep with the door open. On the way to breakfast I meet a man called Book. He is a fitter, a junior mechanic who leads the oilers and wipers in maintenance work in the engine room.

‘Why are you called Book?'

‘Because I am handsome!'

‘OK!'

He talks about being chased by pirates. ‘We should be pirates,' he laughs. Book wears a pirate headscarf.

All day, under rain and container booms, the ship lists and twitches as if she is being slowly beaten. The draughts in the stairwell complain. The crane operators break for lunch and tea. You would not see that in the East.

At 1630 we leave the berth. The Schelde out of Antwerp must present the least promising, most grey and rainswept, most blurred and smoking, towered and glowering, twisted, flat-banked and ship-stormed road to the ocean in all the world. The Deurganck nuclear power station pours steam unbroken into cloud and the river seethes at its outfall. The turns are tight as we join a press of ships, all leaving on the tide. The southern shore is a low marsh of dreary non-colours. The opposite bank is fired with refinery towers and warning lights. The river looks closer to dirt than water, thrashed by the passage of the ships.

The
King Daniel
, home port Palermo, is a villainous tanker. There are Hapag-Lloyd container carriers and the
Philadelphia Express
, a fat car carrier, and even they look smarter than poor
Pembroke
. The cargo planners have broken our lines into lumps of containers, apparently scattered at random. Naked grey hatch covers shine with rain. Asymmetric blocks of reefers catch the wind, which is strong from the south-west and growling around the bridge.

After the
Gerd
we seem quixotic, a battering barge to her cargo liner. How much difference can our containers possibly make to the vast hinterlands of Montreal? With freight rates currently below the cost of shipping the containers, and the oil price high, our only certain achievement is a speck of red on the chart of the company's losses. But the ship rushes on, fixed on the doing of the thing; the why of it as little concern as the low green farmland and the black trees darkening behind the dykes. We alter course every few minutes, three hundred degrees now, as the river turns north-west. The bo'sun, Edgar ‘Sumy' Sumudlayon, is at the wheel. Sumy is the tallest of the Filipinos, a tough young man whose attention switches between the course, the river and the rate-of-turn indicator. In the left seat is the pilot; Captain Koop on the right. Flemish and Dutch come over the radio and the river switches again.

‘Starboard twenty!'

That is a rate of turn. Now the pilot asks for ten more degrees and we round another red buoy. We pass grain elevators, cement works and jumbles of boats as a flight of greylag geese come over, thirty birds in five skeins.

‘Full ahead!'

A container carrier comes up,
A La Marne
, blue and red, carrying K-Line and Hamburg Sud boxes, her bows like ours a snarl of rusted steel. The sky is towering and gigantic now, grey-white cumulus to the horizon. We overhaul a Dutch barge. They look so mighty on the Maas, as you walk in Rotterdam, but they are bike couriers on this coast. The north shore is closer as we come back to 325, blocky buildings behind sprays of bare woods with pylons behind them. Ships travelling at speed heel over as they make their turns. There are lilac clouds now and the river is rot-gut green. It is thrilling, this weather, this twisting exit, this speed, as we turn into the Overloop Van Hansweert, which leads to the bend of Gat Van Ossenisse. We will soon be down there, where the Das Van Terneuzen leads to the Rede Van Vlissingen, Flushing Roads. The Captain shows the bend on the chart, just after our dog-leg out of Deurganck, where container ships go aground. We are deep in the water, ten and a half metres: going into Flushing there are only five or six metres of water under the keel.

Flushing Roads in a February dusk is no place for an amateur; I am surely the only one out here, circling the deck as the light dies. The walkway is narrow, pitted and sheened with spray and grease. The wind bursts between the cargo stacks and ships bigger than ours pass, dark and huge in the dim. Our foremost cargo is some sort of tractor, wrapped in a flapping tarpaulin. The bow is too slippery, too low-gunnelled to be safe. I skid from hand hold to hand hold and retreat, wuthered, chilled and trepid as a kitten. After a bolted supper I am back on the bridge.