Otherwise (18 page)

SS
Blommersdiik
, the vessel chartered to carry me and my collection to Canada, was one of the so-called Liberty ships mass produced in the United States for wartime service. ”Built by the mile, and cut off by the yard,” the Liberties were four hundred feet long, twin-decked, and propelled by a triple expansion steam engine. They were slowpokes, barely capable of maintaining a speed of ten knots.

In addition to the 930 tons of ”freight” put aboard by my crowd,
Blommersdiik
loaded a number of locomotives belonging to the U.S. Army. By then she was, as the bosun, a black-bearded seaman from Bristol put it, well down to her marks.

”Maybe it’ll keep the bitch from rolling her guts out when we strikes dirty weather. Or rolling right over, like a fucking filly. No, sir, don’t you laugh. Her kind’s got a wicked way of disappearing without no survivors to tell the tale. The Disappearing Liberties, some calls them.”

If such gloomy talk was intended to put a pongo into a cold sweat, it had little effect on me. My life during the past several years had not been devoid of risks and since I was at last going home I would probably have been willing to set sail in a sieve.

The voyage turned out to be one of relative luxury. Although
Blommersdiik
had no passenger accommodations as such, she did have a spacious cabin on her afterdeck built to house the crew of a three-inch gun, her only defence against German submarines and planes. The gun and its crew were long gone and the cabin provided more than enough room for me and Roy and Spike. Although the rest of my private army would be returning to Canada packed into troop ships, we three would sail home in what amounted to our own private yacht, low-powered and ill-omened as she might be.

Roy and I were in goodly company. The crew consisted mostly of men who had survived a long and bitter war at sea. They treated us (and Spike) as their own kind. The ship’s master, sixty-seven-year-old Hans van Zwol, was an omnivorous reader who spoke three languages fluently. He had spent fifty years at sea and could have stepped out of a novel by Joseph Conrad. He was one of the larger-than-life ship’s masters who sailed and steamed across the oceans in the early twentieth century, men of whom it was said salt water instead of blood ran in their veins, and they came ashore only to die.

I was wakened at dawn on November 1 by the hoarse blast of a tug’s whistle and the scurrying of feet outside my porthole as
Blommersdiik
’s lines were let go. As the engine throbbed and the great propeller shaft revolved I climbed to the bridge to stare at the frieze of bombed and sunken ships
and skeletal remains of smashed loading cranes bordering our passage through the Schelde estuary.

A pilot came aboard to guide us through the narrow and tortuous channel leading to the North Sea, thirty miles to the westward. As we came abeam one of the many buoys marking a sunken ship, a lone
RAF
Spitfire came skimming low up the channel toward us. As it roared close overhead, the pilot dipped a wing in salute. Punctiliously, Captain van Zwol responded with a pull on the whistle lanyard, then turned to me.

”So now we will leave the wartime behind. Come to my cabin and we will drink a little schnapps to celebrate the end of all that bloody nonsense.”

As I turned to follow him off the bridge I saw a black-backed gull hovering over our stern and trained my binoculars on it. The captain paused.

”You like to watch the birds?” he asked with a smile. ”Since first I go to sea I watch them very much. In the tropics, in the Antarctic ice. Masters of air and water! Typhoons cannot stop them. They go their ways and no man can say what course they steer or why, or how they hold to it.”

Listening to him was like hearing a familiar voice calling me awake after a long and deeply troubled sleep.

As night fell we entered the English Channel. The lights came on in Calais to the south and Dover to the north, and the many ships crowding the passage were bedecked as if for Christmas with red, green, and amber lights. Before turning in we celebrated the end of the obliterating darkness that had shrouded Europe for almost five years. And the chief engineer, an English veteran of two wars, proposed a toast.

”Lights is back on at last! Any son of a bitch tries to turn them off ever again may he rot in bloody hell!”

Spike wasted no time turning himself into a seadog. This nondescript street mongrel so ingratiated himself to officers and crew alike that he soon had free run of the ship. He was careful not to alienate his new companions. Right from the first he used a scupper hole to discharge his cargo into the sea. He was equally careful where he pissed, and it was some time before I discovered his private urinal.

I kept a sharp eye on the crates of shells and bombs lashed to the deck outside our cabin. If any of those containing liquid chemicals should spring a leak, I wanted to be the first to know about it.

On the morning of our third day at sea, I was horrified (and terrified) to find a rivulet of orange-hued liquid apparently seeping out from under a crate of shells. Frantic, I dashed into our cabin to alert Roy and to fetch a knife with which to cut the cargo lashings so we could heave the suspect crate overboard. Ever interested in what was afoot, Spike followed us out on deck and while we fumbled with the ropes took the opportunity to empty his bladder on an adjacent case. His relief could hardly have been a match for what Roy and I felt as we realized who was responsible for the liquid that had sent me into a panic.

By noon on the second of November we were abeam of Eastbourne. The chart indicated that Dieppe lay hidden in the haze forty miles to the southward. I had spent many quite pleasant months in Eastbourne when my regiment, together with the rest of the First Canadian Division, had been standing guard to repel the threatened German invasion of Britain.

Dieppe, on the other hand, was a name to instil horror in those who knew the grim story of the attempt made in August 1942, mostly by the Second Canadian Division, to force a landing on the Channel coast of Hitler’s Fortress Europe. The ensuing disaster had cost Second Division more than a thousand men killed, wounded, or taken prisoner.

But as
Blommersdiik
plodded past Dieppe the air about us came alive with birds. I climbed up to the open upper bridge called ”monkey island” to welcome this manifestation of life in a place that had seen the slaughter of so many Canadians, and of so very many mariners who, over the hellish years, had sailed this ditch of death under the assaults of
U
-boats,
E
-boats, mines, coastal guns, fighters, and bombers.

Now common, herring, and lesser black-backed gulls were eddying above freighters, tankers, coasters, lighters, and ferries peacefully making their way up, down, and across the Channel. The gulls were happily gleaning garbage, something that had been in short supply during the war but was now becoming plentiful again.

Keeping their distance from the ships, occasional fairy-winged kittiwakes, skimming shearwaters, and a few mighty gannets ignored the passing parade and went about the business of fishing for a living.

For years I had not had the opportunity, nor the heart, to watch so many and such varied kinds of birds, and my exhilaration was such that when I returned to the wheel-house I brashly addressed the captain as ”Skipper.”

This might have been regarded as presumptuous aboard any other ship I had ever sailed in. Van Zwol just smiled. Later I would learn that the term skipper, so lightly used by
yachtsmen, is a Dutch title of great antiquity reserved by Hollanders for respected masters of real working or fighting vessels. As it turned out, every man aboard our ship called van Zwol Skipper.
Blommersdiik
’s bosun gave me one reason.

”I shipped with him in 1943 on a tanker bound from Aruba to New York carrying ten thousand tons of bunker-
C
. We was in company with another tanker full of petrol, with an old Yankee four-stacker destroyer for escort.

”Just west of Bermuda the other tanker stopped a torpedo and went up like a bloody torch. The destroyer signalled us to run for it while she went haring off to look for the sub; but instead of running, van Zwol rang for full ahead and steamed straight for the burning ship to see could he save any of her people afore they was fried or boiled.

”The destroyer seen what we was about and flashed a lamp signal:
YOU ARE STEAMING INTO DANGER REVERSE YOUR COURSE
.

”Skipper van Zwol never paid no heed. He held on until we see one of the other fellow’s boats drifting out of the smoke. They was ten men aboard of her – six still alive – though by the time we snatched them out of the boat flames was licking all around it. Seemed like the whole bleeding ocean was aflame!

”The skipper hauled her off then and we run south at full revolutions until we dropped that devil’s tower of smoke below the horizon. When night fell we come about and headed north again.

”After that we never saw the destroyer nor nobody else either until we raised Cape Hatteras and a guard boat led us into Norfolk, where those poor burned bastards was put into hospital.

”That’s the sort of man van Zwol is.
You
can call him captain if you wants, but he’s our
Skipper
. The finest kind.”

For his part, van Zwol was punctilious about using my military title. This resulted in the peculiar paradox that I, the rankest amateur sailor, was the only person aboard to be called captain, though most of the crew used the title with more than a hint of mockery. The first mate, a lanky Friesian with a perverse sense of humour, always made a point of greeting my appearance on the bridge with an impeccable salute and a resounding ”Goot day, mein Kapitan!”

Because the bridge was the heart of the ship as well as the best vantage point, I spent much of my time in the wheel-house, in the adjourning chartroom, out on the port or starboard wing, or up on monkey island. Sometimes I would have the entire structure to myself except for the mate on watch and a helmsman gently handling the big mahogany wheel.

Those were times for dreaming dreams, especially one I had nurtured all through the war of someday sailing
Scotch Bonnet
among palm-fringed Pacific atolls inhabited by languorous, brown-skinned
wahines
. When I rather diffidently confessed to the skipper that I harboured such a fantasy, he was sympathetic. He told me that in his own youth he had sailed as mate on an island schooner trading for copra in Samoa.

Encouraged, I described
Scotch Bonnet
in detail and told him about a promise my father had made that, after the war,
Scotch Bonnet
would be mine to sail wherever I wished.

Van Zwol responded favourably to
Scotch Bonnet
.

”I know her kind. Go anywhere in any kind of weather. Slow, yes, but very strong and” – he paused to give me a sideways look – ”forgiving of a green hand at her helm.”

”I’m green, all right,” I confessed. ”I’ve only sailed in fresh water and never far from shore but I believe I could learn to handle a boat in salt water. The thing is, I don’t really know how to navigate. Once out of sight of land, I’d be like a dog chasing its tail.”

He laughed. ”Ah then, Captain, perhaps I can show you what little I know of navigation.”

So during the homeward voyage I had two things to help me distance myself from my bleak and bloody memories. I was re-entering a world shared with the Others, and I was being inducted into the mysteries of how seafaring men found their way across trackless waters.

On November 4 the skipper rolled out a chart of the entire North Atlantic. Touching the points of his dividers to Bishop’s Rock in the Scilly Isles, which were then abeam of us, he explained:

”Here we will take our departure from European waters. North latitude 49 degrees and 50 minutes, west longitude 6 degrees and 27 minutes. We will steer now a great circle course for Belle Isle, 1,823 nautical miles – that is 2,096 landsmen’s miles – to the westward. If the weather behaves and the Chief keeps his machinery working, we should raise Newfoundland in seven days.”

He paused to ask: ”What do you know of the sextant?”

When I admitted I had never even handled this fabled instrument, he set out to teach me how to use it. Every day thereafter, weather permitting, I reported to him or to the first mate on a wing of the bridge to be shown how to ”shoot the sun” or, at night, to take a sight on Polaris, the North Star.

I was not an apt pupil. When plotted on the chart, my
results often put our vessel so much as a hundred miles off course. Once I put her a hundred and sixty miles inland – on the Greenland icecap.

The skipper did not give up, although the mate did. After the Greenland fiasco, the mate told me with painful honesty:

”Better you stay on land, Kapitan. I wash my hands.”

There would be times later in life when I wished I had listened to him, but by then I was following a different drummer.

The first day out of sight of land broke warm and clear with a brisk nor’wester making
Blommersdiik
kick up her heels. The bosun set his deckhands to checking the hatches and making everything secure in case ”it come on to blow up dirty.” As I watched the oilskin-clad seamen putting extra lashings on the miniature sub marine and the massive bulk of the
V
-2, I wondered what the bosun might be thinking about them. Later on I asked him.

”Tell you the truth, Cap’n, if ’twas me, I’d-a cut them fuckers adrift and pitched them overboard. Subs and rockets! Maybe not the worst things we ever invented but, by Jesus, pretty fucking near!”

I spent most of that day watching birds: fulmars, Manx shearwaters, kittiwakes, jaegers, and even a great skua. To see them was exciting, but I was surprised at how few of each kind there were. The vast sweep of sky and water surrounding us seemed relatively empty. I mentioned this to van Zwol at supper. He was a while replying.

”I wondered if you’d notice the lack of birds. There’s only a drift of them now. Handful of chaff in a gale, you might say. Six years ago starting an Atlantic crossing you’d
have seen rafts of them on the water or flying around the ship thick as snow.