Tales of London's Docklands (13 page)

‘Are you in charge of this filthy chain gang?' he asked me sarcastically. ‘Especially that one.' He pointed to Arthur. ‘He smells awful.'

All eyes turned towards the speaker; Arthur's were ablaze. He simply said to the man, ‘Don't you like travelling with us?'

‘No, I do not!' replied the angry passenger.

‘No problem, then,' said Arthur, who was standing by the carriage door. He grabbed the so-called city gent by the scruff of the neck with one hand, as though he was picking up a mangy cat, opened the carriage door with his other hand, and tossed the offender out onto the platform, just as the train began to move out of the station. Arthur looked up and down the compartment at the other passengers.

‘Is there anyone else here who don't like travelling with us?' he asked in a subdued, calm voice.

A young man, sitting on the other side of me, began to rise from his seat. I grabbed the tail of his jacket and pulled him down. He glared at me. I put my index finger to my lips and whispered in his ear, ‘He's had a hard day's work, he's filthy and he's tired, and he's got a long journey home. He could kill you with a single blow. Don't push your luck, son. He may not treat you as kindly as he did that last bloke.'

The young man was wise enough to take my advice. When he got out of the carriage at Barking, he walked swiftly away and was soon out of sight. He was a very lucky lad.

When we arrived at Barking, the down-hold foreman told the dockers, ‘We can't go on like this. When the next train comes in that's going to Tilbury Town, I'll have a word with the guard and ask if we can ride in the guard's van. That should stop any further antagonism with the other passengers. After all, they're right. I wouldn't want to travel with any of us in this filthy state.'

He did ask the guard, who very reluctantly agreed to let us ride with him, although it was obvious he was having second thoughts about letting Arthur share his facilities. Then he asked Arthur what I thought at the time was a very odd question.

‘Do you wear sharkskin shirts?'

‘As a matter of fact, I do.'

‘They don't allow your skin to breathe, you know.'

‘Don't they?'

‘They don't,' advised the train guard.

His advice did not go unheeded. Arthur never wore sharkskin shirts to work again. I thanked the Lord for that small mercy.

12

J
IM
L., J
OE
B.
AND THE
L
AMB
I
NCIDENT

J
im L. and Joe B. were brothers-in-law. Jim was married to Joe's sister. It was no secret the two men hated each other, although no one knew why, only that they did and kept as far apart from each other as possible. They were similar, though, in a number of ways – just like the North and South poles.

The two brothers-in-law both worked in the same ship's gang as me. Jim was one of the two pitch hands (men who were part of the ship's gang, but worked on the quay or in lighters or barges) and Joe was the top hand (my eyes on a ship's deck). I knew Jim's face as well as I knew my own. I could see him and his mate on the pitch all day as they busied themselves with preparing cargo for loading. One or other of them was constantly looking up to see me in the crane cabin 60–80 feet above their heads, either to give me verbal orders or to make sign language that amounted to the same thing.

When Jim was bending down to his work, his black wavy hair stuck out of the yellow cravat he always wore to hide a wide, jagged scar that ran down the side of his neck. It made his hair resemble the black stigmas of a sunflower surrounded by bright-yellow petals. But as the day wore on and the sweat and dirt began to turn the yellow cravat a greasy brown colour, his head started to take on the look of a dying sunflower. That change in aspect always fascinated me. When I think of it now, it still does.

On the other hand, I could have passed Joe in the street without recognizing him. He was a lot older than Jim. Joe arrived at work at either 7 or 8 a.m., the start time depending on whether the ship was loading or discharging dry cargoes, or discharging frozen meats, cartons of offal, butter, cheeses or other chilled or frozen freight.

A normal day's loading work ran from 8 a.m. until 7 p.m. However, discharging a meat-carrying ship began at 7 a.m. and finished at 8 p.m. The reason for the earlier start and later finish was that freezer hatches were sealed with large caulk-filled plugs, which had to be removed before the ship's discharging gang could start work and then replaced at knocking-off time. The quay gang called a halt to the day's work when all the road transport lorries had been filled with frozen cargo or at 7 p.m., whichever came first. Four down-holders, the top hand and the crane driver then replugged and resealed the freezer hatch.

Joe, my top hand, always made his way up onto the ship's deck as soon as he arrived at work, and that's where he stayed till lunchtime, which was midday. Before the afternoon work period began at 1 p.m., Joe would again make his way up on deck, where he remained till seven or eight o'clock in the evening. He never, ever, came down the hold for his tea break, so I never had the opportunity to get a good close-up look at his features. When the ship's gang stopped for tea, our teaboy filled an old glass bottle with tea and I brought it up onto the deck, the bottle tied to the crane's hook on a piece of looped string. This saved the old fellow having to traipse down several decks to get into the hold in order to get a drink. Anyway, we were pieceworkers: time was money and Joe knew the score.

Another reason I would not have recognized him outside the docks was simply that, when we were working, he always had his back towards me. When I brought the crane round over the ship's hold, Joe would be looking down into the open hatchway. If he wanted me to hold the set away from the hatchway, he would cross his hands over his head. If he wanted a set of cargo brought out of the hold, he would wave the fingers of his outstretched hand from his wrist with the palm facing upwards. When he wanted the load lowered, he would wave the fingers of his hand palm down. When he wanted the crane to stop, he spread the fingers of his hand and held it still. He often appeared to be giving a stage performance of a bird with one wing, although he never managed to raise himself off the ship's deck.

When Joe was waving his fingers with the palm of his hand upwards they were always in the form of a V, and I never really knew if he was trying to be downright rude or whether his arthritis was causing him pain. I also knew there was little to be gained by waving my fist at the back of his head or shouting at him. For the truth is that he would never have seen my fist, nor would he have heard my voice. All I ever saw of Joe during the ten or twelve hours we were at work each day was his back, the nape of his neck and one of his hands. I knew every wrinkle in the nape of his neck, every arthritic knuckle of his right hand. That's how I shall always remember the old fellow, my other pair of eyes.

I was the crane driver to a regular ship's gang who worked for a stevedoring contracting company. The company supplied ships and quay gangs to a number of shipping lines from men picked up on the free call (or the free-for-all as it was known among the dockers) in the Dock Labour Board compounds. The system for obtaining the services of dockers and stevedores can be likened to that of procuring prostitutes for sex. The only difference in the case of dockers was they were picked up in Dock Labour Board compounds that were kept out of the public gaze. As for stevedores, they were picked up on the stones (cobblestones in the streets outside the docks). So one could say that the only difference between stevedores and the ladies of supposedly easy virtue was that prostitutes soliciting in the streets for sex were committing a criminal offence, whereas stevedores on the stones soliciting for work were not. Why was that, I have often wondered? After all, both groups were selling physical service for money. However, I digress.

As a ship's gang discharging cargo, we were made up of one crane driver, one top hand, two pitch hands and six down-holders. On this particular day, we were working at number 1 hatch on a P&O liner that had returned from a voyage to Australia. The ship carried several hundred passengers, whose personal effects, trunks and suitcases not required on the homeward trip were stowed in the upper 'tween deck. The lower 'tween deck held bails of sheepskins and wool, which were over stowed alongside several hundred bags of letters and parcels. The lower hold, which was a freezer hold, was completely filled with sheep carcasses.

Now I have to explain that, on the day of this tale, a secondary driver had been picked up to drive the Stothert & Pitt quay crane. I had been picked up as a pro-rata man to the ship's gang. The reason for this anomaly was that I had a hospital appointment that made it necessary for me to leave the job for some hours during one of the ship's discharging days. As the ship was a luxury liner and had a limited time to stop in port, it was important for her to be discharged as quickly as possible, so she could dry dock to have her keel scraped and repainted with red lead, and her cabins, saloons and foyers stripped, revamped and restored to first-class habitable condition before she was refloated and towed by tugs to her cargo-loading and passenger-boarding berth.

It was on the fourth day of the ship's discharging that I had to attend hospital. When I returned late in the afternoon, the gang had discharged sheep and lamb carcasses from below the skeleton deck in the lower hold. They had begun to move towards the bow of the ship, some 50 feet away from the bottom of the trunkway, which was the opening to the open hatchway.

As the set of two hooks used to carry the meat nets were not long enough to reach the made-up sets of sheep carcasses in the ship's bow, a 20-foot wire pendant was attached to the hook of the crane. This was held in place by a shackle capable of holding 5 tons. The shackle was screwed to the hook of the crane. When a set of carcasses was ready to be taken out of the hold, one of the gang would go to the bottom of the hatchway and give the top hand the signal to draw the set into the centre of the ship's hold before it was hoisted up the trunkway to be landed on the meat board platform, which was set between the railway lines on the quay. On this inauspicious occasion, Jim was the man in charge of giving the signal to hoist the set. Oh! Lucky Jim!

I must confess to having arrived back at work only at about 5 p.m. after having had my nose cauterized at the hospital. I had been advised not to go into a cold atmosphere, so I went back to the ship, made my way to the lower deck, where the Goanese galley scullions had their quarters, down through the number 1 hold hatch cover into the upper 'tween deck, through the lower 'tween hatch into the skeleton deck, down the vertical ladder into the lower hold, and arrived just as the most obscene and vicious exchange of bad language erupted between the two brothers-in-law.

I will not go into detail over the obscenities, but suffice to say that the vociferous and blasphemous exchange of language almost made
me
blush. Nor do I have any idea what caused the rumpus. After all, the top hand was on deck some 100 feet away from the ceiling (bottom) of the lower hold. What I do know is that Jim waved his hand for the set of carcasses to be drawn into the centre of the hold before being hoisted up the trunkway and onto the quay. Instead, Joe stood at the top of the ship's hatchway and shouted at his brother-in-law, ‘You greasy-looking, black-haired bastard, I'll bloody kill you.'

With those remarks, Joe waved his hand to the crane driver, who instantly put the crane into full hoist. The set of sheep carcasses came out of the ship's bow at top speed and shot across the lower hold like an express train. As it rose into the air, Jim, seeing the danger he was in, began to run to escape the set of sheep carcasses as it hurtled full speed towards him. Just as the set reached the centre of the hatch, he leapt up onto the bottom of the wooden skeleton deck, just as one of the frozen sheep came out of the meat net. It dropped down the side of the steel trunkway and the two hind shanks stapled Jim's. foot to the wooden skeleton deck. He fell backwards and hung there, head downwards, arms outstretched, as though he was trying to mimic a circus trapeze artist.

‘You stupid old bastard,' Jim screamed up at Joe. ‘I've got a good claim here for compensation, and for you trying to kill me. Just wait and see what will happen when we get in court. I've got lots of witnesses. You lot saw what he did, didn't you?'

‘Shut up, you stupid sod,' one of the lads said. ‘You waved to Joe to take the set up. Get on with your job.'

‘I can't move. I can't damn well move,' he said. Nor could he. He was stapled to the wooden framework of the skeleton deck by the shanks of the lamb.

I walked across the floor of the lower deck, climbed up into the skeleton deck, pulled Jim up into a sitting position, and prised the frozen sheep off his leg.

‘I can't walk,' he complained.

‘Stop that bloody moaning,' I told him, ‘or I'll leave you where you are. You know how much the gang love you. They will probably book you out.' (‘Booking out' meant that the gang would inform the ship worker that he wasn't working.)

I threw him over my shoulder in a fireman's hold and set about carrying him down from the skeleton deck onto the lower deck floor, then up the 30-foot ladder into the lower 'tween deck, then into the upper 'tween deck, then along the companion way that led out through the gunport door onto the quay. He never stopped griping about his brother-in-law.

‘You had better wait here,' I told him. ‘They've sent for an ambulance.' I made my way back through the ship and down to the lower hold, where the gang were preparing to stop work for the night.

‘What have you done with Soapy?' (Jim's uncomplimentary nickname), the gang wanted to know.

‘Put him on the quay.'