The Last Grain Race. Eric Newby
Leaning my forehead on the brickwork in the lavatory, I remember being sick and groaning to myself: ‘Oh, God, I’m drunk, oh, Christ, I’m drunk, what am I here for?’
There was a lot of singing of a dark, Nordic kind. Then, after a long while, I heard a voice calling ‘Time’. Lights were dimmed and we reeled out into the wet unfriendly night.
Someone suggested that we should dance and we set off down a street of heart-breaking squalor in the direction of a dance hall on the first floor of a building in Corporation Street. We went up a flight of narrow stairs and paid a shilling each to a man who, in any Police Court, would have been described by the Magistrate as a ‘Corrupter of Youth’. The pleasures which we were made free of appeared innocuous enough. The room was large and to the music of a modernist radiogram two or three couples were circling rather gingerly. At intervals the music was drowned by the noise of passing tramcars which swayed past the uncurtained windows like ‘Flying Dutchmen’. The seats round the walls were filled with a lot of girls heavily powdered but well below the age of consent. Some were drinking fizzy lemonade. Most of them looked like schoolgirls who ought to have been in bed asleep by this time after finishing their homework. Soon I was prancing round the room with a big, niffy red-headed girl who was liberally covered with the wrong shade of powder. I tried to talk to her but was relieved to find that she spoke no known tongue. I was very tired.
I was almost glad when a quarrel broke out between one of our crew and one of the natives; chairs were raised and began to fly through the air, the lights went out, there was the crash of glass and a bottle landed in Corporation Street. My partner vanished to join the opposition and soon we were fighting a rear-guard action on the stairs. By the time we reached the street police whistles were trilling merrily.
The march back to the ship was like the ‘Retreat from Moscow’ painted by an elderly spinster. The injured and the incapable were being supported by their companions. Jansson, who was very far gone, was being held up by Vytautas and myself, one on either side.
‘The police will not like this,’ said Vytautas, who was almost sober. ‘I also do not like this place.’
At his suggestion we disengaged ourselves from the main body and made for a different entrance to the dock. Just then Jansson passed out completely and we dragged him forward along the street with his feet scuffling the granite cobbles.
‘We must lift him now,’ said Vytautas, as we came up to the gate. There were the inevitable two policemen, suspicious and broken-nosed. They bore down on us as we hoisted the Wretched Jansson into a vertical, more lifelike position.
‘Where are you going?’ one of them demanded accusingly.
‘Moshulu,’ said Vytautas in a disarming way.
‘What’s the matter with him?’ asked the other, flourishing his great bludgeon in the direction of Jansson whose head unfortunately chose this moment to fall forward with an audible click.
‘He is suffering from overwork,’ I said with drunken insolence, and hiccuped. Nothing seemed to matter any more. Fortunately the policeman failed to understand my English accent. At the same time the drizzle of rain increased to a downpour and they both retired to their hut. Otherwise we should probably have been arrested.
We proceeded on our miserable and interminable way. To reach the Moshulu we had to pass round three sides of the York Dock. On the way we tripped over a hawser in a patch of shadow and nearly dropped Jansson in the water.
At the gangplank we were met by a bedraggled watchman armed with a pick helve who scrutinised us minutely before allowing us on board. Exhausted and wet we reeled into the fo’c’sle and after removing Jansson’s boots, pushed him into his bunk and sought our own. As soon as I lay down on my straw mattress the fo’c’sle began to revolve like a gramophone record. I crawled on deck, barking my shins on all sorts of projections, and sticking my head over the rail, was fearfully sick for the second time. It had been a long, long day.
We were awakened at 5.30 in the morning after our ‘liddle trink’ by a dreadful voice crying, ‘Resa upp, Resa upp.’ This summons with its medieval implications of Hell and Judgment, made me feel like a corpse in a Dürer engraving, and the illusion was sustained when I sat up in the coffin-like bunk and hit my head a great crack on the bedboards of the bunk above.
‘Shot op,’ came an angry voice from the occupant of the upper bunk. I lay still in the stifling blackness until the fo’c’sle door was kicked open and the night-watchman, in oilskins, appeared with a lantern, which he hooked to the ceiling, and a pot of coffee which he banged down on the table. One by one groaning figures began to roll out of their coffins and grovel for boots. From outside came the hiss of rain in the darkness of the too-early morning.
This was to be such an invariable routine, the watchman impatient and bad-tempered after a night on deck, surrounded by the terrors of Belfast that I no longer remember individual days but only that awful first morning.
With two others I was given the job of carrying coal to the galley from the small hatch near the fo’c’sle head. In the coal store by the forepeak we filled great oil-drums with coal, manhandled them in the darkness below decks to the hatch opening, hauled them on deck and carried them to the galley, slung on a capstan bar – hard work for my unpractised arms. We made ten journeys like this before the Cook was satisfied. Afterwards I again cleaned the lavatories.
At eight o’clock came breakfast, which was a mess of pungent beans and very pickled bacon. I was then told to collect a hammer, a pot of red lead and a brush and go over the side forward to chip the rust off the topsides – a job the more experienced and favoured members of the crew had been engaged in since 6 a.m. Rain was still falling steadily. There were already two or three precarious platforms over the side when I got there. They were simply planks with ropes made fast to either end and belayed on deck.
Painting the ship
I do not think it was by design that the platform I inherited was in the most difficult position right over the bows, about two feet above the water. Grimly I lowered myself twenty feet to the platform, to find that it was immediately below the lavatory which I had just cleaned. I began to wish that I had used two or three more buckets of water, and this was a good lesson to me in doing a job thoroughly. At sea one was very likely to find oneself let down by one’s own mistakes. I had not the strength to climb the rope again and shift to a more wholesome area, so I settled down to work where I was.
Set perilously above the dirty waters I first chipped and then red-leaded a large irregular piece of the ship’s side, using red lead from the pot which hung in front of me on a cord. Horizontal movement of the platform was controlled by a system of ropes. In trying to move my platform so that I could work in a fresh and more agreeable situation, and being unable to regain the deck to shift the head-ropes, I inadvertently let slip a clove-hitch which was keeping my platform about four feet to the left of its proper position. The whole construction, thus released, swooped sideways and hit the platform of the man who early that same morning had told me to ‘shot op’ when I hit my head on his bed-boards. He was an able seaman called Sedelquist, made more bad-tempered than usual by the events of the previous evening. The shock of the collision made me drop my hammer in the dock, upset the red lead on Sedelquist’s overalls, and knocked the brush out of his hand. It gave him a bad fright. I had not imagined that he could speak English, as up to now we had not spoken, but he immediately called me a ‘focking1 bastard’ and disappeared on deck. Soon he returned with the same Mate who had sent me aloft the day before.
‘What d’you bloody well think you’re doing?’ he shrieked down at me.
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I replied.