Алистер Маклин: Bear Island

The Morning Star crew

Captain IMRIE – the captain, a large and splendidly patriarchal figure with piercing blue eyes, a mane of thick white hair that was brushed straight back to his shoulders, and an even more impressively flowing beard that would have been the envy of many a biblical prophet

Joseph Rank ‘Smithy’ SMITH – the first mate, six feet two in his carpet slippers and certainly nothing short of two hundred pounds

Mr STOKES – the chief engineer, bereft of cranial and facial hair with a gleaming pate, with tightly-drawn brown face seamed and wrinkled into a thousand fissures, and a long, thin, scrawny neck, looked aged and ageless

ALLISON – the senior quartermaster, a dark-haired young seaman

OAKLEY – the bo’sun

HAGGERTY – the chief cook, with ruddy face with a mass of broken red veins and greying clipped hair

MOXEN – a young steward

SCOTT – a steward

The Olympus Productions board

Otto GERRAN – the chairman and producer, five feet two inches in his elevator shoes, weighed two hundred and forty-five pounds and was the nearest thing to a perfect human sphere – he had no neck, long slender sensitive hands and the smallest feet for a man of his size

John Cummings GOIN – the vice-president, production accountant, company accountant, and financial controller, a civilized and urbane man of medium height, plump without being fat, with a smooth, unlined face and black, smooth, centre-parted, brushed-back hair, always wearing an inevitable pince-nez

Johann HEISSMAN – a full partner, screenwriter, a small, lean, pale man with a permanently apprehensive expression

Michael STRYKER – a full partner, production designer and construction manager, a husband of Judith Haynes and son-in-law of Otto Gerran, a tall, dark and undeniably handsome man with a clipped moustache and the fashionably long and untidy hair

Judith HAYNES – a full partner and lead actress, a daughter of Otto Gerran and wife of Michael Stryker, tall, slender, with a wistfully regal expression, wonderful titian hair and classically beautiful in the sculptured Greek fashion

The film cast

Charles CONRAD – the male lead in the film, thirty years old, cheerful, ruggedly handsome, invariably friendly, courteous and considerate, with a thatch of thick brown hair that kept falling over his eyes of the bluest blue, with most gleamingly white perfect teeth

Mary STUART (‘Mary dear’) aka Ilona WIŚNIOWIECKI – a young actress from Latvia, high-cheekboned with large brown eyes and long straw-coloured tresses

Jon HEYTER – an actor, tall, fair, good-looking, young man with a mobile, expressive, animated face

Gunther JUNGBECK – an actor, at least fifteen years senior than Heyter, a thick-set man with heavy shoulders, a five o’clock shadow and dark, curling hair just beginning to grey; always with a ready, engaging smile

The production crew

Neal DIVINE – the unit director, a man dedicated to his craft, lean, hollow-cheeked, nervous and perpetually balanced on what seemed to be the knife-edge of agonizing decisions, he walked softly and talked softly

Lonnie GILBERT – the production manager, growing old man with baby-clear blue eyes and faultless enunciation, never sober, never speaking ill of others and enjoyed general sympathy

Tadeusz ‘Count’ LESZCZYŃSKI – a lighting cameraman, with a lean aquiline face, black pencil moustache, bar-straight black eyebrows and greying hair brushed straight back from his forehead

John HALLIDAY – the stills photographer, a dark, swarthy, taciturn and unsmiling American

Frederick Crispin ‘Eddie’ HARBOTTLE – the unit’s chief electrician, a large, fat, red-faced and chubby-cheeked, invincibly morose and wholly pessimistic man

Cecil ‘Duke’ GOLIGHTLY – the camera focus assistant, a diminutive, shrewd and chirpy little Cockney sparrow with everlasting appetite

ANTONIO – a make-up artist, hairdresser and wardrobe man, a tall, willowy, exquisite, rather precious but oddly likeable Roman with the shock of ludicrously blond and curling hair

Josh HENDRIKS – the soundman, a small, thin, stern and middle-aged Anglo-Dutchman with a perpetual worried frown

‘THE THREE APOSTLES’ – John, Luke and Mark – young sound crew assistants, all cast in the same contemporary mould, with flowing shoulder-length hair, clad in blue jeans and psychedelic caftans, spending all their spare time with recording equipment, guitar, drums and xylophone in the recreation room where they rehearsed

SANDY – the props man, claiming to be a Scot but had a powerful Liverpool accent, a strange, undersized, wizened leprechaun of a man, with a wrinkled walnut-brown face and gleamingly bald head, with stringy white hair that started about earlobe level and cascaded in uncombed disarray over his thin shoulders, having quick-moving and almost weasel-like eyes behind the steel-legged rimless glasses

Mary DARLING (‘Mary darling’) – the continuity girl, with very long, straight, almost platinum hair that fell down her back, enormous horn-rimmed glasses, no make-up – not even lipstick – and always wearing a severe, businesslike, competent, no-nonsense, I-can-take-care-of-myself-thank-you expression

ALLEN – the clapper/loader, a very earnest youth who had recently been asked to leave his university, an intelligent lad but easily bored, he regarded film-making as the most glamorous job on earth

Dr Christopher MARLOWE – the crew medic

To even the least sensitive and perceptive beholder the Morning Rose , at this stage of her long and highly chequered career, must have seemed ill-named, for if ever a vessel could fairly have been said to be approaching, if not actually arrived at, the sunset of her days it was this one. Officially designated an Arctic Steam Trawler, the Morning Rose , 560 gross tons, 173 feet in length, 30 in beam and with a draught, unladen but fully provisioned with fuel and water, of 14.3 feet, had, in fact, been launched from the Jarrow slipways as far back as 1926, the year of the General Strike.

The Morning Rose , then, was far gone beyond the superannuation watershed, she was slow, creaking, unstable and coming apart at the seams. So were Captain Imrie and Mr Stokes. The Morning Rose consumed a great deal of fuel in relation to the foot-pounds of energy produced. So did Captain Imrie and Mr Stokes, malt whisky for Captain Imrie, Jamaican rum for Mr Stokes. And that was what they were doing now, stoking up on their respective fuels with the steadfast dedication of those who haven’t attained septuagenarian status through sheer happenstance.

As far as I could see, none of the sparse number of diners at the two long fore-and-aft tables was stoking up very much on anything. There was a reason for this, of course, the same reason that accounted for the poor attendance at dinner that night. It was not because of the food which, while it wouldn’t cause any sleepless nights in the kitchens of the Savoy, was adequate enough, nor was it because of any aesthetic objections our cargo of creative artists might have entertained towards the dining saloon’s decor, which was, by any standards, quite superb: it was a symphony in teak furniture and wine-coloured carpets and curtains, not, admittedly, what one would look to find on the average trawler, but then, the average trawler, when its fishing days are over – as the Morning Rose’s were deemed to be in 1956 – doesn’t have the good fortune to be re-engined and converted to a luxury yacht by, of all people, a shipping millionaire whose enthusiasm for the sea was matched only by his massive ignorance of all things nautical.