Richard Gordon: DOCTOR AT SEA

The momentum that had carried us headlong into the pleasures of South America had expended itself by the end of the dance; afterwards our lives settled into the unexciting routine of a ship in port. Every morning I read carefully through the English _Buenos Aires Standard,_ had a cup of tea with Hornbeam, and strolled round the active decks; in the afternoon I filled my cabin with the last squirts of our D.D.T. spray and slept soundly until tea, in defiance of the rattling winch just beyond my head. Now and then I picked up _War and Peace,_ but the freezing plains of Russia seemed so fantastic I killed a few cockroaches with it and finally put the books away for the voyage home.

In the evening, when the sun had gone down and a breeze sometimes blew off the River Plate to refresh our decks, we sat in Hornbeam's cabin with a case of tinned beer flaying sober games of bridge or liar-dice. I felt that I had been living alongside the wharf in Buenos Aires for a lifetime, and I sometimes stared at the familiar angles of my cabin in disbelief that they had ever been softened with the shadows of an English winter's day. When I told the others this one evening Hornbeam said: 'You'd get used to living in Hell, Doc, if we sailed there. All these places are the same, anyway.' He lay on his bunk half-naked, fanning himself with a copy of the _Shipping World._ 'They're hot and sweaty, and full of blokes ready to cut your throat for tuppence. It's the same out East and on the African coast. There's no more romance at sea than there is round Aldgate tube station.'

'When are we leaving for home?' I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. 'I couldn't say. Maybe a week, maybe two. It depends how the cargo goes in. Once you're in port the wharfies have got you, whether it's in Cardiff or Calcutta. I heard from the agent to-day the boys might be cooking up a strike. That would fix us, right enough.'

'I wouldn't mind a pint of old English wallop out of the barrel just now,' Archer said seriously. 'Or a bit of backchat with a Liverpool barmaid. You can have too much of these high-pressure floozies out here.'

We sat looking miserably into our beer glasses, all suddenly homesick.

'I reckon I ought to have married and settled down,' Hornbeam continued. 'I nearly did once. I'm still engaged to her, if it comes to that. She's in Sydney. Sends me letters and sweets and things. I see her about once every two years.'

'I should have stuck to selling refrigerators,' Archer said to me. 'I did it for a bit after the war, but I had to give it up. Your money doesn't go anywhere ashore these days.'

'You fellows don't know how well off you are in the Merchant Navy,' I told him.

'The Merchant Navy!' Hornbeam said, folding his hands on his bare stomach reflectively. 'It's a queer institution. A cross between Fred Karno's army and a crowd of blokes trying to do a job of work.'

'There's no security at sea,' Archer added gloomily.

'Maybe it's better than sitting on your fanny in an office till you drop dead,' Hornbeam said. 'Pictures every Saturday night and Margate for a fortnight in summer. Drive me up the pole, that would.'

'Margate's all right,' Trail remarked, joining the conversation. 'I knew a girl who lived there once. Her father ran a shooting-alley in Dreamland.'

It was a fortnight before we sailed. A quiver of excitement ran through the ship with the fresh vibrations of the engines. The deckhands ambled about their work singing-not sea-shanties, because they heard those only occasionally, on the pictures, but anything they knew from 'She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain,' to 'Rock of Ages.'

'All hands seem to be pretty happy,' I observed to Easter as a man sauntered past chanting 'Every turn of the screw brings me nearer to you.'

'Well, we're going home, Doctor!'

'But we've only been away a couple of months.'

'Still, it's always like this, whether you've been away two years or a fortnight. You gets a bit slap-happy when you leaves your final port.'

'I think I can understand it. For most of them I suppose it's only an attic in Liverpool or a dirty old house in the East End.'

'Still, it's home, sir.'

'You're right. Where do you live, Easter?'

'Down in Cheltenham.'

'Do you indeed?'

'I lives with the old lady,' he continued. 'She keeps a sweetshop down there. Getting a bit past it now, though. Well over seventy.'

The idea of Easter having a mother was disturbing. I had thought of him vaguely as climbing out of the sea on the heels of Venus.

'Are you coming back next trip, Easter?'

'I suppose so,' he replied. 'I've tried it ashore. Done all sorts of jobs. Apart from the halls and the races, I've worked in pubs, laundries, hotels, fish-and-chip shops. Even done a bit of navvying. Sometimes I gets settled into something steady, but…well, you know how it is. I goes round to the public library and has a look at Lloyd's List on a Saturday afternoon, and I'm finished. I think how nice it would be getting away somewhere instead of standing in a queue in the rain.'

'I'm afraid I see your point, Easter. But perhaps you'll get married?'

'What, at my time of life? And after what I've seen of women? Cor! I've had 'em all, I have-black, white, brown, and yellow. They're all the same underneath.'

'Do you read Kipling, Easter?' I asked with interest.

'Kipling? He's dead now, ain't he?'

'He doesn't seem to be dead at sea.'

'No, I don't read much, Doctor. No time for books. Takes you all your life to keep going these days, don't it?'

We detached ourselves from the meat works and steamed slowly down the long buoyed channel along the shallow River Plate towards Montevideo and the Atlantic. From there we had a straight run home, broken only at the Canary Islands for oil. The sea was calm and the sky unbroken. Off Montevideo we left the last persevering seagull behind us and were again alone, ourselves and the sea.

'About another three weeks,' Hornbeam said, 'and you'll be having a pint at the Carradoc.'

'I hope it turns out cheaper than the last drink I had with you.'

He laughed.

'Remind me to get you a new pen, Doc. Anyhow, we ought to have a pretty quiet voyage till we reach the Bay.'

And so we did. Two days out Captain Hogg became more morose than usual, then took to keeping to himself. For a few days he came down to meals, which he consumed without passing a word or giving any indication that he sensed our presence at the table at all. As no one else dared to speak this meant that lunch and supper were eaten in a silence that amplified such noises as chewing a stick of celery to the volume of a Tropical thunderstorm. After that he took his meals in his cabin, and appeared only occasionally on the deck. He would stand outside his door for a few minutes, scratch his head, blow his nose, and disappear for the day. Everyone was delighted.

'The Old Man's got a proper cob on about something,' Hornbeam said. 'Never pokes his nose on the bridge. When I go to his cabin he just grunts and says he's left the running of the ship to me. Suits me fine. Life's nice and quiet, isn't it?'

'Yes, it's wonderful. I wonder how long it'll last?'

It lasted until the night of the shipwreck.

When we were two days away from the Canaries the weather broke suddenly, within a few hours. The sun was intercepted by heavy English-looking clouds, and a cold wind came down from the north and threw handfuls of rain across our decks. I lay in my bunk, rocking contentedly and confidently in the swing of the ocean. It was shortly after midnight, and I was suspended in the pleasant arcade between sleep and wakefulness, enjoying the best of both. Then the alarm bells rang.

I sat up and switched on the light. Seven short rings, meaning 'Boat Stations.' Someone on the bridge had obviously leant on the alarm button. I was wondering what to do when the whistle blew 'Abandon Ship.'