Black Beech and Honeydew (32 page)

During this last decade I have made two more visits to England. The first was taken in a Norwegian freighter, the
Temeraire,
with a New Zealand friend, Essie, who had found out about the line and suggested that as I was thinking of going anyway I should keep her company. The
Temeraire,
sailing from Outer Harbour near Adelaide in South Australia, took twelve passengers. She would carry wool, possibly to Odessa, making several points of call on the way though her Captain’s orders, which were opened at sea, were quite likely to be changed. Ships of this line had been known to make an eight weeks’ voyage without calling anywhere and deposit their desperate passengers finally at Oslo. Under circumstances such as these, arrangements would be made to tranship us to an English port.

It is a journey of nearly a week from New Zealand to Adelaide if you travel by surface. We arrived in sweltering heat twenty-four hours after the Queen had left and found the city still in a ferment with hotel accommodation at a premium. Here we awaited our embarkation notices and after about a week, received them.

On a very hot night we stood in an otherwise deserted customs shed at Outer Harbour while an official hunted through his files for our papers. It was some time before he found them and we were able to board a graceful ship that looked remarkably small in the moonlight.

As soon as we were shown our cabins I knew I would like the
Temeraire.
She was old-fashioned, odd and good. Her one bathroom was tanklike and primitive. The only passengers’ common room was a small smoking parlour with a bit of deck outside. There was a little games deck above this and a narrow promenade amidships. Otherwise one sat or lay on the hatches. The dining saloon was just big enough to take three long, narrow tables. The stewardesses
were two Norwegian college girls who were seeing the world and the steward was also a ladylike little thing. The wireless assistant doubled the parts of cabin boy and orchestra. Nothing could have been less like the organized fun of the luxury liners in which I had taken my last three voyages and no change could have been more refreshing.

Our cabins were unsmart, spotlessly clean, rather large and very comfortable. We stowed away our belongings, setting ourselves in order for a long voyage. The steward looked in and invited us to coffee and little newly baked breads. They were delicious.

On a very warm, still midnight we slipped away from Outer Harbour and when dawn came, stood well out in the Great Australian Bight.

I had not intended to embark such readers as have been kind enough to bear me company, on yet another sea voyage but I find my recollections of the
Temeraire
so pleasant that I cannot resist taking a longer look at them.

We were an oddly assorted company of passengers with little enough in common, one might have thought, but we got on extremely well together. Chief among us was a retired don, a Cambridge man, a classic: Professor S., late of Melbourne University. He was a delightful travelling companion and when we reached the Aegean Sea, spoke of each island as if its legend was an affair of yesterday. Mrs S., three other married couples, including Mr Thompson, the Dane, an excitable fellow, and his Australian wife, two unattached ladies, Essie and I, made up the full complement of passengers.

The Captain was a man of sentiment. He was fair and rubicund and inclined, out of social embarrassment, to giggle. His English was tolerably fluent and he was very polite. He was also a good commander and, one could see, respected by his officers.

When the midday luncheon bell was rung by the cabin-boy-wireless-assistantorchestra, everyone was expected to go at once to the dining room. Captain I. would be standing inside the door. As one entered he would bow and present one with a plate. Behind him on a side table were the smörgåsbord to which one helped oneself. They were always good. When everybody was seated the Captain took up his knife and fork and so did we. On a unique occasion one of the unattached ladies was late and we all sat, rigid with decorum,
until she arrived. Captain I. received her apologies with an austere giggle. Even at breakfast the same protocol was expected of us.

The Captain had all our passports and therefore knew all our ages and birthdays. These he loved to celebrate. As if to oblige him, several of us had birthdays during the voyage. I was one. Dinner, on these occasions, was extra special. The ladylike and kind little steward whose name, Norwegian though he was, turned out to be Dan, also adored these parties, and caused the orchestra to play ‘Happy Birthday to You’ on his piano-accordion in the passage outside.

There was a cake with candles (tactfully unspecific as to numbers), wine and, as a grand climax, the Birthday toast, proposed by the Captain, in a long, involved speech that always made him cry. He would start off quite gaily with one or two careful little jokes but as soon as he got round to saying how nice it was to have whichever of us it was, in his ship and how well-behaved we were, his large blue eyes would fill with tears and his voice would tremble.

It so happened that our Queen’s birthday followed all the others. Not her official birthday but her real one. I’m afraid none of her subjects among the passengers had noticed this circumstance. Not so, Captain I. He knew. He commanded the Birthday Dinner to end all Birthday Dinners. Dan decorated our nursery tables up to saturation point. The cook went away out on decorative icing and the orchestra played our National Anthem without the slightest hesitation. He also played ‘Happy Birthday to You’ which we were expected, always, to sing. And indeed all the Norwegian officers and Mr Thompson, the Dane, loudly gave tongue in their own languages. Naturally, we did, too, but it was a little difficult to know how to phrase the penultimate line.

‘Happy Birthday, dear Queen Elizabeth,’ would be redundant and ‘Dear Queen’ recalled President Roosevelt’s letters to King George V. Too late one thought of ‘Your Majesty’; the thing had already passed off in an ambiguous rumble.

Captain I. rose to propose the Royal Toast. He recalled Norway’s close association during the War with Great Britain and the Commonwealth. He praised the House of Windsor. He reminded us that we and he and his officers and Mr Thompson, the Dane, were members of three great surviving monarchies. And gracious, as Hilaire Belloc would have said,
how
the Captain cried!

One episode of this enchanting voyage sticks most vividly in my memory. Essie had agreed to act as secretary for the duration and we used often to work in the evenings at my current book,
Scales of Justice.
On the night we sailed through the Dardanelles we resolved to stay up until we passed the beaches at Gallipoli, hoping to see them if the moon shone clear. It was overcast, however, and when we stood on deck at about one o’clock and peered into the dark we could only discern, very faintly, a glint of something that we knew was the beaches. The sea was dead calm and the air enervated and breathless. We had wished each other good night and were about to go below when we became aware of a cessation in sound and in movement. The
Temeraire’s
engines had stopped. We lay motionless somewhere, we thought, off the Hellespont. A rhythmic sound of paddling lapped into the silence. We crossed over to the starboard side and there, bobbing towards us in the blackness, was a lantern. As it drew nearer we saw that it hung from the prow of a caique.

The Turk in the caique, foreshortened and upward gazing in the lamplight, hailed us: ‘Ohé, Captain!’ and above us from the bridge, the Captain quietly answered him. Their common language was English which they spoke with a kind of biblical rotundity. It so happened that both their voices were deep and beautiful. Essie had her shorthand pad and pencil with her. ‘Do take this down,’ I said.

‘Who are you, Captain?’

‘The
Temeraire.’

‘From where, Captain?’

‘Out of Adelaide with wool for Odessa.’

‘How many souls aboard you, Captain?’

‘Sixty-three.’

‘Where are you bound, Captain?’

‘For Istanbul.’

‘Do you wish a pilot, Captain, for Istanbul?’

‘I do so wish.’

‘I have no pilot tonight, Captain. If you will, you may proceed without pilot to Istanbul.’

A pause.

‘I will so proceed.’

‘Good night, Captain. A safe passage.’

‘Thank you. Good night.’

The Turk’s teeth gleamed. He raised his hand. The lantern dipped, circled and bobbed away into the night. The engine-room bells rang and we began to throb again.

When I woke next morning and looked out of my porthole I thought: ‘What quantities of very tall chimneys sticking up out of the mist and how romantic they look – they might be minarets.’

The mist dissolved and they were caught like the sultan’s turret in a noose of light and declared themselves. They
were
minarets, of course. This was the Golden Horn and there was Istanbul and ahead lay the Bosphorus, the Black Sea and Odessa.

Of all the landfalls I have experienced: Hong Kong, for instance, or the Piraeus, Venice even, or Beppo or San Francisco at dawn, Odessa was the strangest, the most ambiguous, the most foreign. We arrived in the roads late on a spring afternoon and anchored there awaiting permission to berth. The sky was overcast and the sea dark and choppy. The city itself was simplified almost to a silhouette of onion domes, one of them flaming with the sunset, long roofs, dim flights of steps (’Ah,
The Battleship Potemkin,’
one thought), and the hint of a grandiose theatre down near the wharves. Professor S. talked of Genghis Khan, of barbaric splendours and terrors and the clash of ancient cultures.

The wind shifted. It now blew towards us from the land and carried with it the smell of occupied places and a most disturbing sound – the sound of a vast crowd of men, singing. Someone produced field glasses and through them we could just see that the steps and streets of Odessa and an open park or square were all swarming with people. The effect of this was extraordinarily dreamlike.

It may perhaps be remembered that as a child I had formed a romantic attachment for ‘Russia’, an attachment inspired in the first instance by what I suspect was a very slick piece of travel writing. My fantasy bore as little relation to Russia, I daresay, as the Pre-Raphaelite vision did to mediaeval Italy but the sight and sound of Odessa that evening revived it in an extraordinary degree.

The singing continued: vague, remote, gigantic. A flight of aircraft – Migs, someone said – roared overhead. A gunboat came out, encircled us and made off. A line of airships steamed out of port and into the open sea. It was all very odd and ominous we thought.

Apart from the gunboat nobody paid the smallest attention to us.

It was about now, I think, that one of the passengers pulled himself together and looked at a calendar. The First of May.

The Captain was annoyed and worried. He had not visited a Soviet port before and was, he said, uneasy about procedure. He had been sent a signal to the effect that it was forbidden to sound the ship’s siren and that he was to remain where he was until he received further instructions from the port authorities. He told us that an official party would board us and that the passengers must remain in their cabins where they would be interviewed and might be searched. All passports, cameras and field glasses were to be handed over. Such were his instructions. ‘I do not like,’ he said, very red in the face. ‘I very much do not like. I am obliged.’

We waited there, disregarded, until the next afternoon when a lighter came alongside, swarming with uniformed men and women: drab and businesslike. For the first time on the voyage a loudspeaker came into play. We were to go to our cabins and remain there until further notice.

My door was opposite that of the dining room which was ajar. The tables had been re-arranged by Dan to resemble an office. I left my own door open and sat on my little sofa from where I had an oblique view of the Captain, looking cross, seated at a table behind a mountain of papers and surrounded by Russian officers. A large-bosomed, frightening lady in a shiny navy-blue uniform and with the worst permanent wave I have ever seen, strode down the passage, observed me and shut my door very firmly indeed.

I was nervous. At that time, a particularly icy depression prevailed in the cold war. I had obtained what was held to be an adequate visa for the USSR and hoped to go ashore. The friends in New Zealand of whom I have already written were Estonians, exiled from their own country since it had been taken into the Soviet Republic. When one forms a close friendship one absorbs something of the life of the other partners and I had learned from them to amplify and, as it were, steady my childish dreams of their country. I had with me a parting gift: an old medal of St Innocent, patron saint of travellers. It is silver and has a hole cut in it like a window for the little brown, painted face of Innocent. There is also a legend in Russian characters. I had wondered, when we were warned of a search, possibly of our persons, what would be thought of Innocent, obviously a Czarist
relic? When I asked the Captain’s advice he said he thought it would be best if I posted the medallion to London from Port Said and added the possibility of its being stolen in Egypt was extremely high. So I kept Innocent and wore him under my blouse as I sat in the cabin and waited. There was also the book. It was now typed in triplicate. Would it be seized? Should I conceal a copy in a locked suitcase? But if they demanded the keys? In the end I distributed the typescripts in weighted heaps over my dressing table and little bureau and sofa. No deception practised.

After a long time, boots clumped down the passage. There was a rap on Essie’s door and then a prolonged rumble of voices. Extremely silly, I thought, to be apprehensive but it would be rather nice when it was all over. What ages they were with poor Essie. Were they frisking her for weapons? Doors and drawers banged.

When, at last, they called on me they turned out to be an extremely pleasant and comely young officer who spoke good English and an offsider like something out of a hammy film of
Treasure Island,
with a scar running from his temple to the corner of his mouth and a villainous, hangdog manner.