Black Beech and Honeydew (33 page)

I had to sign eight identical declarations that I had no firearms. While I was doing this, Scarface searched the wardrobe and drawers. There were other declarations, I have forgotten to what effect. The young officer said he understood I was an author and glanced at the typescripts. I said we had been interested in the gala sounds from the shore and he said yes, it was a great week in the year. There was a wonderful ballet at the Opera House. I said how lovely and I looked forward so much…He said unfortunately none of the passengers would be permitted to land. A fury of disappointment seized me. ‘But my passport! I’ve got the special visa! They told me it was all in order.’

‘I regret,’ he said, nicely. ‘No. Your passports will be sent up to Moscow but they are not sufficient.’

‘Could you perhaps arrest me after we have berthed and march me off as far as the Opera House? I would be delighted if you would come as my guest. When the ballet was over you could march me back again.’

He was polite enough to treat this as a good joke and for the rest of the interview we got on very pleasantly, I thought, with lots of jolly laughter. Scarface stood inside the door and looked at nothing.

The young officer repeated his regrets, saluted, smiled in a friendly manner and took his leave.

Not long afterwards the loudspeaker said we could come out of our cabins.

The official party was assembled on deck and about to climb down a rope ladder to the lighter. My young officer emerged from a group and came face-to-face with me.

He cut me dead.

One by one they swung down the ladder and out of sight. He was the last to go. He hung back for a moment, turned and gave me a quick bow and a grin.

When we all met on our little games deck, the wireless officer told me how the formidable lady in uniform – she was, we supposed, some kind of commissaress – strode into his office and without a word wrenched out the salient fuses from his equipment, dropped them in a repellant reticule and strode out again. As far as the outside world was concerned we were now incommunicado.

For that night, all next day and the following night, we remained at anchor in the roads and no one paid the smallest attention to us. The Captain became apoplectic. It was rumoured that the delay was costing his company £300 a day. On the third morning, very early, and against orders, he caused a loud and long blast to be sounded on the ship’s siren. It woke me for a moment but I fell asleep again and the next time I opened my eyes it was to see the flanks of a ship slide past the porthole. We were berthing.

It took ten days to discharge our wool out of Adelaide for Odessa. First of all the long probes, like skewers, had to be run through each bale. One remembered the old story and wondered, if a spy concealed in one of them would, on being transfixed, ejaculate ‘Baa, baa’.

While this was being done a guard was mounted alongside us on the wharf. Three armed sentries. Not far away a diver was being lowered into the harbour. The winch was manned by a man and woman – a woman who according to one’s inclinations was either splendidly symptomatic of muscular comradeship and sexual equality or absolutely terrifying.

Old ladies with headscarves and aprons, straight out of a fairy tale, swept the wharves with witches’ brooms. When, at last, the unloading process was set in motion, one of the gigantic winches was worked
by a young and good-looking girl. There she sat, high up in her cabin, like a goddess: Irma was her name, as we were to discover.

Furious as our Captain was with the port of Odessa he admitted, like the just man he was, that the unloading was the most efficient he had ever encountered. He added (and alas, I have yet to meet a merchant skipper who would not endorse his opinion) that New Zealand ports (’Excuse me. I regret.’) were the slowest in the world. I understand that there is now an improvement.

By watching the watersiders all day and as long into the night as one was inclined, we discovered that the whole operation was ordered rather on the lines of those enchanting Russian dolls that fit inside each other. There was an overall superintendent of wharf operations and under him a cadre of the second rank who observed the main division of labour and, after these, a watcher male or female to each group of five or six workers. No doubt, at some nerve centre there was a superman observing the superintendent. This made for great speed and efficiency.

One of the watersiders was in love with Irma. He apostrophized her with all the frustrated ardour of a Romeo, day in and night out.

‘E-E-E-Errrma!’

Sometimes she would incline from her window and roar back at him.

Not one soul on the wharves or in the ship ever, ever glanced at the passengers. One evening I thought I would try if, by staring at the top of his cap, I could impel the amidships sentry to look up. I got a packet of cigarettes from Dan and leant over the taffrail and stared and stared. It didn’t work. I took a deep breath and let out a gargantuan sneeze. He looked up. I motioned winningly with the cigarettes. He made: ‘Certainly not. On no account’ with his hands and resumed his correct posture.

Our officers were allowed on shore and had come back with accounts of the unbelievably high cost of almost everything and particularly tobacco. Dusk had fallen. The day shift was gone and the night shift not yet at work. The wharf was deserted. I leant over the taffrail, accidentally dropped the bright green packet of cigarettes on the wharf and walked away quickly. About ten minutes later, I returned and looked down. The packet had gone. The sentry glanced up for a moment.

I think it was on the following day that our wireless officer returned from a trip ashore to the seamen’s institute or an equivalent establishment. He was anxious to show Essie and me a pamphlet that had been handed to him. It was in his own language, Norwegian, and was about countries in the British Commonwealth. In New Zealand, it said, the white capitalist reactionaries tortured the Maori slave population.

After a day or two I found a place on deck where I could sit with a writing block under cover of which I made rough little sketches of people on the wharves. There were sailors with red bobbles on their caps and two ribbons fluttering behind: incredibly hefty lady-water-siders with their broad Slavonic faces tied up like puddings: younger Amazons, still shapely and looking as if they ought to be parading in Red Square with swinging arms and bright ideological smiles. There were all the soldiers and the old sweepers and many beguiling and solemn little children. It would have been fun to come out into the open and frankly draw them all but this was considered inadvisable so I scribbled furtively and not at all well.

It was while I was doing this that I noticed my friend, the amidships sentry, stoop down and peer into one of a heap of conduit pipes that had been stacked on the wharf. He straightened up and made a signal to a soldier who was standing some distance away. This man came across, stooped, stared and walked rapidly away. Presently a car arrived with a senior-looking officer. There were no civilian cars on the wharves at Odessa. The sentry pointed to the pipe. The officer stooped and extracted from it a scrap of green and scarlet glossy paper. I looked down and saw that this was a corner of a book jacket or magazine cover. The officer drove away. That evening a top-looking brass and some satellites called on the Captain and told him he was to make it clear to everybody in his ship that no paper of any kind must be dropped overboard. All the following day two Russians in a dinghy paddled round the
Temeraire’s
seaward side, fishing with a net for the most unlovely
trouveaux.

We moved to another berth at the farthest arm of the harbour and continued to discharge wool. There was a military establishment here. Soldiers drilled, ran, fell flat, crawled and ran on again. From a little hut, punctually at three every afternoon, there emerged a small boy wearing a shiny peaked cap, muffler, gloves,
belted blouse and baggy trousers. He had in either hand a little sister in headscarf and long full-skirted dress and a staggering baby, also gloved. They took a promenade, not too fast, not too slow and looking neither to right or left. Past the
Temeraire
and to a certain place on the docks where they wheeled and returned. They were for all the world like a woodcut from a Victorian nursery tale by Mrs Juliana Horatia Ewing: such immensely solemn children and so sedate.

At 11.30 a.m. on the fourteenth day the last bale went ashore and the passengers were given final instructions. We were to assemble in the tiny smoking room and remain there until further orders. One heavily armed soldier stood inside the door and another on the deck outside. Time dragged and we got hungrier and hungrier. Professor S. and another passenger sang Gilbert and Sullivan very slowly and lugubriously and we all joined in the chorus. The guard, not without reason, slightly smiled. After about an hour and a half, Professor S. muttered under his breath and went out on deck. He was at once ordered by gesture and ejaculation to return. Some time after two o’clock, an officer and private soldier arrived. The officer put our passports on one of the tables. We all confessed afterwards to a sensation of extravagant relief at the sight of the passports. This reaction told us just how apprehensive we had been. But the passports were not returned to us. Instead, the officer opened each one and made a long staring comparison between the hideous photograph and the original. He then handed them over to his subordinate together with a flat black object which I felt sure was a camera and which was quickly pocketed. They left us. We endured another long interval during which Mr Thompson, the Dane, and Professor S. lost their tempers and were damped down by their wives. We found out afterwards that during these interminable hours, the ship was subjected to an exhaustive search. At three o’clock the guards went away and the loudspeaker said we were free. When we got down to the main deck the mooring ropes were being cast off and the engines were throbbing.

And now, as a gap of dark water widened between the
Temeraire
and the Odessa wharf, people down below, for the first time looked up at us. They smiled and waved and we waved back; almost, it seemed for a minute or two, as if there were two groups of human
beings wanting, before they lost sight of each other for ever, to come to some sort of understanding.

‘Poor
devils!’
one of the passengers said.

But they didn’t seem to me to be unhappy. They were shabby, hard-working and without any conspicuous vivacity. Beyond that I, for one, received no more positive impression unless it was of a sort of plodding acquiescence.

They waved for a little while and then turned back to their work.

Our next port of call, it was announced, would be Torreslavega on the east coast of Spain.

The contrast could scarcely have been greater. From the bay, a few rows of little pinkish-pale houses stared at us. They had black window-holes in their faces and might have been painted on their bleached, salty background by Christopher Wood. We were halfway between Alicante and Cartagena in a little bay too shallow to allow an ocean-going vessel as modest, even, as the
Temeraire,
to come alongside the wharf. We anchored offshore.

Here was the other kind of totalitarianism: Catholic, picturesque, inconsistent, savage no doubt and, in the background, infamous, but on the face of it good-tempered and a bit ridiculous. The officials who boarded us in Torreslavega were armed to the teeth like bandits and rich in documents, but somehow it all boiled down to them joyously wolfing up any cigarettes that were offered them and suddenly waiving all formalities. All but one. They objected to Professor S.’s very conservative, waist-to-knee, old gentleman’s shorts. ‘I go ashore in no other apparel,’ he said hotly. ‘The thing is ridiculous.’ The officials retired to the customs shed and after a longish interval, reappeared beaming, with a special permit that said El Professor S. would be permitted to enter Spain ‘wearing his pantaloons’.

We were rowed to and from the ship by fisherboys of about twelve years old, who preferred cigarettes to pesetas. They sang, all the way: short songs of a kind that suited the warm weather and the dip of their oars – could they have been made up of the verses
that are called
coplas?
The boys constituted themselves our escort and swaggered along beside us ordering off any lesser urchins who attempted to tag along and beg. They were tough, proud boys. We noticed that our particular one – was he José or Pedro or Carlos? – grew drowsy if we stayed ashore latish in the evening. Once, at about nine o’clock, while we had a drink in a sort of vague restaurant that was called a club he waited as usual, outside, but catching our attention through the window, laid his folded hands along his cheek, shut his eyes, inclined his head and by dint of mime, conveyed to us that he had been out all the previous night with his father’s fishing boat. He had become, suddenly, a sleepy child and we were filled with remorse.

We were loading salt in Torreslavega. It was rowed out in dinghies, hauled up in buckets and tipped into the holds. This process allowed plenty of time for visits to Alicante and Cartagena. To this end some of us hired a car with a single-fanged driver who smelt more violently of garlic than one would have supposed humanly possible. He was incandescent with garlic. On the disgraceful road to Cartagena I sat in front and had the dubious good fortune to meet with his approval. Somehow or another, as we bounced and lurched over potholes we managed to conduct a basic kind of conversation, mostly by means of gesture for which he removed both hands from the wheel. Whenever I guessed his meaning he roared with laughter, dazing me with great hot gusts of garlic, pointing to himself and then to me and crossed his middle finger over the index one. Then, to indicate how well we understood one another, he hit me smartly on the suspender knob. It was a painful trip.

When we arrived in Cartagena he drove us into the slums and introduced us to his family, who were charming.

We lunched very late in a working-man’s restaurant where the food was good and the patron obliging. In paying him we found an English sixpence among my pesetas. He turned it over, pointed to the sovereign’s head, sighed like a furnace and shook his head. So vivid is Spanish gesture that it seems in retrospect that he must have spoken the phrases that he mimed: ‘Ah, Señora, you are fortunate. Ourselves…alas!’ As we left he laid his finger to his lips and drew aside an old coat that hung from a nail on the door. There were exposed two very faded photographs, one of the Queen and the
other of the Pretender to the Spanish throne. It would have been nice if we could have brought him together with our Captain.