In Patagonia (26 page)

But the Intendente took no notice. He was busy talking to the owner of
Higbland Flier
and
Highland Princess
. So we talked to a naval captain who stared out to sea.

‘Ever hear the one about the Queen of Spain,' the ‘Englishman' asked, trying to liven up the conversation. ‘Never heard the one about the Queen of Spain? I'll try and remember it:

‘You are speaking of the Spanish Royal Family?' The Captain inclined his head.

The ‘Englishman' said he had read history at Oxford.

T
HE OLD lady poured tea from a silver teapot and watched the storm blot out Dawson Island. Three chains of gold nuggets were festooned round her neck: she used to pay her peons to wash them from her streams. Soon the storm would break on this side of the Strait.

‘Oh, it was beautifully done,' she said. ‘Of course, we heard rumours before, but nothing happened. And then we saw the planes circling the city. There was a bit of shooting in the morning and by afternoon they had all the Marxists rounded up. It was beautifully done.'

Her farm had been one of the showplaces of Magallanes. Her father had an estate in the Highlands as well. They'd stay for the grouse and stalking and sail at the end of October.

In 1973 the Government gave her two weeks to quit. Two weeks on property they'd had for seventy years. The letter came on the 2nd. Just a few ill-mannered lines to say she'd to be out by the 15th. She'd never worked as she worked in those two weeks. She stripped the house. Of everything. She took out everything. Even the light-switches. Even the marble surrounds for the baths. She'd had them sent out from home. But the men weren't going to have them. They were going to get nothing from her.

They stabbed her in the back, of course. The worst was a man she'd had for thirty years. Always helpful. Oh yes, always polite. She looked after him when he was sick and he only started to get uppity when the Marxists came in. He tried to stop the others loading cattle. Cattle she'd already sold, so
they
should have more for themselves. Then he turned off the heating oil, her oil, the oil she'd paid for.

It was terrible. They stole her dog and trained him to kill people. All that winter they were making knives. Waiting, just waiting for orders to kill them in their beds. And what did they do when they got the place? Ruined it! Burst pipes! Sheep in the vegetable garden! And in the flower garden!
They
had no use for vegetables. Wouldn't know what to do with them.

They'd complain they had no milk. Said they got T.B.
because
she gave them no milk. So she gave them milk,
which
they poured down the drain. They hated fresh milk. Only liked tinned milk I And what did they do when they got the dairy herd? Turned it into
bifes
! Ate the lot! They couldn't be bothered to milk the cows. Half the time they were too drunk to stand up.

And the bull ... Oh! the bull! You didn't know whether to laugh or cry about the bull. The Ministry bought this prize bull in New Zealand. No need for it! Plenty of good bulls next door in Argentina. But they couldn't buy an Argentine bull, not without losing face. So they flew the bull from New Zealand to Santiago, flew it to Punta Arenas, where it was presented, with Lord knows what in the way of speeches, to the so-called model farm. And how long did the bull last? How long before they ate it? Three days! Destroy and destroy. That's all they wanted. So there'd be nothing left.

She moved her furniture from the farm to the city, to the house she'd had for fifty years. The prettiest house in Punta Arenas, and of course,
they
wanted that too. Mr Bronsovič, the Party Boss, came three times. Nothing to stop him. No respect for private property in those days. Said the Party wanted it for its headquarters and she said: ‘Over my dead body!'

The second time he came with his wife, nosing in all her cupboards and even trying out the bed. And the last time he stood in the drawing-room with his Red thugs and said: ‘It's all so English. And to think she lives here alone. Aren't you frightened living here all alone?'

Yes. She wasn't going to say it to him. She was frightened. So she sold the house to a Chilean friend. For nothing, of course. The peso was worth nothing. But
they
wouldn't get it. Not yet. Not from her, anyway. And guess what Mrs Bronsovič did when she heard the place was sold. She sent a message: ‘How much did she want for her chintz-covered suite?'

They arrested Bronsovič in his shop that morning. They marched him home, shaved his head and packed him off to Dawson Island. Then some of his friends went to the Intendente to try and get him out. ‘You surprise me,' the Intendente said. ‘Can you recognize his handwriting?' They said yes, and he showed them their own names on Bronsovič's death list and they then said: ‘He'd better stay where he is.'

The storm broke. Chutes of rain battered the flower-filled garden. The new house was small but warm. It had fitted green carpets and Chippendale furniture.

‘I'm not going away,' she said. ‘I belong here. They'd have to kill me first. Besides, where would I go?'

A
T CASILLA 182, Punta Arenas, an iron gate painted green, with crossed Ms twined about with Pre-Raphaelite lilies, led into a shadowy garden where still grew the plants of my grandmother's generation: the blood-red roses, the yellow-spattered laurels. The house had high-pitched gables and gothic windows. On the street side was a square tower, and at the back an octagonal one. The neighbours used to say: ‘Old Milward can't decide if it's a church or a castle,' or ‘I suppose he thinks he'll go to heaven quicker in a place like that.'

The house belonged to a doctor and his wife showed me into a hallway of solid Anglican gloom. From the tower room I looked out over the city: at the white spire of St James's Church; at metal houses painted the colour of a Slav handkerchief; at bank buildings and warehouses by the docks. The sun slunk in from the west and caught the scarlet bow of the car ferry. Beyond were the black hump of Dawson Island and the cliffs running down to Cape Froward.

My cousin Charley kept a telescope up in the tower, and as an old sick man he'd focus out into the Strait. Or he'd sit at a desk stirring his memory to recapture the ecstasy of going down to the sea in ships:

O
N A blustery autumn day in 1870 a steam launch cast off from the landing stage at Rock Ferry on the Mersey and chugged towards H.M.S.
Conway
, the old ship-of-the-line, then moored in the channel as a training ship for the Merchant Marine. The two passengers were a boy of twelve and a gaunt but kindly clergyman, his face lined from mission work in India. The boy was ‘a small, well-built lad, ugly of countenance, but not repulsive looking', his snub nose the result of interpreting the expression ‘Put your nose to the grindstone' literally.

The Reverend Henry Milward had decided that no amount of slippering would temper his son's wildness and was sending him to sea.

‘Promise me one thing,' he said, as the black and white gunports came up close. ‘Promise me you'll never steal.'

‘I promise.'

He kept his promise and his father was right to extract it: his own brother was a little light-fingered.

Charley ran up the rigging and waved goodbye, but the ship's bully, a boy called Daly, blocked his way down from the cross-trees and made him hand over his jack-knife and silver pencil case. Charley never forgot the tattoo on Daly's arm.

Two years later, his basic training was over, he joined the firm of Balfour, Williamson and went to sea. His first ship, the
Rokeby Hall
, took coal and railroad track to the West Coast of America and came back with Chilean nitrate. He left two accounts of his apprentice voyages. One is a log-book, in which the entries are short, seamanlike, and often in shaky handwriting: ‘Took on 640 bags of nitrate of soda.' ‘Bardsey Island abeam.' ‘Seaman Reynolds hurled against the wheel. Laid up.' Or (his only comment on rounding the Horn) ‘Changed course to NNE from SE'.

The other is the unpublished collection of sea-stories he wrote as an old man in Punta Arenas. Some of the yarns are a bit disordered and repetitive. Perhaps he was too ill to finish, or perhaps others discouraged him. But
I
think they are wonderful.

He put down on paper all he could remember, of ships and men, at sea or in port; the train journeys; the dismal ports of Northern England—‘Liverpool or Middlesbrough are not places to raise your spirits to a high pitch'; the wet cobbles, the bed bugs in flophouses, and the crews coming aboard drunk. And then out in the tropics, riding the bowsprit, the sails slack and the white bow wave cutting the dark sea; or up aloft on a pitching yard-arm, with green water smashing over the deck, dragging in canvas that was wet through or frozen stiff; or waking one night in a norther off Valparaíso, the ship on her beam ends and his friend saying: ‘Go to sleep, Ugly, you little fool, and you won't feel the drowning', and then thirty-six hours on the pumps and the cheers of the men as the pumps sucked dry.

Food was his overriding obsession. He wrote down ‘the peas like marbles in coloured water'; ‘the weevily biscuits, first weevily then maggoty'; and the salt beef ‘more like mahogany than meat'. He wrote the names of the dishes the boys made themselves, from biscuit, peas, molasses and salt pork-Dandyfunk, Crackerhash, Dogsbody and Slumgullion—and the boils that came on after when they ate too much. Gratefully he remembered the friends who gave him an extra feed—an old steward or a German pastrycook in a Chilean port. He remembered how the boys raided the skipper's locker and came back with pillowcases of tinned lobster, tongue, salmon and jam; how he couldn't eat them because of his promise; how he cried when the skipper found the theft and stopped their Christmas pudding; how the cook slipped them the plum duff all the same; and how, when the Captain surprised them, he stuffed his slice under his shirt and ran up the main yard and blistered his tummy.

He wrote down the yarns of San Francisco's Barbary Coast; the boarding-house masters who fed hungry sailors and delivered them, drugged, aboard crew-starved ships. Sammy Wynn was the worst of these men. He got three cadets to desert from an Austrian man-of-war but, when the reward proved higher than his blood-money, shipped them back to court martial and the death sentence.

There were the easy Californian girls; the rough justice of the magistrates' courts; or the Beale Street Gang, who drained Spanish wine out of barrels into a boat while Charley ate pumpkin pie with the watchman on the wharf; or the King of the Hoodlums who raided the ship in white tie and tails, and the silver watch Charley got for seeing this gentleman off ship.

He remembered Ah-sing, the Chinese laundryman, who spat starch from his mouth; and the Chinese crew, decked out in gorgeous silks, burning joss-sticks, bowing to the sun while flying-tackle whizzed round their heads. There were the Chilean nitrate ports; pisco vendors; shanties of whale ribs and gunny bags; and the mule trains snaking down the cliff and the odd mule slipping and falling six hundred feet to the beach below.

There was Able-Seaman Lambert, beaten black and blue for winning at poker. There were the rats that
did
leave a doomed ship; swimming races among sharks; and the time the boys hooked an eighteen-foot monster on their best shark hook: the mate wouldn't let it aboard because of some new paint, so they triced it to the stern and Charley went down on a rope's end and cut its heart out: ‘I have since ridden many curious animals, but I never found anything so hard to stick to.'

The last bale of wool at Melbourne; the last sack of rice at Rangoon; the last bag of nitrate at Iquique—he put them down. And the ship easing out of harbour, and all the men singing in chorus the shanty ‘Homeward Bound!' And the Captain calling: ‘Steward! Grog for all hands!'—the old Geordie skipper, dressed in black and white check trousers and a green frock-coat, with a soft white hat for sea and a hard white hat for port. Charley got him down too.

Here is a story from his apprentice years.

W
E WERE close to the Horn, running with all plain sail set to a spanking breeze on the starboard quarter. It was a Sunday morning. I was walking up and down the main hatch with Chips the Carpenter and he said: ‘The girls at home are pulling with both hands.'

It's an old sailor's idea that every ship has a rope with one end made fast to her bows and the other held by the loved ones at home. And when the ship has a fair wind sailors say the girls are pulling hard on the rope. But when the wind is foul, some say there's a knot or a kink in the rope, which won't go through the block; and others say the girls are sparking round with the soldier chaps and have forgotten their sailor laddies.

Just then four bells struck. It was 10 a.m. and my turn to relieve the wheel. I had hardly got the middle spoke to my satisfaction, when the breeze backed northward a couple of points, so that the squaresails took some wind out of the foreand aft-canvas. The carpenter was still walking up and down when the ship rolled heavily to port. There was no wind in the main royal staysail and the sheet hung slack in a bight on the deck. The carpenter lost his balance in the roll and, by mistake, laid his foot on the staysail sheet. With the next roll to windward, the sail filled again and tightened the sheet like a fiddle-string and caught Chips between the legs and dropped him in the sea.

I saw him go. I left the wheel a second and threw him a lifebuoy. We put the helm down and threw the ship into the wind, letting the top-gallant and royal halyards fly. While some hands cleared the accident boat, the rest began to get in the kites (as the small sails are called), and in less than ten minutes the boat was on her way to pick up the carpenter, whom we could see swimming strongly.