Seagulls in My Soup (26 page)

This was a turn for the books. I stared at the sergeant as he stood hatless in the moonlight. I looked at all the other pleading faces in the pale light around him. The fishermen's boats were far too small to risk a passage on a night like this, through the strait with an easterly gale.

“It'll be a rough passage,” I sang out. The wind was steadily blowing the boat farther away from the group on the jetty. I think the sergeant's face brightened. “But I'll tell you what, sergeant!”

“Que?”

“If you keep that animal locked up for ten days, and make sure he doesn't get on the Ibiza ferry, or find any other way to Ibiza, then I'll do it!”

“Seguro! No hay problema!
Right, you're on!” he yelled back.

I heaved a line over. The sergeant caught it.

I turned to Sissie, who was staring at me in the dim light. “Any problems?” I asked her.

“No. But I'm still a little bit cross with you, dahling.”

“For what? What the
hell
have I done
now,
lass?” I started hauling the boat back to the jetty.

“Exchanging toasts with that
beastly
chep!”

I laughed quietly. “D'ye know what I told him, in Welsh?”

She shook her head. “No, of course not.”

“
Bad cess to you!
And I told him at least a dozen times, and the bugger's built like the Tower Bridge!”

Then began a nightmare night passage that I shall never forget as long as my blood can turn cold, nor yet as long as my heart can warm itself on memories.

Sleep, sleep, beauty bright,

Dreaming o'er joys of night;

Sleep, sleep; in thy sleep

Little sorrows sit and weep.

Sweet babe, in thy face

Soft desires I can trace,

Secret joys and secret smiles,

Little pretty infant wiles.

As thy softest limbs I feel,

Smiles as of the morning steal

O'er thy cheek and o'er thy breast

Where thy little heart doth rest.

O the cunning wiles that creep

In thy little heart asleep!

When thy little heart doth wake,

Then the dreadful night shall break.

“Cradle Song”

—William Blake

By the time Sissie and I had hauled
Cresswell
back alongside the jetty, six fishermen, one of whom was the sick woman's husband, Antonio Puig, had arrived with the
señora
lying on a makeshift stretcher made from an old door. The woman appeared to be in a very bad way. With her eyes closed and an expression of intense agony on her face, she thrashed her head around and moaned grievously. At times her moans rose to a loud screech of pain. The rain had begun to hiss down again, and the wind had risen to a howl.

The fishermen were accompanied by a local priest, a young man about thirty, who wore a long black cloak over his cassock. “God will bless you,” were his first words to me.

“Let's hope not too soon,” said I. “Anyway, can you find out if there's any diesel oil around?” I knew that the small, open fishing boats used kerosene, but I wasn't sure if there might not be diesel fuel stored for the use of a truck or the electrical generating plant. Hurriedly, the priest asked the oilskin-clad fishermen in the local version of Catalan. There were downcast faces and vigorous waggings of regret.

By now we were all wet through. Señora Puig, with Sissie effusing sympathy all over her, was being helped down the companionway ladder. The priest turned to me. “Unfortunately, Spain is not rich in petroleum, you see,
Señor Capitán
—but we make kerosene from the coal of the Asturias.” He started to go onboard.

“
Donde vas?
Where are you going?” I asked him, squinting against the rain.

“Onboard, to have a word with Señora Puig.”

“If you set one foot onboard my boat, I don't sail. We've already had one of your gang onboard a few days ago.”

“Superstitions. Pagan super . . .”

I didn't let him finish. “Look,” I told him, “there's two very sick women onboard
Cresswell
. It's going to be very difficult getting east through the strait between here and Ibiza, with this wind howling dead against us. So far as I know the boat's in good order. I'm not particularly superstitious—but I'm taking no chances. So kindly stay ashore and do us all a favor,
señor
priest?”

I felt a little sorry for the young man. He seemed a decent type—trying to be helpful in this situation, but not what I needed now. Sadly he made a gesture of resignation and acceptance, and turned away toward the dry hotel at the end of the jetty. As he went he called back to me through the rain, “
Vaya con Dios, y que Dios te bendiga!
Go with God, and may He bless you!”

I watched him disappear into the rain, then turned to Antonio, the father-to-be, and patted his shoulder. “He meant you,” I told him. “Of course you're coming with us. How's your sailing? Haven't forgotten it, have you, with those engines you use nowadays?”

Antonio grinned at me. We'd had quite a few jars together in the hotel bar. Of all the Formentera fishermen I had met, I liked Antonio the best. He was about twenty-eight, bigger than the average local man, clean-shaven, but with the very same black hair and eyes. He was clearly worried, naturally. It was to be his wife's second delivery. The first had been a little girl who had miscarried, he told me. “My sailing's good—but God grant a boy this time. It's not much fun . . . The other fishermen have been . . .”

He left the rest unsaid, but I guessed that it would have been “ . . . making jokes about me. You're not a man until you have a son.” It was a tenet of their lives.

I nodded at the bow. Antonio knew what to do. As the rain slashed down in the black night, he hopped to the jetty, cast off the stern-line, untied the bow-line, and started hauling the boat to the seaward end of the little mole. His black oilskin overcoat gleamed in the pale light of the harbor beacon as it flashed every five seconds. What with the rain pelting down, the wind howling in the shrouds, the squealing of the mainsail parrel rings as I strained at the main halyard, and the agonized screams from
Señora
Puig below, it was like a scene from Purgatory.

At the last second, Antonio handed the bow line to one of his fisher-friends and leaped onboard, even as
Cresswell
, with the jib up and drawing, pregnant with the gale, shot out of the harbor mouth. He grabbed the main halyard from me and I sprang down and took the wheel. As I flashed by the companionway I glanced into the cabin. The scene was chaotic. In the dim, reddish-yellow glow of the oil lamp Sissie was bending over, holding tightly the hand of the flailing, screaming
señora.
On the other berth the prone Miss Pomeroy, her face now cleaned of blood but still bruised and bashed, was on her side, trying to open her cruelly swollen eyes; trying, it seemed to me as I took all this in through a second or two, to speak to Sissie.

I grabbed the wheel and heaved the boat around the leeward mole-end. We were lucky. The priest might have been right. We missed the wall by no more than an inch or two. By now Antonio was back hauling in the mainsheet as we both stared through the lashing rain, stupefied, and prayed our way past the great stones under the harbor beacon. As
Cresswell
shot clear of our first hazard, Antonio visibly heaved with relief. He secured the mainsheet and headed for the cabin. I stopped him. I didn't say anything for a moment; there were far too many things running through my head. On top of all the calculations of wind and currents, hazards and dangers, I was almost frantic with worry that Señora Puig might die. The noise from below did nothing to allay my fears for her. I grabbed Antonio's shoulder as my other hand strained at the wheel. Now we were getting the full blasts of the wind, although the sea, in the shelter of the northern point of Formentera, was still fairly flat.
Cresswell
laid over in the sudden, mighty blasts and put her bow-cheek to the sea.

The Mediterranean wind frequently doesn't blow with a regular force, as it mostly does in other climes. It pulses. It's bitchy. One minute it's down to fifteen knots, the next minute comes a bluster, anything up to thirty or forty knots or more. It needs a lot of attention. You have to have eyes and ears in your elbows. You have to concentrate all the time. It's not easy sailing in the Mediterranean at night with a full gale blowing all the way from Vesuvius. With a badly beaten-up woman below, and another screaming her head off, my own head was too full of concerns for me to say anything much to Antonio for a minute or two. He started to pull away, but I kept a hold on him. “Nice weather for ducks, eh?” I said.

Antonio looked at me, perplexed. I pulled myself together, remembering that his English was nil. I hoped he could understand my Castilian. “There's a bottle of gin up in the forepeak. I don't have any drugs onboard . . . no anesthetic . . . Go up there, get that bottle to your wife, and let her . . .”

Antonio nodded violently as I shouted. Already he was off to the forepeak. Soon he was back, bearing Sissie's precious sanity-saver. He grinned and offered me the bottle.

“No—only fools and passengers drink at sea!” I bawled. “Give it to your
wife!
”

All the while the sea's violence was increasing.
Cresswell
zoomed ahead in the gale. By now she was well heeled over, at hull speed, doing around six and a half knots. Steadily her movement increased. She was rearing and descending, bucking and bashing, as she reached the open water west of the strait.

As Antonio held onto me, his face close to mine, trying to make out what I was howling at him, Sissie appeared on deck. She was still in her blue jeans and frilly shirt, soaked through, with her ginger hair now dark and hanging like rats' tails over her eyes, which frowned with worry, as well they might have. She shouted at me from the companion-way. In the roar of the wind I couldn't hear a word she said. I handed over the helm to Antonio, half-conscious at the time that this would tend to steady him up a bit. I grabbed the gin bottle from his hand and scrambled up onto the weatherdeck to shove my ear in front of Sissie's face.

“Oh,
deah
—Ai'm terribly afraid for her, Skippah!”

I rammed the gin bottle into her damp, cold hand. Señora Puig's howls had reached a crescendo, defeating even the blasts of the wind and the crashes of the seas as
Cresswell
smashed into them. “Here,” I shouted, “shove this into her! It's all we've got, lass!”

Sissie started to move down the ladder. I reached down and grabbed her shoulder. I was not surprised to see that she was crying. “Listen, girl, I've got to start pumping. We're taking water in badly! Get the
Reed's Nautical Almanac
off the navigation-book shelf. It's an old one, but there's instructions for emergency childbirth in it. Look it up in the index. Have you ever midwifed before?”

Sissie blinked through her tears and half-smiled. She looked like a half-drowned spaniel, but a brave one. “Oh,
deah,
thet's what worries me so, dahling!” she hollered. Then her face brightened a touch. “But I
did
set Toby's ankle thet time he broke it on the slopes of the Matterhorn!” As she said this her lips pressed firmly together. Britannia, I knew, would
cope.
The awful spell of ignorance, fear, and panic was broken.

“Don't you fret, skippah, we shell jolly-well manage somehow!” She started to head for Señora Puig, who had just let rip an excruciating bellow. “Oh, deah, poor
dahling
Señora Puig!” Sissie wagged her dank head. She stared at the other berth for a second. “And poor
deah
Miss Pomeroy!”

I stared at the incredible scene in
Cresswell
's cabin for a moment. It was truly horrifying. Over
Cresswell
's smashing, jerking, crashing deck I headed back for the bilge pump and desperately heaved away at the great brass handle until the pump got a suction. From then on it was “Armstrong's Patent”—pump, pump, and more pump. Half the night Antonio and I spelled each other at the heavy pump and the heaving wheel, as the wind rose to full storm force and piled up frenetic seas in their millions over the mile-wide, shallow bank under the strait.

We'd left the harbor at about ten o'clock at night. By eleven we were to the west of the strait. By twelve we were about a mile farther east. By one o'clock
Cresswell
, after zigzagging furiously against the blind eye of the wind, had moved a mere hundred yards or so against the raging blasts. Still we persisted. If we could drag ourselves only one more mile east, to clear the southernmost cape of Ibiza, then we could lay
Cresswell
off the wind and shoot up to Ibiza harbor on a broad reach. That was my intention—to get to Ibiza town direct, and get Señora Puig to a hospital as fast as we could.

After I'd pumped out about a ton of seawater which had sluiced onboard, I checked out the cabin again. The scene topsides was bad enough, but below, in the ghostly light of the oil lamp, purposely kept dim so as to preserve our night vision, it was a view of horror. By now Sissie had managed to get about a quarter of the gin down the heaving, lashing
señora,
so at least her screams were a little less terrifying. It looked as if Sissie had had a slug, too—there was a gleam of determination in her eyes now that brought to mind Karsh's portrait of Churchill glowering.

“Deah Skippah!” she crowed, “what a topping ideah of yours! Ai've managed to give
dahling
Miss Pomeroy a teeny drop, too! The poor deah is in a
frightful fret.
I think Señora Puig is feeling a weeny bit better, now!”

“Good,” I shouted back at her, as Nelson gazed damply up from under the table in abject misery. “I'm not letting her husband down here. I don't want any panic. It's obvious he loves her far too much to help her a great deal. You stay with her. Try to get a little bit more gin into her—not too much. And for God's sake, make some cocoa or something! We need cheering up, lass—death's abroad! There's only us and the gin to stove its bloody face in!”

Then I recovered myself and subdued my Welshness. It's not much help when the English are determined. “Did you read that thing about a-borning in
Reed's
?” I asked her.

“Ai'm trying to. It's jolly difficult in this light. Can we turn the lamp up a little?”

“No, take the book over to the stove when you boil the water—and for Chrissake, be careful!” Then I staggered back on deck to relieve Antonio after another fifteen minutes of wild pumping. All heavy work.

By two o'clock we had smashed our way another fifty yards or so to the east against the bitter wind. At two-fifteen Sissie appeared on deck and leaped down into the cockpit beside me. “Oh,
deah,
she's in heavy labor!” The water streamed off Sissie's thin, frilly blouse, and the tears streamed from her eyes.

I was too astounded to say anything for a moment. I stared at Sissie, squinting against the flailing rain and lashing spray, and gritted my teeth. Then I made up my mind. I would have to stop this almost hopeless fray with the storm and head
with
the wind. Our argument with the Fates was far too futile. They would never accede to our powerful demands and our puny strength. We were being too big for our boots.

“I'm wearing her around, Sissie. It'll take all night and tomorrow forenoon to buck this bloody strait!”

I started to move the wheel around to pass
Cresswell
's bow away from the raging wind. Slowly the boat obeyed me. Antonio nodded his head as he eased the mainsheet. He had already figured out my intentions. Sissie stood by the jib sheet, ready to pay it out a touch. Then, as the noise of the wind and sea lessened while
Cresswell
disdainfully turned her back on them, there was a particularly dreadful howl from down below. I half-pushed Sissie toward the cabin, and concentrated on the helm. It's not an easy maneuver, wearing off in a full storm.