Seagulls in My Soup (30 page)

“Oh,
deah
Miss Pomeroy, oh my deah, I shell so much bally-well look
forward
to the ceremony! It will be
splendidly
spiffing!” yelled Sissie as
Dreadnaught
crept away.

Amyas, straining at the long oar, looked up at me suddenly, puffing. “Not a lot of wind, as it were, eh?”

“You'll get a bit outside, when you clear the point, Amyas!” I hollered.

“Oh goodbye cheerio awffly thanks for everything dear Sissie and Tristan!”

“Bye bye, Miss P!”

Sissie and I went to the wedding at the Palma Evangelical Church, just after Christmas. In early 1966
Dreadnaught
sailed for Venice. She called at Bonifacio in Corsica, Cagliari in Sardinia, Palermo and Siracusa in Sicily. She sailed from Siracusa in May of 'sixty-six.

Nothing was ever heard from
Dreadnaught
again. When I called at Venice in 'sixty-nine, no one had seen her. I know that Amyas Cupling and Miss Pomeroy are in a quiet haven onboard
Dreadnaught,
still oily and rusty, with Amyas' painted, eighth-inch welded-steel flowers down below, and the engine still being “refitted.”

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love,

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is a star to every wand'ring bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Sonnet 116

—William Shakespeare

A while after Amyas and Miss Pomeroy were married, I lost Nelson and sold
Cresswell
. Sissie left to meet Willie in Morocco and then go back to Southchester. I returned to Ibiza in late 1967. Between then and late 1968 was a remarkable time for me, but these are not the pages in which to set down those tales.

In late 1968, after the sale of
Cresswell
and the loss of
Banjo,
my twenty-six-foot Folkboat sloop (the loss courtesy of an American film producer, as described in my book,
Saga of a Wayward Sailor
), I hung around with the father of my crewman, Steve Llewellyn, for a few days while I searched the waterfronts of the Balearic Islands for a delivery job. Much water had passed under the hulls of a couple of dozen sailing craft I had skippered, including the unfortunate
Two Brothers,
which had foundered
en voyage
to South America.

In the two and three-quarter years since
Dreadnaught
had bid Sissie and me goodbye, there had been a hundred adventures and almost as many misadventures, but somehow I had managed to stay afloat with a boat under my feet and a rocking berth to lay my head on. Now, at long last, after sixteen years of impecunious, miraculous survival afloat, I found myself boatless. But I wasn't friendless, and that's what really matters.

The ways of destiny are sometimes very strange. Later, when I looked back on that time in my life, 1966 to 1969, I could only come to the conclusion that most of us really never know what is actually happening when it happens. If we did, we'd either be saints or insufferable prigs. Being neither (we hope) we can only be thankful that our destinies, the paths of our lives, are, in the making, obscure to us. Whether our future is to be tragic or comic, rich or poor, the obscurity of Fate's intentions is a kindness in any case. For that kindness we should be grateful.

No matter what we live through, or how many hazards and dangers we have somehow passed, or how rough and imperfect, how torn and bedraggled, how seemingly irreparably wounded our lives might appear, it is futile for us to try to imagine how it would have been otherwise. If we look back objectively at our lives, no matter how messy and jagged and illogical it all has been, and despite all the mistakes, the further we get in time from the events, the more they line up in an orderly array to join a pattern of eternal fitness, and even, perhaps, at times, of heroic grandeur and poetical beauty.

In nature nothing follows a straight line, and so it usually is with a person's life. If it isn't so, then God help him or her. Normally, it is only after a time, sometimes a very long time, that all the ragged threads of our lives appear to fall into place. But they never really have done. The course of a person's life, with all its myriad twists and turns, is a maze. Some events happen at one time which we would never, until much later, dream of relating to other events which occurred at another time. This view of life is one of the saving graces of late middle age; one of the consolations for not being young. The lack of this view of life is one of youth's tragedies. This lack of perspective is one of the root's of youth's arrogance. My advice to anyone under the age of forty is to try to understand an older person's view of destiny. The sooner you do, the kinder you'll be. It's got nothing to do with hassocks and cassocks and little green things that go bump in the night. It's got to do with learning to treat other people with the same understanding that you treat yourself when you look back and see what a fool, at times, you've been. It's got to do with being able to laugh at yourself. As Voltaire put it, “God is a comedian playing to an audience who's afraid to laugh.” Well, we must laugh.

Now that I've got that little lot on the ship's manifest, I'll tell you why.

Losing
Two Brothers
600 miles west of the Azores led to my seeing some of the strangest sights I ever saw. Now, if anyone had been around that drifting rubber raft, with me in it, foodless and dying of thirst, and had told me that I should cheer up; that it was all a part of destiny, of course I should have told him to take a running jump at himself. But there was no one around, and so it was left for time to work its wonders and put events into perspective.

I'd bought
Banjo
from Willie the German, and it was he who took me in his fast motorboat to Ensenada Hondo, where my boat had been lost while I was ashore. There we searched for wreckage, and found the ensign staff and flag. That's all.

Willie landed me on the rocks of the high cliff. He had to carry on around Ibiza island to the holiday camp where he was manager. Alone now, I kept a straight face while he roared off into the blue. Then I stared down into the water below the rocks, at the iron keel of my boat lying on the sea-bottom. I could plainly see it through the clear, calm water of the deep bay. There wasn't one shred of timber left on the keel.
Banjo
had been beaten to death on the jagged fangs of one of the worst anchorages in the western Mediterranean.

I gazed on the watery grave for quite a while. All I now had was what I stood in—my Breton sailing jerkin, a pair of paint-spattered corduroy pants, and a beaten-up pair of deck slippers. And about four dollars in Spanish pesetas.

I turned and clambered up the high cliff without once looking back down at
Banjo
's resting place. It wasn't difficult to do; the cliff was almost all overgrown with dense brambles, high grass, and stubby little trees hanging on to narrow ledges overlooking the abyss. The sun, even in late September, beat down. I knew that even when I got to the top of the cliff I would have a good five-mile walk along the clifftops until I reached the road. Then I would have at least an hour's wait for a bus to take me back to Ibiza town. What would happen then was up to the gods.

Cliff-climbing isn't the usual sailor's idea of exercise. Some of them do it for fun, of course, but for the majority of yachties it is usually an exercise reserved for howling nights with the boat pounding the rocks at the base of the cliff. Somehow I made the 600 feet or so to the top.

There was a little old man, in black peasant's garb, watching me as I pulled myself over the topmost clump of thick, high grass. Breathless now, I stood and panted, about twenty yards away from the peasant. Slowly, but at a steady pace, he approached me. I saw that he was very old. His nut-brown face was lined and creased with at least eighty years of laboring on thin soil under a relentless sun. He was no more than five feet, three inches or so, and bent. He wore the typical black felt hat, black jacket, black trousers, and woolen shirt, collarless, of the Ibizan countryman. I stared at him as he reached up and made to doff his hat. By this time I could reasonably understand the Ibizan version of Castilian.

“Good day,
señor.
” He greeted me with as much courtesy as if I had been in an immaculate suit at a Sunday parade in Ibiza. There was no sign that I was damp with perspiration and breathing heavily; dirty and bedraggled after losing my footing half a dozen times on the way up the steep cliff. No sign that we were at least three miles from the nearest habitation.

“Good day, señor,” I panted.

“Tourist?” said the little old man. His eyes were slits against the bright sun. He carried a hoe.

“Sailor. My boat's down there,” I told him.

“That is not a good place to leave a boat,
señor.
” His voice was high-pitched, but clear.

“I know. My boat's sunk.”

“
Hundido?
Sunk?”

“Yes. It happened last night. I wasn't onboard her. I've just been down to see if I could salvage anything. There's nothing left.”

“It is God's will,
señor.
”

We were silent for a few moments while the old man tried to lean over and peer down the cliff. As I stood there the full import of my disastrous loss struck home. I felt utterly wretched.

“I've lost everything I have,
señor
! Everything!”

The little old man looked me straight in the eye. His eyes were like a hawk's, dark and piercing. “Any life lost?” he asked, quietly.

“No, no lives. But they were lucky.”

“And you are still alive?” The little old man asked the obvious question in the penetrating Spanish way.

“Yes . . . But I've lost . . .”

“Then thank God,
señor.
You have lost little. With no lives lost . . . and even if there had been . . . it is God's will. He has other intentions for you, for the others. Now, take a cigarette. Here.”

He handed me an ancient tin. Inside were tobacco and papers. As I rolled a cigarette he said again, “No lives lost . . .”

I thanked him, and wished him many more years.

“Go with God,
señor.
” He lifted his hoe onto his shoulder.

I walked away from him strong and free and even a little happy.

Willie the German's friend, Christian, who was a Frenchman and kept a scuba-gear store outside Ibiza, arranged that I should sleep onboard the tiny sloop
Coquette,
which was moored for the winter in Ibiza harbor, until I could find a delivery job or in some other way earn my keep until I had my fare home.

Coquette
was only eighteen feet long; more like a closed-deck dinghy than anything else. There were only two berths in her, and her galley was tiny and primitive, but it was better than nothing.

By the time I had been sleeping onboard
Coquette
for a couple of weeks, and helping Willie and Christian out a bit in return for their help, I had written letters to a dozen maritime contacts from Scotland to Malta, but no boats were moving. It was too late in the year for westward-bound trans-Atlantic deliveries, and only a madman or novice sails very far in the Mediterranean after the equinoctials—but bit by bit I was getting my fare home.

I built a bird-coop for a children's primary school. I helped some fishermen caulk their keels. I painted a couple of boats, and slowly the money came in. I never went short of a meal, of course—Antonio at the bodega and Josélito the fisherman saw to that.

It must have been mid-October when Jonnie the Swiss showed up. His boat was an old French sail-fishing smack. She was about thirty-five feet long and rigged as a ketch, the same as
Cresswell
had been. As soon as I saw her come sweeping around the harbor entrance, all weather-beaten and odd, with her rig somehow not seeming to belong to her hull, I reckoned it might be worthwhile to get to know her owner. I would have done it in any case, but I hopped from
Coquette
onto the outer mole to help him moor up.

As
Sans Culotte
dropped her anchor her owner shouted, “No motor!”

I sang out, “That's all right! Throw me a line!”

I climbed onboard a deserted motor yacht, ran to her bows, and waited for him to heave me a line.
Sans Culotte
's deck was littered with fishing gear. There were lines and nets and lobster pots all scattered about. She had a Swiss ensign drooping from her stern.

As her owner got a line ready, I noticed that he handled it clumsily, slowly. “You Spanish?” I called out to him.

His English was guttural. “Swiss!”

“You won't be very welcome here, with all that fishing gear lying around!”

I caught his line and secured it. He looked at me quizzically as his boat's stern swung toward me.

“The local fishermen aren't doing too well here,” I continued. “If they see that little lot . . .” I gestured at the dozen lobster pots lying on his deck, “. . . well, the least they'll do is report it to the harbormaster, and the most they'll do . . . You'll be lucky if they don't burn your boat!”

“What shall I do?” he shouted.

“Stow it all below! Hide it! Get rid of it as fast as you can!”

As soon as
Sans Culotte
was tied up, Jonnie (he had introduced himself by then) collected all the fishing tackle and somehow rammed it below into the cabin. He was no more than about twenty-three or -four, no taller than about five feet, six inches; mousy, straggly haired, lean, wiry—and he had a perfectly insane look in his dark blue eyes. When I looked at his face it was like looking at a benevolent fanatic. He was sunburned, of course, and looked strong and healthy. His hands were calloused and scarred. He was dressed in shorts and a light jersey.

“Nice boat,” said I. By this time I was below in
Sans Culotte.

“Ja. Found her on the beach at Fréjus.”

“Never been there—somewhere near Nice, isn't it?” I asked.

“I never been to sea before. Never worked on a boat. I fix this one up in two months!” The boat was tidy and well-painted below.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“I stay around here until spring, then Gibraltar and the West Indies. I do some fishing here, some fishing there, ja?”

“You'll have to be careful with the local fishermen, Jonnie.”

“Oh, I make friends with them, quick. See, I know . . . how you say . . . magic. You know, all that kind of thing.”

“Conjuring?”

“Ja. Go to parties, make the kids laugh.”

Jonnie handed me a strong cup of coffee. I don't usually drink it, but I was too intrigued by the idea of a sailing conjuror to refuse it. As he handed the cup to me he stared from below his brows. It amazed me to see that devilish look in such a young face.

He turned to his galley and took a bottle from the shelf. Then he reached into a cupboard and brought out two deflated party balloons. As I watched in astonishment he blew up the balloons, his eyes still gleaming brightly. “Watch,” he whispered. “Magic for der kids, ja?”

He tied the balloons, now inflated so much as to have almost lost their colors, to a hook overhead. Then he grabbed the small, dark bottle with one hand and delved into his pocket with the other. He brought out a box of matches, gasped in, took a swig from the bottle, turned loose those mad, staring eyes toward the balloons, struck a match, lifted it in front of his mouth, closed his lips, threw his arms in the air, and blew a six-foot flame at the balloons, which exploded.