The Lonely Sea and the Sky (5 page)

  I caught ringworm from the calves and could not get rid of the ugly sores, but summer arrived, and life became better. There was a wonderfully fine spell in June; the sun on the young grass, the smell of new-mown hay. Hard work from dawn to dusk induced a feeling of bodily fitness, of lustiness, with a kind of hazy, half-drugged stupor in the brain. De Ville had a daughter, Dorothy, (by his first wife) living with him. She was kind-hearted and amiable and I was madly in love with her. But I knew nothing; I was an oaf who didn't know what to do, or what to say, and I just had to suffer in silence. De Ville's second wife, who was part of the household, was not much older. She was a good-looking brunette who kept a tight rein on household affairs.

  There was a railway cutting through one part of the farm, where the mainline expresses thundered past without being visible. Whenever I heard them I used to feel lonely with a great homesickness, but precisely for what I did not know. One day while I was hoeing turnips, the airship R34 passed overhead on, I think, its maiden flight; it looked huge, new and shiny, and it went by slowly. De Ville not being near, I stopped hoeing turnips to watch it until it was out of sight. This was the first aircraft to make the double crossing of the Atlantic. I wonder what I would have said if I had been told by a fortune-teller then that I would be the first holder of the Johnston Memorial Trophy, founded in memory of the navigator of the last airship to be built in England, the R101, which crashed in France.

  One of the more pleasant jobs on the farm was to drive the milk churns to the station. De Ville had an ex-stallion that had been retired late in life. (I think it was rather like de Ville himself, a tough character, but a hard-goer.) One day, on the way back from the station, I was sitting on the box seat of a flat-bottomed dray to which the stallion was harnessed. I had eleven seventeen-gallon churns, all empty, standing on the dray. There was an 'improver' working on a near-by farm, who had also delivered milk in a float with a frisky, fast mare. We started to race home. I was in the lead when we came to a right-angled turn with a large, round stone at the corner of the footpath to keep vehicles off. I was driving with the reins in one hand only, too cocky to use a second hand for turning the corner, and the nearside back wheel went over the boulder. The horse was going as fast as it could trot; I flew through the air, and looked up to the sky to see the milk churns around me like the great bear constellation coming to earth. The churns and I landed together, while the horse set off for home at full gallop. It went clean through two five-bar gates on the farm, and ended up snorting in de Ville's garden. When I arrived, which was definitely in second place, although I had run as fast as I could over the two-mile track, de Ville was waiting for me. He knocked me down in the dining room and held a chair over my head while he straddled my body. I listened to Dorothy sobbing in the next room out of sight, while wondering if the chair was going to come down or not. There wasn't anything that I could do that I could think of, and I was quite calm. I think this had an influence on him, and the chair did not descend. Then he gave me an hour to get out of the house with all my belongings.

  When I left it was midday, and I had already been working or busy about the farm for seven hours. I tried to get trains across country to north Devon. I suppose that I should have taken a train to London, and then another one from there to North Devon, but I did not think of this, and no one suggested it. By midnight I had reached Burton-on-Trent, and was pacing up and down the platform nursing my wrist, which had been bitten by a dog of de Ville's during all the fracas. There was a rabies scare at the time and when my wrist began to throb I got frightened. I made inquiries, and was directed to a doctor's house in Burton. I rang the bell but could not make anyone hear. Then I saw a chink of light from a curtained window, and peeped through to see a number of people sitting round a roulette table. I knocked on the window, and they all jumped up and dispersed like a covey of frightened partridges. The doctor came to the door, and very sedately attended to my wrist, dressed it, and said that he thought it would be all right. He sent me away without charging me anything. When I got back to the station, I was immediately grabbed by two plain-clothes detectives who asked me where I had been. It flashed through my mind that they knew the doctor was running a gambling establishment (then strictly illegal), and wanted me to give evidence against him. Having been befriended by the doctor, I refused to say where I had been or why. At last I convinced them that I was only a passenger to Devon and then they told me that there had been some thefts at the station, and that they thought that I was one of the thieves. About dawn I was approaching Exeter where I had to change trains. Unable to keep awake any longer I slept through Exeter and had to work my way back from Cornwall. I did not get home until 2 o'clock in the afternoon. By that time I was tired, and perhaps not as diplomatic as I ought to have been when my father was furious at my turning up suddenly without notice. There was decidedly no fatted calf awaiting a returning prodigal.

  I tried to get a job in a garage. I bicycled to Exeter and back one day (90 miles) and interviewed six garage owners, but without success. A few weeks later my father obtained a passage for me in the steerage of a ship going to New Zealand. My brother insisted on travelling down in the train to Plymouth with me to see me off, but he had just deeply offended me by laughing at my wish to have a revolver to take with me to New Zealand. This spoilt the start of the voyage for me. Looking back, I think that I may not have been fair to my father. I have been told that he was ordered by my grandfather to enter the Church on the old principle of one son each for the Army, the Navy and the Church, but my father himself told me that he had wanted to enter the Church. I think, however, that he was unsuited for it, and that if he had been in some other profession, he would have made his mark. He was continually fighting against his possibly unconscious wishes and using up his nervous energy in a tremendous effort to do the right thing. In the end he became a puritan of the severest kind. One day he reprimanded one of the villagers for being drunk, and this man retorted that it was all very well for the likes of him to talk, because he could keep drink in his house, and have it at any time, whereas a poor man could not afford to do so. The logic of this seems a bit shaky, but it impressed my father so much that he never drank alcohol again, except in the sacramental wine.

  In the house he seemed to be disapproving of everything I did, and waiting to squash any enthusiasm. Occasionally he was friendly, and on a bicycle ride or a walk he could be a wonderfully good companion. My happiest memory of him is of one day when we were out for a walk together and he wanted to hold me by the ankles over the side of a bridge so that I could take an egg from a water wagtail's nest. I wouldn't let him, and I still remember with regret the whimsical look of disappointment on his face. Building up his collection of birds' eggs was one of his great hobbies. At that moment he was a fellow human being for me.

The
Bremen
, a German ship captured during the war, was lying in Plymouth Sound when I joined her. The steerage quarters were pretty rough, with bunks rigged up in every inch of space. The food was poor to start with, and the cooking made it worse. But I was eighteen, and off on my own to New Zealand. My father had given me £10 in sovereigns and because of the deep distrust of my fellows, inculcated in me during my religion-dominated upbringing, I always kept this gold against my belly in a leather money belt. It was December; we had the expected rough weather crossing the Bay of Biscay, and I went through the normal agonies of seasickness. After this, the romance of the voyage took charge and I would stand in the bows at night, with the quiet roar of the bow wave in my ears, and watch the stars weaving to and fro above the mast. The deck throbbed, and the rigging shook at the end of each roll, but it was quiet for an instant before the ship started each roll back. The steerage passengers were an odd collection. The English ones nearly all seemed to have quirks of behaviour, or queer ideas of some sort; the New Zealanders were more balanced and practical. I think the one I liked best was a New Zealand blacksmith going home. One night a boxing match was arranged, and my opponent was a tall, broad-shouldered man with an exceptionally long reach. It was difficult to get inside his long guard, but the fact that I was getting into rather a mess, with a lot of blood over me, was not a proper indication of the state of the fight. I had not yet got his measure, and was most disappointed when the referee stopped the fight. I mention this boxing match because I think it had an important effect later in the voyage. We reached Durban for Hogmanay, and the coal trimmers' shovels beat a terrific din over the still harbour at midnight. I swam in the surf behind shark-proof iron railings. There was a fresh breeze driving the spray off the combers in sheets, and the sea was so salty it stung my nostrils. The hot burning sun was a novelty. We drove about in rickshaws, and everything seemed romantic and exciting.

  The chief trimmer on one watch had been my second in the boxing match, and when he was brought back to the ship handcuffed I talked the native policeman into freeing him and letting me take him aboard. He had been drunk, of course. Next day he deserted and therefore the watch was one man short. I volunteered to sign on, and was duly accredited a member of my first trade union, the Firemen's Union. My six mates of the watch were a tough lot. They were London-Irish. I was told that the Liverpool-Irish trimmers were the toughest in the world, but it was hard to believe that they were any tougher than these London-Irish were. Most of them had been torpedoed at least once, and one man described how the engineer had stood at the top of the gangway with a revolver threatening to shoot anyone who left his post after the torpedo had struck the ship in the side. The
Bremen
had hot stokeholds; particularly one double hold with a row of furnaces both fore and aft. When shifting clinkers in this hold I had furnace heat from both sides. I was soon exhausted and felt at the end of my tether. But we were short-handed, and in stormy seas after leaving Durban we were on watch ten hours a day – four hours on, eight off, followed by six hours on and six off. After each watch time was needed to wash our bodies grimed with coal black; also we had to eat. Although the food seemed plentiful after the severe English rationing, we were always ravenous. Looking back, I think that again this was probably due to lack of some vitamins in the diet.

  Nearly every day there were fights over the food, sometimes with knives drawn. I never had a fight, and I attribute this to the boxing match early in the voyage that had been keenly watched by both trimmers and stokers. Besides the crew wanting as big a share as possible of any food going, there were also the cockroaches and weevils. I tried various dodges to keep the cockroaches off the plate and mug in my locker. My best catch from one biscuit was three weevils and two maggots. I was not the only person exhausted. In the watch after ours, a big Swedish trimmer said that he could not go on watch. There had to be a full complement below and one of our watch had to take his trick for him. A second time one of our trimmers did his trick for him, but when he declared a third time that he was unfit to work, our watch was not having any more of it. They dragged him out of his bunk, and beat him up with their fists. They seized him by his legs, and dragged him along the alleyway to dump him down the ash chute into the hold. These chutes were shafts, just big enough to haul up a sack of ashes from the stokehold for dumping over the side of the ship. The man looked a ghastly sight being dragged along with his head bumping on the steel floor, and his face covered in blood. I had a feeling of shame that I did not come to his rescue, but I knew that if I intervened they would tell me to do his trick for him myself, and I was at the end of my endurance. Perhaps my mates were better psychologists than I was; the Swede suddenly jumped to his feet and, thrusting his attackers aside, ran down to the hold. I was told later that he worked harder than anybody else on his watch.

  Years later, when I was on a passage from Kobe to London in a P&O steamer after I had crashed in Japan in my seaplane, one of the engineers there turned out to have been seventh engineer in the
Bremen
. He told me the subsequent history of my trimmer watch. Of the seven who started the voyage, only three got back to England. One had deserted in Durban; one disappeared in very suspicious circumstances on the passage between New Zealand and Australia; one had been killed by a blow on the head from one of the long clinker slicing bars; and a fourth had been hanged for murder.

  I got my discharge in Wellington, New Zealand, and drew £9 in wages for the three weeks' work. My ticket was endorsed 'Very good' for sobriety and two other virtues.