Joining the Merchant Navy had been my plan for over a year, since I visited a tanker that the Royal Liberty School, Gidea Park, Essex, had 'adopted' - the Shell tanker SS ' Velutina ', where she was unloading at Canvey Island (see below). My uncle at whose house I lived had brought home to me the necessity of looking after myself as soon as my schooling was ended, and going to sea as an apprentice had seemed a feasible alternative open to me for securing my food and board. There were also, of course, romantic notions about sailing on a tramp ship to far-flung foreign parts. An adventure book about apprentices sailing the world in a tramp ship had played its part too. Before I left the Merchant Service, though, I had seen enough of the routine and ordinariness of the seaman's life. After an interview with a selection board at Leadenhall St. in the City, I waited for my school-leaving examination results and then for a ship.
 

VELUTINA ON TRIALS 1949.
© Shell

   
Visiting the Shell tanker 'SS Velutina' at Canvey Island in 1953. I am the one with open neck white shirt.

When the time came to sail I was already regretting the wrench from the brief newfound freedoms of life while no longer being a schoolboy. I had been allowed a staff room at the mental hospital where my mother was a staff nurse, and I was soon given a job there serving food in the patients' cafeteria, until a male patient attacked me one evening for not serving him an extra egg he insisted that I slip to him on the side. It was decided I had better be in the kitchens as a lowly porter. Half-inch layers of grease often lay on the washing-up water and endless sacks of potatoes and other vegetables had to be prepared. The porter gang of four was a low and vulgar lot, two old stagers and two young louts. I was set to scrub huge wooden tables by the kitchen manager, who had heard I was to go to sea as a cadet; “Good practice for scrubbing the decks!”; But at least I earned money and was able to live it up somewhat for a while too.

The news that I was to sail within the month came as a shock one day and I realised I did not want to leave behind the few new things in which I had found some security. Yet I knew I had no longer any option but to face the wide world and so it was 'off to sea'. With a heavy heart I went through the formalities of buying kit, which soon left both my mother and I literally penniless. But I was resplendent in the dark blue uniform of a deck officer cadet, with the thin gold line epaulettes and the gold-on-red Merchant Navy cap badge. My suitcase was stocked with blue jeans - most unusual garb in those days in England - a variety of tropical kit as well as a set of celestial tables and a huge and famous tome on the principles of navigation by Captain Lecky with its quirky, amusing style, as when he suggested that some of his slower readers might be 'first-class bevel-edged fools'. There was a sombre note from the start: the Dock Street area in the City of London, where all these goods were procured, was most seedy and gave the impression that seafarers could easily end up as wrecks and drunks.

Aboard the M/S London Glory in 1954/5

Shortly after my seventeenth birthday the call came to travel to Liverpool to stand by for the arrival of my first ship, the Greek-owned tramp tanker M/S London Glory (16,000 tons dw.). I was apprenticed for four years and the 'pay' or pocket money was a mere £60.- p.a. for the first year, £100.- p.a. for the second. Since apprenticed cadets were reckoned among the deck officers, I was lodged by the Company at a Merchant Navy Officers' Club, where I met the other first-tripper apprentice who was to sail with me, a South Shields lad called Brian Robson. Despite our excited anticipation and romantic notions about the sea, we had to occupy ourselves in that dingy, dirty-black city for about a week while our ship was laid-up due to heavy storms in the Irish Sea.

LONDON GLORY

M/S London Glory was built in 1952 by Sir James Laing Ltd, Sunderland. Tonnage: 15, 374 dwt. completed 3rd March 1952.

When we finally got aboard we were given a great welcome by the entire Indian deck crew, who crowded the rails as we climbed the rope ladder from the launch that delivered us. We were helped aboard by them in such a friendly atmosphere, wishing us blessings for our future careers, that I still feel the afterglow. Their interest in us was quite unprecedented in my brief experience of people and it really helped to allay my misgivings and nervous anticipations about what was ahead of me out in the rough world.

Even though it was but five years since the end of the British Raj and most of the lascars (deck hands) were used to treating whites as sahibs, that open-heartedness shown to us left an indelible impression in my mind of what genuine spirituality is. I would be woken gently at one bell (a quarter of an hour before the change of watch) by an elderly Indian steward with hot, sweet tea and biscuits. 'One Bell, Sahib', he would say softly and respectfully, yet more like a loving father than a servant and tea- wallah. Most of the elderly Indians were like this. They would spoil me with extra snacks or titbits if they were stewards of the Officers' Mess, or invite me to take a curry or other Indian snack from the crew galley on the poop.

The master was only 26 years old, Captain John Dixon of South Shields and turned out to be an excellent and friendly Old Man so it was what is called 'a happy ship'. The First Mate, a rather elderly and kind Mr. Ashley and his wife, entertained Brian and I to tea while he prepared us for the routine to come: it was overalls on and to work learning the dirty business of tank-cleaning, discharging and loading. To our disappointment our first voyage was from Birkenhead to Manchester and back, along the Manchester Ship Canal. Our next was to Glasgow and back, so at least I was able to be seasick, even though there was so little swell as to be hardly noticeable. The third 'voyage' was again up the canal to Manchester and back! By this time my companion apprentice Brian had to be hospitalised due to a large verucca on his foot and that was the last I saw of him as we sailed for Venezuela.

Removing rust and red lead with chipping hammer in a cabin’s smelly toilet was ideal work for inducing seasickness and also intense regrets of going to sea at all. Rollers athwart the ship shook it into twisting rolls all the way across the Atlantic until we happily reached the quiet of the Sargasso Sea. During this crossing I went through what many young men who fly the nest must do... not only homesickness, but an overpowering sense of existential loneliness that was intensified by the seemingly endless and meaningless ocean all around. Though I had not actually known the security of a real home since I went to boarding school at the age of nine, a shipwrecked sense of being cast out into an uncertain life in a friendless world was very much with me.

At last, however, the blue Caribbean was a relief and the tropical exotica of Puerto de la Cruz and later, of the island of Curacao made the voyage seem less wasted. I visited some apprentices aboard a small tramp cargo steamer that was like something out of Conrad, as was also the river port at Willemstad, packed with vessels of many sizes and descriptions. When we went to Caracas Bay, I discovered that one of my best friends from Sutton, Surrey was there too, berthed aboard a training cargo ship of the New Zealand Line. To my great disappointment it sailed before I was able to get ashore to see him. His life, one of a dozen fellow cadets, was remote from my solitary existence... the only teenager aboard.

After over two weeks crossing the Atlantic in weather fair and foul, during which I slipped on a ladder and sprained my ankle very seriously, we passed the Straits of Gibraltar and I had my first view of 'the Med.' We soon sailed into Algiers. Some young Arab came aboard and I entered my first barter deal, in which I was inevitably the loser. Six bottles of white wine that turned out to be much more like vinegar in return for an unused pair of very sturdy blue working jeans - a kind of clothing which would not become fashionable for a decade but which was already appreciated by hard-up wharf workers. The Third Officer told me that 'flogging your gear for booze' is a well-known way to ruin among seafarers. Despite this, the captain agreed at length to let me have some money from my small and impoverished pay account (apprentices received only 90 for the whole first year) to go ashore and buy myself a wrist-watch, though he asked why the ship's bell was not good enough for my purposes. From one to eight bells were rung on the bridge each half-hour in every four-hour watch, so everyone knew the time more or less without thinking.

I had to go unaccompanied and, though Algeria had not entered the era of revolution, there were occasional disturbances and dangers for foreigners. I was told to keep clear of the kasbah at any cost. There was a feeling of mistrust about, unless I was mistaken and it was my own nervousness. I steered well clear of the street vendors with their fly-ridden boiled sweets and unpalatable looking kebabs and unnameable fried dishes. Eventually I found a Jewish shop with just the watch I fancied, which was also within my range, so I bought it. In my eagerness to see something at last after endless waves, I took a walk to the suburbs in tremendous heat. I was rewarded in seeing some Foreign Legion troops mounted on camels leaving a barracks... and by such a swollen ankle that it seemed that it must have had something more than a big sprain.

Orders came for Malta. With its amazingly blue and clear water combined with the sweltering heat of day, this was my first taste of a Southern European culture. One afternoon I went ashore to walk to Valetta, hoping to see the British naval port made so famous in the 2nd World War by its sufferings and heroism. It soon became an exhausting, trudging trek in the sun without a hat, chased by small dust storms on the sandy cart-tracks that passed for roads amid a landscape that seem devoid of vegetation. But picturesque it was with blindingly-white stone houses set against the sea, sand and sparse bits of brilliantly-bloomed vegetation. It was already early evening when I arrived. I traipsed the streets and gazed into shop windows, but having little money, I was nervous about entering any. Then with surprised relief I saw the familiar red and gold sign of Woolworth’s, that ubiquitous sign of British colonial civilisation. There were no national Maltesers on sale, but the US imperial Mars bar I did buy. I had then been away from Blighty for all of 3 months! The voyage went on without known end: Italy, Iraq, Singapore, Borneo, Java, Sumatra , British North Borneo, Sarawak , Singapore, Australia...

The Indians made me feel at home wherever I met them about the vessel on my duties. I would be invited to 'down tools' and share a curry and rice crouching about the communal plate on the teak deck around the poop, where their cooking galley was. Unlike the somewhat formal dinners in the Officer's mess, these meals were like lively parties to me. Their hospitality and friendship were such that I visited them in my leisure hours too, for tea, sweetmeats and some Indian music. We were regarded as Christians by the (all very religious) Indians. Like the stewards, who were all Goanese Indians of Portuguese colonial background and Christian beliefs. Apart from a few Muslims, the deck crew (lascars) were mostly Hindus who bore themselves with an air of humble dignity and respectfulness for others that I realised was not mere servility to the white sahib. They still addressed white Englishmen thus in 1953 despite Indian Independence. Officers expected this and, apart from a couple of them who did befriend me - the youngest aboard, - I had not much in common with most of the officers.

My days were much the same when at sea, working mostly on my own, or sometimes with the Indian crewmen. Though the English deck and engine staff were kindly towards me, the young Third Officer was the only one whose regular company I could keep. I was at least five years younger than anyone else on board, but I was also befriended by a young engineer, Larry Black from Falmouth, and a young Indian seaman.

The Third Officer, 22 years of age, looked and acted like an officer of the British Navy. He often spoke of the quality and class, the efficiency and glory of the Royal Navy with the reverence of one who looked on a distant heaven of perfection from beneath. I would spend many an hour with him during his eight-to-twelve evening watch, keeping the look-out and drinking hot cocoa made with condensed milk, calling up any ships that passed in the night with the Aldis lamp to exchange identities, small news and a greeting. One of his pet dislikes was literature about the sea that used florid words like 'spindrift' and 'landlubber' that seamen never use. The Third Officer always sent for me whenever there was anything new of note to observe like a well-known liner, supertanker or one of the half-dozen ships of our own company bearing towards us.

For a first-tripper there was of course a very interesting range of unusual natural phenomena to encounter: porpoise schools, giant manta rays that somersaulted in the Red Sea, waterspouts in the Indian ocean, locust swarms in the Persian Gulf at 130 F, sudden gigantic deeps in the oceans that the echo-sounder was too weak to fathom. After dusk one evening I saw a sight from my cabin porthole that threw me into anxious confusion, wondering if I was hallucinating, losing my mind or what. For as far as the eye could see, the entire ocean was literally illuminated with shining light. The waves caused by our passage scintillated even more brightly. I went unsteadily up onto the bridge to see the Third Mate. He was behaving exactly as usual. I nervously asked him what it could be! That was my first encounter with marine phosphorescence. Fish small and huge could be seen under the surface, lit up by the greenish glow as they moved.

The Third Mate had absorbed some of the old Raj mentality and took me along on a proposed inspection of the Indian crew galley. His manner towards the seamen was rather imperious. I now see it as having partly been a compensation for his youthfulness and uncertainty, partly the prolongation of a tradition of British seafaring colonialism. He had evidently not reckoned with the Indian cook, who denied him entry to the galley and stood his ground unperturbed when the Third Officer shouted orders to stand aside. The peculiar knowing way in which the cook handled this British ship's officer showed me that authority was a personal achievement, not merely a matter of social and legal authority. I later witnessed a similar confrontation between the Indian boatswain and the Master.

The best English-speaker among the Indians was a young man of about twenty called Hari. My friendship with him first arose, I think, due to a shared interest in the novels of Aldous Huxley. We used to talk about all sorts of subjects together, from science to politics and religion. Hari held a B.A. in English from an Indian university. As I was put in charge of the ship's library - a ragged collection by charity of the Flying Angel's missions to seamen - he asked me to lend some of the better literature out to him for his leisure hours. It never occurred to me that those who made Company rules assumed that all crewmen were to be regarded as potential thieves and were thus banned from the services of the lending library. However, the Second Officer - saw me exchanging books one day and soon ordered me to restrict lending, the service was only for officers. I explained that the borrower was above suspicion, a B.A. This was my mistake. The Second Officer's pride was pricked and he angrily swore that he didn't care whether this lascar was a B.A. or a B.F. ('bloody fool') and so forth. One such tattered volume was worth a day's work in India, he said. To save my friend's feelings - as well to avoid unpleasantness for myself - I told him nothing, but went on lending to him on the quiet, taking book lists down to his cabin and delivering the books the same way.

My surreptitious book lending to Hari was discovered when the Second Officer made a surprise check on the library. The library keys were taken from me and books could only be exchanged under surveillance. No longer could I save Hari's feelings. Having lacked the courage openly to tell him all the Second Officer's orders and explain the reasons given, which were all of the worst racist sort, my behaviour must have seemed very odd. He failed to grasp the situation I was in, for I had by now been ordered formally by the Captain to avoid all contact with the crew except when strictly necessary in the job. As a first line of punishment, my main source of pleasure on that vessel, my precious guitar, would be impounded for the rest of the voyage if I continued to sneak off aft to the crew's quarters after dark.

Hari was upset by this discrimination and bit by bit he urged me to oppose the whole ship's system. Before long it was a question of either that or our friendship. He insisted on it. Faced with this dilemma, I felt weak in heart and spirit before the formidable challenge: one boy against thirty adult officers on whom I was dependent for everything and under whose definitive orders I must sail. Even in the Merchant Navy, refusing to comply with Captain's orders was formally defined as 'mutiny', and I had no inkling of my actual rights, for these were a mystery ruled over by the Company. The result was really a foregone conclusion. I had to capitulate. So that was the end, virtually, of that.

There was an inexplicable ending to it all for me. The ship was anchored well offshore in the Persian Gulf when the crew were to be replaced by other Indians. I hoped to see Hari one last time and say a few friendly words about things. The opportunity did not arise but, as they were about to disembark, I was called onto the deck in full uniform with all the other officers while the captain confronted the serang (the bos'un or head of the Indian crew). It concerned foodstuffs and other personal stores regularly issued to the crew, which they had saved up to take home. The 28-year old Captain sailing on his first command had decided to exercise in the strictest fashion the Company Rules which stipulated in small print that no stores may be taken ashore by those signing-off. Many of the crew had skimped and saved so as to have some small luxuries to take home to their villages. Seeing how tiny their earnings were, the captain's behaviour seemed most unreasonable and it was not in accordance with time-honoured practice.

A heated argument arose until the captain threatened to open the baggage of the departing seamen, pulling out a penknife to cut a cord on one of the kit-bags heaped for transit. The serang immediately drew a sheath-knife and warned him not to try it. The captain called it mutiny and asked if they knew what that meant, threatening dire consequences. A Sikh drew his knife and asked the captain if he knew what it meant when a Sikh drew a knife, which was that it must taste blood before being sheathed again. It was a very tense scene for some time until the captain had to withdraw. The crew left the ship down a rope ladder into a lighter and I waited and watched, still expecting to see Hari and at least to wave him goodbye. However, I could not see him in the crowd.

The sense of loneliness of seafaring grew worse then, particularly since our tramp vessel did not return to a home port for well over a year. Those were days when the world seemed very large and everything very distant in time and space. A telegram cost more than I could afford while radio telephone back to UK was used only in the direct need and was not always easy to make contact by either. We always awaited news of 'company orders' as to our next port of destination. It could mean that the ship was to return to the vicinity of Britain and thus bring the promise of shore leave at home... the one big desire, it seemed, of everyone.

We were at the tanker terminal in Pula Bukkam, Singapore and we had recently received the joyous news that we were to be homeward bound in ballast. We had been over nine months at sea and it was my first trip. But just before sailing, new orders arrived for Aussie. Port Adelaide and Melbourne and who could tell where thereafter. Gloominess was always evident sooner or later when such orders came. To add to this, we had to suffer weeks of bad seas and storm on the way, rolling tremendously to broadside waves from the Antarctic as we crossed the Great Australian Bight. Several 'Mayday' calls were picked up from distant ships of the U.S. Fleet, including one from an aircraft carrier that was registering 40 degree rolls and one from a destroyer which foundered after a 90 degree roll.

When we reached Port Adelaide, it was actually my bright idea to invite nurses from the nearest hospital to a party on board. I knew of such goings-on from my mother's stories and had indirect experience of the ease with which they could be roused for a party if everything was laid on. I even made the call from a phone box at the quay, but I soon lost my cool and had to call on the assistance of eager hands crowding around me. Half a dozen young nurses were fetched by taxi and alcoholic revels and pairing up began. I soon found myself relegated to striding the catwalk with a Martini as my only companion.

Early the next morning I stood by on the bridge as usual in full uniform as the ship was made ready to sail and the ladies were about to depart in prepaid taxis with huge bouquets of flowers. Once the springs were away, I stood at my accustomed post beside the telegraph, moving its brass handle to the pilot's orders from 'Slow ahead' to 'Full ahead'. The bravado of the Second Officer's jokes as he called down to the quay to the pretty platinum blond covered the glimpse of tears rolling down his cheek. They had all spent that one night of moderate and chaste revelry after ten tireless months of tramping about the seas without respite from the social isolation and all-male company. Faces around me were immobile and thoughtful for what would otherwise always be a cheerful moment when the Captain confirmed that we were at last in open sea and all away on passage.

Back in Borneo at Balikpapaan for about the fifth time, the Indian boatswain arranged for the Fifth Engineer, a friendly fellow called Larry Black from Penzance, and I to visit a hospitable Indian family living in a stylish bungalow below coconut palms at the head of a perfect tropical sand beach. This visit was to fetch two monkeys we wanted to take back home with us. We shortly found ourselves in a quite unexpected and awkward-feeling position like parents with clinging babies that were rather active and angry. We were told that they had been caught in the jungle by the old method with a pot in which food had been placed. The monkeys grabbed the food but were unable to get their full fists out of the narrow-neck. Rather than release the bait or understand their predicament they held on, even when people came to collar them.

No sooner were we aboard ship than my monkey got away, climbed a stay to the top of the mainmast and proceeded to run fore and aft along the radio aerial and the wire mainstays. No-one could get close to it as it appeared here and there to do its monkey business, including the captain's accommodation area. The awning rails of 'monkey island' on top of the captain's cabin was hung with a hundred stalks of bananas, which were an attraction. At length it went down a mooring rope to a buoy where some Dayaks in a dugout canoe recaptured it for us and were rewarded for their trouble by some chapattis from the Indian galley.

The captain required that the monkeys be secured at all times and also banned them from all accommodation areas so we had to tie them by their leads to some stanchions on the after boat deck. There they were for several weeks, sometimes fed by some of the Indian crew. To my great shame, I found looking after my monkey so tiresome that I very often failed even to feed it and I was roundly told off by the First Mate's wife for cruelty, which was doubtless the case... yet I was too foolish and perhaps too callous to take her seriously at the time. The Captain had told us that import of monkeys to Europe was no problem at all as no quarantine was required. By the time we reached 'the Med' he had changed his opinion and told us that the animals had to be disposed of before we reached Rotterdam. He didn't care how we managed it - it was 'not his business' - but go they must because he claimed the ship would be delayed in entering any port with them aboard.

Larry and I had been worrying about what to do with these poor creatures when we should reach England. Donating them to a zoo was the only idea we had come up with. But the captain's order threw us into crisis. Either the First Mate or his wife had tried to get him to change his mind but he was adamant. Larry and I could not face the idea of butchering monkeys so we finally chose what we felt was the lesser evil of setting them afloat when we passed through the Straits of Gibraltar in the hope that a fishing boat would pick them up. We felt it was a sin nonetheless. Larry found a tea-chest which he had carpentered up a bit so it might float a while. It was dark by the time we passed Gibraltar and we had to throw it in with them inside while the ship was still going full ahead. We hoped that some of the small boats whose lights we saw nearby would save them in time. My irresponsibility towards such defenceless and fearful living things is not excused by my relative ignorance at the age of seventeen. Forty years on, I am still sad and guilty to think of the episode and my part in it.

The vessel had been ordered back to Rotterdam via the Gulf due to need for dry-dock repairs. The ship’s side had been nearly stove in at Singapore in a most dangerous incident. Approaching Pula Bukkam for the second time on this voyage, the Master had a major argument with the pilot, who was ex-RN and who had been mostly in destroyers. The fully-loaded London Glory had a lot more way on her than any destroyer, so could not approach the quay so fast. The pilot was bringing the vessel in far too fast for our captain’s liking. I was standing by the telegraph to the engine room, my usual task when entering or leaving port. The captain told me that I was not to waste a second in reacting if he gave the order to slow the ship. When the order ‘full astern’ came, I slammed the telegraph back to that position. However, the telegraph needle moved too far and it stuck behind the brass edge-casing while the accompanying bell went on ringing. In the engine-room, it transpired, they had seen that the telegraph was faulty and put the engines back on slow ahead again, where they had been several times until then. This became evident quickly and the Captain grabbed the ship’s telephone and rang the Chief Engineer, shouting “Full astern, Chief. Give her all you’ve got!” This had to be repeated and the 3’rd Officer was sent sprinting aft to the engine-room to ensure that this was done.

We were approaching the quay far too fast and a tugboat was moored right in our path. Somehow it’s master saw the danger and got away in the nick of time. The Captain ordered the 1’st Mate to drop anchor, which he succeeded in doing more rapidly than ever before. It happened to snag on a massive rock, we later saw, and helped pull up the vessel before it cut into the quay, where it would have severed pipelines that were filled with high octane benzene. The whole port facility would have gone up in a massive explosion had the ship not finally pulled up only a few feet from the quay. However, the impetus caused it to slam sideways into the quay, which partially ruptured the riveted plates on the side tanks and caused a quite serious leakage of oil cargo. This was the reason for our return to Europe, for Rotterdam was then the nearest or best place having the repair facilities required for this.

One final scene I recall from M/S London Glory. Just before the Company Superintendent was to inspect the ship, a staggering drunk and swearing Chief Engineer watching heavy fuel oil overflow spurt up several meters from the ullage pipes in front of the poop, showering the deck from the overfull bunker tanks, the loading of which he was supposedly supervising. I travelled on the homeward ferry from Hook of Holland together with the Third Officer and the 28-year old ‘Old Man’, the Master himself. The poor chap swore privately about this - his first command - in parting and avoided looking at its rust-streaked paint-work and untarred decks which a 'go-slow' action by the recalcitrant Indian crew had caused. News of his failed confrontation with the previous crew had surely been passed on to the replacement crew, who had probably also punished him for his mistrust of them all. On the Channel crossing I saw him getting drunk for the first time.

When the Personnel Officer met us at Liverpool Street Station and asked me how I had liked my first trip, I asked him whether it was possible for me to leave the sea. He suggested I go on leave and discuss my feelings after that. So, after two months on leave living partly at the hospital where my mother worked and partly with some friends of hers, I felt I had to agree that I would give it another try despite all. It remained unclear to me whether I could end my apprenticeship and without paying compensation to the Company... money we simply did not have.

LONDON PRIDE.
©WSS

Aboard the “M/S London Pride” 1955/6

Before I was able to escape the loneliness of the sea, I sailed on a second voyage which took me to the Far East, where my previous ship had also taken me for several months. At Balikpapaan in Borneo yet again, two things occurred that mystified me greatly, the first really striking and important coincidences in my life that I recall. At that time I lived for guitar music, more particularly for that of the so-called 'wizard of the guitar', Les Paul. Not so long before I had broken my only remaining B-string, so I had to replace it in Balikpapaan if I could. I had been ashore there before and it was rather unpleasant, very strange and could be dangerous for whites, due to terrorists. Yet playing the guitar was my only solace, in which I could forget my plight of being on what seamen call 'an unhappy ship'.

The Radio Officer and I were fortunate in being given a lift in a lone jeep. Its young driver agreeably took us wherever we wanted. (He turned out to be chief of the local anti- guerrilla force). On the main street was a Chinese bazaar built of poles, rattan and corrugated iron and filled with the most eye-confusing jumble of incongruent articles, from Arrow shirts to corned beef, ivory-inlaid boxes to Dyak masks. An electric guitar string seemed too much to ask.

The Chinese owner insisted on a clear description of the object, whereupon he led me along aisles of silk sarongs, jade dragons and the like to where, from a network of aerial wires hung a solitary guitar string, attached to the wire by a clothing peg. It was a B-string! As if to underline my good fortune, it was of the same make I used, a Cathedral string. I asked for a full set, but that was the only one left!

The jeep-driver was most hospitable, taking us out for a meal to what he called 'a restaurant' in a thatched hut high up on stilts. He ordered meals for us by throwing his knife into the menu board, but whether it selected the meal by design or chance we never knew. He insisted that we return that evening to accompany him on a local tour of the area by jeep. The Radio Officer was keen to go and wanted me to go along, so I agreed.

After meeting him and some charming English-speaking Malays on a packet boat where we drank cool Anchor Beer for some hours on deck in wickerwork chairs under the stars, we set out. To our nervous surprise, it turned out to be a night patrol to keep a check on jungle guerrillas. This we learned after we were well on the way in the jungle when Mauser pistols were offered around. Our host, called Dan, who said he had fought and killed Japanese on the beaches as a boy, liked some company on these forays for he said he found them boring.

Some hours after midnight and with perhaps twenty miles of jungle tracks behind us, we approached a bamboo and plantain-leaf hut in a small clearing from where to my amazement and joy could be heard the strains of one of Les Paul and Mary Ford's latest releases, which I had not heard since leaving England. It was a 78-r.p.m. record played on a wind-up gramophone. Moreover, we realised that we had clearly been expected too, being welcomed like luminaries with respectful and very friendly hospitality. An old man explained that it was the only Les Paul record they had as he played it for me once again. Unless I'm much mistaken, this was a family of Indians, for there were many in Indonesia at that time.

One may think, as the saying goes, “coincidences just occur”! What was so special about this was that no two things counted more in my conscious scale of things at that time than Les Paul's music and my guitar. These incidents, trivial though they may seem to others, therefore lifted my spirits very considerably from what had to be the real depths of despair, anxiety and loneliness and gave an assurance of unseen power and mystery.

The young Radio Officer had befriended me for the first time that day too, and without his subsequent help in freeing me from that ship I might still be at sea. I had wanted to 'jump ship' ever since joining her in dry-dock in Rotterdam, so awful was the atmosphere and so unfriendly the officers, but that would have taken more money, information and self-confidence than I possessed. I had been led to believe that there was no way out of a Merchant Navy apprentice's indentures short of buying oneself free for a large sum. The Captain of this ship, the London Pride, was most unpopular. He was a strict and scowling old man on his last voyage who I did not dare to ask for help in leaving the sea.

The Radio Officer risked sending my letter directly to a friendly man in the personnel department of the Company, bypassing the Captain. We were on our way back to Europe for a repair, so I wrote virtually begging to be relieved from duty on our return.

Before reaching Rotterdam we went through the great hurricane of 1954 in the Bay of Biscay when large ships went down and many other vessels were lost together with 100 lives. None of the officers had ever seen such a fearsome storm. As the wind went on increasing in roaring violence and the seas came over the entire ship, including the bridge, I was called to the bridge-house to stand-by. What the stand-by was for was not said, but it was a time of real crisis and so the Captain wanted us all present rather than spread about in the accommodation decks below. The vast troughs hid everything from us and after the great crash of plunging down into the base of an on-coming mountain of water, some of which even towered up and over to break onto the bridge, the sky was hidden as the hurricane-lashed water submerged the ship. The groaning, riveted hull rode up again just in time to see the scene across the wave tops. I was thankful it was a riveted ship, for tankers that were being built with new welding techniques were the most prone to split up under extreme seas, if particularly when only in ballast. The screaming gale whitened the entire sea with a moving lace-like surface, from crest to trough.

In the bridge-house, where the officers were silent and anxious, the Captain, who was the commodore of the company fleet and was on his last voyage before retirement, paced back and forth in patent anxiety which he seemed to make no attempt to hide. The Chief Engineer was called for advice about the speed and he arrived in a condition close to dead-drunkenness. The Captain asked him how he could drink at such a time, then actually broke into tears saying that the ship would be lost and us with her. S.O.S. signals had been picked up from many ships in distress near us in Biscay and a tanker had broken its back on the wave crests which already measured about half a nautical mile apart on our radar. The Chief gave the Captain a real piece of his mind about what to do with his ship in the vilest terms and with scathing despise for a fully grown man and a Captain to boot who broke down in front of his officers, a lad like me and an Indian helmsman! The sense of crisis this caused was evident enough even on the blank faces of the other officers.

Apart from the behaviour of the Captain, the furious force of screaming wind and shattering crashes of the huge mountains of waves had by this time made it evident to me that we were among ‘those in peril on the sea’. If I had never really asked for God's protection before, I certainly did so then! The frailty of all things human was patently clear and the priority of life I felt to be so too; to do my best to be good for the rest of my life in the hope that the divine power would protect me!

The peak of the storm passed but for three days afterwards no one could safely set foot on deck. At last I was sent with the other apprentice to measure oil temperatures in the tanks from the open deck. After hours of cold, filthy work I was suddenly lifted by a freak wave that nearly swept me overboard. Fortunately I had developed the seaman's 'instinct' of grasping a rail (“one hand for oneself, one for the ship”), which probably kept me from being lifted overboard. One hand still held the paper, soggy but readable, on which our precious temperature figures were listed. My mind had been thoroughly on that because of the wish to avoid our having to go through all that labour again, as would certainly have fallen to us apprentices. In the shower afterwards, however, my legs literally shook in an entirely involuntary fit of physical shock reaction. I realised I had been very close to the 'Great Divide'.

As we approached the widely-flooded and disaster-struck Holland, good news at last came for me. Instructions arrived by radio-telephone from London that the Radio Officer and myself were to be 'relieved' by new crew members at Rotterdam, much to my relief and the Captain's anger, which the Radio Officer risked by telling me the news himself. I had actually had no idea until then of my likely fate, but my intuition told me that the Captain would put every hindrance in my way that he could. Subsequently he literally confirmed that suspicion when in port he summoned me while he was in a drunken fit and bawled me out for everything he could think of. I had never said a word against him or to his face. My sin was doubtless partly that I had witnessed his funk, partly that I was unimpressed by what I had experienced of the sort of man the sea made of people.

Out of sheer spite, but in the name of seamanlike discipline, he set me to long and near-impossible menial tasks while I was still under command on his vessel, the completion of which he insisted was necessary before I could leave the ship. I had not done anything but decide to leave the sea and circumvent his paramount authority by my letter. When the time came, he had to let me go because the Company instructions were confirmed as unchanged. Captain Williamson and his First Mate were scathing in their comments about my leaving and that I would come to not good in life etc. and they went out of their ways to make life tough for me in the last week or so aboard while I was still under their command. A few weeks after leaving the ship I received the sad news from the friendly and helpful Personnel Officer that the Radio Officer, who suffered from a weak heart, had died. The good deed that he had done for me might have been heaven-sent. In addition, the Personnel Officer discovered a discrepancy in the Master's accounting of my pay and caused him to cover the missing balance, so I actually ended up with about $20 in my pocket.

They were soon just more new experiences among the welter of other passing days; days that were, despite everything, interspersed with the occasional marvels of earth and nature, of foreign parts and people in port-calls on the five continents, days that came and went leaving their marks almost imperceptibly on the keenly forward-longing mind of youth.

In seeing something of the world I had found out for myself that people of all races could smile and share something - that humans are really much more like one another than outward differences often suggest - whether in Providence or Palembang, Algiers or Adelaide. I learned how lack of language was not an impassable barrier and that, however strange or seemingly 'primitive' people were, human contact and understanding could naturally bridge the gap. I feel it was the subtle Hindu input that helped me to realise this, rather than the ideas of the British ships' officers. All this added to the sense of personal expansion and of becoming more 'a man of the world' in a literal sense.

Shipboard loneliness and great distances really did make the heart grow fonder and it added to the intensity of longings. I had to learn a good deal about how to live with myself when cast back on my own mental resources. I was a mere boy amid adults, though befriended by a few of them. Whatever else I felt about the ships' officers, both the good men and the others, I was above all sorry that they were left behind to their constant dreams of homecoming and the soul-dulling solace of alcohol. The life of a seaman in those days just did not leave proper room or time for family and friends.

'The Channels' is the expression of British seamen for a feeling of exhilaration mixed with the longing for home and a love of country, felt when at last entering the English Channel after a long voyage. That was before the Jumbo jet destroyed distances, and with them the intensity of the various experiences of being far away from home in space and time. From a ship in, say, the stormy Australian Bight, England was months away, even when the return route happened to be fairly direct. From there, home was like a mirage - somewhere one never gets to and hence seemed insubstantial... perhaps even no longer existent. One's imaginings about it may turn out to be false, even what one remembered may have altered, no longer be there.

Data:
London & Overseas Freighters 'M/S London Glory' -

Master - Captain John Dixon, South Shields
1st Officer Mr. Ashley,
2nd Officer Mr. John Mitchell, Wales
3rd Officer Mr. David Prince, Sussex
Radio Officer Mr. Booth,
Head Steward Mr. Williamson, Hull or Grimsby
5th Engineer – Larry Black, Falmouth
Ports of call from November 1952 till July 1953 in sequence:-
Liverpool, Glasgow, Liverpool , Manchester, Puerta de la Cruz (Venezuela), Willemstad (Curacao), ‘Henry Morgan’ Bay (Curacao) Puerta de la Cruz (Venezuela), Providence (RI, USA), Algiers, Malta, Trieste, Suez, Fao, Singapore, Balikpapaan (Borneo), Surabaya (Java), (at least two return journeys),Tarakan (British North Borneo), Balikpapaan, Plago (Sumatra), Singapore, Adelaide, Melbourne, Balikpapaan, Singapore, Colombo (Ceylon), Aden, Bahrein, Mena-el-ahmadi, Rotterdam.

London & Overseas Freighters 'M/S London Pride’ –

Master – Fleet Commodore Captain Williamson
Ist Officer – Mr. Markley
2nd Officer - ?
3rd Officer – Mr. Oakes (?)
2nd Apprentice – David Brown
Ports of call from September 1953 to January 1954 in sequence:-
Rotterdam, Mena-el-ahmadi (Kuwait), Balikpapaan (Borneo), Miri (Sarawak), Rotterdam.

Disclaimer: The above data and descriptions are to the best of my ability and memory, so I cannot guarantee that there are some faults here and there. My e-mail is rpriddy@online.no