LAST SHIP

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 July 1943, Page 4

LAST SHIP

INCIDENTS "'AT SEA LIFE ON A TRAMP. THINGS TO REMEMBER. (By John Batten in the '-Manchester Guardian.”) It’s always the last ship that is the best you've ever known. And yet this trip we’re beginning to feel that there’s something to be said for our present home. True, she s a tramp, and so there are lots of disadvantages; and sometimes the old man gets a bit up in the air, but still she’s already taking the place of the best ship of all in our memories. Like lots of tramp ships, she’s dirty. That's one thing against a coal-burner. You can’t wear white clothes in the tropics because they’re white for only an hour or two. Everything you touch oi’ sit on is grubby. And often when you’re .standing aft cinders and ash fall on you from the funnel. So we wear the non-compro-mising khaki. She has no bathroom for the officers and men. We assume that her owners, too, have been accustomed to bathing from a bucket in their backyards, as we do on deck, but it’s no real hardship in fine weather so long as you don’t expect privacy. No one .gets a table napkin. We’re so short of cutlery that it's impossible for all the officers to have their meals at the same time, and the crockery is a rare collection from a dozen sources. But still we’ve a good cook, a Tynesider, who knows how to make even canned food tasty.

THE “OLD MAN.” The old man is a weighty proposition in more ways than one. His birthplace was Jarrow, but he’s a Scot by descent and accordingly has a somewhat dry sense of humour. Vie know that if we let him always lead the meal-time conversation everything will be all right. We talk the way we want to when he’s left the saloon. He weighs eighteen stones and after thirty years in tramp ships can still eat a good meal. So he’s a rare combination. Yes, he’s all right; no worse than many old men we’ve been with, better than some. As for the mate, whb was a champion free-style wrestler and once kept a pig farm, he’s a charming fellow, an unassuming, hard-working Tynesider ■who is never idle. On watch his fingers are always busy with ropes or canvas, as he fashions something for the ship.. He’s been in her four years now and knows her needs. So I could go on down the list through the mates and engineers, telling you how we get along together, managing surprisingly to be on speaking terms and still laughing at one another’s jokes after three months together in the ship, most of that time at sea. There’s no shore job where masters and men are herded together in a space of 400 feet long by 50 feet wide for 24 hours a day, and I doubt if they’d stand the strain if they were. But we manage.

SECRET OF CONTENTMENT.

I suppose the secret of our content' ment is that she’s what they call a happy ship. She’s pretty harmonious. We had a bit of discord earlier on. The African firemen, still with their tribal marks on their heads and bodies, fell out, and much bickering ended in a midnight fight in which one of them was knifed and no longer a source of trouble. They carried him into the saloon on a stretcher and patched him up, and no one was very sorry, for he’d been a regular nuisance. We’ll be putting him ashore at the next port. It’s best in any case for his own safety, and with a cut leg like 1 16 5 ' ie ’d never work again this trip anyway. Since then the shovels have scraped in the stokeholds without being drowned by shouting and argument, and the grimy black men who, the old man says, are “straight from the jungle” are happy at their hot work even when the engine-room thermometer rockets beyond the 120-degrce mark. The galley boy sits in the sunshine and peels a bucketful of potatoes for tea. and at six bells the. old man strolls from his quarters for his daily visit with the chief engineer, a rather glum Welshman, but he has some excuse for his bad temper because he has a bad stomach and is compelled to eat a boiled egg every day of his life. We begrudged him this until we knew the reason, and now we wouldn’t mind if he had two a day.

BOS’N AND OTHERS. Bos’n, who assures us many times a week that he had a £1,500 a year shore job before he came to sea and is studying for his ticket, bustles about in a pair of shorts while his men, having chipped every speck of dust off the ship, grease and oil the decks with a wonderfully sticky compound of fish oil and grease that takes weeks to dry and lands all of us on our backs at least once a day. Old Carl, who has been* at sea since he ran away from his home in Estonia forty years ago, rigs an'awning over his head in the crow’s nest. He uses an old piece of canvas and is wise, for up there where he can see the flying fish ten feet down in the water the sun blazes on him and at midday is 120 degrees hot. The helmsman, a deck boy from London, comes ruefully out on the bridge to see the S-shaped wake his steering has left astern. That’s the third mate’s way of showing him how badly he steers. He goes back io the wheel and tries harder to keep on his course. If you go on the fo’c’sle head, among the great indoor . winches where the breeze comes at you sweet and salt and unsullied by ship’s smells, you can hear the notes of a clarinet coming from a small ventilator. In the cabin beneath a donkeyman, a Negro, is practising scales and has mastered them so well you linger to hear them. Eight bells, lunch-time, and change of the watch. Fresh helmsman and lookout, mate and “Sparks,” and greasers and engineers. Clean black men go down the stokehold ladder, coaly ones come up and dip their grimy faces in a bucket of lime-juice. Things to remember, all these, in later years—the sunshine and blue ocean, the whirring flying fish escaping from our sharp bow, and the little domestic harmonies of music and washing and drinks at eleven a.m.