Jack of Diamonds (90 page)

I wasn’t sure what, if anything, I’d need in Africa, but I visited Sam Ash Music in Brooklyn and purchased two sixteen-hole chromatic Hohner super harmonicas.

Four days later I was told the
Lossiebank
would sail that evening on the tide. I’d paid the $120 for my passage to Liverpool, and gave thanks that, at least during this crossing to England, I wouldn’t be lying in my bunk having nightmares about German torpedoes.

So, the die was cast. I stood at the stern of the MV
Lossiebank
, having waved farewell to the generous, pretty and tearful Stacey, and then watched as the old cargo boat nosed her way out of New York Harbour and began to roll gently on the Atlantic swell. As the Empire State Building receded, I wondered whether I would ever see North America again. I glanced down at my hand on the rail; it wasn’t a pretty sight. Perhaps I should have worn a leather glove to cover it, but then people would ask about it, which would lead to more explanations. Usually when anyone noticed my left hand, they didn’t comment. It was better that way. I’d learned from having a missing earlobe that explanations soon became tedious. I thought of Mr Leslie, who obviously enjoyed recounting the story of his underground mine accident, but I was different; I’d always preferred to grandstand from the keyboard.

‘Mr Reed, sah.’ I turned to see the owner of the voice, an immaculately white-jacketed Indian steward, standing to rigid attention and looking up at me. ‘Captain Irvine invites you for a drink in the saloon with the other passengers, sah.’

I followed him into the interior of the ship, noticing as I went the beautiful old-fashioned teak panelling in the corridor, and the heavy reassuring ‘thunk’ of the teak door as it swung shut behind me, in effect cutting me off from my past.

There were four other passengers at dinner: an American Episcopalian bishop and his English wife; and two American women who appeared to be in their late sixties, both ex-schoolteachers. The bishop had been invited to attend the coronation of the new queen, Elizabeth II, and was taking an extended holiday prior to the ceremony at Westminster Abbey. The captain, a Lancastrian, proved to be a man of few words who left the conversational work to his first officer, Alastair MacIntyre, and another Bank Line officer called Peter Adams, who was hitching a ride back to the UK to take up a position on one of the company’s cargo boats. We proved to be, as the bishop’s wife, Mrs Shillington, put it, ‘a jolly nice lot’, although I saw very little of the other passengers during the daytime, which they spent playing bridge. At meals, they discussed the relative merits of the different bidding systems used in the game, the two Americans, not surprisingly, favouring the American system, while Mrs Shillington insisted the British system was superior.

The bishop, who started on his first glass of claret at midday, abstained from expressing an opinion on either system. By the time we gathered for a ‘sun-downer’, he’d finished his first bottle of claret and took what remained of his third back to his cabin after dinner. A chubby, greying and undistinguished-looking man, his claret nose made Mr Leslie’s look relatively normal.

I spent most of my time reading, or in the company of Peter Adams, another bibliophile and a keen amateur photographer; or ‘snapographer’, as he modestly called himself. I’d seen some of his photographs and they were a lot more than mere snaps. Apart from our love of books, we had the war in common and Peter proved to be excellent company, as did Alastair MacIntyre, when he wasn’t busy on the bridge.

The crossing was comparatively calm compared with my first experience of the Atlantic, and one day blended seamlessly into the next, as they often do on voyages. We arrived in Liverpool and I took the train to London, the name of a decent small hotel in South Kensington, recommended to me by Peter Adams, tucked into my pocket. Almost the sole purpose of my trip to London was to visit Foyles Bookshop to stock up on Penguins, the famous paperbacks that had been popularised in the 1930s, and were orange for fiction, green for crime fiction, blue for biographies, and so on. I quickly filled the large canvas bag I’d brought along and saved on weight and also a small fortune. I also bought a copy of
Gray’s Anatomy
and two large books on industrial first aid, and emergency first aid, to study on the voyage out.

A day later, Peter Adams phoned me at my hotel.

‘Jack, I’ve been appointed first officer on the
Roybank
, a cargo ship, sailing to Lobito in Angola, and assorted other African ports. She sails in four days’ time – interested?’

‘Definitely.’

‘She’s a nice ship, I’m sure you’ll be comfortable. Captain Paul Eggert’s the man in charge . . .’

I jotted down the address of the Bank Line head office in London where I could purchase my passage.

My remaining three days in London I spent looking around. To my surprise, there was still a lot of bomb damage, and Londoners, generally speaking, looked drab and disconsolate in the late winter gloom. Perhaps it was the food rationing, which continued to make their lives joyless. They’d been required to show their stiff upper lips for way too long, and I couldn’t help wondering whether winning the war was all we’d thought it would be. The British certainly didn’t seem to be reaping any rewards for their courage and grit, and there was no sign of the brashness and optimism epitomised by Sammy’s pink Cadillac convertible. Instead of getting back on their feet, it seemed, they were still making an effort to rise from their knees. London in 1953 was a long way from the brassy neon-lit greedy opportunism of Las Vegas or the bright confidence of New York.

At one stage on the crossing from America I’d toyed with the idea of ‘disappearing’ in England, but the dull weariness of London had left me depressed and I thought it unlikely that the British wanted jazz and blues harmonica playing to cheer them up. Africa, here I come.

My fellow passengers on the SS
Roybank
were an Ethiopian diplomat, Berihun Kidane, and his wife, Fenet, who were on their way to Lagos, where he would take up his position as the new consul at the Ethiopian consulate in Abuja. The former consul had died suddenly of a heart attack and Berihun was being transferred from London. It was technically a promotion, but, as Fenet pointed out, a doubtful one. When I’d suggested that I didn’t know diplomats usually travelled by cargo boat, she’d admitted that she had a fear of flying and the
Roybank
had been the first ship leaving for Nigeria. They were a handsome young couple and she was an absolute stunner.

I confess my ignorance at the time. All I knew about Ethiopia was that it was originally known as Abyssinia and was situated somewhere left of the Red Sea, occupying part of the Horn of Africa. What I learned from Fenet was that the ruling class, she and her husband obviously among them, came from the ancient Amhara people of the central highlands. Moreover, they are often very tall – she must have been close to six feet, elegant and slim as a pencil. Fenet told me she could trace her ancestry back to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Like most people, I knew a little about the queen from Bible references, but I’d never considered her appearance. Now, looking at Fenet, I suddenly understood that she could well have been a beauty.

As we steamed south, the weather seemed to control its temper and the air over the Bay of Biscay was warm. By the time we reached Gibraltar, we were in our shirtsleeves and the ship’s officers had donned their white shirts and shorts. As we sailed down the African coast, the weather remained benign, the nights dream-like as the familiar northern stars changed to strange new southern constellations.

We went ashore in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, and I was surprised to see how European the whitewashed colonial buildings were, and how smart – what is it about the French? Freetown, in Sierra Leone, on the other hand, was more like I’d imagined Africa, and was just as Graham Greene described it: a place where nothing happened in a hurry. Lots of black folk stood around, stray dogs panted in the blazing sun, and a few rattling pre-war trucks hooted at nothing in particular. I wished Joe could see the huge cotton tree under which freed slaves had gathered in the 1790s. Curiously, fruit bats slept in the tree during the day, seemingly undisturbed by the noise or traffic.

When we arrived in Lagos, in Nigeria, it was pouring rain, which lasted the entire time we were in port. A black Citroen awaited Berihun and Fenet, but before going ashore, Fenet handed me a letter.

Jack, we’ve loved your company on the voyage. This is to my father in Addis Ababa and is on diplomatic letterhead. If you ever come to Ethiopia, look him up. Who knows, we may be back home as well. Hopefully this posting isn’t forever and we’ll meet again.

I looked up at her, thinking,
Oh, God, why aren’t you single!
‘Surely you won’t be there forever?’ I said.

‘Ah, Jack, it depends on our families.’ She smiled. ‘If we’re all in favour with the emperor, good things will flow from on high; if not, Lagos may well be where our future children grow up.’ She spoke with a very posh English accent, and she, in particular, had been good company. I knew she’d fled Ethiopia at the age of five with her family and other elite Amhara families, following His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, King of Kings, Emperor of Ethiopia, Elect of God. Her family had gone into exile after the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1936 and settled near the emperor in Bath, in southern England, where Fenet received an excellent education, culminating in a first-class degree from Cambridge. I forget her husband’s exact credentials, but they were just as impressive.

Peter Adams was as enchanted by Fenet as I was, and couldn’t stop taking photographs of her. I implored him to send me one and gave him the address of Mr Coetzee, the personnel manager of the Luswishi River Copper Mine, where I presumed I’d end up. It’s not often you want to keep a picture of a woman you can never have and may never meet again, but she was
that
good-looking, and I think I was missing Bridgett badly. I wished now, too late, that I had asked her for a photograph to console me through the next part of my life, which Mr Leslie had indicated would be a sexual desert.

In the three days we were in port in Lagos, I didn’t venture ashore. Peter Adams claimed it was one of the few places on earth where he hadn’t taken a bundle of photographs, and described the mangrove swamps, biting insects, malaria, featureless buildings, lethargic people and endless rain and heat. ‘In other words, Jack, a shithole; the quintessential white man’s grave in Africa.’

We arrived at Lobito in Angola – my destination – at about seven in the morning. I’d done my Angola homework in the New York Library, swotting up on its history. Apparently the Portuguese had been in Angola since the sixteenth century, exporting African slaves to Brazil, another Portuguese colony.

I said my fond goodbyes to Peter Adams, who had been a generous companion and host, and stood on the wharf alone, with the
Roybank
towering over me and affording a little shade from the already blistering early-morning sun. It must have been around ninety degrees and the humidity one hundred per cent. Within a few minutes my starched white shirt was soaked and clinging to my back and chest. Jack Spayd, alias Jack McCrae and now Jack Reed, had arrived in Africa more or less intact, if you didn’t examine his left hand too closely.

The plan, as I recall, was for the ship’s agent to transport me to the town of Benguela some twenty miles along the coast, from where the weekly train was due to leave in a few days for Elisabethville in the Belgian Congo, situated as far from the east coast of the African continent as it was from the west. It would be a long journey back, should I ever wish to see the ocean.

I heard a toot and then a voice calling out, ‘Mr Reed, your car. Mr Reed?’ My escort had arrived. I turned to see a short, thin guy in his mid-thirties jump from yet another black Citroen. His skin was dark but not the really deep black I’d seen in the other African ports, and he wore a white shirt and linen suit at least two sizes too big for him. ‘I am late,
senor
; a thousand apologies!’ He adjusted his jacket by wriggling his shoulders, an action he’d obviously perfected, then hastened to open the rear door.

‘Not late,’ I replied, smiling. ‘Your name,
senor
?’ I asked, then added, ‘
Obrigado
, but, please, may I sit in the front?’ I had learned the word
obrigado,
Portuguese for thank you, from Peter Adams before going ashore as well as a few other useful phrases.

‘Luis de Silva,’ he replied, undecided about whether to close the door first or pick up my kitbag. I stooped to grab the kitbag in my right hand, then reached down with my left for the canvas bag of books. He must have seen my scarred hand because he exclaimed, ‘No,
senor
, I must carry!’ He looked shocked. ‘Front seat not good, spring not okey dokey, but if you want.’

A spring had pushed up through the worn leather, but I pressed it back into place and slid onto the seat.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said with a grin. ‘Big bum!’

He laughed, shaking his head. ‘No, no,
senor
, not big bum! You will see my fadder!’