Acts of Mutiny (7 page)

‘All right? I should think so. What d’you mean?’

‘Oh, nothing. Just wondering. You wouldn’t understand. Come on. We’re nearly at the other side.’

Some instruction had been rung down from the bridge. You could see the bells that clanged and the two men stoking in the dark bowels. Sometimes he was like putty in my hands. I knew who Erica was with. I pulled him away from the engines to see the docking procedure and to watch the wooden paddles mill the water into a tainted foam. The smell came up with each blade like a mouthful of salty petrol.

‘What do you mean, wouldn’t understand?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Come ’ere, you cheeky little sod. You’ll get a clip round the ear.’

I pretended to dodge.

‘You and me, Ralphie, eh?’ he said. He caught me hard and clutched me to him so that it hurt. ‘You and me against the world.’

We rode off to explore the ships in North Woolwich: Victoria Dock, Royal Albert Dock, King George’s. Not many in. We were like two seamen prowling the wharves, looking for a berth, ready to sign on for some adventure. ‘It’s in the blood, Ralph. Handed down. A man can’t fight against his own nature.’ The rusty hulls towered over us, the rusty cranes towered above them. Hardly anyone was about. I would peer up the gangways to where the silent sailors lived. They gave nothing away.

So my father led me from tanker to tramp along the cobbled concrete, across the rusty crane tracks. Where we could not cycle, we lifted our bikes over heaped-up anchor chains and the great twists of steel hawser. The water beside us was green-black and scummed at the corners. The artificial terrain of this north shore stretched away to a hinterland of waste called Custom House. And westward now I knew the swinging road bridges were the connection to the East End and up towards the City. It was enemy territory for us over here, deprived, bombed out, desperately poor – my father called it ‘cannibal country’.

‘Come on then, Ralphie. We’d better go back now before they get wind of us. They’ll be after you, all right. They’d fancy getting their teeth into you.’

The forms of mutiny are legion. They are a gamut of crimes. After muteness, slowness to respond, and questioning an order, there is insolence. Say, swearing at an officer. But think also of whispering, spreading dissension.

Disputing the navigation is mutinous, so is complaining about treatment and conditions, combination, or circulating written material. Soon we come to the more fundamental notes: conspiracy, violence to superiors, striking sail – in other words, refusing to work. Insurrection, taking up arms, disclosure of secrets, communication with the enemy, incendiarism, murder, rebellion, seizure of the ship – the sequence swells to a crescendo – piracy, egalitarianism, the construction of an alternative and licentious marine economic under iron hand. And the ship is a famous microcosm, naturally; something of a well-tried metaphor. By this token, all crimes by another name are simply mutinies against the nation, which is doing its best for heaven’s sake, steering its lawful course.

So let all who sail in her bear in mind mutiny’s traditional punishments. They swell in sympathy – beating with a knotted rope’s end, caning with a rattan, the cat-o’-nine-tails, confinement, irons, gagging, the grampus, the gauntlet, death by flogging, death by hanging, death by drowning, death, death … Like an insistent drumming in the brain. Mutiny and Punishment are the systole and diastole, the Navy’s heart-throb.

Before we did the deed Mr Chaunteyman went away for two months. He flew places: he was
off to California in the mo-o-orning
, as they sang on the wireless. ‘What d’you want me to bring you, kid?’

I told him I wanted an Indian head-dress – and waited in an ecstasy of yearning. When he came back he brought instead a shrunken head and a three-stage plastic rocket that ran on tap water and compressed air. It was from Disneyland. You pumped it with its own plastic pump, and it would go up three hundred feet. But we had nowhere wide, open or spacious enough to try it out. Whereas in Australia … That word was now being breathed secretly between Erica and myself.

He also brought a rubber toad, and a model dinosaur. The hollow shrunken head was female, charcoal black, with long raven hair and a string to hang it up by. ‘Hey, Disneyland’s just wonderful. One day I’ll take you.’ And if I had been disappointed at all about the head-dress then my heart leaped up again: after Australia, the world.

My father still said nothing, seemed to suspect nothing. His electrical repairs, however, veered into chaos. As the season closed in he would sit at night as usual with someone’s television eviscerated on the back-room table. But in the blaze from the hearth, under the intense glare of his clip-on lamp, he sweated with frustration, and swore wickedly under his breath – because the picture would not hold still, the resonances would not be tuned, there was sound-on-vision, inexplicable ghosts, fireworking valves; even, one torrid winter evening, a cathode-ray tube catastrophe. Not the grand implosion, but a vicious glass scar cracking right down the screen’s face as the vacuum gave. And the radios fared no better. Hisses and untraceable dry joints bedevilled them. His storm was micro-electrical.

Though I understood nothing about his circuit diagrams, with their arcane signs and calculations, I felt their significances almost dance in my stomach. The power that ruled the world moved enigmatically – and I had begun to be convinced that by virtue of our enchanting visitor I, like my suitcase, possessed a core of magic deep inside me. The feeling persisted on the
Armorica
, under my seasickness.

Perhaps I had not made myself clear to Mr Chaunteyman. An Indian head-dress – an Indian head. He might have misheard. The head was extraordinary, in its own right. With a a fine nose and shrivelled ears, it had a grisly beauty. I would run my finger down its cheek, then turn it over and peer inside. Its smeared and gluey-brown interior looked quite convincing as skin. It had pride of place in the suitcase. I had read of the Amazon jungles, the South Seas, the Coral Islands, the Typee.

Our leaving had been a sudden stroke, while Dad was at work. I wondered now, to the throbbing wind, why I could recall no agonising, no regret, no attachment. Beyond Mr Chaunteyman I had no emotions. In fact, the more I examined the mental snapshots of home, the more I saw nothing but the dirty tidescapes of the river whose approaches I haunted. Once I had gone with another boy to look at the three-masted schooner that had come in to Greenwich all the way from Norway. Masts and wharves and the masts again of the
Cutty Sark. We
went under the foot tunnel, scared out of our wits that the Teds we had seen on the other bank would come down to meet us half-way. But we emerged unscathed. ‘Run away to sea?’ my friend said, jokingly. I had blushed. Then we rode back through Charlton along the riverside. What they call Mudlarks. Now my impressions remained of shadow along the wharves, and the astonishing mud laid bare by the tide. Of a filth hanging on to the timber baulks, fascinating, weed-dressed, under a fitful sunset.

We poor sailors have always been good with the needle. We can seam and pocket like invisible menders. Like flatfishes who flounce on to the seabed and take up its imprint, even the shingle’s detailed patchwork; we are good at matching appearances, and hiding them.

We sailors have always been the slaves Britons should never be. We sewed up our lips – you would never have known us complain, authentically, officially, of our conditions of service. Murmuring, after all, was mutiny; and punishable. Inarticulate as children, we cried only over food – or grog. And now I, overnight it seemed and with hardly a look back, was glad to be away. My Atlantic was a tantalising enigma, the gateway to something, hiding everything. My father’s betrayer, I made myself one with that great ocean – I had become that rarest and most serious of beings: a full-blown mutineer. And with my rebellious magic might yet regulate the forty-foot waves.

Joe Dearborn, the man with whom he shared his cabin, called Robert the mad scientist. Joe himself was one of those necessary phenomena who turn up uncannily on cue. If there had been any doubt as to
his
existence, Robert concluded ironically that he would have had to invent him. It was just his luck. Several days into the severe weather Joe was still laid low, but the word about curative teas with strange-sounding names had got about. In his case it was a preparation of the African Zizyphus tree – the original lotus. So the cabin steward claimed, winking at Robert the only hoodwink that was to get past his companion in the duration of the voyage.

‘Could you be a mate, Bob, and get them to send me another cup of this stuff? It does wonders. I wish I’d known about it before.’

Their cabin was very small. Robert, as lucky first comer, had secured the top bunk. Viewed from this vantage point it was nothing more, under a low white ceiling, than an assembly of cupboards and drawers faced with hardwood, a mirror, a sink, a porthole, and an angled, rattling door.

‘Ah well,’ Joe had said. ‘Maybe we’ll swap half-way.’

The only disadvantage to the arrangement was that whenever he wanted to go to bed to sleep or study, he had to climb a ladder past the wiry, living presence. In his top bunk there was a personal light, and a personal ventilator, and a curtain. But they could not insulate him.

‘I can’t see how you can do it. Take me, now. I don’t mind a good book; in fact, I’ve been quite a reader in my day. But it really does beat me how you can swot that stuff all the time, Bob. Do you honestly find it interesting, or do you have to force yourself? You do, don’t you?’

The trouble was that Joe was nobody’s fool, and so his comments were neither idle, nor ignorant. Effortlessly, good humouredly, they pinned Robert squirming. He had to take his room-mate very seriously, precisely for being so sharp – and such a pervasive force in the cabin, even when he was supine with seasickness. In fact, he
grew
by confinement – because he was always there. Many of Robert’s most basic functions had now to be experienced entirely within, so it felt, a Dearborn universe. He radiated outward from his bedclothes in innocent shafts of neighbourliness, bounced from the wooden surfaces, reverberated from the ceiling, mingled with the soft pulse and rattle of the engines, and reeked from certain drawers. It was a complex, wonderful thing. Robert hated it.

Joe had an ivory chess set wedged, open, on the locker top beside his bunk. It was very beautiful, oriental, with one army of combatants stained a bright, Chinese red, as if they were exotic food. It was designed for travelling: the little board contained within the box, and each square walled off with a delicate, carved, and partly padded barrier. So every piece sat always in silk-upholstered luxury. He had got it in Singapore on the way out.

Joe worked for a Kalgoorlie mining concern, and was going home via Perth. He was not Australian, but had been out there so long that he might just as well have been. And he had made good – enough to travel in a degree of style these days, and take his time. ‘Need a little bit of a holiday from Mrs Dearborn, Bob. Every couple of years. Not that I don’t … Ah, but you know how it gets. She’s an Aussie, herself, so she doesn’t miss the old country. But I do. And catch up with the old folks before they pass away. Little bit of business for the company. I reckon I owe it to myself by now.’

But he was the first person Robert had come across who glossed – or unglossed – the authorised version of emigration. It was a short time after their first meeting, while Joe was still standing. ‘Hoping to make a new life for yourself, are you?’

‘Yes I am, Joe.’

‘Poor sods!’ He jerked his thumb backwards to indicate the rear of the ship.

‘Who do you mean?’ Robert asked.

‘The folk in the stern. Packed in like sardines. Have you seen what it’s like?’

‘No. Are they?’

‘You wait till we get into the sunshine. Then you’ll see ’em. You can look over the end of the boat deck and see the whole steerage full of broiling Pommy skin, like chicken under a grill. Christ, it hurts your eyes to look at them. They think they’re at bloody Blackpool.’

‘That’s all right, isn’t it?’

‘Surely. Like our two gentlemanly governments struck a knock-down deal on Leeds and Manchester for a tenner a head. Two would-be lairds over a dram, Bob, what do you reckon: Menzies and Macmillan. “I’ll take any number of your Northern Whites, Harold. Any number.” “Good show. On the hoof, or carcass?” Or those folk who got bombed out of London and live in those little concrete sheds, what d’you call ’em?’

‘Prefabs,’ said Robert.

‘Yes, those things. Macmillan says, “Take ’em away. At last the invisible solution again.”’

‘What to?’

‘Poverty. Crime. Housing. The whole bloody class. Transportation, Bob. Only you cut out the cost of the irons. What do you think of that?’ He chuckled. ‘Men, women and children, done to a turn. You’d think they’d know better by now.’

‘By now?’

‘The poor never learn when they’re being done over.’

Robert found himself riled. ‘Why are they being done over? It’s a good deal, isn’t it? They’re not stupid.’ His own trip was company paid. ‘Just because people are working class doesn’t mean they’re any different from anyone else. I’m working class myself, Joe’ – whatever that meant – ‘I’m just lucky enough to … People think about it, talk about it. They know it’s bound to be a bit of a sweat that cheap. No one would expect a luxury cruise for ten quid, would they? Come on. But they’re prepared to put up with it for a month or so. Why not? For the chance. For the sake of a new … crack of the whip.’