Clifton Chronicles 01 - Only Time Will Tell (49 page)

Just as Harry was beginning to feel a little more confident, almost enjoying the experience, the captain said, ‘Not much more you can do tonight, Mr Clifton. Why don’t you go below and try to catch some shut-eye. Be back on the bridge by seven twenty to take over the breakfast watch.’ Harry was about to protest, when a smile appeared on Mr Bradshaw’s face for the first time.

‘Goodnight, sir,’ said Harry before making his way down the steps and on to the deck. He wobbled slowly towards the narrow stairwell, feeling with every step he took that he was being watched by even more eyes. One voice said, loud enough for him to hear, ‘He must be a passenger.’

‘No, he’s an officer,’ said a second voice.

‘What’s the difference?’ Several men laughed.

Once he was back in his cabin, he undressed and climbed on to the thin wooden bunk. He tried to find a comfortable position without falling out or rolling into the wall as the ship swayed from side to side as well as lurching up and down. He didn’t even have a wash basin to be sick in, or a porthole to be sick out of.

As he lay awake, his thoughts turned to Emma. He wondered if she was still in Scotland or had returned to the Manor House, or perhaps she’d already taken up residence at Oxford. Would Giles be wondering where he was, or had Sir Walter told him he’d gone to sea and would be joining the
Resolution
the moment he landed back in Bristol? And would his mother be wondering where he could be? Perhaps he should have broken her golden rule and interrupted her at work. Finally, he thought about Old Jack, and suddenly felt guilty when he realized he wouldn’t be back in time for his funeral.

What Harry couldn’t know was that his own funeral would take place before Old Jack’s.

52

H
ARRY WAS WOKEN BY
the sound of four bells. He leapt up, hitting his head on the ceiling, threw on his clothes, squeezed into the corridor, shot up the stairwell, ran across the deck and bounded up the steps on to the bridge.

‘Sorry I’m late, sir, I must have overslept.’

‘You don’t have to call me sir when we’re on our own,’ said Bradshaw, ‘the name’s Tom. And as a matter of fact, you’re over an hour early. The skipper obviously forgot to tell you it’s seven bells for the breakfast watch, and four for the six o’clock watch. But as you’re here, why don’t you take over the wheel while I take a leak.’ The shock for Harry was to realize that Bradshaw wasn’t joking. ‘Just be sure the arrow on the compass is always pointing sou’-sou’-west, then you can’t go far wrong,’ he added, his American accent sounding more pronounced.

Harry took the wheel with both hands and stared intently at the little black arrow as he tried to keep the ship ploughing through the waves in a straight line. When he looked back at the wake, he saw that the neat straight line Bradshaw had achieved with such apparent ease had been replaced by the sort of curves more associated with Mae West. Although Bradshaw was only away for a few minutes, Harry had rarely been more pleased to see anyone when he returned.

Bradshaw took over and the uninterrupted straight line quickly reappeared, although he only had one hand on the wheel.

‘Remember, you’re handling a lady,’ said Bradshaw. ‘You don’t cling on to her, but gently caress her. If you can manage that, she’ll stay on the straight and narrow. Now try again, while I plot our seven bells position on the daily chart.’

When one bell rang twenty-five minutes later and the captain appeared on the bridge to relieve Bradshaw, Harry’s line in the ocean may not have been entirely straight, but at least it no longer appeared as if the ship was being steered by a drunken sailor.

At breakfast, Harry was introduced to a man who could only have been first engineer.

Jim Patterson’s ghostly complexion made him look as if he’d spent most of his life below decks, and his paunch suggested he spent the rest of the time eating. Unlike Bradshaw, he never stopped talking, and it quickly became clear to Harry that he and the skipper were old friends.

The Chinaman appeared, carrying three plates that could have been cleaner. Harry avoided the greasy bacon and fried tomatoes in favour of a piece of burnt toast and an apple.

‘Why don’t you spend the rest of the morning finding your way around the ship, Mr Clifton,’ suggested the captain after the plates had been cleared away. ‘You could even join Mr Patterson in the engine room and see how many minutes you survive down there.’ Patterson burst out laughing, grabbed the last two pieces of toast and said, ‘If you think these are burnt, wait until you’ve spent a few minutes with me.’

Like a cat that has been left alone in a new house, Harry began stalking around the outside of the deck as he tried to become familiar with his new kingdom.

He knew the ship was 475 feet long with a 56-foot beam and its top speed was fifteen knots, but he’d had no idea there would be so many nooks and crannies that undoubtedly served some purpose which, given time, he would learn. Harry also noticed there wasn’t any part of the deck the captain couldn’t keep a watchful eye on from the bridge, so there was no chance of escape for an idle seaman.

Harry took the stairwell down to the middle deck. The aft section consisted of the officers’ quarters, amidships was the galley, and forward was a large open area of slung hammocks. How anyone could possibly sleep in one of those was beyond him. Then he noticed half a dozen sailors, who must have come off the dog watch, swaying gently from side to side with the rhythm of the ship and sleeping contentedly.

A narrow steel stairwell led down to the lower deck, where the wooden crates that held the 144 Raleigh bicycles, a thousand cotton dresses and two tons of potatoes were all safely secured, and wouldn’t be opened until after the ship docked in Cuba.

Finally, he descended a narrow ladder that led to the boiler room, and Mr Patterson’s domain. He heaved open the heavy metal hatch and, like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, marched boldly into the fiery furnace. He stood and watched as half a dozen squat, muscle-bound men, their vests soiled with black dust, sweat pouring down their backs, shovelled coal into two gaping mouths that needed to be fed more than four meals a day.

As Captain Havens had predicted, it was only a few minutes before Harry had to stagger back into the corridor, sweating and gasping for breath. It was some time before he recovered enough to make his way back up on to the deck, where he fell on his knees and gulped in the fresh air. He could only wonder how those men could survive in such conditions and be expected to carry out three two-hour shifts a day, seven days a week.

Once Harry had recovered, he made his way back up to the bridge, armed with a hundred questions, from which star in the Plough points to the North Star, to how many nautical miles the ship could average per day, to how many tons of coal were required for . . . The captain happily answered them all, without once appearing exasperated by the young fourth officer’s unquenchable thirst for knowledge. In fact, Captain Havens remarked to Mr Bradshaw during Harry’s break that what impressed him most about the lad was that he never asked the same question twice.

During the next few days, Harry learnt how to check the compass against the dotted line on the chart, how to gauge wind direction by watching seagulls, and how to take the ship through the trough of a wave and still maintain a constant course. By the end of the first week, he was allowed to take over the wheel whenever an officer took a meal break. By night, the captain taught him the names of the stars, which, he pointed out, were every bit as reliable as a compass, but he confessed his knowledge was limited to the northern hemisphere as the
Devonian
had never crossed the equator in all her twenty-six years on the high seas.

After ten days at sea, the captain was almost hoping for a storm, not only to stop the endless questions but also to see if there was anything that could throw this young man off his stride. Jim Patterson had already warned him that Mr Clifton had survived for an hour in the boiler room that morning and was determined to complete a full shift before they docked in Cuba.

‘At least you’re spared his endless questions down there,’ remarked the captain.

‘This week,’ responded the chief engineer.

Captain Havens wondered if a time would come when he learnt something from his fourth officer. It happened on the twelfth day of the voyage, just after Harry had completed his first two-hour shift in the boiler room.

‘Did you know that Mr Patterson collects stamps, sir?’ Harry asked.

‘Yes, I did,’ replied the captain confidently.

‘And that his collection now numbers over four thousand, including an unperforated Penny Black and a South African triangular Cape of Good Hope?’

‘Yes, I did,’ repeated the captain.

‘And that the collection is now worth more than his home in Mablethorpe?’

‘It’s only a cottage, damn it,’ said the captain, trying to hold his own, and before Harry could ask his next question, he added, ‘I’d be more interested if you could find out as much about Tom Bradshaw as you seem to have wormed out of my chief engineer. Because frankly, Harry, I know more about you after twelve days than I do about my third officer after three years, and until now, I’d never thought of Americans as being a reserved race.’

The more Harry thought about the captain’s observation, the more he realized just how little he too knew about Tom, despite having spent many hours with him on the bridge. He had no idea if the man had any brothers or sisters, what his father did for a living, where his parents lived, or whether he even had a girlfriend. And only his accent gave away the fact that he was an American, because Harry didn’t know which town, or even state, he hailed from.

Seven bells rang. ‘Would you take over the wheel, Mr Clifton,’ said the captain, ‘while I join Mr Patterson and Mr Bradshaw for dinner? Don’t hesitate to let me know if you spot anything,’ he added as he left the bridge, ‘especially if it’s bigger than we are.’

‘Aye aye, sir,’ said Harry, delighted to be left in charge, even if it was only for forty minutes, although those forty minutes were being extended each day.