and the bloody hard world it had been. Mr Chaunteyman brought gifts and opened him up. Week by week I would hear something shocking: my dad’s own mutinous anger leaking for the first time into words.
But the change in my mother I felt through my skin. Erica began to dress as young as she was, and to wear her blonde hair in the latest film styles. She hummed about the house and bought flowers instead of winkles from Woolwich market. Her make-up was on all the time: while she vacuumed, or while she hung the washing on the haul-up clothes-horse over the bath. She nagged my father for a gramophone. Two or three times a week she escaped by trolleybus to the pictures.
Mr Chaunteyman stirred his tea and rolled his eye. Erica was very pretty. Therefore, even when I thought of our sooty house and examined the likelihood of the officer and the shorthand typist, I saw nothing preposterous in the courtship – that he should have gone to these lengths. The risks, the adventure, the distance. Love had been sanctioned by the movies, by television. I was, in a curious way, thrilled. Besides, she had engaged my complicity.
And it was only one week before this storm that I had deliberately packed a selection of items into a miniature blue suitcase – stealthily in my bedroom by nightlight, right under the knot board. Ready for the flit, and its consequences. I too was infatuated with him.
A dry blow. I learned to tighten my stomach against the fear, gritting it out.
And of the blue suitcase? ‘God gave the frog legs to swim with. And hop,’ said Mrs Trevor. I would gaze out of the dull schoolroom to where the dirty clouds rolled by, until her Welsh tones reclaimed me. ‘Now by the way, you children, I hope you all say your prayers every night. Have you finished listing your amphibians, you, that boy at the back? Is there anybody here who doesn’t say their prayers?’
‘God get me out of this’ were the words that came to mind. Childhood, we had been told, was magical.
‘Chairs on desks, hands together, eyes closed. Vespers, ready!’
Now the day is over
Night is drawing nigh;
Shadows of the evening
Steal across the sky.
My benighted personal devotions were a mishmash: ritual, obscure, a touch orgiastic – I was ashamed of the scenes in which Mr Chaunteyman’s image became entangled. They were in a way taboo, involving the I-Spy Book of the Wild West, the things in the blue suitcase, and a picture torn from a magazine.
The blue suitcase was not an article of ordinary luggage. When the time came to up-anchor, my proper things were carried in proper containers. The blue suitcase was almost, but not quite, a toy. I could think of no adult use for it: just too small for overnight, just too deep for documents. So it had ended up in my bedroom, where its contents worked my worship. All the more intently since his coming.
And in this climate of mutiny what of my father? On a Saturday he might take me on the free ferry. Around Woolwich Market Square every building was the colour of soot. Then there was a widening, a vista, a dropping-away towards the ferry ramp road. Our bike wheels hammered on the cobbles and shocked across the old tramlines. We rode past the queuing cars and lorries. One of the three ferry boats was always mid-stream, paddling its flat dollop of a hull through the toxic gap between us and the opposite bank. Below the water-line, black; above it, a shade of bright nautical tan, soot-smirched, grease-stained. And the tub had two bridges, was double-ended. Her best features were her two thin smokestacks. They gave her a hint of Mississippi, which must have struck my father particularly.
‘Dave Chaunteyman, Ralphie. You get on all right with him, don’t you?’ We were wheeling our bikes on to the pedestrian section.
‘All right.’ I thought of my torn-out picture.
‘Like one of those smart gamblers, in’t he, boy? Like you see on the films.’
‘Yeah.’ It showed two painted lovers, kissing.
‘What they call a handsome sailor, eh?’
‘Do they?’
‘Now don’t give me any of that, you little bugger.’
There must have been something in my face. I had no idea why he was suddenly so protective of the man. We waited for the ferry boat to swing out against the rip, then went below.
‘Look at that lot, mate. D’you see?’ He always showed me the engines at work turning the paddle wheels. ‘Chunky, eh?’ Two huge steel rods shoved sideways out of the lower regions. Shaped like the cranks of my bike, though infinitely magnified, oiled and engineered, they looked like silver sea monsters who would at turns rise up and gnaw the drive. The assembly roared and clanked and hissed, and smelt of power.
‘Nothing to the big ones, though.’
I looked up at him. ‘You’re going to be all right, aren’t you?’
‘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