of the Navy for good by VJ, he went to work in the arsenal – like everyone else. It remained for some years a large employer. All the while some kind of suffering was palpable in him, but unarticulated. You could see it in his arrogance, his ironic grin, as if he were perpetually biting back the pain of an inventive old-world punishment. Hating religion by the same token, he shrugged off any approach of emotion with grim clowning. He used that peculiar baby-talk larded with back slang, which tends to lurk in the Navy. By these means he cemented what must have been our conspiracy, for it was always to him that I took my troubles, right from a toddler. I regarded him as my special protector; like a joking Jesus.
I try hard to imagine him in his own youth, cycling up to the grammar school at Shooter’s Hill; I rode there myself in my teens, on the same bike. Though he left at fourteen and was sent soon enough to HMS Ganges at Ipswich, the ‘stone frigate’ hell-hole, where his own dad had once been an instructor.
I went through sixth form and qualified for my commission because the war had changed everything. There was technology and free education. And he told me in a gruff voice how I had ‘bloody gone aft’, how he ‘wouldn’t know how to speak to me no more’ – Ganges being to Dartmouth what the beast is to beauty. Gone aft! Dad, no one ‘goes aft’. It was wilful and jealous, this adherence to Jack Tar, who never slings his mental hammock but in a wooden man-o’-war.
Once I was commissioned, the eddies of career kept me in the northern hemisphere. Not so unusual. It is not all ‘See the world’. So it was perhaps not until seventy-nine that I first found myself south of the Line. That would have been with Zebra, the best destroyer I served in. I was in my late twenties, keen, good at my job, making progress.
We waved our flag at Cape Town and sailed east for Sydney on a goodwill visit, bound for Hong Kong. Oceans are all different. To trace the famous old trade routes of the roaring forties holds an excitement, a freshness. I enjoyed my baptism in those last-discovered waters, the southern seas. We hurried along to Australia at a steep clipper-fast run, and made landfall.
But just as we approached Sydney harbour a flotilla of small craft blocked our route. We had to hold off: yachts, cabin cruisers – even a few old steamers. They were making their way out past the Heads which mark the harbour’s entrance. It seemed as though the whole population had taken to the water, skittering and skimming about like a vast shoal haunting a reef.
The few Sydney folk who had not got themselves afloat were up there waving right on the bluff, or drawn up to the very edges in their cars – we could just make them out and just hear, dimly on the breeze, the noise of their horns mingled with the hoots and blarings from the little fleet.
In the midst of them stood a great white passenger ship dressed over all, proceeding out to sea. Every few minutes a blast of sound would come from her funnel across the swell, and the small fry would reply at once hooting back; and then tack or dart all the more.
We lined the wires; it was a sight. I turned to speak to the man next to me, and found Tommy Hall-Patterson, our Principal Warfare Officer. He said it was the send-off for the liner Avalon on her last voyage. He was a distant, rather isolated man; but a hard-nosed sailor, one of the old school. Hated to see a damn good ship go to waste, he said. ‘She’s the last of the three white sisters, the Avalon, the Armorica, and the Hispania. There goes what it’s all been about, Ralphie. You see that glorious thing, beside which this old tub, though I love her dearly, is no more than a rocket-launching sardine can sharpened at one end …’ He paused. ‘Look at those bloody lines. Isn’t she a vision?’
‘Absolutely,’ I said.
‘And what are we having to do with her?’ he continued. ‘Sell her to the damn Chinks. She’s off to Taiwan to be broken up. With all her bloody glad rags on. Makes me livid.’ He nodded towards her, and added some half audible snippet of verse. ‘You know that?’ He repeated it: Kipling – about the great imperial steamers in their white and gold liveries. ‘When you see the like of her, what do you think?’ His angry eyes turned from the Avalon and seemed to bore into me. I hesitated, not knowing what sort of reply he was after.
But he carried on: ‘For three hundred years, the Royal Navy has kept the seas so that a creature like that could slip off Clydebank and go anywhere she wanted without fear of bloody molestation. But there’s no more cash, boy. We’re all washed up. Men have given their lives for a cause and what does it amount to. The Jap, the Yank, the Russian, the damn German and the heathen bloody Chinee; these shall inherit the earth, and there’s not a thing we can do about it.
‘And if anyone has the balls to say nay,’ I can hear his cultured, old-fashioned voice even now, ‘if anyone questions the damn carve-up, Ralphie, why then it’s all hell and four-minute warnings. Short and curlies, eh? No one can move a damn muscle, for the awful poise of the balance. If poor old Britannia dares draw the line again what a bloody flap there’d be. Before you know it an unstoppable escalation, some idiot politician presses the button, and the lot of us gone up for good. You and I, Ralph, will never see active service. Have you grasped that? Lucky, are we? By God, I’d give anything for a crack at someone about this.’ He indicated the Avalon. ‘But the bastard politicians will cut us, and cut us, and cut everything down to the bloody bone. No merchant fleet left and nothing to defend.’
His fist tightened on the wire before him. ‘But we never lost a war, did we? Battle or two maybe, but we never lost a war. Eh? No Vietnam. D’you see? No bloody Vietnam. Well, I’ll soon be hanging up my hat, boy. But what about you?’
I had no answer. After eyeing me meaningfully once again, he went about his business. He was a good man; the sort you would want next to you in a crisis. Though of course he did not see active service; while I, of course, did.
But later that day, when we were all in a bar in Sydney somewhere, he made a point of buttonholing me and buying me a Scotch. He insisted he had confused the names. Two sisters only: Avalon and Hispania. Why he should have made a mix-up like that he had no idea. Two sisters only.
‘What?’ I said.
‘That’s all right then. That’s all right.’ And I cudgelled my brain then for the other name he had let slip.
But now glimpses of the Armorica burst softly around me like the artillery of butterflies. The barrage of memory takes its own time, its own slow motion of opening.
It had not been calm all the way. In fact, the Armorica was late because of the Bay of Biscay. Only a few days out from Tilbury and the English Channel, a huge winter storm had forced her to turn head on to the waves, and stand far out into the Atlantic.
‘It claimed in the brochure this ship had stabilisers,’ Barry Parsons said to the steward that lunch-time, when the motion first went beyond a joke. Penny overheard him trying to help his green-faced wife out of the dining-room. All morning there had been wry smiles and comments about sea-legs. An ominous pewter sky bottomed wider and lower, beaten out by a dinting wind. The lounges were suddenly deserted; the clamorous gloom penetrated the cabins themselves. But Penny had always reckoned herself the kind of person who would, when put to the test, make a good sailor.
In her neat blouse, her light jacket cinched at the waist, her long skirt of brown serge, and her court shoes which turned out slightly when she walked, she presented herself for lunch; though at the back of her mind she did worry that a ship made entirely of steel – it was, wasn’t it? – should be able to creak and grind so.
The dining-room was large, brightly lit and expensively panelled. But, lying between the outermost cabins each side of D deck, it had no windows or portholes – and therefore no reassuring horizon. She shared a table with the Finch-Clarks, and now their little girl. Children were permitted at lunch. It was a table at the edge of the dining area, where carpet gave way to wood. About her, the slightly built Goan waiters coped with chops, game, fish, soup, and deployed their twin spoons to serve level vegetables