hoping to make a complete record of the trip with his ciné camera. In the afternoons she went up to a friend’s house, where she treated the eggs that we were taking with us by plunging them into boiling water for five seconds, and then into cold. It was the first time that we had tried this method of preserving eggs, and by the time we had eaten the last one it was over two months old. It still tasted good to me.
Soon after the Games were over Britannia left, and, as Melbourne began to reassume her workaday clothes for the few days left before Christmas, the smoke from workshops, tugs, and launches came drifting up the river, smudging the white sail-covers and making black marks on the deck. For the last few days we moved into the entrance to a little yard at the end of the wharf, as our berth was required for the dredgers, which were coming up from Port Phillip Heads. We were separated from the rest of the wharf by some high iron palings, so that casual onlookers no longer came to stand above us, and this seclusion was most appreciated by Pwe, who now spent some of the day, as well as of the night, ashore. Some shrubs grew along the palings, and there she assiduously hunted sparrows, but the Melbourne sparrows were too smart for her. Fortunately no quarantine officials found her—though there are few ships’ cats who don’t take a turn ashore when they get the opportunity, and no one is very fussy about them, as long as they are not mentioned.
We had one or two visitors in our new berth, and one of them was a tall elderly man, in a town suit, and a black hat, but one glance was enough to see that he was no city man. He was a sailor, and he knew a great deal not only of sail but also of the Southern Ocean. ‘Well,’ he said when he left, ‘Good luck to you. I think you’re going to need all of it, and I must say that I’d like to see another 7 feet off those masts.’
We thought that all small ship passages, at any rate long passages, had an element of luck about them—so is there about most things that are worth doing. But if we had thought that it was just a question of luck whether we would arrive or not, we wouldn’t have attempted the passage. We were most certainly not in search of sensation, and we believed that we had a ship and a crew that were capable of making the passage under normal conditions. We knew of course that we might meet with bad luck in all kinds of ways, but as long as we were prepared, as far as was possible, for anything that might turn up, there seemed to be no reason why we should not overcome it.
‘What on earth do you want a year’s supply of stores on board for?’ someone asked Beryl.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘there is always the possibility that we might get dismasted, and then heaven knows where we might end up, and anyway the passage would take much longer than we had expected. We could probably make do for water, but I like to be sure that we have all the food we need.’
Australia was a good place to buy all kinds of tinned food, and besides tinned food we had potatoes, onions, and two sides of bacon, as well as plenty of oranges; and after the oranges were finished, we had tinned orange-juice or grapefruit-juice in almost unlimited quantity.
Although there is plenty of stowage space on Tzu Hang, we were so well stocked that Beryl began to think of creating more by getting rid of Blue Bear. Blue Bear had become a ship’s mascot, and John and I wouldn’t hear of it. He had been given to Clio when we first left England. He was a blue teddy bear, inappropriate and too big, but no artifice of ours could persuade Clio to part with him. When we were crossing the Bay of Biscay, and beating down against a south-westerly wind, with Tzu Hang close-hauled and sailing herself, Blue Bear, in oilskin and sou’wester, was lashed to the wheel. Through the doghouse windows we had seen a steamer come away from her course and steam up alongside to investigate. The captain came out of his cabin without his jacket, dressed in trousers and braces, to peer through his glasses, and others of the crew lined the rail. Blue Bear was obviously the centre of all interest, and when they drew away they seemed still to be discussing the composition of the crew.
He had sailed with us on every trip, lolling in one of the bunks, often with the cat and dog keeping him company, and now I found a more austere berth for him on the shelf in the forepeak, where he could still keep his eye on what went on.
There was one major difficulty to overcome before we left, and that was to get John to have his impacted wisdom tooth pulled out.
‘Not likely,’ said John. ‘He said he’d have to dig it out, and anyway it’s not hurting.’
‘But you must have it done, it might blow up on the trip.’
‘Not me. I don’t want to have a tooth dug.’
‘But John,’ Beryl said, ‘you sail all the way from Canada in that tiny boat, and now you won’t have a tooth out. I do believe you’re frightened.’
‘Too true,’ he said, with his usual disarming frankness, but in the end he agreed. After all there was a very pretty girl there to hold his hand. When we came back from a visit to Tasmania it was out, and John had a swollen jaw and a smug look.
Next morning I went to the Customs Office to arrange for clearance. I got into the lift and pressed the button for the appropriate floor. The lift started up and then came to a shuddering halt half way up. I tried to peer through the grille, but I was right between two floors. I thought that if I waited for long enough someone was sure to want the lift and I should be discovered without the indignity of bawling for help. After about ten minutes I heard an angry voice from below shouting, ‘You up there: what are you doing in the lift?’
‘I’m stuck!’ I shouted indignantly.
‘Well, stand in the middle, then.’
I stood in the middle, and the lift began to climb creakily upwards again. A few minutes later I was shaking hands with the Customs Officer, with my clearance in my pocket for the following day.
‘I’ll let the Customs launch know,’ he said, ‘and they’ll meet you at the mouth of the river and give you a check up as you go. I remember the last chap we cleared for Montevideo was that Irishman, Conor O’Brien, some thirty years ago. He had a ship with a funny name.’
‘Saoirse.’
‘Yes, that’s right. He had a beard and a yachting cap. He was a rum chap, but he was a real sailor,’ and he looked at me doubtfully.
I hoped that I might be half as good, but I knew that he couldn’t have had so good a crew.
A TUG whistled down the river. Beryl sat up in her bunk as if this was the signal that she had been waiting for. She pulled a jersey over her pyjamas and went aft to the galley. I lay in my bunk. I thought that it would be the last time for days and days that I would lie in my bunk with the ship still.
John was also in his bunk, a quarter-berth that he had made in New Zealand, aft of the galley and doghouse. He had separated it from the rest of the cramped stowage space below the bridge-deck by a plywood partition running fore-and-aft from the cockpit to the bulkhead on the starboard side. Whenever I tried to get into this berth through an oval hole cut in the partition, in order to get to the stowage space aft of the cockpit, I stuck, either with my head in and my stern out, or my stern in and my head out. John used to go in stern first like a wart-hog going into its burrow. Although he was bigger than I, but not taller, he did everything with an effortless grace, and could even get in and out of his berth with no apparent difficulty. It was snug inside and removed from the rest of the ship. It was his quarter—a small piece of privacy which was never invaded.
I knew exactly what was going on in the galley, without looking aft through the ship to where Beryl was sitting in the cook’s seat behind the dresser and sink and beside the stoves: an oil stove and a primus