Doctor at Sea

Easter said, still leaning on the door,’ I would say this was an occasion for the medical comforts.’
    ‘Medical comforts? What on earth are you talking about?’
    ‘Bottle of brandy,’ he explained.’ It’s issued buckshee, like, for the hospital. You can get another from the Chief Steward if you indent for it.’
    ‘But I haven’t seen anything of this brandy.’
    ‘I usually keeps it in my cabin, Doctor. Dr Flowerday and I had an understanding about it.’
    ‘Is there any left?’
    ‘Almost half, Doctor,’ he said proudly.’ Dr Flowerday used to give him a glassful and talk to him, gentle like, as if he was a baby. Worked like a charm. Shall I fetch the bottle?’
    ‘Here they come again!’ the patient shouted.
    ‘Perhaps you’d better,’ I said.
    I gave him a tumbler of brandy and explained that the five green Alsatians were not really present, like a nurse soothing a night-scared child. After a couple of glasses and half an hour’s persuasion I had reduced the intruders to three in number, and to terriers of normal colour. I felt entitled to be satisfied with this. I left the patient sleeping in his bunk with the empty glass in his hand and went back to my cabin.
    ‘Seen many cases like him ashore?’ Easter asked with interest, collecting the remains of the brandy.
    ‘No. I have not. There seems a great difference, Easter, between the practice of medicine on shore and at sea.’
    ‘Funny you should say that. Same thing always struck me about the doctors.’

5

    IT is remarkable what spiritual contentment can be obtained from washing your own socks. I soaped a pair in the basin and hung them to dry on a line Easter had stretched across my cabin. I glowed with a modest sense of achievement. This was the first time I had been obliged to do any washing, which I had previously looked upon as an esoteric feminine function comparable with giving birth.
    The crew of the Lotus did their own laundering - even Captain Hogg, who appeared in the early afternoon on the strip of deck round his cabin with a bundle of white uniforms under his arm and a basket of clothes-pegs. The other officers hung their shirts over their bunks and smartened them afterwards in the bathroom with the Third Mate’s travelling iron. Down aft, the crew set aside Sunday afternoon for the laundry, when it was usual to see large firemen and deckhands dressed only in underpants and tattoos scrubbing their singlets with bar soap in the fire-buckets. The clothes were then strung thickly round the winches and ventilators and flapped round the stern of the ship like some fantastic signal.
    Drying was simple, for we had reached the Tropics and the ship’s company was in white uniforms. I had only to fix a white cover on my Company’s regulation cap, but the officers appeared unexpectedly one morning in white shorts and shirts like a crop of snowdrops. The other hands were less affected by the order. Easter changed his blue serge jacket for a white one, but the rest were permitted the informality of uniform usual in the Merchant Service and did no more than roll their dungaree trousers half-way up their calves and remove their shirts.
    ‘We should have been in whites two days ago,’ Hornbeam grumbled.’ It’s the Old Man’s fault.’
    ‘Why? What’s he done now?’
    ‘The old bastard sunbathes every afternoon and keeps us in blues until his knees are brown.’
    I felt I was becoming quite a sailor. I let my days pass uncaringly, carried away in the drift of the sea routine. In a ship everybody seems constantly to be getting up or going to bed. The watch changes every fourth hour, which brings one of the mates, warm from his bunk, to the bridge, and sends a couple of engineers scuttling down the complicated ladders into the engine-room and stokehold. As well as the officers, two A.B.s go on the bridge to take turns at the wheel, and a gang of greasers and firemen troop below. All this movement is set off by the ship’s bell on the bridge, which rings through each watch an arithmetical progression of half-hourly strokes.
    Members of the ship’s company who had no watches to keep - people like Whimble, Easter, and myself - all arranged their days round the after-dinner siesta. In the afternoon the whole ship died. All hands, apart from those essential for the running of the vessel, tottered away from the saloon table and, encouraged by a weighty meal and the noon session of gin, crashed gratefully into their bunks. This was