Doctor at Sea

on the African coast. There’s no more romance at sea than there is round Aldgate tube station.’
    ‘When are we leaving for home?’ I asked.
    He shrugged his shoulders. ’I couldn’t say. Maybe a week, maybe two. It depends how the cargo goes in. Once you’re in port the wharfies have got you, whether it’s in Cardiff or Calcutta. I heard from the agent today the boys might be cooking up a strike. That would fix us, right enough.’
    ‘I wouldn’t mind a pint of old English wallop out of the barrel just now,’ Archer said seriously. ‘or a bit of backchat with a Liverpool barmaid. You can have too much of these high-pressure floozies out here.’
    We sat looking miserably into our beer glasses, all suddenly homesick.
    ‘I reckon I ought to have married and settled down,’ Hornbeam continued.’ I nearly did once. I’m still engaged to her, if it comes to that. She’s in Sydney. Sends me letters and sweets and things. I see her about once every two years.’
    ‘I should have stuck to selling refrigerators,’ Archer said to me.’ I did it for a bit after the war, but I had to give it up. Your money doesn’t go anywhere ashore these days.’
    ‘You fellows don’t know how well off you are in the Merchant Navy,’ I told him.
    ‘The Merchant Navy!’ Hornbeam said, folding his hands on his bare stomach reflectively.’ It’s a queer institution. A cross between Fred Karno’s army and a crowd of blokes trying to do a job of work.’
    ‘There’s no security at sea,’ Archer added gloomily.’ Maybe it’s better than sitting on your fanny in an office till you drop dead,’ Hornbeam said. ‘Pictures every Saturday night and Margate for a fortnight in summer. Drive me up the pole, that would.’
    ‘Margate’s all right,’ Trail remarked, joining the conversation.’ I knew a girl who lived there once. Her father ran a shooting-alley in Dreamland.’

17

    IT was a fortnight before we sailed. A quiver of excitement ran through the ship with the fresh vibrations of the engines. The deckhands ambled about their work singing - not sea-shanties, because they heard those only occasionally, on the pictures, but anything they knew from ’She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain’, to ’Rock of Ages’.
    ‘All hands seem to be pretty happy,’ I observed to Easter as a man sauntered past chanting’ Every turn of the screw brings me nearer to you’.
    ‘Well, we’re going home, Doctor!’
    ‘But we’ve only been away a couple of months.’
    ‘Still, it’s always like this, whether you’ve been away two years or a fortnight. You gets a bit slap-happy when you leaves your final port.’
    ‘I think I can understand it. For most of them I suppose it’s only an attic in Liverpool or a dirty old house in the East End.’
    ‘Still, it’s home, sir.’
    ‘You’re right. Where do you live, Easter?’
    ‘Down in Cheltenham.’
    ‘Do you indeed?’
    ‘I lives with the old lady, ’he continued.’ She keeps a sweetshop down there. Getting a bit past it now, though. Well over seventy.’
    The idea of Easter having a mother was disturbing. I thought of him vaguely as climbing out of the sea on the heels of Venus.
    ‘Are you coming back next trip, Easter?’
    ‘I suppose so,’ he replied. ’I’ve tried it ashore. Done all sorts of jobs. Apart from the halls and the races, I’ve worked in pubs, laundries, hotels, fish-and-chip shops. Even done a bit of navvying. Sometimes I gets settled into something steady, but... well, you know how it is. I goes round to the public library and has a look at Lloyd’s List on a Saturday afternoon, and I’m finished. I think how nice it would be getting away somewhere instead of standing in a queue in the rain.’
    ‘I’m afraid I see your point, Easter. But perhaps you’ll get married?’
    ‘What, at my time of life? And after what I’ve seen of women? Cor! I’ve had ‘em all, I have - black, white, brown, and yellow. They’re all the same underneath.’
    ‘Do you read Kipling, Easter?’ I asked with interest. ’Kipling? He’s dead now, ain’t he?’
    ‘He doesn’t seem to be dead at sea.’
    ‘No, I don’t read much, Doctor. No time for books. Takes you all your life to keep going these days, don’t it?’
    We detached ourselves from the meat works and steamed slowly down the long buoyed channel along the shallow River Plate towards Montevideo and the Atlantic. From there we had a straight run home, broken only at the Canary Islands for