On arrival in London the chief and I parted company and I made my way across to Paddington where I boarded the train and settled in for the journey to Sharpness in Gloucestershire. Sitting opposite me was a young female American tourist heading for Stratford-upon-Avon. She was a pleasant girl, not what you’d call outstandingly attractive but nice enough in her own way, and quite the intellectual too: well spoken, and studying English literature at an American university. She was a mine of information about Shakespeare, of whom I’m sorry to say I knew nothing except that he was dead. After a fairly lengthy and passionate monologue from her about her idol, the conversation turned to life in general and we compared life in Britain to life in America as the late-summer green Wiltshire countryside flashed by. We were getting on very well; in fact, we were getting along so well that we paused our conversation to engage in some frantic sex in the train toilet. On our return we picked up the conversation as if nothing had happened until it was time for us to change trains. It was one of those pleasant little interludes that doesn’t happen very often in life, but when it does, makes it worth living.
The Singularity had already made the local papers and TV news before I arrived, with two Tunisian stow-aways being discovered onboard. Apparently they had been hiding in the ship’s fo’csle (the pointy front bit). We ended up sitting at Sharpness docks for three days. It was tedious. Sharpness was like a miniature version of Ming-Ming: some docks, a few houses, and a pub—although unlike Ming-Ming the pub was quite pleasant. But I was a young man and I wanted action, and action was not something I was going to get in Sharpness—stuck as it was in the middle of nowhere! Instead I had to settle for wandering aimlessly around the docks while waiting for the pub to open, or spend time and money talking to my girlfriend on a public phone.
Eventually the ship was fully laden with cattle feed and set out for Seville in Spain, the main city of Andalusia. After a quiet trip across the notorious Bay of Biscay, the ship arrived at the mouth of the Rio Guadalquivir, and began the fairly lengthy 50-mile river passage to Seville. It was late August and Seville was hot. It was hot when we arrived at the river mouth, and as we travelled upstream it only got hotter until it was over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit outside and even hotter in the engine room. We arrived in the late afternoon, tied up, and began discharging immediately. I would liked to have sampled the apparently excellent nightlife of Seville, but unfortunately a large crack had appeared in the main engine rear exhaust uptake and had almost gone around the entire circumference. It was blowing diesel fumes into the engine room and needed urgent repair, so we had to get that section out and have it sent ashore for specialised welding. We then had to wait for it to arrive back and refit it. We also had to remove the crankcase doors and inspect the crankshaft because the engine had suffered a crankcase explosion while entering Barcelona on a previous trip. That took care of most of the night. The chief, who was an OK sort of a bloke, if a little arrogant, gave me the next day off, but the ship was unloaded in one day and then out, so all I had time for was a walk around town, where I managed to pick up a few souvenirs. That was it! Then we were off.
From Seville the ship headed north to Rouen in France, where it arrived on the 27th of August after a pleasant few hours river journey up the Seine from Le Havre. As with Seville, we spent little time in Rouen, but it seemed nice enough for a place that had virtually been obliterated in the war. The ship was sailing at around midnight, so although some of us did manage to get ashore and have a few drinks, there wasn’t too much else that we could get up to. After a brief visit to a fun fair and a few bars we crossed the bridge over the River Seine and set off for a place called Ghazaouet in Algeria.
We were having good luck with the Bay of Biscay: our third crossing and still no rough seas. We passed through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean and briefly stopped for bunkering and supplies at Ceuta before continuing to our destination. Then the wait began. We had arrived off Ghazaouet on September 3rd, but didn’t enter until the 10th. In the meantime we sat at anchor, and as any seaman will tell you sitting at anchor is about the most boring thing you can do. Hours feel like days, days like weeks. You are going nowhere, there is little you can do by way of maintenance in the engine-room as it has to be ready to sail at a moment’s notice, and there was no TV. So I spent my time up on the monkey island getting a suntan and having my sexual organs slowly rendered sterile by the ship’s radar. One day while reading Spike Milligan’s wartime memoirs I fell asleep sunbathing with the book covering part of my face. I woke up some two hours later extremely sunburned: red, except for the outline of the book. I was a laughing stock.
Eventually a berth was free, we started the engine and a short while later tied up alongside. Ghazaouet is a small Algerian town set in a fairly barren North African landscape. On the horizon stands the Atlas Mountains, beyond which lies the vast hot, dry expanse that is the Sahara Desert. We found very little by way of entertainment in the place: there were a couple of small cafes where you could sip mint tea and smoke a pipe, and there was a small market. But that aside, the TV was awful and the whole experience was one of complete and utter boredom for a young man. The only small piece of entertainment was provided by the local dockworkers dropping a Bobcat into the dock while hoisting it ashore after clearing the last of the grain from the ship’s hold. It was while at Ghazaouet that I’d received notice that I’d got another job, and so I drafted and mailed my letter of resignation to the office at Greenhithe.
Finally, on the 20th of September, we left for Holland. We’d been at Ghazaouet a total of seventeen days…now why couldn’t we have spent that kind of time in Seville? The return journey to Europe was a pleasant one and on the 24th of September we arrived at Moerdijk on the River Diep about twenty miles south of the Europort complex. I took a cab to Rotterdam Airport and caught a small turboprop aircraft back to Heathrow.
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