On the 7th July 1980, almost four years to the day since leaving school, I collected by Seaman’s Discharge Book from the Mercantile Marine Office at Ensign Street, Aldgate, London E1 ready for my first trip at sea. After the excitement and camaraderie of South Tyneside I found being back in Shoreham dull and boring; indeed, had I not been on a cadet’s meagre salary I wouldn’t have gone back at all! Hanging around the place was driving me nuts, so fed up with waiting I decided to call Everard’s head office in Greenhithe. I was told that a ship was due back from South America by the end of the month and was set to return there. I could either wait for that or take something less interesting straight away. Eager to escape the monotony of Shoreham, and not really caring about South America anyway, I said I would take the latter, in which case, I was told, the MV Somersetbrook was discharging on the River Thames and I could make my way there immediately.
I couldn’t pack my stuff quickly enough before hopping on a train to Clapham Junction, then another across the familiar southeast London landscape to the River Thames at Erith where the Somersetbrook was moored at the Erith Deep Wharf. Lucky me…I was going to Archangel (Архангельск) in the north-western Soviet Union for cut timber. The taxi dropped me off at the end of the jetty and I made my way onboard where I was introduced to the chief and second engineers, given a cabin and told to settle in. The chief was a short, somewhat squat older Scotsman, grey-haired and close to retirement; while the second, in his forties, I thought looked and sounded like a cross between the actors Charles Bronson and Robert Shaw. My other engine-room accomplices were Ali—the Yemeni donkeyman—and ‘farting fanny’: the ship’s eight cylinder, high speed, four-stroke Ruston diesel main engine. As ships go it was on the small side and they had never had a cadet before, as a consequence they didn’t quite know what to do with me. Still, being informed by the second that a ship of this size “separated the men from the boys” certainly filled me with confidence. Lucky I wasn’t on the QE2 eh?
As the ship set off down the murky waters of the Thames estuary I was instructed by the chief to familiarise my self with the engine room, accessed via a bulkhead door in the accommodation block. It was hot and noisy, and smelled strongly of diesel fumes. The upper level contained the domestic hot-water boiler and the hot and cold domestic water pumps, and in a separate room were the two Ruston diesel generators and the power switchboard. On the lower level sat the main engine, the lubricating and fuel oil purifiers, the main compressors and receivers, standby oil and water pumps, and the ballast/bilge pumps. Finally there was a large reduction gearbox at the aft of the main engine on top of which sat another generator, driven off the main engine, known as “tail-end charlie”. “Tail-end charlie” supplied all the electricity needed by the ship when it was at sea and the engine at full speed. This meant that the other generators could be shut down when not manoeuvring or using the deck cranes. Built at the Cochrane yard in Goole, the ship was designated a UMS (un-manned machinery space) ship—which meant that the engine room could be left unattended. But there had been a few mechanical problems and so the chief decided to run a standard 24 hour watchkeeping regime. It was decided that I would do the 12 ‘till 4 watch with Ali, while the chief would do the 8 to 12 and the second the 4 to 8. The best thing about this was that Ali, being a good donkey-man, virtually ran the engine-room while I kicked back, drank beer, and did jack shit. Ahhhh this was the life!
I had some on-board assignments to complete for tech, but I soon ‘lost’ them over the side. Nothing was going to prevent me having fun! It wasn’t all plain sailing though: the worst thing about the Somersetbrook was the fact that it was a dc ship, and this meant that once the batteries had run out in the ghetto blaster there was no music. I always loved music and seldom went anywhere without it, but this was the day of the cassette tape and a few rewinds of your favourite tape soon rendered the standard manganese dioxide batteries of the day useless. After couple of days crossing an unusually calm North Sea, we sighted the spectacular Norwegian coastline where the dark, rugged, snow-capped mountains of the fjords met the azure waters of the North Atlantic. The ship followed the coastline deep into the Arctic Circle and a few days later rounded the North Cape (Nordkapp), just a few miles off its flat-topped, dark-grey snow-covered mountains. Thenceforth we were in the Arctic Ocean, specifically a part of the Arctic known as the Barents Sea. The Barents Sea is much calmer than the North Atlantic, calmer still as it becomes the White Sea. Most of the time it was like a sheet of glass and it was not an uncommon sight to see whales frolicking and breeching in the calm but cold waters. Another familiar sight was the periscope of the Soviet submarine sent to keep track of us off of Murmansk (Му́рманск): their main northwestern naval base. Eight days after leaving Erith the ship arrived at the mouth of the River Dvina. It was four in the afternoon and I went up on deck to take a look. We had picked up the pilot, but we were still some way off and land was not yet visible. I noticed, however, that the water was no longer the clear blue water of the Barents Sea but the deep brown water of a river that had run for many hundreds of miles through pine forest.
It was a dull, overcast afternoon and the smell of pine trees overpowering as the ship began its run down the Dvina to the port of Archangel. Initially the vista was one of pine forest and small islands in the river where the local girls would occasionally sunbathe naked, but as it approached the port the first of the giant sawmills came into view. It was massive: like no other sawmill I’d ever seen—a huge series of white buildings, covered in bright lights, blasting out clouds of white steam that hung in the still, cold air and stood out against the grey backdrop provided by the low cloud that filled the sky. It was easily the size of Shoreham power station and was followed by mile after mile of others, with their giant red and white hooped smokestacks reaching for the sky. Similarly the timber wharves stretched for miles and were stacked high with wood. I’d never seen so much cut timber! I’d also never seen floating logs on that scale either: huge log rafts being towed along the river by tugboat from the forest to the sawmills. Meanwhile dozens of ships, both foreign and Russian, were either at anchor or tied up alongside being loaded. Archangel was a busy place in season.
The USSR was not at all what I had expected. We’d arrived just as the Moscow Olympics was underway, but the Cold War was still in full swing and what immediately struck me was the propaganda; not theirs, ours! In Britain we were brought up to fear the Soviet Union because like its American ally, Britain was still running the ‘red scare’ campaign. The British media, both publicly and privately owned, had whipped up anti-Soviet hysteria to the point that we believed the Soviet Union to be a massive, ultra-modern, military machine, manned by rabid communists that was poised to over-run western Europe at any moment. The reality, however, was very different. Sure, there was some modern military hardware, but basically the place looked how I would have imagined a rural backwater of early Victorian Britain to have looked, not a late twentieth-century superpower. Whoever described it as ‘Upper Volta with rockets’ wasn’t far off the truth. And far from Russian TV zealously promoting communism overseas and whipping-up militarism and a desire to over-run the West among its people, it was running exactly the same scare campaign that the West was. Only on this side of the ‘iron curtain’ it was the Americans that were poised to invade just as the Nazis had done. It was the propaganda of defending the homeland, not invading other nations and it immediately gave me cause to reflect upon the ‘truth’ of what I’d been indoctrinated into believing at home.
Furthermore, far from the rabid communist zeal I had been expecting to witness from the Russian people, their general attitude was one of supreme indifference to everything except alcohol, which was consumed by just about everybody in massive quantities. I had never seen so many drunks, nor do I think will I ever see as many again. The Archangel drunk was no ordinary drunk: these people—and there were many of them—had drunk themselves into total and utter oblivion on ridiculously cheap vodka. They were unconscious on benches, clinging to lampposts, or just plain passed out on the street, yet none were ever violent or aggressive. The first words ever spoken to me by a Russian came from one of the Red Army guards placed at the bottom of the ship’s gangway inquiring about alcohol. They were: “Comrade…whisky?” Such was my introduction to the terrifying and highly efficient Red Army! Just like the rest of the population they were indifferent in the extreme. There was a story going round about a group of merchant sailors from another British ship that got the Russian soldiers so drunk on scotch whisky that they quite happily let the sailors take their Kalashnikovs and fire them into the river on full automatic. A couple of bottles of scotch would have probably got you a Kalashnikov of your own!
We were quite at liberty to come and go into town, but there was little reason given that there was literally nothing to do except get drunk. So most of our time was spent at the seaman’s mission. The seaman’s mission was not too bad for a drink: a bus would come to the ship to collect those that wanted to go, and we’d be ushered onboard by a fairly attractive female employee of the mission affectionately known to all as ‘Vulgar Olga’. The journey would then take us along some fairly rough roads, past block after block of the ubiquitous grey Russian residential workers’ flats until we arrived on the outskirts of the city centre. Some of the older inner city buildings were of the more elegant traditional Russian design, but most were ‘60s- and ‘70s-built concrete boxes. Having disembarked from the mission bus, we’d be met by another fairly attractive female employee, ‘Naughty Natasha’, who would offer to change your money at the exchange rate of one rouble to the pound; something you only ever did once, because you’d soon discover that on the black market your pound sterling would fetch ten times that amount. Having received my roubles, I headed to the bar and proceeded to demonstrate my drinking prowess to the rest of the ship’s officers, quickly leaving them far behind. My two years on Tyneside and in West Yorkshire had thoroughly prepared me for anything booze-wise, and the twelve-percent alcohol Golden Pheasant Czech pilsner with Stolichnaya vodka chasers were going down a treat. The captain looked on in astonishment while the chief told me to take it easy—but I was on fire, and by evening’s end I had out drunk them all! I, the first-trip cadet, had kicked their arses—the whole lot of them! And they were hardened drinkers.
Once loaded we set sail for Hørsens in Denmark, arriving about a week later. I enjoyed Hørsens immensely, it was a great little town with friendly people and plenty of my favourite lager—Tuborg Grøn. I’ve always wanted to go back there but have never had the chance. It was only a short walk along the quayside into the town centre and—after first stopping off for our first Tuborg at the Viking Bar—myself and the younger crewmembers would go on to spend some fantastic long summer evenings there. We were in Hørsens for at least a week and made some good Danish friends there. It was often the case that you could find the most fun in the most unexpected places, and Hørsens was a typical example of this. But all good things must end, and so we set sail around the 8th of August. Then, a couple of days out from Hørsens on the return journey to Archangel and disaster—the main engine seized due to a lubricating oil failure! It happened as the ship was off the coast of Norway. I went down into the engine room to do a spot of ‘soojeying’ (cleaning) and as I opened the engine room hatch I saw smoke billowing from a vent near the main turbocharger. Not knowing exactly what to do, I rushed up and told the second engineer.
“Fuckin’ ‘ell!” he yelled as he shot past me and raced down into the engine room.
Too late! By the time he reached the control panel ‘farting fanny’ let out a strange squeak and seized completely—she’d given up the ghost! At first I thought it was hilarious. Apparently the lubricating oil purifier had lost the water seal and dumped all of the engine oil into the bilge instead of sending it back to the lube oil tank. The ‘seal fail’ alarm hadn’t gone off because someone had bypassed it after being constantly annoyed by the frequent spurious alarms that the thing generated. However my mirth soon evaporated as the weather began to get increasingly wild. A tug had been sent out from Bergen but would take several hours to reach us. Meanwhile the ship was taking some big waves beam-on and being thrown around like a toy. I fully expected the thing to ‘turn turtle’ at any moment and sink. Eventually though the tug arrived and we were towed into Bergen where a crew from the engine-makers were flown in.
I must say I was impressed with Bergen. Arriving by sea, you sail up the impressive Bergenfjord and meet the city head on. The waterfront architecture is typically old Norwegian and set against the backdrop of pine-covered mountains. We were berthed right in the city, close to the old Viking Hall museum, and so we were able to stroll into town in a matter of minutes. But although Bergen is a beautiful city it’s a bloody expensive one, and as a result much of our alcohol consumption was done onboard the ship. While there I met a Norwegian girl called Unni, up from Oslo on holiday. We invited her and her girlfriend aboard for a drink. The crew were having one of their regular parties and it turned into a big one. All that was missing was some good quality drugs. I had way too much to drink that night and on top of that spent most of the early hours having sex with Unni. The upshot was that the next day I ‘fell through’, which was merch-speak for bad hangover, door locked, won’t get up for work. When I did finally surface it was about eleven o’clock and the chief was going ape-shit. The fact that there was a naked and hung-over Norwegian girl in my bunk only made matters worse. He told me to get her out. Reluctantly I had to comply—I didn’t want to push my luck. But it wasn’t as easy as might be expected. Unni spoke no English at all, and I no Norwegian, so I more or less had to manhandle her out. Nevertheless she was waiting at the quayside for me that night and I snuck her aboard for another night of passion. Up yours chief!
I fancied a spliff and found out that to score you had to go to the park at the University. I duly made my way up there, parted with some hard-earned cash, and in return received about a quarter ounce of Afghan Black—just as the cops were raiding the park! I shoved the entire quarter in my mouth but one of them saw me and came running over. I knew if I was arrested I’d be sent home for sure—I was already pushing my luck with the chief. So I swallowed it. With that there was nothing the copper could do and I returned to the ship as quickly as I could. I needed to get the stuff back up—and quickly! I desperately tried to throw up but to no avail. I drank warm soapy water, vinegar, salt water, vegetable oil, shoved a pen down my throat repeatedly to the point of making that little dangly thing at the back sore—but nothing. My body was so used to enormous quantities of alcohol it had long since given up complaining by being sick. I knew then that I was in for an ‘interesting’ night.
It started when I made a cup of coffee. For some reason the bubbles circulating around it scared the crap out of me. This was going to be bad—I had ‘the horrors’. It was late at night by now but there was no way I was going to sleep. I’d worked myself into a panic, and not knowing what to do I went ashore and wandered around a deserted Bergen in a daze. I felt like I wanted to pass out but for some reason thought that if I did so I would die. Eventually I became so dizzy and weird I just thought “fuck it, if I’m gonna go I’m gonna go” and with that I collapsed and passed out. I was awoken by a young couple out walking. They thought that I was poisoned and suggested I should go to hospital. I declined and instead went back to the ship. I felt really strange, I was frightened—but I didn’t know what of. I decided I was going to confront this irrational fear face-on anyway and go to bed. My last memory of that terrifying night was of being sucked into a giant vortex. Needless to say I ‘fell through’ again the next day. The chief was furious. He threatened to send me home and tried desperately to do it but there must have been someone at the office looking out for me because I managed to stay on. Lucky for him anyway because I had decided that if he did put me off I was going to go out in a blaze of glory and punch him out—I mean really do a number on him. Smoking pot was never the same for me after that night and within eighteen months I’d stopped completely. It was probably a good thing in hindsight. Marijuana had just been another adventure for me: a means to escape the mundane and experience new thoughts and different realities. I never needed it as a crutch, and now that I was travelling widely it no longer served the purpose it once did. For someone who once devoted so much time to smoking pot, I can’t say I miss it.
Another, perhaps dubious, benefit to being in Bergen was the availability of the English newspapers. I never bought them, but often a member of the crew would often return with a day or two old copy of the Sun or the Mirror if they’d run up to the shops during one of their breaks. One of the issues ran a story about a man and his pet monkey that sparked an amusing episode in the crew’s mess. Apparently the man devoted so much time and lavished so much attention on the monkey that he virtually ignored his wife who claimed he would rather spend time with the animal than have sex with her. It was an innocent enough story based around her ultimatum that either she or the monkey would have to go, and that he chose to keep the monkey. Ali the donkeyman could read a little English, but was having some difficulty with this particular story. He asked one of the crew, Cockney Mick, to explain it to him. Mick explained that the man had left his wife for the monkey, but Ali was perplexed: why would a man leave his wife for a monkey he wondered? Because, said Mick, the man would rather be with the monkey than have sex with her. Ali was aghast: “He fuck monkey?” he asked incredulously.
Mick seized on the misunderstanding and promptly turned it into a wind-up. He pretended that having sex with monkeys was common practice in England: “Yeah! All Englishmen fuck monkeys—don’t we lads?” he asked the rest of us.
We nodded in agreement, trying to keep straight faces.
“Don’t Yemeni men fuck monkeys too?” he asked in mock innocence, as we tried desperately control our mirth.
“No”, came the reply, “Yemeni man never fuck monkey! Englishman very bad to fuck monkey…very bad”.
“So you don’t fuck monkey—just little boys” said Mick.
Again Ali was horrified.
“No! Yemeni man never fuck boy or monkey…never!” He glanced back at the paper and shook his head.
“Englishman very bad to fuck monkey” he repeated quietly to himself, “very bad”.
“Doesn’t Allah say it’s OK for a man to fuck a monkey?” asked Mick, trying to breathe more life into the gag and keep it going for as long as possible.
“No, Allah never say OK to fuck monkey” came the reply.
“But OK to fuck small boy?”
“No, Allah never say to fuck small boy”
“So what does Yemeni man fuck?” asked Mick. “Dogs?”
“Woman” came the reply, “Yemeni man fuck woman”.
“But what if you don’t want to fuck a woman?—what if you want to fuck a monkey…or a dog?”
“Why you want to fuck monkey?”
“Because fucking a monkey is good…it’s better than fucking a woman. See, this man left his wife because she said he couldn’t fuck his monkey. You should try fucking a monkey Ali—once you have fucked a monkey you’ll never want to fuck a woman, or a dog, again”.
At that point Ali got up and left the crew’s mess. He was still shaking his head in genuine disbelief as he left.
“Englishman very bad to fuck monkey…very bad” he declared on his way out.
I felt sorry for Ali at times, he was a pious Muslim who prayed to Allah every day and here he was surrounded by filthy-mouthed, morally bankrupt, drunken, whoring British merchant seamen. He’d had a tough time over the previous few weeks because Ramadan had begun in mid-July that year and we had spent nearly a fortnight above or close to the Arctic Circle where the sun hovered tantalisingly close to the horizon at around midnight without ever actually dipping below it. To add insult to injury, the crew were taking bets among themselves as to what day he’d finally cave in and eat something. In the end he and the cook found a compromise in the form of some light soup. The first real sunset on our journey south and the poor bastard virtually ate the fridge!
While all this was happening the crew from the engine-makers were busy regrinding the crankshaft, replacing all the bearings and some of the cylinder liners. A couple of days after the guys from Ruston had arrived the second was taking his morning smoko up on deck. He’d just cracked open his first beer of the day when a voice behind him suggested it might be a bit early for alcohol.
“And just who the fucking hell might you be?” the second asked the owner of the voice tersely, thinking that he was from the engine-makers.
“I’m Everard’s engineering superintendent…and who the fucking hell might you be?” came the reply. The second, of course, was a Longstaff man and so hadn’t recognised his new boss. The upshot was that the chief asked him not to drink beer during working hours, a request which was promptly ignored.
“Fuck ‘em” he said to me “let ‘em send me home and get some other cunt out here to deal with this shit!”
But, alas, all good things come to an end, and after a very enjoyable few weeks in Bergen the engine was reassembled and we set sail for Archangel again. I was sorry to go; I have happy memories of Bergen and remember it fondly. I also remember Unni fondly—my first foreign girl! While in Hørsens the ship had taken on lots of Carlsberg beer including the powerful Elephant Beer. The Elephant Beer was fun at first but after a short while the entire ship’s crew began to tire of it. It was too sweet and heavy, and while most enjoyed slamming down more than a few bottles of ordinary beer after their watch, the Elephant Beer got them drunk far too quickly. Typical of the British, they preferred to gulp down large quantities of ordinary strength beer rather than sip on a few strong ones, so after a short time—when the novelty had worn off—all agreed that on balance an ordinary strength beer served as better day to day refreshment and no-one wanted it anymore. With several cases left on his hands, finally—and probably out of sheer desperation—the Captain turned to me.
“Do you want the last few cases of the Elephant Beer?” he asked.
“How much?” I inquired.
“Nothing” came the answer.
“In that case then yeah, I’ll take it”, I replied.
On the return journey from Archangel the ship sailed into an area of the North Sea known as the German Bight and was met by a severe force-eleven storm. In merchant-navy talk this was known as a ‘hooligan’. Being relatively shallow, the North Sea gets whipped-up really quickly and big waves can hit from all sides. Sitting in the saloon, I was subjected to a tremendous racket: it was the ship’s cook, cursing and swearing at the pots and pans as they careered out of control on the galley stove and came flying out of just about everywhere. The faster he put them back, the faster they flew back out at him. He seemed to be taking it personally, as if believing that they were doing it deliberately, just to annoy him. A less valiant man would have admitted defeat, have given up long ago and gone to his bed. But the stubborn Cornishman refused to be beaten. Exhausted, he returned to his cabin for some medicine. The ‘medicine’ in question was Gordon’s London Gin—export strength. Far from having a calming affect it had a terrible reputation as a ‘fighting drink’—at least it did in the amounts that the average merchant seaman consumed. Thus fortified, he returned to battle. The cursing that followed was some of the most foul and yet original that my poor young ears had ever encountered. He was getting out of control and so I slid the saloon door closed, lit up a cigarette, and carried on drinking the last of my Elephant Beer in peace. I suppose in a way the second was right, these small ships did indeed separate the men from the boys. Two months previously my sea legs were so poor I would have been seasick in a dry-dock. And now here I was in a ship not much bigger than a tin bath, relaxed, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes alone at two am in the middle of a force-eleven storm in the North Sea listening to a madman yelling at pots and pans.
Occasionally she ‘pooped one’ as the rear deck of the ship, affectionately known as the ‘arse end’ became totally submerged. Although every porthole and door was battened down, seawater in copious amounts still managed to find its way down into the crew’s accommodation and thence into the engine room. The ship lurched and rolled violently, occasionally pitching into a huge wave and shaking violently. I honestly thought that it was going to break in two. Being back on engine room watch wasn’t so bad because being right at the bottom of the ship the movement was less noticeable. You could tell the storm was still raging however because the bilge pumps were getting a workout and an occasional drenching with sea water occurred when a large wave slammed into the side of the ship and sent a hefty serve of seawater down through the vents at the top of the funnel. I remember thinking “there’s only one way that water can get in up there” and that was if a wave as high as the ship’s funnel crashed into it. Marvellous!
There was another problem to contend with though. While in Bergen, a temperature probe had been installed into the exhaust manifold of each main engine cylinder head. All of these probes were then connected to a controller which would drop the engine speed to idle in the event of a overly high temperature reading. As a way of protecting the engine it proved to work just fine—until the ship hit its first dose of bad weather. Now here we were in a force eleven and every time the ship pitched into a huge wave, the propeller came out of the water. This had the effect of taking the load off of the main engine which in turn caused it to increase its revs very quickly for a short while until the governor brought them back down. But the increase in revs quickly sent the exhaust temperatures high and the new controller then shut the engine power off and sent the revs to idling speed. Then there was a race to reset the damn thing before the big seas turned the ship round to take the waves beam on. But of course by then we’d lost “tail-end charlie” and so had to rush up and get one of the other generators on the board as quickly as possible and which was subsequently left on. After three or four such occurrences the probes were quickly disconnected because the last thing you need in a big storm is to lose the main engine. Lose the main engine in those conditions and it’s rescue time—if you can get someone to come out to you!
But our problems didn’t end there. While not dangerous in itself, timber makes a dangerous cargo. As cargoes go it’s very light, so once the ship’s holds are full it is stacked on deck as well. And that’s the problem, because deck cargo is apt to shift in bad weather and unbalance the ship, and obviously the last thing a ship needs in bad weather is a list. So of course it was bound to happen!—and happen at night! Out into the blackness, rain, howling wind and crashing waves went three of the crew. They may have been a bunch of drunken yobbos most of the time, but when the chips were down they were true professionals. It took more courage to go out there than the average person would ever have had, but they did so with big grins on their faces and within an hour or so had everything under control. Such was life in the merchant navy: one minute boredom; the next, mayhem. It’s a million miles away from the safe but mundane life of an office worker!
After three or so days battling through the storm—at one stage so violent that the ship ended up going backwards for most of the day—the weather abated and we arrived in Zandaam, Holland. It was here that I saw the last of the chief and was also the one sent into central Amsterdam to score some ‘Bob Hope’. We were only alongside for one day so my first visit to Amsterdam was a brief one, which was a disappointment. From Zandaam the ship sailed to Delfzijl—also in Holland—where apparently it was so far into town that it wasn’t worth the trouble or expense getting there. From there it was back to Archangel and then to somewhere really exciting: Millwall docks. The return leg began peacefully enough, in fact the Barents Sea, although cold, was flat calm and being several hundred miles inside the Arctic Circle meant we were treated to some fantastic displays of the northern lights. Once we had rounded the North Cape, however, typical of the North Atlantic the weather began to turn ugly. It soon became so bad that the captain decided to take shelter by sailing down the Norwegian Fjords. This meant extra expense for the company because a pilot was involved but I didn’t care because the scenery was absolutely stunning, even to a twenty year old who didn’t really care too much about that sort of thing. Huge mountains, lush green at the base and black rock at the top, towered over the waters of the fjords. It was something everyone should experience at least once in their lifetime. We spent a couple of days cruising the fjords before entering the North Sea. The remaining leg across the North Sea was also pretty rough until we reached ‘Knock John’ and the relative shelter of the Thames estuary. From there, it was a few hours upstream to Millwall.
1980 saw the Millwall dock complex just about finished as a going concern and there was only us and one other ship berthed there. I was due to pay off, having completed my three months, but I decided to stay a while because to be quite honest I had no desire to return to Shoreham. The new chief, who was a Geordie, a pisshead, and much more my type, suggested I at least go home for a few days. I thought about it for a while, but declined. Instead I got the bus up Westferry Road as far as the nearest pub which went by the rather odd name of the Magnet and Dewdrop, and had a few there before continuing to that den of iniquity known as Charlie Brown’s pausing only to score some ‘Bob Hope’ in the Londoner. There weren’t too many decent pubs—i.e. pubs with girls in them—on the Isle of Dogs back in 1980. In fact there weren’t any in nearby Poplar or Limehouse either. This was the old Isle of Dogs, before Canary Wharf and the dockland redevelopment, and the vista was one of drab terraces—some might say slums—overlooking deserted, desolate docks. With the docks largely defunct the place was an urban wasteland, and the people forgotten and left to rot by the new Tory rulers. What Antwerp, Amsterdam, Hamburg and Rotterdam could do, London apparently couldn’t: a pathetic indictment of the British ruling classes and a true indication of how they feel about their own working people! It seemed to be a case of getting rid of them to turn the place into a yachting marina for the wealthy! Anyway, one of the crewmembers, a local lad from West Ham, recommended Stratford and so we thought we’d give it a go and headed up there. It wasn’t too bad: I met a West Indian girl who had travelled across the river from South Woolwich and spent the night with her at her cousin’s place in nearby Bromley-by-Bow. She was a nice girl, even though she had an annoying habit of introducing the word ‘innit’ at least three times in each sentence. Unfortunately I’ve completely forgotten her name.
From Millwall we had time to make one last trip back to Archangel before the season closed. By now it was late October and the port of Archangel could only be reached with the assistance of an icebreaker. To say it was cold would be an understatement: it was bloody freezing! It was so cold that the hydraulic oil in the ship’s derricks turned to a jelly-like substance and had to be heated somewhat clumsily with the oxy-acetylene torch to get it to flow. We left Archangel for the last time on 1st November and other magnificent display of the northern lights accompanied us on the journey back. The North Atlantic was good to us this time, and although cold, was calm. About a week later we arrived in Leith, Scotland, and several of the crew and myself immediately took the long stroll up Leith Walk and made our way to the many pubs and bars of Princes Street, Edinburgh—one of my favourite cities.
A few days later the ship set sail southward to the River Humber, taking on a couple of Scots girls just prior to our departure from Leith. They had secreted themselves in the crew’s quarters, looking for adventure on the high seas. The best we could offer, however, was Scunthorpe. They seemed quite happy with that and offered to sleep with the crew in return for a bed and some food. It was, of course, strictly against all the rules and I doubt that the captain or mate would have been too pleased if they’d found out. I certainly didn’t partake in any of the sexual fun and games—I never was a team player—but everyone else seemed happy with the arrangement. We sailed up the Humber and under the Humber Bridge before turning southward into the River Trent, past the ruins of the chemical works that had exploded at Flixborough some six years previously, to a place called Gunness in Lincolnshire. Gunness Wharf was only a small place, and it had a pub conveniently situated at the entrance less than a minute’s walk from the quayside. For a twenty year-old however, it was a little too sedate and I soon found myself on a bus heading for the bright lights of nearby Scunthorpe with the two Scots girls for company.
Scunthorpe was a steel town, and the huge works dominated the skyline. Like many steel towns, it was drab and unexciting. We got off the bus at the town centre and the girls looked around disappointed. Scunthorpe obviously didn’t live up to their expectations:
“It’s worse than fucking Motherwell!” one of them exclaimed.
“Never mind”, I said patronisingly, “I hear Grimsby’s nice this time of year”.
They shot me a stony glare, told me where I could stick Grimsby, and decided they were going to head to Doncaster, then London. I, meanwhile, made my way to the nearest bar. It was a fairly rough-looking place, but despite its appearance and that of its clientele, it ended up providing me with a pretty-good night’s entertainment. This included two fights between patrons—one of which spilled out into the street—and culminated with me engaging in what might be termed a ‘passionate interlude’ with a local ‘lady’ in her friend’s car in a nearby municipal car park. Saturday night in Scunthorpe was a classy experience for sure!
I made my way back to the ship, which, the next day, had to leave in for a place a few hours away back on the River Humber called Immingham. I always found the Humber a strange kind of place: a weird mixture of rural landscapes and rich agricultural land interspersed with huge oil refineries, chemical works, shipyards and docks. And if I thought Scunthorpe was bad, Immingham—or ‘Ming-Ming’ as it was known—was worse! The docks at Immingham are quite large but they are out of town, hence the only pub nearby—The County—was the sole source of entertainment and refreshment. I’m struggling to find words to adequately describe The County as it was thirty years ago: ‘god-awful’, ‘rough as guts’, and ‘shit-hole’ spring to mind. It says something about a pub, I always think, when chipboard instead of glass sits in some of the window-frames. It was as if all of the roughest prostitutes, genetic mutants, retards, and psychotic homicidal maniacs from within a one hundred mile radius had been corralled into it! It had only been a week or two previously that a young seaman had been quite badly stabbed by one of the psychos that drank there. You could almost hear the banjos playing as you approached! In fact I can only think of one worse pub in the whole of the UK, and that would be the one that I found myself in at Tilbury on the River Thames—a pub that no sane person would purposely enter unless they wanted to have their face permanently re-arranged by some of the shaven-headed thugs that called it their local.
There was a fairly substantial crew change at Gunness, including the captain, the mate and the cook. I was standing with a lad called Alan at the top of the gangway preparing for a run ashore. As we did so a huge shaven-headed man jumped out of a cab and swaggered up the gangway. I turned to Alan.
“This one looks a right aggro merchant Al” I declared.
“Yeah, he does doesn’t he” came the reply.
The man arrived at the top of the gangway and approached us. He towered over us and was built like the proverbial brick shithouse. He stopped and spoke:
“Wherth the cookth cabin?” he lisped in one of the most effeminate voices I’d ever heard.
“Down to the end there, then downstairs, second on the right mate” Alan replied.
He was barely out of earshot as we looked at each other and pissed ourselves laughing!
We found out that her nickname was ‘Bev’—so named because she could consume massive quantities of alcoholic beverages: at least three cases of beer and a couple of litre bottles of gin per day, if not more. She was pretty good as a cook though. Alan also told me that after I’d paid off Bev had got very drunk one night and chased him around the accommodation block before catching him and kissing him. “It was fucking horrible mate”, he declared, “but he was so big and strong I couldn’t get away from him”.
The British merchant navy was in its death throes. From being the largest fleet in the world, it had shrunk steadily since the Second World War and after Margaret Thatcher’s ascent to the Prime Ministership almost appeared to be collapsing in a heap in front of our eyes. As a result many of its ‘interesting’ characters like Bev eventually found themselves working for Fred. Another of them was ‘Hydraulic Jack’ who had replaced the original skipper at Gunness. Hydraulic Jack had been through the card, from Royal Navy to the big liners and eventually, as he got more and more shot away, down to Everard. He earned his nickname by virtue of the fact that the only movement he seemed capable of was to raise his right arm from the horizontal to the vertical and back down again while drinking beer. He never left his cabin and he never ate but, as though he were some strange separate species, survived entirely on alcohol. As a consequence he was pencil-thin and his behaviour became increasingly erratic, strange and divorced from reality. Alan later told me when we met up on the Stability that he’d finally cracked in the middle of the Mediterranean. Apparently Alan had been called up to his cabin and was told to sit down. A towel lay curled up on the lounge and as Alan went to sit, Hydraulic Jack, so poisoned by alcohol and lack of food that he was hallucinating, believed his towel to be a turtle. Alan was warned not to sit on the thing and then instructed to say hello to it.
“Hello Mr Turtle”, said Al, barely able to control himself.
Apparently, from that point on things got increasingly absurd, and in the middle of the Mediterranean Jack ordered several of the crew to lower a lifeboat because he was going to pay off. At that point they physically restrained him and the Chief Engineer assumed control.
From Ming-Ming the ship sailed to Antwerp where it discharged and then had to wait for a berth at the china clay wharf. We were there for a week and I had a terrific time. Antwerp is a huge port—the second largest in Europe after Rotterdam/Europort. It is also one of my favourite ports as several of the berths are within easy walking distance of the old city centre. One night a group of us were drinking beer in one of the more seedy dockland bars on the outskirts of the city centre and as the evening wore on the atmosphere was becoming increasingly bawdy and riotous. We found ourselves drinking with a group of women, none of whom could be described as elegant or classy—not that we cared. Anyway, at some stage of the night one of these Belgian women, a strawberry blonde a fair bit older than me, declared in her thick Flemish accent that she liked English men and came to sit on my lap. We were both drunk and fell backwards off the chair. Then, in full public view, as I was lying on the floor she dropped her jeans and underwear, pulled her buttocks apart, and pushed her arse right into my face! I almost suffocated as she rhythmically ground herself into me, to the cheers of all those around. Struggling for breath, I floundered around like a fish out of water until she finally got off of me and suggested that we have sex. I wanted to decline because I was way too drunk and had a feeling that I was going to be sick, but my crew mates insisted that I would be letting the side down if I didn’t. We emerged from the men’s toilet some time later to the cheers of all around. It was an even classier experience than Scunthorpe!
A few days later we arrived in Wismar, which is on the Baltic coast of what was then communist East Germany. It was December by now and the weather in the Baltic was freezing. After a couple of days at anchor, during which time I celebrated my twenty-first, we were given a berth and entered the small harbour. The official exchange rate was four Ostmarks to the pound, but on the black market we were able to get ten times that. As a consequence the large steins of beer that the locals were drinking cost us a matter of pennies and we got outrageously drunk. Because it was a communist country there was a flourishing black market and we soon found ourselves being approached by several local ‘businessmen’ looking to buy jeans, British cigarettes and scotch whisky. Of course we obliged, but demanded payment in hard currency. As was the case with the Russian Roubles, all of the East German marks that we had accumulated had to be spent because they were not a recognised currency in the West and so could not be exchanged for real money. It was a situation that encouraged drunkenness and riotous behaviour on our part, and we had soon made a name for ourselves in the local bars as drunks and big spenders. We didn’t care, we bought drinks for everyone and still had money left. Meanwhile back at the ship sordid sex was taking place: several of the dockers were women who bore a remarkable similarity to the East German women athletes of the day. They were made even less fetching by the white hard hats that they were wearing. Despite this, one of the crew, who shall remain nameless, traded some of his t-shirts for oral sex with one of these women. He apparently told her to leave her hat on! It would be nice to think that that’s where Joe Cocker got the idea for the song from—but I somehow doubt it!
The town centre was on the opposite side of the dock from where we were berthed which meant a fair walk into town. A couple of the crew decided to take a shortcut and simply walked across the ice. They were promptly arrested and then had to be bailed out. Apparently the East German police were much worse than their couldn’t-care-less Soviet counterparts and really gave the two lads a hard time. We were all warned not to do it again. Despite this, I quite liked Wismar even though it seemed to be stuck in the fifties. Those lucky enough to own cars had to make do with the ubiquitous light-blue two-stroke Trabants, but for most, it seemed, it was the bus or foot. Along with the steam locomotives it seemed to be stuck in a time warp. Nevertheless, the locals seemed to be making the best of it and enjoying themselves in the local bars. Although part of the Soviet bloc, it seemed a world away from Archangel. It was while alongside at Wismar that we heard John Lennon had been shot. I never really liked the guy’s music, but even so… From Wismar it was a few days journey back across the North Sea, via the Kiel Canal and Cuxhaven, to the Thames Estuary and Greenhithe Wharf, a couple of miles down-river from Erith where I had joined over five months earlier.
So there it was, my first trip at sea. In many ways, the first trip away at sea is like your first time with a girl: you come out of it a different person with a different perspective on life. I’d travelled before, sure, but I’d never lived it. When you do the tourist thing you tend to look at the sights and shop for souvenirs; when you are at sea you go to places that tourists would never go and you tend to socialise with the locals a lot more. This in turn breaks down your prejudices and allows you to see things from a different point of view. So when I returned to Shoreham and saw all the familiar faces in the pub, sitting in the same chairs, talking about the same old stuff and doing the same things they’d always done, it felt completely alien. These were my friends: people I’d known since my first day at infant’s school, some even before then, but we’d grown apart and now had little in common. If two years at Shields had distanced me somewhat, my five months on the Somersetbrook had changed me completely. I‘d made the right choice not going to South America because all in all the Somersetbrook had been a riot!
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