(David, fiction)
My first ship was HMS Winchester, launched back in 1946 as the last in a line of ten sharp-nosed frigate sisters built for the war. By the time I joined her on a bone cold January day in Devonport, twenty-four years later, she was an arthritic old bucket.
She'd had a hard life, and comfort wasn't in her. Certainly not for a shiny new sailor out of basic training and sharing a big hard-edged messdeck with fifty others, rising in age and experience from a handful of us boys to grizzled old men in their late thirties.
In those days, the compulsory retirement age for an able seaman or a leading hand—known as a killick after the anchor on his rank badge—was forty, regardless of experience and competence. No promotion to petty officer or above during his twenty-two years of man's time, then no chance of signing on for what was called a fifth five. The old gods on our messdeck were approaching the ends of their Royal Navy careers.
Yes, they were old. A life of around-the-clock sea watches aged a man. When shoved into civvy street, they would look more like men of fifty or even sixty. Even those who weren't hard drinkers. Some of them, so the accepted wisdom said, wouldn't last long out there.
And, yes, they were gods. Some were friendly enough to us new joiners, while others weren't. Some were helpful, some not. They wore long experience as evident as the old blue tattoos on their arms, and often had little time for those who failed to learn the ropes quickly. They definitely had no patience with youngsters who didn't know their place. Gobby kids learned the hard way.
I respected those old men. Life outside had changed a lot since they'd joined the navy as boys. The soundtrack of their school days had been Bing Crosby and Glen Miller. Mine was the Beatles and Stones. They barely knew my world out there, but they did have deep knowledge of the one I'd chosen to enter. Although I didn't grovel in my first days onboard while we got ready to sail to America, I did acknowledge their experience, and they knew it. Also, I was bright enough to learn new skills and sensible enough to avoid irritating my elders. So, they accepted me, those who were inclined to, and I liked that.
The one who took me under his wing was Able Seaman Bob Walsh, the quarterdeck lockerman, who was king of all he surveyed in his deck-gear storage compartment tucked between the mortar well and the Chinese laundry.
The room-sized locker was packed with great cotton-reel shaped drums of thick berthing ropes and wires, with every possible tool and many implements whose functions I was yet to learn, with rows of coiled heaving lines that hung from iron wall racks and swayed together to the ship's motion.
Also, curiously, there was a small collection of decorative items. A candle, driftwood sticks, shells, feathers, and a sea-washed glass bottle filled with sand. He usually kept those things out of sight, but on quiet evenings he might arrange them upon a small triangular shelf in a corner hidden from the locker door.
He was a burly man, about twice my age, a strong presence who spoke little and tended to think before he acted. He came from a family of river people somewhere in eastern England.
"Fishermen and harbour women," he told me the day we slipped from Plymouth for my first Atlantic crossing.
It was lunchtime. My stomach was unaccustomed to the ship's movement on my first ever day out at sea. So, instead of going down to the mess where the old men were having their tots of rum, I'd stayed in the quarterdeck locker where he had its heavy watertight door clipped open to catch the damp salty air, and he taught me how to tie a tight monkey's fist knot the size of a cricket ball on the end of a new heaving line. It occupied my mind as well as my hands, and helped me to deal with the queasiness.
I assumed his story was similar to mine. "You escaped to sea."
He gave a nose wrinkle, indicative, I realised, that my assumption was inaccurate.
"No?"
"We're sea witches," he said, soft-splicing a handle loop deftly into the end of another new heaving line. "In the river mouth, mainly, but every few generations one of us goes away to sea. Keeps the family magic strong when we settle back home again."
"Is that why you poured your tot over the side today?"
"Offering."
"Who to?"
"Medusa."
For the first time, I noticed in the shadow above the triangular shelf, a framed dark image of a woman's head and bare shoulders. No snakes were visible, just a lot of dramatically wild hair. "You worship her?"
"I work with her."
Sea witches. A goddess. Magic. I blinked, unsure from his deadpan expression if this was yet another case of an old sailor spinning a yarn to make fun of some youngster.
He examined my monkey's fist. "Not bad. Soak it in a bucket of water overnight and hang it up to dry tomorrow, then dip it in a pot of red paint."
All the quarterdeck lines and tools and deck gear were marked red. At the other end of the ship, the pointed end, fo'c'sle gear was marked with blue paint. It helped would-be thieves to resist their impulses and avoid getting a punch in the mouth.
I squinted when a brief tune on a bosun's call sounded from the general broadcast speaker outside the locker.
"They use the pipe at sea," Bob explained. "The jimmy doesn't want anyone speaking on the tannoy except in an emergency. It's one of his things. That pipe means hands turn-to. Lunchtime's finished."
"Jimmy?" I'd heard that person mentioned once or twice, but didn't know who he was.
"First lieutenant."
We joined the quarterdeck hands congregating outside the locker, where our part-of-ship petty officer Bagsy Baker and our killick Slinger Woods allocated our jobs for the afternoon. Mine was cleaning the after heads, which was a grim task when people were being seasick in them but someone had to do it and we weren't surprised that it fell to three of us boys.
What did take me by surprise was how tiring it was to do anything physical while the ship slammed ahead into the English Channel's south westerlies. It was like trying to walk and work on some thumping fairground ride.
Four o'clock was the end of the day for part-of-ship work, except that at sea our days were divided into four-hour watches and they never ended. Every one of us doubled our daywork hours in a relentless watch-on-deck rota, for us boys as lookouts up on the bridge, as helmsman down in the wheelhouse with the quartermaster, or as lifebuoy spook standing lonely on the stern to sound the alarm if someone fell overboard. It went on all day and night, every day and night. It was the shape of our lives.
A big part of the daily structure was mealtimes. Breakfast was a fry-up with a mug of tea, lunch a main course and pudding, and four o'clockers an afternoon snack with a mug of tea that got us through to dinner at eight. Our chefs were a rough bunch, and the food they produced was hit-and-miss, but we didn't go hungry.
Another part of our daily routine was domestic cleaning, and evening rounds at seven when the officer of the day would tour all the lower deck messes and bathrooms and heads.
Men of the first dogwatch swept and scrubbed either their own messdeck or whichever bathroom and heads went with it, then one of them would stick his hat on to salute and report the compartment, "Ready for rounds, sir," when the officer of the day and the petty officer of the day arrived with a bosun's mate piping their way from fore to aft through the ship. It was a hurried, sweaty workout. The bathroom boys needed a minimum of thirty minutes to get them shiny clean and wiped dry, so everyone had to be showered and out of there by six-thirty at the latest.
We didn't just shower. It was an early evening ritual. We filled the bathroom in naked numbers and stood at metal sinks with soapy water sloshing around our feet as the ship climbed and rolled and plummeted and the drains gurgled and bubbled. We gripped those sinks to avoid sliding on the tiles and falling over in the suds, shaving our faces and dhobying our underwear while waiting for a turn under a good blast of hot water in one of the shower stalls. Then out so the next man could get in, and back down the mess to towel ourselves dry and drape our dhobying across the overhead steam pipes.
We put our clothing and bedding and towels through the dhoby house under the quarterdeck, where three Chinese laundrymen worked, cooked, ate, and slept. Everything went through there except our boxers and socks. Those, we washed by hand every evening and dried them overnight on the steam pipes.
Then we dressed in our clean evening uniforms to eat in the dining room and back down to the mess for our relaxation time, those who didn't have the first watch, which mostly was playing either cards or board games. The games were old, traditional, unlike their equivalents in civvy street. I would have to learn them. Adults drank cans of beer, while us boys drank lemonade. It was our time to chat. Gossip. Laugh.
The atmosphere was good. Funny. Humorous, that is, if often cuttingly so and occasionally harsh. Sarcasm was an art form.
I sat there on my first evening at sea and thought I was going to like it.
Opinions were being aired freely about some of the ship's officers, who were generally scorned and some of them despised.
The skipper, I heard, was some sort of minor aristocrat who would rather talk to a piece of shit on the sole of his shoe than to a lower decker.
The jimmy considered himself to be hard but fair, and only the first half of that was true.
And our joss man, the navy's name for a ship's master at arms, was a mean bastard. Shiner Wright said the joss had knuckled the back of his head that morning for not getting out of the way fast enough.
"He's not allowed to hit you," one of the boys protested. One of the gobby ones who hadn't learned yet. Only, on that occasion, pretty much everyone agreed with him.
"You're right," one of the killicks said. "He's not allowed, but he does it. Keep your mouth shut around him."
I left them talking in the mess square and went to get some sleep before my middle watch.
Next morning, after being up on watch from midnight to four and then up again for breakfast at seven before turning-to with everyone else at eight, I was knackered. But already I felt more at ease with the ship's movement, now out in the Atlantic and straining for America. Already I felt like one of the part-of-ship crew who mustered for our morning's work allocations on the quarterdeck. Already I felt part of the cheerful community in my messdeck. It happened that quickly.
The cheerfulness existed, I discovered, in spite of an unnecessarily strict regime and mean-spirited discipline onboard. Sailors, I learned, are resilient. Everything about them is, including their sense of humour that when called upon can quickly grow a gallows tone.
On my second evening at sea, that commenced.
I hadn't been in a good mood earlier. The weather was harsh all day so we'd been working below, using a thick, black, tar-like glue to fix lifting deck tiles back into place. Our overalls saved our trousers and shirts from it, but not our boots and hands, and it packed tight and stuck under our fingernails.
The afternoon's task passed without a break for me into my first dogwatch, four until six, when Bagsy Baker was PO of the watch-on-deck for both dogs and he told me to continue gluing the final few lifting tiles on my own. That led straight into the last dog when I had my first experience of cleaning for evening rounds, having been on the go it felt like since midnight last night and with only a brief pause for lunch.
Dogs? I was dog tired. How would my body ever get used to this?
Inevitably, I got the after heads to clean and report, and all I had to look forward to after that was being back on watch from four to eight in the morning followed by another long day working the quarterdeck. It wasn't great.
And it got worse when the officer of the day turned up with Bagsy in tow, and that lieutenant looked me up and down from my hat to my splattered boots then back up to the tarry glue set hard and black on my saluting hand.
"Don't you teach them to wash their hands?" he asked Bagsy, drawling like some throwback to the Regency period.
Bagsy murmured something unsupportive, earning from that moment on my undying contempt.
But I wasn't stupid. I'd watched and learned enough from my elders to mask my feelings with a blank expression.
"See the master at arms after rounds," the lieutenant said when he'd inspected the clean heads. "Show him you've washed your hands."
When he'd inspected the bathroom too and I could finally get in the shower, taking my seaman's knife with me to scrape away the glue until my skin was raw, I stepped out of it to find Bob Walsh dhobying his boxers and socks in a sink.
He read my face. "What's up, winger?"
I told him about the officer of the day.
"Lieutenant Keen," he said. "He's just a grammar school boy pretending to be upper class. There's more of them like that in the wardroom these days than proper nobs. Don't let him spoil your day."
Wisdom.
"Careful with the joss, though."
He clapped my ear, the joss man, when I showed him my clean hands. Hard. It made my ear whistle. "Don't waste my time again."
I sat with Bob at dinner, which was a fruity curry and big fat chips.
"Come to the locker after this," he said. "There's something I'm working on."
We went aft to the quarterdeck locker, where he unlocked the heavy watertight door and closed it firmly again once we were inside. He flicked on the overhead electric lamp to get out his sea magic things and set them up on their shelf, lit the thick church candle in the centre of that display, poured dry white sand from the bottle in a circle around the candle, and flicked off the electric lamp.
"This is my working." He showed me a length of silken white cord in the candlelight. A short stick of blanched driftwood was spliced across one end of it like a toggle, with a neat back splice at the other end.
"What is it?"
"Witch's ladder." He smoothed it out on his bench with the palm of his hand.
Okay.
He closed his eyes and took deep slow breaths, in and pause and out and pause, several of them, then passed his hands close over the candle's flame while saying something I couldn't hear. When he surfaced from what I thought was some sort of brief trance, he tied a knot in the cord, close to the blanched stick, murmuring something as he did so. Then he tied a second knot two inches farther along, again murmuring something mysterious.
The place he'd chosen for it was in the shadows among many hanging ropes, where a length of knotted thin cord would be as good as invisible. He hitched it up there to one of the rails, and the driftwood toggle gave it weight to hang straight.
"That," he pointed to the first knot, "is the joss man hurting his punching hand. That," he pointed to the second knot, "is Lieutenant Keen getting his."
He nodded for me to open the door, "It is so," and extinguished his candle.
"You do black magic, then?"
He blew out his lips. "There's no black and no white. I do baneful magic when it's needed. It's all magic. What matters is intentions. Come on. Time for a beer."
I sat beside him in the mess square when he bought himself a can of beer from the fridge and me a can of pop.
The atmosphere was the same as the night before. Relaxed. Joking. Games tables set up all around the mess, and people chatting comfortably.
Until the tannoy buzzed into life, and a hush fell.
I expected to hear a bosun's call and wondered what it might mean, outside of the normal routine. But no bosun's call sounded.
Instead, an unidentified male voice blurted, "Jake!"
That was it. The tannoy clicked off.
A moment of silence, and then everyone laughed.
"The jimmy'll do his fucking nut," someone said, and everyone laughed harder.
On the bridge at four next morning, binoculars jammed to our eyes as if we were genuinely scanning the horizon, the duty communications rating and I discussed the event in low voices, except that we weren't sufficiently quiet to avoid the officer of the watch's ire and he sent me out in the cold to lookout on the bridge wing.
The jimmy had indeed done his nut. We heard at breakfast that within seconds of the "Jake" sounding, he'd been seen tearing around various compartments all over the ship where emergency broadcast microphones sat in locked boxes. With no joy, apparently.
"Jake" sounded again at lunchtime, and to our delight whoever it was drew out the single word for a full ten seconds. The junior ratings dining room laughed long and loud.
That evening he struck again, but this time, instead of just the elongated name, he first mimicked the sound of a chain saw being flashed up and ticking over. It was a good imitation.
We loved that.
Next morning, the hijinks continued.
When I whipped my dhobying down from the overhead pipe and drew the lovely warm clean boxers on, my balls fell through a big hole in the crotch. I looked. It had been cut away in a diamond shape, too big to mend.
I shook my head in disbelief at the vandalism, then noticed other people standing in front of their kit lockers with their balls too having fallen through diamond holes cut in their boxers or briefs.
Was it everyone in the mess? Yes, everyone who'd had underwear drying on the steam pipes overnight now had a pair that had been cut.
Was it only our mess the diamond cutter had targeted? We established quickly that no, it wasn't only us. Every junior ratings mess had been done.
Heads shook everywhere, and suspects were named. Had to be a watchkeeper, everyone agreed. Probably a stoker, us seamen thought. Probably a seaman, the stokers thought.
"Jake!" He laughed like a drain before the tannoy clicked off, and then ten minutes later the chainsaw sounded.
The jimmy and the joss man were going daft trying to catch him. At lunchtime, we heard the joss man had fallen down a ladder while running around the ship and had broken his right hand.
"Couldn't happen to a nicer bastard," was the general opinion.
From the next long dining table, Bob winked at me.
"Are you Jake?" I asked when we were alone in the locker.
"Nope."
"You know who it is, though?"
"Got an idea, yeah."
"Who?"
"Same one who's cutting diamonds in everyone's knickers."
Whoever that was had now moved on to the senior rates cabins, which must have been a lot more difficult to access without getting caught. He'd been at it for several nights. We were halfway across the Atlantic and people were running out of underwear. Some tried to dry theirs in secret places. I know I did. But the diamond cutter found them all.
Lieutenant Keen got his comeuppance when it was discovered that all the coastal charts for when we reached America, which as the junior navigating officer were his responsibility to store and keep until they were needed, were missing.
Their slender storage drawers were locked, always, and the keys kept in a secure system. The hurried investigation concluded therefore that the charts hadn't been stolen, and the only other possibility was that the lieutenant had forgotten to ensure they were there before we sailed. They tried to keep it quiet, but our jungle drums banged out the entire story for everyone to enjoy.
The skipper's purple-faced fury was something to behold, apparently, and Lieutenant Keen had shrunk into a shadow of his former self.
Bob winked at me.
Next time I was in the locker, I looked for his witch's ladder. It was gone, but the church candle was still there in a circle of white sand on the shelf. Often, outside of normal working hours, I saw Bob murmur his quiet business while staring into its flame.
We neared the American coast and a thrill of anticipation rippled through our little community, enjoyed by everyone, I supposed, except probably the skipper and the navigation officers because of those missing charts, and the jimmy and joss man because Jake was still having his wicked way with the chainsaw.
"He wants to be careful," our oldest killick Stan said. "The joss is talking about charging him with inciting mutiny and all sorts of shit. If they catch him, they'll nail him to a wall."
No one had any underwear left without a diamond cut in them, except maybe for Bob who dried his in the quarterdeck locker behind its padlocked door. Even the officers in their single cabins got theirs cut, which must have been nigh-on impossible to achieve. Even the bloody skipper, according to his steward, which was honestly amazing. The day thatnews broke on the grapevine, Jake celebrated with chainsaw impressions at intervals for a whole hour, accompanied by cheers and cheers from the groups of men all over the ship.
The night before our scheduled first port of call, which was to be the US Naval Station in Norfolk, Virginia, we had a party feeling in the mess. All the games tables were out, plus one where Bob was doing tarot readings for people.
Everyone knew he was a witch. No one made fun of him. Sailors are a superstitious lot and here we were with our very own witch onboard. Someone to be respected, not mocked.
Once he'd read for Stan, he was done for the evening, but they remained at their table having a beer together.
Stan read our horoscopes sometimes, when he was drunk to the point of talking slow and deliberate but still mentally there. Reading someone's horoscope in Stan's case meant analysing their character and telling them exactly what they were like, warts and all. He could be quite scarily accurate and pulled no punches.
He wasn't reading Bob's horoscope. They were two titans at the same table.
"I'm ready to go outside," Stan said, following on from Bob's reading of his cards.
"What are you going to do?"
"Fuck knows. Something with boats. I'll look in the harbours down Cornwall."
"You glad to be done with this?"
"Yeah. I'm tired." He scanned the mess, where other conversations had paused while people listened in on his and Bob's. "I remember sitting in a mess exactly like this when I was a boy sailor. My first trip across the pond, heading into Roosevelt Roads in Puerto Rico, I think. This ship's discipline is like that one's was. Stupidly harsh. It's from another era, this tub. Feels like I'm tying a neat knot, ending my time in a shit bucket as nasty as the one I started in."
He sipped his beer. "You youngsters are clever these days. If any of you stay in for a full whack, you'll probably get yourselves promoted to POs or chiefs. But maybe some of you will find yourselves, twenty years from now, killicks sitting in a messdeck surrounded by kids just starting out who weren't even born when you joined your first ship." He reached across the table, patted Bob's shoulder, and shuffled away to his bunk in the old men's quiet gulch.
Bob caught my eye, and tilted his head stern-wise to suggest that we meet in the quarterdeck locker.
Ten minutes later, I found him standing with the candle's flame reflecting in his eyes.
"Want to know who Jake is?"
Of course I did.
"Here's the thing. You're a good kid. I like you. I've been thinking you might take over as lockerman when I leave the ship next year. If you want to."
It hadn't occurred to me, but I appreciated his trust in me.
"So that's the seamanship. But what about the craft?" He stared at the candle, then back at me. "You interested in this too?"
Witchcraft, he meant. Interested? Yes.
"Then I've got a lot to teach you. There's much more to the craft than to the job, so you'll only be getting started when I go. But meeting Jake will be a good start."
Mysterious. Okay.
"Come on." He left the candle burning when we left, padlocking the door and walking ahead of me, forward into the ship.
Just past the mortar well, he paused for a moment, then turned back the way we'd come.
The padlock was still in place. Bob had his key ready and he swung that heavy door open, revealing the candlelit shape of someone inside the locker reaching up for Bob's underwear draped on the overheads.
"Gotcha." There was no triumph in Bob's voice, and certainly no malice. He sounded happy to meet this person.
How had the intruder got in through the locked door? He'd have had to snip the padlock, but it was still locked in place when we came back. How?
The shape turned, and it wasn't even a person. Just a smoke-like shape with a wide grin and merriment dancing in its gleaming eyes and one of its hands was a big pair of scissors.
"Hello, Jake."
"Jake!" it said with delight.
"What is it?" I whispered. Not frightened. More worried that a noise might scare it away.
"He's an egregor," Bob said. "Like a collective idea. A magical entity made of the crew's thoughts and feelings. He's all fun, aren't you Jake?"
"Jake!" The chainsaw impression at close quarters was very impressive, and even more so because of the joy in his eyes when he did it.
"Giving us a laugh and pissing off the officers." Bob was more animated about this than any other time I'd seen him.
"You know, I'm not interested in covens. Except for my family back home, I work alone. Unless I'm teaching, I suppose." He winked at me. "But this is brilliant. Jake is our energy, us lower deckers, our intentions, all together like a song. It's powerful magic. Jake!"
"Jake!"
Bob's rumbling chuckles joined Jake's delighted giggles, and I couldn't help adding my laughter to the chorus of joy.
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