reminded her of the little boys at the school; how they sought to cope with life away from home by such creations. Everyone outside their world was an articulately structured joke. Poor little devils. One thing her mother’s school had taught her was that she did not want her boys to go away like that. And yet that was where they were now, her boys, and she was here in the midst of these unlooked-for waves talking to an unlooked-for Robert Kettle, who would probably see the point and then apologise. But I didn’t mean it like that, she found herself protesting. I didn’t want it to happen like this. This is just temporary.
And she thought of all her furniture down there in the hold, their bed and their books, and her poor violin, and the Finch-Clarks’ enormous cat in its cage.
‘Hey, be careful with that, kid!’ Mr Chaunteyman had given me half a crown and told me to keep his service revolver dry on deck. He was an American, Navy too – though he never wore uniform. We were going to Australia with him, Erica and I. That much was clear. I had the gun strapped to my waist. It weighed me down on my left. I had pinned on my sheriff’s star and wore my cowboy hat, which the wind now thrummed at somewhere behind my head. The cord threatened a strangle, but I would not take it off.
I had turned one side of the brim up to the crown with a safety pin, Australian style. Failing anything to serve as an authentic tin visor I was Ned Kelly in mufti, on his boat. I had stalked the heaving promenade deck for twenty minutes looking for people to shoot: possibly one or two of the Commies I had heard about from Mr Chaunteyman’s lips. Luckily the other children were not in evidence. Then I had fetched my raincoat and come forward here.
I too thought the ship would soon shake to pieces. Images of my life ran appropriately before my eyes. Scenes of home – containing unfortunate further images of death. Such scenes, for example, as had welled once from the open experiment on top of our wireless when I was little. My father placed a stout board to support the metal frame; the cathode-ray tube perched in its own scaffold. We drew the drapes across the french windows and clicked the knob. And were transfixed by scintillation.
The television was the great metal granny of all knots. But I was warned off. My father tended it jealously, as a household god. Through its face our English future brightly spilled; with its back parts he had sole communion. The private glows and buzzes, the electron lens, the HT circuit – ‘twenty thousand volts, boy, all right?’ – the decoders, oscillators, transformers and valves remained a mystery to me.
It was unhealthy, and suffered intermittent snowstorms. In the midst of them I watched cowboy fantasies: The Mystery Riders, Roy Rogers, or Renfrew of the Mounties. North American corpses were two a penny. During weekends he set up a mirror and stood behind it, twiddling, tuning, testing, to attain that fullness, unstable as the grasshoppers on Bostall Heath, of which the contraption was capable. And then one Sunday he unclipped his Avo meter. He put down his insulated screwdriver with a grunt of satisfaction. Now the confusion was of real sea, and genuine weather. A poor, monochrome vessel was beam-ended on the Goodwin Sands; it rolled back and forth inside the screen, endlessly, helplessly.
The horror rose to my lips. ‘They’ll be all right?’
‘Two of them were saved. But the captain always goes down with his ship.’ My mother’s look assumed a glassiness as she said it. I had not seen her face so before.
Thus I realised early that there might occasionally flood in a loss which was unendurable. The skipper of the Enterprise had given his body to the waves; he breathed in lethal sea water as surely as I drank my National Health orange juice.
My mother’s cousin ‘went down with the Hood’, but to that bare phrase my small imagination could attach no picture at all. I put death in a far-off quarter, snow-bound, snow-blinded, epitomised solely by that other terrible captain: Scott of the Antarctic, whose recovered boat-coffin clung to the Embankment by Tower Bridge, and whose bereaved son painted snow-tormented birds in the screen of our television.
Then one evening Erica took me to a slide-show talk given by Sir John Hunt. It was at my school in Bostall Lane. The conqueror of Everest was some years happily returned. But Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tensing stood on the snowcap screen against a glare of magenta-blue, still planting the Union Jack. And after that I was reassured; for there was no undiscovered place upon the globe, no unexpected continent, able to surge in, disaster-filled, cannibal-fretted, sacrifice-plagued, species by man-eating species. Death was a thing of the past, and I learned to sleep by blocking it out. Until this ocean, and this storm. My beliefs heaved and bucked under me.
Regarding the Atlantic, though, I knew my father and grandfather had led charmed lives. It was Erica who had told me. Both career seamen, they were survivors of the two world wars. My grandad missed Jutland, being fortunately on weekend leave when his ship rushed hooting out of Chatham. He had already retired, and was only hooked back out of honourable discharge because there was a crisis. The worst shock he got in the war to end all wars was from a streak in the phosphorescence. Too paralysed to sing out – a potentially capital omission – he stood watch in his trance as the tell-tale slice closed and closed, aimed dead at the engine-room below him. Against the intimate torpedo there is no defence. Desperate small-arms fire would be as useless as prayer. Only at the last minute did the streak turn miraculously away, and he caught a glimpse of its dorsal fin in the moonlight; though not of its hammerhead sneer.
One of the few sailors ever to be saved by a shark, then, my grandfather Frank Lightfoot began in sail, abided in steam, and ended on shore; a charmed life indeed, if tedious. When he fell from the old Impregnable’s rigging, he was preserved by a Scotsman, who caught the youthful seat of his pants as they passed the lower yard-arm. After that he was unsinkable, undrownable, unexplodable. His recollections covered a vast red world of experience.
Such had always been the integrity of the family story. The males at sea, or foremen at the arsenal, the women at home – except in times of national emergency. We were the kind of folk who could put together a down payment, tough but reliable souls, salts of the earth. The kind who never had calamity or Zeppelins predicted for them.
Therefore my grandmother Lightfoot, not long married, with an infant, was surprised to find herself out at work and hardly in her new Co-op home at all. She was frightened too, making ammunition for the Somme. It was to keep up the payments, and do her bit while big Frank was escorting his convoys.
She had to leave my toddling aunt with a neighbour each morning and take the workers’ train from Abbey Wood. And once within the great black curtain wall of the arsenal she must give herself over dutifully to production. Extending her pretty finger ends, she picked up on each of them, including the thumbs, a cartridge-paper hat from the bench to her left. Then held them up – like a raw crown roast. She plunged them into the fish-glue in front of her on the stove. Judging the clutch to avoid a progressive cooking of her skin, she drew them out again, dripping, steaming, stinking. At last with a pianistic flourish which was entirely her own, she pressed her whole batch firmly into the empty cases, waiting at her right and newly machined – like brass lipstick holders. So each of her innocent digits made a neat bullet hole, time and again.
Erica, while powdering her nose once, had spoken of the Blitz and hiding under the stairs. But no one had actually died. They were stairs I should never see again. Nor should I ever set eyes upon the family I had been born into: immortals, familiar with weapons, innocent of death. Now we had left England, in circumstances I bluffed myself I had the hang of, and everything was new. We were wilful outlaws, pirates. The huge waves queued up in front of me. The wind tore at my hair. I stared back at the immense grey sea.
