get me out of this’ were the words that came to mind. Childhood, we had been told, was magical.
‘Chairs on desks, hands together, eyes closed. Vespers, ready!’
Now the day is over
Night is drawing nigh;
Shadows of the evening
Steal across the sky.
My benighted personal devotions were a mishmash: ritual, obscure, a touch orgiastic – I was ashamed of the scenes in which Mr Chaunteyman’s image became entangled. They were in a way taboo, involving the I-Spy Book of the Wild West, the things in the blue suitcase, and a picture torn from a magazine.
The blue suitcase was not an article of ordinary luggage. When the time came to up-anchor, my proper things were carried in proper containers. The blue suitcase was almost, but not quite, a toy. I could think of no adult use for it: just too small for overnight, just too deep for documents. So it had ended up in my bedroom, where its contents worked my worship. All the more intently since his coming.
And in this climate of mutiny what of my father? On a Saturday he might take me on the free ferry. Around Woolwich Market Square every building was the colour of soot. Then there was a widening, a vista, a dropping-away towards the ferry ramp road. Our bike wheels hammered on the cobbles and shocked across the old tramlines. We rode past the queuing cars and lorries. One of the three ferry boats was always mid-stream, paddling its flat dollop of a hull through the toxic gap between us and the opposite bank. Below the water-line, black; above it, a shade of bright nautical tan, soot-smirched, grease-stained. And the tub had two bridges, was double-ended. Her best features were her two thin smokestacks. They gave her a hint of Mississippi, which must have struck my father particularly.
‘Dave Chaunteyman, Ralphie. You get on all right with him, don’t you?’ We were wheeling our bikes on to the pedestrian section.
‘All right.’ I thought of my torn-out picture.
‘Like one of those smart gamblers, in’t he, boy? Like you see on the films.’
‘Yeah.’ It showed two painted lovers, kissing.
‘What they call a handsome sailor, eh?’
‘Do they?’
‘Now don’t give me any of that, you little bugger.’
There must have been something in my face. I had no idea why he was suddenly so protective of the man. We waited for the ferry boat to swing out against the rip, then went below.
‘Look at that lot, mate. D’you see?’ He always showed me the engines at work turning the paddle wheels. ‘Chunky, eh?’ Two huge steel rods shoved sideways out of the lower regions. Shaped like the cranks of my bike, though infinitely magnified, oiled and engineered, they looked like silver sea monsters who would at turns rise up and gnaw the drive. The assembly roared and clanked and hissed, and smelt of power.
‘Nothing to the big ones, though.’
I looked up at him. ‘You’re going to be all right, aren’t you?’
‘All right? I should think so. What d’you mean?’
‘Oh, nothing. Just wondering. You wouldn’t understand. Come on. We’re nearly at the other side.’
Some instruction had been rung down from the bridge. You could see the bells that clanged and the two men stoking in the dark bowels. Sometimes he was like putty in my hands. I knew who Erica was with. I pulled him away from the engines to see the docking procedure and to watch the wooden paddles mill the water into a tainted foam. The smell came up with each blade like a mouthful of salty petrol.
‘What do you mean, wouldn’t understand?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Come ’ere, you cheeky little sod. You’ll get a clip round the ear.’
I pretended to dodge.
‘You and me, Ralphie, eh?’ he said. He caught me hard and clutched me to him so that it hurt. ‘You and me against the world.’
We rode off to explore the ships in North Woolwich: Victoria Dock, Royal Albert Dock, King George’s. Not many in. We were like two seamen prowling the wharves, looking for a berth, ready to sign on for some adventure. ‘It’s in the blood, Ralph. Handed down. A man can’t fight against his own nature.’ The rusty hulls towered over us, the rusty cranes towered above them. Hardly anyone was about. I would peer up the gangways to where the silent sailors lived. They gave nothing away.
So my father led me from tanker to tramp along the cobbled concrete, across the rusty crane tracks. Where we could not cycle, we lifted our bikes over heaped-up anchor chains and the great twists of steel hawser. The water beside us was green-black and scummed at the corners. The artificial terrain of this north shore stretched away to a hinterland of waste called Custom House. And westward now I knew the swinging road bridges were the connection to the East End and up towards the City. It was enemy territory for us over here, deprived, bombed out, desperately poor – my father called it ‘cannibal country’.
‘Come on then, Ralphie. We’d better go back now before they get wind of us. They’ll be after you, all right. They’d fancy getting their teeth into you.’
The forms of mutiny are legion. They are a gamut of crimes. After muteness, slowness to respond, and questioning an order, there is insolence. Say, swearing at an officer. But think also of whispering, spreading dissension.
Disputing the navigation is mutinous, so is complaining about treatment and conditions, combination, or circulating written material. Soon we come to the more fundamental notes: conspiracy, violence to superiors, striking sail – in other words, refusing to work. Insurrection, taking up arms, disclosure of secrets, communication with the enemy, incendiarism, murder, rebellion, seizure of the ship – the sequence swells to a crescendo – piracy, egalitarianism, the construction of an alternative and licentious marine economic under iron hand. And the ship is a famous microcosm, naturally; something of a well-tried metaphor. By this token, all crimes by another name are simply mutinies against the nation, which is doing its best for heaven’s sake, steering its lawful course.
So let all who sail in her bear in mind mutiny’s traditional punishments. They swell in sympathy – beating with a knotted rope’s end, caning with a rattan, the cat-o’-nine-tails, confinement, irons, gagging, the grampus, the gauntlet, death by flogging, death by hanging, death by drowning, death, death … Like an insistent drumming in the brain. Mutiny and Punishment are the systole and diastole, the Navy’s heart-throb.
Before we did the deed Mr Chaunteyman went away for two months. He flew places: he was off to California in the mo-o-orning, as they sang on the wireless. ‘What d’you want me to bring you, kid?’
I told him I wanted an Indian head-dress – and waited in an ecstasy of yearning. When he came back he brought instead a shrunken head and a three-stage plastic rocket that ran on tap water and compressed air. It was from Disneyland. You pumped it with its own plastic pump, and it
