in her own version of English. There was an accent, but not a definitive one. She had seen God up there on the way. Courtesy of Qantas. She was the Holy Ghost and I was the recording angel.
Then she demanded asylum, claiming Commonwealth citizenship – for what that is worth – but could give no country of origin. I have seen a lot of claimants, fished out of passport queues, flushed out of cargo holds. I have seen forged documents exposed, and various scars upon the body, some genuine. The airport becomes its own island beach, where the world’s wretched are washed up. She could, as I say, have been anything. She called me ‘frozen-faced douanier’, and she is right, it is my official persona – policeman of boundaries. Perhaps it was Carla’s presence that made this particular encounter stay in my mind, just after the night of our intimacy. A woman’s body, that Terra Australis Incognita. Carla is a member of my department. We sometimes work together.
Could I have mistaken the name? Armorica? It is some slip, perhaps, where an idea loops back on itself and we find ourselves positive about an erroneous fragment. That is a commonplace of the witness-box, after all. No two people ever see quite the same incident. Details get confused. Could I have crossed one ship’s name with another? A burnt woman …
While I should have been writing reports, I have been researching passenger lists: for the relevant years from the relevant companies. No Ralph and Erica Lightfoot appear. No David Lafayette Chaunteyman. There are two Kendricks and one Kettle, but they are not Penny or Robert.
If you asked me to describe the night of my return to Abbey Wood with Erica, I could not. There may have been scenes, recriminations, blows. What I do know is that afterwards the name Armorica never crossed our lips. Not once. The voyage’s memorabilia were trashed from our luggage: the menus with their little seabed illustrations, the brochures of ports, the bus tickets, waiter’s bills and so on. Our Australian effects, my school notebooks – even Erica’s snaps were handed over to be destroyed. When we returned and my grandfather was ‘gone’, the house was brought ruthlessly up to date. A proper television went in, fitted carpet, a three-piece suite, all hire purchase. It was fumigated of its past. And the television stayed on all the time, sealing them into their marital capsule.
And this is my utter frustration now, of course: that for my father’s honour, my original voyage was so rubbed out. Within those walls it had absolutely never happened, though I can hardly think our self-censorship had the power to extinguish a whole ship from public record.
My father hated memory. He never spoke of his war. Out of the Navy for good by VJ, he went to work in the arsenal – like everyone else. It remained for some years a large employer. All the while some kind of suffering was palpable in him, but unarticulated. You could see it in his arrogance, his ironic grin, as if he were perpetually biting back the pain of an inventive old-world punishment. Hating religion by the same token, he shrugged off any approach of emotion with grim clowning. He used that peculiar baby-talk larded with back slang, which tends to lurk in the Navy. By these means he cemented what must have been our conspiracy, for it was always to him that I took my troubles, right from a toddler. I regarded him as my special protector; like a joking Jesus.
I try hard to imagine him in his own youth, cycling up to the grammar school at Shooter’s Hill; I rode there myself in my teens, on the same bike. Though he left at fourteen and was sent soon enough to HMS Ganges at Ipswich, the ‘stone frigate’ hell-hole, where his own dad had once been an instructor.
I went through sixth form and qualified for my commission because the war had changed everything. There was technology and free education. And he told me in a gruff voice how I had ‘bloody gone aft’, how he ‘wouldn’t know how to speak to me no more’ – Ganges being to Dartmouth what the beast is to beauty. Gone aft! Dad, no one ‘goes aft’. It was wilful and jealous, this adherence to Jack Tar, who never slings his mental hammock but in a wooden man-o’-war.
Once I was commissioned, the eddies of career kept me in the northern hemisphere. Not so unusual. It is not all ‘See the world’. So it was perhaps not until seventy-nine that I first found myself south of the Line. That would have been with Zebra, the best destroyer I served in. I was in my late twenties, keen, good at my job, making progress.
We waved our flag at Cape Town and sailed east for Sydney on a goodwill visit, bound for Hong Kong. Oceans are all different. To trace the famous old trade routes of the roaring forties holds an excitement, a freshness. I enjoyed my baptism in those last-discovered waters, the southern seas. We hurried along to Australia at a steep clipper-fast run, and made landfall.
But just as we approached Sydney harbour a flotilla of small craft blocked our route. We had to hold off: yachts, cabin cruisers – even a few old steamers. They were making their way out past the Heads which mark the harbour’s entrance. It seemed as though the whole population had taken to the water, skittering and skimming about like a vast shoal haunting a reef.
The few Sydney folk who had not got themselves afloat were up there waving right on the bluff, or drawn up to the very edges in their cars – we could just make them out and just hear, dimly on the breeze, the noise of their horns mingled with the hoots and blarings from the little fleet.
In the midst of them stood a great white passenger ship dressed over all, proceeding out to sea. Every few minutes a blast of sound would come from her funnel across the swell, and the small fry would reply at once hooting back; and then tack or dart all the more.
We lined the wires; it was a sight. I turned to speak to the man next to me, and found Tommy Hall-Patterson, our Principal Warfare Officer. He said it was the send-off for the liner Avalon on her last voyage. He was a distant, rather isolated man; but a hard-nosed sailor, one of the old school. Hated to see a damn good ship go to waste, he said. ‘She’s the last of the three white sisters, the Avalon, the Armorica, and the Hispania. There goes what it’s all been about, Ralphie. You see that glorious thing, beside which this old tub, though I love her dearly, is no more than a rocket-launching sardine can sharpened at one end …’ He paused. ‘Look at those bloody lines. Isn’t she a vision?’
‘Absolutely,’ I said.
‘And what are we having to do with her?’ he continued. ‘Sell her to the damn Chinks. She’s off to Taiwan to be broken up. With all her bloody glad rags on. Makes me livid.’ He nodded towards her, and added some half audible snippet of verse. ‘You know that?’ He repeated it: Kipling – about the great imperial steamers in their white and gold liveries. ‘When you see the like of her, what do you think?’ His angry eyes turned from the Avalon and seemed to bore into me. I hesitated, not knowing what sort of reply he was after.
But he carried on: ‘For three hundred years, the Royal Navy has kept the seas so that a creature like that could slip off Clydebank and go anywhere she wanted without fear of bloody molestation. But there’s no more cash, boy. We’re all washed up. Men have given their lives for a cause and what does it amount to. The Jap, the Yank, the Russian, the damn German and the heathen bloody Chinee; these shall inherit the earth, and there’s not a thing we can do about it.
‘And if anyone has the balls to say nay,’ I can hear his cultured, old-fashioned voice even now, ‘if anyone questions the damn carve-up, Ralphie, why then it’s all hell and four-minute warnings. Short and curlies, eh? No one can move a damn muscle, for the awful poise of the balance. If poor old Britannia dares draw the line again what a bloody flap there’d be. Before you know it an unstoppable escalation, some idiot politician presses the button, and the lot of us gone up for good. You and I, Ralph, will never see active service. Have you grasped that? Lucky, are
