It should have been the Norse Saga but anyway it kept me busy and then sleepy. I think after I spotted that mine, and after I did what the first mate wanted without a word, the crew began to respect me, because after that they let me sleep even till five fifteen, fifteen minutes after my watch had begun, not needing me right away anyhow, and woke me gently in bed: ‘Come on, Dulouse, time to get up, you’ve slept enough.’
‘The sleeping beauty,’ announced the bosun as I’d walk in for coffee.
They were good boys and we had a good trip. I for one never did figure what was wrong with that chief mate. It was close to being a Billy Budd and Master-at-arms Claggart situation because he was always fuming with rage and I was always sleeping, which explains Claggart and Billy pretty well, the guilty and the innocent soul side by side in the same ship.
I thought, for instance, I heard a big fistfight and wrestling rough-and-tumble on the steel desk right over my pillow one morning, fifty guys fighting, with clubs and sledgehammers, but it was ‘Pueee puee pueee’ the scream of the ‘All hands on deck’ attack warning, and I realized I was listening to depth charges going off in a submarine attack. I just turned over and went back to sleep. Not because we had 500-pound bombs and couldnt do anything about anything anyhow, but because I was just naturally sleepy and I had figured out in the Navy nuthouse: ‘I could get killed walking across the street, if Supreme Reality’s arranged it, so why not go to sea?’ And besides, ding-blast it, I WAS just simply sleepy all the time. They called me ‘Sleepy Du Louse’. Like Beetle Bailey, you might say . . . ZZZZZ.
IX
The NMU delegate at the meeting, with the approval of the members, also denounced the chief mate for the lifeboat bailing-out incident. I dont quite remember where I was during these meetings, either in the back making coffee in the big fifty-cup urn, or sleeping, or reading, or standing bow watch and dreaming, but it all worked out.
I mentioned all this to redeem myself from the curse of being accused of slacking in the US war effort.
The looseness of discipline in the Merchant Marine, which incidentally now I remember was the big complaint the chief mate kept screaming at everybody, was what made me love it and accept it and the danger with it. Sometimes I’d think ‘O boy would Pa love this, to be on this ship, with me, maybe he could have been dishwasher, nah, his legs wouldnt stand it, well, purser, with typewriter . . . but those waves, those storms, these guys.’ Everything is romantic when you’re twenty-one in 1943.
The war brought people closer together, no matter what you can say about the rest of it.
The thirty-one-year-old captain was constantly looking thru binoculars, having the Navy boys signal the rest of the convoy with their blinkers, drinking coffee, trying to catch nine winks. He looked like a worried executive Johnny Carson at a desk but he was a real captain. He paid no attention to the first mate. He didnt drink, like other captains I’ve known, seemed to be worried I think about his family. There’s always something mysterious about the captain of your ship, the ‘Old Man’ he’s called, as tho he was other than human, as everybody knows, and of course I couldnt get over those first twenty days of the voyage of the Pequod in Moby Dick when nobody even got to see Ahab but just heard his stump up and down, stump, stump, in the captain’s stateroom as he brooded on the whale, that damned white whale, that damned white whale whose eyes I see right now in the Heavens (looking one this-a-way, the other that-a-way, if you know what I mean).
X
But now that I’m forty-five years old and in a continual rage myself, I can understand and sympathize with that chief mate, at last, and I know what way the salmon jump up that river of bitter time and pain, wifey . . .
And lo! one morning the sun rose plaintiff to the accusing mists of the Firth of Clyde and the ships come into a bright part of sea where on the left you could see cliffs of Scotland, on the right flat green meadows of Ireland itself with thatched huts and cows. Imagine having a thatched hut right by the sea! A farm by the sea! I stood there crying, my eyes were pouring tears, I said to myself ‘Ireland? Can it be? James Joyce’s country?’ But also way back I remembered what my father and my uncles had always told me, that we were descendants of Cornish Celts who had come to Cornwall from Ireland in the olden days long before Jesus and the calendar they start Him from, Kerouac’h (‘Duluoz’) being, they said, an ancient Gaelic name. The cry was always ‘Cornwall, Cornwall, from Ireland, and then Brittany’. No secret to that, all these places being tidied up by the Irish Sea more or less, including Wales and Scotland over there on the portside with her lairdy cliffs. But the bosun rasps at me:
‘Come on, Du Louse, aint you ever seen Ireland, get busy with these hawsers you doodle brain!’ (‘Ker Roach’ they really called me.)
Still with tears in my eyes, I worked on, but can anybody tell me why? It was just the sight of the little thatched huts on the green meadows by the softly breaking waves, and the cows lending their long shadows to early morning sun, and the wind at my back I guess . . .
XI
Then we sailed down into the Irish Sea, laid anchor off Belfast, waited there for some British convoy boats, and crossed the Irish Sea that afternoon and night straight for Liverpool. 1943. The year the Beatles were born there, ha ha ha.
And the year some little bum in a derby hat took my advice and lived with his legs whole. As we came up the Mersey River, all mud brown, and turned in to an old wooden dock, there was a little fellow of Great Britain waving a newspaper at me, and yelling, about 100 yards ahead as we bore directly on him. He had his bicycle beside him. Finally I could see he was yelling something about ‘Yank! Hey Yank! There’s been a great Allied victory in Salerno! Did ye know that?’
‘I dont know, Mr English, but please get off that pier, from what I can tell we’re going to ram it down head on . . .’ But he couldnt hear me because of the wind and the tide and the noise of cranes and winches unloading other ships nearby on the Merseyside docks.
‘Yank! Yank!’
‘But, mon’ – I think the captain’d gotten drunk at last for the first time and the chief mate maybe too on Schnapps – ‘but please turn around and start running as fast as you can, this ship is not going to touch at that dock, it’s going to ram it! The bridge is drunk!’
‘Hey? Hey what? Salerno!’
I kept waving him away. I pointed at the bow, the bridge, the dock, at him, I said ‘Run run run . . . away!’ He took off his derby and ran back with his bike he was pushing, and sure enough, the bow of the SS George Weems carrying 500-pound bombs and flying the red dynamite flag rammed right into that rotten wood wharf and completely demolished it, ce-rack-ke-rack-crack, timbers, wood planks, nails, old rat nests, a mess of junk all upended like with a bulldozer and we came to a stop in Great Britain.
‘This sceptred isle.’
Now, if it had been a modern concrete job, goodbye Du Louse, this book, the whole crew and nothing but the crew, and ‘alf and ‘alf of Liverpool.
XII
Where does a captain go when his ship’s finally docked and here he comes out after supper all decked out in his best suit, with epaulets and all, and steps down the gangplank carefully to a waiting cab or limousine? And in this here wartime Liverpool, was he about to go have dinner (cocktails first) in a castle over a sea-crashin cliff? Or a lounge somewhere? In fact, and where does the scarred first mate go with his snarling smear of thoughts, to weirder friends somewhere? In fact, and where, even the bosun, the lowest Portuguese ordinary, the engine room, where do they go? They’re all togged out and stepping out? They amaze me as I watch them go. Because I’ve agreed to work the whole weekend for the Portuguese ordinary so that when he comes back, I myself can have two straight days in a row. Anybody wondering what I’m going to do? But where do captains go? It’s like wondering about where elephants go when they die, with their tusks. Some hidden blonde? Some old fishy Britisher seadog friend who taught
him to read maps in Magellan rooms? I dont care if the port’s Norfolk Virginia or Liverpool or Hong Kong they must surely go to strange places. So I’m there watching everybody going ashore, I have to stay aboard two days and fiddle with the loading spotlights and the wires that feed them the electricity, make coffee for the gangplank watch, and in the morning watch all those crazy little Liverpudlian longshoremen come rushing up on their bicycles with their lunches and their thermos bottles of ‘tay’ as they eagerly get down to the ‘job’ of unloading those awesome big 500-pound bombs destined for poor old sweet Dresden or someplace or Hamburg.
But that first night, a Friday, practically the whole crew gone, I wheedled the lines around, put up rat guards extra against the original ones, pointed the spotlights right, made coffee, and mostly spent most of my time rearranging things on deck and saying to myself ‘Aye saye, Mayeteee’ in imitation of the Lancashire accents of the longshoremen. My nose was sniffling in the riverside cool, I was having fun, all alone practically on one big ship, and suddenly it began to occur to me that someday I would become a real serious writer with no time to fool around with poetry or form or style. Besides, at dusk, red on the Mersey liquid belly, here goes this oldest and littlest freighter I ever saw in my life with old fellas sitting on the afterdeck in old chairs smoking out of pipes, the SS Long Voyage Home, bound for Bangkok I guess for the thousandth time, the ship just slipping past me at my rail, the old men not looking up, just a touch away, by pole anyway, into the sinking sun they go on long voyages to the Pacific: and I’m wondering ‘Joseph Conrad wasnt wrong, there are old seadogs who’ve been to everywhere from Bombay to British Columbia smoking their pipes on poops of old sea vessels, practically born at sea they are, and die at sea, and dont even look up . . . Even have cats down below for the rats, and sometimes a dog . . . What tobacco they smoke? What they do, where they go when they put on their glad rags in Macao, to do what? What a vast crock it all is for me to even dare to think of anything when all is said and done, Mayetey, I saye, get those lines wound right . . .’ Talking to myself, I laughed all night. Not even a drink since Brooklyn . . . Who needs it?
Maybe at noon I’d slip off down the cobblestoned Merseyside streets and try the pub, it was always closed, not alone they didnt have any sausage in wartime England except was made with sawdust, but no beer proper either. And always closed. Some bold old bum in a bar complained that the poor of Liverpool were using their bathtubs to put coal in.
But when my weekend was over and Portuguee came back to take over my duties for two days, I put on MY glad rags, which was shiny oiled black leather jacket, khaki shirt, black tie, Merchant Marine Army Navy Store phony goldbraid hat with visor, black shined shoes, black socks, and stepped down the gangplank leaving all the returned crew’s hangovers behind me and to go buy a ticket to London England on the Midland Railway. Even the captain was now back, disappointed I’m sure.
I got a haircut downtown Liverpool, hung around the rail station, the USO club looking at magazines and pingpong players, rain, the rimed old monuments by the quai, pigeons, and the train across the strange smokepots of Birkenhead and into the heart of La Grande Bretagne (‘the Great Britain’).
Book Eleven
I
Then the sun came out and our train rattletootled across your most beautiful green countryside, England in September, early September, haystacks, fellas on bicycles waiting at the crossings as our train smashed thru, dreamy little narrow rivers that apparently feed the cottages they fell through as tho they contained the waters of Manna, hedges, old ladies with Walter Pidgeon hats clipping at half-timbered cottage hedgerows, the whole shot of England as I’d always wanted to see it only to see it I had to stand there at the door window of the mail car and look out eagerly because three hundred Aussies were sitting on the floor smoking and yelling and shooting craps, soldiers. No room anywhere on that train. Boom we go into the night lights of England, bang, Birmingham, Manchester, call it what you will and in the morning I’m asleep on the floor all dirty and disheveled like all the other soldiers but we dont all care because we’re in London town on leave.
In those days I used to know subways pretty well so I took a subway straight from the railroad station to Trafalgar Square which I knew was near Piccadilly Circus but I wanted to see pigeons, Trafalgar’s statue of Nelson for some reason, and anyway a kid gave me a shoeshine, and I spruced up in a USO club and started wandering around in the warm city day well pleased, even went into an avant-garde painting exhibit and listened to local contemporary intellectuals carry on as they’ve done before, during and after any war on your bloody history map.
Then I doodled around looking at posters and decided to try Royal Albert Hall for that evening for a performance of Tschaikowsky by the people there with Barbirolli conducting. This took me to Hyde Park and kept wondering if it was named after Mr Hyde and where was Dr Jekyll? It’s fun when you’re a young kid in a foreign country, especially England, after all those movies you’ve seen in the Rialto.
As the concert was going on, and I sat on the balcony next to an English soldier, he whipped out a volume of verse by T. S. Eliot called Four Quartets and said they were magnificent. Lot I cared. On my right was an American soldier who had a flask. In the midst of the performance (God knows how I managed to sit thru concerts in those days without a trip to the toilet, a sandwich or a drink or a snip of the stars) when Barbirolli announced ‘As you can hear from the air raid sirens out there, London is being raided this evening by the German Luftwaffe. Shall we continue on with concert or go downstairs to our shelters?’ Applause, ‘No! Concert!’ So they continue with the concert. But I was lucky. This was just after the real Battle of Britain in the Air, after the RAF and the Canadians had clobbered Göring’s Luftwaffe, and, mind ye, just before the beginning of the next nemesis: the rocket-powered super bombs of the V-1, not to mention the V-2 a little later. It was a lull in the air war in Britain when I got there.
Funny, in fact, how I never got to see a bombing raid anywhere, not even on the SS George Weems with its three strikes painted on the stack, or from Spitzbergen in 1942 Greenland. I guess that was why I was washed out of the US Naval Air Force.
Anyway after the concert we all piled out of Royal Albert Hall into the pitch blackness of blacked-out London, the raid was still continuing in the suburbs I guess, and me and the Four Quartets soldier, and the drinking soldier, bumped on down the road together straight for Piccadilly Circus bars and late Scotch. We got plowed and stupefied in there till the very end when by God the host did actually yell out over the yells of airmen and soldiers and seamen ‘Hurry up please gentlemen it’s time.’ We spilled out of there into the darkness of Piccadilly, fur coats of whores kept bumping up agin ye, ‘Ducks, I saye!’ and ‘Hey, where?’ I lost everybody and finally one fur coat said its name was ‘Lillian’ and so we went off together into a little cozy inn.
II
In the morning they brought us breakfast, it was gray and misty outside with coalsmoke pouring out of William Blake’s chimney pots, and Lillian said ‘One more time ducks and then I gets ready for tonight’s duty.’ So I afterward say goodbye to her, pay for the room, and go down to smoke and relax in the inn’s, or hotel’s, fireplace reading lounge. In there is a big fat ruddy Englishman in a tweed coat smoking a big pipe and speaking in loud and sincerely grandiose tones to an old crone in a tweed suit drinking tea out of Cheshire cups, whatever they are. The fire roars and twinkles and crackles like the big Englishman’s eyes. With my own eyes I saw they were on their guard to keep England to themselves indeed. I wanted to talk to that man but I was afraid of him, Colonel Blimp and the whip hand and the hauteur and all that, but you know as well as I do what would have happened: Scotch, drinks, trips around town. Americans were naïvely in awe of dear auld England in those days. I’ve lost my awe of England today in that they’ve tried too much to become like ‘us’. That’s true. And that’s no Cambridge lie.
III
Well, morning and a few cold beers with American airforcemen in Piccadilly beer bars, where they chill the beer for American tastes, a walk around, even a nap in a park during an air raid, and then I have to find my way to Threadneedle Street because Lillian or something or somebody took most of my money away: I think it fell out of my pocket in Piccadilly dark: to borrow money for the train back to my ship in Liverpool from an American shipping office. An old man carrying an umbrella and wearing a homburg hat comes up to me and says imperiously, tapping me on the shoulder, ‘I say, which way to Threadneedle Street?’ Why it’s the bloody Bank of England street, haint it? Anyway I get my money, back to the train, back to Liverpool arriving dark late night now, and as I’m trying to wend my way back to my ship at the docks I’m stopped at the monument near the river by another bag like Lillian saying ‘I saye, Ducks’ and so as I said earlier in the story, up against monuments. But on my way home to the ship, I know the way, there’s another air raid blackout and b’God do you think for one minute I was afraid of those possible German bombs? No, in the very middle of the cobblestoned streets of that waterfront with my money from Threadneedle Street in one hand and a bloody cobble in the other, I stalked soft as a Canadian Indian because I could hear them breathing in those doorways of the blackout dark: the thugs and muggers who give birth to beats on piles of bitumen in bathtubs and dont pay the rent.