An innocent aboard
Jonathan Mirsky
EIGHT BELLS AND TOP MASTS: DIARIES FROM A TRAMP STEAMER by Christopher Lee Headline, £24. 99, pp. 244, ISBN 0747274924 If, as Joseph Conrad remarked, his aim was 'above all to make you see', Christopher Lee's book about his two years as an apprentice on a tramp steamer 50 years ago does just that. Raised in the Kent marshes, he was a typical badly educated lad of the time — he believed in a worldmap coloured pink for British — but somewhat different, too; he had worked on a coasting barge and knew about tides, winds and knots. He had dreamed of going to sea, and in 1958 secured a berth on a goodsized tramp steamer, sturdily built in 1942 and one of the last of her kind. Tramping — cruising from port to port around the world, loading here, unloading there
according to whatever deals the owners could strike — gave the lad glimpses of Shanghai, Hong Kong, Colombo, Suez, Gibraltar and Havana. He remained innocent: when the rest of the crew were buying girls in Madras with bars of pink Sunlight soap, Lee visited the Flying Angels, Anglican chaplains stationed in every port 'to stop us bagging off', or having sex, Thus he avoided 'the full house — gonorrhoea, diarrhoea and pyorrhoea.'
It wasn't until he ate lunch in an expat's house in Hong Kong — where he was groped by his upper-class hostess, who, he learned, 'hasn't worn knickers since she was 13' — that young Lee saw photographs of living people in a living-room. 'I'd never thought about it before,' he wrote in the diary he kept which makes this book so lively.
The only pictures we have at our home are of dead people ... There's Great Uncle Will in uniform before he was killed. There's one of Granddad Jim, and he's dead. Drowned at sea. Mum said. Drowned in whisky, said Auntie Eva.
What Christopher Lee makes us see above all is the detail of shipboard life through the eyes of a naive, shy, eager, curious lad from the marshes. He had learned to signal with a flashing lamp on the barge and one night aboard the tramp he was ordered to signal to a passing warship by the mate, who called everyone Chuck. He sent his signal fast to impress the mate, and the answer returned so fast that I couldn't read a flipping word of it. That'll teach you, Chuck, said the mate ... Lesson one, he said: always signal at the speed you want them to send back to you. Lesson two: don't friggin' show off. Lesson three: that's what life's about.
Later, the mate was teaching the lad how to tell time at sea by the ever-changing position of the sun. Baffled, Lee suggests that time was something people just made up. Why shouldn't it, just as well, go backwards? 'Listen, Chuck, this is a navigation lesson, not a frigging seminar in metaphysics.' The next day when the mate orders him to do a complicated task the lad replies, 'with respect, sir,' that there wasn't enough time. 'With respect, Chuck, you're the great expert on frigging time: find some.' In Shanghai Lee sees enormous pictures everywhere of 'their president, or whatever he is, Chairman Mao'. One portrait goes halfway up a skyscraper. Mao's famous wart 'must be three feet across. Imagine having a wart that big. You'd think they'd do something about it. I suppose that's what makes him different.' Indeed.
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