Crossing The Bar

By Michael Martin

70s UK: nationalised industries run the country and Unions run them into the ground: sometimes into the sea. Xmas 1971 approaches and a brand new Island ferry is due to replace the unreliable old ferry, but keep the same unreliable, self destructive crews. Meanwhile, wealthy local riverside property developers have plans to rid the river of the dirty ferry service. Xmas disaster is inevitable.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Martin
• Release date: Feb 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301586844

Michael Martin

Michael Martin, a Mennonite pastor turned blacksmith, is founder and executive director of RAWtools Inc. and blogs at RAWtools.org. RAWtools turns guns into garden tools (and other lovely things), resourcing communities with nonviolent confrontation skills in an effort to turn stories of violence into stories of creation. RAWtools has been featured in the New York Times and on Inside Edition and NPR. Martin lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Book preview

CROSSING THE BAR

Michael Martin

Copyright © Michael Martin 2010

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover copyright © by Robin Matto

www.robinmatto.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher

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Table of contents

Part 1

Chapter01

Chapter02

Chapter03

Chapter04

Part 2

Chapter05

Chapter06

Chapter07

Chapter08

Chapter09

Chapter10

Chapter11

Part 3

Chapter12

Chapter13

Chapter14

Chapter15

Chapter16

Part 1

22nd December 1971

Chapter 1

Three deckhands: Dick Godwin, Dan Delaney and Mullet, stood on the car deck of the dirty little paddle ferry, M.V. Fishmouth and watched Harry Dove, the new trainee deckhand as he leaned over the side, staring at the starboard paddle churning up the surprisingly green waters beneath the lowering December sky.

From six in the morning ’til nine at night the old ferry chugged to and fro across Oyster Water, the three mile wide channel separating the idyllic tree clad Island from the mundane mainland. To the west a narrow spit of shingle protected saltgrass covered mudflats at the mouth of Millington River from the storms of the English Channel.

The cadaverous Dick’s thin pale lips twisted into a cruel grin above his little pointed beard and his long, thinning ginger hair flailed in the salty breeze as he considered how best to make use of the new deckhand in his destructive plans. Beside him Dan drew a huge hand through his thick black beard and his bushy brows knotted into a puzzled frown as he watched the nervous new deckhand. Mullet prodded a plump finger at his greasy head and twisted it, saying, with a smirk: ‘Wot a nutter.’ His protuberant beer belly wobbled over his trousers from the exertion of his finger movement and his fat, greasy, mottled face juddered beneath lank hair as he tried to imitate Harry’s nervous ticks but, as usual, his efforts to amuse met with no encouragement from the crew.

Dan and Dick transferred their attention to watch Mullet with disgust until he disappeared down the ladder into the warm suffocation of the crew’s mess below decks. They turned back just in time to see Harry scrabble up on the side of the ferry. Sure his intention could only be to throw himself overboard they rushed across the deck and each grabbed an arm as Harry tried to flap them, either in an attempt to shake Dan and Dick off, or to fly away over the sea. Gripping him tightly they laid him down on the deck but as soon as they let go he rushed back again to the side of the ferry.

‘Whoa now. Stop that. Are you really trying to kill yourself?’ Dick shouted into Harry’s face as Dan held him in a full Nelson. Harry stammered and spluttered incoherently something about being dead already. Dick slapped his face hard, twice.

‘You won’t feel this then.’

Harry didn’t answer so Dick slapped his face again.

‘Feel it that time? Well.’

Harry nodded.

‘Not dead yet then. Listen: maybe you’ve nothing to live for but sure as hell there’s nothing to die for. Die and there’s really nothing, nada, zilch.’ He pushed his bony face up close. Harry shut his eyes tight. ‘So the trouble here is that you just don’t know yet how to live. Someone needs to open your eyes and show you some REAL LIFE, beats the hell out of death. What are you anyway: nineteen, twenty? Never lived yet have you? Have you?’

‘Nuh, no.’ Harry stammered.

‘Well I’ll show you. Give it, what? Three days. Give it till Christmas Eve and if you haven’t understood what living’s all about by then, if you still haven’t got the message, I’ll kick you over the side myself. Deal?’

Harry nodded.

The fourth deckhand in the crew, Gordon Fanshawe, was considerably older than the rest. He greeted Mullet as he entered the steamy gloom of the mess.

‘Ah Mullet. Tea’s made for the skipper.’

‘Not moi turn ter day.’

Gordon consulted the neat little rota he always compiled and pinned to the notice board.

‘Oh yes it is: your day.’

Mullet grumbled and poured a cup out for the Captain then climbed back up the ladder, spilling most of it in the saucer. The wind was strong as he weaved with the tea through the cars across the car deck and climbed up the ladder to the bridge. Before opening the sliding door, he emptied the saucer back into the cup. Then, without thinking, he opened the door on the windward side of the bridge and crashed inside. The wind whipped tea spray all over the interior and scattered magazines and newspapers off the chart table before Mullet could slam the door shut.

Captain Prawl got off his stool and stood - short, squat, pockmarked and swarthy - in front of Mullet and looked up unblinkingly into his red eyes. Mullet twitched.

‘You’ve been on this ferry how long?’

‘Uh, twelve year, Cap’n.’

‘Twelve years, and still you haven’t learnt which door to come in when the wind blows.’

‘Won’t need ter bother soon, will oi, what wiv the new ferry due?’

‘That’s right, Mullet, oh that is so right.’ Prawl took the remains of the tea from Mullet’s sticky hand. ‘You won’t have to know anything on the new ferry; it’s been designed for cretins just like you. Go on: that’ll do.’ He dismissed him from the bridge.

‘And talking of cretins - where did they dig that new trainee deckhand up from? Bring back Binstead: all is forgiven. If I’d known they’d send this moron to train in his place I’d have let Binstead go on pickpocketting the passengers and sacked him in the New Year when the pressure was off. Look, just look at him down there, shaking like a leaf. Has he got the DT’s or what? Doesn’t want to be permanent does he?’

‘Just Christmas vac, from University, I think.’ Trunky, the Leading Hand, replied.

‘Oh God protect us all, another student, and I thought he was just retarded, what with the tick and the stutter. University eh? Goes to show. Hah, when I was a lad, and I can tell you I wasn’t daft, not some gibbering nervous wreck like that, but do you think I could have gone to University?’

Trunky sighed and nodded as the familiar theme recurred.

‘Eh? Of course not. Not the likes of me. No feather bed for me: had to work, get a job, make some money, study and train in my own time, couldn’t do that could you? No: too idle, made easy for you but you still dropped out like the rest of this misbegotten crew. Too fond of your creature comforts eh?’ Prawl jeered as he bent down to retrieve his wind blown magazines and newspapers. ‘And where’s the Mate got to? Another cretin.’

Henery, the old weather beaten Mate, quietly entered at that moment on the leeward side. He took over from Trunky and his long thin body and great beaky nose hung over the wheel.

‘That’ll do then, Leading Hand.’

‘Aye, Cap’n.’

‘Well, Henery, everything shipshape?’

‘Aye, Cap’n, not too busy terday. We’ll square her up when we’m alongside. Lots o’ sweety wrappers an such on the decks, ar, and matchsticks too.’

‘Fine, fine.’

‘Aye, and I saw a big cigarette butt.’

‘Oh.’

‘T’ad lipstick on um, hur.’

‘Really?’

‘Ar.’

Captain Prawl elected to end the conversation at that fascinating point. Henery spun the enormous wheel and Captain Prawl varied the power to each paddle with the huge brass lever, bringing the cumbersome old ferry alongside the Fishmouth pier, their Island destination.

‘Oi shall be sorry ter see the old ferry go, Cap’n.’

‘Well you’re the only one who will be, Henery, she’s rusty, unreliable, a bugger to steer, underpowered when the engines do feel like running, and forever slow.’ Prawl thought to himself: ‘Just like you Henery.’

‘Ah, well, I been on her all moi loife, and moi father afore me.’

Henery was only three years off retirement now. He started as a deckhand when he was a lad straight from school. His father, Arthur, had been a Leading Hand then. He eventually became a Mate and carried on working on the ferry for years until one day, at home, Henery walked down the garden to use the privy and spotted his father lying dead on his cabbages. His mother had died years before his father. Now Henery lived alone down Saltgrass Lane on the edge of the marshes in his parent’s little cob cottage with a single cold water tap and no power or sanitation. On his few days off, or back home after early turn, or before late turn, he could see the ferry from his cottage as it weaved its way in the distance down from Millington along the winding river through the miles of saltgrass mud and then finally out across the few open miles of Oyster Water to Fishmouth on the Island. This little stretch of water with its fast tides could be flat as a millpond one moment then, when the tide turned and the wind piled the waters up, beset by short, choppy waves that pounded against the old neglected ferry hulk, sending all the glasses and cups flying in the bar, making passengers sea sick and causing peculiar and pungent eruptions in the ferry’s strange toilet system, whose convoluted destination was always Oyster Water.

Further along the low lying exposed piece of shoreline from Henery’s hovel lay the imposing beach house of Mr Frobisher, with its ten acres of lush gardens and tall pine trees that offered protection from the wind. It had a private beach and boathouse. Moored at his private jetty were his yacht and his motor cruiser, neither of which had been used for years.

Mr Frobisher owned many properties along the riverbank. He was the major shareholder in a development Company. His fellow shareholders, Mr Huntley, a local industrialist, and Mr Spraint, the Town Mayor, also owned key riverside properties. Their joint plans for future riverside developments would be significantly more profitable if the dreadful old British Rail ferry service did not chug up and down the river for sixteen hours or more each day. The old ferry was nearing the end of her life but, rather than stop the service altogether, British Rail was about to replace her with a brand new ferry, much larger, with plans to do night runs which would completely blight all schemes for quality property development along the river.

Mr Frobisher stood on his balcony and watched through binoculars as the ferry docked on the island at Fishmouth. He could see Henery’s distinctive silhouette on the bridge and make out his frantic arm movements on the great wheel as the final manoeuvre was completed.

Mr Frobisher and his partners had a plan for the fate of the ferry service but unfortunately he had delegated its implementation for various reasons, nepotism being among them, to the wrong person: his son, Roderick. Time was running out and the new ferry was still in one piece in the boat yard, days away from delivery.

After the final voyage of the M.V. Fishmouth on Christmas Eve there would be an official party aboard the new ferry for the two shifts of crews, the management, the shore staff, passengers who held season tickets, local dignitaries and businessmen. This would also double as the usual Christmas party and be free publicity for the inauguration of the new ferry, the M.V. Fishmouth II.

Captain Prawl stood on the bridge and watched the cars drive off. He scanned the car park with his binoculars looking, as he habitually did, for any sign of a fiddle or conspiracy among the shore hands, but the Island staff - unlike their Millington counterparts - were innocents. He swung round and scanned Oyster Water and spotted a glint of sunlight over the other side, for a moment he perused Mr. Frobisher with his binoculars as he was perusing him.

‘You fat, rich old poof,’ he murmured.

‘Cocky little Captain Pockmark.’ Mr Frobisher noted. He walked back inside through his French windows and had the feeling he was floating on air over the luxurious new carpet. He called for his latest companion: ‘Jeremy, Jeremy, ah, there you are, dear boy.’

The crew were sitting down in the mess drinking tea and waiting for the call to load the ferry and leave. The ferry spent an hour on the Island in Fishmouth and fifteen minutes in mainland Millington but it was always tied up for the night in Millington.

Mullet had disappeared to pursue one of his many work evading tactics. This time he crept into the largest of the life jacket lockers in the lower saloon and fell instantly asleep on the soft musty heap.

‘Speak to me, Harry,’ Dick invited. Harry was hiding in the darkest corner of the ill lit mess, wedged on the end of a splintery bench between the bulkhead and the cupboard used to store the cups and plates. Since joining the crew they had not exchanged a single word until Harry tried leaping over the side of the ferry.

‘Wuh, what?’

‘Well, here you are, cast among us, who are you? Well? Oh never mind.’

Harry looked away. He cleared his throat a few times and hoped he could remain overlooked. When enough time had elapsed and Dick was deep in conversation with Gordon he slipped out and up the ladder to find a quiet undisturbed length of taffrail to lean on. Dick watched him go from the corner of his eye.

‘Jesus, what a zombie, what can be done? Boot him off into the other crew?’

‘Sub clinically neurotic.’ Dan surmised.

‘What he needs,’ Gordon confided, ‘is a damn good meal, a damn good drink and a damn good - woman. Answer to any male problem. Always worked for me.’

Dick climbed the ladder back up to the deck and slunk along until he found Harry leaning over the side staring out across Oyster Water back to Millington.

‘Hey, don’t do it.’ Dick yelled. Harry jumped out of his skin. This, in turn, made Dick jump.

‘Whoa there. Steady.’

‘Juh, just luh looking.’

‘Over the worst?’

Harry nodded.

‘How old are you then?’

‘Nuh nineteen.’

‘Nineteen? Yeah, let me see, now where was I at nineteen? Huh - chick was pregnant, the story of my life; lost my grant - apparently I never attended a lecture or tutorial - well who had time for all that crap? My father ran off with my sister’s best friend - good for him I say - and my mother, well, she died of cancer not long after. My sister - good looking girl - O.D.’d pity, good stuff, but too good. Meanwhile my brother was doing Christ knows what in South America. Oh yeah, and then I got in on the ‘Blunt Instrument’ tour, keeping the lads supplied. You name it; I supplied it. You name it; they wanted it. Heh, and sometimes they got more than they wanted: indeed, so did we all. So - you at college or what?’

‘Um, yuh.’

‘So, just here for the Christmas week then?’

‘I suh suppose so.’

‘Then back to college?’

Harry shrugged.

‘No?’

Harry shook his head. He didn’t want to talk, he just wanted to be left alone: all of sudden everything had gone wrong. He felt so cold, all the time he felt cold. Now he couldn’t even breathe or speak properly, let alone control these tremors. Since the purpose of speech was to communicate and since all he could currently communicate was his new inability to even speak properly, the last thing he wished to do was communicate at all. He felt himself trapped forever in an increasingly unpredictable body: serving a life sentence just because he could no longer speak one. Or should it be a death sentence?

‘So - do you drink?’

‘Yup.’

‘Good, good. Smoke?’

‘Nuh now and then.’

‘Well there’s hope for you yet.’

Dick looked at Harry as he stood there shaking and saw somebody wiped clean or drained dry by something, someone. He saw someone who was extremely vulnerable, who no longer had any foundations, somebody with a profound distrust of himself, someone who had even forgotten how to breathe properly let alone speak. How low was that to sink? Someone who - less than an hour earlier - had wanted to throw himself into the freezing waters to be chewed up by the paddles. Someone who could be saved from himself - which would be a very boring, goody goody thing to try to do - or someone who could be a fire ship to send drifting pilotless in among the enemy fleet. Who were the enemy? Almost everyone else out there: certainly anyone who had the temerity to try telling Dick what he should do. Complex strands were coming together for what he hoped might result in a startling new weave.

‘So what went wrong?’

Harry gave him a fleeting look of panic.

‘Yeah. I know: a girl in there somewhere.’

Yes, somewhere amongst it all there had to be a girl. The right person summoned but at the wrong time: too soon, enough magic to summon her but not enough to keep her.

‘Dyad, huh, or so you think: soul mate. Gone. The barbed sting, she’s out there somewhere and taken half of you with her, but she’s forgotten you even exist, so you oblige her by making quite sure you don’t. Is that what you wanted? Eh? Hey, I’m talking to you, look at me. Wake up, open your eyes: so, do you still exist?’

Harry dropped his head and walked away unsteadily along the heaving deck.

Henery was comfortably ensconced in his little cabin eating a digestive biscuit. He looked at his watch, worked out what time it was, and left his little warm womb for the harsh world of the deck. He toughened, straightened his back and threw up the beaky nose.

‘Alright, single up,’ he called in every doorway and hatch where a conscientious deckhand might have been. Nobody appeared so Henery guided the twelve cars himself to park on deck. He grunted as he took their tickets, it was the deckhand’s job. Up on the bridge the Captain blew his whistle and hands miraculously appeared to loosen ropes.

As usual the shorehands cast them back to the deckhands who coiled them up again on deck. On the Island, at Fishmouth, this was a gentlemanly process; the shorehands were an entirely different breed. The whole Island was an entirely different world where life moved at a different pace, where kindness and courtesy ruled, but on the mainland in Millington the shorehands were scuttling rat-like creatures, ever on the lookout for fiddles, perks and tips. The deckhands hated the shorehands because they were paid the same money for less work and had access to all forms of fraud, and the shorehands hated the deckhands for just the same reasons.

The usual card school developed on the return trip to Millington involving everyone except Mullet, who was on the bridge doing the lookout. Dick dragged Harry down to the mess to play. Harry was reluctant to play for money; the stakes were low but so were his funds. He felt his way carefully into the game of nine-card brag: at first his losses were slight. After several hands observing his opponents he was more adventurous. It became clear to him that Dan was naturally lucky, Dick was devious, Trunky had little idea how to play and Gordon usually had the sense not to. Harry proved to be lucky too, and devious.

‘Where are we?’ Trunky asked, the steering rods passing overhead in the crew’s mess clanked abruptly indicating a bend in the river. ‘We’re past the mouth of the river, so where’s Mullet?’ Trunky needed Mullet to play. Only Mullet was worse at cards than him, only Mullet could lose money to Trunky.

‘Ah,’ Gordon called through from the little galley where he was preparing more tea, ‘Mullet said he didn’t want to play today.’

‘He said what?’ Trunky roared. ‘Since when has he had a choice?’ No one answered. They were in full agreement that to give people like Mullet any kind of choice at all was not in the interests of democracy and that democracy was getting a bad name in the world because of just this sort of silly mistake.

In Millington, as usual, there was the delay before anyone joined Henery on deck and when they did appear they were greeted, as usual, by glaring shorehands torn away from sharing their ill-gotten gains in their seedy little hut.

‘Where you bin then?’ Suggins shouted from the jetty at Mullet on the for’ard end. Mullet retorted by throwing the heaving line - left soaking in a bucket on the deck for this very purpose - straight at Suggins’ head. The slimy line smacked Suggins full in the face and then looped and dribbled over the top of his head and round his neck. Passengers assembled on the deck for disembarkation laughed loudly. Suggins said nothing; he hauled in the rope and looped it over the bollard, then walked off without a backward glance. In fifteen minutes the rope would be off again and he would be throwing the heaving line back at Mullet. The muscles in his donkey jacket twitched in anticipation.

Henery, though only yards away, had been oblivious to this, concentrating hard, quivering at his marks for the cue to lower the prow. One prod of the red button marked ‘push’ and the whole huge prow would rumble and jolt down to the slipway. The great slimy chains restraining the mighty timbers trapped every vehicle on board until, he, Henery, unleashed this mass to free them. It was a burden of responsibility he could not bear lightly. He would still wake up in the middle of the night sweating profusely, the bobble of his nightcap in his eye, thinking of the one time when he pressed his red button and - gasp - nothing had happened. He had pressed it again: nothing, and again. Waiting foot passengers had giggled, motorists had glared, but still nothing happened.The Captain - it had been Captain Harbinger that day, in a foul drunken temper on the last trip, eager to get away for more drink - had abused him from the bridge for all to hear. He had pressed and pressed at the button and then, miraculously, the motor had whirred and the prow had gently lowered three feet before the right hand chain snapped, leaving the prow dangling lopsidedly for five minutes. Then, just when the Engineer appeared angrily from his cabin in his blazer, ready to go home, the left hand chain snapped too, and the prow had smashed down on the slipway, killing two passing rats.

The Engineer, who had to stay behind for five hours unwanted overtime supervising the maintenance contractors’ repairs, blamed Henery. Henery could have explained that all he had done was press the red button but he had never thought of it like that and ever since he could not trust that red button, or the one at the other end of the roll on roll off ferry. It now joined every other mechanical item he had ever come across, as an enemy, ready to confound. Who but the truly impractical could ever comprehend the animosity of the inanimate object? However, this afternoon Henery was saved again, the red button potently responded, and the prow lowered as commanded.

From the bridge Captain Prawl watched the last car bump off and the last passenger disembark. In the brief interim before the ferry filled again and the whole monotonous process was repeated he grabbed his binoculars. A brief scan of the waiting passengers confirmed that, as was usual on the winter runs, in spite of the run up to Christmas, there were no delightful passengers to slaver and lust over or invite up to the bridge to flirt with, so instead, he peered over the fence at the shorehands in the car park.

The shorehands were discreet of course, their illicit activities refined by years of practice, so that the chance of his ever witnessing anything he could act upon was remote, but still he would scan them at every available moment and one day, one day, he would catch one at it. His short, thick fingers with hairy tufts grasped and wrung the binoculars as if they were a shore hand’s neck.

It was not the morality of the situation that incensed Captain Prawl. It was the certain knowledge that out there, before his very eyes, money and goods were changing hands in return for bookings, tickets, or a priority placing on the ferry, for which he was getting no cut: not a sausage, a sore point as he saw the sausage and pie lorry in the car park ready to embark and could almost smell the gratis sausages sizzling in the shorehands’ hut. Furthermore, with Christmas so near the crew had only the prospect of a can of beer each as a customary gesture from the British Rail management, which was so derisory that it deserved one of the crews’ customary gestures in return. Meanwhile, the shorehands were being given whole crates from the beer lorries, dozens of pies and sausages, aftershave and goodness knows what else.

Captain Prawl was jolted back to the present by the sight of Henery loading the ferry and his usual wasteful method of parking. As usual Henery was getting flustered. Provided the driver had commonsense and ignored his instructions everything would be fine. The forefingers of Henery’s hands were jerking at each other, as if urging the young woman driver to make her car implode. She did not do so: instead she drove straight at Henery. He smacked his hand down repeatedly on the bonnet until she stopped. Then, before Henery’s bulging eyes, she got out of the car and left the deck, paying no attention to his roars to come back, leaving the car parked obliquely across the middle of the deck, just where he had directed her to park. Henery had directed her parking many times before: she knew just how to handle him.

Henery’s main problem in the issuing of directions was that all he had ever parked himself was a bicycle and having successfully accomplished this on numerous occasions he assumed that vehicles could be manhandled and adjusted at the last moment in similar fashion. Unbeknown to Henery, his inability to fit the booked cars on the ferry had repercussions beyond the booking office. It struck deepest at the shorehands who relied on fitting extra un-booked vehicles on the ferry every trip, and it was no use them phoning in false bookings if not even all the genuine booked traffic could be fitted on deck. Captain Prawl was certain that some of those little weasel faced ignorant peasants were