Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart [47]
We adopted strategies for dealing with everything: you timed your lunge from galley to table with your plate of stew, to the pitching of the boat. The pitching was more or less predictable, so in one lunge you could get to the bulkhead at the end of the chart table. There you wedged yourself in tight, holding the stew aloft, while the boat toppled crazily over the other way; then, as she started to come over again, you made the final dive and at the bottom of the roll slumped neatly down onto the seat and waited for the next roll to slap your stew down on the nonslip mat. Thus seven people fed three times a day.
When we weren’t eating, we would read … some would have their heads deep in the Vinland sagas, or some earnest nautical tome. I myself found it impossible to concentrate on anything more complex than Edward Lear and so, at Hannah’s insistence, reverted to reciting “The Jumblies.” Oddly enough, I derived the greatest comfort from joining her in declaiming:
And when the Sieve turned round and round
And every one cried, “You’ll all be drowned!”
They called aloud, “Our Sieve ain’t big,
But we don’t care a button! We don’t care a fig!
In a Sieve we’ll go to sea!”
We may have been in the middle of a nightmare, but that didn’t mean we were without pleasures; after all, you can only be catatonic with fright for a certain limited period. When the source of the fear is with you night and day, roaring and whirling just an oaken hull away from you and your dinner, your fear—and I make no bones about admitting that I was absolutely terrified—soon takes second place to other, gentler things: conversation, laughter, reading, hope, the minutiae of daily existence. Also there was the inspiring example of little Hannah, who seemed hardly perturbed at all. She had adapted immediately, in the way that children will, to her new environment. Ros and Tom would read to her and play, just as if they were at home in their cozy cottage in the New Forest, and she was happy.
There was an odd sort of coziness about the situation, too. The saloon was lit by oil lamps, which cast the most romantic glow, and a comforting warmth came from the little potbellied stove in the corner. Everywhere you looked there was some big lug of a man sprawled out like a dog, reading a book or dozing, rocking involuntarily with the motion of the boat. And there was a heavy and complex odor about the place, composed of diesel, meat stew, the fishy smell of the sea, outbreaks of flatulence, and the putrid miasma of unwashed bodies and wet wool. This was far from pleasant, but you can get to like anything with familiarity. As I said, it was oddly cozy.
BY COMMON CONSENT, EVEN when things were as bad as they were now, we the men would go on deck to take a leak. The heads could become unpleasantly congested with the daily traffic of five men, so they were reserved for what you might call sit-down occasions, and for the more refined use of Hannah and Ros.
Now, as you may imagine, it was far from pleasant going up onto the storm-lashed deck to relieve yourself, so you would try and hold things in until it was your watch, when you had to go on deck anyway. This was not always possible, though. You might, for instance, be in your berth, thinking ruefully of your loved ones and the home you suspected you might not get to see again, and little by little that familiar old insistent urge would steal over you. It might be one o’clock in the morning, and you’re not on watch till four. You wonder if perhaps you could hold it back … for three hours? No, impossible. You lie back and try to forget it…. Maybe it’ll go away. You try to think of something different, but to no avail.
And so, wearily, you set the long tedious process in motion: first you unzip your sleeping bag, whereupon most of that lovely warmth you have worked so hard to create vanishes. Then you wriggle out of its clinging silken folds and the tangle of the woolen inner. Next you reach up in the dark to untie the lee cloth, grateful that you were sensible enough to tie it