The Ice-Cold Heaven: A Novel

Part One

THE WOODEN FISH

Gumboots and Chocolate

Emyr, Gwendolyn, Dafydd and Regyn

Poste Restante Recalada

Ennid and the Monkey

Shipwreck

In the Swarm of the Gun Crews

Boilerman’s Hands

How are you, Mr. Blackboro?

Captain Scott’s Blanket

Shackleton

Introductions

Cormorants, Ahoy!

1

GUMBOOTS AND CHOCOLATE

A GENTLE ROCKING OF HER RIB CAGE, A CRACKING OF HER wooden knuckles, then a bump against the pier to make sure no one falls asleep … That’s how the ship passes her time.

She’s waiting to cast off.

And she’s right to be impatient. What are we waiting for?

We’re outta here, was what Bakewell said. But nothing’s happening. Just sitting in the dark, the same for hours, rocking. Makes no difference if my eyes are closed or open. It’s as black as a night in a black tent.

Christ, the water tastes good.

Here, drink something, he said, and passed the bottle into the locker. His sooty face in the crack of the door.

And, shorty, everything okay? Just do me a favor: if you’re hungry, don’t eat my gumboots. Eat McLeod’s.

Ha ha, Bakewell, very funny, ha ha. I was already suckling at the bottle.

Come on, we’re outta here any minute. The two of us, hey?

THE LEGEND SAYS THAT KING ARTHUR ONCE SPENT THE NIGHT IN MY village—no idea if that was in a locker, a tent or the Linden Tree pub on the road to Mynyddislwyn. Either way, it’s a long time ago. And Pillgwenlly, Wales, is very far away. Today is one of the last days in October 1914 and I’m leaving Buenos Aires. I’m sailing on the British barque Endurance. As a stowaway.

Three sailors smuggled me on board and hid me in a locker full of oilskins. The culprits are Bakewell, who I came over with on the USS John London; How, who they call Hownow; and McLeod, who’s already sailed for the South Pole once before, on Captain Scott’s Terra Nova. McLeod is nicknamed for the town where he was born, and called Stornoway. And even though Stornoway can hardly be better known than Pillgwenlly, McLeod makes a lot of his home, and if it were up to him, the whole world would know where it lies: In the Hebrrrides.

McLeod, How and Bakewell belong to the twenty-seven-man crew of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. If she ever manages to cast off, the Endurance will set a course for the Antarctic continent, which her crew will be the first ever to cross on foot.

My plan from here is to be the twenty-eighth man. And my chances aren’t bad. Once the Endurance has passed the lightship at Recalada, she’ll be on the open sea. Sir Ernest isn’t going to throw me overboard, and whether I end up as the seventieth sled dog, like Stornoway predicted during the piss-up last night, is something we’ll just have to find out.

This locker could do with a porthole. And maybe a bed below the window while we’re at it. I’d only need to lift my head to be in the silver sunshine over the Rio de la Plata. The brand-new transporter bridge must be sparkling in the sun. There’s an especially long concert of horns and whistles going on right now, since it’s not every day that a British national hero sails under the bridge at La Boca. Hundreds of porteños, people from the area around the harbor, must be standing on the pier and wishing Shackleton the best of luck as he sails off.

Holy ship’s gusset, does it smell of rubber in here, was what Bakewell said. It would be the oilskin locker that the three jack-tars picked for me to crouch in, while the three of them are up on deck with the dogs barking and the sun falling on their faces. Farewell, Argentina!

The sirens are howling from the rooftops of La Boca’s egg-yellow warehouses. Hooting from all sides. Any minute now and the tug will cast the Endurance loose.

Well guessed. They’re already cheering. She’s off! And I whistle along. Hi-ho! We’re off into the ice, into the white, white ice.

We’re going to see the Beardmore Glacier and Coats Land and the Larsen Ice Shelf. With a bit of luck, we’ll discover the Blackboro penguin or be the first to stand on the ice shelf’s unexplored edge … Pillgwenlly Land.

Ha ha, no point doing things by halves.

Those are the prospects. The stories I could tell, if I wasn’t so completely by myself. I’m a young man from a one-horse town near Newport. More a mother’s than a father’s son. Unthinkable! But it’s true, it’s true, and being your mother’s son in the time of the Great War is something special. I’ve never been to any of our enemies’ countries, but I know German sailors. Of Great Britain I only know Wales and of Wales only a chunk. To be precise, I know Newport and the southerly villages between the Usk and the Ebbw. The Usk has the biggest trout in Wales. No doubt King Arthur knew that, too.

I’ve got an older brother, Dafydd, and a sister, Regyn. Her husband, Herman, is a foreman at the oldest factory in Wales, which can therefore also boast of being the oldest factory in the world. Wales was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, though that, too, was a long time ago. On the day of the general mobilization, my brother-in-law, Herman, and my brother, Dafydd, went to the railway station and on to the new Flying Corps barracks at Merthyr Tydfil.

How says on that day the Endurance was anchored in the Thames estuary, waiting for the King to decide if the expedition would take place despite the outbreak of war. Now they’re celebrating, my motor-sledding comrades, because we’re off into the land of ice. And cheering the King, they’ll stick the Union Jack right on top of it. But if King George had telegraphed not just his one regal word—Go—but added two others—to war—they’d all have obeyed and climbed instead into the dreadnoughts and the trenches: Sir Ernest and Wild, his second in command; Captain Worsley and the two doctors, Macklin and McIlroy; the scientists; the painter and the photographer; McNeish the carpenter; Green the cook; the two stokers; Vincent the bosun and all his sailors. Only Bakewell would have tipped his hat and said, Not for me. I’m a Yank without a home, and war only matters to people with homes.

You’re right, Bakie! And you know what? There are more important things than shooting as many Germans as you can; that’s something the King understood, and that’s what he meant by just wiring Go. The King wants us to do something with our lives. He wants us to be the first to cross the Antarctic from the Weddell to the Ross Sea on foot. He wants us to be able to tell our great-grandsons how we did it. And because all that’s too much to write in a telegram, the King sent just that one emboldening word.

Go! Get the canvas set, boys!

George V, King of England, is as sensible a man as my friend Bakewell from Joliet, Illinois.

Sir Ernest and the skipper are pacing off the lines of kennels on deck. Orde-Lees is checking the strap rings on the sleds. They won’t be needing any dogs, because they’re motor powered, made in Wales. Hurley is standing at the gunwale, filming. And high up somewhere on a yardarm, Bakie, Hownow and Stornoway are dancing the tango with the first long-legged gusts coming off Cape Horn.

Away into the south of souths. It’s two and a half years since Scott, Wilson and Bowers froze to death on the march back from the Pole. Scott put down in his diary every stage of the tragedy after Amundsen got there first. My brother read it to me out loud night after night, and we tried to imagine what it must have been like in that small tent with a ten-day blizzard howling around it.

Antarctica, Antarctica.

I’ve been cowering down here for a night and half a day, and haven’t eaten anything but chocolate.

2

EMYR, GWENDOLYN, DAFYDD AND REGYN

I CAN STILL REMEMBER THE FACE MY MOTHER MADE WHEN MY brother and brother-in-law wrote from Merthyr Tydfil: Mam, they’ve actually gone and seconded us to the hangar troop. It’s fantastic. We’ll be back when we’ve fixed the problems with the propeller firing.

Until then, Mam hadn’t even known exactly what an aeroplane was.

From my perspective, the unsolved problem of propeller firing meant having to find work to help support my family. In the week after general mobilization, I started work in the shipyard where my father, Emyr Blackboro, has been building ships for forty years. He does interior fittings, and it’s because of the artistry of his wainscoting in particular that my father is a sought-after, if not famous, man in the harbors on the Usk and the Severn. It wouldn’t take him a day to transform this smelly oilskin locker into a richly decorated cabin. It would still be just as dark and uncomfortable, but I’m sure that it would smell as sweetly in here as in our old yard boss’s orchard after summer rain.

I did a string of little jobs in the Alexandra Docks in Newport: running messages, stitching, painting. After the end of the shift, I used to sit with the seamen who were smoking their pipes by the waterfront and telling stories about the ports they’d docked at. Not once did they take any notice of me. I used to sit on the mountain of cable rope I’d been splicing since the early morning and feel that I was sinking further and further down inside myself. I was as tired as Checker, the dog that swam the English Channel.

My eyes would be falling shut and it would feel like my ears were, too. With only half of one ear open, I listened to them talk about the houses they wanted to visit in New York, the American friends who’d promised to be on the Hoboken quayside when the tub docked in Manhattan, to take them and their sea chests straight to Times Square, where these fine friends claimed to live. They couldn’t have cared less about the pond. That they would first have to cross the Atlantic from Newport to New York, thousands of miles of foaming ocean where, along with everything else, the Kaiser’s U-boat fleet was lurking, didn’t interest them.

The sea seems not to mean anything at all to most of the sailors I’ve got to know. They behave like it doesn’t exist. Who can understand that? I think of my dad, who loves everything that’s made of wood. Imagine if he acted as if there were nothing special about a tree? Here, for example, my cold wall, made of planks. Two or three handsbreadths behind it, there’s nothing but water. Even in the dark, he would know what tree it came from. He would smell it, run his hand over it just once … Elm, boy, elm.

After a few evenings on the pier, I didn’t know what to make of those sailors. Only one thing was clear: that these men, many of them only a few years older than me, had never been inside a Sunday school. They swore and lied till my head spun. Since then, I’ve learnt that the one true love these yellow-toothed loudmouths have is the love of embellishment. A few months ago, I still hadn’t realized it, which is why I didn’t notice that I embellished my feelings just as hopelessly.

My father sometimes sent me to Skinner Street, to pay an invoice at the ship chandler Muldoon’s. That’s how I got to know her: Ennid.

It took months, or that’s how it seemed to me, before I had a conversation with Ennid Muldoon. At first we communicated, other than the usual greetings, only through numbers. When I entered the shop, I said hello like a normal person. Mr. Muldoon inspected me. Ennid returned my greeting. I said my name and Mr. Muldoon clapped open a red-bound ledger, which he handed to his daughter. Ennid took the ledger and limped over to me with it—she’s got a weak leg—and said, Ninety-seven. I opened my father’s wallet and counted out the right amount: Ninety-seven. Ennid re-counted the notes and coins: Ninety-seven. The next instant, I was standing back on Skinner Street, outside the door and the greening copper plates that encased the building, and didn’t know how I’d got there.

Swaying, I wandered down to the harbor. But I didn’t even see the ships. I was so happy that I would have given the first sea dog to shuffle past a big wet smacker. And if not that, I would at least have smiled at him the way Ennid Muldoon had smiled at me. That is, if I hadn’t been so unhappy.

When it comes to growing up, to maturing in a difficult situation, my dad likes to say that you always stay the same. According to my old man, all that changes in the course of your life is your growing ability to recognize happiness and unhappiness as such. Since I’ve never heard him change his mind and since that makes him a kind of living proof of his theory, he can’t be completely off the mark. But it didn’t help me, being the same person before and after the outbreak of war, before and after a day of drudgery over a rock-hard sailcloth in need of patching, before and after Ennid Muldoon. And I thought I had recognized where my happiness lay. That’s what gave me the confusing feeling that my happiness was making me unhappy.

I didn’t understand what was wrong with me. The two people I could have asked for advice had other worries. My brother, Dafydd, and brother-in-law, Herman, were building a machine gun behind the propeller belonging to flying ace William Bishop, and I didn’t want it to be my fault that instead of bringing down one of the Richthofen brothers in a dogfight over Paris, he ended up shooting holes in his own aeroplane because his two Welsh machine gun engineers hadn’t focused on their work. So I decided to ask Regyn about Ennid Muldoon, but all I got was sisterly incomprehension.

My mam, Gwendolyn, advised me to forget the whole thing and not to mention it to my father. My dad claimed later that he had known at once what hour had struck, and I want to believe it, though he never said anything when we plodded home along the Usk to the village for the weekend, silently. Or I was silent and he whistled one of the tunes he’d invented.

But one morning on the way to the warehouses, he said, Have a look at the paper today. Everything’s in there. Read it and you’ll know what’s wrong with you.

He cracked the whip and our pony, Alfonso, who had as much distaste for Monday mornings as I did, snorted cantankerously and sped up.

My dad was apparently being serious. How was that supposed to work? I was in love with Ennid Muldoon; I knew that already. I’d been in love a few times before and had even prayed to warm my sister’s frozen heart. But fatherly advice is always well-meant. You can’t just throw it away.

So after the end of the shift, I bought a copy of the South Wales Echo and retreated with the rolled-up oracle into the mess of a steamer that smelled of glue and had just been given the pretty name Saint-Christoly.

My eye ran across the headlines:

USA URGES BELLIGERENT POWERS

TO RATIFY LONDON DECLARATION ON NAVAL WARFARE

SCANDINAVIAN COUNTRIES TO RETAIN STRICT NEUTRALITY

JAPAN DEMANDS GERMANY RELINQUISH BASE AT TSINGTAO, CHINA

The course of the war was on everyone’s lips. The dispatches in the evening paper only expanded the information that you heard in the harbor during the day. But the more dispatches I read, the more strongly I had the feeling that they applied directly to me, in ways I’d never expected.

Some articles I read time and again. And as I ran my eye over the headlines, the realization that my father had predicted happened:

USA URGES BELLIGERENT POWERS

TO RATIFY LONDON DECLARATION ON NAVAL WARFARE

SCANDINAVIAN COUNTRIES TO RETAIN STRICT NEUTRALITY

NEWPORT BOY MERCE BLACKBORO WANTS TO BE A SAILOR

Sitting in the glue smell of the Saint-Christoly, I knew all at once that the reason for my unhappiness was none other than the lure of the sea.

I had wanderlust. I was tearing myself up with the yearning to get away, away from Pillgwenlly, away from my parents and my sister, away from Merthyr Tydfil with its hangars and its oldest factory in the world. Everything seemed as old as the legend of King Arthur, as old as the Welsh we spoke when we were by ourselves, as old as the Celts, who were as old as Moses, who was put out in a reed basket at the waterfront, yn yr hesg ar fin yr afon.

I wanted to get away, to go somewhere where everything would be new. Although the reports in the South Wales Echo had only one subject, the war, which was spreading around the world, each of the headlines offered me the possibility of seeing that world before it was too late … before I made my happiness out of Ennid Muldoon and the artistry of my own wainscoting.

I don’t want to accuse my father of wishing that I would join the Royal Navy. I just wish that he would have spoken to me candidly, perhaps about his disappointment that Dafydd, instead of going to sea like a good Welshman, was copying the French and tinkering about with flying machines. In Dad’s eyes, an aeroplane is good for only one thing, and that’s crashing into the Channel. It’s five years since the Antoinette flew from Calais to Dover, and to my father Blériot is still a godless swindler. If, just for a change, we had spoken about my future, I would have said to him that although dreadnoughts do need sailors to go down with them, they’ve no need of wainscoting, even if it is as nice to look at as Emyr Blackboro’s.

But above all, I would have liked to talk to him about Ennid. Particularly one afternoon when we left the cart outside the warehouse and walked home along the Usk, past the meadows of blue bellflowers, past the sawmill and over the little bridge where the Ebbw flows into the Usk. We stopped and looked down at the golden flashes among the pebbles in the water below.

There. You see it? A big fat one.

He pointed at the trout he’d spotted. Unmoving, it rested in the shadow of the raspberry bushes, its head facing the current. Its spots were red and black, and lightly ringed. Scared by our voices, it beat its tail once before it disappeared under a stone.

I went on and he called after me: Ennid the Limper? The Jew’s brat? Out of the question. Merce, stay there. Merce …! Merce …!

3

POSTE RESTANTE RECALADA

EVERY FLOATING TUB HAS ITS OWN UNMISTAKABLE WHISTLE AND this is one I recognize. There’s only one horn on the Rio de la Plata whose tootling is so cheerful and it isn’t a coincidence that it’s the last one before it’s only the wind that’s blowing. Where the estuary meets the Atlantic, there lies the Recalada lightship.

The signal means: "Row the man over, Endurance, but row him gently. The next lot’ll need him as much as you did."

At Recalada, the pilot leaves the ship. From here on, the skipper usually takes charge, and only the skipper. But on the Endurance it’s different. On this ship, it’s Shackleton who has the last word.

And quiet … Suddenly there’s no more thumping. The engines have stopped. From the way the Endurance is gliding, the sea must be flat and calm. The chains rattle and the anchor drops.

Lower the boat!

A ship makes the same noises whether she’s sailing out or coming home. There’s nothing strange about that, because a ship doesn’t change, but stays the same as long as her crew doesn’t wreck her. A ship can neither jump over her shadow nor slip out of her skin, and it makes no difference how many times she’s painted over. Just in Newport, I know a dozen little squirts whose clothes have been made as colorful as flower beds by the endless repainting of hulls. They’re all as green behind the ears as I once was, and none of those on the swings that hang above the waterline ever alters a ship just because he paints it sun yellow one day and in camouflage the next. The ship stays the same.

What changes under all the layers and crusts of paint is the boy. He changes because he has time on his swing to dream up stupid ideas. And it’s not only there … No matter what you’re doing, just as long as it stretches out endlessly and stays perfectly the same, your hands will work all by themselves. You wouldn’t believe the insights that float into your head when you’re sitting on a mountain of cable rope in need of splicing. You become an absolute Buddha. Truths occurred to me by the dozen. I realized the truth about my brother-in-law: he’d taken the first chance he’d had to escape from Regyn. He’d had enough of my sister. I realized the truth about Mr. Muldoon: that by treating me with disdain, he also showed disdain for my dad, who’d been his customer for forty years. Mr. Muldoon needed a solid thrashing. And my dad? He was different. He was different not just from Mr. Muldoon but, above all, different from me. Always the same man, always diligent, always unswervingly focused on doing his bit, he was sure of my love forever. But if there’s one thing I’m not, it’s unswerving. I’m not the same person two days in a row. On the John London, Bakewell and I lived through hours when we were turned inside out, wrung out, chopped up and sewn back together. We looked at each other, asking, Is that you? A part of Bakewell became a part of me and some part of me is now a part of Bakewell. Also, you’re always in some measure the man standing in front of you. And the man in front of you is always different.

The ship is just the ship. She belongs neither to the sea she floats on nor to the land where she was built and where she’ll be scrapped. She’s something in-between. Nor is the ship changed by the way her crew handles her. Whether she rides well before the wind or scrapes low through the waves like a plane through too-soft wood, it’ll alter nothing about the ship. The next crew will treat her better or worse. The ship never changes, which is why the noises that she makes are the same whether she’s coming into harbor or setting out again for the open ocean.

The Endurance’s chain rattles and clanks. Because she’s going to ram her way through the ice, her bow has been made of wood three feet thick, and her anchor, when lowered over the rail, thunders dully against the hull before it rushes into the water and down to the bottom. The clattering of the winches, the pacing, the stomping, the commands from Worsley and the swearing from a man readying himself for hard work, all that and all the other noises, such as the rumbling of my stomach, are a part of the Endurance heaving to.

Pull! Stroke one, stroke two, pull, pull!

THE PILOTS FROM BUENOS AIRES, PUNTA DEL ESTE AND MONTEVIDEO disembark on the Recalada lightship. On the morning when they plucked Bakewell, me and the eleven other survivors from the remnants of the USS John London, wrecked on a breakwater, and took us down here to pass on to the pilot for Montevideo, there’d been an out-and-out pilots’ party happening on the little lightship.

The men didn’t drink anything, of course, but they sat in a circle on deck, smoking their golden Virginia or pinching the snuff that went from hand to hand in a circular tin. If I were standing at the railing now, I’d be able to hear them laughing. Antáricanos! We towed Scott onto open water and piloted Amundsen and Filchner across the current. Hardly is Mawson back from the Pole but Shackleton wants to set off. What’s the Weddell Sea to us? The ocean’s made of water wherever you go, even under the pack ice. But it’s only the Plata that’s made of silver, God’s own silver salver.

When it gets dark, the two towers on Cape Antonio light up and the night pilots come. The others all climb on board the last ship going ashore. It’s a friendly little boat, Recalada’s bright-red lightship.

If a seaman has written a last letter home, he can post it here. For a small fee, the pilot will take it back to port and send it off. And if a seaman has been sent a letter, he can pick it up here. The pilot will have collected it from the harbor post office, for a small fee, and left it on board, poste restante Recalada.

Maybe Shackleton will be getting a last greeting from First Lord of the Admiralty Churchill, written by the lovely right hand of his ministerial secretary. Or perhaps the Queen Mother, Alexandra, has scribbled a note to remind him of the edifying qualities of the Bible she dedicated and placed in Sir Ernest’s luggage. Stornoway gets a letter from Stornoway. And Hownow gets a loving telling-off from his wife, Helen, who gives him the news about their baby: it’s a boy and he’s named after you, Walter. Bakewell, like most of the others, gets nothing. Apart from me, and I’m, firstly, not currently unimpeded, and, secondly, very near him, there’s no one Bakewell could receive a letter from.

When he ran away from Illinois, he was eleven years old. Now he’s twenty-six and has been a farm laborer in Missouri, a coach driver in Michigan and a railway navvy in Montana before coming to Newport as a topman, where, eventually, I fell exhaustedly into his lap.

No matter if it bothers him or not, seaman William Lincoln Bakewell will be leaving the Recalada lightship empty-handed.

The same goes for me. Even though there are two addresses I could offer:

Merce Blackboro

Stowaway

Oilskin Store

Endurance

And, for those whose post isn’t urgent:

Merce Blackboro

Seaman

USS John London

poste restante Davy Jones’s Locker

4

ENNID AND THE MONKEY

BEFORE I TOOK SHIP IN NEWPORT, MY MAM GAVE ME THIS storm-proof jacket. I love it. Since then, I’ve only ever taken it off for washing. Its hood keeps my neck and ears nice and toasty even in this freezing cupboard and, because Mam stitched a double lining into the sky-blue body, I can’t complain about a lack of padding, either.

Why should I be sad about there being no post from home when I can dip into the good-bye letter from my parents?

I also have Ennid Muldoon’s fish. Ennid’s lucky charm has been beside me ever since I sewed a buttoned pocket into the lining of my coat during some time off duty, sitting on the jib boom as the John London ran through quiet seas. Hidden in the pouch is a little wooden fish with a note in its stomach that I’m supposed to read only when my courage fails me.

But even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t be able in the dark to read the advice of Ennid’s wise fish, which feels like a pinecone through my jacket.

And I don’t want to read it. Only once have I come close to looking at the note: when we were drifting on the wreckage of the John London and I told Bakewell about Ennid. We floated helpless through stormy seas for more than a week, and I still didn’t feel like I’d run out of grit. The fish stayed in its pocket then. I’m not taking it out now.

Get some sleep? Yes, sir. Yessir, a quick nap. Don’t lose heart, Merce! Build a bed out of gum boots. There’s still time to kill before the starting gun. Only when the stub-nosed Endurance is on the open sea and her course is set for South Georgia will there be no turning back.

Every day counts in the ice. Even Shackleton can’t cross the Antarctic in winter. And Bakewell should sooner or later find a good opportunity to bring me out of the locker and put me in front of the skipper. I’ve got to get out sometime … before I start to lose it down here. But no matter how good Captain Worsley’s mood is because all the sails up to the topgallant are swelling in the wind or because Sir Ernest, in his childish excitement, has just put an arm round his shoulders—no matter how good, the captain’s going to bawl his own lungs out when I stand in front of him in my sky-blue jacket and rub my eyes, blinded by so much light.

THE JOHN LONDON WAS ONE OF THE MERCHANT SCHOONERS THAT sailed the South American route before the war. Mostly three-masters with an underpin, the ships transported large bulk cargo made of steel and iron or sometimes of wood. They were battered rust buckets, always in the dock. The elderly John London was under contract to a company in Swansea and she sailed back and forth between Wales and Uruguay with her belly full of railway sleepers. She’d often been in Newport, which is how my dad knew her. Years ago, he’d built her a new fo’c’sle for her crew quarters. When the John London moored at the pier of the Parks shipyard, we went on board to take a look at the state of the fo’c’sle and start to arrange whatever needed fixing.

We spent a few weeks on the bulkheads and quarters below deck, which were all in a fairly sorry condition. During all the carrying, sawing, fitting, sanding, filing and painting, I got to know pretty much every nook and cranny of the ship. Everywhere there were signs of neglect. But the three carpenters and I gave the old girl a good sprucing up. And Dad even gave her a new hat to show off in, a new fo’c’sle roof made of gleaming cherrywood.

We were nearly finished when, one morning, life began to pulse again in the usually empty ship. Sailors and stokers came on board. Muldoon’s people delivered the parts for the new jib. A motorcar brought the captain to the shipyard, where he spoke to my dad before going below decks. And lastly, there appeared two men, dressed in tailcoats but still not particularly elegant, one American, the other from the Swansea company. The hiring began.

One of the first seamen to come back out into the sunshine from the mess where the procedure was taking place stood next to me and asked about what I did. We talked for a while. He told me that he’d signed up for Montevideo and back. And then he wanted to know, without my having mentioned anything about it, if I didn’t feel like coming along.

Maybe, I said. And he laughed, quiet and friendly.

That’s how I met Bakewell. Since then there hasn’t been a day we haven’t put our heads together. If I think about it, there are only three things I miss in my locker: the sea air, the light over the ocean and Bakewell.

Here, the two of you’d better drink something, you and your wooden fish.

A few days later, I spoke to my father