Surgeon at Sea

Chapter Twenty

The next morning we steamed into the Thames. The country raised a faint glow of sunshine to welcome us, but the effort was too taxing and the atmosphere soon relapsed into its habitual rain.

We passed the long finger of Southend Pier, which appears a far more dignified structure when seen in reverse, signalled our name, and passed down the channel towards Tilbury. The wet, orderly fields of England on the narrowing banks, with a demure English train jogging through them towards London, had the appearance of a winter's garden after the turbulent unfenced vegetation of the South American coast. Off Tilbury landing-stage we anchored for the Port of London doctor to board us. He was a large, friendly man in a naval battledress and a duffle-coat.

'Have a good voyage, old man?' he asked, running his fingers down the pages of my logbook.

'Pretty good, thanks.'

'Going again?'

'Oh, no. I don't think so, anyway.'

'Back to the N.H.S., eh?'

'That's it. If I can remember any of my medicine.'

He laughed. 'You can still sign your name, can't you? All right, free pratique granted.'

We continued down the River, and I was seized with a spasm of nostalgia by catching sight of an L.P.T.B. bus.

In Gallions Reach the tugs set about us and turned us towards the locks of the Royal Albert Dock.

'Is that all the room we've got?' I asked Easter, as we headed for the narrow entrance. As I always had difficulty parking a car in a busy street I filled with admiration for the mates and tugmasters every time the Lotus came into port.

'There's bags of room,' Easter said. 'They gets them big New Zealand boats through here easy enough. Look at all them bright lads we've got to help us.'

I saw a chilly knot of longshoremen waiting to receive our ropes as we came into the lock: sad, damp Englishmen, their coat collars up to their sodden caps.

'That one there's been on the job for years,' Easter said. 'We calls him Knuckle 'Arry.'

He pointed to a depressed-looking man with a long moustache standing still and holding a rope fender over the end of the jetty.

'That's an odd name. What's his knuckles got to do with it?'

'The knuckle's what he's standing on. Now you wait.'

As the Lotus drew near the stonework the pilot shouted from the bridge: 'Keep her off the knuckle, 'Arry!' The man touched his cap, and solemnly manipulated his fender to save our paint. He then resumed his immobility in the thick rain.

We passed the knuckle, the locks, the entrance to the dock; the tugs dragged us slowly down to our waiting berth; more men in caps and old overcoats secured our ropes to the quay; the ensign came down from the gaff and was rehoisted, in compliance with custom, on the stern jack-staff.

'Lower away gangway!' Hornbeam shouted from the bridge.

The Lotus leant contentedly against the dock and, after three months all but five days, we were home.

There was a wonderful end-of-term spirit abroad. Everyone was packing up and behaving with the recklessness of men for whom there are no longer any consequences.

We were paying-off, the morning after our arrival. Mr. Cozens and his colleagues came aboard and treated us with cordial superiority, and we looked on them with good-humoured contempt. Cozens himself questioned me closely about the exit of Captain Hogg.

'Very good, Doctor,' he said. 'I think you did entirely the correct thing. Our Sunflower is due at Teneriffe in three weeks' time and she will bring him home. We have your successor for next trip-a Dr. Gallyman. Do you know him?'

'I'm sorry, I don't.'

Cozens sighed. 'I'm afraid he is a little on the old side,' he said. 'Retired from practice some years ago. I believe there was some trouble with the medical authorities, too…Still we must hope for the best. It's so difficult getting doctors for these ships just now.'

Apart from the office staff, the ship filled with taxi-drivers, luggage carters, laundrymen, dry cleaners, marine tailors, and haircutters, all of them pressing their services on the ship's company before it dispersed. I shut the door of my cabin, looked despairingly at the empty cases and my curiously augmented possessions, and wondered how I was going to pack. I started with the volumes of _War and Peace. _I hadn't got beyond the first page, but I had killed one hundred and thirty-two cockroaches with them. I was hesitantly fitting them into a case when Easter came in.

'Letter for you, Doctor.'

It was only the second one I had received since leaving Liverpool. It too was from the laundry.

_Dear Sir,_ (it said), _'Further to ours of November 28th. I have to inform you that your laundry has been sold to defray expenses of the wash. The sum received was 6s. 3d., which is 1s. 9d. less than your account. We would appreciate your settling this deficit at your earliest convenience.'_

Sadly I put the letter into my pocket.

'Getting the loot packed, Doctor?' Easter asked.

'I only wish I could.'

'The Customs is pretty hot down here,' he went on. 'Not like some ports I could mention. Get away with murder, you used to. So long as you bought your tickets for the police ball.'

'What police ball?'

'I remember once the old arm of the law putting his head round our cabin door and saying, "I'm sure as you gentlemen would like to come to the police ball." Well, I knew the ropes, see, so I says, "Not 'arf we wouldn't. We've been thinking about it all voyage." So he hands over tickets at a dollar a time-but you mustn't take 'em, like. I looks at mine and says, "Ho, constable, I regrets but what I have a previous engagement." So he collects all the tickets back and flogs 'em again in the next cabin. Mind you, he keeps the five bob.'

'Well, I hardly think it worth while my making the investment. Apart from the junk I got at Teneriffe I've only some corned beef and a pair of nylons.'

'That's the ticket, Doctor! Girls round our way will do anything for a tin of corned beef. Show 'em the nylons as well, and cor! they're all over you.'

'I assure you these are destined for middle-aged relatives.'

'Used to do pretty well out of nylons during the war. Some of the blokes on the Western Ocean made a fortune flogging 'em in Southampton. The places they thinks of to hide 'em! Down the chain locker in the foc's'le's usual. One of the lads put a dummy pipe across the deckhead and filled it with nylons and fags. Lovely job he made of it. Painted it up just like it was real. But the Customs boys copped him. Oh, they're very fly, they are. I'll get you an empty beer-case from the Chief Steward.'

'Thank you, Easter.'

I sat wearily among the disheartening jumble. Well, this was the end of the trip. What had I got from it? Some corned beef, some nylons, a cure for headaches, two stones in weight, and a deep sunburn. But much more than that, surely I had found for the first time that the world isn't divided simply into two classes-doctors and patients. Three months at sea had taught me more than six years in a medical school. I had learned to give and take toleration, to grapple with grotesque predicaments, to appreciate there is some goodness behind everybody, that life isn't really so serious, and that doctors aren't such bloody important people after all.

The Customs man-young and keen-came in and rummaged my cabin. He did so like an old-fashioned physician searching for a diagnosis with an irritating air of professional detachment.

'Where did you get these from?' he asked, holding up my best pair of pyjamas.

'Swan and Edgars.'

'Timm. Have you any spirits?'

'Bottle of whisky.'

'Opened?'

'Certainly.'

'Umm. Have you a watch?'

'No.'

'What, not one at all?'

'I lost it one night in B.A.'

He looked at me narrowly.

'Watch your step, Doctor,' he said, leaving me alone.

I managed to throw my packing together before paying-off started in the saloon. It was more a ceremony than a business transaction. We were theoretically not entitled to any pay until the end of the voyage, though we could draw foreign currency at the pleasure of the Captain. Our wages were set out in a long narrow sheet, with additions for leave and Sundays at sea and deductions for advances, Channel money, bar bill, stores account, and anything else the Chief Steward thought he could add without protest.

The pay was distributed by the Fathom Line officials, under the eye of the Shipping Master. They sat at the big table behind exciting piles of five-pound notes, looking like the tote about to pay off on the favourite. Also on the table were the ship's articles and a pile of discharge books-the sailor's personal record-signed by the Captain with a comment on conduct like a school report.

The crew lined up eagerly, all in their best clothes. I had difficulty in placing the clean, modest-looking men in the smart blue and grey suits as the half-naked roughs who strode round the decks with paint pots in the Tropics. The Carpenter was particularly baffling: he wore a dark herringbone tweed, a hard white two-inch collar, and an artificial rosebud in his buttonhole, giving the appearance of a moderately liberal-minded clergyman on holiday at Sandown.

Nothing gives such a pleasant feeling of false prosperity as paying-off a ship. By the time my wages had been reduced by deductions I had less than a month's salary in general practice, but I stuffed the notes into my pocket and felt like Lord Nuffield. Then I signed off the book of ship's articles opposite the space where I had signed on them three months ago. My contract with the Commander of the Lotus was broken: I was quit of my obligations to him to obey his lawful commands, to work the ship in emergency, to abstain from bringing my own liquor on board, and to check myself from using foul language in his presence. For his part, he had no longer to trouble about feeding me at the required standards, avoiding carrying me into Arctic or Antarctic latitudes, and returning me to my own country within a period of eighteen months. I was free-out of work, but free.

I said good-bye to as many of the crew as I could find; sailors' farewells are brief and shallow, for they make up half their lives. Easter shook hands heartily and impressed on me solemnly the importance of speed whenever I should come to do the three-card trick. Almost everyone left the ship-to go on leave, to quit her for good, or to be in Canning Town by the time the pubs opened. The rain prevented cargo being worked, and the Lotus was not only empty of people but silent, as miserable as a school when the children have gone home.

My taxi was coming later, so I went up to the deck to look round the docks. The sheds and the cranes did something odd to the Lotus's proportions: at sea, when she was alone and stood unhindered from the water, she achieved a touch of dignity. Now that she lay in relation to other pieces of wood and steel she shrank and became ridiculous. The long boatdeck I used to walk was hardly the size of four railway waggons, and the enchanted spot where I sunbathed and watched the flying fish in the afternoon was nothing but a sooty piece of wet planking. Standing in the rain I saw clearly, but with regret, that the land is ever master of the sea.

I saw Hornbeam in his blue raincoat, striding alone up and down the few feet of shelter below the bridge.

'Hello, Doc,' he said as I went up to him. 'You off now?'

'In a few minutes. I'm only waiting for my taxi.'

'Oh well, I'm sorry to see you go. We haven't had a bad voyage on the whole. We've made a bit of fun for ourselves.'

'We certainly have.'

We walked for a minute or two in silence.

'What are you going to do now, Doc?' he asked.

'I've no idea. Find a practice somewhere, I suppose.'

'Do you reckon you'll go back to sea again?'

'Some day I will. I'm making sure of that.'

'You might, at that.'

'How about you?' I said. 'Going on leave?'

'No leave for me, Doc. I'm off to Liverpool to-night to join the Primrose. She's sailing tomorrow for New Zealand.'

'Of course, I was forgetting. You know, to me our arrival is the end of an isolated adventure. But I suppose to you and everyone else it's just another stop in port.'

'That's it, Doc. Always on the move. It's a mug's life, isn't it? Still, someone's got to do it.'

My taxi came then. I waved to him from the dock, and watched him as I drove away. He was walking up and down the deck again in the rain, an incongruous and lonely figure.

The first person I went to see in London was the psychiatrist.

'Hello!' he said. 'When are you going away?'