Authors: John Bowen
None of this did for Tony. He could not understand it, and she would not stop for him; her pupils, I suppose, had taken what they could use from the generous flood, and if they took only a twentieth of what there was, it was still enough. And, surprisingly in such a
woman, she was impatient with him. Naturally
sympathetic
to atmosphere as any actress must be, she had caught from Arthur a little of the scorn he felt for Tony, and it remained at the back of her mind as a feeling that Tony was not “one of our kind of people”. And so, although she appealed to him sometimes (she appealed to everyone; she would have appealed to the gulls of the air to confirm a point of feeling), she did not wait for him, or notice his bewilderment and pain when he was snubbed.
What surprised me was that she should think highly of Arthur; surely
he
was not “one of our kind of people”? She had so little in common with him, except to complement his narrowness with her breadth, his bile with her richness. What circumstances had first brought them together, I could not discover; Gertrude who would talk freely of her life in the old days, was reticent about her escape from London. Arthur had met her, and had picked her up, and had taken her with him until they found safety together on the raft. She seemed to admire him and to accept his leadership completely; I had not the courage to ask her whether she actually liked Arthur, nor am I certain whether she knew.
*
Arthur was holding an after-supper conference. “We shall have to think about scurvy,” he said.
“We shall have to think about mould,” said Sonya, “I’m sure the Glub’ll have penicillin growing all over it if this goes on much longer.”
“It’s vacuum packed,” said Hunter.
Muriel said, “We shall have to think about rheumatism. It can’t be healthy, never having dry underwear.
“I have already thought of that. We shall light the stove one day a week.”
“Oh bliss!”
“What shall we use for fuel?” I said.
“Driftwood.”
“But it’s wet.”
“We shall use some of the wooden crates in the hold to start the fire. Driftwood will be stacked close to the stove to dry, ready for use on the next occasion when further driftwood will be similarly dried. Is that clear?”
“Dear Arthur!” said Gertrude. “At all times so far-seeing!”
I said, “But if we do that, can’t we keep the fire going all the time? There’s plenty of driftwood.”
There was a moment of silence. Arthur’s mouth contracted, and his adam’s apple jerked a little. “There is no reason why not,” he said, “provided that somebody is always on hand to keep the stove from going out.”
Ridiculously I found myself a little frightened. Arthur, so benign a leader at other times in his acid way, lost all his benignity if one suggested altering any detail of his plans; I should have phrased my suggestion more tactfully. But, while hostility from Arthur might have been expected, there was more than that. In that moment of silence I could feel the hostility spreading from Arthur to Gertrude, to Hunter, to the Otterdales, to Banner. I could hear the sound of the rain and the
tick of the electric clock. Sonya moved from her place by the empty stove, and came and stood by my side. “Of course,” I said, “it might be difficult to find enough driftwood. I’m sure you’re right, Arthur. I’m sorry.”
“Perhaps we shall be able to light the stove more frequently later on when we see how easily the wood is collected,” said Arthur. “I had been thinking of something of that sort. Meanwhile let us return to the problem of scurvy.”
Drinking water was kept in a two-gallon bottle in the cabin. Whenever a new lot had been distilled, the contents of a small phial of lemon juice concentrate was added to it, so that our drinking water always tasted a little of fresh lemonade. Hunter had disclosed, however, that the supply of this concentrate was almost exhausted. “There is no doubt,” Arthur said, “that our diet is in danger of vitamin deficiency.”
“My fault really,” Hunter said, “I thought we might as well use the stuff while we had it. Never thought it mattered about—Well, I mean, isn’t Glub supposed to take care of that kind of thing? It says on the packet——”
“No.”
“Does it have to be lemons?” Sonya said. “Or would any sort of green stuff do?”
“I suppose it would.”
“Seaweed?”
Arthur considered, “There
are
edible seaweeds,” he said, “just as there are edible fungi. I should not undertake, however, without some sort of expert….”
Sonya said, “There was some stuff called dulse. They
used to sell it in paper bags. Sort of chewy only rather salt. It was like dried red cabbage.”
Gertrude said, “I’m sure the texture would be almost Chinese. I adore Chinese food. If you would like a guinea pig——”
“No, let me,” said Mr. Banner. “One need not take very much, after all, to try it. I remember that we conducted an experiment into the effects of mescalin at the Townswomen’s Guild. I was the guinea pig for that also, and really, you know, it was not at all unpleasant; rather as if one were seeing one’s body for the first time. I felt as if I had been dipped in concrete, I remember, which had hardened on me, but beneath the brittleness of my skin, there was a quite extraordinary amount of life in——”
“Perhaps Mr. Clarke would care to taste the seaweed,” Arthur said. “He would in any case have to do so in the cooking.”
“By all means. You’d like it served as a vegetable, I imagine.”
“I’m sorry, darling.”
“Sorry, Miss Banks?”
“I mean, I’m sorry it was my suggestion that—Wouldn’t it be fairer if we——?”
“But it was a very sensible suggestion,” said Arthur. “I am sure we shall all benefit from it.”
In a sense, we did. All the seaweed I tasted was rubbery and quite inedible, but we added the water in which it was boiled to our meals of fish, and had our vitamins that way, I suppose.
*
Cooking, cleaning, fishing, so the time passed. Collecting driftwood, exercising in the hold, mending our clothes, so the time passed. Listening to the rain and wondering when it would stop, the time passed;
holding
evening entertainments and discussions on
uncontroversial
subjects, the time passed; watching the
progress
of foot-rot between the toes, the time passed; lying apart, segregated by sexes in cabin and bedroom, the time passed. Making do, the time passed; socks were darned with the unravelled sacking, toothbrushes improvised from the shredded twigs of a branch that floated by. Captain Hunter taught Banner to play the schoolboys’ game of book-cricket by opening at
random
the pages of the Bible or the Oxford Illustrated Dictionary, and in the evenings Gertrude read aloud to us from the Old Testament—the greatest dramatic narrative of them all, she said. All the books on board,
Oliver Twist, The Rubayat of Omar Khyam, Breakfast Cereals:
1952
, The Collected Plays of William
Shakespeare
, Better Sight Without Glasses, A Hundred Best Novels Condensed, Rogue Herries, Jamaica Inn, Making and Doing in the House, Making and Doing in the Garden, Britain’s Beauty Spots
, several books by Peter Cheyney and a number of navigational and technical works, all were read many times.
How many days did we continue like this? It cannot have been so long a time, but it soon seemed as if it had been for ever, and would be. We grew into a routine. My temper does not accept authority easily, but I accustomed myself to Arthur’s leadership, nor did
Sonya question it, since the details of who did what in our everyday administration were not important to her. It was, after all, easier to do what we were told, and wise to submit to a discipline if we were not to fret one another to pieces. So we grew accustomed to the life and to each other, and time passed.
Our complement was not increased. We cannot have been far from land, for we found flotsam in plenty—wood, occasional movables, a few dead bodies, from which, when we could get close enough to them, Arthur insisted we should strip the clothing (but usually it was perished, and the bodies gnawed by fish). We salvaged a deserted rowing boat, and towed it behind us; it had to be bailed out every eight hours, which made another task for Arthur to allot on his daily list. We saw no other vessels at this time. The steadily falling rain confined our field of vision, and our small world was empty. I asked Arthur what he would do if we came across any other survivors, and he replied that it would depend; he did not think anyone we found now would be in a condition to “pull his weight in the boat”.
Once at night some of us thought we heard a faint call in the darkness. Arthur said it was nothing, but he allowed us to go on deck and look. Faintly in the night and rain, some of us thought we saw a yellow light not far away, but Arthur said it was probably
phosphorescence
; what light, in any case, could keep alive in the wet? We went inside again.
We worked on at caulking barrels, at contriving
rough furniture from salvaged driftwood—Gertrude even tried to make a waterproof cloak from woven seaweed, but it was not a success. All this, Arthur told us, was against our future life when the waters would subside again, but I do not think we took any great thought for that time; we just did what we were told.
We were surprisingly healthy. As the routine of regular meals, clothes that could now be dried and the more and more frequent warmth of the stove took charge of us, we grew stronger; even my foot-rot was checked. Bounded by the four sides of the raft, secure within its cabin from the rain, we felt life take on a kind of normality again. Only Wesley Otterdale did not lose his haunted hollow look, and Muriel, lying apart from him at night with the rest of the women, worried and pined for him.
*
Then the tempest came.
The raft had been provided with a set of diaries in octavo, a page to a day; the intention had been that Hunter should keep a log. Most of the pages in the earlier volumes were blank, the occasional entries brief: “Thunder today”, or “Trouble with sharks”. Since Arthur had taken over, these entries had become much more detailed, the log was written up every evening after supper. And the rest of us, although we had lost the sense of time and date before, could now tell Tuesday from Thursday again, and twelve from two.
It was on the morning of the 26th of June 1966, that the tempest struck. I was fishing. Something had made me remember the season. I sat in the little shelter from which we fished, and remembered June.
I remembered rainy Junes and sunny Junes. I
remembered
Sundays by the Serpentine, with the
gramophones
’ discordances, and the Teddy Boys snatching self-consciously at each others’ towels. I remembered country cricket matches and river bathing, and punting down the green corridor of the Cherwell from
Magdalen
Bridge on drowsy afternoons. All those Oxford Junes! I remembered commemoration balls and college gardens, making notes in the sunny spaciousness of the Codrington Library, terrible parties with cucumber cup in the garden of the Perch Inn, and one curiously final morning on which I walked round Radcliffe Square over and over again in the sunlight, sucking at
peppermints
and waiting for my
Viva
. Then there was that neurotic summer session at the University of Indiana, when I washed cutlery in the canteen of a campus dormitory and wrote papers on the criticism of Eliot and Matthew Arnold. I remembered Junes by the sea—the dreary pier at Bournemouth, the aquarium at
Blackpool
, beach after beach littered with ice-cream papers, and the English making holiday glumly together in cotton dresses and cloth caps, sitting bolt upright in deck chairs or against the wall of the promenade. I remembered a writing holiday in a stone cottage not far from Blaenau Festiniog, where we had to empty our nightsoil secretly into a mountain stream. I remembered willow trees and midges and mosquitoes, and the Indian June of the monsoon season, though even the monsoon rains, I remembered, were intermittent and heavier when they came than this persistent and for-ever downpour.
June is bustin’ out all over
, I thought; but not this June, not this rainy June, which had followed a rainy May and would give place to a rainy July, a rainy August, month after rainy month, and year by year, while the waters rose, and our children were born with scales and a tail.
Rain, rain, go away. Come again another day
, I said aloud, for the rain was blowing on my face, not falling in a straight line as it usually did.
It’s raining; it’s pouring. The old man is snoring. He went to bed, and he bumped his head, and he couldn’t get up in the morning
. The rain was blowing on my face, not steadily but as if somebody high in the sky where the rain curtain began were shaking it lazily, so that the curtain undulated. And the swell below the raft, I noticed, was much more pronounced.
I wound in my fishing line, and went into the cabin. “There’s a wind getting up or something,” I said. Arthur was making up a list. He put his ball-point pen down on the table, and looked up. The table tilted, and the pen rolled off on to the floor. Arthur rose, and began to don his absurd yellow oilskins.
“I doubt if there’s anything we can do about it,” I said.
“We can at all events see what is happening.”
The two of us went on deck together. The swell was stronger now, and, as we looked towards the east, we seemed to be looking up an incline. There was a rail running round the outside of the cabin wall, and Arthur told me to keep hold of it. The wind was still blowing fitfully, but without much power.
Towards the east, the universal grey of the sky seemed to have become several shades darker. “Captain Hunter,” Arthur called. “Would you come out here, please?”
Hunter appeared at the cabin door, the others
crowding behind him. “What’s happening?” Sonya said.
I said, “I’d stay inside if I were you.”
Arthur said, “A sensible suggestion. It would be better if all the women were to remain inside the cabin. Mr. Banner, perhaps you will see to that. Captain Hunter and Mr. Otterdale will stay here with us.”
The raft, which had been tilting for a long time in one direction, suddenly went over the crest of what had ceased to be swell and was definitely a wave. The women, Tony and Mr. Banner fell backwards into the cabin, and the door slammed shut. Hunter said, “It looks as if we’re in for a bit of a blow.” Then a smaller wave reared suddenly up, and smacked the raft
sideways
; I felt like a flea on an ice-hockey puck. The top of the wave broke over the deck, and soaked us. Arthur gasped for breath, and said, “Captain Hunter, what action do you usually take under these
circumstances
?”
Hunter said, “I take down the sail. Then I go inside and shut the door. There’s a sort of shutter thing you pull across to keep the water out. Gets a bit stuffy after a while. The fishing hut comes to bits, and you stow it inside. Doesn’t take a moment. We’ll do the sail now, if you like.”
In the fitful wind, we negotiated the damp canvas of the sail.
“What about the rowing boat?” I said.
“I suppose we’ll have to junk it.”
“We shall do no such thing,” said Arthur. “We must take it inside with us. We shall need the wood, even if
we do not use it as a boat. If Captain Hunter will
dismantle
the hut, the three of us will get the rowing boat indoors.”
“My God! Look at that,” said Hunter, and pointed out to sea.
Through the rain we saw that the darkness in the eastern sky had drawn closer to us. We saw that it was not darkness at all, but a wave, an enormous wave, rushing upon us. There was no time to do anything but grasp the rail, as the raft tilted to a sixty-degree angle and, as it seemed, ran or was drawn to the top of the wave, danced for a moment crazily on the crest, and almost capsized as it began to fall down the further slope. Now the wind hit us with appalling force. The little fishing hut was lifted into the air, and sailed away, light and independent, back over the top of the wave again. The rain was driven into our faces like hail, and I cried aloud with the pain, and closed my eyes. As I opened my mouth to shout, the wind filled it, and I might have popped like a paper bag if we had not at that moment dropped deep enough into the trough between our first wave and the next to be sheltered once more from the wind and even from the rain, which was now passing overhead.
“Got to get inside,” said Hunter.
“Save the boat.”
“How?”
“Rope,” said Arthur. “Rope.”
Wesley said, “The Lord is mighty in anger. He sendeth the storm to chastise us.”
“I dare say.”
Arthur opened the cabin door, and jumped inside as the raft began its journey up towards the crest of the second wave. There was no time for us to follow him. Wesley had let go the rail, but I caught him by the collar of his jacket and held him fast, turning my face to the wall of the cabin and lowering my head as far as I could into my chest as a shelter against the wind and rain. Up we went and up. In the moment before the wind struck, I heard Wesley begin to pray aloud.
That moment came, and almost drained me of terror as the raft was juggled by the crest of the wave, and I did not know whether it would fall forwards to be overwhelmed or capsize backwards down the almost oblique outer slope. Once again, I felt the full force of the wind, and the rain like gravel against my body. I held the rail with one hand, Wesley’s jacket with the other. There was a violent wrench. Then I had both hands round the rail again, and then the calm came again, and Arthur reappeared with a cut on his forehead and the rope tied round his waist.
“Where is Mr. Otterdale?” he said.
“I was holding him,” I said.
Hunter said, “You aren’t now.”
“I know. He was praying.”
Arthur said, “Help me with this rope”.
“I must have let him go,” I said.
“We should just have time to fix it.”
Arthur threaded the other end of the rope over the rail, and then tied it around Hunter’s waist. There was
a great deal of slack in between. “You must let us out gradually, Mr. Clarke,” he said. Then, as we survived the third wave, conversation ceased.
The rowing boat was tied up to one end of the raft, but the second wave had lifted it and flung it, with some damage to the timbers, on to the deck of the raft itself. Somehow, heavy and cumbersome as it was, it would have to be unlashed and pulled inside the cabin while we were momentarily becalmed between one giant wave and the next. Arthur and Hunter scampered out to the edge of the deck, and I took in the slack of the rope around my own body. They had succeeded in unlashing the boat, when the raft tilted as we were again drawn up the slope of a wave. The boat began to slide along the deck towards the cabin wall. I saw it coming, and moved quickly to one side; this sudden movement of mine, combined with the tilting of the deck, jerked Arthur and Hunter off their feet, so that they rolled over each other, and finished in a heap against the wall.
We reached the top of the wave. Once again the curling tip flicked the raft into the air. The rowing boat was jerked up, fell—mercifully away from us—against the cabin wall, and was lost overboard. Arthur and Hunter were tossed along the deck the length of the rope, like bait on an angler’s line, and fell back again. Arthur, who was underneath, took the full force of this, and as one knee crashed against the cabin wall, he gave a shrill cry. As we dropped again into the trough, I took in the slack, and Hunter managed to get to his
feet, and cling fast to the rail. Arthur, who was obviously badly hurt, lay where he had fallen, his eyes wild and his lips tightly closed with the effort not to cry out again.
I said, “We’ve got to get indoors”.
Hunter said, “Are you all right, Arthur?”
Arthur said, “Imperative. Inside.”
Before Hunter could untie the rope, the next wave took us. I held on to Arthur as tightly as I could, but even so he was cruelly buffeted, and by the time we had stumbled through the door with him, he was unconscious.
Inside the cabin, Gertrude, Sonya, Muriel, Tony and Mr. Banner had wrapped themselves round the legs of the table, which was screwed to the floor. Since Hunter’s shutter things were not in position, all five of them had been soaked by the water which was slopping about inside. That there was comparatively so little of it was because those giant waves were too large to be bothered with the raft as an antagonist; it was no more to them than a speck on the water’s surface.
I had time to carry Arthur to the bunk in the
bedroom
, and to throw myself across his body, gripping the sides of the bunk as tightly as I could with my arms and legs. The door to the bedroom had been latched back. Those to the galley and the bathroom were closed; behind the one could be heard the clash of saucepans, and I could guess that there would be broken glass behind the other. Most of the movable objects in the main cabin were books, and these damaged nothing but themselves as they were tossed about. Mr. Banner,
struck on the ear by
Jamaica Inn
, went bravely on with his attempt to comfort and encourage the women under his charge. “Oh God,” he said, “if it be indeed Thy design to punish us in this way for our misdeeds, be not too outrageous in Thy wrath. Spare, Oh Lord, the helpless. Bring succour to the distressed——” The
plate-glass
port-hole in the wall beside me became
momentarily
part of the floor, and I could see the sea surging beneath the glass. Then we were in the calm again, and I shouted to Hunter to get the shutters up.
“You think we ought to?” he said.
“Arthur would wish it.”
“Right ho,” said Hunter. “Give us a hand, padre, will you?”
Mr. Banner unwound himself from the table leg. His face was grey-green from fear and nausea. Tony joined him. I told them to hurry while there was still time to move, and they stumbled over to the door. There the shutter was a kind of screen, which slid across and was secured by a bar. While Banner and Tony were dealing with the door, Hunter moved swiftly around the cabin, pulling down the shields of metal that reinforced the glass of the port-holes.
When they had finished, the cabin was in darkness, for Hunter had forgotten to turn on the light. The three men could not find their way back to the table. We heard them fall, and a bumping as they were thrown about. Then there was a cry from Gertrude.
After we were over the worst of it, I said, “Is everyone all right?”
“Hit my bloody head,” said Hunter.
“Mr. Banner?” There was no reply. “
Banner!
Is he hurt? Can you find him in the dark?”
“Well, I don’t think he’s dead or anything, because he’s just been sick,” said Sonya. Banner groaned.
“Is he within reach?”
“Yes.” I heard Sonya’s voice, comforting in the temporary calm. “Here, hold on to me; you’ll be all right. Goodness, don’t
bother
about that.”
“What have you done with my husband?” Muriel said.
There was no more calm after that for a long time. The giant waves were done, and what remained was simple tempest. The raft was battered and thrown from side to side while we lay in the darkness and wet of the cabin, listening to the waves and the wind. I lay closer to Arthur than a lover, keeping both him and myself on the bunk; my neck and arms and the backs of my knees ached with the tension. Ridiculously, I began to feel sea-sick, and so, I could hear, did the others; the cabin was filled with the stench, and became suffocatingly hot.
The suffocation and the stench. It was as if God had decided to take the intending suicide with his head in the gas-oven of a shabby basement flat, and give him a good shaking to bring him to his senses, but had neglected first to open the windows, so that Divine anger was only added to the physical discomforts a suicide has to bear already. In that close air, I seemed to see the whole raft caught up in God’s hand to be
rattled and shaken and tossed petulantly aside, falling again through the air, and turning over and over as it fell into a darkness that had no end. Down and down I fell through that darkness into sleep, knowing as I fell that it would be my last’ sleep, and sure enough, when I awoke we were at peace.