This is a companion piece to this column from a week ago

The top deck of an ocean liner, somewhere in the Sixties. The eighth storey of Port Soy, a block of flats in Mouille Point, Cape Town, circa 1970. A boy, arms on the ship’s rail, and later on the parapet, looking down. The Sixties child’s mind ablaze with wonder and hope. The Seventies kid’s mind fearful: does he have the courage to climb up, and let go. The sea, and that fear, had everything to do with him becoming a writer.

This is as personal as it gets, but time is moving on. An old school friend urged me, recently, to let go of my reticence in digging too deeply into the darkest period of my adolescence, to just “write it down”, because it’s a part of me, perhaps even key to me.

The sea, and the great ships that ply it, are key to the story.

The setting for much of it is the docks in Cape Town. But first, let’s go back to that little boy in the Sixties.

There are three moments to treasure when boarding a passenger liner at the start of a cruise. The first is when the little-boy you first catches full sight, right up close, of the great ship, which looks so much bigger when it’s right there in front of you, shifting almost imperceptibly in its moorings, almost as if it’s breathing. It seems strangely alive. You creep right to the dock’s edge and look down, the sheer hulk towering above you, moving closer and then away.

You step onto the gangplank and up you go, but it’s when you get to the top that you find yourself in a large doorway from which you step down a few paces to alight in a place that feels different. You’re aware of being on something afloat even as you put your feet down for the first time. It’s an off-balance, almost cushioned feeling; as if there’s a little bounce. You’re in the assembly foyer with many other passengers and their luggage and brandishing tickets, where you’ll be processed, acclimatised, meet the purser, and shown to your cabin.

Once you’ve found your cabin and deposited your bags, you’ve made your way to a port deck. You sneak between two adults for a place at the railing, grip the wooden rail with both hands, and look way down, where crowds of farewell-wishers are shouting goodwill messages and throwing streamers, some of them being caught by your fellow passengers. Your small hands struggle to grab hold but finally you snare one, and you feel the tug of the wind before you do that of the grown-up’s hand holding it way down there on the A-berth dock.

It’s a carnival of ribbons and goodwill, with a tinge of regret by some on the quayside who wish they could swop with you. They decide that it shouldn’t be too long before they make a trip of their own.

Breaking the hum and gabble of the crowds below and on deck is the sudden booming wail of the funnel. You become aware of the fumes from the coal-fired tugs now nudging the great hulk, and then, magically, it starts to move from the dockside, and away, until there’s more and more of the oily green harbour water between you and the people on the quay, the streamers floating mournfully down to alight on the water, where seals are flipping and plopping in the watery tumult. The craft seems to have grown to twice its size, and you can feel its great weight even though you are just a small creature on a tiny part of one of many decks. You’ve never felt smaller. You throw up just once, right after dinner, on the staircase while running for the bathroom, but never again on board any seagoing vessel. In your life.

The dinners, after that first night, are the thing that makes you realise there’s more to eating than just food. Conversation scintillates around the great dining room, all the grownups in their suits and costume jewellery, chewing over the day’s events as much as on the food. A waiter arrives at your elbow with a plate of dinner rolls and silver tongs, with which he places a small, perfectly round dinner roll on your plate. It’s golden brown, crunchy yet so soft within, and you scoop up lovely little curls of butter to melt into it.

A table set for dinner aboard an ocean liner. Photo by Ron Porter on Pixabay

The nightly dinners meld into one. You learn new words. Consommé and potage, what Roast Norfolk Turkey tastes like (the ship was out of Southampton before coming to the Cape); the difference between a noisette and a mignonette, a darne and a salmis, flamande and chasseur, and were there cabinets in Cabinet pudding?

If that seemed like Little Richie on holiday with his well-heeled minders, the truth was far more modest. Dad saved for an entire year for each of our annual holidays, and if they did seem lavish, the other 11 months of the year held those few weeks to account.

The years between then and 1970 continued the pattern of 11 dreary months in the diamond village and three glorious weeks of freedom. And then, in late 1969, you all moved to Cape Town under unexpected circumstances. And life became difficult, and jobs were found and lost, and bottles were hidden at the back of wardrobes, and then there was that court order, the dwindling money, the Cortina GT being sold and that money soon gone too, the auction that saw everything you recognised sold to strangers, whether sideboard, milk jug or old toy; the food parcels you and mom would collect from social welfare in Queen Victoria Street once a month. Sundry simple foods, including samp, you remember. You’ve never liked samp since. Finally the divorce, and being at the parapet on the eighth storey of Port Soy, wondering. Do you have it in you? And let’s not gloss over the little matter of the truant kid. The one who didn’t show up for school on the first day of 1970 and was only found out in August. And where might he have got to during all those months?

That’s the part that my old school friend Leonard tried to get me to open up about the other day. The docks, that’s where. To the great ships bobbing and swaying at their moorings. To the faraway thoughts in your slightly bigger boy’s head, trying to picture the places they’d sail to. The faraway ports, the cities and strange people with their indecipherable languages. You’d said to your mom, Betty, many years before, “I’ll write your story one day.” You knew you had to write, but how the hell did you do that? You’re not even going to school, and it’s been so long now, so many months, that you have no idea how to go back. How much trouble were you in? What would they do to you? You banished such bewildering thoughts by listening to LM Radio, to David Gresham’s Top 20, by thinking about everything you looked at; by observing, focusing outwards.

It was easy to gain access to the big ships, whether passenger liner or freighter. You just went to the shipping line’s offices on the Foreshore or in St George’s Street and asked for a pass. The nice ladies soon got to know you and would start writing out a coupon even as you walked in. They must have nattered about you once you’d left. Such a strange kid, with his hobby of hanging around on ships loading cargo or passengers in port.

You’d eventually go back to school, if somewhat reluctantly. You’d start to do pretty well, write an English anthology in Standard 8 which had the teachers all shaking their heads. The dim kid could write, apparently. And the dawning: maybe you can actually do that. But the how, that loomed impossibly large. Your decision to leave school in mid-Standard 9, despite the promise of that anthology, seemed to put paid to that ambition. Until.

Fast-forward to 1976, and you’ve emerged from the hated military service. You’re 21. You’ve applied for jobs, been turned down by the SAR&H (railways) for scoring too high in their aptitude test. (You learn something about irony.) Been told, again and again, to go back to school, son, you’re not qualified for anything.

And then you meet a guy who knows the Cape Times shipping editor, George Young, and urges you to make an appointment to meet and talk to him. You do so. Walk into the Cape Times building in Burg Street. Up two flights and along a wood-panelled row of offices to find his. The sign on the door, Shipping Editor. Which is on your desk today. Right there. A strange-looking man at a desk. Proper eccentric. A second desk, empty. I’m asked to tell him about myself. I tell him. He’s intrigued about my time spent at the docks. He pries it all out of me. Then he tells me about his teenage years. When he’d go down to the docks and board ships, meet the sailors and captains and talk to them.

The other desk, he tells me, is empty for a reason. Captain CJ Harris has sat there for five days a week, mornings only, for years, compiling the shipping log. Until that day. He’d left only minutes earlier. Recording what’s in port, what’s due, what’s departing, where from and where to, and what they’re carrying. He needs someone to do that. From Monday.

Turns out it’s me.

When I say, as I did in a companion piece to this column a week ago, that “serendipity follows me around”, this remains the strongest instance of it. I work with George for several years, before sailing off into other realms of the newspaper waters, from news reporting and subediting to arts journalism and, along the way, many ports of call to do with food and the cooking and eating of it. But the great ships have always stayed with me.

Not least, the Union Castle liners. The first, somewhere in the Sixties, had been the Cape Town Castle and Pretoria Castle, and our family holidays aboard them in successive years. During those years of working with George, we’d both go down to the docks every morning and board the many vessels. The greatest thrill was when we’d board the Union Castle liners to sit down with the captain in his quarters and chew on the ocean cud.

We were there, both of us, when the lilac-hulled Union Castle liners departed for the last time, one after the other, over a few very sad months. At the dockside we’d watch the beautiful old liners sail off to the breakers, soon to be no more. There goes the Pendennis. There goes the Windsor Castle. You’re witness to an age dying. You mourn, turn away, and life unfolds until the day comes when you decide it’s time to set it all down. Today. DM