Once Is Enough

CHAPTER ONE

PREPARATIONS IN MELBOURNE

THE crowd still thronged the Spencer Street bridge when Clio and I came back from the Olympic Games. They were leaning on the parapet and looking at the Royal Yacht, as they had done ever since her arrival in Melbourne. They were in holiday mood, looking for the best angle for their cameras, and full of enthusiasm and pawky Australian humour. Just across the bridge in a shop window a notice had been posted: ‘English spik here,’ it said; and on the door of the funeral parlour, a little further up the street, there was a card saying briefly that any Olympic visitors were welcome.

Looking down river from the bridge, we could see how it wound its way between wharves, warehouses, and docks, its course marked by high cranes and the masts of ships, until in its last mile it curved between low flat banks to its outlet in Port Philip Bay. In front of us Britannia’s beautiful tall bow reached over the bridge, and beyond her, on the other side of the river, an Australian ship was moored. Immediately opposite Britannia, and tied up to the south wharf, there was another yacht, also flying the British flag, for she was registered in England, although her home was now in Canada. She was very small compared to her royal neighbour, but she also intended to sail in a few days for England, and by the same route, south of New Zealand and south of Cape Horn. She was called Tzu Hang, and she was ours.

Beyond the Britannia, and parallel to and across the river from Tzu Hang, ran Flinders Street, with its ships’ chandlers, whose shops Beryl visited every day with a preoccupied air and carrying long lists in her hand. Behind Flinders Street, the land sloped up to Collins Street, with its banks and clubs and prosperous good-looking buildings, and to the low hills on which the city of Melbourne is built. Not so long ago the river here used to be full of sailing ships, and Clio and I would have seen a forest of masts and spars; but now there were only two, Tzu Hang and a big yacht down from Sydney, which was tied up in front of us.

‘Look at that idiot cat. She isn’t half giving those sails a go,’ someone said, calling the attention of his friend to Tzu Hang, and when we looked across we saw Pwe, the Siamese cat, sharpening her claws on the cover of the mainsail. The sail-cover was put on not so much for looks as to protect the sail from the cat. As we watched we saw a man climb down on to the deck of the yacht, carrying one of the plastic bottles which we used for topping up the water tanks, and Beryl appeared in the hatch and took the bottle from him.

‘I wonder who that is?’ I said. ‘It’s not John.’

‘Oh, it’s just someone she’s roped in,’ said Clio irreverently of her mother. ‘She’s always roping someone in to work. Come on.’

She ran on now across the wharf to where Tzu Hang was lying. Although she was only fifteen she was already fully grown in height, tall and slim. She leant out from the edge of the wharf, unaware of her best clothes, and caught hold of the shrouds, and then swung on to the ratlines, and dropped down on to the deck. She wouldn’t be with us on this next trip. She had been with us on all our previous trips; from England to Canada, and three years later from Canada to New Zealand, and then across to Australia, and now she had to go to England to school. We were going to follow in Tzu Hang as quickly as possible. She was not the first member of the crew to leave the ship, because her small brown dog, who had also been with us on all our travels, had already been sent off home from Sydney. He was travelling in luxury now in a cargo ship, spending most of the time in the bunk of one of the apprentices. We hoped to be back in time to receive him when he came out of quarantine.

To replace these two members of the crew we now had John. We had first met him in San Francisco, where we found that he also was bound for New Zealand, and like us had sailed down from Victoria in British Columbia. He was sailing single-handed in his little Laurent Giles-designed yacht, Trekka, which he had built himself, with great skill, in Victoria. We planned our trip across the Pacific together, and for a year now we had seen much of each other. When the two yachts lay together at the various anchorages and ports we made, John used to come on board for meals, and he would put on weight in port and take it off again as quickly during his single-handed passages. When he heard that Clio was going back to school, and that we would like to have a shot at the Horn if we could find a suitable crew to come with us, he said that he’d lay up Trekka in New Zealand, and come along with us. Nowhere could we have found a better companion.

Before climbing down from the wharf on to Tzu Hang’s deck, I had a good look at her, but I could see nothing that wanted doing now. She had been fully fitted out in Sydney, and spruced up again on her arrival in Melbourne, and she had had a good testing on her way down. She is a 46-foot ketch, 36 feet on the water line, 11 foot 6 inch beam and drawing 7 feet. She has a canoe stem and a marked sheer, and her bowsprit follows the line of the sheer so that it has a delicate upward lift, and she seems to be sniffing the breeze and eager to be off. The truck of her mainmast is 51 feet above the deck, and her mizzen 35 feet and she carries 915 square feet of sail. She is flush decked, with a small doghouse, 5½ by 5½ feet, separated by a bridge-deck from her self-draining cockpit, which is only 34 by 34 inches. She was built of teak in Hong Kong, copper fastened and with a lead keel of just over seven tons, in 1938, and she was shipped home in 1939. We bought her from her first owner in 1951, and sailed her back to Canada.

I let myself down on to the deck by way of the shrouds and went below, and I found Beryl and Clio sitting together in the main cabin opposite a stranger, an Australian and, I supposed, the man who had been helping her with the water.

‘Hullo,’ she said to me. ‘Here you are. This is my husband. I’m afraid I didn’t quite get your name——’

He introduced himself. ‘How d’you do,’ he said. ‘I just came down here to take a snap of the Britannia from the wharf here——’

‘And Beryl put you to work,’ I interrupted.

‘Too right she did, and I’ve been working here ever since. I tell her that there’s many a firm here would snap her up, for labour management you know. She’s been telling me about your trip. Sounds very interesting. I wish I could come with you.’

‘As long as it’s not too interesting.’

‘It might be at that. It can be quite tough even round here. I do a bit of sailing here. Tasman race, but crewing, not my own boat. Which way are you going?’

‘Well we thought we’d go straight across and through the Banks Strait, and then right down south of New Zealand, and then across keeping just about north of the limit of icebergs or floating ice. We’d go south of the Snares here and north of the Auckland Islands, and south of the Antipodes Islands.’ I showed him the route on a weather chart.

‘It’s a long way south,’ he said. ‘Have any other yachts been that way?’

‘Well one or two have been round the Horn, or through the Straits of Magellan, but I think they’ve all been up to Auckland first, so that our route will be a good bit further south than the others.’

‘Well I’d still like to come along, but anyway I’ll not say goodbye now, because I’m going to pick you all up in my car on Wednesday and drive you to the airport. I hear you are off to school in England,’ he said, turning to Clio, ‘I wonder how you’ll like that after all this sailing.’

The tea was made and the kettle was hissing pleasantly on the galley stove, but he wouldn’t stay. ‘The first time I’ve ever known an Australian refuse a cup of tea,’ I remarked, but he said that he’d have tea with us on Wednesday, and off he went.

‘What a nice chap!’ I said to Beryl. ‘How did you pick him up? Good show fixing a lift to the airport.’

‘Oh, he just came along and asked if he could give me a hand. He’s brought gallons of water. And when I told him that Clio was leaving on Wednesday, he said that he’d been longing to give someone a lift as an Olympic gesture, and that we were the first non-Australian visitors that he’d been able to pick up. I don’t think that he’s taken a photo of the Britannia yet.’

We sat down to tea. ‘You really ought to have been at the Games,’ Clio said, ‘it was such fun.’

‘I don’t think that I’d ’ve enjoyed them very much. Besides they look so like the school sports to me, and you know I hate school sports. I think the umpires are the best part. They look so funny all dressed up in their little blazers, and they go trooping after each other in single file, looking exactly like a string of cormorants, and when they sit on those steps one on top of each other, they look even more like cormorants, sitting on a rock. Anyway Pwe and I have enjoyed ourselves, and I’ve made a new rack for the saucepan lid.’

Beryl’s carpentry suffers from her preference for using up an old piece of wood rather than throwing it away, but all the same she is a very enthusiastic and determined carpenter, and was always making something about the ship. The cat was sitting on her lap, her eyes closed and her ears pricked, and her tail lashing gently at the mention of her name. Her eyes opened now, a deep clear blue, as the ship stirred and someone stepped down on to the deck.

‘Here’s someone who always knows when tea’s ready,’ said Clio as John came down below. He was tall and fair, and filled most of the cabin door, so that Beryl had to squeeze past him to get to the kettle.

‘What do you think of my saucepan rack?’ she asked, pointing it out to him.

John is a carpenter, or rather an artist in carpentry. He looked at it, and then patted her on the shoulder. She looked quite small beside him. ‘Pretty good,’ he said, and I saw that she was pleased with the praise from the expert.

The remaining days before Clio left went all too quickly, and almost before we knew it we were standing disconsolate on the airport, watching an aircraft climbing away from the end of the runway.

‘She was better than me, when I left my Mum in South Africa,’ John said, ‘I couldn’t see for tears and fell down the gangway.’ And after a moment’s thought he said, ‘Still she didn’t really know what she was doing, did she? She kissed me too.’

‘I think she had a pretty good idea,’ Beryl said, and we all laughed.

Later, when we were back in Tzu Hang, I said to Beryl, ‘Do you think she’ll be worried?’

‘Worried about what?’

‘Oh, about us and Tzu Hang, you know, when she’s not there.’

‘No, I don’t think so. As a matter of fact I asked her and she said she wouldn’t be.’

‘Good heavens. Why on earth not?’

‘Don’t be so silly. You don’t want her to worry, do you? She said that she reckoned that Tzu Hang would look after us.’

‘I hope she does.’

‘Who? Clio or Tzu Hang?’

‘Clio—or rather, both.’

In the wharf shed on the south wharf there was a small room with a telephone, which we were allowed to use. This was Beryl’s operations office, and she sat there in blue jeans and a checked shirt, ordering immense quantities of stores to be delivered to the ship. When they arrived, she and John filmed each other staggering along the wharf carrying big cartons of food. John was hoping to make a complete record of the trip with his ciné camera. In the afternoons she went up to a friend’s house, where she treated the eggs that we were taking with us by plunging them into boiling water for five seconds, and then into cold. It was the first time that we had tried this method of preserving eggs, and by the time we had eaten the last one it was over two months old. It still tasted good to me.

Soon after the Games were over Britannia left, and, as Melbourne began to reassume her workaday clothes for the few days left before Christmas, the smoke from workshops, tugs, and launches came drifting up the river, smudging the white sail-covers and making black marks on the deck. For the last few days we moved into the entrance to a little yard at the end of the wharf, as our berth was required for the dredgers, which were coming up from Port Phillip Heads. We were separated from the rest of the wharf by some high iron palings, so that casual onlookers no longer came to stand above us, and this seclusion was most appreciated by Pwe, who now spent some of the day, as well as of the night, ashore. Some shrubs grew along the palings, and there she assiduously hunted sparrows, but the Melbourne sparrows were too smart for her. Fortunately no quarantine officials found her—though there are few ships’ cats who don’t take a turn ashore when they get the opportunity, and no one is very fussy about them, as long as they are not mentioned.

We had one or two visitors in our new berth, and one of them was a tall elderly man, in a town suit, and a black hat, but one glance was enough to see that he was no city man. He was a sailor, and he knew a great deal not only of sail but also of the Southern Ocean. ‘Well,’ he said when he left, ‘Good luck to you. I think you’re going to need all of it, and I must say that I’d like to see another 7 feet off those masts.’

We thought that all small ship passages, at any rate long passages, had an element of luck about them—so is there about most things that are worth doing. But if we had thought that it was just a question of luck whether we would arrive or not, we wouldn’t have attempted the passage. We were most certainly not in search of sensation, and we believed that we had a ship and a crew that were capable of making the passage under normal conditions. We knew of course that we might meet with bad luck in all kinds of ways, but as long as we were prepared, as far as was possible, for anything that might turn up, there seemed to be no reason why we should not overcome it.

‘What on earth do you want a year’s supply of stores on board for?’ someone asked Beryl.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘there is always the possibility that we might get dismasted, and then heaven knows where we might end up, and anyway the passage would take much longer than we had expected. We could probably make do for water, but I like to be sure that we have all the food we need.’

Australia was a good place to buy all kinds of tinned food, and besides tinned food we had potatoes, onions, and two sides of bacon, as well as plenty of oranges; and after the oranges were finished, we had tinned orange-juice or grapefruit-juice in almost unlimited quantity.

Although there is plenty of stowage space on Tzu Hang, we were so well stocked that Beryl began to think of creating more by getting rid of Blue Bear. Blue Bear had become a ship’s mascot, and John and I wouldn’t hear of it. He had been given to Clio when we first left England. He was a blue teddy bear, inappropriate and too big, but no artifice of ours could persuade Clio to part with him. When we were crossing the Bay of Biscay, and beating down against a south-westerly wind, with Tzu Hang close-hauled and sailing herself, Blue Bear, in oilskin and sou’wester, was lashed to the wheel. Through the doghouse windows we had seen a steamer come away from her course and steam up alongside to investigate. The captain came out of his cabin without his jacket, dressed in trousers and braces, to peer through his glasses, and others of the crew lined the rail. Blue Bear was obviously the centre of all interest, and when they drew away they seemed still to be discussing the composition of the crew.

He had sailed with us on every trip, lolling in one of the bunks, often with the cat and dog keeping him company, and now I found a more austere berth for him on the shelf in the forepeak, where he could still keep his eye on what went on.

There was one major difficulty to overcome before we left, and that was to get John to have his impacted wisdom tooth pulled out.

‘Not likely,’ said John. ‘He said he’d have to dig it out, and anyway it’s not hurting.’

‘But you must have it done, it might blow up on the trip.’

‘Not me. I don’t want to have a tooth dug.’

‘But John,’ Beryl said, ‘you sail all the way from Canada in that tiny boat, and now you won’t have a tooth out. I do believe you’re frightened.’

‘Too true,’ he said, with his usual disarming frankness, but in the end he agreed. After all there was a very pretty girl there to hold his hand. When we came back from a visit to Tasmania it was out, and John had a swollen jaw and a smug look.

Next morning I went to the Customs Office to arrange for clearance. I got into the lift and pressed the button for the appropriate floor. The lift started up and then came to a shuddering halt half way up. I tried to peer through the grille, but I was right between two floors. I thought that if I waited for long enough someone was sure to want the lift and I should be discovered without the indignity of bawling for help. After about ten minutes I heard an angry voice from below shouting, ‘You up there: what are you doing in the lift?’

‘I’m stuck!’ I shouted indignantly.

‘Well, stand in the middle, then.’

I stood in the middle, and the lift began to climb creakily upwards again. A few minutes later I was shaking hands with the Customs Officer, with my clearance in my pocket for the following day.

‘I’ll let the Customs launch know,’ he said, ‘and they’ll meet you at the mouth of the river and give you a check up as you go. I remember the last chap we cleared for Montevideo was that Irishman, Conor O’Brien, some thirty years ago. He had a ship with a funny name.’

‘Saoirse.’

‘Yes, that’s right. He had a beard and a yachting cap. He was a rum chap, but he was a real sailor,’ and he looked at me doubtfully.

I hoped that I might be half as good, but I knew that he couldn’t have had so good a crew.

CHAPTER TWO

FALSE START

A TUG whistled down the river. Beryl sat up in her bunk as if this was the signal that she had been waiting for. She pulled a jersey over her pyjamas and went aft to the galley. I lay in my bunk. I thought that it would be the last time for days and days that I would lie in my bunk with the ship still.

John was also in his bunk, a quarter-berth that he had made in New Zealand, aft of the galley and doghouse. He had separated it from the rest of the cramped stowage space below the bridge-deck by a plywood partition running fore-and-aft from the cockpit to the bulkhead on the starboard side. Whenever I tried to get into this berth through an oval hole cut in the partition, in order to get to the stowage space aft of the cockpit, I stuck, either with my head in and my stern out, or my stern in and my head out. John used to go in stern first like a wart-hog going into its burrow. Although he was bigger than I, but not taller, he did everything with an effortless grace, and could even get in and out of his berth with no apparent difficulty. It was snug inside and removed from the rest of the ship. It was his quarter—a small piece of privacy which was never invaded.

I knew exactly what was going on in the galley, without looking aft through the ship to where Beryl was sitting in the cook’s seat behind the dresser and sink and beside the stoves: an oil stove and a primus on gimbals, so that they swung either way and remained steady when the ship pitched and rolled. There was an occasional rattle and clink, well-known noises which I could interpret from days of practice at sea, and then came the sudden welcome hiss of the primus burner and the sound of the primus pump. Soon the porridge was on the stove and Beryl came back to the forecabin to finish her dressing. I put on some clothes and went on deck by way of the forehatch.

It was a sparkling summer day, with a light wind blowing up the Yarra River. A little further down, a big cargo ship was docking. The tug, whose whistle had stirred us to movement, was pushing the steamer’s stern in to the wharf. ‘Today is the day,’ I thought, ‘today is the day.’ And then I remembered that Pwe had not yet returned from her night out. I called her, and she answered from the shrubs by the railing. She came trotting out, explaining as only a Siamese can, about being caught out by the daylight, and about the sparrows being so wary. When she got near to the edge of the wharf, she lay down and rolled, waiting for me to come and get her. I stepped on shore and picked her up, and Beryl called ‘Breakfast’ from the hatch.

That wonderful call to breakfast! I do not know whether it is because of its association with porridge and bacon and eggs, but her voice always sounds as young and exciting as ever it did, and the day seemed young and exciting too.