Deck boy, p.1
Deck Boy, page 1
DECK BOY
Alan Temperley is a Geordie who left grammar school aged sixteen to join the Merchant Navy. As cadet and deck officer he has spent years aboard ships not unlike Pacific Trader in this story. At other times he has sailed as able seaman and trawlerman. Following studies at Manchester and Edinburgh Universities, he became a teacher of English, notably in the Scottish Highlands, and also an author. His novels appear in eighteen languages, have been successfully televised and won a number of awards. He has one son, a solicitor in Edinburgh, and two granddaughters. He lives in a schoolhouse in rural Galloway.
Also by Alan Temperley:
Tales of the North Coast
Tales of Galloway
Murdo’s War
Harry and the Wrinklies
Ragboy, Rats and the Surging Sea
The Simple Giant
The Brave Whale
Huntress of the Sea
The Magician of Samarkand
Harry and the Treasure of Eddie Carver
Scar Hill
Copyright © 2022 Alan Temperley
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
Cover illustration: Alan McGowan
Cover design: James Hutcheson
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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ISBN 9781803134130
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When Ben Thomson, nearly fifteen, plays truant from his expensive boarding school, he has no idea that he will never return. All he intends is to visit his old home in Westport, but a chance encounter in a steamy workmen’s café on the Dock Road turns his life on its head. Before he knows it, Ben finds himself escaping through a window, assaulted in an illegal drinking den, threatened by a murderer, changing his name and his appearance, forging documents, getting tattooed, making a host of new friends – and enemies – and outward bound on a voyage to the far side of the world. Surrounded by a crew of loyal, eccentric, gay and violent shipmates, Ben needs all his courage and resourcefulness to keep one step ahead of the law and something infinitely more dangerous.
Deck Boy is a full-blooded and often comical adventure set in the 1970s, the last great days of the British merchant fleet, when the dock basins were crowded with ships, navigation was by the stars, and the thronging crews were very different from the crowd you met in the high street.
Some reviews for Alan Temperley
Harry and the Wrinklies
A gloriously outrageous adventure : Jacqueline Wilson
I wish I’d written Harry and the Wrinklies. It’s such a happy book : Anne Fine
A glorious romp of a book … fast and furious fun … Temperley is a talent to watch : The Independent
Murdo’s War
The narrative is so vigorous, the action so breathless, the atmosphere so powerful … vivid authenticity of the background : Geoffrey Trease, Times Educational Supplement
Best novel I’ve read in weeks … straightforward curl-up-in-front-of-the-fire thriller : Sunday Post
Huntress of the Sea
The sea has always been a metaphor for the erotic, but here the imagery is sustained and developed with unforgettable beauty and horror … a powerful and original novel : New Statesman
A taut, beautifully-written story : Mail on Sunday
The Magician of Samarkand
A true page-turner … packed with beautifully-narrated action … Temperley is a wonderful story-teller : Guardian
I defy anyone … not to be caught up in the magic of this robust, thrilling adventure : Scotsman
Scar Hill
But this is more than an adventure. More than anything it is a love story – the unconditional love that binds Peter to his dad, his dog, his sister’s child and the magnificent landscape of the far north-west of Scotland : Herald
Temperley is a consummate storyteller … real edge-of-the-seat stuff : Daily Telegraph
Ragboy
Rattles along with more thrills, spills and chases than an Indiana Jones adventure : Daily Telegraph
I wish to thank the following people for their friendship, kindness and help in so many ways during the writing of this book: David Banks, Gordon Armstrong, Andrew Constable, Iris Patrick, Iain Alexander, Deirdre Lothian and Jim Hutcheson. A special mention, with love, to Jean Slaven, my lifelong friend and partner, who has supported and encouraged me from the start. To all my warmest gratitude.
For my son
Andrew
List of Characters
Ben Thomson - deck boy
Charlie Sunderland - Ben’s great friend, junior ordinary seaman
Joey Bennett - young seaman in Westport
Fizz - Joey’s girlfriend
Barry (Smoky) Crisp - able seaman
Dolores - Smoky’s wife
John (Jumbo) Ryland - bosun
Lenny Rathbone (Rat’bone) - able seaman
Steve Petersen - efficient deckhand
Sam Pearson - tattooist
Michael Goldie - officers’ steward
James Tanner (Barbara) - greaser
Ossie Bagot - messman
Duncan Rose - mate (first officer)
Trish - mate’s wife
Tony Fanshott-Williams - senior cadet
Philip Hare (Bunny) - junior cadet
Tim Nettles - second mate
Aaron Scott - junior ordinary seaman
Samuel Isaiah Jones - able seaman
Captain Bell - captain of Pacific Trader
Heidi - Captain Bell’s wife
Luigi - greaser
Kevin - galley boy
Nadia - Aaron’s girlfriend in Fiji
Sandeep - Nadia’s brother
Claire - New Zealand nurse
Ka’tang - Indonesian man
Sulu - Ka’tang’s son
Vera Stringbaum - landlady
Betty - café owner
Rolly - landlord of the Eight Bells
Meg and Joe Sunderland - Charlie’s parents
Matthew Thomson - Ben’s father, a Merchant Navy Officer
Jockey White (Lampie) - lamptrimmer
Chippy - ship’s carpenter
Brian - able seaman, union representative
Attila - ship’s cat
CONTENTS
PART ONE WESTPORT
PART TWO PACIFIC TRADER
PART THREE OUTWARD BOUND : THE ATLANTIC
PART FOUR THE GREAT OCEAN
PART FIVE NEW ZEALAND
PART SIX HOMEWARD BOUND
Glossary of Nautical Terms
PART ONE
WESTPORT
Café on the Dock Road
I SHOULDN’T have been in Westport; I should have been at Frankie’s, the expensive boarding school I attended, a hundred and fifty miles away.
I shouldn’t have been shivering in the bitter wind that blew down the Dock Road; I should have been perched on a warm stool in double chemistry.
And I shouldn’t have been inhaling a mouth-watering aroma of sausage and chips; I should have been gasping in the laboratory stinks of sulphuretted hydrogen and whatever else my classmates were brewing up in their bubbling retorts.
But at lunchtime that Friday in early November I was in Westport, every moment expecting a heavy hand on my shoulder and a voice demanding to know why I wasn’t in school.
A lorry sped past, whirling litter past the dingy shops on my side of the road. An empty can rattled to my feet. I kicked it back and gazed at the funnels and rigging of the ocean-going ships that rose above the warehouses opposite. A gull slanted past, battling against the wind.
I turned back to the café beside me. The windows ran with condensation. Dead flies floated on the inside ledge. The room was busy. Men in working jerseys and donkey jackets sat at Formica tables. A babble of voices and laughter, mingled with the rich scents of tea, bodies, cigarette smoke and those sausages, blew from the rattling extractor fan. I looked up at the name, Betty’s, then down at the curling menu. With eighty pounds in my wallet, my entire savings, I could afford anything I wanted. Fourteen years old and very self-conscious, I pushed open the door.
A loud bell jangled on its spring but no one took any notice. The warmth and smells and steam closed round me.
Two men stood at the counter. As they were served I looked from the deep-fat fryer to the hissing coffee machine and yellowed menu above racks of crockery.
The men moved away.
“And what can I get you, my love?” A busty blonde woman mopped the counter with a dripping cloth.
“Sausage and chips, please.”
“That the lot?” Vigorously she stirred a paddle in the frothing fat and took a drag from her cigarette. “Cup o’ tea? Fried slice? Couple of eggs?”
I couldn’t help noticing that her blouse was rather tight, tugging at the buttons. At every movement it bounced splendidly. My ears burned. “Eggs, please. And a cup of coffee.”
“That’s right. Keep you warm on a cold morning.” She cracked eggs into a big black pan and clattered cutlery onto a tray. “Growing boy like you, got to keep your strength up. Off one of the ships, are you?”
“No, I’m er– ” I hunted for the lie. “I’m with my dad. He had to go into town.”
“So you’re having your lunch here. That’s nice.” She shovelled two sausages and a mound of chips on to a plate and scooped the eggs on top. “Salt and vinegar on the table.” She added my coffee to the tray and rang up the cash on a battered till.
I handed her the money. Her fingers were yellowed with nicotine, her hair dark at the roots. But it was the blouse that fascinated me.
“’Ere, saucy!” She laughed and slapped me across the shoulder with her drying cloth. “Keep your eyes to yourself. Your dad know you look at girls like that? Here’s your change.” She dropped it into my palm. “There’s a table over there.”
I turned away blushing. As I squeezed between the workmen’s shoulders, I was startled to hear my name called aloud.
“Hey! Ben!”
Charlie
I LOOKED all round. Until nine months ago I had lived all my life in Westport. Who was it among those chatting, laughing, smoking, munching workmen down there on the Dock Road who knew me?
It must be a different Ben, I decided. But it wasn’t.
“Over here.” An Asian boy aged about seventeen was waving. He had a thin moustache, a gold ring in one ear and he was grinning broadly.
I wondered who he was.
“Come on, Ben, mate. It’s me, Charlie. Charlie Sunderland.”
“Charlie?” Suddenly I recognised him. “Hey, Charlie!” Delighted to find a friend, I pushed through the elbows of the diners.
“Watch where you’re going, son!” A man slopped tea on his jeans.
“Sorry!”
Charlie shifted some shopping bags and cleared a space at the table. “What you doing here?”
It was too complicated to explain. I unloaded the tray. “You cut your hair. You look different.”
“Yeah.” He smoothed the sleek moustache and ran a hand over his black hair, cropped at the sides and permed into curls on top. “Smart, eh? What you think?” He turned to give me the full effect .
“Great.”
“Drives the girls mental.” He introduced me to the two men who sat opposite. “This is a pal o’ mine, Ben Thomson. His dad was mate on the old Boston Princess. Ben done a trip with him a year back. I was deck boy.”
We shook hands, thick fingers with chipped nails, very different from the hands of teachers.
“Can’t stop, Charlie.” One ground out his cigarette and stacked their plates.
“See a man.” His companion rose. “Leave you to talk to your mate.”
“Catch you in the Eight Bells.”
They nodded to me. “Nice to meet you.”
“Yeah, see you.” Charlie watched them go. “Couple of ABs from my last ship. Still got seventeen days’ leave, lucky beggars.”
I arranged my lunch and reached for the sauce bottle. “You off again then?”
“Sign on, Monday. Sail Wednesday.”
“What’s the ship?”
“Pacific Trader.”
“Where you going?”
He shrugged and took a chip. “Oz, I think. Or South America. Somewhere like that. Anyway,” he brightened. “Like I said, what you doin’ here? Not the school holidays, is it?”
I shook my head. “Half term two weeks back.”
“What, playin’ hookey?”
“Sort of. Well yeah, but not like you mean.”
“Naughty boy!” Charlie laughed. “I didn’t reckon you for that sort o’ game. What about that smashin’ gran o’ yours? She’ll give you hell if she finds out.”
“Not going to.” I felt a familiar lump in my chest. “She died last winter.”
“Oh, mate, I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s OK.”
“What happened?”
“Fell on the ice. Broke a hip.” I took a shaky breath. “Turned to pneumonia.”
Charlie made a face. “She was great.”
I nodded.
“Where you livin’ now, then?”
“Dad came home to sort things out. There wasn’t anyone else, really, not that I could live with full time. So I’m at boarding school up the country. Stay with my Auntie Marjorie in the holidays. Dad’s aunt, really, my great aunt.”
“What about your mum, her family?”
I don’t like to talk about it. When I was two, my mother ran off with one of dad’s shipmates, leaving me with my gran. I never saw her again. Last I heard, she had moved to Germany. “Dunno,” I said.
Charlie helped himself to more chips. “So what you doin’ back here? Just come to visit the old place?”
“I s’pose. See the house; put some flowers on gran’s grave.”
I’d already been to the house. The new owners had built a porch and garage, laid a block-paving drive, painted the woodwork blue.
I picked up a sausage with my fingers and dabbled it in sauce.
“Just down for the day?”
“Booked into one of those B and Bs down near the beach. Told them at Frankie’s my auntie wanted me to come down for the weekend. She doesn’t live here, though, she lives in Oxford. I’ll take the train back on Sunday.”
“You mean you just said like: ‘Hey, I’m going down my Auntie Marjorie’s, see you on Sunday’?”
“Not exactly. I had to write a letter.”
“Ah! Signed ‘Auntie Marjorie’. But didn’t they ring her up?”
“Yeah, but she’s away this week.”
“And they know what an honest lad you are. Crafty devil. When I forged a letter sayin’ I couldn’t do gym, they just laughed an’ give me press-ups and cold showers.”
“I got one of the sixth-formers to write it, cost me two quid. They’ll kill me if they ever find out. So will dad.”
“I bet.” Charlie thought about it. “Still use the cane in a place like that?”
“Occasionally.”
“What’s it like?”
“Only been there one and a bit terms. Never had it. Not yet.”
“I meant the school.”
“Oh!” I pictured the long, wooden corridors of Frankie’s – or to give it its Sunday name, The Sir Francis Drake School for the Sons of Merchant Navy and Airline Officers. The pictures of famous seafarers and aviators on the walls; the four-to-a-room dormitory I shared with my best friend Anson and two other boys; the early morning runs; the rows of washbasins and lavatories; big boys flipping you with their towels; the uniform jerseys with a ship’s wheel badge; the tears of some of the younger boys. It was costing dad a bomb and I hated it, resented it, even half blamed it for gran’s death, which was ridiculous.
“It’s OK,” I said and popped the yolk of my second egg. “Anyway, what have you been doing?”
“Me? Well, Ordinary Seaman now, aren’t I? Gone up in the world.” And Charlie launched into an account of the two trips he had made since we last met. Life at sea attracts all sorts of weird characters and crazy behaviour. Soon I was laughing so much that, for the moment at least, Frankie’s and my reason for being in Westport were driven from my mind.
“Hey, but listen,” he said at length. “You don’t want to stay in some boring old guest house. Come an’ stay with us. Now our Bill’s away in the army you can have his room.”
“What about your mother? Won’t she – ?”
“Nah. Mum’ll be tickled pink. She’ll spoil you rotten. Come on, let’s get your things.”
I drank off the last of my coffee.
“Bye, Betty,” Charlie called cheerfully.
“Bye, my darlin’,” came the equally cheerful response. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t.”
The Landlady
