Free Down to the Sea in Ships by Horatio Clare Page B

though I am in solidarity with the crew I am not actually an employee – I have a gin and tonic at a swanky bar, conscious that my hi-vis jacket sends a confusing signal. Slightly lost and slightly thirsty, I console myself that I must look a bit like a seafarer. On the way back to the ship Rohan and Prashant disabuse me of this illusion.
    The first time I have seen them out of uniform, and they are strolling along the
calle
in their t-shirts and shorts like the cooler sort of tourist. They look well off, alert, as ever, healthy and contented: strikingly different from the old image of the merchant seaman, raddled with drink and vice. They want to know if I know where the action is. I wish I could tell them. It is the first time we have met in my environment, or at least one where I am not awed and innocent. Rohan and Prashant look at me eagerly, hoping for the inside take on Algeciras. These wonderful, terrifying young Indians! They are so kind and encouraging on the ship that I could hug them: they seem almost to sympathise with a plight you did not know you were in before you met them. When we talk I cannot help feeling that their civilisation knows mine for a foppish, effete and idle abstraction which cannot even look up its own train timetables without Indian help. There must be twenty-five-year-old Britons who could match Rohan’s knowledge of one of the most sophisticated machines on earth, who are already married, who have children and a series of ten-year plans which are actually going to be realised, but I suspect there are very few.
    â€˜So do you know where is good to go?’ Prashant asks. Spanish girls, tapas, flamenco and a roiling atmosphere of sensuous vivacity would evidently be welcome.
    â€˜Things tend to start very late in Spain . . . I found a nice cocktail bar,’ I say, lamely, ‘where you could have some – lemonade?’
    They go on their way, laughing. The route back to the ship is lined with fishing boats, some of whose crews have not finished, and queues of silent lorries, their curtains drawn: another strange, still glimpse of the numberless tribe of men far from home, from company, from family, working to the regulations of a concrete world.
    All night, in clunks and booms, we take on cargo: we are now lower in the water by a metre and it takes 120 tonnes to sink us an inch. Stevedores and deliveries come and go, two technicians fiddle with one of the radars, calibrating it, and fail to work out what is wrong with the other. Carl-Johann has gone; the new chief engineer, Andreas, looks stoically resigned. Like captains, senior officers work ‘back to back’ – three months on, three off, handing over to their relief quickly, because they know each other and the ships they maintain. But many officers hide from their phones on leave, especially over Christmas. If they can be reached they can be asked to work, which means being flown anywhere in the world at no notice.
    We depart in thudding sun. In the bow two crew work the lines, feeding them on to the drums of six huge winches. Chris is at the winch controls, on a raised walkway which runs around the gunwales above the deck space where the two men work, separated from the peril by railings. Something goes wrong.
    â€˜Captain, the ship is moving forward!’ Chris yelps, and dives for the controls. The winches pay out. They are still on automatic, so nothing snaps.
    â€˜The lines are designed to break backwards,’ Chris says. ‘But in some ports you still find steel – they whiplash. Cut you in half.’
    It turns out a throttle on one of the slave stations, a sub-control on the bridge wing, was not quite at ‘Stop’. When power was switched to it our monster moved.
    â€˜I always like this bay. I like that mountain,’ the Captain says, as we turn out across the afternoon glare. He and Sorin mock Tarifa Traffic Control when it fails to ask the standard question.
    â€˜How