Mistress and Commander Read online

  ‘We’ve found her!’ I couldn’t help blurting out. ‘We’ve been on board and Cubby thinks she might be OK – well, the deck’s OK at least,’ I gabbled, stretching up to kiss John.

  ‘That’s good, but you must have driven really fast from Hamburg to get here in the light,’ he observed. He was good a puncturing a bubble: we’d only had a moment on the deck and there was everything else, the engine, hydraulics, machinery – the whole boat to learn about.

  Cubby had insisted on a room next door to ours, saying he’d get lost in the fancy hotel, but he appeared, neat in clean jeans and navy polo neck, having perfectly well found the bar. John, happy to be out of a suit, was also in jeans, but Ian had not bothered to change. Dinner, with inevitable herrings, to Cubby’s delight, had been excellent and we were a cheerful, if curious little party, happily building our virtual boating empire.

  In the morning the roads were still sheeted in ice as I inched the Flying Tomato slowly along the quay, this time stopping well back from the edge. A man waved from the wheelhouse and we carefully climbed down the ladder. Monaco’s owner, a large friendly Dane, waved his arms about and made rumbling noises which, as none of us spoke Danish, we took to mean he’d start up the engine – we were being offered a sea trial.

  Off we went, with the engine throbbing away, Monaco moving out of the Søndeborg harbour in the cool winter sunlight. We stood about trying to appear professional, as if sea trials and ship inspections were second nature. Cubby, the only person who knew anything about what we were doing, was nowhere to be seen.

  The Monaco was an unglamorous, sturdy, industrial side-trawler, built in 1970 entirely of European oak. She was 25 metres long with a draft of 4.8 metres and, as I had learnt, was typically Danish. ‘If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ’em all,’ I’d been told by the agent in Hull. The only difference was size, and Monaco was one of the biggest in the harbour. She was not pretty, hardly romantic and she seemed huge and with curious fishing equipment. Cubby liked her and dismissed the fishing gear as irrelevant. What appealed to him was the way she ‘met’ the swell and of course her size. Our friendly Dane, sensing a sale, turned her round to head back. The brief sea trial had gone well. Cubby had spent most of the time grubbing about below decks with a torch, prodding his knife into assorted timbers, poking round in the bilges and studying the engine. He was filthy but full of bounce and had a twinkle in his deep blue eyes. He was always full of charm and wit when things were going his way.

  John, Ian and I stood about rather awkwardly watching the bustling harbour. A ferry gave three blasts on its whistle as it began to go astern. Monaco began to slow down and gently drifted to a halt. With her superstructure acting like a sail in the light winter wind she began to drift straight into the path of the reversing ferry. I glanced up at the wheelhouse: our Danish skipper was staring open-mouthed at the ferry.

  ‘Amelia! Come with me,’ Cubby shouted. I ran after him along the deck, following as he ducked into a small opening on the port side where I could hear the engine. The metal floor was slippery with oil, but by now only the top of his head was visible as he disappeared down the ladder towards the engine. I turned, kneeling on the slippery steel plating at the top of the ladder and carefully felt below me for the top rung. Cubby stood by the thumping red engine and put his mouth next to my ear to shout over the noise: ‘I reckon it’s the gears. He’s no clue, yon man up there.’ It had taken Cubby barely a moment to form an unfavourable opinion of the Dane’s abilities.

  ‘D’you see that?’ He pointed to skeleton wheel about a foot in diameter. ‘Can you turn yon wheel while I push her back into gear?’ Grasping the wheel I waited while he listened, judging the revs for the right moment. As he nodded, I heaved on the wheel. It was stiff but I managed to turn it as he pushed a red lever sticking up through the plating of engine room floor.

  There was no crunching of machinery; he’d caught the right moment and the tone of the engine changed to a purposeful beat. I stepped out of his way as he hurtled past me, up the ladder, out on deck. Scrambling up, I followed him. It had only taken a couple of minutes and Monaco was still in the ferry’s path. Cubby’s tousled head appeared from the wheelhouse window. ‘Grab a fender, girl!’ was the curt instruction. Clearly our mighty Dane had let Cubby take charge and there was just time for me to lob a big orange fender over the side. Cubby knew I was good at judging it and I took extra delight in gauging exactly the right spot while John and Ian were watching. The ferry squeezed the fender flat, pushing Monaco harmlessly and unscathed out of her path.

  Cubby was unconcerned about the incident in the harbour and reassured the others. He liked her solidity. Monaco would do. She would be the one.

  Later, in the hotel dining room, drawings were scattered amongst glasses and plates as John and Ian immersed themselves, meticulously planning the layout for cabins, bathrooms, drying room, galley and saloon for our prospective passengers. They revelled in details: little shelves for a book, a hook at face level to see your watch in the night, reading lights, lights inside hanging cupboards, two hooks for towels in the showers, a wine rack and book case in the saloon. Cubby said nothing, listening to the debate about what went where, how many inches each cabin could be. On and on they went, delving deeper and deeper into the minutiae of cabins, loos, showers and the drying room: everything had to fit in to what was now the fish hold. Eventually they were satisfied.

  They had not only managed to fit everything in but had painstakingly drawn the cabins to scale on graph paper. John leant back complacently, picking up his glass he pushed the sketches across the table. ‘Looks pretty good, don’t you think, Cubby?’ he said rather smugly. Cubby bent over the sheets. He burrowed in his pocket for his tin of tobacco, flipped it open, took out a green Rizla paper and slowly started to roll a cigarette. Silence. We all waited. Eventually, he looked up at John; I could tell a little smile was tugging at the corners of his mouth.

  ‘Aye, aye, you’ve done a great job. Aye, it’s a great job. It all looks just fine. But there’s one wee thing. There’s a cabin missing.’

  Six

  When we had first drawn into Peterhead after my father-in-law’s funeral, John had told me it was possible Monaco’s insurers would reject our claim. They were doubtful: after all she’d only been on their books for one day before needing to be rescued. The tow, combined with the short-term repairs in Peterhead, had clocked up nearly twenty thousand pounds. ‘Just find out what you can. We need to know why she was sinking, there’s bound to be more to it,’ he’d insisted. I’d never walked into a pub on my own, but I’d been told I would find our tug captain with a dram and a pint in the corner of the Creel Inn. He was swarthy and dark, and his huge powerful hands curled gently round the dram. Suspicion oozed out of him: what did this redhead want? But he was also a Yorkshireman, so much easier for me to understand than the thick Peterhead dialect I’d been struggling with.

  After receiving John’s instructions, he told me, he had left the safe harbour of Aberdeen in his tug to find the Monaco, a steam of over six hours through a black January night. Monaco when he reached her was rolling and wallowing from side to side, powerless in the big swells she had drifted amongst the brightly lit, humming rigs of the Ekofisk oil field. Circling round in the tug, he had made his assessment as he listened to the VHF transmissions coming from the Monaco’s crew.

  ‘Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is MONACO! MONACO! MONACO!’

  He watched her pitching aimlessly, water sloshing across her decks. As she rolled and wallowed, he had also been able to make out the blue light of a burning gas ring and to see figures huddled around, keeping warm. Snug in the crew’s mess. So he had simply ignored the Mayday transmissions and instead instructed them to prepare Monaco for a tow and thus had saved us and our insurers from paying out salvage claims.

  I could tell he was making light of a tough job with boats rolling heavily in the winter swells and I appreciated his Yorkshire sense of dogged perseverance. Something was needed
. ‘Could I have a dozen bottles of Grouse, please?’ I asked the barman. ‘Yes, in a box would be great!’ He’d earned every one of them. Word went round the town. It was the first little crack in the carapace of local hostility.

  Cubby had of course instructed me in great detail how to brief the delivery crew who were to bring Monaco to Scotland from her Danish home port. His long list of critical items had started with checking the bilge pumps and gone on to ensuring they had the appropriate charts. But with the difficulties of my father-in-law’s death, the briefing had been cancelled. John and I had reasoned they must be OK – they were a professional delivery crew after all. But it seemed they had neither bothered to check the bilge pumps nor study the charts. In shallow Danish waters, Monaco had touched the bottom, knocking off a little pod housing the sensor for the echo sounder. Water flowed in through the small hole. A hole the size of a grapefruit and eventually, the engine room had become knee deep in greasy, cold saltwater. Death to an engine. However, the belts which drove her machinery, now wet, started to slip and the engine had come to a stop; no corrosive saltwater had been sucked in. Monaco, powerless, had drifted, with the wind pushing her within the ‘cordon sanitaire’ of a pulsating oil rig. Operations had been closed down, drilling stopped. It seemed the tug captain had not been our only piece of luck.

  After Monaco’s arrival in Peterhead, we’d spent four long freezing weeks working on her. Exposed high above the concrete slipway, the biting easterly winter wind whistled round the hull, flurries of snow blew across her deck. Whether out in the howling winds, sloshing about in the bilges in freezing water or squeezed into the engine room, I had worked hard. Making her seaworthy again had occupied the engineers for three weeks while we’d worked on the non-technical things. We had temporarily repaired the damage caused by the towing cable, cleared debris from the decks, and scrubbed off ingrained oil, diesel and grime from the engine room, hydraulics and electrics. I thought I would never be warm or clean again. We’d lurked in cafes clasping hot mugs of coffee, steamed in the shower at the Fishermen’s Mission and slept in pastel-hued B&Bs while living on the best fish and chips in the world, and occasionally I had joined the shipwrights in their canteen, warming my bum by the gas heater, using the need to make calls on my wonderful mobile as an excuse.

  While Monaco was exposed and totally visible on the slip out of the water, five marine surveyors came up to inspect and assess. Arrogant, chauvinistic or ingratiating, each had been convinced his plans were the best. Below the deck, in accordance with John’s sketch in what was presently the vast fish hold, there were to be a small saloon, en suite cabins, and a drying room. Above deck we wanted a galley and dining saloon with big viewing windows. We needed a shipyard that could do the work quickly and well and, as I’d been warned, would not go bust mid-conversion. We needed a surveyor I could trust and who would not take advantage of my inexperience. It was just the sort of project any one of them would relish. I hadn’t a clue which one to choose, but eventually, using a combination of cost and gut feelings, I had made a decision. After discussions with John, we’d settled on one that was known for its proficiency with steel, vital for the proposed construction of the new deck saloon.

  Between the surveyors’ visits, two directors of our little company decided to come and see what was going on. In earlier days they had taken cruises with Kate and Cubby and so had invested on the strength of those holidays. One day, emerging from the fish hold, grimy and smelly, I found two men standing on deck amongst the twisted gear, staring around. One I recognised from our inspections in Denmark, the weedy streak, Ian, with a wobbling drip on the end of his nose. The other, a dapper little fellow, stretched out a hand. ‘Hello! I’m Jeremy, ex-Navy don’t ye know! Come to see what’s what!’

  For three days they got in the way. Jeremy fussed about getting dirty and Ian stood about useless and cold. Neither had any idea of what they could do to help and both were suspicious of me and impervious to my attempts to charm them.

  ‘No!’ said Jeremy at the suggestion he and Ian join us for supper. ‘I will not join unwashed trawler men in the Fisherman’s Mission to eat congealed pie and frozen peas! It’s just not my kind of place!’

  Cubby, concentrating on his roll-up, looked up. He began slowly, ‘Do you know what the three most useless things on a boat are?’ I held my breath knowing the answer well. ‘Aye, well,’ he went on, taking his time to insert the little filter into his roll-up. ‘It’ll be a top hat, a lawn mower and a naval officer.’ Jeremy huffed his way down the ladder and was gone. John had one director the less.

  ‘Aye, aye, away you go. I’ve told Cubby you can be off. She’s ready now,’ said Ali, the chief foreman at Stickers, as our engineers were known in Peterhead.

  Shipwrights had caulked and pitched her hull and made her deck watertight again. Sparkies had reconditioned the electric motors needed for Monaco’s navigation lights and radar. Stickers’ engineers had overhauled as much as was needed to get her going. Cubby had lashed the shattered fishing gear, tying it down so it was immoveable whatever winter swells we might encounter. And now Ali said Monaco was ready to go. It seemed terrifying.

  Ali was reassuringly calm; I trusted him completely. Small and neat, he was the perfect size for a ship’s engineer. His face and hands had a deep oily diesel sheen making him look like a dedicated sunbather, but occasionally when he pushed aside his cap a luminous white bald dome glowed underneath: engine rooms are sunless places. A devout Baptist, he was as clean living at home as he was grimy during the day, and, as chief foreman with a workforce of two hundred, he was a firm but fair God. If he said the Monaco was safe, she was; and while the idea of actually being in the North Sea in January was terrifying, I was desperate to get on to the next stage of the venture. We had just three months to transform her into a smart expedition ship carrying twelve lucky passengers. The solid industrial ugly duckling designed for Arctic waters had to turn into a sleek swan. We had the prestigious National Trust for Scotland contract to honour, plus Monaco was to offer expedition cruises on Scotland’s treacherous west coast.

  I sauntered out of the workshop, trying to appear happy with the news and there she was, calmly tied up alongside the quay. ‘OK. Let’s get going.’ My voice sounded wobbly even to me. ‘Ali’s told me we can go. He’s already told Cubby and the harbour master,’ I said to Kate. ‘So let’s get going.’

  There was not a sign of Cubby.

  ‘Do you know where he is, Kate? He said last night the tide’d be OK so we’d better get on with it.’ She said nothing but disappeared into the crew mess aft. I peered up into the wheelhouse. No sign of him.

  Then he came round the corner of the ice plant, walking slowly under the massive stainless-steel chute which disgorged the ice, to shoot it straight into the hold of a waiting trawler; it was the last thing each ship did before heading off to catch more fish. Cubby paused and stared at the Monaco, no roll-up to be seen. Without a word, he jumped lightly onto the deck and disappeared into the engine room.

  A giant cough shook Monaco. Boom! Boom! Boom! A great spurt of cooling water spouted into the harbour from the pipe in her port side: Monaco came to life.

  She was still a mess, with her deck more of an assault course than a clear, neat working space. Jagged pieces of superstructure and twisted fishing gear were a sharp reminder of the damage she’d suffered from the tow across the North Sea. As the deck throbbed gently, I considered Ali’s comment that she had the Rolls Royce of marine engines. All five cylinders beat purposefully. He should know, so who was I to doubt?

  Kate and I stood on deck, now unable to hide our grins, one on the starboard and one on the port shoulder, each of us with a fender in hand.

  Ali, his apprentices and the shipwrights were lined up to look down at us from the quay. Figures in yellow oilskins stood up and stared across the harbour. Bustling forklift trucks paused as the drivers peered out of their cabs at us. There were people lining the harbour, standing, staring, waiting. The whole t
own knew about the red-haired English girl; there’d even been a piece in the Press and Journal about me.

  The Monaco began to move.

  Slowly she rubbed her starboard side along the quay.

  Sideways, like a crab, she scraped along, blown by the chill January wind.

  Minutes passed.

  Steadily she moved on along the quay edge, drifting remorselessly on. I glanced up, as the shadow of the massive hollow ice chute came closer and closer. Any moment now Monaco’s mast would bash right into it, dragging it off at the roots.

  On she drifted.

  The throb through my feet become a smooth regular beat and at last, steadily, purposefully, Monaco began to inch astern, backing away from the chute. A gap opened up between her starboard gunwale and the edge of the quay. Slowly her stem turned away from the stone coping towards the opening in the dock wall. She inched her way gently through the narrow cutting under the first swing bridge and into the second basin, steadily past swing bridge number two, moving through the maze of basins and swing bridges that were safe home to the great fishing fleet of Peterhead.

  The people lining the quays stared, but no one waved or smiled. Silently they watched. Waiting for Monaco to collide with a fishing boat, to run into the harbour wall or for Cubby to take a wrong turn and miss the exit. But unhurriedly he gently eased her delicately through the armada of fishing boats and past the harbour master’s office windows. Cheekily, I waved. That would teach them to think we were amateurs.

  We were clear. Out into the North Sea and neither of us had needed to use a fender. I looked up at the wheelhouse windows and blew Cubby a kiss.

  Once the course had been set, the engine room checked and we were all standing for the first time on our moving boat, I asked him, ‘OK then, where were you?’