At sea, ships are moved by the motion of the waves, by the swell, although different types of ship move in different ways. There are two main points of force that affect a ship at sea – the centre of buoyancy, through which there is an upthrust that keeps the ship afloat, and the centre of gravity, the opposing downthrust. As the sea pushes against the side of the ship and causes her to heel over, the opposing forces of buoyancy and gravity lever her upright again. As the ship is righted, though, the momentum then causes her to heel over the other way. Thus the ongoing rolling motion is created.

For those on board, heavy rolling was at first amusing, then awkward, then inconvenient, then hateful, then a part of life. When the rolling started, there was always some good theatre when people were caught unprepared. The edges of the dining tables had one-inch wooden barriers that were raised, known as storm boards, to keep the plates from sliding off, and the tablecloths were wetted down to give more grip to the plates and dishes. Ropes were attached to the bottoms of the saloon chairs, and these were clipped to rings in the deck to keep them fast. Even so, a heavy roll could always produce a spectacular saloon event when a plate of food leapt the storm board and landed in someone’s lap, or perhaps one of the chair clips would fail and the chair and its occupant would go barrelling across the saloon to crash into the bulkhead. Drinks slid around the bar, and there was a crashing and smashing from the galley as stacks of plates went over. In the cabins, anything not put away would move about and make a racket, or fall and break or both. There were howls of grief from all over the ship as people lost things. On the deck, every single thing needed to be secured, otherwise it would break loose and cause damage.

Life became more difficult, it required more attention, it needed the use of a hand to hold on. Eating, drinking, just standing up, all became a chore. Sleeping required us to wedge ourselves in our bunks with pillows and blankets to prevent being flung around. On severe occasions I would have to swaddle myself by taking an extra sheet and using it as a rope that went under the skinny mattress, tying myself down. On a couple of occasions, the motion was so violent I was flung right out the bunk, still lashed to my mattress. We all became tired and irritable, and longed for a change of course that would take the sea off the beam and cause the rolling to diminish.

A fully laden tanker, loaded right down to her marks, has a centre of buoyancy about one third up from the keel and a centre of gravity just below deck level. This results in a deep roll against a heavy broadside sea, causing the water to break over the side as the rails dip under the surface. Water boils down the deck, completely covering it in a foamy wash. The centre of buoyancy moves across the ship as she becomes more submerged, until the roll is checked, levering her upright, cascading the water out through the rails. A tanker’s roll is usually predictable.

On a general cargo ship, the rolling motion is different to that of a tanker. The liquid cargo of a tanker is uniform, whereas on a cargo ship the centre of gravity varies according to what type of cargo is stowed where. If there is a lot of heavy deck cargo, the centre of gravity will be raised and will be closer to the centre of buoyancy, which means that there is then less force to make the ship come upright again after being pushed over by the sea. This manifests itself as a sloppy motion. The ship heels over and then hangs there, before reluctantly coming back. A loose roll like that is always unsettling, sometimes alarming. It feels as if the ship is not going to come upright again and will just flop over into the deep. If on the other hand, the weight of the cargo is mostly in the bottom of the ship, the roll becomes stiffer and the ship will snap upright violently after heeling, which can cause structural damage if left unchecked. The motion of a tanker can be relied upon, but the motion of a general cargo ship was different every time we left port, depending upon the cargo being carried and its distribution around the ship.

On the heels of motion at sea comes motion sickness, seasickness, mal de mer. We bipedal humans compute our movements by sound, sight, skin pressure and muscle activity, all of which is co-ordinated in the inner ear by the central nervous system. The inner ear receptor produces a set of balances and predictions that is transmitted to the brain. When this mechanism gets out of synch, because you are being moved about by external forces, because you try to walk in one direction although getting moved in another, or because the gravity keeping you on the ground is continually varying across your body, the brain becomes confused and it can no longer properly understand what’s going on. This confusion of the brain and the resulting symptoms is motion sickness. People with highly developed senses tend to get more seasick than others. I was blessed with poor central nervous co-ordination in this regard and consequently never suffered. Other more sensitive souls would go through the seventh circle of hell. Seasickness causes nausea, sweating, dizziness, a general feeling of unwellness. It produces a pale and greasy pallor, a retention of liquid in the throat, drooling, dribbling, retching, vomiting. It makes the sufferer drowsy then sleepy, clumsy, then uncoordinated. It induces shortness of breath, suppressed panic and a feeling of foreboding. It can be a ghastly experience that generally lasts three or four days. People who are affected, even if they have spent a few years at sea, become accustomed to seasickness to the extent of developing an ability to function, but they never become completely immune. In the end you are either someone who got seasick or you aren’t. It’s that simple as that.

During the big rolling periods, the first sufferers would start to succumb after an hour or so. They would never be let off their duties, though, because shipboard life couldn’t just cease. The only exception was when someone had an attack so extreme that it inhibited all normal motor reflex and ability to function, although that was extremely rare. This meant that during the rolling we always had several people moving around the ship in a zombielike state, barely able to contribute to the working of the ship, groaning, weeping, retching with dry rasps. Non-sufferers often took the occasion to wind up the unfortunates with elaborate commentary on greasy fried foods, or asking if they fancied a raw egg or a glass of scotch to settle their stomach. The afflicted would never see the funny side, the unafflicted found it unendingly hilarious.

The officers of the Benlawers were a mixed bag of personalities. I liked some of them, got on with most, disliked a couple. There were only two Englishmen on board – me and the second electrician. As an Englishman, I had assumed that I would get a bit of stick from time to time, although that was rarely the case. The real rivalry was between those from the islands against those from southern Scotland. Most of the islanders were from the Hebrides, with the biggest contingent from Skye. There were several from the Orkneys and a couple of Shetlanders, ‘Sheltees’. There were also a few from the northern and north-western Highland coastal towns, who were treated as honorary islanders, rather than Highlanders.

The islanders were slower in speech and manner than the southern Scots, who were predominantly from the eastern coastal towns, with a sizeable cadre from Edinburgh. Southerners were looked down on by the islanders, who didn’t even consider them real Scots. a couple of the Sheltees had maps of Scotland stuck to the bulkheads of their cabins with the English border moved north to a line penned in from Aberdeen to Bute, condemning the industrial Glasgow Edinburgh belt to a sort of quasi-English status. In turn, the southern Scots spoke of the islanders as country bumpkins, teuchters, slow of mind and permanently behind the rest of Scotland. I kept a neutral line between the factions, although I generally found more common cause with the islanders. I was demonstrably an outsider whenever I opened my English mouth, and this sat better with them. The islanders regarded the southern Scots, particularly those from Edinburgh, as lording it over ‘real’ Scotland, inflicting self interested laws while blaming the English for anything that ever went wrong, endlessly failing to address their own weaknesses and incompetence.

I got on with most of them well, though, both islanders and southern Scots, and was pleased that I had come to work for a Scottish company. There were only two people who rubbed me up the wrong way. The first was Tam, the third engineer. He was from Glasgow, a west coast man serving on an east coast shipping line. It was out of the ordinary to find Glaswegians working on Leith-based ships. They usually favoured the Clyde shipping companies. Tam was a short square man in his late twenties with a ruined face, pockmarked and sagging from too much drink. He shaved sporadically, his uniform was always wrinkled, and he was grubby. His driving interest was football, he was an ardent Glasgow Rangers football fan.

He was not just ardent but fanatical, insanely fanatical. I had a passing interest in football, as I did with most sports, although I wasn’t wedded to any club. I also had a very limited appreciation of just how obsessive and passionate football fans could be. One evening, I entered into a discussion about football with Tam. I was oblivious to the others around me looking uncomfortable, I was oblivious to Tam’s increasingly stony expression and to the hostility clouding his face. I blathered on, airing my worthless opinions about the best football clubs in England, the best clubs in Europe, the best clubs in Scotland. I had no real knowledge, just information gained from hundreds of similar conversations on hundreds of different subjects. I was just yakking, and rather enjoying myself. Suddenly, I became aware of Ian the leci, standing behind Tam, waving his arms and mouthing, ‘No! No! Stop talking about football!’ I paused, I looked at Tam. He had put his drink down. He was glaring at me, his black eyes bright with menace.

He leaned towards me. ‘Listen’, Tam said in a voice laced with impending violence. ‘The best football team in the world is Glasgow rangers. Rangers are the best team in the world. Not the best in Britain, not the best in Europe, they’re the best team in the world. There’s no other team anywhere that can compare with them. They’re the best team in the world and that’s all there is to say. Do you want to argue about it?’

The room went quiet. The air-conditioning hissed, the fridge seemed to be humming loudly. I looked back at him.

I said, ‘Well, Tam, if you think they’re the best in the world then that’s fine, good for you. I can’t agree or disagree.’

I started to comprehend the ugliness of the situation. I shifted my weight on my feet, trying to prepare myself as best I could to ward off an attack by a drinkfuelled madman from Glasgow. I wasn’t relishing the prospect. I looked at Tam. Tam looked at me. We both tensed. I noted how solidly built he was, perhaps a bit of fat, but not much fat. Then the tension shrugged out of his shoulders, he tossed back his drink and stamped out of the bar, muttering. I learnt a lesson – be cautious about discussing football with Scotsmen.

Ian said, ‘You were lucky there. He almost head-butted me the other day when I told him that Celtic were doing well in the league.’

The second person I had little time for was the Roddy, the fourth officer. He was a strange character, a long, gangling, clumsy man, a few months younger than me. He came from just north of Edinburgh. Roddy was uncompromising in his dislike of all things English. Sometimes his dislike boarded on hysteria. In all the years I sailed with Scots crews, he was the only person I found to be like this. Being a lone Englishman at sea among Scots, I was never so dense as to start an England versus- Scotland discussion, and any joshing I received was always of a good nature. But with Roddy it was different, there was a real underlying unpleasantness, a bile that soured the air. In our normal day–to-day working we got on well enough. We were civil and talked to each other in a friendly manner. On occasions, though, Roddy would begin to change. He would seek out any opening in the conversation to bash the English, he would curse the bloody Sassenachs who had caused all the trouble in the world, how they robbed the Scots, how they should all be evicted from Scotland. When he noticed I was there he would rush to assure me that his remarks did not apply to me, just all real Sassenachs. I don’t know what he viewed me as, presumably some sort of honorary Scot. I mostly ignored him. The others squirmed with embarrassment at his crassness and told him to shut up, to no avail. He was universally unpopular.

By and large, I liked the officers on that ship more than I had on others during my previous tanker life. I found the islanders to be essentially better company than the southern Scots, I thought they were better people. They had a way of combining gentleness with fierceness that you don’t see with those from the cities. It was easy to see why southern Scots regarded Highlanders and islanders as slow, because they never reacted with the speed and panic that was expected of them and seemed to take longer to absorb what was going on. The ship could be sinking and Ian would have said, ‘aye, I suppose we had better be getting off then,’ and he would then take another pull of his beer. Angus would have replied, ‘aye, we had best head for the lifeboats,’ and slowly stubbed his cigarette out. They were not slow, though, nor stupid. They were men who considered what they did and said. They would not be rushed. They were decent men, with morals and principles. They would not let you down, they would never exclude you, they were not in the habit of deriding their fellows, and they would rarely mock. They had a deep underlying passion and loyalty for the things in life they thought were right and worth defending, and when they were roused they could be terrifying. It made me feel good to be with the islanders, although being with them made me aware that the core of me was not as noble I wanted it to be.

Singapore was forever one of my favourite ports. I had lived in the city as a boy and I knew the feel of the place. I loved the succulent mossy taste as I breathed in the air, the screams of the wandering hawkers, the blasting rains in the afternoons, the close feel of over two million people crammed on an island only ten miles long and five miles wide. History indicates that Singapore Island was a fetid swamp off the toe of the Malay Peninsula when it was founded by Stamford raffles in 1819, although the populated history in fact stretches back to before the thirteenth century. Various parties have had a bite at the island over the centuries, including the Mongols, the Malay Sultanates, the Siamese and the Javanese, before the Dutch and British appeared over the horizon one day in all their modern finery. The name Singapore in Malay, Singapura, means Lion City although there were no lions around. There were tigers, though, reputedly still roaming on the island at the end of the nineteenth century. When raffles arrived, Singapore was a backwater of little significance, either locally or internationally, there were less than a thousand Malays living there, together with a few Chinese traders. Raffles recognised the potential for a deep sea harbour at Keppel, and he could see the island rested at an important strategic location, both of which would help to weaken the Dutch stranglehold on that part of South East Asia. By various deals with the nearby Sultan of Johore, raffles secured Singapore for the British in perpetuity. He built the harbour and turned Singapore into a free port, a tax-free trading environment. The traders rolled in, the Chinese arrived in hordes as workers, and the City State grew and grew. Singapore became a pivotal part of British Far Eastern strategy until independence was granted in 1959. In the mid-1970s, the place was booming, a capitalist business paradise. The population was 75 per cent Chinese, mostly the descendants of the workers who had been brought over in the previous century, even though the Malays were still recognised as the indigenous people. About 10 per cent were Indians, again brought in by the British in the nineteenth century.

This history, together with the cultural mix and the commercial drive, gave Singapore a unique frisson in the 1970s. Excitement zapped through the air. The government was just beginning to crack the whip over its inhabitants to herd them into the tight civic discipline that now prevails, and a few civil liberty types were already starting to cry foul, although then it was still a free and fairly wide open place. Noisy markets peppered the streets day and night. At night in the city, the bars and clubs and restaurants were vibrant. On the fringes, the seamier side of nightlife bubbled away. The brothels, street whores and sex shows were always there.

The Benlawers would moor in Keppel Harbour, which was walking distance from Anson Road, the legendary street of sailor bars. The bar area was starting to wind down at that time, as the Singapore government began to map out its puritan phase, although a number of bars, including the famed Champagne Bar and the Ritz Bar, were still doing a roaring trade. The shifts for the Singapore dock gangs were either twenty-four or sixteen-hour working. This translated into two of the three junior deck officers doing a twelve-hour or eight-hour stretch while the third one had the whole day off. We would generally be in Singapore for four or five days. Our evenings ashore would usually start in Anson Road, perhaps half a dozen of us drinking ice-cold Tiger beer in the ice-cold air-conditioning, while the bar girls twittered around us, hustling for drinks and tips. The drinks we bought them were coloured water at twice the price of a beer, but the commercial wheel had to go round and we always bought.

Later, we would find ourselves in one of the dens off North Bridge road or Victoria Street – dark, seedy, filthy, slightly dangerous. We would always insist that the beer bottles were opened in front of us. Later still, we would migrate to Bugis Street, the open air street market in the edge of the centre, famous for its transvestites, fights, seafood and wild reverie atmosphere. The clientele was mainly Europeans, largely seamen, some American and Australian servicemen on rest and recreation from nearby military antics. Bugis Street used to be packed with British servicemen every night, but Britain had formally handed over the defence of the island to the Singapore government in 1972 and all the troops went home, ending over 150 years of British military presence. In 1974 the Bugis Street market was still several years from being closed down. The strutting transvestites, known as Ki-Tis, the street kids hustling for games of noughts and crosses on small blackboards, the screaming fruit hawkers, the food sellers and the party atmosphere made it still the best late-night show in town. The Bugis Street toilets, a stinking block near the centre of the market, were internationally renowned as being the most disgusting to be found anywhere. Many a drunk slipped over in the pitch dark inside and emerged sodden through from rolling in puddles of piss, smeared and caked with unimaginably foul pastes. Most people would avoid the toilet block and slip into the shadows to urinate directly into the monsoon drain. If we were in the mood for a serious feed, we would go to Fatty Choys in nearby Albert Street. Fatty’s didn’t look very special, it looked uninviting – grimy, crowded and noisy, people sat on wobbly stools at mismatched wooden tables set on the pavement and the edge of the street. The place was lit by hissing naphtha lamps. Fatty and his team served the customers. The team was uniformly overweight, tired looking, bored-looking, shabby, miserable, and snappy. When we arrived, we would get a table wherever one was free. Sometimes we had to wait for a party to finish so we would sit on the edge of the monsoon drain, drinking beer until summoned. Once seated, we would gorge ourselves on bowls of steamed crab claws, duck roasted in soy sauce, braised chicken, noodles, stewed vegetables, slabs of fish, giant platters of fried rice, flushing it down with icy anchor Pilsner in iced glasses. The food in Fatty Choys was as good as it was possible to be, it was food for the gods. Tourists in the Four Seasons Hotel, a few hundred yards away, paid five times more for food of a quality that Fatty wouldn’t have dared serve to his guests.

Hong Kong was the main Far East port for the Leith Company, and was regarded as the eastern home by most officers. But it was Singapore that held a special pull for me because I had lived and been to school there only five years previously when my father had been stationed at the royal air Force base at Seletar. His squadron flew Twin Pioneer aircraft into the Malayan jungle strips and he carried his pistol strapped to his hip in case they ran into trouble with the remnants of Chin Peng’s communists insurgents who were still causing the odd stir of trouble in the remoter outposts.

On one free day while the others were splitting the cargo duties, I went to wander the streets of Katong on the east coast of the island, where I used to live, noting all the changes. We used to have the sea at the end of our road but the land had been reclaimed and was now choked with high-rise flats, relegating our seaside road to just another outer city street, hunched among other outer city streets. Mr Yan, the Chinese doctor who lived at the house next door, still lived there. He was sitting in a rattan chair reading a newspaper when I paused outside his chain link fence. He didn’t look up, so I walked on. I went on back to the city, to Anson Road, to drink in the bars, which is what I really liked to do.

I had always drunk too much. From the time I left home to go to sea at sixteen years old I liked to drink alcohol more than I should have done. I had drinking genes. My father was a big time drinker, he never stayed home at night, and he went out every evening to the officer’s mess or to the local pub. He came of age in the war when young men went off to die and partied in between, because that was the right thing to do. He was a young RAF officer who flew off to bomb Europe in a Wellington bomber, weaving through the flak, watching his friends caught in the searchlights, being shot down. Later in the war he transferred to Fighter Command and fought Germans in the summer skies over France in his Spitfire. What young man wouldn’t have spent his time in wild drinking rushes between those bouts of death? After the war, he carried on the habit, as did all his generation. So when I went to sea, drinking was the most natural thing to slip into. The life at sea was a drinking environment, and it fitted me like a glove. As a junior cadet I had worked on deck with the crew, mostly on ships plying their trade in the South China Sea. I squatted in the sun in a pair of shorts, chipping off the rust, scouring the metal, painting, the sun beating down on my back. I became stronger and more resilient.

At the end of the day I would slump in the shade on the poop deck with the other cadets and we would drink down ice cold cans of beer. I would spike the can with the opener that hung on a string around my neck, which was the fashion in the East at that time, and the amber fluid would slide down so sweetly, so beautifully. I could feel the beer fill my mouth then sluice in two icy channels down either side of my throat. After the first long swallow, I would light a Rothmans cigarette and pull the smoke deep into my lungs, then expel it with a sigh, then I would take another pull from my can and I thought, ‘This is so-oo good. It’s so good to drink like this.’ as time went by, it wasn’t just the oh-so beautiful taste, it was also the ambiance, the drinking camaraderie, the drinking culture that I loved. I was getting enjoyment from every corner. I liked the taste, I liked the pleasure of taking the alcohol inside of me, I liked the loosening of life’s grip as the effect of alcohol blunted my concerns, I liked the camaraderie of drinking with people who felt the same as me. I loved the whole drinking culture.

I loved the rituals. I observed them at all times. They were a fundamental part of the culture. The drinking world needs ritual to endure.

The first drink: No one took a sip from their glass or a swig from their can until everyone in the group was ready, and then we raised our glasses slightly to each other and said, ‘Cheers’ and we drank together.

The round: the first person, the one who arrived at the bar ahead of the rest, or had his hand in his pocket, or who had the lead of the conversation, would say, ‘Beers all round?’ and we would say, ‘aye.’ The round would then pass to someone else, and then to each of us in turn. It was rude to refuse, and it was near sacrilege to miss out your turn to buy the round.

The conversations: when we drank, we either told each other stories or we speculated about the future. That is how we communicated as men. There was rarely any philosophical debate, we did not talk of our feelings, we did not talk of our families or loved ones. We told each other stories, most of which involved drinking and girls, most entailed some wildness out of the ordinary that resulted in embarrassment or humiliation or violence or someone getting their just desserts. No one hogged the conversation, everyone in the circle was given a hearing to tell their own tale, and the rest of us listened respectfully, even if the tale was dog-dull. If stories weren’t being told, we would speculate on where we were going next, when our next pay rise would be, who was leaving next, who might be joining. It was easy to fill a whole evening’s conversation with idle and part-informed speculation.

The loyalty: no one would ever be left behind. if we were out on the lash in some dockland bar area and someone became too incapable to carry on, we would either carry him around with us to the next bar, or one of us would be charged with taking him safely back to the ship.

The humour: drinking would bring out the best in us whenever we were in a group, it would bring out the fun within. No matter how low someone was feeling, how tired, how undervalued, when we were together drinking in a group, the underlying sentiment was humour. It was used to lighten the load. Serious subjects were taboo within a drinking group. These only intervened occasionally between two people, very late on in the session, when both were very drunk. Then, and only then, it became acceptable for the pair to air grandiloquent bullshit of the higher calibre.

All of this was built into me when I signed on the Benlawers. Once on board, I found myself entering a drinking culture supreme. I was a rank amateur among all the Scots. I was like a child let into the sweetshop. All the officers drank, some constantly, most heavily. A few had prodigious capacities. I was a quick drinker. I drank at speed from the starting gun, I pushed the pace. Later in the evening I started to slow, and those who had refused a drink earlier in the evening began to overhaul me. I was a stayer, though, usually there to the end. As I drank more I talked less and less sense, although I kept at it until even I couldn’t understand myself, at which point I became an enthusiastic nodder. On a typical drinking party that started at seven in the evening, I would be in the pole position for the first two to three hours, after which I would drop back in the pack and drink much slower. My incomprehensible phase arrived about eleven o’clock and would see me retreat to the periphery. At one o’clock or thereabouts, my second wind would arrive, like the relieving cavalry, and I would perk up, pick up, start drinking again, drive the pace again, take the second star to the right and continue straight on until morning.

In my drinking I mostly stayed with beer, which was usually bottled or canned lager. The Scots officers on the Benlawers would often switch to whisky later in the evening. I was not a whisky drinker, and whenever I tried I would be violently ill. I found I had quite a capacity for Japanese whisky, Suntory, but try getting a Scotsman to drink Japanese whisky – I made myself a figure of derision whenever I had a glass. Drinking wine in the mid- 1970s was not a habit indulged in by men at sea. We drank beer or we drank spirits. I would occasionally go into a gin-and tonic phase, and sometimes we would amuse ourselves by quaffing exotic cocktails, but mostly for most people it was beer.

I knew that I drank a lot, but I never considered myself a heavy drinker. No drinker ever does, until they look back. A thudding head and a general feeling of malaise in the morning was commonplace for me, although I was usually fine by midday. I had a few occasions of seeing dancing lights in the early part of the day, which puzzled me, then worried me, then I got used to their odd appearance so I stopped thinking about it. I never craved a drink, but I always missed drinking if I was not in on it.

There were several officers on board who appeared permanently the worse for wear. Tam looked blighted by drink, Ian looked ten years older than he was, Angus became addled easily, and he sometimes remained that way even when he had sobered up. I was aware that my drinking habits were on the march, although in those days I never thought it was time to start pulling on the reins. I was too young, I was too healthy, I was enjoying myself too much. I hadn’t yet begun to properly stare into the abyss.