Man Overboard

One of the houseboats on the estate's stretch of the river is turned back into a working paddle steamer to help with the estate's finances.

 

 The inaugural voyage of the PS Batch Castle.

 

MAN OVERBOARD

 

 Peter Maughan

 

 

 

Chapter One

 

Smoke from the funnel ringed with Trafalgar blue and gold idled in the air above the PS Batch Castle. On deck, Sir Humphrey Strange, the twelfth baronet and squire of Batch Magna and this March, took the cigar from his mouth and grinned beefily for the cameras of the local press. 

     “This is an historic occasion, boys!” he boomed, as the Church Myddle Silver Band on the landing stage finished with ‘The Drunken Sailor’ and started on ‘Haul Away, Joe’, the polish on their instruments liquid with sunlight, and the boat's whistle screamed, two long, full-throttle blasts, announcing that they had steam.  

     Humphrey grinned again and looked up, as if the sound were visible, and waited until the notes had died.

     “My great-great uncle, Sir Cosmo Strange, started the Cluny Steamboat Company over seventy years back now. A guy who went to London to sort out the family finances and came back instead with five paddle steamers,” he said, sharing it with a grin of pride, as if to say, ‘how's that for sorting out the family finances’!

     “He bought them at a public sale on the old River Thames,” Humphrey went on, re-telling a family legend. “And from there he sailed at their head to dry dock at historic Chatham, were they were took apart and hauled over to the railhead for the journey to Shrewsbury and the home waters of the Cluny, carried there on a train pulled by an engine called Progress. That’s history for you, boys! And today we’re gonna make a bit more history when the Batch Castle here once more sails under the company’s flag. Today, boys - today,” he announced, his voice lifting as the steam whistle erupted again, “the Cluny Steamboat Company is back in business! Even if there is only one of them,” he felt obliged to admit.

      “Sir Humphrey -” one of the reporters started. 

     “Humph, son, Humph,” Humphrey reminded him.

     “Humph. Any plans, Humph, for more working boats?”

     Humphrey rolled the cigar round his mouth, his eyes narrowed at the river, as if wondering how many he could get on it.

     “Well, we couldn’t use the other three paddlers, that’s for sure, because people, friends, live on them,” he said then, reluctant to let go of the idea. “Like the Commander and his wife, Priny, did on this, till last year. But we did a straight swap, see, the Castle for one of the old Masters’ Cottages on the river here.”

     He pointed at the deck saloon against inclement weather on the aft deck, with a galley to the stern of it. “Only a few months back the saloon there used to be their living quarters, a lounge, small bedroom and bathroom. We left the kitchen, the galley, as it was. We’re gonna be serving food and drink from it. It took a lot of work and money, converting it back �" but luckily, unlike the other paddlers what was left of her engine hadn’t been ripped out. That’s the problem, see, guys, money. Money,” he said again, shaking his head, pestered by that tiresome reality.

     Reality, to the man who wanted to bring part of Tower Bridge home with him from his London honeymoon, bought with money he didn’t have from a man who hadn’t the right to sell it, even if it had been for sale, was a killjoy, a party pooper, a grey, boring presence turning up on the doorstep with a briefcase of facts and figures just as life had started to liven up.

     “But you never know, boys, you never know,” he added breezily, and winked, determined not to let reality have it quite all its own way.

     “Anyway, gotta go now, it’s my turn on the steam whistle.”

     The photographers wanted one more shot, and Humphrey, cigar in mouth, hands gripping the lapels of the Brooks Brothers executive suit his large frame was attired in, worn for the occasion with his best Yankees baseball cap, gazed, eyes narrowed, into the distance for their cameras, a man of destiny sizing up the future.    

     “And be sure to get a good one of Lady Clem and the babe,” he told them then, waving the cigar, an Havana torpedo bought for the occasion, in the direction of his wife with the newly arrived baby in her arms, a son to go with their daughter Hawis, now playing tag among the crowd on deck with Jasmine Roberts’s brood and their friends from the village.

      “Ralph Franklin T. Strange the Second. Gonna be running the joint one day. And my Mom’s about somewhere. Hey, and don’t forget the Commander, the guy in charge. Get a couple of him in his new uniform. And Sion Owen the fireman, and Tom Parr, ship’s chief engineer,” he said, promoting Tom on the spot. 

     “We’re doing the Captain and crew next,” one of the  reporters said.

     “Master, he’s called the Master. Make sure you get that right, fellas. That goes back to the old CSC, another bit of history. Help yourselves to a drink. Hey, and don’t forget to get that in about it being an historic occasion,” he reminded them, already on his way through to the wheelhouse and the steam whistle, glad-handing people and slapping backs en route.

     Humphrey was fond of the phrase ‘historic occasion’, the words used on the notices advertising the event, penned by Phineas Cook, a crime writer off one of the houseboats, the Cluny Belle, now wearing his steward’s hat, as he put it, happily popping celebratory corks from one of the drinks hampers on a deck bench.

     He considered it had a ring to it. And it referred to history, and Humphrey knew about history. It was responsible, through the feudal law of entailment, for where he was now, and he lived with it looking over his shoulder.

     It followed him about, like the eyes on the portraits of past squires and their families lining the staircase of Batch Hall, his ancestry home. He carried it about with him in a title which went back to Charles 1, and it waited for him each week in St Swithin’s, home under its Norman roof to the 17^th century alabaster figure of the first baronet, his sword and his Welsh wife Hawis by his side. And in case he needed another reminder, it sat above his head in the form of the Strange family escutcheon, painted in fading dark blue and gold on the wall of the squire’s Jacobean box-pew. A box-pew in which this squire, in his Brooks Brothers suit, baseball cap in hand, diffidently, almost apologetically, took his rightful place with his family each Sunday.

     Because if history had come to terms with Humphrey, an overweight, erstwhile short-order cook from the South Bronx, with a taste for Hawaiian shirts, baseball caps and cigars, Humphrey had yet to fully come to terns with it. History to Humphrey, a man who had largely been innocent of any sort of history, including that of his native USA, was like a parent or teacher he was still trying to prove himself to. Whatever he did as squire, he did with one eye on history.  

     And if today wasn’t history then would somebody kindly tell him what was.         

     And so Humphrey played on the paddler’s whistle bell, varying the flow of steam and thus of pitch, as Tom Parr had taught him, a steamy song of triumph to history and to the man who over seventy years ago had brought the boats home.

     The sound sending back for the older villagers there echoes of a past when Batch Magna felt like a little port, exotic with travel as far upstream as Shrewsbury and back, the five paddlers the company had then chugging up and down it like a bus service, carrying passengers and goods, and deck cargoes of livestock from the fields on market days, and crates of chickens, geese and Christmas turkeys.

     And now that past had returned, or at any rate one part of it had, the PS Batch Castle, about to be put to work again after more than twenty five years tied up at that landing stage, keeping company with the three other houseboats on the estate’s stretch of river, all paddle steamers and all once part of the old Cluny Steamboat Company.

     The PS Sabrina, the vessel which had made the full complement of that tiny fleet, would be saluted with a triple blast of steam as the Castle once more thrashed her way upstream past her wreck, a diving board for generations of village children, and with moorhens nesting in her broken wheels.

     The boiler of the paddler had explored two years into service when her Master tried to push more speed out of her than her maximum eight knots safely allowed, in an effort to beat a previous time from Water Lacy, the first scheduled stop on the journey upriver to Shrewsbury.

     The Master of the PS Batch Castle would make no such mistake. If she went out of business then so would the new CSC, with the loss not only of the money invested in her, but of a potential income as much needed as anything else the estate did to keep things together.

     It was a responsibility that Commander Cunningham, as Master, had not taken lightly.  

     After lessons on her wheel from Tom Parr, an old CSC hand, paddling up and down to Shrewsbury, practising keeping the shallow-draught vessel on a straight course in the strong midstream current, and in and out of the twists and turns the River Cluny and the Severn were  known for, he had applied for his Master’s license.      

     The result of that test was framed on the back wall of the wheelhouse, along with all the other licenses and certificates a working boat needed, ready to reassure any passenger who knew the Commander had only one eye and that he liked a drink. 

     He had one in his hand now, leaning on his badger head stick, talking to the First Lieutenant, as he called his wife, Priny, now in charge of the CSC booking office, but today a passenger, one of the forty they were licensed to carry, a mixture of invited guests and first-come-first-served ticket holders. 

     The Commander was remarking that it was only last week, or a fortnight ago at the most, or so it seemed to him, that he and Tom Parr had been rowing up and down the river, bringing back salvaged bits and pieces from the wreck of the Sabrina. And now look at her.

     And now look at her. She had been scraped, patched, welded and riveted, and her engine brought to working order. Her upperworks dazzled the eye with sunlight and fresh white paint, while elsewhere she wore the dark gold and Trafalgar blue livery of the old CSC, her name, with its fairground flourishes, touched up along the arches of her two side paddleboxes.

     The company’s house flag, a castle and lion and otter rampant in gold on a blue field, had been hoisted again on her mast, the red ensign, the flag of St George, the Stars and Stripes and the red dragon of Wales flew from staffs at the stern. And she was dressed in bunting like a tart’s handbag, as the Commander had put it, red, white and blue fluttering from the masthead and from the funnel.

     It was Tom Parr, one of the few villagers living to have worked for the old CSC, who had largely been responsible for the refitting of her engine. Tom had joined the company in the early 1920s, a young motor mechanic who, after one trip on a paddler, happily went backwards, swapping the promising future of the internal combustion engine for the external one of the past.

     In Tom’s day, the engineer on the boats had also been the fireman. But then, in Tom’s day, Tom’s arm had been stronger, so Sion Owen, the estate’s gamekeeper - or head gamekeeper, as Humphrey described him, ignoring the fact that he only had one of them - now worked on the plate, shovelling on the heat from the wheelbarrow loads of coal he’d pushed up the gangway the day before from John Beecher’ s yard in the village.

     But Tom’s real worth was in his head still, and he was once more on the deck of a working paddler, in his white engineer’s overalls and the aged company cap with the gold CSC ribbon he’d kept all these years, a castaway rescued from the Cluny’s past.

     It was then the Commander’s turn for the press cameras, in his new navy CSC Shipping Master’s uniform, navy and white cap with its badge of the Strange family coat-of-arms in a wreath of gold oak leaves, and four gold rings on his sleeves topped with Nelson loops.

     He was photographed at the boat’s wheel, and with Humphrey and Clem, and then with his two-man crew, and one with Priny on his arm, dressed as if for Ascot and wearing her pearls.

     The Commander watched the reporters trooping after Tom to inspect the engine room, and moved his neck as if his collar was too tight.

     “I only hope, Number One, that I don’t prang her,” he muttered in an aside to his wife. “And end up on the front page.”

     “Nonsense, Cunningham,” Priny said briskly. “Of course you won’t prang her. You haven’t yet, and you’ ve taken her up and down enough times.”

     “Not with forty odd souls on board, I haven’t.”

     “Besides,” Priny added, brushing at nothing on his shoulder, above this wartime Fleet Air Arm medal ribbons, “Tom wouldn’t let you. And if you’re good, I’ ll bring you up something in a glass once we’re round the island,” she said, referring to Snails Eye, an island they had first to go down to and round to start their journey upriver.

     Tom had opened the sea c**k and boiler-stop valves earlier to let steam, the lifeblood of the paddler, into her pumps and engines, and when he led the reporters into the small engine room behind the wheelhouse, one of them, finding the engine slowly turning, looked at his watch.

     “I thought the departure time was ten-thirty.”

     “Ah, it is. I’m just warming it through, getting her joints moving, like  Her’s an old lady, and like me teks a bit of time to get going of a morning.” 

     He nodded at Sion, shovelling coal into the mouth of the firebox.

     “Same as her boiler there. Teks three days, it does, to get it up to a working pressure from cold, so’s not to put too much stress on it, see.”   

     “Where d’you get the water from?” one of the  reporters asked, looking about him.

     “From the river, of course. By a water feed pump, worked off the crankshaft,” Tom said, as if that should be obvious.

     “Nice engine,” another reporter said vaguely.

     “Ah, it is,” he agreed, looking at it, fond as a parent, the strokes of the copper piston rods carrying light up and down on them from the overhead bulkhead lamps, its enamelled ironwork a shining post-office red. “That’s a twin cylinder compound diagonal job, that is.”     

     Tom told them how it worked, a simple tale simply told, of how the boiler turns water to steam, which is fed into pipes, where it expands under pressure to push a piston in the cylinder, which is then passed from the piston to the crankshaft, which turns the paddle wheels.

     Tom told it gruffly, looking at them with the glare of age in his eyes, sounding defensive, or protective. This was his world, in the bowels of a late Victorian paddle steamer smelling of engine oil and the heat of her fire. That other world, beyond the hills of his valley, may do all sorts of clever things, and did, such as landing men on the moon. And let them, that’s the way Tom saw it, as long as they left him and his twin cylinder compound diagonal steam engine alone.

     “And a compound engine,” he went on, pointing a grease-stained finger, “uses the remains of steam after it’s pushed the cylinder’s piston to repeat the job in that second, low-pressure cylinder there. A twin cylinder job, see.”

     After they had left, Tom checked the steam pressure gauge on the boiler Sion was still heating up. They needed a working steam pressure of one hundred and twenty pounds per square inch. Less than that and the boat would move too slowly, if move at all. More than that and there was a danger of her sharing the same sort fate as the PS Sabrina.

     Not long after that Tom had his pressure. She was ready.

     Sion, a Welsh bullock in a coal-stained singlet, his dark Elvis quiff flattened with sweat, was leaning on his fireman’s shovel thirstily seeing off a pint of cider from a plastic gallon of it. He was done for now, the fire up, its heat burning at its banked heart like a sun around which everything needed to move the boat revolved.

     Her fire was up and she breathed steam. She was ready.   

     The Commander was talking to Humphrey at the bottom of the wheelhouse steps, Humphrey waving his cigar at the river, describing, perhaps, the future of the new CSC.

     “Her’s ready, Commander,” Tom reported.

     Humphrey shot an executive cuff on his wrist watch. “And ten minutes before time, Tom!” he congratulated him.    

     “Thank you, Tom,” the Commander said briefly, his good eye saying the rest. On the painted glass of the other, like blood in it, he was showing the flag, flying on this day that had come at last, the Union Jack.

     “All ashore what’s going ashore!” Sion bellowed, holding his fireman’s shovel as if ready to help them on their way with it.

     He followed the last of the dawdlers down the gangway and cast off fore and aft from the newly painted iron bollards that had once secured all the vessels of the CSC. He chucked the ropes up on deck to Tom and then hauled the gangway up after him.

     He and Tom disappeared back into the engine room and the Commander limped up the wheelhouse steps on his stick, followed by the Cunninghams’ Welsh collie, Stringbag.

     He checked his watch, took his time lighting a pipe, and then rang down to the engine room on the brass telegraph bell for ahead, his good eye steady.

     Tom pushed the ahead lever on the engine and turned the small wheel on the steam valve. And then turned it again, letting more steam into the cylinders, and pushed more speed out of the engine with the ahead lever.

     The paddle wheels stirred, and started to turn, and there was cheering from the landing stage and waving from the port rail, as the Castle pulled slowly away with a double blast of steam from the whistle, the Silver band breaking into ‘Hearts of Oak’, the bouncy, sea-brisk notes following her out to midstream.

     The Clung Steamboat Company was underway.  

 

ge:EN-G"�/sa�� pI'mso-spacerun:yes'>  well, just push away. And for extra speed, bend your knees into the down stroke. That’s all there is to it. Have fun. Oh, and if you do get stuck, remember to hang on to the punt and not the stick,” he added, on his way past the single lantern, moths fluttering around its light, leaving Adrian muttering to himself, going over his instructions on the punting deck.

     “Now what is this all about? Mmm?” he said, parking himself next to Suzanne, and patting her hand.

     “How am I doing then?” Adrian asked complacently awhile later.

     “Fine, Andy, you’re doing fine,” Phineas said, preoccupied. As the same sex as Adrian, he was learning just what a swine he was, holding Suzanne’s hand and murmuring sympathetically now and then.

     “Yes, well, it’s not exactly difficult, is it,” Adrian said on a laugh. “I mean, it would be hard to find a more basic form of propulsion.”

     “No, you’re doing splendidly, Andy, splendidly. Couldn’t do better myself,” Phineas muttered, gazing at Suzanne.

     Even her teeth shone, gleaming moistly in the reflected light as she smiled at him. She smiled at him, and he smiled at her, and before he knew what was happening it had happened. They had kissed.

     And if the earth didn’t move, then the punt did, rolling, unnoticed, under them.

     “Soon got that sorted,” Adrian said then. The punt and got that the midstream current had suddenly met again and he wasn’t sure how it had happened, but after splashing about with the pole, trying to use it as a rudder to steer with, he found himself facing what he was sure was the other way. Up or down river, what did it matter? He’d got out of trouble midstream in half the time it had taken Phineas - and he was supposed to be the professional.

     He sank the pole again with a scornful laugh in Phineas’s direction.

     Not that Phineas noticed. Phineas was lost, to Sally and the new perspective, drowning in Suzanne, and going down for the third time, the third, lingering kiss, their embrace increasingly heated and desperate with murmured endearments between more kisses.

     Adrian was also enjoying himself. He had really started to motor now, as he thought of it, the current doing most of the work for him. He didn’t understand why they hadn’t set off downriver in the first place. He was using the current instead of fighting it, going with the flow. After that it was just a question of rhythm and balance.     

     He was beginning to suspect that, despite his boasting, Phineas hadn’t a clue. He wondered, at this speed, and given that they were going the right way, how long it would take them to get to Shrewsbury.

     They were fairly bowling along,  Adrian bending his knees and pushing away. Past the houseboats and Snails Eye Island, and a sleeping Batch Magna, while his passengers grew more passionate in the shadows.

     Running under the moon and the ruined castle on the hill, punting on down to the water meadows, past Magna and Lower Rea, Leech Meadow, Pistol and Prill Leasow, to where the fall of swollen water over Prill Weir ahead of them was like a storm wind gathering in the trees.

 

 

Author's Note

Be glad of general comments.