Categories
Fiction Short Stories

The Sea Stories

A few posts ago, I mentioned the seven short stories from When I Am Not Writing Poetry that are set in the merchant navy: three short snapshots and four longer pieces: The Beginning, Cargo, The Sailing Board and Such Sweet Sorrow. While the snapshots and The Beginning are true stories or are based on real events, the other longer pieces are complete fiction… although heavily based on my experiences.

Cargo tells of the life a third officer on board a general cargo ship bound – as I often was – for New Zealand. Cargo on board, loaded mostly in the UK, varied hugely from trip to trip, although there were usually cars or car parts, possibly agricultural or other machinery, steel in some form or another and a variety of chemicals. All carefully recorded and mapped to their positions in the holds, having been loaded to ensure that they would be accessible in the various discharge ports. The small section of a cargo plan – colours faded after half a century – shows the upper decks of the forward  two hatches. In the secure lockers, there is whisky, paper, some cartons of books, and some personal effects, while in the open space between the lockers and elsewhere are 28 tons of tubes, chemicals, bags of lime, drums of bleach, three cars, pallets of alkathene, steel plate and so on.

It was the second officer’s job to decide where cargo was stored on board. A complicated task as quite often the ship would be loading at three ports in the UK for discharge at a number of ports in Australia or New Zealand! The second officer would be more-or-less ably assisted by the third officer who would be eager to learn the skills of loading cargo. It would be his job next! And the job that always fell to him was the creation of a master cargo plan and a set of smaller copies – all hand written and coloured in the days before computers and photocopiers! It always amazes me that we did not even have a calculator on board and yet, within five or six years of leaving the sea I was using microcomputers – albeit early and very basic ones – in the university!

I do not recall if the third officer had to make deck rounds while the ship was at sea as the story suggests – I suspect that he didn’t. I do not remember ever doing so! Although later, as a second officer on container ships, the metal ‘lashings’ holding in place the containers stacked on deck had to be checked regularly. But, for the story, I needed some means of getting him onto the foredeck each day!

Each ship carried a ‘chippy’ – a carpenter, a senior seaman on board – and one of his daily jobs was to sound the fresh water tanks to determine how much was left for showers and drinking! This was done by dropping a rope with a series of brass segments at its end down pipes from the deck into each tank. By chalking each brass segment, it was possible to see how deep was the water in the tank when the rods were withdrawn. And this simple task formed the basis of a story when it became inexorably linked with something from the cargo plan that the third officer could not forget!

The story of The Sailing Board came from nothing more than the recovered image of a sailing board (above) and is pure fiction! Pure fiction… but so many elements are true… or based on people that I met on board one or other ship. I have just brought them together in a story!

Categories
Fiction Poetry

My covers and the sea

By now some readers will probably have noticed that there is a theme linking all of my covers: the sea, that “watery part of the world”(Moby Dick) that for some ten or so years was both the foreground and the background to my life as I served as a Navigating (or Deck) Officer in the New Zealand Shipping Company and Overseas Containers Limited, travelling mostly to New Zealand and Australia. Before that, my love of the sea was confined to teenage years of swimming, fishing and surfing on the Gower in South Wales. It was a good start!

Many of my poems (such as The Voyage in Mostly Welsh) deal explicitly with my time at sea while others in that collection simply use the sea as a metaphor (for example, Ocean and Lost). Even in Book of the Spirit, a poetry pamphlet focussing very closely on words, writing and love, the sea – and the horizon, another recurring them – find a way in. The first poem ends:

for a future, a new future, a better future, aware of time only in our memory until –
watching the sun sink below the horizon, time’s illusory rim, and the vast sea

that is the circle of our future existence wash its unknown waves to our feet –
we understand the futility of the search, we understand each splash of destiny

And there will be – of course – sea poems in my next collection too. Heatherslade, previewed here, is specific to those Gower years while others – Tides, Shell, The Estuary and Thálassa, Thálassa are of other seas, other coasts, other horizons. The most recent poem published here – Life Tercets – brings together my life as a poet, memory, and my life at sea.

During Covid lockdown, my writing moved on to fiction and to The Dark Trilogy, which is autobiographical fiction: much of Book I is concerned with sea voyages and Book II is a play for voices covering my early years at sea as a Deck Cadet and young officer, from joining my first ship – an experience, like the first few trips, that was  quite unnerving to someone who had never left home before (see Innocence. posted here last November) – and ending when I left the sea forever.  

And then there is my recent short story collection, When I Am Not Writing Poetry Here there are a total of seven short stories set in the merchant navy: three short snapshots and four longer pieces: The Beginning, Cargo, The Sailing Board and Such Sweet Sorrow. I may speak a little more about these in a future post.

So I hope that  you will begin to understand the inevitability of my covers – they could only reflect my innate connection with the sea! Even Braiding Brexit is a deep sea blue! For the rest, there are waves, the vastness of the sea and the horizon!

Categories
Fiction Short Stories

Latest Curated Lines Title

Published yesterday, Chris Armstrong’s When I Am Not Writing Poetry is a selection of the short stories – some very short and one almost the length of a novella – that he wrote during the latter half of 2020 while he was locked down in front of his computer during Covid! And there are only so many poems a man can write! Several of the stories make oblique reference to the Covid ‘plague’ but other tales are a reflection of the author’s earlier life, a half-dozen of them going all the way back to his time at sea! Several of the stories also bring to life and give a fictional back story to three minor characters from The Dark Trilogy.

Anyone who has read either his poems or his fiction – may notice a tendency to link themes to the sea! And if not the sea, then the horizon! The sea is always there! Short snapshots such as Ladies of the Port or There’s Whiskey in the Jar are complemented by stories such as Cargo or The Sailing Board. Moving away from the sea there are snapshots from teenage years (such as The Call) and longer works of fiction such as Three Characters in Need of Their Writers. The final work, a short novella – A Writer’s Life – creates a fictional past life in both his place of birth – Brighton and in Swansea where he grew up.

As the Kurt Vonnegut epigraph notes, the book “is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders”!

Categories
Fiction Short Stories

A Little Taste

A Time of Plague; a Time of Love

It was strange to think of the poet sitting in his usual chair, drinking his usual espresso coffee and watching the world go by. As usual. She liked to think of him like that—his old scarf still around his neck despite the warmth of the place, his jacket open on the usual black T-shirt and his bag on the floor under the table—although she knew that now—now in this strange time—he would have to be at home. Because he was old—well, old by her standards—and he wasn’t allowed to leave his house—he had told her that…

The beginning of one short story in When I Am Not Writing Poetry (available next month).

Categories
Fiction

The characters behind the characters!

If you have read The Dark Trilogy you may remember three minor characters – Jan, Simon and Neal – friends with whom I walked some of the way home when I left prep school each day. They only get brief, passing mentions – adding some detail from life that serves to add to the picture which hopefully also make the story more real.

I remember that we both used to try to walk some of our way home from preparatory school with the lovely Jan although she turned off our route almost as soon as we reached the end of the school grounds…

and, again,

the pretty and petite Jan with whom – along with Simon and sometimes Neil – we made sure to walk the few hundred yards to her aunt’s bungalow as we left school…

…but in soon-to-be-published When I Am Not Writing Poetry I have created back stories for all three of my friends which gradually build their relationships to me in their adult lives. Of course – although all three children existed (I have not used their real names!) – I do not know their adult lives as well as I pretend.

I wonder if any of them will recognise themselves!

… or the blazer badge!

Categories
Event Fiction

New Title!

What will the next cover be?

We are pleased to announce that our new title, When I am not Writing Poetry will be available at the end of February. This collection of short stories – some very short and one almost the length of a novella – was written during the latter half of 2020… my only excuse being that I was stuck in front of my computer during the Covid lockdown! And there are only so many poems I can write! I needed a change!

Several of the stories make oblique reference to the Covid ‘plague’ but other tales are a reflection of my earlier life, a half-dozen of them going all the way back to my time at sea! Regular readers – of both my poems and my fiction – may notice a tendency to link themes to the sea! And if not the sea, then the horizon!

The sea is always there!

Don’t forget you can buy the latest titles directly from here!

Chris Armstrong

Categories
Fiction

Gorillas, Children and Reading

One of the charities that I support is Nkuringo Education & Community Support (NECS) which was set up to support the school and villages of Nkuringo in Uganda – who hosted a group of us when we visited in 2014 to see the mountain gorillas of Bwindi ‘The Impenetrable Forest’. The charity – through its ever increasing membership has supported many, many children through primary and secondary school (which involves providing clothes, shoes, school books, bunk beds, desks and mattresses as well as paying for their education) and has gone on to support the building of further classrooms, a teachers’ block, and water tanks as well as providing medical aid and small loans for villagers to get a business started. There is always more to do! Following Covid-19 when money was terribly short in the village the school buildings have fallen into disrepair as the little money available had to be used for food. It seems endless. And there are always more children wanting to start school!

The page images above are from the group’s newsletter – a bumper issue following the first visit back by the Trustees to assess needs and progress. You can follow the group on Facebook as GO UGANDA NECS where you can read the entire Newsletter (Recent Media in the right hand column).

And please – if you feel the least tempted to buy a copy of The Dark Trilogy, remember that half of the royalties are going to the NECS charity.

Categories
Fiction Poetry

The Sea

The sea is ever present in my writing – both in my prose and in many of my poems. I spent ten years of my life at sea and, both before and after that time, the draw of swimming or surfing continued to take me to beaches. I was lucky to have spent most of my childhood on the Gower in South Wales so had ready access to wonderful beaches. Perhaps that explains – to some extent – the sea’s tidal pull.

Much of the story… much of the two stories in The Dark Trilogy is governed by the sea and my times on it: Book II is a play for voices that covers my first years at sea, particularly the three years when I was learning my trade. And the sea is also present in a number of the short stories that will  be published early next years, perhaps nowhere more than in ‘The Endless Horizon’, but other stories too tell of ships in, or between, ports.

I am just completing my second full-length work of fiction – Trystan, which should be published sometime next year, and here, too, although I have set the action in a small town, the sea is very much a focus – always there in the background of the story.

And although the poems in my recently-published chapbook – Book of the Spirit – have another focus, lines in the first poem at least, do not escape the ocean:

…the future
becomes nothing but a sunlit ripple in the dark eternal wash of the sea

…until –
watching the sun sink below the horizon, time’s illusory rim, and the vast sea
that is the circle of our future existence wash its unknown waves to our feet

And the second poem picks up the theme:

And we are drops left on the shingle
Until the sea reclaims us for its own

I also have a longer collection of poems being published in 2023. Looking through the selection, I find that nearly 25% of the poems have some link with, lines about, the sea… including ‘Heatherslade’ – of which you may have an early sighting here:

Heatherslade

Where lies my blinding country of youth, that
cloudless demi-dream of some easy time
innocent of the weary world dark, time
fresh born beech bud green, time
joyous as the cuckoo echo across the fields, as
the eternal sea sparkle of the bay, as
I was eternal for a time?

And then was freedom in my world, and time
was mine in that sun lit sea wet summer
and the waves were mine, and the sands golden
at my feet as I plunging had the surf
roll at my will, and the slow day was a time
long pebble pooled in the rocks where the sea and
deep were bounteous for my pleasure

Sun hot days stretched time and heaven was the blue
eternal sea as the hazed horizon conjured wave on
wave to the shore to foam and darken the tide line
gold to darker amber, the swell the surge that gives
renewal to the ever changing sands, that gives
new life to the creatures it strands, that gives
me joy as I poise board in hands, that gives

my body wave born to where she stands

Categories
Essay Fiction

Who is Trystan Lewis? Who Am I?

Much of The Dark Trilogy deals with my past. A while ago I read, and felt that I had to respond to, a blog post – Clearing Out – by Andrew Green, one-time National Librarian of Wales. He had written:

I’ve been clearing out.  Clearing cupboards in the front room, full of books, files, magazines, papers, photos, games, maps and other detritus.  Many of them have been there since the cupboards and the bookshelves above them were built some thirty years ago…

The cupboards have yielded plenty of surprises. Some things I’d entirely forgotten I’d kept. Funeral services of long-dead aunts and godmothers… Some things have been easy enough to discard… But between the can-go’s and the must keep’s there’s another class of object I worry about, the borderline cases.  Take this newspaper article with an image of me and other hopeful cyclists about to set off from Cardiff City Hall to Aberystwyth to raise money for Nicaragua. If it goes, so does all evidence of me as I was then.  But that raises a serious problem – a problem, you might say, in the philosophy of time, or of consciousness.  Who was I then?  And I am the same person now as I was then? 

By chance, almost exactly a year earlier, the poet and writer Helen May Williams had written in her blog:

“When I was seven years old, I remember writing an essay about ‘Who am I?’ In it, I pondered whether the person I was last year was the same as the person I was now, and whether that person would be the same a year hence. I still don’t have the answer to that question.”

My response to Andrew Green – I think I thought that it doesn’t matter whether you are a different person (better/worse!) now to the person you were then: both histories of you are equally important and go to making up your life – was:

I am the last person to talk about de-cluttering… I keep everything!

But there is another side to your archive. I have had so many conversations with relatives – my sister, my sisters-in-law, etc – wishing that they (and I) had paid more attention to the stories that our/their parents told during the years when they were alive. So many attempts to identify people in photographs! So much history lost! To the extent that I am currently working on an annotated and illustrated timeline starting with my grandparents to pass on to my grandsons… who may or may not be interested. Now, or ever! I had thought it near finished. But, alas! Your piece suggests a further annotation: ‘Objects’ [in my cottage] – the pair of china figures, the pewter… much of which came from my grandfather’s house… or the fake fur coat I bought in Liverpool in the sixties!

Spare a thought for the generations to follow who may wonder why Grandad had a… or what Grandad did!

… and what he was like when he was younger… was he the same man then as the man they came to know?

Categories
Fiction Poetry

What Comes Next?

In The Dark Trilogy, I created a literary alter ego – Trystan Lewis – named Trystan as I had a vague idea when I began writing – all those years ago – to link him in some way with the Tristan in The Romance of Tristan and Iseult. I never found a way to make that work but kept the name! Lewis, the surname, after the old nickname I had been given when I first went to sea, Louis (as in Louis Armstrong or Satchmo). A few months ago I was reading an article about James Joyce which reminded me that Stephen Dedalus was Joyce’s literary alter ego and, in turn, that reminded me of my original plan… and I began plotting… planning… and a new book was born! While I have made no attempt to write a modern version of The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, all of the main chapters are named for the chapters in the Romance and each chapter has thematic links and some reference point to the original. Character names are all drawn from the original: for example, Trystan’s good friend George Knight is named for Gorvenal (the word means knight). The story follows Trystan and George through a twenty-four hour period and deals with fate and the downwards spiral of events caused by drink, much in the way of Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend. Although the story is centred in a small Welsh town, as with much of my writing the sea is central to, and surrounds, the story and among many, often hidden, literary allusions, Moby Dick is referenced at both the beginning (Trystan “sailed about a little [on] the watery part of the world”) and the end (“the great shroud of the sea rolled on”) of the story.

So Trystan lives on! 

I do like the idea of extending story lines so, as well as Trystan, several other characters from The Dark Trilogy also appear in, and indeed are the subject of, some of my short stories.

I have a publishing programme planned and expect to publish a poetry chapbook very soon, before – early next year – the short story collection. Trystan and a further collection of poems should follow soon after that. [Order of publication may be subject to change!]

Watch this space!