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 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
Essay Poetry Short Stories

So Many Books on the Go!

I seem to have books in most rooms of my house that I pick up, read, and put down at different times of the day. The cache in the lounge is probably the most interesting (and mixed). I started reading short stories – a format I had for years shunned in favour of lengthier, meatier books – a few years ago when I was given Paul Auster’s Collected Prose – a collection that I would unhesitatingly recommend to anyone, as indeed I would his wife’s collection that I came to next – The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis – although I see that I have not quite finished the final story! Or perhaps I did finish it and have just left a tantalising bookmark behind! I am still working my way through the prose writings of Seamus Heaney – Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 which is a more difficult read: essays such as ‘The Placeless Heaven: Another Look at Kavanagh’ or ‘Yeats as an Example?’ demand slower, more thoughtful study and are perhaps less late-afternoon-lounge than writing-room. I think I shall move the book! Recently I received Tess Slessinger’s Time: The Present – Selected Short Stories – all written, and very much of the age, in the 1930s, they are a fascinating look at the political and, perhaps more to the point, the cultural scene in New York at the time. They are beautifully written in her very identifiable style. As yet untouched and at the bottom of the lounge pile, Alun Lewis Collected Stories is a natural successor to his Collected Poems, which I have in the writing room. The final lounge book – floating at the top of the pile by reason of the subject matter and the ease of reading that makes it easy to dip in and out in spare five minute gaps – is Mo Gawdat’s Scary Smart, which deals with the advance of artificial intelligence into our lives. His style does tend to talk down to his readers and repeat facts to ensure you have grasped them as he emphasises them for the third time – a style seemingly enhanced by the generous line spacing and the comic-book inserts of mid-text comments. But it IS a very interesting book!

There are often – well always – poetry books in the lounge pile and I am currently reading a few poems a day from both Ruth Bidgood’s New and Selected Poems and – only just acquired – Dominic Fisher’s A Customised Selection of Fireworks. Sometimes these make their way up to the writing room, where they join a library of other poets. Apart from Alun Lewis and the Library of Wales Poetry 1900-2000 near my desk you can find Jeremy Hooker – like Dominic Fisher, a one-time Aberystwyth poet – R S Thomas, Idris Davis, Vernon Watkins (encountered again in another lounge book, Iain Sinclair’s wonderful Black Apples of Gower) and a plethora of Anglo-Welsh poets as well as many American beat poets, Malcolm Lowry, Leonard Cohen, Ella Frears, August Kleinzahler and Samantha Walton. A friend once gave me Adonis’ If Only The Sea Could Sleep: Love Poems – a little book to which I often return (I wish that was my title!) and – in the same vein – I have added Attar  and Rumi to my library.

Other books that have crept through the lounge over the past few years include James Lovelock’s Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence, followed – not too long after – by Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None; Luke Kennard’s Notes on the Sonnets and (by the same publisher, Penned in the Margins, since, sadly closed down) Tom Chivers and Martin Kratz’s Mount London: Ascents in the Vertical City. Having planted apple trees, it was interesting to read Raymond Blanc’s The Lost Orchard and, for a similar reason, Maoko Abe’s ‘Cherry’ Ingram: The Englishman Who Saved Japan’s Blossoms – currently unfinished and moving from room to room!

The dining room has fewer books – more actually, if you include the bookshelves themselves – but fewer current or recently current books! And they are a more mixed collection: a book about Leonard Cohen: Harry Freedman’s Leonard Cohen: The Mystical Roots of Genius and Cohen’s own A Ballet of Lepers: A Novel and Stories; Karen Armstrong’s Buddha and Nancy Wilson Ross’ The World of Zen and last, but certainly not least because of the subject’s connection with the farm on which I live, Diary of a Welsh Swagman 1869-1894, edited by William Evans and its companion by Bethan Phillips, Pity the Swagman.

Oh! And there will always be a thriller or novel of some sort on my Kindle that I read as I fall asleep! The latest was the first part of Elena Ferranti’s Neapolitan Novels, My Brilliant Friend, which so immersed me in the life of its characters that I frequently found myself still reading an hour after I had lain down!

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).