If you read about me on the back cover of The Dark Trilogy, you will discover that once – for some ten years or so – I sailed the seas:
Sailor and librarian, navigator and researcher, teacher and trainer, and—always—a traveller: Chris Armstrong has had three careers, working as a merchant seaman…
Book II of the Trilogy explores my first faltering years at sea: young, innocent, at sea in more ways than one, working on a ship where it seemed that everyone knew so much more than I did! I once wrote a poem about joining my first ship:
Innocence
The London mist wets the docks and the decks
of my first ship on the day that I join;
I am alone at the rail: there are barges, a tugof loneliness in my chest. This sea,
the sea in the docks, is dirty brown
rainbow oily, scummed with ship droppings,a lone plank of timber floating like a lost
surfboard – I think of the sun on Gower waves.
I left home young and immediatelyuncompanioned by strangers, was lost
to all they knew, drowning in the isolation
of my new-learned bewildermentwondering if I shall ever know the pleasure
of girls’ bodies as their talk suggest they do.
Loaded, this ship is as empty as my soul
Book II of The Trilogy – a play for voices – begins:
Imagine: This is how it begins… It is early Spring, it is afternoon: dismal dock drizzle hazes everything beneath each yellow damp lampglow and dulls the docker din and the winch whine as cargo is loaded. A smell that is a mixture of the salt sea, old oil, steam, old and filthy dock water, smoke from the barge tugs, sweat and stale beer is held down against the ground by the wet mist…
They have travelled by train, by underground and finally by taxi to get here: his mother and his father guiding him for the last time – guiding him through a geography he does not yet know. All of his life, they have guided him, directed him, helped him, pushed him, and now their time is at an end. Neither the boy nor they have recognised this change…