Epiphany by Moonlight

Pleasant dreams are shattered by the wail of an alarm, hooting in the dark like an angry owl, and I sit up. The ship feels not quite right. The door crashes open and the bulky second engineer falls into my cabin, thrown violently inwards by the streaming light behind him.

The fishroom is half-full of water, he says, but he cannot make the pumps draw it out, he says. He has tried both the main and standby pump, he says, and he has tried the secondary valve, he says. He has also checked, and the bilge pumps will not even pump out the engine-room bilge, he says. He sounds frightened. He looks frightened. He is much older than I am, but I know that he is as frightened now as he has ever been in all his life. Once more the ship does that little thing which does not feel quite right. Should I be frightened too?

I sleep in my boiler suit, as a matter of course, for just these occasions. What can I do? Tell him to go and sort it out for himself? He is not a thinker. Hope that someone else will come along and sort it out for us? We are miles from port, miles from land, and at sea there is no breakdown service. True, there are other trawlers out there within radio range, and should the cry go out "for those in peril", those closest to us not in peril would drop everything and charge to our assistance. Well, plod at 12 knots, actually, and in the worst case they would just pick up the pieces. If we were lucky, we would still be there bobbing amongst the flotsam.

So I get up, and as I do, the mate comes down from the wheelhouse. I ask him, was someone washing down the pounds in the fishroom? Yes, they were. Have they made sure they've turned off the hose? Ah, the second engineer says, perhaps it's still running. Go and check, I tell him, and don't just turn off the valve, pull the hose right up out of the hatch and throw it on the deck. Within less than a minute, the mystery is solved, the hose, still gushing, now lies harmlessly in the scuppers. We are, at least, un-holed, and not sinking deeper by the second, merely tricked by a lazy man and a faulty valve.

And so I have to now sort out the pumping system. There are two, a main and a backup, and I know the second engineer has already tried both, so I know the fault cannot lie in both of the pumps. There are two suction points for the fishroom, forward and aft, and a quick look tells me that the second engineer has at least tried each of those. And then the bright light of inspiration comes like a flash, and I know exactly what he has done wrong. He has tried one pump on the suction line, then switched to the second pump, then, in a rush, opened the valve which joins together the two separate pumping lines, thinking that he must try all options. The pump which is running is unable to draw water through the blockage in the fishroom bilges, so instead, it is sucking whatever it can through the crossover valve, and on the other side of that valve is the other pump, leading out to the ship's side; and the running pump, the water lines throttled by skin and scales, is breathing in air from the stationary pump instead. I close the discharge valve for the second pump, and watch as the water beneath the main engine vanishes. We will be saved, once I have worked out a plan for unblocking the fishroom bilge valves, themselves now under a couple of feet of water, their strum-boxes clogged with debris swept loose by the hosing down.

Return to now, or recently now, where the land stays put and there is no need for navigation lights.

I was used to those blinding flashes, epiphanies, when my mind would leap ahead of itself and suddenly see the answer, and I would then have to bring the vision back to my slower brain so that it, (I) could see the problem and try to tell myself how we were going to get out of this mess. I functioned best, I thought, when I was scared and under pressure to find the answer in a limited time.

I don't do that sort of thing anymore. In a way, I am glad. I was proud of my ability, and partly loved, but mostly loathed, the fear which made my talent shine. I have left it behind me. But I still have the calculating part of me that would see a way forwards, break it down into concurrent and consecutive steps, and then convey to all of those around just what it was that each of them must do.

Except, I have been told, I do not convey. I bark orders, I "scream", I "shout", I "dash about"; I terrify poor souls who are not used to there being no time to lose. But, I tell them, and myself, it is a survival trait. I did not want to die in the belly of a steel whale as it slowly glubbed beneath the waves. I practiced moving round the engine-room in the dark so that I could, if needed, restart the diesels when a violent wave had rolled the ship so far across it's beam that the oil pressure alarms or overspeed trips had shut them off, and the torch had chosen just that time to burn out the bulb. I stashed spare spanners at odd locations round the ship so I could get to one quickly, when the one I had been trying to use had slipped from my oily fingers and plummeted into the bilge. I was cunning, I was prepared, I was fore-armed, I was not going to die a stupid death.

I have tried to run my life ashore on similar principles. If there is something I have to rely upon, I make sure I have a backup, in case that thing should not be there when I want it. I have a spare battery, fully charged, and a set of jump-leads, so that I can start the car on a frosty morning without having to call the breakdown service to turn up with their jump-leads and their battery, and get me out of a hole which anyone with half a brain could have foreseen. I do not like being caught out. I keep my spanners in two places, I keep a torch somewhere that I know I can get to in the dark.

So then, to last week, when it all began, Little Petal's youngest daughter tells her mummy that daughter's car has burnt out the clutch, and she cannot possibly live without it. So mummy drives up to daughter's, gives her mummy's car, and the Sopwith Camel then stops what he is doing, and drives the fifty miles to pick up mummy, and the fifty miles back. They then drive over to absent brother's house and collect the large 4-wheel drive which brother has said S-C should use while he is away. My carefully planned itinerary for the thing I must get done by the end of the month is knocked back, more than the mere four hours the whole escapade has taken. But I brutally bark orders at myself and re-plan and once more settle down to do those things which I have to do, while Little Petal, now the only serious earner in our small cabbage-patch, drives my car up to work.

For a few (two) days, all is going to plan. Little Petal finds a garage to mend Little Petal's daughter's car. Not within a five mile radius of where Little Petal's daughter lives, for some strange reason, but the garage just up the hill from us where Little Petal takes her own car to get it fixed. How, I ask curiously, are you planning to get the car with no clutch the fifty miles it has to travel in order to be re-clutched here? Her plan, hatched in conjunction with her chicken-rearing daughter, is that daughter should get the car a few hundred metres down the lane from where she lives and then phone the recovery service, and say "Hayulp, hayulp, this dayummsel's in distress", and use the obliging truck to take the car to the place to which she was heading and has to reach no matter what. It is a cunning plan, and I say as much. I also think, but do not say, that both Little Petal and daughter could do with a good birching, both for their scurrilous ways, and for my private entertainment.

Then, one evening, comes the unexpected call. Little Petal, in my car, says that the clutch has failed, (my clutch), and she is waiting for the recovery truck to bring her, and it, back home. I say "Oh fuck bollocks cunt shit piss and arseholes of the western world, is there no end to this syphilitic stupidity?" But I also formulate a plan to get us out of this, and before she has managed to put down the phone, I tell her to contact the daughter with whom she shares the common bond of clutchlessness, (upon the reality of life), and prepare for a flying visit.

So, cometh the recovery truck with my now-dead car, steppeth up the biplane. Little Petal has actually thought, for once, and says that if we take up with us a 13mm socket, Little Petal's daughter's partner can take out the battery from their other defunct car, (the one they put aside when they got the soon-to-be-clutchless car), and possibly start it the next morning so that they can take the kids to school. For that is the main reason that they need their second car, they live in the country where the buses won't go, and that, in the eyes of the social services, is not an adequate excuse for their children missing lessons in how to speak abominable English but know all about Islam.

"Just that?" I ask, "One single socket?" So Little Petal calls her daughter who confirms that a single 13mm socket will do the trick, but when asked does it need to be 1/2" square drive or 3/8", just says "what?", and then says that her partner is not around to answer the question, he is outside looking for a fox. And so the Camel, wise to the capriciousness of fate, selects a deep 13mm socket and a ratchet which will fit it, and a 13mm combination spanner too, and an adjustable wrench, and sets off to drive the fifty miles to face his foes.

And arriving, parks younger brother's car facing the sulking blue Ford which is flat in the battery department, while Little Petal goes inside to talk with daughter about such things that man himself need not know. And, when Little Petal's daughter's partner looms out of the gloom and raises the bonnet, finds, to his chargrin, that he has failed the world. Gotham City lies helpless underneath the chuckling Joker, while Batman hangs caught upon the barbed wire in which his underpants, (worn outside), have snagged. The bolts which need to be undone are set deep at the base of the battery, and really need an extension bar as well as the deep socket. The Camel tries, and although he can fit the socket on each nut, and just about get the ratchet bar to move half an inch in the narrow space between bulkhead and battery, finds he is denied success. The bolts are not 13mm, but 1/2" AF, fractionally smaller, and they have been rounded by the previous use of the 13mm socket. Oh, fuck-bollocks, fuck-cunt, fuck-arseholes. (And today we have naming of parts). Fuck our souls, and then throw them back with the haddock, the plaice and the cod.

But, in a flash, the Camel has seen the way out. The Ford can be rolled backwards down the lane to stand outside the front door if the clutchless car is first rolled a few feet towards the shed in which the chickens cluck and the cockerels crow. And then, with an extension lead from the nearby window, the battery charger can be plugged into the mains and clipped onto the battery, and lo, come dawn, come brum-brum.

The Camel communicates his wisdom to Little Petal's daughter's partner, which takes the form, spoken pleasantly, of "get the extension lead, make sure it will reach from the house to where we're going to push the car, and then come back and we'll do the deed." The Camel is a wily shaggy beast who won't thrash his strength away on a fool's errand.

Some minutes later, the Camel goes to look for Little Petal's daughter's partner, who is to be found standing by the chicken shed with a bright light, scanning the fields, looking for a fox. What news of leads is there? Ah, it seems, he says, that Little Petal's daughter does not know where the solitary extension lead is, and she says that the best thing to do is to make some space in the chicken shed and push the car into there. The Camel, glancing through the door, can see that it is more than a couple of hours work to redistribute chickens and coops to allow cooperative cohabitation with a car.

He steps back into to starlight and draws in a breath. He is about to utter, with force, with clarity, with conciseness, the suggestion that everybody; mothers, daughters, daughters of daughters, dogs, cats, chickens and possibly even cockroaches, get up and stop watching the TV or tootling their flutes and "find that fucking lead." Because it is cold outside, and the Camel, despite the fur, is starting to shiver and shake, and is worried that slight hypothermia is going to upset his special powers and make his balls shrink to naught but dried peas.

And in that brief intake of breath, glancing up into the beautiful starry sky, comes epiphany. It is a quiet and peaceful place, here in the middle of nothingness, and they are not foundering. The ground is firm, frosty even, but re-assuring. It will not open up and swallow, or buck and heave and wallow. The chickens, cockerels, cats, dogs, ducks, and progeny have no knowledge of the quiver inside that one feels when the world is about to turn turtle and slip away from you. Their world will not stop if the children miss a day at school, although some excuses might need to be made. Unlike the sea, though, the authorities can sometimes be persuaded to be merciful. There is no need to bring shock and awe into this little land.

And so the Camel bows his head, collects Little Petal from the house, makes sure her car starts, and drives slowly home in a convoy of two, a caravan crossing the chilly desert from one small oasis to another. Four more hours have gone, plans are yet again set back, the Camel has to meet deadlines which, although not as cruel as those set by the sea, are pitiless on ones who fail to meet their stipulations. Companies House have this year applied a decade's-worth of inflation to their penalties all at once, and whereas it used to be a fine of £100 for late filing of accounts, now it is more than seven times that much, and no remission, no chance of appeal. The money which has been spent on saving the banks from perishing in the storms of foolish greed has now to be reclaimed from elsewhere, and those on whom the burden of support will fall will be those who are least likely to unite and protest against the injustice.

And that's my second epiphany in the dark: we are not alone in this stormy night, but we are scattered on the waves, and they are picking us off one by one. Save Our Souls.

Put on the light, and then put on the light.

The least we can do is wave to each other.