I couldn’t help thinking about what my mother had told me about bad luck, and kittens, and cages. I supposed I was now grown enough for that protection to be behind me, which made me even more glad (as if I could have been any gladder) to have been chosen to live the seafaring life.
For there were no men who put cats in cages living here. On board the Amethyst I was free, and I was safe.
And I was safe, and also free, for a long time. We all were. And Captain Skinner turned out to be much like Captain Griffiths – stern when he needed to be, soft when he didn’t, and as appreciative of a dead rat as the next man. Well, assuming the next man was a naval man, anyway.
Captain Skinner was also happy to have a ship’s cat among the company. Though he didn’t whistle for me (and it would be impolite to follow him around without permission), he seemed very happy to have me in the wardroom during meal times, particularly when we had visiting naval dignitaries on board, where he liked most for me to entertain them.
But a ship at sea, previously a warship, as the Amethyst had been, was not always about entertaining visiting dignitaries. Her new role – and her white post-war livery reflected it well – was always to try to help keep the peace.
So when we were given our orders, midway through April 1949, it was odd to begin hearing whispers around the ship that the peace might not be as robust as everyone thought.
Though our orders were, to be fair, perfectly ordinary. Having recently spent a while in Shanghai, and had some fifteen young ratings join us, we were now being sent to relieve our sister ship, HMS Consort, which was stationed in Nanking to provide protection for local British residents, and in particular, the staff of the British Embassy. We were also there to bring supplies to the British and Commonwealth residents and, should they require it (which they apparently might, given China was currently such an unstable country) evacuate any nationals.
We knew Nanking, because the Amethyst had already done a spell of this back in December, the guardships being in place there on rotation. It had been a deployment that had gone without incident. Rather too much without incident, the way I remembered it; the crew that had been there complaining bitterly (we had been moored there for a month) that as protocol dictated they were unable to enter the city itself, they’d spent most of the time fed up, too hot, and bored witless.
Not so, Peggy and I. Peggy because she was largely witless already, and, if strapped for entertainment, would simply chase her own tail. As for me, the word ‘bored’ took a great deal of fathoming, since it was completely beyond my comprehension. You were either busy (killing rats, tormenting cockroaches, eating, playing and so on) or you were dozing (always a pleasure), or you were asleep. So the business of being ‘bored’ (and its sister complaint of ‘getting down in the dumps’) was a concept I found hard to understand.
‘Aww, Blackie,’ Jack would often say to me, wistfully, ‘oh, to be a cat, eh? Oh, to have a cat’s life!’ Then he’d sigh theatrically, as if somehow jealous.
But this time around, it seemed my friends might not be bored. Because though the Amethyst had nothing to do with the Chinese Civil War, she was still about to be pitched into the middle of it. Yes, this had been the case last time and, yes, it was true no harm had come to us, but since that time the Chinese war had begun to intensify, and all the talk in the wardroom that night was of worries that now we might be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The concern lay in the fact that we weren’t even supposed to be there: we were standing in for another ship, the Australian HMAS Shoalhaven. The Shoalhaven had already been in Shanghai, all set to go to Nanking, when the ‘powers that be’, as Captain Skinner put it (and he’d seemed none too pleased about it, either), had changed their minds about the ship being deployed at that point, deciding that, with Anzac Day imminent (a day when Australia remembered her war dead) they were not prepared to send an Australian vessel up the Yangtse, and run the risk of their sailors being put in danger. ‘So that’s where we come in,’ Captain Skinner had explained to the crew the night before we sailed, confirming what was already being rumoured by the officers. That, with the war reaching crisis point, this trip to Nanking could, in theory, put the Amethyst in the line of fire instead.
Though the nationalists and communists had been at war with each other since the 1920s, a point had been reached where the communists controlled the north shore of the Yangtse river, and, though a temporary truce was apparently in place, they had made it known that if the nationalists didn’t allow them to pass freely, they would make an assault on the south bank.
In just three days from now.
If I knew nothing of boredom, I knew even less of war. My only experience of human conflict was the occasional rumpus over something or other down at Stonecutters dockyard – which was usually resolved with no more than angry words being exchanged or, at the worst, someone’s cart being upturned.
All I really understood about ‘war’ – that human preoccupation that continued to confound me – was that, as far as we were concerned, it was history. War was over now – everyone always seemed to say that. We’d just had the ‘war to end all wars’, and the older sailors on the Amethyst would tell the younger ones about it constantly.
‘Back during the war…’ they’d say, before regaling them with some spine-tingling anecdote or other. ‘Back when bloody Jerry had the upper hand, or so they thought…’ they’d begin, before painting pictures that had the boy seamen’s eyes bulging out as if on stalks. ‘You’re lucky, lads, not to have been through it…’ they’d remind them, their expressions stony, before slapping them on the backs and laughing long and loud. But for all that, it was still laughter that held enough of a note of relief to make it clear that being in a war was not a good thing.
Now war was done with, and everyone was happier as a result of it. All the talk, always, was of ‘keeping the peace’. That was what the Amethyst was there for. To keep the peace. Our job was to patrol the waters around the countries of the Far East, so that no one could be in doubt that – where His Majesty’s Navy was concerned, anyway – that was the way it was going to stay.
The jacarandas were in bloom in Shanghai as we left it. Blossom was everywhere – the whole hillside was dotted with colour – but it was the jacaranda blossom that most grabbed my attention, because it took me back to my kittenhood, to the same luminous purple that I remembered from when I’d left. So had it been a year? A full year since I’d gone to sea?
I decided it must have been, because I was in no doubt that the sea felt like home now; by my reckoning it had been home for longer than it had not. So as we slipped that day, smoothly and without ceremony, for Nanking, it was only the usual excitement that I felt. It was another day, another journey, another sea-going adventure. If my friends were bored, I would do my best to entertain them. To jolly them out of their dissatisfaction.