Isvik (2 page)

He put his hand inside his shirt and pulled out a face like a sunflower carved out of some pale-coloured stone. ‘Worn it ever since.' And he added, ‘We all of us have moments when we need to grip on to something – something that will reassure us that the luck hasn't run out. So I never gave it to him and his plane disappeared into the ice.' He slipped the amulet back inside his shirt, silent again.

‘When did it happen?' I asked him.

‘What? Oh, the plane. Let's see. I've been back almost six months now and it happened just before I left MPA. Funny thing, you know, it was only by chance that he caught that particular flight. He had been flown out from somewhere in the States in an Argentine Air Force plane. He was Argentinian, you see. At least, that's what his passport said. But he was an Ulsterman really. His nature, I mean – very puritan. He landed up at the Uruguayan base near Montevideo, then hitched a ride to Mount Pleasant on one of our aircraft that had been diverted to await an engine replacement. All chance – haphazard airlifts that were like stepping stones to oblivion, the final step when he hitched the ride on that American plane. It landed in my bailiwick because of an electrical fault, and as soon as my engineers had sorted it out it took off, and that's the last anybody saw of it.'

‘How did you come by the notebook then?' I asked him.

‘A big German icebreaker found the bodies. They were lying out on a layered floe of old ice about thirty miles north-west of the Ice Shelf, not far from where Shackleton's
Endurance
was crushed. No sign of the plane, no flight recorder, nothing to indicate what happened, just the bodies lying there as though they had only had time to scramble out onto the floe before the plane sank.' His hand was fingering the lobe of his left ear again. ‘Very strange. The whole thing is very strange. The only written record we have of anything that happened on that flight is there in Sunderby's notes on ice conditions and his sighting of that extraordinary
Flying Dutchman
of a vessel.' He sighed. ‘Could he have imagined it? He was a scientist, very precise in his speech …' He hesitated, shaking his head. ‘Well, it's past history now and it all happened a long way away. A very long way away.' He repeated the words thoughtfully as though he needed to remind himself that time had moved on and he was back in Britain.

He glanced at his watch and got to his feet. ‘I've got to go now. A young pilot who's a wizard in the air, but can't handle money, or women it seems.' And he added, ‘Expensive boys, fighter pilots. Cost the taxpayer a hell of a lot to train them. And after I've done my best to sort the poor devil out …' He smiled at me, a sudden flash of charm. ‘One of the joys of flying is that you leave everything behind you on the ground. Including that muck.' He nodded at the tall windows where the light had almost vanished as snow swept across the flatness of the airfield. ‘At fifteen thousand feet I should hit blue sky and sunshine.'

I handed the notes back to him and as we went towards the door he said, ‘It was the AOC reminded me of it. Had a visit from him last week. He'd just come back from Chile where they had flown him down to Punta Arenas, that base of theirs down in the Magellan Strait. There was a lot of talk apparently of an old frigate with an Argentinian crew and flying the Argentine flag having been sailed through the Strait just after the war en route to their base in the far south of Tierra del Fuego. Apparently some woman, a relative of one of the crew, had recently been making enquiries.'

He paused as we reached the big carpeted foyer at the front entrance of the Mess. ‘You all right for transport?' And when I told him my car was parked behind the building he took me down a corridor that led past the cloakrooms and showed me a short cut through some offices. ‘Strange,' he said as we parted, ‘the way that episode stays in my mind. Those bodies tying out on the ice, and Sunderby's notebook recording ice conditions in the Weddell Sea, nothing else, and at the end of all that scientific stuff, those three pages describing the glimpse he'd had of a sort of ghost ship locked in the ice.' He shook his head, his features dark and sombre as though the man's death was something personal, his memory a physical hurt. ‘Drive carefully,' he said as he opened the door on to a brick passageway. ‘Everything's freezing out there.' His hand was on my shoulder, almost pushing me out, the door shutting abruptly behind me as though in talking to me he had revealed too much of himself.

At the end of the passage I walked out into the bitter wind that whistled across from the open space of the airfield to find my car with the windscreen iced over. I sprayed it, but even so I had to run the engine for a good five minutes before I had even a peephole I could see through, and all the way back the roads were icy as hell despite the salting, the weather conditions so bad I didn't reach King's Lynn until past four.

The factory was in the industrial estate on the flats down river, but the Pett, Poldice offices were where they had always been, close by St Margaret's and the old Hanseatic ‘steelyard' that had been a sampling yard before the 1500s. The building was cold and strangely silent. Everybody seemed to have been sent off early. The office I shared was empty, my desk clear except for a letter typed on a single sheet of K.L. Instant Protection notepaper.

I picked it up and took it over to the window, shocked and unbelieving as I stared down at those two brief paragraphs, two paragraphs that told me I wasn't wanted any more.

Dear Mr Kettil
,

This is to inform you that the Pett, Poldice operation will be closed down as of today. All manufacturing will thereafter be concentrated at the KLIP factory at Basingstoke, the whole Group being administered from Instant Protection's Headquarters at Wolverhampton. Your services being no longer required, you will kindly vacate your office forthwith as both the office building and the factory have now been sold
.

The terms of your employment will, of course, be met, and our Wolverhampton office will be in touch with you at your home with regard to redundancy pay, pension, insurance etc
.

A man describing himself as ‘Personnel Executive' had scrawled a faceless signature at the bottom.

I think I must have read that letter through at least twice before I finally took it in. Redundancy, like newspaper disaster headlines, is something that happens to others, never to oneself. And we were such an old-established company.

I stared out at the brown brick of the warehouse opposite that had been converted into flats, the narrow gap between it and the next building showing a cold glimpse of the river. A mist of light powdery snow fell out of a pewter sky. It was typical of our firm to have held on to these offices for so long. The directors had thought the antiquity of the building an asset, for Pett, Poldice went right back to the days when ships were built of wood. They had been timber merchants then, and as the vessels coming up the Great Ouse to King's Lynn changed from wood to iron, younger generations of the Pett family had diversified into importing tropical hardwoods, and later still into the preservation of timber, particularly the oak-framed and oak-roofed buildings of East Anglia.

It was only when men we had never seen before began poking around the various departments asking questions about cashflow and cost ratios that we learned the Pett family had sold out to Instant Protection, a subsidiary of one of the big chemical companies and our keenest competitors. I should have realised then what was going to happen. But you don't, do you? You bury your head in the sand and get on with your work. And there was plenty of that, for we had a full order book, which made it all the more tragic.

I put my anorak on again, scooped up the few things that belonged to me and shut the door on almost five years of my life. Nobody even to say goodbye to, just an empty building and a security guard I'd never seen before on the door.

I had never been forced to look for a job in my life. I had never been unemployed. I had simply followed in my father's footsteps. He had worked for Pett, Poldice ever since the Navy released him from national service in 1956, and because I had always known there was a job there for me, most of my spare time was spent sailing out of Blakeney exploring the Wash and the Norfolk coast. That was after we had moved from the North End part of King's Lynn to Cley, and when I had finished school I volunteered for one of the Drake projects, then crewed on a Whitbread round-the-worlder.

I was lucky. I could do that because the certain prospect of a job with Pett, Poldice gave me a safety net from which to launch myself at the world. Now, suddenly, that safety net was gone and I discovered how harsh a world it could be. I had no qualifications and in the field of wood preservatives everybody seemed to be cutting staff – ‘streamlining' was a word I heard all too often so that I met others who had been declared redundant, and quite a few of them did have the qualifications I lacked.

Only the sales staff, the younger ones in particular, seemed able to shift jobs with relative ease. I discovered this about a month after Pett, Poldice was shut down. Julian Thwaite, an ebullient extrovert from the Yorkshire Dales, who had been our sales manager and lived quite near us at Weasenham St Peter, suggested we all meet for a drink in the centre of King's Lynn, ‘to exchange experiences, information, contacts and aspirations'. It was a nice idea, done out of the goodness of his heart, for he himself had apparently had no difficulty in switching from wood preservatives and special paints to lubricating oils. Almost fifty, out of a total workforce of seventy-nine, turned up at the Mayden's Head in the Tuesday Market Place, and of those only fourteen had found new jobs. It was the workers at the factory and the specialised staff at the old Pett, Poldice office that were, experiencing the greatest difficulty in adjusting.

Within a week of being declared redundant I began toying with two possibilities, both of which excited me and had been in my mind for some time. The first was to sell my boat, borrow enough cash to get me a big 35–40 foot motor-sailer and set up as a charter skipper. The other was to set up my own wood preservative consultancy. Both these possibilities were exciting enough to have me lie awake at night planning, and as often as not fantasising. It was that evening at the Mayden's Head, talking to those other poor devils who had lost their jobs and hadn't got another, that finally decided me.

I started looking at the charter skipper possibilities first, for the very simple reason that it had always been something of a dream of mine and I knew my way about the sailing world of East Anglia, the people to ask. But I soon discovered that the cost of borrowing the money to buy the boat meant that at least two months of my chartering would disappear in interest payments before I even started meeting all the other costs: maintenance, equipment replacement, stores, expenses, etc.

It just wasn't on, not unless I could finance it myself. And so I set myself up as a self-employed wood consultant, and instead of writing to possible employers, I started offering my services to companies and institutions I had been in touch with during the five years I had been at Pett, Poldice.

One of those institutions was the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. We had once done some rather specialised work for them on a newly discovered figurehead. I got a nice letter back from the Deputy Director, but no offer of work. He saw no prospect of requiring the services of anybody outside of the Museum staff in the foreseeable future.

It was what I had expected, so I was a little surprised, about six weeks later, to receive a further note from him to say that, though he couldn't promise anything, he thought it might be worth my while if I could arrange to be in Greenwich the following Wednesday when he had a meeting fixed with somebody who needed advice on the preservation of ships' timbers.
Not really my province
, the note added,
but the ship itself is of great interest to the Museum, and the circumstances are intriguing. I thought of you in particular because of your sailing experience. You will see why if you can attend the meeting which will be on board the Cutty Sark at 11.00
.

It was a curious letter, and though I could ill afford the time, and indeed the expense, of going up to London, Victor Wellington was too important a figure in the world I was now trying to establish myself in for me to ignore his invitation.

That Wednesday morning I took the early inter-city express, which got me into the bedlam of reconstruction that was Liverpool Street station shortly after nine. The sun was making bright bars through clouds of dust and picking out the network of new iron columns and girders towering above the boarded alleys that channelled the rush-hour traffic through big machines grabbing at the foundations of old buildings. Outside, by contrast, the City seemed bright and clean. I had plenty of time so I stopped for a sandwich and a cup of coffee at a small café by the Monument, then walked on to Tower Pier and caught a boat down to Greenwich.

Twenty minutes later we were turning into the tide in Greenwich Reach, crabbing across the river to snuggle up to the pier. Beyond the pier buildings, the masts and yards of the
Cutty Sark
stood high against a blue sky, varnish and paintwork gleaming in the clean bright slant of the sun's light. To the left, as I stepped ashore, I could see the green of grass between the pale grey stone of Wren's riverside masterpiece. I glanced at my watch. It was not yet ten-thirty.

The
Cutty Sark
stood bows-on to the river, her great bowsprit jabbing the air midway between Francis Chichester's
Gypsy Moth IV
and the pier entrance. I walked over to her and stood for a moment leaning on the iron railings, looking down into the empty dock that had been specially constructed for her. Stone steps led down on either side so that visitors could look up at the sharp-cut line of her bows and the figurehead with its outstretched arm and flying hair. There was a walkway all around the inside of the dock to a similar set of steps at the stern. A gangway and ladder on the starb'd side led up to the quarterdeck, but the main entrance to the interior of the vessel was to port, almost amidships between the first and second of her three masts. It looked something like a drawbridge, as though it had been lowered from the tumblehome of the ship's hull to lie flat on the stone edge of the dock.