Living Silver 



boxers to the wheelhouse, but he was left alone with the other 

 and had to endure a yarn of some ninety yards close type about how 

 a bottle of whisky had got broken and how the bee had effed the 

 effing bottle and beeing well refused to buy a new efiFer, and how 

 he would show the efFer that he couldn't eff his efiPer with impunity. 



At seven, Jan had had one hour's sleep. His mouth felt like the 

 flooded part of a coal mine and his head as though he had spent the 

 night in a kippering kiln. He staggered up the steel companion- 

 way and out to the green brass freshwater tap where he began to 

 wash his teeth clean of the dirty corduroy padding that smoke had 

 wedged around them. Immediately he was mobbed by jeers. 

 'What a clean little boy heeums is !' 'Don 'this sweat smell sweet?' 

 *Come on and give me a manicure, Johnny lad. ' Even the skipper 

 joined in: 'And who's next for shaving? I've got my cut-throat 

 with me, lads.' Jan completed his ablutions but, while he was 

 drying his face, toothbrush, toothpaste and a cake of soap were 

 knocked through the scuppers and over the side by an accidental 

 flick of a hose that had somehow started squirting. Jan himself 

 was drenched in salt water. 



Never again was it quite so bad. He had learned that it was not 

 the done thing to wash one's teeth on a trawler. It was still worse 

 to shave, except after entering port. And, indeed, he didn't want 

 to do either once work began. From the moment the first trawl 

 was shot till the time when the skipper mumbled in his best- 

 disguised and most off-hand voice: 'All right, lads, you can wrap 

 it up now!' there was not a moment free for such luxuries as 

 washing. Shoot, haul, shoot, haul, and the winches clattering as 

 though determined to break through the deck, and the net torn 

 in a dozen places, and the knee-deep thousands of kicking fish, and 

 the ice yellowing and melting in the pounds, the slush- wells clog- 

 ging and the whole hold flooding, the rhythm pounded through 

 every corpuscle of his blood and his head was a sleepy whirl of 

 half-formed wishes, all subordinate to a deep, deep will to sleep, 

 to sleep for hours and days and centuries, sleep, sleep, and never 

 wake up. 



136 



