The Home Run 



woman, or two, or half a dozen, they would all have been out- 

 rageously welcome ; but the whole brood of values that hide be- 

 hind women's skirts, the love of safety, of security, of tidiness, 

 cleanliness, respectability - to go aboard a small ship was to get 

 away from all these things. The only feminine objects in a fishing 

 fleet were the ships themselves. And they, of course, made the 

 usual feminine demands . They had to be kept clean and painted and 

 polished. But, at least, a man did not have to do the scrubbing alone. 

 There were always a couple of his buddies to lend him a hand. 

 As the years passed, Jan heard more and more of the new traw- 

 ler fleets that had been building since the war. He did not see 

 them, except occasionally as a dot headed north across the hori- 

 zon, but from what he heard he often wished that he sailed on 

 them. They were completely different from the rusty coal-carry- 

 ing vessels of Aberdeen. They were either diesel driven or they 

 were oil-burning steam ships. In both cases, however, and this 

 was what most interested him, the crews' quarters were aft, and 

 that meant that a deckie did not need to crawl on hands and knees 

 across a thirty foot stretch of wind-blown capsizing deck when- 

 ever he wanted to go to bed in a gale. Then too, he was told that 

 they had bathrooms, real bathrooms with hot and cold water, and 

 some of the bigger ones even had separate cabins, with two berths 

 in each, for the ordinary deckles. Eight men did not need to sleep 

 in a single steamy semicircle, each within touching distance of 

 every other. These ships sounded like a home from home. Some 

 of the more experienced Aberdeen men had sailed on them but, 

 for one reason or another, they disliked them. There was the 

 smell of burning oil, to begin with. And then, though it was 

 admitted that there was less movement in the quarters aft than in 

 the fo'c'sle, there were rumours that when a gale came and the 

 sea grew choppy, the screws of these diesel-driven ships would 

 rise clear of the water, just underneath a man's head, and juggle 

 every bone in his spinal column out of its proper place. They 

 were too noisy, too fast, too wet. There seemed to be a thousand 

 reasons against them. Jan put them all down to jealousy. 



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