A Steady Trade by Tristan Jones

Author:Tristan Jones
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781574090185
Publisher: IB Dave's Library
Published: 1982-01-25T08:00:00+00:00

12

In My Element

The amount of work expected of a young boy onboard a ketch-barge never ceased to amaze me. I had known from conversations with old seafarers at home that the boy was cook as well as deckhand, lookout, steward, cargo-handler, makee-learner helmsman, rigger, sailmaker, and painter, but I had never realized quite how much continual effort was involved, nor how much of this was taken up by the cooking. The worst of that job was that unless I thought about it deeply, I could never see any result. No sooner was a meal ready and served than it was consumed. There was left only a pile of plates and pots to be cleaned, and that in itself was another job. We had no such thing as washing detergent. Soft soap was, in our straitened circumstances, always in short supply. I used to do most of the galley cleaning with salt water and sand.

With the amount of work to be done by everyone onboard it was vital that the crew be properly fed. After the first trip, when I had worked in the galley under Ted’s tutelage and with Bert’s eagle eye often on me, I was left more or less alone to get on with it as best I could, though the mate and deckhand were always willing to help me if I had a problem.

On the short passages we ate pretty much as we would have done ashore; porridge, bacon and eggs, and tea for breakfast; plenty of bread brought from ashore; butter; potatoes, onions, carrots, cabbage; and fresh beef, lamb, or pork. There was always a good supply of tea, condensed milk, and sugar, too.

On the longer sea passages, when we sailed, for example, up to the northeast coast or south to the Channel Islands, where we might expect to be (and often were) becalmed for a few days, it was a different story. Then we stowed away salt fish — usually cod or haddock — potatoes, rice, dried peas, “Portmadoc pantiles” (hardtack biscuits), margarine, and salt beef. Unlike some of the other coastal sailing craft, we salted down our own beef. Tansy never trusted the quality of barreled salt beef bought ashore. Before a longish trip he took time off from all his other duties, such as dealing with the paperwork, the factors, and a couple of dozen other entities, to go along to a local butcher (who was usually a pal of our butcher-shareholder in Harwich). There he selected his own cuts of beef — flank, brisket, chuck, or sirloin. When the butcher’s white-aproned errand boy showed up with the meat in the basket of his bicycle on the jetty, I carried it down below to the meal-table in the skipper’s flat, still in its muslin wrapping. There, Ted and I rubbed coarse rock salt into the beef until all the salt had been absorbed. Tansy never let Bert take part in the beef salting, though I never found out why. It might have had

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