“Life was very different for teenagers back in the nineteen thirties and forties.”
If ever an inkling of doubt about the veracity of that statement raises its head, I just have to spend a couple of hours with my Dad. At the age of fourteen he left his small Scottish coastal village, (where everyone knew not only everyone else, but everyone else’s cousins, aunts, uncles and all their dogs as well), and took the “Paddy” to London. The “Paddy” was aptly named, being the steam train that picked up mainly Irish workers from the nearby ferry ports and spirited them off into the “Big Smoke” of London, there to put their hands to pretty much anything that paid enough to send back to their families, (after lodgings and a stout or three were taken care of).
However, the long journey south to the clickety-clackety Irish Jig of the “Paddy” was, for Dad, just the first step of many as he joined up to take his chances on the High Seas, where, instead of a Nintendo Wii or a Blackberry for his fifteenth birthday, he got to harpoon whales in the South Atlantic. Okay, okay, I know it’s not a very eco-friendly thing to do, but at least the whale had a fighting chance in those days.
Having “seen that, done that, got the bag of whales teeth”, it was on and off merchant ships at exotic, (and some not so exotic), foreign ports, all the while harvesting and storing up memories that he would, years later, enthral us open-mouthed, snotty-nosed kids with. Like how, in some Spanish seaport – the name of which I can’t for the life of me recall – he and his shipmates casually asked the Spanish stevedores if they could have “a couple of them oranges”, crates of which were stacked as far as the eye could see and almost as high, only to be told “no, no, and hush, the Generalissimo has ears everywhere”. No sun, sand, sangria or free oranges here, just the uncomfortable murmur of how it must have felt to live under the dubious shelter of a Fascist regime.
Anyway, I digress, (just as Dad does even now when telling his tales). What he always found remarkable was how some of his crewmates seemed to have no great difficulty in communicating with the dockers and port-labourers of these far-flung, (and not so far-flung but still very foreign), ports and parts. For example, apparently Gaelic – which many of the crew could speak, given that a disproportionate number of them hailed from the Western Isles of Scotland and, incidentally, were all, (according to Dad), called, “McLeod” – had, and still has, I guess, much in common with Dutch. Oops, there I go, digressing again. Must be hereditary.
One of the most amusing recollections in this rich vein was the tale of when, again in some Spanish port, one of Dad’s young shipmates decided that, as the taste of fresh duck had become something of a distant memory, he would purchase one of the unfortunate birds from a port vendor who had plenty of them, all squashed into a rather rickety cage like Japanese commuters into a rush-hour train. Now, not wishing to appear stupid in front of the vendor or his peers, young McLeod – okay, I’m guessing his name – sought out any of his crewmates who could speak Spanish and would oblige by conducting the business on his behalf. Step forward one of the old hands, (in reality, probably in his mid-twenties), who was quite matter-of-fact in his claim to have mastered the predominant tongue of the Iberian Peninsula and much of South America.
“Ask him how much first”, was the prospective purchasers opening request for translation. The gathered crew fell silent as the ships premier linguist cleared his throat and spoke the now, (in my family, anyway), immortal words:
“Quanta costa quack-quacks wi’ the flat feet?”
Young McLeod got his duck, though. Adapt, adopt, communicate, eh?
Donald Farrell
