Taking Tea - Kavinda and Me

 

Taking Tea - Kavinda and Me

I didn’t officially start work until 8:00 a.m., and usually I’d have completed my flags up and lights off chore by shortly after 6:00 a.m., so every morning I would have time on my hands as those around me snored. Already feeling wide awake there was little point in my going back to bed so I’d sit on the ship’s railings and look on as the busy port of Colombo joined me in coming to life.

Shortly after daybreak, local men, all astonishingly vocal considering the time of day, would gather near our ship. Similar groups could be seen waiting by the many other vessels berthed along the quay, hoping to be noticed and employed. From my vantage point they looked like ants marching in procession before congregating around something motionless and edible though, if push came to shove, I reckoned the ants would have had more chance of success. Having spent the night sleeping on the dockside beneath old flour sacks, they hadn’t had far to travel to work, but I wouldn’t necessarily have considered this a perk of their job. I guessed, correctly as it turned out, that they were discussing the probability of the cargo machinery breaking down and them having the opportunity to earn a pitiful wage by doing the job manually using the old tomato tin method. They all had one. The tins and the flour sack bedding seemed to be their only possessions. All their hopes for the day hinged upon mechanical failure. What a sorry place this was.

A low, crumbling concrete safety wall separated workers and vehicles from the rail tracks along which rusty dockside cranes would manoeuvre slowly and noisily, like ancient pterosaurs in the throes of agonising deaths. As I watched, small mounds of rotting grain would be swept from the wall by scrawny, leather-like hands to clear a place to sit where a chorus of totally indecipherable Sinhala (the official language) would shatter the early morning stillness. Each expectant labourer wore just a sarong or loincloth as standard dress, but some could also boast a button-up shirt or sandals to augment a wardrobe of donations from foreign sailors. From their tomato tins they would remove some of their rations for the day. These almost always comprised of plain boiled rice parcelled up in palm leaves. Some had one or two kolikuttu (small local bananas) or even shared a fish caught from the dock and cooked on a flattened tomato tin supported by stones over a small pile of burning sackcloth. Breakfast was certainly the main meal of the day for those who had food, but many had nothing. 

With still an hour until my own very British breakfast was served in the officers’ dining room, I would sometimes have a bit of a nosey around on the quay. Just a quiet saunter to see what was happening on dry land and to spy on other ships tied up nearby, comparing their patched up areas of rusted steel hulls with our own. I’d been warned that as soon as we had sailed from port, chipping away at corroded metalwork and repainting it would figure largely in my workload, so it made sense to prepare myself with a bit of a recce. I couldn’t wait to get to sea. Discharging cargo required too much hanging around for my liking. I wanted to be moving and I wanted to feel some fresh ocean air in my lungs.

During my promenade one morning, one of the men sitting on the wall spoke to me in English. Whilst on cargo watch I’d often tried to speak to the dock labourers but the language barrier was insurmountable. So, although startled at first, I was pleased to be able to join in a conversation.

‘Would you like to drink chai with me?’ asked the wiry man from behind a moustache almost as big as his face. He held up a glass bottle. Its distinctive design suggesting it had previously contained Coca Cola but today it was filled to the neck with a dark yellow liquid that I thought may or may not have been tea.

‘Oooh, yes please!’ I falsely enthused. The drink didn’t appear very appetising but I didn’t want to offend him by turning down his offer, and I was keen to talk.

From somewhere in his ambudaya (loincloth) he produced a very old and battered Nescafé tin into which he decanted fluid from his Coke bottle until it was half full. Passing it to me he commanded ‘Drink!’ and then said ‘Chin chin,’ in a mock Eton College accent.

I’d flown out from England just slightly more than two weeks earlier to join the M.V. Baron Maclay, and at that stage hadn’t actually been to sea. This was the first ship of my seafaring career and Colombo was the first place that I’d ever in my life set foot on foreign soil. My nerves were in absolute tatters at the start of an adventure that suddenly struck me as being a bit too adventurous for my liking. And I’d never encountered South Asian germs before. My first week was bearable but the second was blighted by a dose of what I considered to be cholera with a few night time hallucinations thrown in; a symptom of severe dehydration and mineral deficiency, apparently. In the third week I was feeling much better and after a brief pause for thought I convinced myself that I must have built up an immunity to any bacteria that might be contained in the yellow liquid and the corroded receptacle. So I reciprocated the ‘chin chin’, took a sip and miraculously didn’t die on the spot.

Through gaps in the jungle of hair that grew on the man’s upper lip, I saw a smile that exposed half a dozen teeth stained red from a lifetime of chewing betel nuts. Then he asked me, ‘What is your name, sir?’

‘Terry,’ I replied.

‘I am very pleased to meet you Mr Terry, sir, and it is my great honour to be your servant,’ was his response.

‘It’s just Terry, not Mr Terry,’ I corrected him before asking his name.

‘Okay Mr Terry. I am Kavinda.’

‘Just Terry!’

‘Okay Terry, sir,’ he wouldn’t give up.

‘I’m very pleased to meet you too, Kavinda,’ I said and shook his hand to express sincerity. ‘Where did you learn to speak English?’

‘For many years, sir, I worked in a shop that was selling clothes to English people. I was the cleaning boy and then when the lokka (boss) saw that I was very clean and I didn’t steal anything he said I could be the clerk for parcels delivered to the port on ships from England. It was terribly difficult to learn but the BBC World Service helped me on the radio and I very much like your Cheerful Charlie Chester. Also I had to learn to ride the bicycle.’ Pride beamed from his face as he told me this.

‘So why aren’t you working there today?’

With his look of self-admiration turning to one of hurt, Kavinda replied, ‘All of the English people have gone back to their Blighty and the shop is closed for several years. There is no work there now so I come to the harbour every day and maybe I am lucky and there is work for me.’

‘And what if there’s no work here?’

‘If there is no work there is no money for me and my family to eat. For two days I did not work.’

‘So none of you have eaten?’ I asked in horror. ‘You must be starving.’

‘I am very angry, sir.’

Believing that I was going along with his sense of social injustice, I said, ‘I would be very angry too, but even more so, I’d be very hungry.’

‘Yes, I am very angry.’

Holding his fingers to his lips a little like a chef’s kiss, he gestured as if putting food in his mouth. I soon twigged that he’d meant he was hungry, of course, but his Eton accent wasn’t consistent. I understood him but didn’t correct him. That would have been cruel.

I was aware that he had his bottle of urine-esque tea with him but had no rice or fruit like most of the others had.

I didn’t ask him any more questions but simply said, ‘Wait here. Don’t go away!’ before running up the gangway and round onto the poop deck to the back door of the galley.

The assistant cook, Derek from Dundee, was there having an early morning smoke. I’d last seen him in the night club as I was leaving round about midnight. He appeared then to be negotiating a straight cash deal with one of the bar girls who would provide private entertainment in a nearby shack long after the club’s doors had closed. He’d obviously arrived back at the ship earlier than the Captain because I hadn’t seen him when I was doing my dawn patrol of flag hoisting and light switch flicking. So hopefully, before starting to prepare breakfasts, he’d taken the time to wash his hands after carrying out his inevitable early morning intimate inspection. Keen to offer advice to the new boy, other members of the ship’s personnel had told me to be very wary of this sort of activity amongst the catering staff when the ship was in port, and perhaps skip the first meal of the day as a precaution. Some of them hadn’t eaten a breakfast on a ship in port for decades. And with all of that in mind, I’d already lost my appetite.

Feigning exasperation, I asked him, ‘Derek, is there any chance of me having my breakfast out on the deck? The Third Mate’s wanting me to start the cargo watch without him because he was on the Lion beer last night so he’s in no state for facing the heat or being more than five minutes away from a European toilet.’

‘Aye, alright!’ he replied whilst chuckling at the thought of our Third Officer heaving away with his head down the cludgie. ‘Would just a sausage roll do for you?’

We were on a Scottish ship registered in Ardrossan, with a predominantly Scottish crew, so I knew fine well that what he was suggesting was not the standard pastry sausage roll but one of those ethnic Scottish creations comprising a flat square piece of fried sausage meat in a circular bread roll. A generous measure of tomato ketchup was always added for lubrication purposes in the event of the recipient having a hangover and a mouth as dry as a camel’s arsehole in a Sinai tailwind. Well that’s the most polite and least racist or sexist version of what shipmate types would have said, though I suspected at least half of them had never been anywhere near a camel or, if they had, never examined the hydration levels in its nether regions. The poor creature in question would probably have benefitted from a bit more fibre in its diet.

‘Perfect,’ I answered, forgetting about Derek’s big night out with his dock gate dolly.

‘Give us a wee minute,’ he said, scratching his groin with the hand in which he held his lit cigarette as he disappeared through the hatch into the galley. Five wee minutes later he was back with two sausage rolls on a proper china plate bearing the shipping company’s emblem and a big mug of hot milky tea. I was pleased and imagined that Kavinda would be delighted.

Trainee officers like me were supposed to be among the elite in the ship’s company (except on those other occasions when we were told we were the lowest of the low) so we were expected to have all our meals in the officers’ dining room with its wooden panelled walls on which hung framed portraits of the Queen and the Pope to keep everybody happy. There was also a photograph of the smiling Celtic captain, Billy McNeill, holding aloft the European Cup. It was on a page cut from a football magazine which, at the request of a by then deceased Chief Engineer, had been autographed by King Billy himself. To maintain the high standard of the décor, the picture had been attached to the wall using modern BluTac rather than the more traditional Sellotape.

Under normal circumstances, my not being there would have aroused suspicion. Had the Captain noticed my absence he would have assumed that I’d been ashore all night getting pissed up in a seedy bar with ladies of easy virtue. But that was exactly what he had been doing himself, and he’d only minutes earlier returned to the ship in no fit state for ingesting square sausages, so I took my chance and made a run for it with the breakfast contraband.

The metal gangway bounced up and down making a bit of a racket as I dashed back down its steps two at a time, without any concern about the number of people whose attention I might be attracting. But the cargo machinery had started work by then, creating an even greater bit of a racket and raising clouds of wheat dust. So, as well as not being heard, it was unlikely that I’d be seen either.

My new friend was sitting alone on the wall when I offered him the sausage rolls. ‘Where is everyone?’ I asked.

He looked at the mug of pale brown milky tea as if it was the most disgusting drink he’d ever set eyes upon. Then, politely taking very small mouthfuls of a breakfast roll, his smile returned and he informed me, ‘They are already doing the work for the flour mill, sir.’ Obviously enjoying the food, he paused before adding ‘One of the suction pumps for the Polish ship is broken to pieces, sir.’ Noticing the chaos further along the jetty, I’d realised this before I’d even finished asking the question.

‘Was there no work for you Kavinda?’

In a split second the look on his face altered from expectation to disappointment. ‘You told me to wait here. Don’t go away, you said.’

‘So you missed getting work for the day because of what I said?’

‘Yes, sir. But I was thinking you will have work for me. I am very happy to be your servant because of my admiration for England’s great and glorious empire, sir.’ He spoke to me like I was an aristocratic plantation owner from a century earlier.   

I was eighteen years old and almost six thousand miles from home. I had little knowledge and absolutely no experience of the brutal challenges of life in a poverty-stricken Third World country. Something I’d said without thinking it through had caused this poor man, this total stranger, to lose a day’s work and a day’s pay on my account. He had a wife and kids who were as hungry as he was and relying heavily on him taking home money to keep them alive. My mind went numb and I felt physically sick. I sat beside him for ten minutes, shaking while he finished eating the first of the sausage rolls. He didn’t speak but made a number of appreciative noises before wrapping the second roll in a piece of cloth that he produced from the folds of his ambudaya. How could he eat under such distressing circumstances?

Kavinda eventually broke the silence. ‘The British food is very scrumptious, sir. I will take some home for my family,’ he said, licking the last traces of ketchup from his fingers but not worried that some had gone on his clothes. Would that be the sum total of the family dinner that evening?

‘How many children do you have?’

‘My beautiful wife has blessed me with two girls and two boys.’ He held his hand to his heart and closed his eyes as he said this, not noticing the greasy stain that appeared on the breast pocket of his white shirt. His beautiful wife would no doubt bless him with another clean shirt the following morning.

Discovering that in addition to him, five other people had lost out because of me, I felt even worse. Desperately hopeful, but not at all optimistic that they might have some other source of income, I asked him, ‘Does your wife work?’

‘All of my family work, sir. They sell fruit to worshippers leaving the holy temple. They are very busy after morning prayers and evening prayers, but in the day there are very few customers. They give food to the monks because they are very holy men and they have no money.’

I was glad to hear that they all tried to scratch a living, though their means of doing so sounded somewhat less than lucrative, and under my breath I cursed those holy men who begged from the poor. I suspected that his children were of school age but didn’t dare to ask. The parents wouldn’t have had the money to educate them and if they had been in a school all day they wouldn’t have been able to sell fruit with their mother. As my heart sank deeper and deeper, and the time approached for me to start work, I had an idea.

‘If you had worked on the Polish ship today, Kavinda, how much money would you have earned?’

‘I think I might have thirty rupees,’ he estimated, ‘Maybe thirty-five rupees if the afternoon storm doesn’t come.’ I remember back then in 1976 there being twenty-five Sri Lanka rupees to England’s pound. One rupee was four new pee! If we got away without the four o’clock thunder, lightning and torrential downpour that brought work to a halt every day without fail, he could hope to take home the equivalent of £1.40 for ten hours’ work.

Again I thought what a sorry place this was.

 

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Image:

My own photograph of my own copy of The Efficient Deck Hand, a guide to the Department of Trade and Industry’s Examinations for the Efficient Deck Hand and Able Seaman. I later qualified as an Efficient Deck Hand at Glasgow College of Nautical Studies and was presented with a certificate as evidence of this. However, it is no longer in my possession as upon leaving the Merchant Navy I was obliged to surrender it in case I went around demonstrating efficiency in other types of employment.

 

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