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Authors: Robert Rankin
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taking in the fresh morning air. The Mission was situated on the Butts Estate not a stone’s throw from Professor Slocombe’s house. It was a fine Victorian building, built in an era when craftsmen took a pride in their work and knew nothing of time and a half and guaranteed Sunday working. Now the once-proud structure had fallen into bitter disrepair; its chimney pots leaned at crazy angles, its roof lacked many essential tiles, paint peeled from the carved gables. That which the tireless assault of wind and weather had not achieved without, had been amply accomplished within by woodworm and a multifarious variety of fungi, dry rot and deathwatch beetle.
The Captain stood framed in the doorway, master of his land-bound ship. Thirty years he had been at the helm. The Mission, bequeathed to the borough by a long dead Victorian benefactor and maintained by a substantial foundation, was the Captain’s pride. A fine figure of a man, still erect and dignified although now the graveyard side of seventy, the Captain took a pull upon his cherrywood pipe and let escape a blue swirl of seaman’s smoke. His white hair and tabby beard, the faded blue of his rollneck sweater, the bellbottom trousers and yachting sandals all bespoke in him a man who lived and breathed for nothing but the salt winds of the briny deep and the roar of the shorebound breakers.
Sad to say the Captain had never seen the sea. He had taken the job at the Mission at a time when jobs were few and far between and one took what one could. The only stipulation given had been that the applicant must be a man of nautical bent with a love of the sea who would maintain the Mission to the highest ideals and qualities of his Majesty’s Fleet.
Togging up at a theatrical outfitter’s with his last few pennies Horatio B. Carson applied for the post. His characterization must have been as convincing as that of Charles Laughton in
Mutiny on the Bounty
, because “Captain” Carson was immediately accepted for the job.
His duties were not arduous. Few if any sailors had ever honoured the Mission with their visits. However, a proliferation of down and outs, ne’er-do-wells, roguish knights of the road, shoelace pedlars and grimy individuals smelling strongly of meths and cheap sherry had soon appeared upon the doorstep. The Captain welcomed each in turn, extending to them the utmost courtesy, carrying their sorry bundles and opening doors before them.
“Here is your room, sir,” he would say, drawing their attention to the luxuriance of the pillows and the fine quality of the bedcoverings. “Our last lodger had to leave in something of a hurry,” he would explain. “He, like your good self, was a seafaring man and the doctors at the isolation hospital said that there would have been some hope of saving his life had they been able to identify the crippling and particularly virulent form of disease to which he so sadly succumbed. I haven’t had a chance to fumigate the room yet, but I am sure that your travels must by now have made you immune to most sicknesses, even of the horrendously disfiguring and painful variety which so sorrowfully took him from us.”
At this point the Captain would remove his hat, place it over his heart and look skyward. The tramp to which he was addressing this tragic monologue would follow the direction of his eyes then make his exit, often at astonishing speed, with talk of “pressing engagements” and “business elsewhere”.
In the thirty long years of the Captain’s residence, no visitor, no matter how apparent his need or dire his circumstance, be his tale one to raise a tear in a glass eyeball, no visitor had ever spent a single night within the Seamen’s Mission.
On this particular morning as the Captain stood upon the porch his thoughts dwelt mainly upon money, the strange ways of fate and the scourge of homosexuality. He knew that he could not expect many more years within the Mission and that his days were most
The Captain stood framed in the doorway, master of his land-bound ship. Thirty years he had been at the helm. The Mission, bequeathed to the borough by a long dead Victorian benefactor and maintained by a substantial foundation, was the Captain’s pride. A fine figure of a man, still erect and dignified although now the graveyard side of seventy, the Captain took a pull upon his cherrywood pipe and let escape a blue swirl of seaman’s smoke. His white hair and tabby beard, the faded blue of his rollneck sweater, the bellbottom trousers and yachting sandals all bespoke in him a man who lived and breathed for nothing but the salt winds of the briny deep and the roar of the shorebound breakers.
Sad to say the Captain had never seen the sea. He had taken the job at the Mission at a time when jobs were few and far between and one took what one could. The only stipulation given had been that the applicant must be a man of nautical bent with a love of the sea who would maintain the Mission to the highest ideals and qualities of his Majesty’s Fleet.
Togging up at a theatrical outfitter’s with his last few pennies Horatio B. Carson applied for the post. His characterization must have been as convincing as that of Charles Laughton in
Mutiny on the Bounty
, because “Captain” Carson was immediately accepted for the job.
His duties were not arduous. Few if any sailors had ever honoured the Mission with their visits. However, a proliferation of down and outs, ne’er-do-wells, roguish knights of the road, shoelace pedlars and grimy individuals smelling strongly of meths and cheap sherry had soon appeared upon the doorstep. The Captain welcomed each in turn, extending to them the utmost courtesy, carrying their sorry bundles and opening doors before them.
“Here is your room, sir,” he would say, drawing their attention to the luxuriance of the pillows and the fine quality of the bedcoverings. “Our last lodger had to leave in something of a hurry,” he would explain. “He, like your good self, was a seafaring man and the doctors at the isolation hospital said that there would have been some hope of saving his life had they been able to identify the crippling and particularly virulent form of disease to which he so sadly succumbed. I haven’t had a chance to fumigate the room yet, but I am sure that your travels must by now have made you immune to most sicknesses, even of the horrendously disfiguring and painful variety which so sorrowfully took him from us.”
At this point the Captain would remove his hat, place it over his heart and look skyward. The tramp to which he was addressing this tragic monologue would follow the direction of his eyes then make his exit, often at astonishing speed, with talk of “pressing engagements” and “business elsewhere”.
In the thirty long years of the Captain’s residence, no visitor, no matter how apparent his need or dire his circumstance, be his tale one to raise a tear in a glass eyeball, no visitor had ever spent a single night within the Seamen’s Mission.
On this particular morning as the Captain stood upon the porch his thoughts dwelt mainly upon money, the strange ways of fate and the scourge of homosexuality. He knew that he could not expect many more years within the Mission and that his days were most
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