[B] WRITTEN IN THE ER LOG BOOK BY "BUZ", ENGINEER CADET, CITY OF HEREFORD, c 1964 /B]

Have one on me said a drunken old tree,
To a man going home to his spouse,
No thank you said he 'cos, as you can see,
I've just had one on the house.

More spoken poetry by the late Charles Causley at https://poetryarchive.org/poet/charles-causley/

Strongly recommend you listen to his second reading of Timothy Winters.

'Tis proper Cornish.

CHRISTMAS AT SEA
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)

The sheets were frozen hard, and they cut the naked hand;
The decks were like a slide, where a seaman could hardly stand;
The wind was a nor'wester, blowing squally from the sea;
And cliffs and spouting breakers were the only things a-lee.

They heard the surf a-roaring before the break of day;
But 'twas only with the peep of light we saw how ill we lay.
We tumbled every hand on deck instanter, with a shout,
And we gave her the maintops'l, and stood by to go about.

All day we tacked and tacked between the South Head and the North;
All day we hauled the frozen sheets, and got no further forth;
All day as cold as charity, in bitter pain and dread,
For very life and nature we tacked from head to head.

We gave the south a wider berth, for there the tide-race roared;
But every tack we made we brought the North Head close aboard:
So's we saw the cliffs and houses, and the breakers running high,
And the coastguard in his garden, with his glass against his eye.

The frost was on the village roofs as white as ocean foam;
The good red fires were burning bright in every 'long-shore home;
The windows sparkled clear, and the chimneys volleyed out;
And I vow we sniffed the victuals as the vessel went about.

The bells upon the church were rung with a mighty jovial cheer;
For its just that I should tell you how (of all days in the year)
This day of our adversity was blessed Christmas morn,
And the house above the coastguard's was the house were I was born.

O well I saw the pleasant room, the pleasant faces there,
My mother's silver spectacles, my father's silver hair;
And well I saw the firelight, like a flight of homely elves,
Go dancing round the china-plates that stand upon the shelves


And well I knew the talk they had, the talk that was of me,
Of the shadow on the household and the son that went to sea;
And O the wicked fool I seemed, in every kind of way,
To be here hauling frozen ropes on blessed Christmas day.

They lit the high sea-light, and the dark began to fall.
"All hands to loose topgallant sails," I heard the captain call.
"By the Lord she'll never stand it," our first mate Jackson, cried.
..."It's one way or the other, Mr Jackson," he replied.

She staggered to her bearings, but the sails were new and good,
And the ship smelt up to windward just as though she understood.
As the winter's day was ending, in the entry to the night,
We cleared the weary headland, and passed below the light.

And they heaved a mighty breath, every soul on board but me,
As they saw her nose again pointing handsome out to sea;
But all that I could think of, in the darkness and the cold,
Was just that I was leaving home and my folks were growing old.

There are good ships and wood ships
and ships that sail the sea
But the best ships are freindships
and may they always be .
==============

I came across that one years ago , but cant
remember who wrote it .

Happy New Year to all Shipmates on here .

Tony

Anonny Mouse

Passage Through Bab el Mandeb

(A memory of the Brocklebank steamer
SS Marwarri in 1960)

The steam turbine throbs down the Red
Sea road, through the oiled steel deck,
the rust-streaked hull, in the dreaded
dripping sweat of the Red Sea road.

You have never seen such colour,
it’s a molten sea of brass, splashed
across with mazarine, and Mocha
burns in orange low away to port.

The sky, blinding at the zenith,
fades into asses milk along the horizon,
across the ovens of Punt,
Eritrea and the Sudan.

Javelins in volleys -
flying fish pursued by nightmares -
break surface, trailing
necklaces of silver.

Then, like salamanders dancing
in a furnace, tortured islands
rise up twisted dead ahead -
shimmering anvils of the sun.

Vapours exude
out of long-dead mahogany.
Decades of varnish soften
and creep down bulkheads.

The banded funnel exhales
black smoke in rippled pulses
that hover, then drift away astern.
The phosphor-bronze screw thuds out


the passage of time. But
the crew are ghosts in history now,
scraps of memory, as the old ship glides
through the Gates of Weeping.


Begun 2003, revised Oct 2010 for the Brocklebank Reunion.

Harry Nicholson, one-time radio officer, SS Marwarri.

(Bab el Mandeb translates: “Gates of Weeping” - these are the straits at the southern end of the Red Sea across which slaves were carried out of Africa to the markets of Arabia)

Thank you Harry.