Snippets

The Run Ashore

This story and poem is dedicated to every seaman of every colour, creed and nationality who ever served  as a seafarer on a commercial tankship whether in the deep-sea or coastal trades!

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Although I enjoy good, meaningful poetry and the precision with which poets use language I don't write any.  As a younger man I used to write verse and the following is a sample.  I wrote it as  a seaman aboard a BP tanker nearly fifty years ago.

The demand for oil was increasing as industry burgeoned, prosperity arrived and the age of the family car dawned. There was a frenetic rush for tankers to make the voyage as swiftly as possible to the major oil production areas of the Middle East and back to the then centres of demand in the Southern Mediterranean, North West Europe and the USA.  

The political uncertainties in the Middle East and the conflict between the Arab nations and Israel had closed the Suez Canal. The tanker voyage would be lengthened by several weeks having to chart a non-stop passage around the Cape of Good Hope; along the south coast of South Africa. 

Ships would load their oil cargoes often at a sea-buoy or jetty placed far from the shoreline of the desert wildernesses comprising the Persian Gulf terminals.

There was no opportunity for shore leave or other recreation for the crews. Air conditioning on board was not a universal feature in all ships of that day. Living conditions were not bad, neither were they good: spartan but reasonably comfortable. Men would be housed in single berth cabins and be confined to the accommodation and each other’s company for weeks and months on end without relief.

Whenever the chance for a run ashore occurred it would be seized with delight by all crewmen of whatever age and exploited by them  to the full. If this was in a port that offered the four items most tankermen would seek to procure - beer, wine, women and song - so much the better. And Genoa was one of the best discharge ports in that regard. It’s red light district was affectionately known to seafarers as ‘The Dirty Mile.’

I wrote this soon after sailing from the port after discharging our cargo of Kuwait crude oil. It is, mostly, based on fact.

The Run Ashore:

At the coming of dawn, our ship will be borne,

Into the port of Genoa.

From Capetown we’ve come, for the women and rum

And a taste of the local pleasure.

We’ve been sailing away, for two months and a day,

Without stepping foot on the shore.

But tomorrow, instead, we’ll paint the town red

Until we can’t take any more.

We’ll be off down the ‘Mile’, with a laugh and a smile

With money to burn in our hands.

We’ll have us a time with the beer and the wine

And we’ll sing with the boys in the band.

After a drink in each place, at a very fast pace,

We’ll all go to bed with a whore.

At the end of the night, we’ll have us a fight

And be run-in again by the law.

The very next day, once we’ve sailed away

All bruised and our brains in a flap

When we find that we’re ‘skint’ and that I-talian 'bint'

Has giv’n us a dose of the clap.

Our tales we will tell, with a few lies as well.

In our letters home to our kin

And to each other we’ll say, in a  most sincere way.

I’ll never do that again!