he Return of a small Latvian bulk carrier CEG Cosmos to our village pier revived local talk of a time when these waters were a great thoroughfare across the Iron Curtain.
Someone in Britain’s royal household once claimed that horse stables are society’s great leveller, where Emperor and groom worked as one. But leaders of an island nation should know better. Ports are the true crucible of humanity. Beyond borders and credentials commerce is the only rule, savoir faire the only virtue.
Gerald, the retired post-master, recalled his own merchant visits to Archangel in the 1950s, and the drunken friendliness of Soviet sailors he met there – veterans of the wartime White Sea blockade runs.
Right up to the 1990s, Soviet fishing boats would regularly call in on our West coast ports (those who have seen the film ‘Local Hero’ will remember a robust landlady cheerily conversing with the Russian crews on the crackling VHF above the bar).
Bringing a few bottles of Whiskey Gerald and his friend, Sandy, would invite themselves aboard for a raucous evening.
“Then their political officer would sweep into the mess in his big black coat and order us all out of the room, ‘cos we was talking politics, see.”
I considered the bust of Napoleon which had sat on his desk in the old harbour post office, and wondered who was in danger of radicalising whom.
The seafarers anecdotes flew back and forth over the pints of ale in the amber evening as we watched this year’s newly felled trees lifted from truck to garrick and lowered into the cargo holds of the old Soviet boat, which was then bought by Germans and later a company which we thought was British but was perhaps a subsidiary of a conglomerate based in Dubai.
A schoolfriend of mine – who now works on marine infrastructure – shared round a screenshot he had taken from his boat’s sonar screen, displaying the seabed under a local fish farm. There was clearly a submarine lurking down there.
“Crikey, did you show that to the Ministry Of Defence?” Asked the Timberland-shod skipper of a local pleasure yacht.
“Nah – I don’t want to get in trouble for snooping.”
“How do you know it was one of ours and not one of… theirs?”
“Theirs?” Shrieked Gerald, and roared with laughter – the red star on his cap sparkling in the sun.
Here and now, as it was there and then, our governments and capitals seem impossibly distant.
Far out on the shimmering meniscus of the Atlantic, I could see old Sandy pulling up his nets. A retired merchant navy radio operator himself, he’s not the only the only person I’ve met who shares anecdotes about a visit he made to North Korea. But he’s the only one who drank fire-water and sang with local sailors in the Kim Il Sung Dockyards, besting the vain, in-tourist, experiences of the modern politician and journalist. Though he would never see it that way.
