Voyage Three
SS Charles J. Finger - Page 2
Somebody standing near me said "What's that?" I looked and saw a ship, a freighter coming out of the fog and it was bearing right down on us. It was trying to turn. It was close enough that I could see two men on the monkey bridge frantically turning the wheel. It answered the helm just in time but both our aft ends scraped sides. You could have jumped across decks from one ship to the other as she came up along side us. Their Captain, and old man, was on the bridge with a hand held megaphone and he was screaming. He had a heavy accent and because his bridge was wooden, I think he was Norwegian - the Scandinavians had a tradition of always having their bridges made of wood. Well, the old man was cursing his head off "You son of a bitch, what the hell you trying to do, you bastard!" Our Captain was pleading back at him through his megaphone how sorry he was but what could he do. We were dead in the water. That ship passed us and disappeared back into the fog. Just before she did I saw the red flag on her stern. That was a signal that she was carrying explosives. If she had hit us God knows what kind of an explosion there might have been as we were carrying munitions also.
I liked life at sea and I liked the routine. It suited me. Being at sea really gave a man an appetite. I've seen men come in to breakfast and eat several eggs or even a dozen, with slices of ham and half a loaf of bread and wash it down with a whole pot of coffee . We had a night cook - a baker. His job was to bake bread, rolls, cakes and pies. We had a chief cook and a second cook, too. They fed us well because we were union and the union demanded it. I got pretty stocky before it was over - first time in my life that I had any fat on me. Before the war a seaman's life was miserable. Poor food, poor living conditions and poor treatment - you had nobody to complain to. It was the Depression and if you didn't take what they gave you, tough. The companies would save money on what they fed a crew. The battle to unionize in the thirties was ugly- men died. The war changed everything. Crews were all unionized, either SIU or NMU. Hell, the steamship companies didn't care as they were making money hand over fist. The government was building all these new ships at public expense and turning them over to various shipping companies to run and then paying the companies war bonuses to operate them. The steamship companies didn't mind feeding us well because they were raking in the money.
The officers had to be more careful how they dealt with the crew. They couldn't screw you over so easily. If the Captain or the Chief Engineer had a beef and called a seaman up, he had a right to have his union representative present as a witness. If they didn't handle everything properly they knew that there would be hell to pay with the union when they docked. One of the first things a crew did each trip was elect its union representative.
The Finger docked in Liverpool on March 21, 1944. I can't remember the names of bars and picture shows now, but I was familiar enough with Liverpool back then to know my way around it well. We went ashore every day that we were in port. There was an English guard or watchman that checked our papers the first time we left the ship and he must have had a good memory, because when we came back and after that every time we came or went, he'd smile and stick up his index finger - he knew we were off the Finger.
I didn't like English food much. They didn't have much, especially meat, but I did like their fish and chips. I would buy a bag of fish and chips every chance I got. They would wrap it in paper - news paper folded into a cone tapering into a point on the bottom. They had a lot of street vendors with little stands or carts that sold roasted chestnuts, but I couldn't eat the things. We had plenty of cartons of American cigarettes on the ship, Lucky Strike, Old Gold and Chesterfield. American cigarettes were as good as money. I could buy a cartoon for fifty cents aboard ship - five cents a pack and sell them ashore for $10 a cartoon. I've taken several cartoons into a pub and dumped them on the bar and I had all the drinks that I wanted and was able to stand rounds for everybody else. One time we were playing black jack for cartons of cigarettes. I kept getting good cards and I won more than thirty cartons. I took them ashore the next day and really cleaned up. I tried English cigarettes like Players and I thought they were nasty. Everybody wanted American tobacco.
I can't remember now how I came to know this Englishman. He was older than me. He invited me home to eat with him and his wife. They were very nice people. They made tea with a pot right over the fire place. It was good strong tea. They asked how I liked it and I said fine, but it didn't taste anything like our tea back home. They asked what kind we drank and I told them Lipton Tea. The man laughed and asked if that was the tea that came in little paper envelopes. I said yes. They both laughed and said that yes, their tea was very different from ours. They didn't have a lot but they shared what they had. I was often invited into English homes