OLD JACK TAR
1925-1936
27
On a balmy Thursday afternoon in the Northern Transvaal, I killed eleven men, and a grateful nation awarded me the Victoria Cross for service above and beyond the call of duty. I haven’t had a peaceful night’s sleep since.
If I’d killed one Englishman in my homeland, a judge would have sentenced me to hang by the neck until I was dead. Instead, I have been sentenced to life imprisonment, because I still see the faces of those eleven wretched young men every day, like an image on a coin that never fades. I’ve often considered suicide, but that would be the coward’s way out.
In the citation, gazetted in The Times, it was stated that my actions had been responsible for saving the lives of two officers, five non-commissioned officers and seventeen private soldiers of the Royal Gloucesters. One of those officers, Lieutenant Walter Barrington, has made it possible for me to serve my sentence with some dignity.
Within weeks of the action I was shipped back to England, and a few months later I was honourably discharged following what would now be described as a mental breakdown. After six months in an army hospital, I was released back into the world. I changed my name, avoided my home town of Wells in Somerset, and set off for Bristol. Unlike the prodigal son, I refused to travel a few miles into the next county where I would have been able to enjoy the tranquillity of my father’s home.
During the day, I would roam the streets of Bristol, rummaging around in dustbins for scraps, while at night my bedroom was a park, my resting place a bench, my blanket a newspaper, my morning call the first bird to announce a new dawn. When it was too cold or wet, I retreated to the waiting room of a local railway station, where I slept below the bench and rose before the first train shunted in the next morning. As the nights became longer, I signed up as a non-paying guest of the Salvation Army on Little George Street, where kind ladies supplied me with thick bread and thin soup before I fell asleep on a horse-hair mattress below a single blanket. Luxury.
As the years passed I hoped that my former companions-inarms and brother officers would assume I was dead. I had no desire for them to find out that this was the prison I’d chosen to carry out my life sentence in. And it might have stayed thus, had a Rolls-Royce not screeched to a halt in the middle of the road. The back door swung open and out leapt a man I hadn’t seen for years.
‘Captain Tarrant!’ he cried as he advanced towards me. I looked away, hoping he’d think he’d made a mistake. But I remembered only too well that Walter Barrington was not a man who suffered from self-doubt. He grabbed me by the shoulders and stared at me for some time before he said, ‘How can this be possible, old fellow?’
The more I tried to convince him I did not need his help, the more determined he became to be my saviour. I finally gave in, but not before he had agreed to my terms and conditions.
At first he begged me to join him and his wife at the Manor House, but I’d survived too long without a roof over my head to regard such comfort as anything other than a burden. He even offered me a seat on the board of the shipping company that bore his name.
‘What use could I possibly be to you?’ I asked.
‘Your very presence, Jack, would be an inspiration to us all.’
I thanked him, but explained that I had not yet completed my sentence for the murder of eleven men. Still he didn’t give in.
I finally agreed to take the job of night watchman at the docks, with three pounds a week pay and accommodation provided: an abandoned Pullman railway carriage now became my prison cell. I suppose I might have continued my life sentence until the day I died, had I not come into contact with Master Harry Clifton.
Harry would claim, years later, that I had shaped his whole life. In truth, it was he who saved mine.
The first time I came across young Harry, he couldn’t have been more than four or five. ‘Come on in, lad,’ I called to him when I spotted him crawling towards the carriage on his hands and knees. But he immediately leapt up and ran away.
The following Saturday he got as far as looking in through the window. I tried again. ‘Why don’t you come in, my boy? I’m not going to bite you,’ I said, trying to reassure him. This time he took up my offer and opened the door, but after exchanging a few words, he ran away again. Was I that frightening a figure?
The next Saturday, he not only opened the door, but stood, feet apart, in the doorway, staring at me defiantly. We chatted for over an hour, about everything from Bristol City FC to why snakes shed their skins and who built Clifton Suspension Bridge, before he said, ‘I’ll have to be off now, Mr Tar, my mum’s expecting me home for tea.’ This time he walked away, but looked back several times.
After that, Harry came to visit me every Saturday until he went to Merrywood Elementary School, when he started turning up most mornings. It took me some time to convince the boy that he should stay at school and learn to read and write. Frankly I wouldn’t have managed even that without the help of Miss Monday, Mr Holcombe and Harry’s spirited mother. It took a formidable team to get Harry Clifton to realize his potential, and I knew we had succeeded when once again he could only find the time to visit me on Saturday mornings because he was preparing to enter for a choral scholarship to St Bede’s.
Once Harry had started at his new school, I didn’t expect to see him again until the Christmas holidays. But to my surprise, I found him standing outside my door just before eleven o’clock on the first Friday night of term.
He told me he’d left St Bede’s because a prefect was bullying him – damned if I can recall the cad’s name – and he was going to run away to sea. If he had, I suspect the boy would have ended up an admiral. But happily he listened to my advice and was back at school in time for breakfast the following morning.
Because he always used to come to the docks with Stan Tancock, it was some time before I realized Harry was Arthur Clifton’s boy. He once asked me if I’d known his father, and I told him yes, and that he was a good and decent man with a fine war record. He then asked me if I knew how he died. I said I didn’t. The only time I ever lied to the boy. It was not for me to ignore the wishes of his mother.
I was standing on the dockside when the shift changed. No one ever gave me a second glance, almost as if I wasn’t there, and I knew that some of them thought I wasn’t all there. I did nothing to dispel this, as it allowed me to serve my sentence in anonymity.
Arthur Clifton had been a good ganger, one of the best, and he took his job seriously, unlike his best mate, Stan Tancock, whose first port of call on the way home was always the Pig and Whistle. That was on the nights he managed to get home.
I watched Clifton as he disappeared inside the hull of the Maple Leaf to make some final checks before the welders moved in to seal the double bottom. It was the raucous sound of the shift horn that must have distracted everyone; one shift coming off, another coming on, and the welders needed to get started promptly if they were going to finish the job by the end of their shift and earn their bonus. No one gave a second thought to whether Clifton had climbed back out of the double bottom, myself included.
We all assumed that he must have heard the blast on the horn and was among the hundreds of dockers trooping through the gates, making their way home. Unlike his brother-in-law, Clifton rarely stopped for a pint at the Pig and Whistle, preferring to go straight to Still House Lane and be with his wife and child. In those days, I didn’t know his wife or child, and perhaps I never would have if Arthur Clifton had returned home that night.
The second shift was working flat out when I heard Tancock shouting at the top of his voice. I saw him pointing to the ship’s hull. But Haskins, the chief ganger, simply brushed him aside as if he were a tiresome wasp.
Once Tancock realized he was getting nowhere with Haskins, he charged down the gangway and began to run along the quayside in the direction of Barrington House. When Haskins realized where Tancock was headed, he chased after him and had nearly caught up with him by the time he barged through the swing doors into the shipping line’s headquarters.
To my surprise, a few minutes later Tancock came running back out of the building, and I was even more surprised when Haskins and the managing director followed close behind. I couldn’t imagine what would have convinced Mr Hugo to leave his office after such a brief conversation with Stan Tancock.
I found out the reason soon enough, because the moment Mr Hugo arrived on the dock, he gave orders for the entire shift to lay down their tools, stop working and remain silent, as if it were Remembrance Sunday. And indeed, a minute later, Haskins ordered them all back to work.
That was when it first occurred to me that Arthur Clifton might still be inside the double bottom. But surely no man could be so callous as to walk away if he’d thought, even for a moment, that someone might be trapped alive in a steel grave of their own making.
When the welders went back to work, Mr Hugo spoke to Tancock again before Tancock trooped off through the dockyard gates and out of sight. I looked back to see if Haskins was pursuing him again, but he was clearly more interested in pushing his men to their limits to recover lost time, like a galley master driving his slaves. A moment later, Mr Hugo walked down the gangway, climbed back into his car and drove off to Barrington House.
The next time I looked out of my carriage window I saw Tancock running back through the gates and once again charging towards Barrington House. This time he didn’t reappear for at least half an hour, and when he did, he was no longer red-cheeked and pulsating with rage, but appeared far calmer. I decided he must have found Clifton and was simply letting Mr Hugo know.
I looked up at Mr Hugo’s office and saw him standing by the window watching Tancock as he left the yard. He didn’t move away from the window until he was out of sight. A few minutes later Mr Hugo came out of the building, walked across to his car and drove away.
I wouldn’t have given the matter another thought if Arthur Clifton had clocked in for the morning shift, but he didn’t, nor did he ever again.
The following morning, a Detective Inspector Blakemore paid me a visit in my carriage. You can often judge the character of a person by the way he treats his fellow men. Blakemore was one of those rare people who could see beyond his nose.
‘You say that you saw Stanley Tancock leaving Barrington House between seven and seven thirty yesterday evening?’
‘Yes, I did,’ I told him.
‘Did he appear to be in a hurry, or anxious, or attempting to slip away unnoticed?’
‘On the contrary,’ I said. ‘I remember thinking at the time he looked remarkably carefree given the circumstances.’
‘Given the circumstances?’ repeated Blakemore.
‘Only an hour or so earlier, he’d been protesting that his mate Arthur Clifton was trapped in the double bottom of the Maple Leaf, and they were doing nothing to help him.’
Blakemore wrote down my words in his notebook.
‘Do you have any idea where Tancock went after that?’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘When I last saw him he was walking out of the gates with an arm around one of his mates.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ said the detective inspector. ‘That’s been most helpful.’ It had been a long time since anyone had called me sir. ‘Would you be willing, at your own convenience, to come down to the station and make a written statement?’
‘I’d prefer not to, inspector,’ I told him, ‘for personal reasons. But I’d be quite happy to write out a statement that you could collect at any time that suits you.’
‘That’s good of you, sir.’
The detective inspector opened his briefcase, dug out a police statement sheet and handed it to me. He then raised his hat and said, ‘Thank you, sir, I’ll be in touch.’ But I never saw him again.
Six weeks later, Stan Tancock was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for theft, with Mr Hugo acting as the prosecution’s principal witness. I attended every day of the trial, and there wasn’t any doubt in my mind which one of them was the guilty party.