Bill turned out his pockets. "Oh! seven and a sprat."
Jim had eight bob, and I five and six. By combining our resources and buying cheap stuff "in bulk" we lived eight days on that lot, till the strike finished and work started. Jim had built a fish trap, which was mainly responsible for our success, the river teeming with fish of all sorts. I was duly appointed deckhand on one of the tugs, powerfully engined but slightly ancient. The bloke in charge was rather a martyr to liver complaint, but he was ordinarily so decent that one could easily be tactful, and pass over the livery bouts. The engineer was German, but when the war started he became "Hanoverian"—as indeed I believe he was, only he didn't say so before. Not at all a bad sort, but apt to lose his head when things went wrong.
We'd be toddling along with a string of empty punts astern, when the regulation "doodlum-clink" would suddenly change to a series of terrific bangs. A wail of despair from below. "It's der whackum (vacuum) agin!" Then would we tie up to the handiest wharf and effect repairs, with much banging of hammers and clashing of tools thrown angrily about. Next day, perhaps, we would haul a punt off a shallow place, stirring up much mud. A few minutes later a powerful smell of burning rubber, and loud oaths in a strong German accent, would apprise us of another disaster. Up would come the "sheaf," tearing his hair and dancing on his cap. "What's wrong, Franz?" says our skipper, with that quietly sarcastic attitude which is more maddening than a blow.
"Blitzen und picklehaubes! Der Cotdom gon-denzer iss choged vit zand!!"
"Well, clear the damn thing then. What'r'ye makin' such a fuss for?"
"But der rupper backing iss burnt!" with much gesticulation.
"Well," says the skipper, with a disgusted look. "Want me to give you one o' m' boots to mend it with? Put a new bit of rubber in!"
Franz, not apparently having thought of it before, dives below again, and we wait until the orgy of oaths, bangs, thumps and thumb-smashings has ceased, and he comes up again, wiping his brow, to inform us that "she's all right now till someting eless goes."
But it was always the "whackum," and it "went" pretty often, in fact nearly every day for a month, and Franz talked wildly of "shucking his yob." This statement roused old Tom (the skipper) to ribald contumely. "What! You 'shuck' your 'yob.' Why! a bloomin' charge of dynamite wouldn't shift you, and you know it, and" (with bitter emphasis) "you can't stuff me with that, old 'shap.'"
At last one day Franz's bête noir broke so badly that we were left alongside a downstream wharf for ten hours while he took the whole caboodle up to the mill in a launch, to be properly seen to. After that it went all right. Time passed quickly, the work was interesting, even the deckhand's job calling for the exercise of some brains and common-sense, and I averaged about £12 a month right through.