“Now open your mouth. You’re so anxious to be washed clean, just taste that,” and he washed the inside of my mouth with the rotten soap.
And I’ve never wanted to be washed clean since then!
5
Perfume on the cook’s feet and hair on my chest.—What of it?
As I grew up, strong and healthy, I had three very simple ambitions in life: to be able to hand, reef and steer; to spit as far as any Swede could; and to get as much food, if not more, than anyone else. On sailing ships the food is portioned out in what is called “whack;” that is, so many ounces of food per week is allotted to each person. There was no way of definitely estimating the exact number of days a trip would take, as we depended entirely on winds to blow us to our destination.
We carried no fancy foods—there wasn’t room for anything except plain necessities in the storerooms. Lentils, rice, salt beef pickled in barrels of brine, dried codfish, powdered milk, dried prunes and apricots for desserts on holidays, and lime juice. The stores were stowed in an after-hold and were kept under lock and key. Only the Jap cook and my father had keys to that sanctum of grub and they guarded them relentlessly. The locked storeroom made life a bit difficult for me. I never seemed to get enough to eat. For instance, breakfast consisted of a big dish of cooked oats, dry bread and coffee. When the cabin-boy rang the breakfast bell it had the effect of a fire alarm and we all stampeded to the dining saloon. The first one that got to the table grabbed the bowl of mush and scraped off a big pile on his plate. I soon learned to grab the quickest. I developed in me the ability to take care of myself. Once a week, on Thursday, we had duff pudding. Duff day at sea was always an occasion. The cook prepared a sticky, glutinous mess of steamed suet and flour and put a few raisins in it. Plum duff it was called, but I always thought the cook put the pudding at the top mast and tossed plums at it, always missing, for I never could find any fruit in it. Weeks became important to me because of the plum duff pudding, and instead of saying of the future, “next week,” I always calculated next duff day, or two duff days ago. Frequently the salt horse, as the pickled beef was nicknamed, stank so that I couldn’t eat it, and neither could the sailors without drowning out the smell with mustard pickles, and holding their breath as they swallowed it. Sometimes by way of variety of menu, the bread took on the appearance of raisin bread, but the raisins were unfortunate cockroaches that had dived into the dough when the cook was kneading it. Little fresh meat additions like that never killed our appetites.
The final blow to my father’s æsthetic sense came one day at lunch time. Father bit into a crust of bread and then his face became livid with anger.
“Slops!” he yelled at the cabin-boy. We had a new boy every trip. “What kind of so and so does the cook call this bread? It stinks of perfume like some barmaid.”