Another Great Day at Sea Read online

  Published in Great Britain in 2014 by

  Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  www.canongate.tv

  Copyright © Geoff Dyer, 2014

  Copyright photography © Chris Steele-Perkins

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Illustration by Nathalie Lees

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  eISBN 978 1 78211 335 5

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Appendix: US Naval Rankings

  Acknowledgments

  In loving memory

  Phyllis ‘Mary’ Dyer

  27 July 1925–29 June 2011

  Arthur ‘John’ Dyer

  30 November 1919–30 November 2011

  1

  We were going to be flying to the carrier from the US Navy base in Bahrain on a Grumman C-2A Greyhound: an ungainly propeller plane, more war- or work-horse than greyhound. There was nothing sleek or speedy about it. The sky was doing what it always did at this time: waiting for the sun to show up. The sun is the only thing that happens to the sky in this part of the world—that and the stars which were nowhere to be seen. The temperature was pleasant; a few hours from now it would be infernal. Sixteen passengers, all Navy except for me and the snapper, gathered round the back of the Greyhound—also known as a COD (Carrier Onboard Delivery)—listening to the safety briefing. Our luggage had been weighed and taken away for loading. Despite my protests, I had to hand over my computer bag as well, something I’d never let happen before. It had to be stowed because when we landed on the carrier, when the plane touched down and hooked the arresting wire, we would go from 140 mph to 0 mph in a couple of seconds: the trap, the first of many words that I heard for the first time, or rather the first of many times that I heard a familiar word used in a completely new way. I knew what the trap referred and pertained to—the hook, the arresting wire—but was unsure how to use it. Did we make the trap? Hit the trap? Come in for the trap? The trap: it existed in isolation from other words, abruptly and permanently arrested from the normal momentum of syntax.

  Then there was the word ‘cranial’: in this context not an adjective (as in massage) but a noun referring to the head-, ear- and eye-protectors that were handed out for the flight. Unnoticed, I noticed now, the sky had brightened from grey to blue. We put on our float coats, carried our cranials and filed onto the plane. There were two seats on either side of the aisle—all facing backwards—and two windows on either side of the fuselage, each the size of a dinner plate. It was not the sort of environment in which one could complain about the lack of leg room, though that was one of the striking features of this aircraft. Others were fumes and noise.

  The ramp we’d walked up winched itself closed and sealed us in. Further safety checks were made. This involved shining a torch as though to see if there were holes in the fuselage. There must have been more to it than that but holes in a fuselage are good things to check for, obviously. The woman who made these checks was the military equivalent of a flight attendant. She was wearing a sand-coloured flight suit, looked as tough as a woman in an Annie Proulx story. There was nothing of the trolley dolly—nothing ‘Chicken or beef?’ or ‘Doors to manual’—about her, but when she sat down in front of me, prior to take-off, I saw that her hair had been plaited and pinned into a tight bun on the back of her head. The Navy allowed women to keep their hair long. I wasn’t surprised, exactly, just pleased that’s how things were.

  We were not taxiing but a noisy increase in power had taken place and the noise was deafening. I’d thought the noise was deafening when we’d first boarded but back then I didn’t know anything about noise or deafeningness. It sounded like the flight of the Phoenix. Felt like it too—even though we were not actually moving, let alone flying. This was the moment, evidently, to put on my ear-pinching cranial. Having done that I sat there, strapped tight, struck by the undisguised use of the rivet in the seat in front. Everything in the plane was ripped, scuffed, scratched, stripped. Tubes, pipes, cables and superstructure were all laid bare. Commercial passenger planes from the world’s poorest countries outdid this one when it came to frills; even to compare this plane to anything in the fleets of the budget airlines of the West would give a distorting impression of luxury. Passenger comfort was not a factor in any part of the design process.

  Having worked itself up to a state of unstoppable intensity the plane accelerated along a runway for so long it seemed that we were attempting the logically impossible: driving overland to the carrier. At last the ground—glimpsed, through the window just behind and to my left—dropped away. We flew over a blur of Gulf but it was neck-achingly awkward, craning backwards to look through the porthole, so I reverted to sitting tight in this silently noisy, vibrating, heavily laden tube, studying rivet patterns.

  After forty minutes the bumpy ride became jumpier still as we descended, bucking the bronco air. There was a stomach-draining lurch and heave. We were land— no we weren’t! The flight attendant’s arm came up in a spiralling lasso gesture to indicate that we had missed the arresting wire and were bolting: going up and around again.

  We circled and tilted round, descended again. This time we thumped down and came to a dead stop. Instantly. It was sudden, but not as violent as I’d expected and feared—possibly because we were facing backwards and so were forced into our seats rather than thrown forward and out of them.

  The ramp-hatch at the back of the plane was lowered to reveal that we had landed on another world—albeit a world with the same pure blue sky as the one we had left. Rotating radars, an American flag, the island (another old-new word, referring to the bridge and assorted flight-ops rooms rising in a stack from one side of the deck: an island on the island of the carrier). The hatch continued to inch its way down, revealing the flight deck itself, populated by vizor-faced beings in red, green, white, yellow jerseys and float coats. Parked jets—F-18s—and helicopters.

  We were here. We had arrived on carrier-world.

  I have never known anything like the suddenness of this change. Compare it with the experience of flying from London and landing in Bombay—from freezing winter to eighty-degree heat—at two in the morning in January. Even a change as dramatic as that is gradual: a nine-hour flight; a long and slow descent; taxiing round the airport to the gate; immigration, baggage claim, leaving the terminal. Typically it’s an hour and a half before you find yourself out in the Indian night with its
smell of wood smoke and the sense of vast numbers of people still asleep. Whereas here, one moment we were travelling at 140 mph and the next we had stopped, the hatch opened and we had entered another world with its own rules, cultures, norms and purposes.

  The black-vizored people were either looking our way or scurrying, or lounging or gesturing. Three, in white jerseys and float coats, stepped onto the ramp and told us to follow in single file. They must have been yelling because we stepped out into a silent world—I had not realized until now how effectively the cranials’ ear protection worked—in which steam curled and floated along part of the deck. The air was heavy with the smell of jet fuel. Heat blared from the sky and bounced up off the deck. Three more cranial-headed guys in brown jerseys and trousers were swathed in heavy chains like mechanics in the Middle Ages, in charge of a siege engine. We wanted to dawdle but had entered a dawdle-less and urgent world where you do what you are told which was to walk single file to the catwalk at the edge of the deck and then down the steps to the Air Transfer Office (ATO). Already crowded with people preparing to depart, it was soon full to the brim with those who had just arrived.

  Ensign Paul Newell, who would be chaperoning us around the boat, squeezed into the room and introduced himself. Always nice to be greeted in an alien world! Especially when the greeter is as friendly, smiling and welcoming as Paul. It was like being met at a resort, conveniently located right under the local airport, with a welcome drink and a garland of flowers to hang around your neck—except there were neither drinks nor garlands. He was wearing a white jersey and sporting something that I would come to recognize as a not uncommon feature of life on the carrier: a form of moustache that has become almost entirely extinct in civilian life. Not an obsolete RAF handlebar extravaganza, just a little under-the-nose, over-the-lip number that had no desire to take itself seriously, that spent most of its time in a state of discreet embarrassment at the mere fact of its continued if meagre existence.

  We were ready to go—but we were not ready to go. I had been making notes on the Greyhound and rather than hanging on to my notebook had obediently handed it over to the flight attendant who, as we were about to begin that aborted first descent, chucked it into a kit bag with stuff from other passengers. And it had gone missing. So Paul had to set off on a stationery search and rescue. Why hadn’t I just crammed it in my pocket? Because I did as I was told. But by doing as I was told I displayed a lack of initiative which was now delaying—possibly even jeopardizing—the mission.

  The other new arrivals were taken to their quarters and those leaving the carrier were escorted onto the flight deck. By the time Paul returned, the snapper and I were the only people left.

  ‘This is all there was,’ said Paul. He was holding not a sturdy Moleskine notebook of the type allegedly used and mythologized by Chatwin and Hemingway but a flimsy school exercise book with a green cover and some kiddie’s scrawl on the inside pages.

  ‘That’s it!’ I said, glad to have my vocational identity re-established.

  Now we were ready to go. Which meant we were ready to begin traipsing through endless walkways, hatches and doorways, some raised up a few inches (knee-knockers), some at floor level. It was like a tunnel of mirrors, and the snapper, naturally, was keen to get a shot of this infinite corridor. That would have to wait. Every ten feet there was one of these open hatches and there was always someone either standing aside for us to go through or walking through as we stood aside—the former, usually. Being a civilian and therefore without rank meant that I was treated as though I outranked everyone. This willingness to step aside, to let me pass, was a demonstration, at the level of courtesy, of a larger point: they were willing to lay down their lives for me, for us. Had the order come to abandon ship I would have been escorted, firmly and courteously, to the first available lifeboat because I was a civilian. As well as people stepping aside—one of them with a healing cut across the bridge of his nose and the remains of a black eye—there were always people cleaning. Everywhere you went, down every walkway and stairwell, sailors were washing, wiping, rinsing, dusting, sweeping, scrubbing, brushing, buffing, polishing, shining.

  Personally, I spent the rest of my time on the carrier ducking and diving or, more exactly, ducking and stooping. I walked the walkways and stoop-ducked through hatches, always focused on a single ambition: not to smash my head even though there was an opportunity to do so every couple of seconds. It was like staying in a cottage in Wales that had been epically extended and converted to nuclear power. Every time I pulled myself up to full height I was at risk. So I bobbed and weaved, ducked and stooped.

  The older one gets the more obvious it becomes that the advantages of being short in this little life greatly outweigh the mythic benefits of being tall. In exchange for a slight edge when serving at tennis and being attractive to tall women (or so we delude ourselves) we spend our time folding our limbs into cars and planes and generally smashing our brains out. My fourteen days on the boat were the stoopingest I have ever spent, fourteen days that rendered the Alexander Technique obsolete, and made nonsense of the idea of good posture. I was on the look-out, right from the start, for other tall men with whom I could bond. Was I the tallest person on the boat? (Did the Navy have a maximum height requirement the way the police or the Army had a minimum one? If so was this ceiling height reduced further in the notoriously cramped conditions of a submarine?)

  After five minutes of knee-knock and stoop-walk we arrived at my stateroom. Note the possessive pronoun. Not ‘our’, ‘my’; singular, not plural. I was taken to my room. The idea of sharing a room had so filled me with dread that, right from the start, I had been lobbying for solitary confinement. That would not be possible, I was told: the snapper and I would share a room with Ensign Newell and three other officers. Six in a room! But we writers need a room of one’s own, I claimed, trusting that any grammatical damage would be more than offset—in the eyes of the Navy—by the Virginia Woolf allusion. I like to write at night, I went on, and the sound of my typing would disturb other people. No need to worry about that, came the jaunty response. With jets taking off and landing you become adept at filtering out noise, so a bit of tapping won’t disturb anyone. It’s not just the typing, I replied (via the mediators who were arranging my stay on the boat). My prostate is shot to hell. I need to pee at least twice a night. What he needs to understand, came the Navy’s reply, is that space is extremely limited. Enlisted men and women are in berths of up to two hundred so to be in a room for six is an enormous privilege. What they need to understand, I replied, is that I’m too old to share. I’ll go nuts if I have to share. I grew up with no brothers and no sisters. I am constitutionally incapable of sharing. My wife complains about it all the time, I said. Basically, only the Captain and a few other people in positions of high command have their own rooms, came the stern rebuke. Well, maybe I could take the Captain’s room and he could move in with Newell and the boys for a fortnight, you know, reconnect with the masses, I emailed back (to my mediator, not intending this to go any further). As the time for my deployment drew near I tried to reconcile myself to the inevitability of sharing a room—I even bought a pair of striped pyjamas—but found it impossible to do so.

  Imagine my relief, then, when I was shown to the Vice-Presidential Room in a special little VIP corridor of ‘guest suites’. I had got my own room through sheer determination and force of will. I had taken on the might of the US Navy and won. Newell escorted the snapper to their shared quarters, said they’d be back in fifteen minutes, but I didn’t give a toss about the snapper: he could have been sleeping out in the open, under the stars on the flight deck, for all I cared. The important thing was that he wasn’t sleeping here, with me, even though there was a spare bunk (or rack, as they say in the Navy). That would have been the worst outcome of all: sharing with the snapper, or any one for that matter. Sharing a room with one person is worse than sharing with six and sharing with six is in some ways worse than sharing with sixty. But t
o be here on one’s own . . . to have this lovely little room—with a desk, a comfy chair, a basin (for washing in and peeing in at night) and a copy of George Bush Sr.’s daughter’s memoir of her dad—was bliss. There was even a thick towelling robe—jeez, it was practically the honeymoon suite, a place where a man could devote himself single-handedly to the maritime art of masturbation.

  There was one small problem and it became obvious when I’d been in the room for about three minutes. The crash and thunder of jets taking off. Good God! A roar, a crash and then the massive sound of the catapult rewinding itself or whatever it did. The most irritating noise in my street in London is an occasional leaf-blower. You know how loud—how maddening—that is? The noise here made a leaf-blower sound like leaves in a breeze, the kind of ambient CD played during a crystal-healing or reiki session. This was like a train rumbling overhead. It was nothing like a train rumbling overhead; it was like a jet taking off overhead—or in one’s head. It was a noise beyond metaphor. Anything other than what it actually was diminished what it was. It was inconceivably noisy but the noise of jets taking off was as nothing compared with the noise of jets landing. I thought the ceiling was going to come in. And then there was the shock of the arresting gear doing its business, so that the initial wallop and roar overhead was followed by a massive ratcheting jolt that tore through the whole ship. I knew I was one floor down, directly below the flight deck, and although I wasn’t able to work out exactly which noise meant what it seemed that my room was precisely underneath the spot where most planes hit the deck.

  How was I ever going to get a night’s sleep? Especially since—as Newell explained when he and the snapper came back—this went on all night. I would be here two weeks. I would not get a minute’s sleep. Was it the same where they were? No, they were two floors down, Newell said. You could still hear the jets but it wasn’t anything like as noisy as here. We were yelling at the top of our voices, not quarrelling, just trying to make ourselves heard.