Captain Ken #12 - Visits to the USA and Christmas

Following the tremendous TV coverage of the USA presidential election, I have noticed how often Philadelphia has been mentioned and this reminded me of an incident when my ship M.V. Ulysses was there in the fifties. We were engaged on trips running between the Far East and USA which was referred to as the 'Pendulum service'.   Many years later I was again engaged on the very same schedule which the Americans then called the 'Screen-wiper’ service.   In the post-war years, the USA Immigration department was particularly vigilant, even more so than it is now, and certainly had no sense of humour.  When you were asked, as everybody was for some reason, ‘Do you intend to assassinate the President of the United States? ‘ it was wise to reply with a straight ‘No' rather than to make a joke of the question.  We had one Liverpool engine room hand who, when asked, ‘Is there any record of insanity in your family?' replied, ‘Well I have got a sister who married a Yank’ (she was in fact a G.I. bride). The consequence of that answer was that he was denied any shore leave whatsoever. 

The Immigration officials were particularly strict with our Chinese crew members who were never allowed ashore at any time and to ensure they were confined to the ship, an armed guard was permanently stationed at the top of the gangway and another at the dock exit gate.  You can imagine their surprise, therefore, when prior to our departure, we found one of our Chinese crew members was missing.  We discovered that during the night a particularly cold spell had descended on us and the river had frozen over enabling our Chinese crew member, who had family in Pennsylvania, to simply pack his suitcase, put a rope ladder over the side, and walk across the frozen river, to the city centre. 

As a rather unusual Christmas approaches, I am reminded of one Christmas a few years ago, when we were west bound from Malaysia to New York on our ‘screen-wiper’ service and called at a new container transit port on the Calabria coast of Italy.  My wife, Allwyn, had joined the ship in Singapore and had the brilliant idea that we could take our Filipino chief cook to the village supermarket and purchase some additional luxury items for Christmas, which we anticipated celebrating in mid Atlantic.  We had been kindly allotted a generous gift of money for this purpose from our owners and charterers.  

Our agent arranged a taxi which dropped us off at a little bar I knew, owned by a former Italian P&O cruise ship steward.  On explaining the situation to my friend, he said, ’Well I've got some bad news and some good news. First, as you know everything round here is owned by the Mafia, including the supermarket, which is closed.  The good news is that the two men sitting at the bar with leather coats and sun glasses are Mafia.’ S o we explained our situation to these gentlemen and they agreed to open up the supermarket for an hour so we could buy whatever we wanted, provided we paid in U.S dollars . The supermarket cashier wasn’t too happy about this as other local customers started taking advantage of the surprise opening.  However, our crew were delighted with the three full trollies of Christmas gifts we had bought.  Allwyn then took a taxi along the amazing cliff-top road to Regio Calabria on the Messina Straits, from where she flew home via Turin In good time to spend Christmas with our family and, of course, to ensure that the donkey had been arranged for the Crib Services at Mellor Church. 

(This article was first published in the December 2020 edition of the Mellor Church Outlook Magazine).