Uncle Sailor
This River Is Your River
“Always take the adventure,” Uncle Sailor used to say. “Take the adventure every time.” It was a motto he’d lived, to the best of his ability. If he could have spent his life entirely at sea, he would have done. He never wanted to get off the boat.
His brothers — Uncle Flyer, a military and civilian pilot; Uncle Policeman, a motorcycle cop; and Dad, a source of many other stories — had always rather looked down on him. I suspect they were jealous of his lovely wife (and later his lovely young second wife), or the freedom he got from sailing a small cargo boat up and down the coast, or the fact that he was nearly always happy. He was the one with the constant and genuine smile; also, significantly for me, the closest musician in the family. He owned a guitar and could play it to accompany his songs of liberty, equality and wide-open spaces: This Land Is Your Land would come out at any family party, to applause from his mother and sister, and sour looks from his male siblings.
They, collectively, always took most delight in one-upmanship. It was a perpetual competition, and often played downhill: “Poor you,” one might imply, “but poorer me, ha ha ha” — and that was as far as it would get, before one of the others chipped in with a tale of even worse woe that had befallen him. So they must have experienced a little personal disappointment when Uncle Sailor was diagnosed with an aggressive and terminal cancer: he had only a few weeks to live. Damn, I imagine them thinking, that bastard’s won again. How does he do it?
Still, they accepted defeat with some grace, and set about trying to make his final days happy ones. Uncle Policeman visited him in hospital. Did he have any last wishes that the wider family could comply with to ease his passing?
Yes, Uncle Sailor said. He liked the idea of being buried at sea. Could his family look into organising that?
Uncle Policeman looked into it, and jumped back aghast. Only two enterprises in the country were authorised to conduct a maritime funeral. Both were hundreds of miles from the family’s heart in Liverpool, and their prices were at the top end of any notional range of acceptability. Burial at sea was, regrettably, out. But how would he like cremation, followed by a scattering of ashes on water?
Yes, Uncle Sailor said, that would do nicely. And he had an idea to contribute. As a boy he’d worked on the Mersey Ferry. Perhaps there could be some kind of ceremony aboard one of those boats?
Uncle Policeman went down to the Ferry terminal and found a Ship’s Officer to talk to. In his standard-issue policeman’s manner, he started to bring up the subject. His brother used to work on these boats, older brother you know, and now he’s dying, and won’t see them again, and —
The Ship’s Officer gently cut him short. “You’re thinking about scattering his ashes?” Uncle Policeman was startled into silence. “Sure. We do it two or three times a week.”
There were even Guidelines, Uncle Policeman reported with some relief, and comical stories about people who’d failed to follow them: such as the mourners who cast away their departed’s remains still in his polystyrene urn, so that he drifted with the tide and washed up at New Brighton a week later. But with a few days’ notice, and at no extra charge, the family could travel the triangular ferry route and give Uncle Sailor his preferred sendoff. As a promise in response to a last wish, it could hardly be bettered. Uncle Sailor wore as broad a grin as ever for nearly all of his two remaining weeks.
On a blustery morning early in the next month, about forty relatives arrived at the appointed hour to find the stern of the ferryboat unobtrusively roped off for our use. The boat made its usual trip on schedule, except that mid-channel it gave two blasts on its whistle and stood to, facing the wind. That was the signal for Sailorwife II to do the necessary. She unscrewed the lid of the urn and tried to cast.
This didn’t go quite to plan. If there was a Guideline on how to throw, either Sailorwife II didn’t know about it or the wind didn’t. A gust of turbulence whirled the sparkling stream of ash back toward the hull, where about half of it caught on a damp, sticky mound that some previous passenger had recently deposited atop the bulkhead, just above the waterline. That outcrop, I realised, was the source of the unpleasant smell at this end of the boat. Oh well — we’re not all sailors.
The flowers, and a generous glug in salutation from a bottle of whisky, reached the water with more success. After a respectful two minutes’ silence Island In The Sun, one of Uncle Sailor’s favourite songs, began playing on the crackly PA system, and the boat turned its head back to Wallasey. Despite the waves that were now splattering all of us with foam, the glittering mass stayed where it had landed. “He doesn’t want to get off,” someone laughed, to general agreement. “He’d be enjoying this.”
There was more that he would have enjoyed: while the whisky made its way around the gathering, the youngest Sailordaughter, ten years old, was invited up to the bridge and allowed to steer for a while. On return to the Pier Head, the PA started up again with the predictable Ferry Cross The Mersey, and everyone scattered for home.
The surviving brothers naturally began trying to hatch plans to top Uncle Sailor’s farewell when their own times came — a cruise liner? a naval vessel? a military aircraft? Meanwhile, a tradition had been established: six months later we reassembled in the same place to do it all over again, in the same way, for my grandmother. I think it was the same ferryboat, and if I’m not mistaken Uncle Sailor and his perch were still aboard; following the usual practice of sailors maintaining their craft against corrosion, they had not been removed, only painted over.
He really didn’t want to get off the boat.
