In our continuing series in which 'Irish Times' writers consider their alternative careers, Tony Clayton-Learemembers his life-changing time sailing the world in the Royal Navy
DID I EVER tell you about the time I stayed up until dawn in the company of six transvestites in Singapore? Or the time I almost slipped overboard in a force 9 storm while we were gamely sailing through the Bay of Biscay? What about the time I missed getting back to my ship in Hong Kong because I failed to hear orders above the din of the music in a topless bar? Or that, while on leave and back home in Drogheda, someone in a pub said to me that if certain friends of his knew I was in the British armed forces I’d get a bullet through my head? No, I don’t think I’ve mentioned these before. Perhaps it was all a dream. Or maybe they happened to a different person. Sometimes other lives have a knack of making you feel like that.
I was a month shy of my 16th birthday, in 1972, when I joined the Royal Navy. Seeing me off at Dún Laoghaire were my mother (who had, on hearing that I didn’t want to stay at school, and that I wanted instead to leave home, promptly walked into Dunnes Stores on West Street in Drogheda and bought me a cherry-red suitcase) and my brother (who had himself returned from two years in Australia).
Looking back, I get a sense that I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I simply knew that I didn’t want to finish secondary school and that I didn’t want to stay in a dreary provincial town. The fact that my mother had left Drogheda in her early 20s for a life far more interesting in England could have been the impetus. My father wasn’t around (they had separated in the 1960s), yet he too had travelled extensively in Africa before settling in London, where he and my mother married. That my brother had left school early as well, to live and work in Australia, may also have contributed to the family belief that travel broadened the mind.
The only thing I am certain of now is that joining the Royal Navy changed my life utterly. I dread to think what I would have been like if I had continued to live in Drogheda. Maybe I’d have passed the Leaving Cert and . . . then what? Gone to college or got a job.
The notion of my teenage self was to spread my wings, not to have them clipped. Thankfully, my mother realised this, gave me her blessing and signed the necessary papers. I remember that, the morning I was leaving, she helped me pack my red suitcase and that, when I opened it on the ferry over to Holyhead, I found beneath a few vests a sex-education book that she had slipped in when I wasn’t looking. Such foresight, such pragmatism, such love.
Of course, women were quite likely one of the more subliminal reasons for joining the Royal Navy. Didn’t sailors have girlfriends in every port? It would be quite some time, however, before any female would find a six-stone weakling with no discernible social graces in any way interesting.
Besides, easy-going humiliation and lack of charm were core to the six weeks of basic training I received at HMS Raleigh, the “concrete ship” at Torpoint near Plymouth. Here we were put through the hobnailed boot-camp drill. Raw recruits were subjected to what I vividly recall as a lesson in unbending adherence to discipline, plus a hierarchical display of authority and a dismissive attitude towards any sign of sensitivity. If you snivelled you were sneered at. If you cried – well, you just didn’t cry.
It wasn’t juvenile detention – none of us was remotely close to being a borstal-boy troublemaker – but neither was it Hogwarts. Rather, it aimed to instil a militaristic belief system that traded individuality for deference to authority. As well as learning basic procedural information about life Royal Navy-style, I was instructed how to polish shoes, march around a parade ground with a kit bag on my shoulders, shoot self-loading rifles, sew, iron, tie knots, peel vegetables, cope with intense peer pressure and avoid being beaten up. (Clue: having a sense of humour really helped.) I also learned, crucially, how to interact with, and strategically avoid, people in very compact spaces.
Which was just as well, because within several months I joined the 230-plus crew of the frigate HMS Torquay. During specialist training at HMS Collingwood, another shore training base, I had trained as a control electrical mechanic, which meant that I and the team I worked with were responsible for the maintenance and repair of communications, sonar and missile equipment.
Within weeks the ship sailed for the Caribbean, and while I had put up with what I’d experienced on shore with varying levels of forbearance, commitment and stubbornness, my experiences of being at sea on such a large vessel turned from wary to wondrous. A wet-behind-the-ears teenager from Drogheda sailing across the Atlantic on the way to the Virgin Islands? Pinch me until I wake up, sub-lieutenant!
From a distance of more than 30 years it is hard to pinpoint why I loved being at sea so much. Was it the excitement of not knowing what the next day would bring? I spent two of the next five years on HMS Rothesay, the highlight of which was a nine-month around-the-world trip that saw us join the dots pretty much everywhere between Gibraltar and Panama. In that half-decade I experienced things that remain touchstones in my working and personal life. It is, for instance, both a blessing (with luck, for my colleagues) and a curse (for my wife, I'm certain) that I have an inbuilt sense of what constitutes a deadline. Perhaps it's from a fear of being ordered to run around a parade ground with a kit bag on my shoulders that has instilled such time-efficiency in me. As for ironing shirts and trousers, well, if you want a crease you could cut cheddar with, call me.
You may well ask that if I loved it so much – and I did, I really, really did – why leave after five years? The truth is that I was getting tired of being told what to do. I was over 20 and still being told to get my hair cut, polish my boots, be back on board by midnight. And then there was the claustrophobic, sweat-heavy proximity of people who, even now, I clearly recall with varying levels of fondness, dislike, amusement and unease. Enough!
And, besides, I was getting to love music more and more. Each week after I joined up, my mother diligently posted me two papers, the NMEand the Drogheda Independent. In the former I read strange things about glam rock and punk rock, as well as first becoming aware of writers such as Raymond Chandler, Evelyn Waugh, JG Ballard, Albert Camus, F Scott FitzGerald, Harlan Ellison, Hermann Hesse, Graham Greene and Franz Kafka, all of whose works I devoured. Through the Drogheda IndoI made my sailor mates laugh by shouting out, at totally inappropriate times, townland names such as Termonfeckin, Annagassan and – their all-time favourite – Nobber.
I look back on those days as, in line with how the Defence Forces ads would have it, a life less ordinary – as well as a life that very few would, or could, fully understand. Curiously, I have no yearning to sail again. I have had the wind knocked out of me, you might say, by having done it before so brilliantly, and under such professional, disciplined care and control.
But there are times when I look out to sea and remember random, extraordinary things that I thought I’d long forgotten: a beautiful woman in Fiji, sailing through the Suez Canal, a dive bar in Hawaii, the human noise of Bombay, the calm of Antigua, the degrading poverty in Djibouti and how a boy from the provinces turned into a man of the world.
Whenever these and other memories come back I know my other life wasn’t a dream at all. And I thank God and my mother for that.
