Uncle Billy
My earliest recollection of my Uncle Billy dates back to when I was about five years old.
He used to visit us fairly often, staying in a spare room in which mum had made up a folding bed for him to sleep on. After a short stay, he would disappear for months at a time, only to reappear again and take up residence as if nothing had happened. I learned that during these periods of absence, he was at sea, for he was a sailor on a coaster based in Liverpool.
My brother, Rod, who is six years my senior and would have been eleven at that time, said that Uncle Billy was very old to be still at sea. Uncle Billy, however, would laugh and pooh-pooh such a suggestion.
"Old age is in the mind," he said. "As long as you feel young, you are young. When I feel old, I shall give up work, but until then, I will continue doing the things I have enjoyed doing all my life."
From this, you will understand that he was one of those people who loved the job he did and even though others might not have found it to their liking for whatever reason, he was happy.
Strictly speaking, he was not our Uncle, but mum's. That made him our 'great uncle', but it was easier just to call him: 'uncle'.
He was quite a big man, standing about one meter eighty tall, but he called it six feet. We did too, because this was around about 1950 and we worked in the Imperial System of weights and measures. (Decimalisation did not happen for another twenty years or so.)
He had a round, jolly, weather-beaten face, with white hair that came half way down his back. The top of his head, however, was bald and he loved having it scratched. He would sit for ages while mum brushed his long silky hair, letting me scratch his bald patch.
He was always smartly dressed, usually wearing grey flannel trousers with sharp creases and a navy-blue blazer with gold buttons. It had a badge depicting a ship's anchor on the breast pocket. He said he wore it to show that he was proud of his life as a sailor from his earliest days serving before the mast to the present time as first mate on a coaster.
"Did you have a job as a waiter, then, Uncle?" I asked in all seriousness.
"Whatever gave you that idea?" he laughed.
"Well, you said that you served before the mast. Waiters serve you don't they?" At least that's what mum says!"
"No! Not that sort of serving. It means where I worked. For example, a soldier serves in the army, where his job is to fight for his country. A sailor does likewise in the navy on board of a ship. As the ships I sailed on were mostly powered by the wind in their sails and those sails were held up by masts, it was known as serving before the mast. Do you understand?"
"Oh! Right you are Uncle!” I said, nodding my head in agreement.
"To continue," said Uncle Billy, "I sailed on all the Seven Seas.
Now before you ask, that means that I sailed on all the oceans of the world.
I've sailed across the Atlantic Ocean; gone round the Horn into the Pacific Ocean; sailed in the Arctic Ocean and the Southern Ocean; I've sailed in the Indian Ocean; the Red Sea; the Black Sea; the White Sea and the Yellow Sea; the Mediterranean Sea; the Baltic Sea; the Caribbean; the North Sea and of course, the Irish Sea........"
"Hold on Uncle!" Rod interrupted. "That's more than seven seas!"
I agreed with him, for I had counted eight seas and five oceans so far.
"The term 'Seven Seas' doesn't really mean that there are only seven of them. As I just told you, it means all the seas of the world. I have sailed on most of them at one time or other!"
Uncle Billy told us that like ourselves and mum and dad, he had been born in the Isle of Man and like many men of his age he first went to sea as a small boy. His father, (my maternal great-grandfather) was a crofter. That meant that he scraped a living from the land by farming his smallholding or croft all year round to provide food for his family. He supplemented this by fishing, mainly for herring, during the summer months. As soon as he was old enough, Uncle Billy helped his dad on the land and at sea, thus soon becoming adept at rowing the boat, steering it under sail, tying knots, mending nets etc. As well as giving him proficiency as a sailor, it also gave him a love for the sea and so it was no big surprise when he left home, still no more than a boy and went to earn his living at sea.
It was a dangerous life, but it was the only way for a young man with no education to see and learn about the world. However, as well as dangers, there were also many good times to be enjoyed and one of the things Uncle Billy had discovered he liked most, was story telling, both hearing them and telling them himself.
"You see lads, at certain times at sea, when you weren't on watch........."
"Why would you be standing on a watch?" I asked, imagining Uncle Billy trying to balance standing on his pocket watch!
"Not a pocket watch, my lad!" he explained, laughing as he realised what I must be imagining. "A watch in this case is a period of time spent on duty on board ship."
He continued to explain that when members of the crew were not on duty, they would sometimes entertain each other by telling tales and singing songs called shanties. The stories were sometimes true, but more often than not were made up. Sometimes they were rhymes and sometimes songs. If they were popular ones, they would be repeated often and so be remembered even if they were not written down.
(I don't think Uncle Billy could have written them down in his younger days because he had never been to school and so had not learnt how to read and write. He could scrawl a signature, which approximated to his name, William Harvey. However, he learnt how to read and write during his time at sea, when kindly officers of ships on which he sailed, took him under their wing and educated him sufficiently that later in his life, he himself was able to pass the tests necessary first to become a junior officer, then to rise to his present position.)
Uncle Billy could play some musical instruments such as: a penny whistle; a mouth organ; a banjo and a guitar. Of course, he didn't play them all at the same time, but did sometimes play the mouth organ and the guitar together, using a special sort of clamp to hold the mouth organ slung around his neck so that his hands were free to play the guitar. He also had a mellow baritone voice and we used to love to sit and listen to him play his guitar and sing to us, especially when the songs he sang were his own compositions.
At the time I am talking about, although television had been invented and had been transmitted for over ten years, not many people could afford to own a set and even if they could have, the signal to the Isle of Man was so weak as to be quite useless anyway. Consequently we found other ways to entertain ourselves. The following is a list of the sort of things we did for amusement:
We would listen to the radio most evenings. I enjoyed particularly a programme called 'The Goon Show', a programme starring such comedy greats as Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, Michael Bentine and Harry Seacombe. It was full of loveable characters and each week there would be a story which was complete nonsense, but most amusing and enjoyable non-the-less.
We would read books and comics. Sometimes we did this for ourselves, but better still, we loved to have stories read to us. This was done mostly by mum, especially if we were ill in bed.
We had toys to play with and board games such as Ludo; Snakes and Ladders; Chinese Chequers; Chess etc. and jigsaws which were a particular favourite of mine.
We played card games such as Snap; Patience and Strip Jack Naked. Mum taught us a game called Cribbage, a quite complicated adult card game at which I became quite expert even though I was only five years old.
We went to the local cinema which ran three programmes a week. We would go there on Monday, Thursday and Sunday as a family. Rod and I would go without our parents on a Saturday morning to the weekend children's matinee.
Whenever we could, we would play outside in local glens and especially on the beach.
The thing that we most looked forward to though was when Uncle Billy visited us and told us his stories and played his instruments.
We enjoyed Uncle Billy's stories so much at the time that I thought it would be a good idea to write them down. Being so young however and even though mum had taught me to read and write the letters of the alphabet, I could not take on such a task and promptly forgot all about it. However, unbeknownst to me, mum took the idea to heart and did write down some of his stories.
Thirty-odd years later, after mum died, on going through her belongings, I was delighted to find a hard-backed notebook in which she had painstakingly written down what she could remember of 'Uncle Billy's Far-fetched Tales', this being the working title she had given the stories. Her reason for doing so became obvious to me when I began to read the first one, for it brought back the memory of him starting a story with a twinkle in his eye and the words:
"My tales are not so much far-fetched, boys, as fetched from afar!"
The following tales then are those my mum could remember, along with a couple I have added from my own memory.
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