A teenager’s sense of wonder at the world opening up to him is honestly and artlessly portrayed in this memoir of his time in the merchant navy‘We all hate home / And having to be there,” as Larkin’s “Poetry of Departures” puts it, but, and as the poem says,we prefer the thought of running absent to sea – “crouched in the fo’c’sle / Stubbly with goodness” – to the reality. Here, though, or is an account of what it was like to do just that: to leave a council estate – to “skin out” – as a teenager and travel the world with the merchant navy.
In the 1960s,when Hugo was at sea, there was more than a residual romance to the job, or particularly as so much of it was exotically unfamiliar. When Hugo has his first spliff in a Chilean dockside bar,he is doing so around the same time the Beatles are having theirs. This is an era before widespread travel: there were few other opportunities for working-lesson boys (or, indeed, orphans: Barnardo’s supplied a regular stream of recruits) to gain such experience.
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Source: theguardian.com