Giraffes and Cold, Cold Water
Created | Updated Sep 25, 2016
This story's so good it's scary.
Giraffes and Cold, Cold Water
From the age of five or six I had a recurrent dream, always the same, always meaningless to my childish frame of reference. Always very, very vivid and emotional on a scale that was too grown up for me to grasp.
I am standing. A young man, fully grown, long hair poking from beneath my grey cap, flapping in the sea air. Tears run, unnoticed, down my stubbled cheeks, dropping onto my grey tunic, merging with the spray to dark spots. My eyes don't falter, I do not look down as the cold, cold tide laps around the sword at my thigh, the chill Atlantic nothing against my flesh as I watch her leave.
The mighty steamer surges westward, back home, racing on to Carolina.
These names and places trouble my childhood memories, lost in the slipstream of a century's worth of events. Placed back in the box of dreams until next time I wake, tearful, regretting I will never see home again, worried for the outcome of a war long ago decided.
At least weekly these dreams come to tease and bemuse, on into my teenage years, always exactly the same, tears mingling with the grey Atlantic salt.
Why is an English boy dreaming of colonial civil war; why are English tears being shed, sometimes nightly, over a ghost ship – as I watch steam powered paddles slipping into the distance?
At the dawn on my manhood, as a sixteen-year-old apprentice, I found myself working at the local shipyard. Hundreds of years of naval history surrounded me on every side.
Grimy and dangerous work, looked down upon by an elite of managers, planners and naval draughtsmen from their wood lined office complex.
One such naval architect happened to be my elder sibling. I remember waiting at the reception, an errand of some importance now long forgotten, but being escorted into the hallowed halls. Each wall lined with photographs, paintings and etchings of the vessels commissioned by long gone owners.
I inhaled the woody scents, mixed with cigar smoke and the perfume of the secretaries that gave the young lad with long hair poking out from his cap and dirty grey overalls sidelong glances and, in some cases, flirting looks.
Three quarters down the corridor I stopped, heart welling and tears coming unbidden to my eyes, falling to create dark spots on grey, as I looked upon a depiction of the merchant ship Giraffe, a schooner rigged, double stacked paddle steamer, an ironclad. I knew then she was also a ship that was refitted in the UK in 1862 as the CSS Robert E Lee.
Her first run was to Wilmington in January 1863.
I smiled through my goosebumps, wiping the tears away, wondering who that soldier was and why he never went home but also knowing I would never dream that dream again. He was at peace, his story finally told and understood.
