The Night Ferry

The Night Ferry

“Come with me.”

March 1977 at the English Channel, and the wind coming off the water was wet and icy, but the cold that settled on me from the words spoken by this ill-dressed bobby in a scuffed helmet was an emotional chill; I was inside the Dover police station and my beat-up blue fiberfill coat was plenty to keep the damp away.

The walls of the cell were covered with obscene graffiti, mostly in French and mostly maligning the British, but there were other languages, too. From what I could make out, the passport officer’s mother seemed to have a bad reputation. I imagined the words being scrawled by miscreants and troublemakers who, unlike me, deserved to be in jail, although after two hours in this cell I, too, had begun to feel tainted by the curses and the unswept floors and the rickety chairs­­––I fell through the first one I sat in.

I got up from the second-worst chair and lifted my backpack. The officer motioned us toward the door and pointed down the hallway. We wound through some passageways to a network of gates and then three doors marked H.M. Immigration Office | Private | Customs.

“Wait here.” We were ushered into another dirty room with more crappy chairs, but this room was glass so the bobby on the outside could keep an eye on us. I noticed his shoes were scuffed to match his helmet. Then I noticed mine were worse.

My traveling companion was Sheila and she was in the pokey with me but she wasn’t under detention. She had a gig awaiting her. She would be living and working on the estate of the clan MacMillan in Finlaystone, not far from Glasgow. She was to be paid only room and board and would be referred to as a “slave.” Apparently, the gentry of Scotland thought this was an ironic or humorous term, or else it was the last vestige of their aristocratic mentality. Her primary job would be picking daffodils to sell at the markets of Glasgow. The real irony, the exquisite one, was that the MacMillans –– a clan who traced their ancestry back to MacBeth ­­–– had resorted to selling flowers in order to earn enough income to pay taxes on their estate so they could keep it in the family. Lady MacMillan protected her aging hands from the acidic juice of daffodil stems with rubber gloves she got from the local gynecologist. “They’ve only been used once,” she told Sheila one day. Peeled off, most likely.

Sheila and I arrived in Dover on the night ferry from Calais because it was the cheapest way to the United Kingdom. We were surprised to learn we had to pass through passport control on the boat, and when the signal came to queue up, a crush of people pushed forward and I got squeezed backward, separated from Sheila by a few bodies. She moved through the control with no problem.

I was not so lucky. The man just before me in line was Basque and at this time the radical wing of the ETA had succeeded in painting all their countrymen with the broad brush of terror.

I heard the passport control officer’s voice rise, but I’d been traveling for days and exhausted, so I wasn’t really listening.

In response to the raised voice, the Basque guy raised his voice, too. “You have no right to talk to me in this way!” and suddenly my attention and everyone else’s snapped to them. Both men became aware they were now a theatrical performance for several hundred passengers and the tension ratcheted up, neither wanting to lose face, both refusing to give ground. The passport control officer, law enforcement for all practical purposes, for sure knew that over the past two years, Basque separatists had murdered dozens of police in Spain, some in the course of bank robberies, others just stone-cold reprisal murders. He saw a name like Echevarria and the lights began to go off in his brain. Who is this guy, why is he coming into the UK, who might he be after? Will I be responsible for allowing him in so he can blow up a police station or murder a Spanish diplomat? The Basque guy knew this, too, and he was also furious at the way his people had been treated in Spain for thirty years––not even allowed to speak their own language––and the way the rest of Europe had turned a blind eye, but this guy was just a guy with a recognizable name who was not a murderer, not a member of FRAP, even though he may once have worked with the propaganda branch of the ETA. So what of it, I saw him thinking, I’m innocent, you fucking Limey! Don’t you dare insinuate otherwise!

This went on for another three minutes, which was an eternity, especially for the person next in line –– me. It was the middle of the night and already I suspected myself of being guilty of poverty and being unkempt and thus possibly unworthy of entry to the UK myself. I shifted from one foot to the other, trying to relieve some of the tension in my back, trying not to look nervous. Finally, the argument was over and the Basque guy waved through, meaning the passport control officer had suffered a small humiliation in front of his rapt audience. The crush of bodies had increased the temperature in this low-ceilinged space below decks and I was wearing a heavy coat and a thirty-pound backpack, plus this shouting match had completely unsettled me. I stepped forward, sweaty and self-conscious. Does my seven-day beard make me look like a suspect, too? I handed him my passport, then ran my hand through the hair at my neck, tugging at it – my nervous gesture.

He looked at me hard, not smiling, still steamed. “Why do you want to enter the United Kingdom?”

It was 3 a.m., We’d passed through Paris without stopping in order to save money on lodging, I was sleep-deprived and not operating at a hundred percent and this question took me off guard. I stupidly blurted out the only thing that came to my mind, which was the truth. “I am planning to go to Ireland.”

“And what do you plan to do in Ireland?”

I hesitated. I’d accidentally stepped onto the path of telling the truth and I was too addled to think my way clearly onto the better, less-truthful path; to simply lie and say, “I’m just a terrorist––I mean tourist.” How easy it would have been, how cool and logical, but no, I was standing in front of two hundred people feeling like my pants were pulled down and I was too young and too self-conscious to think straight. Plus, lying went against my nature, I was an Eagle Scout, for chrissakes! It had been only a few years since I had dedicated myself to being physically strong, mentally alert, and morally straight. Sadly, the latter two were now in conflict.

I had graduated from college only weeks before with a BFA in sculpture and had read somewhere, to encourage artists to move there, Ireland was levying no tax on artists. Okay! I’m dead set against the crassness and commercialism of the New York art world, and also maybe just a little intimidated by it or maybe I’m scared of it because I got so lost on the subway while trying to find my way to see the Gordon Matta-Clark installation last year to at The Clocktower. Maybe Ireland will be a great place to meet other artists and live for a while, a place where artists don’t have to compete with each other for attention, where artists and even the society believe in the social value of their work. I’d seen myself in a pub listening to some Celtic music talking with someone resembling the young Stephen Dedalus. Maybe there won’t be subways. Not having thought long enough to ask myself why these “encouraged” artists might be more worried about taxes than about sales, I bought an airline ticket and set off across the Atlantic with my sketchbook.

“I’m hoping to find some work and live there as an artist,” I said, blinking.

Just what he needed. Some dumb-ass American to vent his pent-up, Basque-bested law-enforcing wrath on.

Nodding, no lips visible, “and how much money do you have?”

“Nine hundred dollars.” This time I had to lie. I had two hundred at best.

 “Well, we’ll have to see what Dublin Castle has to say about that. Sit over there. I’ll hold onto your passport for now.” What? Are you kidding? I looked beyond him and saw Sheila in the crowd of people on the other side. Is she in England? She was looking back for me over the heads of dozens of worn-out people. I caught her eye, made a grimace with my mouth, then sat. That was three hours earlier––five a.m. Somehow, when the ferry docked, she was able to circle back and explain why she needed to accompany me.

The bobby who took us from the ferry to the police station said, “the Immigration Officer will call Dublin Castle at a reasonable hour.”

Three hours later, we were still cooling our heels with nothing to do but hang out inside our own heads.