l8	JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS
to drink than anyone. The boom years were in his
heavy flesh and his three chins; one couldn't at first
sight tell how the depression lay like lead in his
stomach. If one were to paint his portrait in the old
style of tiny landscapes and Tuscan towns, one would
have given him as background an abandoned blast-
furnace or the girders of a great bridge left a perch
for birds.
Even when drunk, even when bawdy, he had an
admirable sanity. "Eighteen months on the Coast.
Tell me, doctor, what do people do about it?"
"Insoluble," the doctor said.
"But what they do about it?"
"Even the Governor has asked me that. There's
no answer."
He was the last to go to bed, he would reel for ten
minutes up and down the corridor, there was some-
thing common and royal about him which called for
devotion, nothing he did could offend. "Kipper," he
would shout outside the Captain's door, "Kipper,"
and obediently the Captain would emerge. He had
the way of Falstaff with a woman, an absurd
innocence that was quite content with a slap and a
tickle. "You saucy little sausage/' and even the young
shy inhibited married woman who had never left
Liverpool, who wouldn't drink and wouldn't smoke
and wouldn't look at the moon, slapped him back.
There was a ballad quality about his bawdry. His
words had the merit of children's art; they were vivid,
unself-conscious, uncorrupted.