A slate-cloud Thames morning, late August, that time when sleeping optimists never believe that autumn is getting ready. Barely-awake workers, damp hand-rolled cigarettes pasted and dangling from silent lips, lean against the rail of the Woolwich ferry, its great paddles churning ochre wakes from the ancient river. Dockers. Wharfies. Tallymen. Big boots. Caps. Sullen morning faces. Across the black waters of the Royal Docks are row upon row of cargo ships, arm-thick hawsers and hemps looped to iron bollards beneath the stark lattices of silent cranes.

Black-hulled British India steamers. Red-banded runnels of the Clan boats. An away-from-home Blue Funnel. The high-sided Lykes Lines with company name in spindly twenty-foot letters along her hull; the Stars and Stripes still in the first light. The clear, clean blue Maersk with general cargo from Rotterdam. Ben Bros. Ellermans. Federal. The Maru from Osaka. The Gothic, on a brief visit and making ready for New Zealand. The Bank boat with its sand-coloured superstructure not quite dry, but set for Singapore.

At the end, near the lock gates, The Tramp, riveted together in a few days, just for the duration of the war, but ten years later still here. Moored alongside her, a sturdy broad-beamed barge. But this is no rusty and menacing lighter to be tugged upstream to a Mortlake jetty. This is a strong wooden-hulled Thames sailing barge. Thick spruce mast and spars up and along which will soon rattle the hoops and blocks that hoist the tan gaff-rigged canvases. In an hour the wharfies will be aboard The Tramp. The steam winches will hiss and clank. Strops of jute bales of Havana sugar will be hoisted from her great hold and swung over the sheer black and rust side and down to the open hatch of the barge until she’s taken her fill. Then she’ll be off. No Santiago, Calcutta, Cape Town or Kobe for her. Out through the lock and into the ebb until Long Reach, then tacking from Charlton, Erith and Dartford, Gravesend and Tilbury, and by morning off the Whitstable sticks and alongside again, and maybe peas and pie in Rosie’s Cafe. Rosie’s Cafe, not Café. Frank Bevan the skipper, Billie the mate on loan, on a promise, from the reform school, and a scuff-shoed lad from the marshes along the Lower Reach.

As the barge slips into the stream and the paddle ferry waits for her to settle past, the lad will look back at the cream masts and booms, the white bridge deck and that red, white and black funnel. In a couple of years he’ll have had his spell in the barge. He’ll be wanting other horizons, and he’ll be stowing his gear as apprentice boy aboard that same ship, though yet he doesn’t know it. Can’t know it. A couple of years? An age away. Not yet a first kiss. But for now there’s the tarpaulin to stretch, the hatch irons to drop into their slots, the hammer to be taken to the wedges. There’s not much time.

It is the late 1950s. What the lad doesn’t know is that time is closing in on the skipper, the barge, the tug that brought them through the lock, even on the Royal Docks themselves, the Royal Victoria and the King George V, even on the mighty-sided ships alongside with busy derricks, mates and masters, bosuns and greasers, wharfies and tallymen. For now is the lingering death of The Tramp. When she is gone, her end will ring the end of the ancient trade when an old converted coal-burner with Hong Kong Chinese crew and a few British officers would tramp from port to port, picking up cargo where she could. Never knowing where she, and they, would be heading next. The scruff end of the merchant fleet. A master with a flat cap. A Second Mate with one lung. A Third Mate without a ticket.* An ageing ex-policeman as Fourth Engineer. A far cry from the liveried elegance of the P&O; liner moored at the smarter end of the pier. In those late 1950s, all was changing, but it was the traditional tramping trade that was about to disappear.

‘Maybe one day’ soon arrived. He’d been told he was bound not for Rio but the factory. Get a trade, they’d told him, get a trade. Clock on for a job for life. Horizons? Every year he’d have them. Two weeks at Broadstairs. So much sifted sand that there was not even a flat stone to skim across the breaking waves to whatever lay beyond. He was not a rebel. Strong will was enough. The parents knew him better than he did. They’d fret, but they’d let him go or they’d lose him for ever, not just between eight and five Mondays to Fridays.

He’ll be gone from home for close on two years. No Whitstable, Faversham, Mersea, Pinmill and Maldon. He’ll be bound for Bombay, Madras, the Yangste, Tientsin, Ngoya, Eureka, Nauru, Sydney, North Bend, Panama, Galveston, Havana. The true tramp steamer rarely touched the northern line of ports from Brest to Kiel. They were considered home waters, and a crew could sign off the ship’s articles and demand to be sent home.

Therefore he will have to get used to this 7,000 tons of ship being his home in every sense.

He will learn to stow salt from the Sudan, scrap from Texas, bags of sugar from Havana, hills of phosphate from Nauru. He will learn the names and customs of the bars from Shaukiwan, and Mojiko to Pensacola, São Paulo and Bahía Blanca, Boogie Street to Ma Gleeson’s. He will be nervous in the company of tall, languid Sudanese. He will be fascinated by the Egyptian gully-gully man with his day-old chicks disappearing into cuffs and sleeves as deftly do the lad’s shillings. He will smell his first Madrasi slums, ride in his first rickshaw and hang from the Wanchai tram. He will yearn for a letter from home and forget to write. In the daytime he will chip and paint the decks. Climb, for the first time, the tall swaying foremast. Throw the long black handles of the aged steam winches as the derricks haul iron beams from the ’tween deck hatches. The lad will learn to scrub for cockroaches. That done, he’ll listen to trampers’ tales as, long past midnight, he stands lookout across the summer Pacific. He will learn to live in the company of older men, men who sometimes frighten, others who laugh, others who sadden. Men who will go down in the memory with their ship. For just as The Tramp is dying, so too are the Mates, the engineers, the deckhands, greasers, donkeymen and boilermen, the bosuns and casabs who sail her.

MacAuley, the hugely bewhiskered Mate who once designed shoes. Brown, the dour engineer who cries himself to sleep most nights in the arms of his Chinese boy. Butrell, the Yorkshire skipper who puts on his bowler hat when entering and leaving port. Langtry, the minor aristocrat with his suede shoes and his pocket of peppermint creams. Wilson, who washes his hair but once a quarter-day and keeps a snake in his locker. Butler, who plans to sail the world in a small boat and writes mysterious letters to a South Sea Islands chief. Chong Ah Ping, the carpenter who sends all his money home to his two wives in Kowloon. Fan Kan, who disappears like a ghostly spy wherever the ship comes alongside. Bevan, who once was a priest and is now a rutting Second Mate. Ainslie, the other apprentice. A mixture of all the lad never knew.

These are his new tutors, his models. He has no peers. Betters, yes. Peers, no. His friends are his exercise books. Books for his navigation, his seamanship, his ship construction lessons. But he takes few notes of formal instruction. He is a poor pupil but a careful learner.

For nearly two years, in those exercise books, he tells what he sees and hears about her decks, compartments, ladders, monkey island, bridge, wireless shack and chartroom. There in his words are the ways of the ship and her people – from very stem to very stern. These are the ways as they were, or he thought they were, in the late 1950s. Ways that are ending. The old order changing.

*

In the autumn of 1957 everyone knew the world was changing faster than since the day it had started to rain over Noah’s boatyard, as the Mate once confided. That October the Russians sent a satellite into space – a little silver Sputnik. Technology to be admired. But the rocket that hurled it out there was to be feared. If the rocket was powerful enough to break through the earth’s atmosphere into space, then...