Sailors, structures and serenity

V S Pritchett: great insights on maturing men

V S Pritchett is one of the great underrated English story tellers: he is brilliant at evoking characters, drawing out the emotions woven through everyday life. His short stories are especially good, and I was impressed by one I read recently, simply called The Sailor.

In this story, the narrator describes how he meets and befriends a shabby middle-aged man who is lost in London. He turns out to be Albert Thompson, a ship’s cook, invalided out of the service two years before.

“Off a ship?” I said.
He looked at me as if I were a magician who could read his soul. “Thank Gawd I stopped you,” he said. “I kep’ stopping people all day and they messed me up, but you been straight”.

The writer, who lives alone in the country, gives Thompson a job as his cook, and things change from day one.
 

I went into the sitting-room. I thought I had come into the wrong house. The paint had been scrubbed, the floors polished like decks, the reflections of the firelight danced in then, the windows gleamed and the room was glittering with polished metal. Door-knobs, keyholes, fire-irons, window-catches, were polished; metal which I had no idea existed flashed with life.

“What time is supper piped-er ordered,” said Thompson, appearing in his stockinged feet. His big, round eyes started out of their dyspeptic shadows and became enthusiastic when I told him the hour.

A change came over my life after this. Before Thompson everthing had been disorganised and wearying. He drove my papers and clothes back to their proper places. He brought the zest and routine of the Royal Navy into my life. He was collarless and he served food with a splash as if he allowed for the house to give a pitch or a roll which didn’t come off. His thumbs left their marks on the plates. But he was punctual. He lived for Orders. “All ready, sir,” he said, planking down the dish and looking up at the clock at the same moment. Burned, perhaps, spilling over the side, invisible beneath Bisto-but on time!The secret of happiness is to find congenial monotony. My own housekeeping had suffered from the imagination. Thompson put an end to this tiring chase of the ideal.

What Thompson shows us is the part in maturing men that longs for structure as a salvation from the appalling uncertainties of everyday life. If Thompson has his orders and his billet, he is happy. No need to worry about the chaos of the world, the everyday routine is clear.

In our lives, we won’t find a benign narrator to give us a job and make our world safe. Maturing men have to find a part of themselves that can do that, can create some degree of structure and order amid the chaos, but without denying reality, a kind of inner father, without losing adaptability where it’s needed.

This ability to keep both structure and flexibility, active will and passive receptiveness in one’s life at the same time can be called co-creativity: you will find this quality explored at length in my book, The Natural Advantage. It may not be found in many ship’s cooks, but is a central feature of the approach organic farmers have to take in order to survive and prosper.

Alan’s book The Natural Advantage, ISBN 1-8578826-1-x is now out of print, but available through Amazon and others. The Sailor is in Essential Stories, a collection of short stories by V S Pritchett: ISBN 9780812972948. 

Alan at the Magdalen Project in Dorset, the organic farm he founded in 1990