THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

Sailor Town the world over is a realm apart.  Under whatever flag it may happen to be – to whatever temporal sovereign it may owe its external allegiance – in spirit it is of the kingdom of Neptune: a shoregoing Neptune, it is true, stretching his legs in a pub and having a gay time among the girls – but Neptune just the same.

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If they could only talk, what yarns they could tell, these sea-fretted lumps of old iron – yarns of small, strange cities, white under tropic skies; of surf breaking over West Indian reefs and seabirds’ cries shrill and keen above its thunder; palm-fringed islets and thirsty Bahaman cays of ghost-watched pirates’ treasure; and queer little dusty towns under the seaward slope of the Andes with a red anchor painted up on the cliff-side to guide vessels to their moorings.

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You follow a street – gritty with dust in dry weather, and slimy on wet days with the thin yellow dockland mud – that winds between the warehouses and repairing yards and dock basins until it ends suddenly in a flight of shallow, worn stone steps leading down to the river water when the tide is in, and the river mud when it is out.  There are generally one or two beery beings of the wharf-rat type leaning against the low wall at the top of the steps, and a chattering bunch of amphibious urchins disporting themselves in their birthday suits and wrangling like a lot of gulls over some treasure trove in the way of a derelict plank or a dead cat.

Fox Smith/Sailor, 1923