Now there are forms to be filled in, documents to be issued, permits to be warily exchanged for a string of personal data. The next day I was sent down to the Merchant Navy Office, an establishment which was a cross between a railway booking-hall and the charge-room of a police station on a Saturday night. There I poked my letter of appointment nervously through a small window at a clerk, who glanced through it with the unconcealed disgust of a post office employee reading one's private thoughts in a telegram.

'Got your lifeboat ticket?' he asked gloomily, his steel nib arrested in mid-air.

'My what?' I saw for a second the picture of myself shivering on a sinking deck, refused permission to enter the lifeboat because I had not purchased my ticket at the proper counter. 'Where do I buy it?' I asked wildly.

The man looked at me with pity. 'They sends us some mugs these days,' he observed wearily. 'Lifeboat ticket, he repeated, mouthing the words as if addressing a deaf idiot. 'Ministry certificate. Savvy?'

'No,' I admitted. 'I haven't.'

'Got any distinguishing marks?' he asked, giving me a chance to redeem myself 'Or blemishes? Tattoos?'

'No. None at all. As far as I know.'

He nodded and gave me a chit entitling me to a free photograph at a shop across the street. I queued between a tall negro in a jacket that half covered his thighs and a man in a strong-smelling roll-necked sweater who picked his teeth with a safety-pin. When my turn came I had to face the camera holding my number in a wooden frame under my chin, and I felt the next step would be in handcuffs.

Now, sitting in my cabin with _War and Peace,_ my Company's Regulation Cap hanging from a hook above me, I saw that Mr. Cozens was wrong. The _Lotus_ wasn't a nice ship at all. She was a floating warehouse, with some accommodation for humans stuck on top like a watchman's attic. All the cabins were small, and mine was like a railway compartment quarter-filled with large pipes. I wondered where they went to, and later discovered I was situated immediately below the Captain's lavatory.