Outside in Lime Street the adolescent tarts already clung hopefully to their damp doorways. The dripping buses took home the last pale shipping clerks, the overhead railway rattled along its grotesque track, and the dock police steamed themselves warm in front of the stoves in their cabins. The Lotus herself lay lifeless at her quay with tarpaulins tented over her hatches, creaking gently at her mooring ropes like an old bed in a bad dream.

I stood in the rain on the quayside reading a large sheet of printed instructions for resuscitating the apparently drowned. This was the only information of any sort available to passers-by. The wharf was deserted. The cranes huddled together in a row, a few railway trucks crouched between their legs; the warehouses were shut, locked, and abandoned even by the cats; the Lotus, lit with a few dim lights, looked as uninviting as a shut pub.

I was a young doctor with a bad diploma passing through the difficult stage of professional adolescence when you discover the medical schools teach as little about medicine as the public schools do about life. My knowledge of seafaring was based only on _Treasure Island_ pictures in the windows of Cook's, and a walking-on part I had been allowed to play in a students' production of _The Middle Watch._ I was nevertheless a recognized sailor. I had in my pocket a new seaman's identity card with my fingerprints on it, a document that made me the professional descendant of Drake and Cabot, subject to and protected by a batch of Parliamentary Acts, the target of missionaries' good intentions and girls' bad ones, and entitled, if I felt like it and there was enough room, to doss down in the Sailors' Home.

The first problem presented by nautical life was how to get aboard the ship. A slippery gangway reached up from the wharf to the Lotus's afterdeck, but there was no one to welcome me at the top. After a few damp minutes I climbed the gangway nervously and looked around me. I was on a dirty iron deck littered with pieces of timber, scraps of rope, and coils of wire, like the junk room in a ship chandler's. A heavy wooden door led into the upper works, and as the rain was coming down my neck persistently I opened it and stepped inside.