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say something complimentary about the shipowner,’ Rawlings scoffed.
    â€˜But it’s true,’ snapped Mackinnon. ‘They were tough and uncompromising, and wanted only a profit. Some of them were absolute bastards and fed us shit – you both know the old story about the condemned food: “fit for cattle feed or ship’s stores” – and that’s quite true, quite true. But companies like Eastern Steam
did
care up to a point. You joined Eastern Steam, not some nebulous organisation called the Merchant Navy. As a navy the thing neverexisted, no matter how many ignorant journalists write about the
QE2
being the “flagship of the British Merchant Navy”. No, companies like Eástern Steam did value loyalty and, though not really paternalistic, they looked after their employees in a generally responsible way.’ Mackinnon paused to finish his drink. ‘None of this sort of thing would have happened in Old Mother Dent’s day, I can tell you.’ Mackinnon put his glass on the bar and nodded at Woo before moving towards the door.
    â€˜Times change, sir. Even the Old Woman would have been unable to resist today’s pressures.’ Rawlings handed his glass to the steward then turned to find Mackinnon blocking his exit.
    â€˜She’d have found another way, mister,’ the Captain said with sudden vehemence, ‘not cast us off like rubbish!’
    Mackinnon felt irritated at the small breach with Rawlings. He did not like the man, but he was a tolerable Chief Officer, efficient in a lacklustre way. In common with many of his background, Mackinnon was entrenched behind the conservatism of the 1950s; he respected order, stability, and a pecking order in society, and viewed the arrest in their erosion as a necessary brake on an otherwise undisciplined descent into chaos. The industrial anarchy of the 1960s, and in particular the seamen’s strike of 1966, had marked a low-water point in John Mackinnon’s professional life. Nevertheless, he sympathised in general terms with Sparks’s robust and committed socialism, increasingly so as he watched the demise of companies like Eastern Steam; but he had worked too hard for what he had achieved to donate it, uncompensated and unguaranteed, on the altar of socialist fraternity. The change would come by evolution, and, as far as Mackinnon was concerned, socialist government in Britain had proved the worker was as capable of being corrupted by power as king, count or counsellor. By such associations as he had enjoyed with old Mrs Dent, withCaptain Shaw and through the experience of his own advancement in a capitalist trading company, he acknowledged the old order and largely approved of it.
    To Captain Mackinnon, precisely because he was a seaman as well as a ship-master, the pragmatic necessity of checks and balances, of authority and underlying freedom of will, were essential foundations of civilisation.
    â€˜Without order and discipline,’ he was fond of saying, quoting an eighteenth-century admiral, ‘nothing is achieved.’
    And precisely because of this received wisdom he did not believe that society did not exist, nor (as was becoming political dogma at the time) that it was a haphazard collection of individuals. If economic reason was to prevail, it required an underlying structure upon which to work. As far as Captain John Mackinnon was concerned, the collection of ships that went under the one-proud misnomer of the Merchant Navy were as fundamental as Parliament or the Bank of England. At the point of its being declared redundant, Captain Mackinnon’s views swerved violently off what had now, distressingly, become the tracks of orthodoxy. Therein lay the roots of his dislike of Mr Rawlings.
    Rawlings, though adequate enough in his glib way, was not what Mackinnon wanted in his Chief Officer. The man was facile and dutiful only to the point of routine. He was the product of the post-war age,