AMATEUR FIREMAN.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 10916, 4 November 1913, Page 2

AMATEUR FIREMAN.

ANXIOUS TO GET HOME.

' VOLUNTEERS FOR STOKEHOLD. GETS HOT RECEPTION. BUT WINS OUT. « An intending passenger by the Wa- | ,hW from Wellington on Friday night ; who was Induced to plav the part of > fireman In orcler to enable the steamer i to gdt a war has supplied the " Timaru Poet" with a very interesting account of hk experience on the passage to | Lyttelton. " I had," he sap, " business of extreme urgoncy in South Can- 1 terbury and had booked by the Wahine. Indeed, it was necessary to orosa to the South Island even if I had to swim Cook Strait. At 7.30 p.m., therefore, when I met an anxi-ous-looking officer on the wharf, I bailed him' up and asked if wc should get,away. 'You a passenger '—Yea. ' Wellj tnen, I'm two men short in the Stokehold arid unless I can get two wo pan't move.' Silence and a pause for meditation. Then I made up my mind. Here was a chance to ensure getting over, and one moreover which promised some good copy. I have never used a coal shovel before and am not likely l to again, but I must gb south." It was the chief engineer that was talking to tlio young man and after some show of hesitation; the intending passenger—who surely was a journalist—agreed to go into tho stokehold for a free passago and a small payment. _ Rigged out in brown overalls supplied br the engineer he took his place in the 8 to 12 watch and then to quote his own words, " the band began to play." WIFE DANGEROUSLY ILL. The amateur fireman's, troubles began at the very beginning. His appearance and his ignorance of everything appertaining to his new work gave him away at once and a dozen men in scanty costumes and with hot, angry faces clustered threateningly around, him. "They all spoke together," his story continues,, "but all to the one refrain, 'Are you a Union man?' The answer,"' No, but —' was drowned in an angry shout, and. two or three shovels were swung up above my head. Among the torrent of angij words ' three phrases only were distinct, but they were oloquent enough. 'Scab!' 'Blackleg!' ana 'Get out, before yon have to be carried out!' Under the circumstances the advice was sound, arid they saw I took it. They hustled me to tho ladder; one man even folI lowed me on deck. Him I reasoned I with thus: 'Now look here, mate, I'm 1 not doing this to hurt you or your Union. I'm a passenger and I want .. to get south. You a married manP Yes.r. Well, you will understand. My I wife is ill—dangerously—at Timaru. She's a stranger there and I've got to get down. It's life or death* and that's why I want to do my bit to get the ship away.' " This appeal was successful; The men were only angry now that, the position had not been explained to them before, and the amateur fireman was allowed to take his place among the, rest, even welcomed with a rough kind of sympathy and appreciation. ■ IN THE TEETH OF A GALE. Tho next stage in the anxious husband's experience can be described only in. his own vivid language. Even people who have made the passage between. Wellington and Lyttelton in a luxurious "deck cabin can understand the feelings of a landsman under such conditions and amidst / such surroundings, j "There was a distant tinkling of bells," he says, " and then the throb! B throb! of the engines and the quiver

pf the propellers. We were off. and I shovelled. coal, clumsily enough, into an iron barrow, wheeled it out of the bunker, ducked through a dangerous low doorway, and dumped it on the floor before the furnaces. A gale was driving dowit the ventilators, raising a whirlwind of coal-dust that eddied everywhere, the air waa thick with it land desperately, intolerably hot. As each .furnace door was opened a blast of withering heat drove ecorchingly out. When we got out into the Strait the vessel began to kick, and this, superseded to the temperature of 100 degrees in the coal-dust, the necessity for-the new chum to keep at it, the fact that he had had two sleepless nights, had just travelled over 400 miles by train and had come aboard after a greasy whitebait supper, all these things tended to make the conditions far from ideal." One_ would think so. But the amateur, it is plain •to s6o, though his tale is modest [ enough, was undaunted, and as he stuck manfully to his task,_ his own misery pressing down on his racked body and weary' soul, his resoect for his toiling companions mounted almost to reverence. . BLACK, SCORCHING NIGHTMARE. • One more extract from this story of a black, scorching nightmare is due.to .the.men who stood by the ''scab" through the long hours of his fiery ordeal. " Then I had the fireman in a new light," he tells, " as a man ind a .brother, a fellow of kindly sympathy, good chaps all. Try to imagine the conditions under which they work, .half naked, dripping sweat as,the clouds tdrip rain, toiling as galley.-slaves scarcely ever toiled, breathing in and being coated by a fctorm of coal-grime. On© : would ■ cell _ his immortal soul for a cool drink; but all things are hot—water more than tepid and ( coffee a misnomer for hot And dirty water. You are in a world apart, • the* rest forgotten, closed in by iron doors and past and future are things of naught. Everything is bound up in the present, the urgent need to shovel and wheel, wheel and »hovel. The ship must go, the hungry fires mti«b fed no matter how or what th« individual feels. A legion of devils may be battering down the gates of < heaven, thrones and empires be tottering to a fall,..but no thought can be spared for Bilch trifles. The fires I The fires I They devour coal; they cry aloud for more, and every soul in the stokehold is tensed to the urgent needs of the present." Sea-sick, weak and dizzy, the amateur struggled on to the end, the men who had wanted to brain him at the start "hurrying their own work," as ho says, " and doing the better part of mine." At Lyttelton, still his friends, they urged him to " clear out sharp" and avoid trouble, and he was fain enough to do their bidding.