Ships that pass in the night.

It was 1964 and I was working for the coastal shipping company FT Everard when I was ordered to be on the next train to Great Yarmouth and join the barge Will Everard. A few hours later I climbed aboard and introduced myself to the skipper, a Thames waterman by the name of Jim Penn. We had an uneventful trip round the coast to the company yard in Greenhithe, Kent and I only spent a few days in Jim's company, but he was to leave a deep impression on me. As well as being a highly skilled boat handler Jim had led an adventurous life and was widely travelled. Still only in his thirties he had been a tug skipper in the Persian Gulf, lived and worked with goatherds in Spain and fished with the sardine fleet. Well read and equally at home propping up the bar of a Soho pub as behind the wheel of a tug in the Millwall Dock, Jim was a true working class bohemian. But more than this he was clearly a good man, an open minded man of the left. As I say, he left a deep impression and although we did not meet again I never forgot him.
Thirty five years later I was working on the upper Thames, towing a large pontoon into position in preparation for the annual Great River Race. I dropped alongside a passenger boat lying on the pier and got chatting to the skipper. It turned out that we had both worked the east coast trading barges and in the course of our conversation I asked if he had ever met a bloke called Jim Penn. He hesitated for a moment before replying,"I'm Jim Penn". After all those years there was no way that we would have recognised each other. Jim had continued his adventures, had become a respected marine artist and although retired was driving passenger boats on odd days just to keep his hand in. We didn't talk for long; the tide waits for no man and we both had to go about our business. We had a couple of lengthy phone conversations and talked about meeting up some time, but we never got round to it. A couple of years later I learnt that Jim had died. Truly ships that passed in the night.