Under Eight Flags

Book excerpt: After 11 years at sea, Tony Winstanley saw little reason for staying in the British Merchant Navy. He had reached a dead end. Difficulty with passing exams, and the prospect of long absences from home cast a gloomy future. The answer was to emigrate to Canada, to make a new life for himself and his family. This meant finding a good job ashore. This second volume of memoirs is about his futile attempts to achieve this. He toiled in a fish plant, took a soul-destroying job as a salesman, even worked in an ice cream factory where he was fired for dropping the flavour of the month onto the conveyor belt. Finally he realized that the only way to support a growing family was to pursue his destiny to remain at sea. During the nine years covered by this book he sailed in cargo and passenger ships both deep sea and coastal, and did a stint inland aboard a tug on Lake Okanagan. "I had a tendency to quit jobs if I did not like them. This was hard on my wife, but we always managed to pay the bills."