I was first introduced to Uncle Walter walking in the crowd on the wide pavement of the road leading back to Aghia Sophia in Istanbul. He was a short man, and was wearing a blue sailor’s cap, under which his hair was still thick, but flecked with grey. His neck was sun bronzed and seen from behind, which is how ak first pointed him out to me, the thickness of his neck and the broadness of his shoulders and upper body were accentuated by the broad check shirt he was wearing. – Heavily muscled, I thought, like a weightlifter. – He was a stoker in the Merchant Navy, ak told me.
He had the body of a man used not only to sustained physical effort, but also to working in the heat, shoveling coal into the fires of steam turbine boilers, so that ships could run and trade could be carried over the seas. - Stoking fires, and he had a fiery temprament to match, ak warned me. – Difficult to get to know, I thought. Irrascible, but a good man to have on your side in a tight corner.
He turned to walk down a side street, and as we allowed him to become separated from us in the crowd, he became almost lost to view.
I wondered what routes he had sailed, and how often he had come accross the Mediterranean Sea here to Istanbul.
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