Skinning Out – to Sea by Mick Hugo review: life aboard ship in the swinging 60s

A teenager’s sense of wonder at the world opening up to him is honestly and artlesssly portrayed in this memoir of his time in the merchant navy

^‘We all hate home / And having to be there,” as Larkin’s “Poetry of Departures” puts it, but, as the poem says, we prefer the idea of running away to sea – “crouched in the fo’c’sle / Stubbly with goodness” – to the reality. Here, though, is an account of what it was like to do just that: to leave a council estate – to “skin out” – as a teenager and travel the world with the merchant navy.

In the 1960s, when Hugo was at sea, there was more than a residual romance to the job, especially as so much of it was exotically unfamiliar. When Hugo has his first spliff in a Chilean dockside bar, he is doing so around the same time the Beatles are having theirs. This is an era before widespread travel: there were few other opportunities for working-class boys (or, indeed, orphans: Barnardo’s supplied a regular stream of recruits) to gain such experience.

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