An officer and a gentlewoman: Life is tough as a woman at sea, but dangerous liaisons must and can be avoided, a former merchant sailor tells Beverly Kemp

Stephanie Sutton is something of an expert at fending off sexual harassment. The cook who grabbed her where nicer men wouldn't received a well-aimed kick in the groin. A punch from a deckhand was intercepted in similar fashion. Silly boys. A woman who has spent 14 years in the merchant navy is unlikely to be a marshmallow.

She is also the last person to be surprised by the hiccups aboard Royal Navy ships now that women serve alongside the men. 'The tensions and the relationships that develop when men and women are closeted together for long periods are inevitable,' she says.

In recent weeks, there have been two courts martial. Two petty officers who had been conducting an adulterous affair were jailed after stealing pounds 11,000 from a safe. And another officer was was given a suspended sentence for biting a female sub- lieutenant's buttock.

Women have sailed in the merchant navy for more than 40 years and have had to make their own rules on how best to cope with the men. Always heavily outnumbered, 1,330 women now serve alongside almost 32,000 men.

Ms Sutton joined the merchant navy in 1979. After qualifying as a third officer with BP, which she had joined as a cadet, she switched to contract work on foreign ships. She often sailed as a lone woman among crews from anywhere from Guyana to the Philippines, and quickly grasped the first lesson of survival. 'I could never afford to show I was upset. It would only have invited hassle. The most important thing was to look after my butt. I became a little brick wall that everything unpleasant bounced off.'

The crews' attitudes to her ranged from protective to hostile. 'I had to learn to ignore the insults and become a figure of authority. The only way was to be 110 per cent professional and make sure I was capable of doing every job I asked my men to do.'

The frequent complaint that the efficiency of ships is compromised by women struggling to carry out the most physically demanding jobs was something she made sure could never be levelled against her. She climbed 50ft masts and knew how to work every piece of machinery on board. She navigated ships in treacherous seas and lugged crates of beer and bananas until she was close to collapse.

Ms Sutton even rejects the idea of separate facilities for women at sea: 'How can we expect to work alongside men as equals if we demand our own washing areas?' She only insisted on her own cabin. 'There would be one shower and toilet for 10 men and myself. Often you had to go through the shower to reach the toilet, so I grew accustomed to men wandering by when I was showering. At least there was a curtain.'

Nights were a different matter. Locking her cabin door was a fire hazard. Leaving it unlocked became a personal hazard. Every party brought at least one nocturnal visitor. 'My door would fly open and in would come a very drunk man in his underpants, slurring, 'How about it, then?' Most times one stern look was enough to send them packing, but if they persisted, I really lost my temper. The next morning they would be mortified and full of apologies.'

Was she ever frightened? 'Only once in a small port on the Colombian coast. Four stevedores pulled their knives, dragged me down a hatch and tried to rape me. All I can remember is screaming as loud as I possibly could until they eventually let me go and ran off. My body was black with bruises for a fortnight. From then on, I carried a supply of morning-after pills everywhere.'

Now 30, Ms Sutton has left all that behind her. She and her husband, Nick, also a merchant navy officer, are expecting their first baby in August. At their Dorset home, she pours tea with one hand and idly strokes a dozing cat with the other.

'I didn't grow up with a yearning to command tankers,' she says. 'Far from it. When I was at school I would burst into tears if someone said something nasty to me. Going to sea was more a dose of teenage rebellion.'

But it wasn't easy securing a cadetship in 1979 if you were female and 16 years old. 'I walked into P&O and the personnel manager told me that he was only interviewing me as a matter of courtesy and had no intention of offering me a job,' she recalls. BP took a more enlightened view and offered her a cadetship.

Then began a gruelling five years of training: merchant naval college, months at sea, technical exam after technical exam. And the discovery that cadets are often the entertainment for their seniors.

'My mind was always trying to keep one step ahead of all the practical jokes.' Like the time she sat on a black lavatory seat - 'You try cleaning your backside yourself when it's covered with black boot polish.' She may have escaped the head- and eyebrow-shaving sessions, but instead she spent hours searching for non-existent items. Six out of the eight women Ms Sutton trained with dropped out, but she went on to win her class-one master mariner's ticket, which enables her to sail any merchant navy ship in the world.

Half the men dropped out, too. Some boys who were bullied until they could bear it no longer. 'It was tough,' she says. 'But if they couldn't cope with that, they wouldn't have survived at sea.

'Certain men are as soft as puppies where family matters are concerned. If they had news that a child was very ill or their divorce papers arrived, they would come to me because they didn't feel able to cry in front of another man. I would take them for a walk on shore and try to cheer them up. I think it really helped them to have a woman on board.'

The odds are high that a young, single heterosexual woman working far from home in a closed environment with men for up to six months at a time will occasionally find herself attracted to some of them. 'I picked men I could trust never to boast about it, the stable and loyal ones who would keep their mouths shut,' Ms Sutton says.

'Of my generation of women sailors in the merchant navy, I cannot think of anyone who broke up a family. The stories about the Royal Navy show that some families are suffering because of women going to sea, but I am sure that 90 per cent of women in the RN do their jobs properly; the other 10 per cent attract bad publicity.

'If I were going on a long-haul trip, the last thing I would have thought of was packing flimsy lace knickers. I took the most horrendous big, cotton affairs that offered maximum comfort under a boiler suit. But I did have to take supplies of tampons. Try finding them in Colombia or Ecuador.'

Ms Sutton says that the moment she felt herself becoming emotionally involved with a man, she would end their relationship. 'I tried not to think about it when I was working,' she says. 'I couldn't have done my job properly if my defences were down. There was no way I could risk a relationship unless it was kept casual.'

Until Nick. They met on a tanker heading for Barcelona. She was chief officer, he was chief engineer. Her brick wall collapsed. 'He just had the right hammer and chisel,' she laughs.

They never managed to sail together again, but weathered the long separations and married a year ago.

Last year poor health forced Ms Sutton to retire from the merchant navy. Nick noticed her ignoring people who spoke to her. She began stepping off the pavement in front of cars. She had developed a disease of the nerve between the ear and the brain. It is not yet known if the illness is progressive, but she has already lost 50 per cent of her hearing and now wears hearing aids in both ears.

'There is no point in getting emotional about it. I just accept it,' she says. It's only later, when we are looking at photographs of her at sea, that I detect a tear in her eye.

(Photograph omitted)