IN THE CIRCUMSTANCES they could not have been more fortunate. Tertian was what was known in the Navy as a “happy ship”: from the day that she had been commissioned, her officers and men had shaken down and integrated to form the mysterious chance medley that makes such a ship, and into which two more animals were easily assimilated. Besides, she was only fulfilling the role of her familiar alias “Noah’s Ark” — a nickname that had followed inevitably when Lieutenant Commander Andrew Knorr, R.N., had been appointed to her command — as the shipboard sages pointed out.
As well as being the “Owner” of his Ark and of a flaming red beard, Knorr was also the owner of the legendary Barkis, some seventy amiable pounds of solid white bull terrier who had conformed to life in a destroyer almost as though he had evolved there. Even his descent of a vertical ladder or companionway was a fine bold adaptation: with forelegs in diving position and hind legs extended, his mighty body steeled, he would hurl himself down the length as though on a chute, gaining such impetus on the way that he usually slithered several feet along the deck, taking the legs away from anyone unfortunate enough to be in his path as he went. While the ship’s company admired and respected their skipper for qualities such as unruffled seamanship or his unique — and contagious — general enthusiasm, it was quite obvious that Barkis regarded him merely as a willing, easily taken-in slave.
When Knorr eventually issued an official warning, therefore, that any subsequent infringement of ship’s discipline that could be traced to the presence of the new arrivals on board would result in their being dumped overboard forthwith (an operation that he, personally, would supervise), no one was unduly alarmed.
The dog had been discovered in a storeroom, most fortuitously by none other than APO Reid, who duly reported its presence to the Buffer, receiving the sole comment “Flaming Ark is flaming right —” who had in turn reported it to the First Lieutenant, who had only inquired hopefully whether it was large enough to devour the fecund Hyacinthe and then reported it in turn to the Captain, who had instructed the Office of the Watch to enter it in the ship’s log. Finally SBA MacLean had volunteered to assume responsibility. So, officially at least, one dog had been processed through all the proper channels, and was now on the ship’s strength.
Even if he had understood, this knowledge would have been little consolation in his present insensate terror. Tertian went about her ordained way, her crew long conditioned and balanced to the cramped discomfort and ceaseless sawing movement of a destroyer slicing through the Atlantic swell. Up on the bridge Barkis relaxed on a bunk in the Captain’s sea cabin or rolled nonchalantly along the decks in widespread nautical gait, conforming effortlessly to the ship’s every movement. Below decks in Number Two Mess, Hyacinthe slept the hours away in her small swaying hammock, peacefully unmoved by all uncouth human disturbance.
But to the small newcomer, straining to keep his balance, even his faculties, under a fixed table in a small cramped mess, what was routine to them must have been a heaving nightmare of confusion and terror from the moment he had staggered to his feet in the slippery pitching blackness of the storeroom.
He had lived his entire life on the open road, yet safely contained within the small nomadic world of which he was the beloved and valued center. In one flame-seared moment that world had gone, and with it all security: he had come through the terrors of fire and water to waken now in what was possibly the most terrible element of all to him — confinement. Confinement in an unstable, unyielding steel box filled with the hurrying boots of strangers and their unrecognizable speech sounds: his ears assailed by fearful incessant noise, ranging from the routine background of bells and wailing pipes and disembodied voices of the loud hailers, the whine of turbines to the wind’s eerie descant, the crashing roar of heavy seas, the thunder of guns that reverberated throughout every inch, and the great muffled shudder of exploding depth charges. An inhuman metallic world now that sought to deafen him to the gentle familiarity of tinkling bells and the clap of hands, the creak of rolling wheels, the notes of birdsong and flute: an arid world that would deaden his senses to the smell of damp woods and fresh green fields, hot living smells of fairgrounds, the promise of wood smoke.
Above all, it must have been the loneliest of worlds, with only the slightest association of voice and smell between this human who now ordered his life, MacLean, and that deep, however brief, attachment to the soldier from whom stretched back his only link with his lost world. The soldier had shared that world once, traveled in the caravan and left his imprint on its people — the transference to him had been of the dog’s own volition. Later in the terrors of the sea there had grown a close interdependence. Now there was only this unyielding stranger with the competent but impersonal hands, a brusque exclusion in his voice and unsmiling eyes.
A rope collar had been fashioned for him, not for restraint, for he was too terrified to move anywhere by himself, but to stop him sliding around the deck. And he was kept tied up, with only brief forays on the end of a line to where the depth charges were secured over the stern. Here, in an area frequently washed down by following seas, Barkis came to lift his Olympian leg, or squat, while his attendant of the moment stood by with a hygienic bucket of water. Here, to this sterile, salty substitute for trees and fragrant earth, came the trembling newcomer, creeping low, hesitantly testing the deck as though expecting it to give way beneath his paws, or scrabbling desperately for purchase as it heeled, the whites of his eyes supplicating the white-maned restless unknown that filled the horizon beyond the rails. Barkis displayed an overwhelmingly generous interest when they met there, but the exuberance of his greeting, the excited lash of his whiplike tail and the playful buttings of his rock-hard head invariably capsized the small dog’s already precarious balance and terrified him even more.
Hyacinthe had appraised him the first day with a cold green gooseberry eye, apparently found nothing to alarm or disquiet, and thereafter ignored him.
Although his body shivered constantly, he was otherwise unanimated. All the spark had gone out of him, the endearing topknot had been cut off, his shaggy ears trimmed short: he was drearily unattractive in his misery, and he had become very thin. He spent the hours routinely in the dark obscurity of the kneehole under the sick bay desk, or under the Mess table, never curled up or sprawled in canine relaxation, but always tensely crouched, giving the impression that he was somehow clinging on against a suspended movement and dared not let go.
Both from safeguard and training, he had been taught never to eat anything offered by strangers. Only one familiar hand had slipped tidbits into his expectant mouth, and then always in reward, the same hand that had never touched him save in praise or affection. There had been no unsteady isolated bowl set before him, its unrecognizable contents to be eaten alone or apart. Food had always meant a shared savory intimacy at the end of the day’s work or travel, her plate or the pot to lick clean afterwards, perhaps a morsel fallen from the old man’s fingers, a handout from the monkey — and, if there were any doubts over the rights, there had always been her smiling nod of reassurance.
MacLean attributed the dog’s refusal of food now to a combination of seasickness and changed environment. In charge of an animal experimental laboratory before the war, he had known plenty of sick and miserable animals in his time to refuse food, and almost always they had become reconciled to their lot in the end and had started eating once more. But as the days passed, and his charge continued to exist on tinned milk alone, he was forced to admit that there was a difference between those withdrawn, hunger-striking animals and this miserable but adamant little dog who would accept a biscuit, then lay it on the deck, where it would remain untouched: or if confronted with a bowl, would give the contents a perfunctory sniff, then turn away as though he had no stomach for them.
MacLean tried seasick remedies, put sulfur in the dog’s drinking water; he mixed conditioning powders and emptied them down the unprotesting throat, vitamin pills by the handful followed. He doused the coat with flea powder and searched his memory for every last veterinary remedy dispensed to distraught owners of small pampered dogs who had gone off their food. He even — and this went very much against his principles — tried feeding by hand; but his disapproval inevitably communicated through his fingers and voice, and in the end it was only by holding the muzzle and waiting until the throat was forced to swallow that he achieved anything, and then the dog retched up again. This behavior, and the dog’s utter dejection and constant shivering irritated MacLean exceedingly: it went against his professional grain. For the first time in his life, he had encountered an animal whose will to resist him was unyielding.
He even consulted the doctor, who thought that the dog might still be shocked, suffering from exposure, inhaled some oil . . . at least he was drinking, it couldn’t be rabies . . . give him time, he’d never heard of a dog starving itself to death.
“My prescription would be time,” he ended, looking sympathetically at the abject huddle with the round baffled eyes at MacLean’s feet. “Time — and lots of TLC.”
“TLC?”
“Tender Loving Care — plus, plus,” said the doctor, who took a perverse delight in rousing his dour SBA’s invariable reaction to any sentiment. He was not disappointed now.
“Thank you, sir,” said MacLean, his voice as acidly disapproving as his face.
“Patient’s name, rank, and number?” asked the doctor, happily adding a row of hearts and hieroglyphics to TLC on a medical form.
“It hasn’t got a name,” said MacLean, stiff with outrage at this foolishness.
The doctor looked up in genuine astonishment. “Well, you might start in right there with the treatment — at least give it a personality, poor little devil,” he said. “I wouldn’t feel like eating myself if I were nothing but an It,” he added, half to himself, as MacLean departed. And he wondered, not for the first time, at the complex nature of this man whose hands he had seen at work on a tiny sick monkey with the most expert deftness — yet with less actual involvement with his subject than he had seen in a mechanic dealing with a choked carburetor. It was the same with “It”: how, out of the whole ship’s company, one who quite obviously had no affinity for dogs should have taken over this one was a corresponding puzzle.
His SBA was a reticent man, and apart from once prying out the fact that he had worked for a vet and in an animal laboratory before joining up at the outbreak of war, the doctor knew little of him other than what he had observed. He spent his off-duty time in the sick bay, when it was empty, reading and knitting or playing solitary chess. Very much a loner, not liked by his shipmates, yet not disliked either — rather one who was treated with wary circumspection, for he more than made up for his small stature by the bite and lash of his tongue. He ran the sick bay and dispensary with impersonal extreme efficiency. The long-mouthed lead swinger got short and scornful shift, but he could show deepest concern and unstinting gentleness towards the wounded or seriously ill. In the six months that he had been on board, the doctor could not fault him in any of his duties.
Periodically after a shore leave, he would appear so drunk at the end of the brow that it was so far only by a miracle — or by a deliberate Nelson-eye approach to his problem on the part of the duty personnel — that he had avoided the defaulter’s list. But no matter how monumental the hangover, how green his face, how black an eye, he had never failed to report for duty dead on time in total efficient control of himself, and smelling strongly of peppermints.
“I’m chust partial to a wee dram at times. It helps,” had been his only explanation when the exasperated MO, putting a stitch in above an eyebrow, had asked him once why he had to drink to such heroic excess each time.
“Helps what?” he had persisted.
“To pass the time,” said MacLean woodenly.
The doctor returned to his job of censoring the crew’s letters. Over the months he had become expert at skimming over the contents, long familiar with those incautious hands that invariably needed his deleting attention. Among this week’s batch was one that he read twice:
HMS TERTIAN
c/o GPO
July 1st 1940
Dear Corporal Sinclair,
It is my sincere hope that when this reaches you, you will be well on the road to recovery. Perhaps even enjoying some sick leave. I write this line just to tell you that I have your belongings in safe keeping. I found the enclosed souvenir among them and enclose it for luck. The clapper was missing, but I have fashioned another.
I would be glad to receive a line from you. There seems little likelihood that I will be able to dispatch the above mentioned article for some time as we are kept on the hop just now. But I will see to it that it reaches you in good condition one day as promised.
Yours sincerely,
Neil MacLean, SBA
It was the first letter of MacLean’s that the doctor ever remembered. He had a more retentive memory for names than the writer had credited him with. “Very interesting,” he said to himself, wielding the censor stamp, and was immensely tempted to write “and bow-wow to you too!” under its imprint, “Very interesting but why . . .” He replaced a tiny brightly polished silver bell, neatly cocooned in a pillbox.
MacLean wasted no deep thought in a name. He had been brought up on a farm where each succeeding sheep dog had inherited the name of its predecessor. Thus there was always a Ria if it were a dog, and a Meg if it were a bitch. This was therefore a Ria. It was as simple as that.
“I would be obliged if you would be calling the dog Ria to accustom it,” he said to Reid and his messmates over tea, before picking up his book and preparing to read as usual right through the meal. “Ree-ah,” he emphasized.
“Ria,” said Reid obligingly, “Ria, Ria —” and he leaned over to pat the dog. “Good dog, Ria,” then, “Eh, but you’re nowt but skin and bone, luv— we’ll have to feed you up.” At the concern in this voice, the ears pricked slightly and the tail stirred. Reid cleaned his plate with a piece of bread, but his offering was forestalled.
“The dog is getting fed once a day — by me,” said MacLean with cold flat emphasis, and returned his eyes to the pages of Admiral the Lord Nelson.
So, phoenix-like, and most sadly, arose from the ashes of his former life this new dog, Ria: as unlike that other as it was possible to be: no hint of the vivacious little professional in this stricken-eyed cowering shadow. The only hint of his exceptional intelligence might have been remarked in the short time it took him to put meaning to words of a new language, and to interpret the message of ship’s bells and pipes. But in a mess where there was a constant turnover as the watches changed, there was little time or opportunity to observe anything as intangible as this. His bewilderment and pathos had reached out to the men as a whole; they had tried to give him the reassurance he so obviously needed, to make him one of them, but their attempts wilted under the consistently disapproving glare of one who so forbiddingly kept himself to himself, and made it quite clear that this extended to his belongings as well.
The stolid Reid, the only man who ever said what he felt like to MacLean, argued the necessity of rigid discipline. “It’s a dog’s life all right, the way you’re going about it,” he said, and received the not unreasonable reply that an undisciplined animal roaming around underfoot in an emergency could be a real menace.
“It is essential that he learns a set place at all times,” said MacLean, “and is never distracted from it.”
Reid’s reply was succinctly monosyllabic.
In the meantime Ria existed, physically at least, as a fairly adequate diet was being added to the milk in the guise of porridge, gravy and cod liver oil, all of which he lapped up with tidy disinterest.
In contrast, shipboard life held the warmest and happiest of worlds for the monkey, who had no complexities of devotion to suffer a sea change, and almost immediately had become a very distinct personality, with a name, Louis, the beginnings of a wardrobe and some fifteen willing subjects in his personal kingdom of Number Five Mess.
Leading Seaman Lessing, who had owned a capuchin monkey in civilian life, had interested himself in Louis’s welfare from the beginning when he had been housed, a sick, listless bundle, in a cardboard box in one of the boiler rooms. Here he had received the best clinical attention from MacLean, but grew daily more apathetic. Lessing had insisted that if the little animal did not have some constant contact with a living being he would simply pine away, no matter how excellent the treatment.
After trying, and failing, to persuade Hyacinthe to share the warmth of her fur coat, he took matters into his own hands one day and removed the monkey to the mess deck. Here he provided both warmth and contact with his own body, first wrapping Louis in the folds of a woolen scarf. He slept with this bundle and ate with it on his lap. At the end of his four hours off, when the watches changed, he virtually press-ganged his opposite number into continuing this treatment. For days, Louis was never out of someone’s arms or stuffed inside the comforting warmth of a jersey or duffel coat, and by the time it was decreed that he was fit enough to be left to his own devices on the deck for a while, he was everyone’s concern.
A seaboot stocking had been cut and neatly tailored to make a pullover; he already owned one pair of knitted shorts with a second pair on the needles; and another pair of devoted hands had netted a small hammock like Hyacinthe’s. It was found impossible to train him to the use of Hyacinthe’s sandbox, however: Louis had a happy disregard for such niceties of behavior. Fortunately there was no shortage of cotton waste from the engine room, and his shorts were lined with this.
It was an incredibly cramped and congested kingdom, directly above a magazine, much of it already taken up with a maze of pipes and cables, the bolted-down benches and mess tables, lockers, hatches, ladders, even the large round bulk of a gun mounting and ammunition hoists. Yet in it some fifty men, divided between the port and starboard watches, lived, slept and had their comfortless being. At night when the hammocks were slung there were seldom enough to go round and the luckless stretched out on lockers or mess tables. They were seldom dry; the deckhead dripped constantly from condensation, and in heavy weather some of the water swirling along the decks inevitably found its way down the ammunition hoist and sloshed to and fro to the ship’s roll so that even their kit in the lockers was soaked. A rich fug compounded of steaming wool, bilge water, socks, tobacco and the stale reminder of the last meal permeated everything. It was hardly anyone else’s idea of the perfect kingdom, but Louis thrived there. From the point of view of a very small monkey it could not have been more ideal, for there was always company, always something going on, always some human only too glad to alleviate the monotony or shut off the mind to the discomfort in the parenthetical company of something so responsive, so innocently amusing and mischievous as a capuchin monkey.
Even when the ship was at action stations and Louis was tethered by a collar and chain to a table, he was still not alone, for there were always two hands stationed at the ammunition whips leading up from the magazine. If nothing was happening he would occupy himself endlessly polishing the table with a much-prized yellow duster in one hand, an empty tin of polish in the other, or swinging in his hammock slung below the table. At the first explosion of guns or depth charges, however, he hopped into the hammock and covered his head in the folds of a long woolen scarf. He was always nervous and particularly mischievous after such a time, and the hands soon learned to keep anything they valued out of his reach afterwards: someone would usually give him an additional cigarette to his daily ration of two as a consoling distraction.
He escaped once, unfortunately fetching up in the Chief Petty Officer’s Mess. Here he rifled the drawers, found a tin of brilliantine, then using a clean shirt as a polishing rag, he stickily burnished everything within reach, including a photograph of somebody’s wife and twin daughters. The official reprimand and warning that followed this escapade was so sharp that thereafter Number Five Mess took steps to train their Louis to such a remarkable degree of invisibility when authority was in the offing that it became a nightly challenge to the duty officer making rounds to try and spot him.
Louis’s escapade was soon forgotten. Authority, recognizing the tedium and discomfort of the lower decks, was benevolent. Perhaps even a little envious, for sometimes the MO, on the professional pretext that he liked to follow up his patients, would borrow Louis for a visit to the wardroom. On the first occasion that he met the Captain there, also visiting, with Barkis as usual in tow, his flaming beard so excited Louis’s grooming instincts that he threw a very human tantrum when the time came to return him. Barkis had viewed him with considerable reserve, his pink-rimmed piggy eyes rolling in acute embarrassment: being bidden to suffer without action the indignity of having his tail tweaked by a monkey was too much. Thereafter he tucked it well under and remained firmly seated when he encountered Louis.
Tertian had returned to the Biscay coast after Falmouth and ferried back hundreds more Polish and British troops. Shortly after this she proceeded to Gourock, and there she was taken from the Home Fleet and given over to Atlantic convoy escort duty. The unremitting exhausting grind of those first few hundred miles outward bound to Halifax on the Western Approaches passage were soon intensified when the long-range Focke Wulf Kondors were able to operate out of Bordeaux, and not only to attack but act as aerial spotters for U-boats. Although the hands could fall out at action stations if there was no imminent urgency, they had to be ready to fall in again at minutes’ notice, so there was seldom any letting up, and never more than the brief snatch of sleep. But the U-boats were not yet ranging right across the Atlantic, and there was an area, like Tom Tiddler’s Ground, before the convoys reached their eighteenth west meridian rendezvous and there dispersed to continue alone or with Canadian-based protection, and Tertian turned back with the homeward-bound convoy. Before she steamed back into range of the hungry U-boat, there could be a brief interlude when a man might sleep for a few uninterrupted hours, finish a hot meal, or even find a pair of dry socks; a time to obliterate from the mind the shocking toll of lives and tonnage in their last flock and appraise the new assortment.
There might even be time then for the off-duty watch in Number Five Mess to bring out a harmonica or a concertina and entertain — and be entertained by — their mascot.
The moment any music started Louis would jump down from whatever shoulder he was favoring at the moment, bob up and down until someone found his enamel mug, then break into a kind of shuffling dance, skillfully catching anything thrown to him in the mug, gibbering in the grimace that his audience had learned to interpret as a smile. Or, if someone produced the trapeze that needless to say had been fashioned for him, he would go through an expert and unvarying routine of gymnastics. He expected applause and, when he got it, would make the rounds with his mug for reward. Sometimes the men teased him by withholding the applause; then he would chatter in frustration, pulling at Lessing’s hands, or retire to his hammock and sulk with his back turned, his little blue pullover pulled up over his face. When the claps and whistles were forthcoming at last, he would wait like some temperamental prima donna for the right pitch of rising enthusiasm before he appeared again. When he was really offended — and he was unexpectedly sensitive — it was a long time before the offender could win himself back into favor.
If Louis’s gamin, chimerical qualities were a relaxing diversion to tired tense men, then they in turn gave him everything that he could have wished for: the love and constant company that he craved, adulation, warmth and comfort, ingenious toys for his amusement. He even had his own place at the table, where he downed thick cocoa or very sweet tea from his own mug and picked at whatever delicacies the messman and his messmates could heap upon his plate. If he lacked one thing in his little kingdom of Number Five Mess, that was the other half of his life’s act, his steed and companion, the dog.