The submarine creeps quietly along, patrolling a mile or so off the coast of Sumatra, in the Straits of Malacca. This is the northern end, the widest part, the entrance to the Straits.
A fisherman on the shore stands for a moment staring out across the water that lies beyond the mud-banks. He is emaciated, this man, and clothed in rags, because most of the fish he catches are taken to feed the Japanese occupying troops. Lately they have increased their demands, since junk after junk, laden with rice and other food, has failed to arrive in the river-mouth. Some of the junks’ crews, landing later in fishing-boats to which they have been transferred, have carried strange tales of Englishmen boarding them in the middle of the silent night, taking them into their ships which float under water, and later putting them into any other smaller craft that they have encountered. They were given fine food in the Englishmen’s ships, and some have said that they would be happy to repeat the experience.
The fisherman cannot understand these things. Turning slowly away towards the fringe of palm-trees, he remembers the pall of smoke that darkened the horizon a few days ago. The Japanese were always more angry when these things happened: no man could call anything his own, in Sumatra, when the Japanese were angry.
A haze of heat hangs over the mud-banks. There has been no breath of wind for many days.
Thirty feet under the surface of the Straits a young man lay dreaming on his bunk: he lay on his back, moving as little and as seldom as was possible, following the habit that he had learned in the interests of keeping cool. There was little comfort in a bunk soaking and reeking of sweat, even when it was your own. Yet this bunk was comfortable: he knew it well, saw it as a sort of haven in which he could think his own thoughts, dream his own dreams. On patrol, the bunk was the nearest, the only approach to privacy. There were five bunks lining the sides of the submarine’s tiny wardroom, and the space was such that any two officers could have stretched out their arms from their respective bunks and shaken hands across the wardroom table. When you were used to it, the lack of space was no disadvantage: you learnt to take up as little room as possible, you learnt to do what you needed to do with a minimum of inconvenience to your fellows.
You learnt to lie in your bunk and dream. Many people more or less live on dreams, and most people entertain them to a greater or lesser degree. At periscope depth the silence and the warm inaction of being off watch are conducive to deep and happy dreaming: being young, wanting something softer than steel, more understanding than regulations, you dream mostly about the next leave and about getting back to England, the girl on leave and the girl in England being of course distinctly different people. The one on leave is in Kandy, the ancient capital of Ceylon, where unless you’ve had the best part of a bottle during the evening you’re liable to be woken and kept awake by the drums from the Temple of the Tooth. This girl in Kandy is surrounded by at least four hundred other officers who appreciate her as much as you do, and as a result the drums are rarely loud enough to wake you up, which is in its way a consolation. The girl in England is in many ways quite different, one of the ways being that she is fond of you, worries about you: she writes letters frequently, and she has none of the attraction of the girl on leave. She is, however, linked in your dreams with an old car, freedom of movement in a countryside dotted with your favourite pubs, the fact that you can rub your hand along the old wood of one of her father’s five-barred gates and feel all England under your hand. That’ll be when the war’s over, and another dream is the actual going home and telling them you’re on the way. This one takes you to sleep, where a real dream tells you there’s a target, and when Jimmy wakes you by kicking you in the side as he slides down from his bunk, it’s true, there’s a target and the order’s Diving Stations, stand by Gun Action for the nineteenth time.
A coaster steaming through the Straits with food for a Jap garrison, shells for Jap guns, clothes and comforts for Jap soldiers, and it’s going nowhere except to the bottom. From forty feet the submarine comes up like a cork, a rocket that hits the surface in an explosion of flying spray, wallows with the water streaming off her flanks. The hatches were open when they were level with the water, and the first thing the coaster knows of it is a shell that smacks in below the bridge: if they had a chance of living, that’d teach them to keep a better lookout. The shell kills the helmsman, smashes the steering-gear, and the coaster begins to swing off her course.
It makes a difference that she swings, because it throws the deflection out and the next round misses, while the coaster opens up with a light weapon mounted on the after end of her bridge. The water is perforated down the submarine’s starboard side and something clangs off the aftercasing to scream away astern. Shift target to stop the danger, and when the fourth round goes home, the back of the coaster’s bridge is shattered in an orange glow of flame. It was more than well placed, it was a lucky one and hit an ammunition locker. The submarine’s gun is used like a surgeon’s knife, shifts to a new point of aim, the water-line, to let some water in.
The coaster’s bridge is well on fire, and the blaze spreads aft where one of the crew has just taken a spectacular and unskilful dive over the side. Later there may be time to pick him up, but now it’s only business, Malacca Straits business. Shells are ripping in, and some of them are getting right inside the coaster’s belly before they burst. You glance at the Captain, and he’s grinning at you as though there was something funny about the way you look, your face black with the cordite smoke; and perhaps your face shows also that this is what you enjoy doing.
The coaster is settling lower in the water, and as you blow your whistle in short blasts that tell the Gun’s Crew to cease fire, her bow sweeps up and her stern goes down, down, the sea hissing as it drowns the flames and swallows the ship. Eleven minutes from the time the Gunlayer first pressed his trigger the submarine is alone on the surface, with a haze of smoke and some rubbish floating where the ripples spread, spreading till they lap the steaming mud-banks where the fishermen’s stakes stand stiff like sentries that have witnessed an execution.
The Gun’s Crew are busy clearing the platform of empty shell-cases, kicking the hot cylinders over the side, then training the gun fore-and-aft and jamming on the clamp. Shells come up from below to refill the water-tight ready-use lockers, the Gunlayer and Trainer unship their telescopes, and the five men drop down through the hatch, which clangs shut as the submarine heads back to pick up the one Jap survivor. He’s clinging to a plank which he must have thrown over before he dived. Two sailors drag him up over the saddle tanks, and he’s so dazed that he tries to bring his piece of timber aboard with him. He’s a lucky man, because everyone knows that the Japs have no healthy interest in our survivors, and he might not be welcomed as a guest were it not that the Intelligence people will like to have a chat with him. Moreover, he ought to be ashamed of himself, because in between being sick he mentions that he was the Captain of the ship. The best captains stay in their ships at least as long as the rest of their men.
The submarine turns and heads out towards the middle of the Straits, twelve knots and the bow-wave curling away as white as spilled milk. White shows clear and far on the dark blue surface, and the sinking will by now have been telegraphed to a Jap airfield, so while the submarine must put herself out in the deep water as quickly as her diesels will get her there, she must also have an eye on the sky. Within a matter of twenty minutes this sky holds three little specks growing bigger from the direction of Penang, but they have little time to get much bigger before the bridge is cleared, the vents drop open in the saddle-tanks and the submarine glides down until the needle in the depth-gauge is steadied at fifty feet. An order from the Captain puts the wheel over to starboard, swings her round towards the South, towards the One Fathom Bank and the minefields that guard the road to Singapore.
Look at a map of the Straits of Malacca and you’ll see, if the map is large enough, that where the Straits narrow about half-way down to Singapore is a light-house marking the One Fathom Bank. South from this point the way is barred by belts of submarine mines strung across the channel between the sandbanks. There are many belts of them swinging to and fro on their wire moorings, live things waiting in the dim, green silence, death in their horns and antennae. For nearly three years no submarine has passed south of the One Fathom Bank. One day, someone will have to be the first.
Back to zero again, with the figure twenty in the front of your mind, or at the back of it. Twenty is the number of rounds it took to sink the coaster and to kill four Japs who would rather have died than lived, which they could have done by jumping with their captain when they knew their ship was one for Davy Jones. Thinking around their preference for dying it was almost understandable that they often killed prisoners instead of marching them into cages, because they seemed to have the impression that a prisoner was a deader man on his feet than he was when stiff. It did not cover their habit of twisting bayonets round in a man’s stomach when he lay with rope round his ankles, though, and it was knowing of such habits as these that made it easy to kill Japs without considering them as being any more than monkeys with a blood-lust.
Twenty was something else as well, more personal, the age of the girl in England. Strange, that while you’re lying on a narrow bunk fifty feet under the surface of the Malacca Straits the girl may be playing a game of tennis in Sussex on a grass court that you helped to weed. To be honest, why think about her at all, when you know that it is only needing someone to think about that makes you do it about her? In your mind you are remembering not the look of her, but the look of Crowhurst, Heathfield, Mayfield and Cross-in-Hand, smelling the sweet tang of an early morning in the woods behind Buckholt. It was having someone, too, that you could know was thinking about you, a contact in the outside world where people used thin china and kept themselves clean and didn’t have destruction as their aim from day to day. When you heard Stuart Someone-or-Other reading the B.B.C. news and saying that a certain tonnage had been sunk by His Majesty’s Submarines in the Far East, you immediately thought of her listening and knowing that this was what you had done, and you were in her mind and she’d care if your letters stopped reaching her. That was why you thought of her, and you knew that when you were home and the war was over you’d see no more of her than of anyone else.
“What colour are her eyes, Sub?”
What colour? Grey, or green, or the mixture called hazel?
“Whose eyes?”
“Don’t tell me you weren’t mooning over Sheila.”
Sheila: she was the girl in Kandy, and you knew about her eyes. Green they were, like a cat’s eyes in the dark. After this patrol you were due for leave, and you hoped to be seeing something of those eyes. When you got back: it never occurred to anyone that they might not get back from this patrol, or the next, or the one after that, and if it did occur to them they thought about something else, because imagination is an enemy under water and there are enough enemies without making your own.
“What’s for supper, Chef?”
The cook shoves his head round the side of the water-tight door, an opener in his left hand menacing the tin in his right.
“Bangers, sir.”
“And mash, I hope.”
“Yes, sir.”
The Captain looks up from the signal-pad over which he has for some minutes been aimlessly waving a pencil.
“Bangers? You mean Soya Links, don’t you?”
“That’s right, sir.”
“Christ! Again?”
Chef looks at Chief, the Engineer Officer, an expression of pain and surprise on his unshaven face.
“Don’t like links, sir?”
“I’ll have yours, Chief.” Chef transfers his gaze to the Sub-Lieutenant. His expression says, “Ah, you’re all right: proper sailor’s taste.” He looks at the Captain. “What time we going up, sir?”
“About an hour. Tell the Cox’n I want him.”
“Aye aye, sir.” The Captain doodles on his signal pad until the Cox’n heaves himself through the bulkhead door.
“Yes, sir?”
“We’ll surface at eight-thirty, Cox’n.”
“Aye aye, sir.” He pauses. Then, “Nasty little bastard we got for’ard, sir.”
“Which?”
“The ruddy Jap, sir. Sullen cove. They got ‘im peelin’ spuds, but I don’t know as it’s right lettin’ ‘im ‘ave a knife.”
“Make him use a short, blunt one. And have the fore-end watch-keeper keep an eye on him.”
“Aye aye, sir. Shadwell’s looking after him now.” Everyone smiles. Shadwell could look after an army of Japs and they still wouldn’t try anything.
The Cox’n turns and walks for’ard. You slide off your bunk, tighten the belt of your shorts and go barefoot into the Control room to take over the watch. The Captain’s buzzer buzzes and you nip back to the Wardroom.
“Red lighting at eight, Sub.”
“Aye aye, sir.” No dreams now, only trim, course, speed, position, and a careful periscope search as the light fades over the Straits. Keep an eye on the man with the headphones: what eyes can’t see, ears can hear. They are big, hairy ears, and even the frequent wearing of headphones for hours on end has failed to prevent them standing out at right-angles to the man’s head. He’s a nice lad, Saunders, a farmer from Dorset, and he’ll be glad to get home one day to a decent pint of bitter, if it’ll ever be decent again, and not just coloured water. That’s what the Germans have done, thought Saunders, watered the bloody beer, them and the Nips between them. Tortured old men and women too, killed little kids, and you couldn’t sit by and let ‘em do that, not without having a bash at them, the dirty bastards.
Eight o’clock on the Admiralty-pattern electric clock. White lights are out in the Control Room and in the Wardroom, red ones glowing in their place. Red light, say the scientists, accustoms the eyes to seeing in the dark; so do raw carrots, which are eaten whenever anyone remembers to eat them. The Captain wears dark goggles as he pulls on a waterproof jacket, then gropes behind the water-tight door for his binoculars. The First Lieutenant takes over the watch, and the Sub, who will have the first watch when they surface, gets dressed and studies the chart in the dim orange light.
Eight-fifteen. Number One, in the Control Room, reaches for the microphone that hangs from an air-pipe on the deckhead. He flicks the switch on with his thumb and says:
“Diving Stations… Diving Stations.” Within a minute each man is in his place, his station for diving, surfacing, attack. Again the microphone carries an order through all compartments:
“Stand by to surface.” Reports come in, vents shut, blows open.
“Ready to surface, sir.” The Captain is straining his eyes into the periscope. The man with the headphones, Saunders, reports all clear all round. The periscope hisses down into its well, and the Captain puts a foot on the ladder as the Signalman steps back from opening the lower hatch.
“Surface!” High-pressure air rips into the ballast tanks as the hydroplanes are swung to force the boat up. The needle in the depth-gauge rises, slowly at first, then faster, and the Captain and the Signalman climb up through the hatch into the conning-tower. As the submarine breaks surface the Captain opens the top hatch and heaves himself quickly up on to the bridge. The diesels roar into life and the submarine gathers way through the dark deserted sea: her sleek hull gleams shiny black while the water still drips from her sides. Down below in the warm, lighted compartments men are lighting the first cigarettes and pipes of the day. The comfort and sociability of smoking draw men together, and in this strange world of their own, remote from others of their kind and near only to their enemies, men from all walks of life and all parts of Britain are perfectly at home.
Stand alone on the front of the bridge while the submarine forges slowly ahead, one engine driving her at slow speed while the other pumps new life into the batteries. There are two seamen, lookouts, on the after end of the bridge, binoculars at their eyes, but you, the Officer of the Watch, must see anything before they see it. The Captain is asleep, or as near asleep as he ever is, down below, and in these narrow Straits which are enemy territory you alone are responsible for the safety of the ship and the lives of the men in her. For the two hours of your watch the binoculars are never lowered from your eyes, not for longer than it takes to pass an order or quietly to acknowledge a report through the voice-pipe: to and fro and all round the glasses sweep, minutely careful, missing nothing. You must see the enemy, if he is there, before he sees you, and if you fail in this you can call yourself a failure and there is no place for you in a submarine.
As you sweep, questions ask themselves and are answered automatically in your mind: What will I do if I see a dark shape there, a bow-wave there, coming towards at speed? If a strange recognition signal challenges from the darkness on the starboard bow, what action will I take? What will be my first order down the voice-pipe if I hear an aircraft which the Radar has failed to pick up? Watchful, straining eyes, a tense mind and a body taut and hard, only the regular swish of water sweeping over the saddle-tanks and the low throb of one diesel breaking the silence of pitch-black night. Over all, the constant hope: an enemy worth sinking, and you must sight him not one second later than it is physically possible to sight him. That is all you have to do, alone on the bridge, and to every detail you must do it, because you are part of something in which only the highest standards are acceptable.
This is Patrol Routine.
Remember how it started? In a garage, for you, on the same Sunday, of course, when it started for the rest of the world. You were making screens for blacking-out the windows, tacking thick cardboard on to frames of thin deal slats that you’d made to fit the windows. You were the son and the only male of one of thousands of households that were getting ready for a war. You knelt on the garage floor, that summer morning, and hammered in the nails while your mind was full of the war which, being very young, you had been looking forward to for some time.
You were on leave from the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. In a year or so you’d be at sea as a Midshipman, and you hoped the war would last that long so you could go to sea and fight and make up for having thoroughly disliked the time you spent at Dartmouth. Not that it was your fault, really. At the age of thirteen the brass buttons and a photograph in the Illustrated London News had been enough to give you nightmares of failing the entrance examination. Besides, there was an Admiral with your name, and there had always been your name in the Navy List, so they said, your aunts and your mother, that is. So when you were thirteen you went to Dartmouth, in a uniform, and you were told that you were a Naval Officer and that you were expected to behave as such, but when you arrived at Paddington on your way home after the first term and you strolled into the refreshment bar and asked for a sausage-roll and a pint of bitter the barmaid smiled and said, “Sorry, sonny, no beer, not under eighteen.” You were still a little boy, after all. Your House Officer didn’t think so, though, or else he had less idea than his job demanded of how to treat little boys. He sent for you one day, during Stand Easy, and you ran up the narrow stairs wondering what it was that you had done now.
“Shut the door,” he said, and you shut it, taking care not to let it slam, and you faced him squarely, ready for something.
“When did you last see your father?” he asked, abruptly, as though the question embarrassed him. It struck you as being a silly question, and you had a quick flashback to the picture of a little boy standing on a hassock in front of the Roundhead officer who was doing his job of hunting down Englishmen who had committed the crime of loyalty to their Sovereign. You gave him the obvious, the only answer.
“Last leave, sir.”
Your House Officer put his hand flat on the desk and stared at the back of it. Then he looked at you, and you felt as though he didn’t believe you. He said:
“Well, he’s dead.”
There was a pause, while you looked into his impersonal eyes: you felt no emotion because it had come so quickly. He looked away, back at his hand, and he asked, still looking at it:
“I suppose you can carry on with your work?”
“Yes, sir,” your voice said, and your hand turned the knob on the door and your feet took you down the stairs, running, because otherwise you’d be late for the class, and there would be no excuse for that when you had said that you were able to carry on with your work.
Lots of other boys loved Dartmouth, and that made you feel very different, abnormal. If so many were happy, it must be you that were wrong. So you always said, when they asked you how you liked it, that you loved it, every minute of it, and they always believed you.
And you felt you ought to like it.
The big screen for the french window in the dining-room was just finished when your sister shouted from the drive that the broadcast was coming through, and you dropped the hammer and ran with her into the drawing-room, where your mother was sitting as stiffly as though she were sixty and not thirty-five. The Prime Minister spoke, said that a state of war existed between us and the Germans, and then they played the National Anthem and you stood to attention, which you had been taught people never did in their own homes. Your mother looked as if she was going to cry, so you left as quickly as you could to finish the job in the garage. You knew that what made her unhappy was the fact that you would soon go to sea and stand a chance of being killed, and this was something you couldn’t deal with because what made her so miserable was the very thing that made you happier than you could remember.
A few years ago, whatever you felt, you could have cheered her up, shown her that you loved her and made her believe that things would be all right. But now: well, you’d been to Dartmouth.
A thin trail of exhaust from the throbbing diesel curls over the submarine’s wake. The tense, watchful atmosphere of the night patrol hushed your voice so that you speak quietly into the voice-pipe, although if you shouted no enemy could possibly hear. A lookout pauses to wipe the sea dew from his binoculars with a wad of periscope paper. It is half-past one, and in half an hour the watch will be changed and you can go below to sleep until, just before the light comes, the submarine dives for the daylight patrol. For the three weeks of the patrol you follow the same routine of two hours on watch, four hours off, except for the times when your off-watch spell is broken by the alarm buzzer, or the klaxon, or the sudden shout of “Diving Stations” that means an attack. When it means an attack, you’re glad to be woken, however tired you are.
Sweep all round for the thousandth time, blink and start again at thirty degrees on the port bow, sweep slowly right, over the bow and down the starboard side, stop at about thirty degrees on the bow, sweep left again. Stop with a jerk at ten on the port bow: something darker than the night. No good staring straight at it or you’ll lose it, sweep to and fro just across it, don’t act until you know it’s real and not one of those things that are so easy to see in your imagination when you’re looking for them. This one is real. Note the bearing, keep your glasses on it while you order one of the two lookouts to get down below. Into the voice-pipe:
“Stop starboard, out engine-clutch, break the charge. Captain on the bridge. Stand by all tubes. Night Alarm.”
Down below your orders are shouted through the compartments and you hear the buzzer making long buzzes, an urgent, penetrating noise like a dentist’s drill in a sleeping sailor’s brain. The Captain’s on the bridge and you show him the target, but it’s a full minute before he gets it in his glasses.
It could be anything from a junk to a destroyer. Send down the other lookout: you may have to dive in a hurry. It’s not likely to be a destroyer, but from this angle it looks damn like it. Slow ahead on the motors, creep round the target at the same distance. Whatever it is, it’s under way, started on the port bow and has crossed to starboard, moving very slowly, but that’s no indication as to what it is because even a destroyer can go slowly when it wants to, when, for instance, it’s hoping that a submarine may be in the neighbourhood on the surface. Creep round, watch the target. Close in from astern, and suddenly, as clearly as though it was daylight, you can see that the tallness is not the superstructure of a destroyer but the sails of a big junk.
Voice-pipe again:
“Stand by Boarding Party.”
“Carry on below, sir?”
“Yes.” You fall through the hatch on to the ladder and drop into the Control Room, move aft quickly through the hurrying men. Over your bunk in the wardroom hangs the belt with a .38 revolver and a short Italian bayonet strung on it. Grab the belt and strap it on as you check up on the Boarding Party who are mustering in the Control Room. They’re all there with their gear: revolvers, heaving-lines, a wheel-spanner, and Shadwell the Torpedo-man has a bag containing two fitted charges, lighters and a pair of pliers. That’s all you need.
“Boarding Party ready in the Control Room, sir.”
“Very good. Come up, Sub.”
On the bridge again, you see the junk plainly, even without binoculars. She’s right ahead with her stern towards you.
“Up Vickers guns.” Two seamen appear out of the hatch and mount machine-guns on each side, slap on the pans of ammunition and stand ready.
“Boarding Party on the bridge.” They pour up through the hatch, five of them.
“Ready, sir.”
“All right, Sub. Down you go.” The Captain hasn’t taken his eyes off the target for one second since he first saw it. He stands hunched in the front of the bridge, a silent, familiar silhouette of a man as you swing a leg over the side of the bridge and climb down the cut-away footholds on to the catwalk, walk around the side of the bridge on to the fore casing. The men are behind you and you lead them for’ard, right up on to the sharp bow, between the anchors. Crouch down so that the Captain can see over your heads, and watch as the distance lessens between you and the stern of the junk. The submarine is propelled by her electric motors, and there is no sound except for the swish of the sea under the bows and over the tanks, and as you get closer you hear also the creak of the junk’s gear. The submarine’s bow swings off a foot or two to starboard and suddenly with the slightest of bumps you’re there, the high wooden poop towering over you, and you jump, your hands grabbing the top edge of the junk’s stern rail. Swing over, land quietly on the poop, your rubber-soled shoes make no sound. The men are behind you, swarming over.
“Sails down, Bird.” The Second Cox’n and two others run to the mainmast, back at the ancient cordage, and as you throw open the door of the shelter in the poop, the yard crashes down across the junk. A light line holds the submarine’s bow alongside.
There are three Chinese in the shelter, screaming and shouting, scrambling over each other, mad with fear and excitement.
“Shut up! Speak English?”
“Yes, master.”
“Good.” One of the Boarding Party is behind you. “Get these Chinks aboard.”
“Aye aye, sir.” The crew are hustled away. The junk’s papers are in an old box in the corner, and you stuff them into your pockets. Out of the shelter, you drop down into the after hold, Shadwell with you. Using the bayonet you prise up a board, and under it six inches of dirty water cover the bottom of the ship.
“Five-minute fuse.” Shadwell chops off the right length of fuse and you drop the charge into the water. The old junk creaks and groans as you work by torchlight, preparing to send her to the bottom. All set, you scramble up on deck, and shout:
“Ready, sir!”
“Carry on!” the Captain’s voice hails back out of the darkness.
“Clear the junk.” The Boarding Party jump down on to the submarine’s casing: you retire alone into the hold with Shadwell’s pliers to fire the tube on the fuse and finish the job. Shining your torch down through the bottom boards you kneel there to check that the charge is in the best spot. There’s a grunt in the dark over your head and you spring back, your torch lighting up a Jap face with a snarl on it, a yellow hand with a knife in it. The Jap has been hiding on top of the cargo, dragging himself laboriously forward through the narrow space between the top of the stack of cases and the deckhead. Another foot, and he’d have had you with that knife. The .38 jerks in your hand as you fire twice, and one bullet gets him just above the left eye. He slumps forward, dropping the knife, which is big and heavy: it falls on the boards where you were kneeling a moment ago. You hardly notice that blood is dripping from him as you dive down to the boards again, grab the pliers and fire the fuse: see it begin to splutter then get away fast, jump down on to the submarine’s bow and flash your torch at the bridge. The submarine backs away from the deserted junk that hasn’t long to live.
A minute passes and the Captain mutters, “Should have gone off by now.” You’ve been thinking the same thing. Another minute passes and there’s a whumph and the junk’s stern lifts a clear foot in the water, then drops back and she begins to settle. Just after two o’clock there is no junk left, and the Captain asks whose watch it is.
“Number One’s, sir.”
“All right, Sub. Tell him to come up when he’s squared things off.”
“Aye aye, sir.” You would also like to square something off, with a Chinaman who talks English but can’t tell you when there’s a guard on board. You ask him. He says that he was frightened and forgot, and that when the Jap wasn’t taken away with them he thought that he’d been disposed of and he hadn’t liked to ask questions. The Chink looks hurt when you tell him that he’s a bloody fool.
You drink a cup of the Cox’n’s cocoa before turning in, and while you drink it you look through the junk’s papers, spread out on the wardroom table. Her cargo was rice and small-arms ammunition, and had been meant for Burma. By the light of the single red bulb in the wardroom you parcel the papers together in a big envelope and stow them away in the correspondence locker. The Captain will need them to put in with the Patrol Report. You open your drawer and take out the Torpedo Log and Progress Book, on a spare page at the back of which is a record of torpedo stores expended: you write in neatly the date, “one 1 ¼ lb charge, fitted,” and in the last column, “one junk, about eighty tons.” Blot it and close the book, and you realise that you’re still wearing your belt: you slip it off, take the four unused cartridges out of the revolver and stick your head round the bulkhead into the Control Room. The Gunlayer is on watch, sitting on one of the planesmen’s seats, waiting to go up and relieve a lookout.
“Clean this for me, will you, Smith.”
“Aye aye, sir.” He flicks it open and squints through the barrel at a light.
“Used this tonight, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Kill the flipper, sir?”
“Yes, just before he killed me.”
“Blimey. Would they’ve made me Gunnery Officer, sir, if you’d copped it?”
“Flippin’ likely,” mutters the Cox’n. “Ninety days is all I’d give you, you bastard.”
“Speakin’ of parentage,” replies the Layer, gazing into the barrel of the revolver again, “I ‘ave always made an ’abit of being very polite to Cox’ns, but recently I ‘ave to admit it’s been flippin’ ’ard to keep it up.”
“What I’ve been wondering,” muses the Cox’n, jerking his thumb up towards the deckhead, “is what the ‘ell we carry a gun up there for when there ain’t nobody in the ship’s company with the slightest flippin’ idea of ‘ow to work it.”
“If I was the Gunnery Officer,” answers Smith, “I’d take exception to that remark.” But the Gunnery Officer has gone, and is climbing into his bunk when the Captain stumps in, discarding a wind-jacket.
“Did I hear some shots, Sub, when you were down below?” You turn and look at him.
“Yes, sir. Two. A Jap was creeping up on me while I was fixing the charge.”
“You fired both the shots?”
“Yes, sir. He had a butcher’s knife.”
“You’d better type a statement, and I’ll put it in with the report.”
“Aye aye, sir. Diving at five?”
“About then.”
That had been another good twenty-four hours for the Seahound. She was a lucky ship: some submarines had the damnedest luck, patrol after patrol without a glimpse of the enemy. Seahound had never yet had a blank patrol: each time, when she returned to her base, she had been able to fly the Jolly Roger, and always the flag bore some symbol of a new success: a bar for a ship torpedoed, a star for one sunk by gunfire. Even the very first time, the “working-up” patrol in the North Sea, when Seahound had been sent to patrol a quiet area where there was little likelihood of any excitement. The object was to give her men a chance to settle down to each other and to their new ship, to get used to the routine of patrol. They weren’t expected to sink anything. But from that patrol they returned in triumph with a red bar sewn on the virgin Jolly Roger, red for a warship, a big U-boat which they blew in half with a torpedo, on a dismal rainy morning with the visibility so low that from the time of sighting the U-boat to the time of firing the salvo the hands of the Control Room clock covered only six minutes. The U-boat sank in two separate parts, and Seahound’s Captain jumped up and down like a little boy at the periscope, shouting, “We’ve got her, by Christ, we’ve got her!”
There was a warm welcome from the Depot Ship when a week later they slid into the Loch, and there had been frank surprise in many faces. The Seahounds were due for leave, a last leave in England before they sailed for the Far East: the officers were all going south, to London, and they left together in the Depot Ship’s motor-boat, passed close to their submarine which lay alongside and on whose casing Number One stood to wave farewell: he had had his leave, before the last patrol, and now he regretted having taken it. The boat jumped and bounced through the choppy grey waters to the landing-place near the Bay Hotel, and the Seahounds had time for a drink in the American bar before they caught their train for Glasgow.
Of course, none of them got sleepers at Glasgow. It was the usual routine: the man in the office said they were all reserved, for Generals and Very Important Persons, but that when the train started the attendant might be able to help them. In other words, any sleepers that remained would go to the highest bidders.
The Captain said, “Not worth enriching the attendant. May get a compartment to ourselves, if we’re quick.” They found an empty first at the front of the train, and while the Captain and Sub were stowing their cases in the racks, Chief opened his and drew out a small T-shaped metal object. He inserted it in the keyhole of the door and turned it.
“I’ve had this since I was a midshipman,” he told them. “Pinched it from a guard. I used to have some stickers with ‘Reserved’ printed on them, but I’ve used them up.” The train lurched and gathered way, southward bound: they had a corner each, plenty to read, a set of dice and a bottle of whisky.
The train stopped at York. Just before it was due to leave, the Captain ordered Sub to go and buy some sandwiches. There was a fighting crowd round the refreshment barrow, and he had just got his food and his change when the train shrieked and began to move. He ran, clutching the paper bag, wrenched at the door of the last carriage, but it was locked or jammed. He threw the parcel into the dark window and followed it, head first, landing heavily on a sailor and a girl. It was Able Seaman Young, of the Seahound. Young cursed, and the girl screamed.
“Sorry, Young. Nearly missed it.”
“Nothing doing, Mr Ferris. You’ll ‘ave to find one of your own: this one’s mine.” The truth of his statement was only too obvious.
They seemed surprised when he eventually turned up.
“Thought we’d have to go hungry. What d’you get?”
“Sausage-rolls. You ought to see Young’s girl-friend. I’d like to be Young, till London.”
“Trust a torpedoman,” observed the Captain. The train rattled and rumbled into the south. Throughout the length of it soldiers, sailors and airmen dozed and slept. Most of them were going on leave: some for a weekend, some, just home from overseas, for a longer, gay, embarrassing reunion: some, like the Seahounds, to say good-bye to people and things that they had always known and might not know again. The train was part of the war-time life: whether the end was an end or a beginning it was all the same to the engine: crash, rattle, wallop down the line, down to London and the fleshpots of the south.
Early morning in London: the train stood steaming, exhausted, in a grey station that smelled of hangover. Long after the other passengers had dispersed, Very Important Persons slumbered on in their sleepers. They were getting the Govemment’s money’s-worth. The attendants brewed tea, and waited for tips.
The Sub leant forward to hear what the taxi-man was saying. He was a stranger in Ambershott, and any local information would be of interest.
“You’ll find it a bit of a dead-end up there, sir.”
“Dead-end?”
“Ah, sir. Quiet. Big old ’ouses, they are, quiet as the grave, you might say. Which p’ticular ‘ouse, sir?”
“It’s called Tregowan.”
“Tregowan, sir?” The old head whisked round in surprise, and the taxi swerved savagely across the empty sodden street.
“Tregowan, sir?”
“Yes. Why – is it haunted, or something?” The driver steadied his course, said nothing while he blew his horn at a tabby cat.
“No, sir, not as I’ve ’eard. But that’s where the big boss lives, sir. Foreigner, ’e is.”
“Foreigner?”
“Yessir. Canadian. A General, too: boss o’ the ‘ole bag o’ tricks, ’e is. Perhaps you got the name wrong, sir?”
“No. That’ll be the one.” The driver made no further comment: he was wondering how to explain all this to his wife. There would have to be a good reason for a young Naval fellow taking all his bags and such to Tregowan, and the driver’s wife was satisfied only with the fullest details. The taxi rattled along the narrow streets, under the grim, Victorian house-fronts, an absorbed and worried man at the wheel.
“Shall I drive in, sir?”
“If there’s room. You’re right: it is quiet, up here.”
“Ah. Quiet as the grave.” The gateposts drew slowly past, as though the taxi, or its driver, or both, were unwilling to enter the domain of so exalted a foreigner.
“You wouldn’t be a Canadian, now, would you, sir?”
“No, I’m English. But my mother’s married to a Canadian. The General.” The driver expelled a long breath. So that was it. One more of the town girls got swept off her feet. There’d be a pretty to-do when the lads came back: he had often said so. Not that they were bad chaps, these Canadians: only a bit queer, being from foreign parts.
“‘Ere’s y’ bags, sir. Four shillings.”
“Five to you?”
“Thank ye, sir. But I can see you ain’t no Canadian. I’d get more ‘n that, from a Canadian.”
“Perhaps they get paid more.”
“They do that. And y’ see, sir, I’ve ’eard as ’ow there ain’t nothing in Canada for ’em to spend money on. So of course, when they gets to Ambershott, well!” The old man spread out his hands: what did you expect? “I ‘ope you’ll like it ‘ere, sir. Better ring the bell.”
“Thanks. I will.” But he waited until the taxi had trundled itself backwards out through the gates: then he rang, heard the ringing deep inside the house. It was half-past nine on a Sunday morning.
It was later on the same day that the Captain took a taxi: he climbed into it at Portsmouth station, paid it off outside the Queens Hotel. When he had unpacked his grip, he went downstairs to the phone box.
Pamela was delighted to hear of his arrival: she was on duty, she told him, all day, but he could pick her up at five at the Wrennery. She’d have to break her date with George Witherton. Arthur said that he didn’t think she’d have a date, when they were almost engaged: he meant it as a joke, but Pamela took it seriously, just sighed and said that she’d see him at five.
Rather a silly girl, he thought. But she’s fun, when she gets what she wants and nothing is difficult. The Captain had a feeling that she only tolerated Naval Officers because, being a Wren, she found them handy, usually presentable escorts. He had a feeling that she regarded men as something to be made use of: when she wanted one to be nice to her, she was nice to him, but only for a good reason.
Arthur had dropped in to see his mother, in London, before he caught the Portsmouth train. He had been permitted to see her in bed, having breakfast. Mrs Hallet was a self-preserved woman of middle age: she never rose before ten, and began her war-work after lunch. For want of anything better to say, Arthur told her that he was thinking of becoming engaged.
“Ridiculous, Arthur! At your age! Who is she?”
“She’s a Wren: Pamela Sainsbury.”
“Sounds like a grocer’s daughter. You had better go and shave, Arthur. Was there no hot water in the train?”
He left the phone booth, deciding to spend a little time in the bar, before lunch. It was lonely in the crowd of strangers, and he was beginning to wonder why he had left London, when a couple of friends whom he hadn’t seen for years emerged from the throng beside him. Of course, this was Pompey, where you always met your friends.
Friends? Well, acquaintances: brother officers. Not necessarily friends: only one in a hundred came into that category. Most of them you’d known since you were thirteen: by the time you were seventeen and Chief Cadet Captain at Dartmouth, few of them were friends. They were careful to stay on good terms with you: they watched carefully, waiting for you to slip up. Then, perhaps, “Remember Hallet? He was Chief C.C. You’d never think so, now. Going down the drain, old boy… Missed getting an operational command… Got hat frightful Southsea slut for a mistress… Flash in the pan, old boy.”
They couldn’t say it yet.
The tankards were empty:
“Three more, please,” he called, and he watched the barmaid as she dragged the handles down: she thought of her permanent wave, and while her hands and wrists moved the handles her bright smile faded and she wondered about whether or not she’d have to lose a tooth the next time she visited the dentist.
The bell pealed again inside the house called Tregowan. It was remote, nothing to do with the bell-push: like the cry of pain that came separately, a little moment after the squeeze on the trigger. Obviously nobody was going to answer the door: the Sub left the porch, walked round to the back door. It was locked, and there was no sound from inside: probably this was where the bell rang when he pressed the button on the front.
The top part of the window was open. It was a small window, and limited in its opening, but there might be room to worm through. The Sub wedged one foot on the curve of the kitchen waste-pipe, curled the fingers of one hand round the edge of the window-frame. He stuck his head and shoulders into the kitchen, leant on the inner sill, slid through. He stood up, dusted down his Number One uniform.
He hoped that this was the right house: things could be a little awkward otherwise. Even the crash of his entry had caused no sign of life, no voice or footstep. He left the kitchen, explored the lower rooms: in the drawing-room were photographs that he knew: there was even one of himself, at the age of sixteen, a Cadet, a small, undamaged face, clean white tabs on the lapels. The ashes of a fire lay in the grate.
Leaving the house through the front door, he carried in his two suitcases, dumped them in the hall before he climbed the stairs, cream-painted stairs, the carpet thick and soft. On the landing, he knew for the first time that the house held life: he heard a snore. It was a deep snore, a pleasant sound. The Sub opened the door, and his mother shrieked.
Not with fear. His mother had never really been frightened in her life. She came of an old Border family that had in its blood the acceptance of surprise. Now, it was with surprise and delight that she shrieked: beside her, in the bed, lay the man she loved, in the doorway the boy she had reared. Her exclamation woke the General, who heaved himself still half asleep into a sitting position in his broadly-striped pyjamas.
“Well!” The big man drawled the word in a pleasantly soft accent. He had a big, friendly face.
“So there we are. You’re rushing off to God knows where, and I’m expected to stay here like an old maid for the next five years. The fact that I’m ill doesn’t worry you at all, does it?”
“Don’t be an idiot.” Harry, the Engineer, looked wearily across at his wife. “There’s a war on: you know I have to go where I’m sent.”
“Is there a war on, Harry? I wouldn’t have known. Do you think I’m used to living like this?”
“Like what?”
“Oh, it’s all right for you. You come here for a few days and expect to find a loving little wife waiting for you. At least you get about, see people. You’ve got a job to be interested in. What have I got to think about? You think…”
She had the look that said she was about to cry. Harry was sick of tears. There were people who had something to cry about and yet didn’t…
“You could join the Wrens again. The doctor says you’re fit.”
“Fit? For what? This? Oh, I can’t expect you to understand, can I?”
Harry knocked out his pipe. There was little point in trying to answer. He looked quickly round as though he hadn’t known where the door was, and as though he was relieved at finding it, the way out.
“I think I’ll ring Arthur, at the Queens.”
“At this time of night?”
“Pubs are shut. He’ll be just about back. I said I’d ring.” He thought, I’m making excuses, explaining myself now. What happens when there’s no war to go to?
“And you imagine that just because the pubs are shut Arthur’ll go straight back to his little bed?” The Engineer’s wife smiled. “He’s not married yet, you now.”
After a few days at Ambershott, the Sub travelled down to Sussex to stay with the Bishop family. Before his mother married the General, they had always lived there, in Sussex, always known the Bishops. The Bishops were a part of Sussex as rooted as the Downs, as permanent and necessary as the sweep of country that fell clear from the Three Bells to the distant sea. For the Sub, the Bishops were as much a family as his own, particularly when he felt that his mother had a new life of her own to make and that if he married a widow he’d rather not have her children as well.
Major Bishop was known to his friends as Bish. He was a man of late middle age, bald and a little stocky. His heart was in the land that had reared the generations before him, and when the spirits moved him his talk was always of the ‘14 War, in which, he would state in support of any argument, he had “Gone over the Top”. Whenever he made that statement, his wife was inclined to start giggling, and his son and daughter were apt to remind him that they had heard it on previous occasions. In the Sub’s opinion, there was no family in England more wholly English or more completely united in itself than the family Bishop.
Bish was a busy man, these days. Well over military age, he had enrolled as a part-time worker in a local factory that produced fuel-tanks for aircraft. He had become a foreman: intensely interested, he was ready at any time to describe in detail the production problems of a modern factory. Determined to play a full part in his country’s battle, Bish enrolled for night duty as a Special Constable, wearing the helmet and belt with all the confidence of a regular policeman. When he returned home, late in the evening, and laid down these badges of office on the arm of a settee, his family saw the strain in the face of a man who had never played any part smaller than that within his reach.
As the Sub had once said, over a pint of bitter, to a friend in the Ram’s Head, Bish was a lovely man. Now, leaning on the oaken bar of that establishment, he listened and watched while Bishop talked to old Todd. Todd was saying that he’d never known a gentleman like Mr Forster, never, God rest his soul.
“H’m. Handy man with a gun, wasn’t he?”
“’e was that, Major. And I never knew a man wi’ such knowledge o’ fruit.”
“Fruit, eh?”
“Ah. There’s been many a time ’e’d take a seat by that window, and I’d take an apple or a pear, or whatever it might be, out o’ me pocket, and ’e’d look at un, an’ maybe ’e’d take a sniff at un, apple or pear, or whatever it might be, and ’e’d say, ‘Why,’ ’e’d say, ‘that’s a so-an’-so apple or pear’; or whatever it might be. Never known ’im wrong, Major, never.”
Later, walking slowly home, the Sub said:
“You know, Bish, I reckon that men who love the land and men who love the sea have a lot in common. The same sort of love: the same faith, if you like.”
“Daresay you’re right, boy.” Bish looked faintly surprised. Next thing you knew, the boy’d be writing to the papers.
The Sussex evening and the quiet, homely friendship: here, awake and in daylight, he was dreaming again. He was dreaming that this belonged to him, that he belonged here, that roots existed for him as much as they did for the Bishops. He remembered a school report that had worried his mother: it said, “John lives in a world of his own…”
It was easier to dream, to see things as he wanted them to be. He could even imagine, for instance, that his father had also been worried by that report. In his heart, the Sub knew that his father had never had any lasting interest in his youngest son, the product of his second marriage. His father lived in the past, among friends who were already, most of them, dead. They were not dead to the Sub’s father: they lived as hard as they had always done, riding hard, drinking hard, living in the only way that they had ever wanted to live. Only the Sub’s father was condemned to go on living for ten years longer, alone with the past, in a seaside villa with a single yapping terrier and a young family with whom he had nothing in common.
Once he had told them, “I want to live long enough to see my son in uniform.”
Strange, thought the Sub, to have been so thrilled at such a remark! When he heard it, he had felt as though he had been given an unexpected, needed present, his father’s interest. It was the first and only sign of it that he had ever seen. Not that he missed consciously something that he had never held: only that a taste, a flashing glimpse, filled him with longing.
Now, at the age of twenty, the Sub expected no warmth in human relationships. Rather he shunned it, telling himself that it was sentiment, womanly, unbecoming in a man. He had no close ties, now that his mother was making her own life: good luck to her!
The future? Dreams took the place of the future, dreams and a lack of thought. The future held nothing of interest, only the past held whispers of promise. In his mind there was no idea of what he wanted in the years ahead. But then, in war-time, people were killed. Knowing that he looked forward to nothing, the Sub sometimes wondered whether that would not, perhaps, be a logical conclusion.
The Captain, the Engineer and the Navigator sit round the wardroom table, having breakfast. The first Lieutenant is on watch in the Control Room, and the hiss that comes frequently from that direction as the periscope is raised and lowered tells its own story of a careful watch. The Sub, who was relieved of the watch an hour and a half ago, at six o’clock, is asleep in his bunk.
“Better shake John, Chief,” suggests the Navigator. “Won’t be anything left to eat.” Chief reaches behind him and hangs his fist on the figure in the bunk, and Sub heaves himself up on one elbow and stares moodily at the scene. Smelling sausages he feels better, swings his legs out and eases himself straight on to the locker which serves as a seat for two men.
“Morning,” he says, his eyes half open and looking for food.
“My God!” murmurs Chief, looking at him sympathetically.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“I’ve heard the expression ‘death dug up’,” answers Chief, sipping his coffee, “and I’ve seen things crawl out of heaps of muck in wet gardens, but – did you sleep well, Sub?”
“Very amusing. Wilkins – coffee, please!” Able Seaman Wilkins brings it in and sets it down.
“Morning, sir. Bangers?”
“Yes, please. Did you eat yours, Chief?”
“No, I did not.”
“I’ll have the Engineer Officer’s too, please.”
“Sorry, Sub,” puts in the Captain. “I had them.”
“H’m. Wilkins!”
“Sir?”
“Have you reloaded the other two Oerlikon magazines?”
“Yes, sir.” Apart from being Wardroom Messman, Wilkins is also the Oerlikon Gunner.
Breakfast is finished and cleared away, and Sub turns in again. It is very warm and quiet, an atmosphere full of sleep for the men off watch as the submarine motors slowly along at periscope depth, thirty feet on the depth-gauges. The Captain climbs into his bunk and closes his eyes. Then he opens them again and presses the Control Room buzzer. A messenger appears.
“Sir?”
“Ask the First Lieutenant to see me.” The Captain stares at the wardroom lamp while he hears Number One send the periscope down before reporting.
“Yes, sir?”
“Let me know if you see any fishing-boats big enough to hold the Chinks we’ve got.”
“Aye aye, sir.” Number One moves back into the Control Room, and they hear him say “Up periscope”, the hiss and thump as it rises and stops. There is a loud cough, and Chief looks up to see Engineroom Artificer Featherstone drooping in the gangway.
“Want me, Featherstone?”
Featherstone regards him sourly. “Them flippin’ ’eads is flipped,” he announces. The Captain rolls over on his bunk.
“What, again?”
“Yessir. I’d like to catch the bugger that keeps flippin’ ’em up, sir. Spend ’alf me time off watch putting ’em right and before I got time to put me flippin’ tools away the bloody door’s open an’ shut a couple o’ times and the bastard’s floodin’ up and jammed!”
The Engineer Officer sticks his dirty feet into a pair of sandals that should have been thrown away a long time ago. “Let’s see what’s wrong,” he suggests.
“I know what’s wrong.” Featherstone’s off again. “Some bugger goes in ‘ere an’ does ‘is bit an’ leaves the flippin’ valve open. Or ’e tries to blow ’em with the valve flippin’ well shut.”
In a few moments, Chief comes back. “He’s quite right, you know. It’s time you people learnt to use the heads. Every damn day of your lives you go in there, and someone hasn’t got the guts to ask what he’s doing wrong.”
“Grumpy old bastard. If the heads didn’t go wrong occasionally your department ‘d have nothing to do. And it’s you that wrecks them, as likely as not. Shouldn’t eat so much.”
“Young man, I was blowing submarine heads before you were bloody well born!”
“Before I was born there wasn’t any such things in submarines. I’ve read about it. When they surfaced at night, chaps sat over the side of the bridge with someone hanging on to their feet.”
Tommy, the Navigator, grins at the cork-painted deckhead over his bunk. “That reminds me,” he says, “of the story about the sailor in Chatham dockyard who—”
“Shut up!” barks the Captain. “I want some sleep.”
Twenty minutes is all he gets, because Tommy has only been on watch in the Control Room for five minutes, having taken over from Number One, before he sights a fair-sized fishing-boat. The messenger shakes the Captain, who tumbles out of his bunk, takes a quick look and orders: “Diving Stations. Chinese passengers stand by in the Control Room.”
The submarine is on the surface for about two minutes, during which time the Chinese are hurried into the fishing-boat and the only occupant of that craft is supplied with an outsize tin of corned beef and a tin-opener. It is probably the most solid food the man has seen for years; and his puzzled expression is tinged with pleasurable anticipation as the submarine sinks slowly from his sight. Through the periscope from thirty feet the Captain is amused to watch introductions and explanations taking place in the fishing-boat, which is overcrowded enough without the owner and his guests having to bow to each other from precarious positions around the gunwales.
The Sub leant down to the voice-pipe and shouted:
“Control Room!”
“Control Room,” answered the helmsman.
“Tell the Captain: land in sight, red three-oh to red ten.”
Low on the port bow lay part of the East coast of Ceylon. Trincomali, the base from which the submarine flotilla operated, lay right ahead. Three and a half days ago, Seahound had left the Straits: this evening, she’d be secured alongside her Depot Ship.
The Captain, wearing only a pair of khaki shorts, arrived on the bridge and turned his glasses on to the hazy, cloud-like line of coast that would soon resolve itself into dark-green forests edged with white sand and an even whiter line of surf.
“Dead on,” he commented. “I suppose you’ll all disgrace me again, tonight?”
“Early night for me, sir.”
“One day, Sub, I daresay someone’ll get back from patrol and turn in early. But not before the Socialists or the Yanks have deprived us of our liquor.”
“Think the Socialists have a chance of getting in, sir?”
“A lot of people seem to think so. Get a bearing of the edge, when you can see it.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
In the Control Room, the Signalman was sitting with the Jolly Roger in his lap, sewing on the marks of a successful patrol. A group of men stood around, getting in the light and impeding his efforts with suggestions and advice. The Torpedo Gunner’s Mate, Chief Petty Officer Rawlinson, looked down at the flag with evident displeasure. “This ain’t a submarine. It’s a ruddy gunboat.”
The Captain stops at the bottom of the ladder.
“Cheer up, Rawlinson. We may use some fish, yet.”
“What on, sir? Junks?”
“There’s always hope of meeting something worthwhile, before we finish.” The First Lieutenant came for’ard, from the Motor Room.
“Number One: we’ll be in about five. Better get cracking on the brass.”
“Aye aye, sir. Cox’n in the Control Room.” A messenger went for the Cox’n.
“Yessir!”
“Turn some hands to up top, on the brasswork. Gun’s Crew off watch on the gun.”
“Aye aye, sir.” The Cox’n went shambling for’ard, roaring names as he passed from compartment to compartment.
On patrol the going is rough. It is not considered necessary to shave, and it is not possible to have a bath: moreover, fresh water is precious and must be conserved in order that the patrol can last several weeks and there may still be something to drink. Excessive washing is not encouraged. At the end of a patrol, however, the submarine and her men have to look smart when they enter harbour, as smart as any other ship which may have been swinging round a buoy in that harbour for weeks. So the bright-work is polished, jowls are shaved, and there is a queue for the use of the washbasins. Each man has a spotless set of white uniform, carefully stowed out of the way of dirt all through the patrol, kept inside-out for greater safety, so that when the time comes to enter harbour with the eyes of the fleet upon them every man will look what he is, a seaman, and what is more, a seaman in the Royal Navy. It is a form of pride, a pride well nurtured and now a tradition. And proud Seahound looked as she swept through the gap in the boom, her Ensign fluttering wildly and the heavier black flag flapping more lazily from a slightly raised periscope. The casing was lined fore-and-aft by seamen standing properly at ease as they would on a parade ground: the brass in the bridge, the brass rail round it and the bright-work of the gun gleamed golden in the evening sun as the submarine reduced speed and approached the Depot Ship whose decks were crowded with her own men and with the crews of the submarines in harbour.
Passing the Depot Ship’s stern, Number One ordered “Pipe!” and the Signalman, standing at the after end of the bridge, sounded the “Still”, a high, clear note on a Bosun’s Call: at the same time the men on the casing were called to attention as the Captain faced the Depot Ship and saluted. Loud and clear over the harbour, a bugle-call from the big ship’s quarter-deck answered the salute.
His Majesty’s Submarine Seahound was home from another patrol.
Arthur Hallet, the C.O., came out of his cabin in the Depot Ship, tightening the cummerbund that served two purposes. First, it kept his trousers up: second, it served as an essential part of Red Sea Rig, the compulsory dress for officers at dinner. White open-necked shirt with epaulettes, black trousers, black cummerbund. It was a smart rig, cool and comfortable as well.
He turned out of the cabin flat, stopped to look down over the side, a bird’s-eye view of the submarine alongside. Seahound, just returned, was outside the two other submarines on this side: in the morning there would be a reshuffle, the two inside would lie off to let Seahound re-berth alongside the Depot Ship, so that the cranes and derricks could plumb her hatches, haul out the torpedoes due for overhaul in the big ship’s workshops.
There was pride in his eyes as he looked down at his ship. Another patrol finished, some more of the enemy destroyed, his ship and his men brought safely back. It wasn’t chance that turned a lot of apparatus and a bunch of widely-assorted men into an efficient submarine. He remembered his first impressions of this new command. A cold, autumn morning in Scotland, a dirty submarine in a grey dock: he had met his officers in the base, ashore, and the meeting had hardly been reassuring. He found he had a First Lieutenant who regarded him with suspicion and distrust. He found a Navigator who could probably be relied upon to do his job but who was too quiet and colourless to lend much influence on the character of the ship itself. The Engineer Officer’s attitude was decidedly hostile, and the Torpedo Officer was a young Dartmouth Sub-Lieutenant who happened, at the time of their meeting, to be under arrest.
Hallet saw that the Engineer was the worst of the lot, and he decided, within a minute of shaking the man’s hand, that this particular Engineer would not sail East in Seahound. Not if he could help it. The combination of familiarity and subservience was vaguely sickening. This was an officer who would try to be popular with the men at the expense of the officers, popular with the officers at the expense of the men. Privately, Arthur would have described him as a tyke.
He knew the reason for his First Lieutenant’s distrust. He knew how young Commanding Officers were regarded by experienced yet less successful submariners. They called them “Boy C.O.’s”. They were assumed to have got where they were by pushing, by always saying the right thing to the right people. Arthur had an idea that in any walk of life young men who went rapidly to the top would be regarded in much the same way. He understood: he’d feel the same way himself if he were still a First Lieutenant and one of his immediate contemporaries were his C.O. He had no worries about this First Lieutenant, though: he knew the man’s record, and he knew that by the time they left for the East the distrust would be gone. If he had been what the term “Boy C.O.” suggested, perhaps he would have returned the distrust with dislike: as it was, he left it for the next few months to dissolve.
The Sub was rather a problem. The youngster had done a few patrols, and his record from those patrols was good. The other part of his record was not so striking: as a Midshipman in surface ships he had been regarded as insubordinate and lazy. On his Sub-Lieutenant’s courses, young Ferris didn’t bear thinking about. Now, he was under arrest. He’d have to see the Captain of the Submarine Flotilla in the morning. The story, as Arthur had heard it, was that Ferris and two other young officers had drunk too much on the evening before, that Ferris had produced a .38 revolver of which he was illegally in possession, and that they had hung fire-buckets from the garden railings of the Junior Officers’ Hostel and blown holes in the buckets from a distance of twenty yards. The bullets that missed had fallen in the dockyard around a destroyer’s gangway, and sailors returning from shore-leave had been forced to take cover. The Officer-of-the-day had sent his messenger down to put a stop to the shooting, and the messenger had been sent back with a message to the effect that the officers were only having target-practice. It was after midnight, and the officers had then been placed under arrest.
After dinner in the Mess, Arthur Hallet sent for Ferris. The youngster stood to attention, just inside the door of his C.O.’s cabin.
“Well, sir, that’s the whole story. I didn’t think we were doing any harm: that was why I sent that message back, sir. But I’m sorry about the street lights.”
“Street lights?”
“Didn’t you know about them, sir?” There was only honesty in the boy’s face.
“Oh, yes, the street lights. But don’t mention them tomorrow morning.” So the young idiots hadn’t been satisfied with fire-buckets. “Look, Ferris. I think you’ve been drinking too much lately.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Have you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, the least you can expect is to have your wine-bill and your leave stopped. Will you give me your word in any case to stop drinking for three months?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Your record at sea, Ferris, is passable. Your record ashore is disgraceful. In my ship I won’t have my officers behaving like hooligans. The war’s nearly over now, Ferris: there aren’t many operational flotillas left. There are hundreds of young officers who’d fall over themselves to take your place in Seahound. When Seahound leaves for the Far East, she’ll have only good officers in her. Do you understand?”
“Perfectly, sir.”
“Very well. I’ll see the Captain in the morning, before you do. Carry on, please.” John Ferris wheeled about, returned to his quarters. At ten-thirty next morning he was given the dressing-down of his life: he was also given three months’ drink stopped and three months’ leave stopped. The offence and the punishment were to be recorded in the ship’s logbook.
After that incident, the Sub became a model of good behaviour: sooner than leave Seahound, he’d have shot himself. Score One, thought the Captain, as he leaned on the rail and thought of the early days of the commission.
During the “work-up” period, the months which they spent practising every possible evolution, the weather was no help: off the Scottish coast the gales were as they are reported every year, the worst for forty years. Arthur Hallet remembered bringing his ship up alongside a destroyer in Larne, the little Irish port, the rain lashing horizontally, the wind a tearing force that could easily have blown the whole casing party off the casing if they hadn’t the sense to hang on with one hand while they worked with the other at the ropes and wires: heave in, surge, check, keep it out of the water – Number One shouted himself hoarse through a brass megaphone at the men who toiled with frozen fingers on the wave-lashed casing. Seeing that help was needed aft, Number One climbed down and joined them. He’d seen his C.O. do a first-class job in bringing Seahound alongside, and there had been several months of the same sort of impressions. When he rejoined the Captain on the bridge, there was confidence and respect in place of suspicion and distrust. The Captain thought, Score Two.
He heard, while they were in Larne, that the Engineer was giving a birthday party ashore. That evening he found that Sub was Duty Officer.
“Evening, Sub. Sorry you’re missing Chief’s party.”
“I’m not worried, sir.” Next day, the Sub went into the engine-room to hang up some wet clothes to dry. They’d been at sea all day, under the usual conditions.
The Leading Stoker asked, “Why wasn’t you with us ashore, sir, last night? Proper do, we ‘ad.”
“I was Duty, Williams, or I’d have been there.”
“No you wouldn’t ’ve, m’lad. It was my birthday party, see, and I don’t ask young Dartmouth twirps when I have a party!” It was the Engineer. The group of Stokers looked embarrassed. So was the Engineer, when he turned and saw the Captain on the steel step. Later, the Captain called the Engineer aside.
“Brown,” he said, “that was the first time in my life that I have heard one officer deliberately insult another in the presence of ratings. Is that sort of thing a habit of yours?”
“I don’t see that kid as an officer. He’s hardly weaned, and he thinks he’s some sort of bloody Admiral.”
“That’s neither here nor there. This is one of His Majesty’s Ships, and I’ll not have an Engineer Officer in her who behaves like a hard case in the stokehold of a Panamanian tramp. What are you going to do about it, Brown?”
“I do my job, sir.”
“About half of it. I’m taking a happy ship away when we leave, Brown. I don’t think you fit in.”
“Suits me, sir.”
“Very good. I’ll ask for a relief for you when we get in.” Score Three. And that was the hardest part over and done with. Now he could get on with the job in a better atmosphere. But other troubles came along, too. There was a theft, and a man charged, punishment by Warrant. There was a call at a small Scottish port where a bunch of seamen got themselves mixed up in a dance-hall fight: someone was hurt, a knife wound, and the dance-hall people blamed one of the Seahounds. The Sub was Duty Officer when a Lieutenant from the shore base rang through on the telephone, told him to send a patrol to the dance-hall.
“Sorry,” replied the Sub. “I have only the Duty Watch on board, and I can’t let any of them go.”
“I’m giving you an order.”
“I am acting under the orders of my Commanding Officer.”
“Do you realise that men from your ship are tearing the place apart, you young fool?”
The Sub didn’t like being called names by strange, shore-based officers. “I think that’s extremely unlikely,” he answered.
The Captain, returning later, backed him up. But as a result they were forbidden to enter the port: on subsequent exercises, they anchored outside. Arthur Hallet smiled when he heard the Signalman remark, “Thank God f’ that. ’Oo’d want to spend a night in that ’orrible little ’ole?” Where they lay at anchor, it was blowing a gale. That same night, over a bottle of whisky, the Captain told Number One the story of how he had lost a year’s seniority once, by striking a policeman in Malta. It was the sort of story he had not been able to tell before, when he was regarded as a pusher, as a man who had got on by always being a good boy.
The gale increased, and Seahound dragged anchor: while they were moving her to a more sheltered berth, the freezing wind was warmed by the language thrown against it. There was a healthy spirit among the smells of shale oil and wet clothes, the talk of leave and the eagerness to sail and join their flotilla.
The Captain remembered the relief that he had felt at that time: now, looking down on his submarine from the Depot Ship’s rail, he knew that he commanded a ship as happy and as efficient as any that floated.
He lit a cigarette, turned and headed towards the Wardroom. As he appeared, the Captain of another submarine hailed him.
“Be with you in a moment, Barney.” Arthur Hallet crossed the room, joined his First Lieutenant who had a drink already poured for him.