Stoker Johnson wiped the blade which he had just removed from his razor, and replaced it in the wrapper of blue paper. He stroked his large, smooth chin, admired it in the mirror on the wall of the after heads.
“Can’t see why you all get so excited,” he remarked. “Just because we’re gettin’ back to that bloody ’ole, Trinco, you act like a lot of flippin’ kids off on ’oliday.”
Nobby Clark, the Leading Stoker, took his place at the basin and began to wash out the suds that Johnson had left in it.
“Well,” he said, “it’s better ’n being at sea, ain’t it?”
“No it ain’t, not to my way of thinking. At sea you know where you are, like: it ain’t comfortable, but you don’t expect the Ritz. You gets back to Trinco, and where are yer? Shouted at to do this an’ that, no big cats, no flippin’ room on the messdeck, queue up for a flippin’ bath, clean the bugger up afterwards. An’ what’s the use o’ going ashore in Trinco? You can swim better over the side. First time I goes ashore, I thinks to meself I’m going to ’ave a bit o’ fun. What do I get? Flip-all, that’s what. Not a woman in the ’ole flippin’ area, and if you see one she’s with an officer. An’ mark you, Nobby, a man like me needs a woman.”
“Why you an’ not me?”
“Well, I’m married, see. An’ my wife ’as what you might call an appetite. So I’m used to it. Flippin’ well need it, see? Not like you single bastards, take it when it’s there an’ forget it when it ain’t. I’m used to ’avin’ it when I want it, nice an’ regular, see? Trinco: blimey, I’d be chasing the flippin’ monkeys if we were in longer ’n a couple o’ weeks.”
In the bar of the Depot Ship’s wardroom, Number One and the Sub looked at their empty glasses and called for two more pink gins.
On the way in from patrol, everyone thinks the same thing: early night, turn in straight after dinner. But the first thing that comes is a bath, and the bath makes a difference. It washes off the smell of shale oil, eases out the tiredness in your body and your mind. You lie back in the bath, and sing: there are four baths in the bathroom, so it’s quite a big sing. In the course of it, you forget the early night plan and you develop a thirst. As soon as you’ve changed, feel clean and smart after a long time of feeling dirty and unkempt, you find yourself quenching that thirst in the bar, one foot on the brass rail and a glass in your hand that has something in common with the widow’s cruse.
“The Seahounds are back! Party tonight, boys!”
“We’re turning in early.”
“The two of you, dears?”
“Tiny, if you want a kick where it hurts, just say that again.”
“I’ve been kicked there so often that it doesn’t hurt any more. Now, what am I going to have?”
“A baby, by the look of you.”
The remark came from Arthur Hallet, who had just entered the bar with two other C.O.’s. Tiny, who was certainly on the large size, murmured to Number One, “You know, I don’t think I like your Captain very much.”
“You don’t? Well, that’s all right. You don’t have to.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean as long as you keep any criticisms to yourself.”
“Oh. Like that, is it?”
“It’s like that, Tiny.”
The bar was filling up as the bathrooms and cabins emptied themselves. A few odd pieces of soap clung to the soap-racks, discarded shirts and shorts littered the empty cabins. Below, in the cabin and bathroom flats, the singing was over.
“Hello, Jimmy! Wotcher, John! Sink anything?”
“Nothing much. Only half the Imperial Navy.”
“Both junks, eh. But what did you really get?” They told him.
“Not bad for beginners. Steward – gin bottle, please.”
After dinner, the Sub read the letters that had been waiting for him. It was a routine, well established, to save them for the quiet after-dinner period. First he read the ones from his family, then the one from the girl in Sussex, but he kept to the last the one and only letter addressed in Sheila’s neat handwriting. He finished his black coffee, put the cup down and tore open the blue envelope. This was a thing that he had looked forward to doing.
Not what he’d hoped to read, though. She told him that she was engaged to Gerry Watson, and that she didn’t think he ought to see her again. It would be better, she suggested, if he didn’t spend another leave in Kandy.
The Sub could only agree with that. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to face Kandy without Sheila. He thought of the lake, and knew that the affection which he had developed for it and for all the strange atmosphere of the place was only an offshoot of the way he felt about Sheila. Quickly he thought, that’s nonsense: I’ve learnt a lesson, that’s all.
As he sat there, opposite the big tray with the cups on it, a Medical Officer came along for his coffee. This was not only a doctor: this was the flotilla’s psychoanalyst, the man who put chaps back on the rails when they had begun to go a little bit queer.
The doctor paused, lingering over the array of cups. There were white ones, and a minority which bore a floral design around the edges. He picked up one of these coloured ones, and started towards the coffee urn. Suddenly he whirled round, dropped the cup back on the tray as though it had burnt his fingers. He took one of the white ones instead, and smiled cautiously at the Sub who was watching in astonishment.
“I can’t stand the ones with little pictures on them,” said the doctor.
After the late News from London, the B.B.C. orchestra played the National Anthem.
There were only a handful of men left in the bar: the Seahounds, a couple of other submarine officers, and an R.N.V.R. Sub-Lieutenant whose green stripe marked him as non-executive, an officer whose duties confined him to an office where he ciphered and deciphered secret signals. The Anthem ended, and the young man said:
“Lot of tripe.”
“I beg your pardon?” asked Sub, and Number One rose to his feet.
“This King business,” said the Cipher Officer. “It’s out of date. What do we need a King for?”
The others were also on their feet. It was a long distance from the wardroom deck to the water-level, a very long drop indeed. They came back into the bar, and Jimmy suggested a nightcap. While the steward poured it out, Jimmy lifted the receiver off the intercom telephone.
“Quartermaster’s Lobby,” he said to the exchange.
“Quartermaster? An officer has just fallen overboard on the port side. You’d better send a boat round. Yes, that’s right. He may have broken his neck.”
The next afternoon they went swimming from a beach called Sweat Bay. It was fifteen minutes’ walk from where the boat dropped them, through the trees where the monkeys lived, across a neck of land to the wide sweep of fine white sand on the other side.
Sub had brought a fitted charge, and when they were tired of swimming it was thrown into the water, as far out as possible. It went off like a miniature depth-charge, and they dived in to collect the stunned fish. Tiny made a fire of driftwood on the beach, and they baked the fish for tea. The meal tasted of mud and raw fish.
Number One spat out a lot of bones, and said, “What about a run ashore tonight, Sub?”
“All right. Where?”
“Officers’ Club, I suppose. Coming, Tiny?”
“Not me. Waste of money.” Tiny looked bigger than ever when he had nothing on.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. There’s liquor in the bar, and there are usually some women to look at.”
“Yes, at a distance, and that only makes it worse. Our own bar is all I want, and what’s more it’s Duty Free. Besides, there’s not so far to walk, when you feel like turning in.”
They caught a boat for the shore after a couple of quick gins in the bar, and at the landing-stage they engaged a ricksha to pull them along to the Club. They ordered drinks on the verandah, sat next to a party of four people, two Naval officers and two Wrens. Jimmy waved and smiled at one of the girls, and she discreetly returned the greeting. She was small, blonde, bright-looking: she had a snub nose in a well made-up face. She reminded the Sub of some Hollywood girl who had a raucous voice and a big mouth: he couldn’t remember the name. He asked Number One who the girl was.
“Mary-Ann. Her surname’s Chard. She was Smiley Martin’s girl-friend: he’s just gone home, you know. I’ll have a chat to her later: she shouldn’t be seen out with General Service chaps. It’s not respectable.”
After dinner they drank in the bar on the ground floor. Jimmy said, “Excuse me a minute, old boy.”
“Going to be sick?”
“No. Going to talk to Mary-Ann.”
Twenty minutes later he came back, looking pleased with himself.
“Sorry, Sub. Couldn’t get away.”
Sub had been talking to someone in the bar, or rather the other fellow had been doing the talking and Sub had pretended to be listening while he drank his drink and thought about Sheila.
“Submarines!” said the man. “What on earth, now, do people join submarines for?” He went on to answer his own question at considerable length, and Sub thought about the real answer in his own case.
Well, his first ship had been a battleship in the Mediterranean, an unusual sort of battleship because it had a damn great hole in it. An Italian submarine had done that: a midget submarine controlled by only two men had put one of the mightiest ships afloat out of action for months. It gave him a strange, exciting impression of the power that a few men hold in their hands. Seeing the submarines in the harbour at Alexandria he felt again that impression of swift, ruthless power, and it captured his imagination. The submarines lay alongside each other, amongst the rest of the fleet, and he saw them suddenly with the eyes of a submariner. They were wolves, amongst dogs.
So he joined them. But he couldn’t explain that sort of thing to a half-drunken bore who only raised the subject to give himself something to talk about. He wouldn’t understand, even if he’d listen. Sub couldn’t explain it any more than he could explain how much Sheila had meant to him. The only thing that a man like this would really feel would be a kick in the belly. He thought, Odd, that’s how I feel, like I’d just been kicked in the belly by a horse. But only now, he thought, because I’m a bit tight. In the morning, it won’t matter.
Jimmy’s glass was empty, so he finished his own and addressed the barman.
“Two brandy and sodas, please.”
Golf at Nuwara Eliya was played on a course which was far from easy to the uninitiated: streams criss-crossed the terrain in numbers to rival the streams of the Nile delta, and the streams were by no means as sluggish as the waterways of that insanitary area. These ran fast, in some places torrentially: golf balls, one after the other, vanished into their crystal depths. The caddies, small coffee-coloured urchins, had so many repaints ready to hand that it seemed not unlikely that secret pools or backwaters were the sources of their raw material.
Chief and the Captain were short-tempered long before they ended the round, and when they limped into the clubhouse in search of the watery tasteless beer which was all the bar stocked, and the elderly stranger who wore the uniform of a Captain in the Pioneer Corps addressed them in terms of some familiarity, it was perhaps pardonable that Chief’s reaction was more brusque than might have been expected from an officer from the cream of the Senior Service.
“‘Ullo, Jack!”
“My name,” growled Chief, “is not Jack.”
“Jack’s good enough for me. Any Navy lad’s Jack to me. Care for a spot?”
“All right. Thanks.”
“Boy, three glasses o’ that yellow stuff. Beer, is it?” The man’s thin bony knees looked cold in their whiteness, and his hands trembled where they rested on the edge of the bar. He suggested: “Tell y’ a story?”
“No, thanks,” answered Chief.
“Listen, boy, I got some stories ‘d make y’ hair curl. Sure, I have. The real McCoy. I been around, I have. Ah, the beer, my boys, the beer it is to be sure!”
“Excuse me,” put in Chief. “Forgive a personal question. But a moment ago you were speaking in an American accent, and shortly before that it was Cockney. Now it’s Irish. Where do you come from?”
“Oh, I been around. Sure, I been all over. Tell y’ about it: drink first.”
“They’ve got a nerve to call this stuff beer,” observed the Captain, lowering his glass.
“Tell y’ what I call it,” offered the Pioneer. “Horse-piss.”
Chief shook his head. “It can’t be horse,” he argued. “I’ve had that: it’s what they call beer in Egypt. This is quite different.”
“Some other sort. Elephant, eh?”
“Can’t be elephant. That’d be stronger. Something else.”
“Snake? Ah, that’s it! Snake! Boy – three more from the old snake. Then I’ll tell ‘y all about it. I’m up from C’lombo. Terrible.”
“I’ve heard it’s rather nice.”
“Nice? Boy, it’s all loose women! Looser ‘n you’ve ever set eyes on. I tell y’, I’m here for a rest. Couldn’t stand it! At me all day, they were. Terrible. A man like me doesn’t stand a chance. Not a chance!” He was excited, the veins swelling blue on his white temples: he swept out his arm in a violent gesture that threw his glass off the counter: the crash coincided with the opening of the club-house door. An ambulance man beckoned to the Pioneer.
“Come along now, sir.” The voice was quiet, assured in its power of command. “Come along, sir.”
“He wants to take me away!” The thin figure detached itself from the bar, stood hesitant, rather bent, eyes darting to and from the man in the doorway. His whole body shook, not only his hands.
“Wants to take me away!” he repeated, more loudly, staring crazily at Chief. His face began to crumple like a child’s before the tears, and while the ambulance man stood there watching and the barman slowly wiped the counter the Pioneer’s feet edged forward towards the door that stood open to receive him. The barman picked up a glass that was already clean, frowned at it while he twirled it in the towel.
Chief pushed away his unfinished drink.
“Jesus Christ!” he muttered. “There are worse things than war…”
Number One and the Sub faced each other across the wardroom table. They sat with their feet up on the lockers, for the battery boards that formed the deck had been removed to allow the electricians to top up the cells of the battery with distilled water.
The Sub said, “There’s a dance tonight, at the Club. Wish to God there were some more women in this blasted place.”
Number One smiled. “I’m going to ring up Mary-Ann.” He was still smiling to himself as he climbed across the framework of the deck and went into the Control Room. Smiley Martin had been a fly in the ointment for many months. Kneeling down, he cracked a joke with the Leading Electrician as he examined the top of a cell: he was looking forward to tonight.
Sub thought for a moment, undecided. He reached for a cigarette and was about to strike a match when he remembered that the battery was open: no smoking. The unlit cigarette in his month, he went for’ard, up the ladder and over the plank, up the long gangway into the Depot Ship. In the wardroom entrance he lit his cigarette, then picked up the phone and asked to be connected with the Wrennery.
“Mary-Ann? This is John Ferris. Sub of Seahound. Yes, I met you once at a party, with Smiley… Look, is anyone taking you to the dance tonight? … That’s marvellous! … Can I pick you up at the Wrennery? … About seven? … Fine. See you then.” He rang off, went back to work.
In the submarine, Number One looked at him and asked, “What are you looking so pleased with yourself about?”
“Oh, nothing. Just my usual cheerful self.” He thought for the first time: This is going to be a little awkward by and by. It was a dirty trick, but he consoled himself with the idea that love and war justified any extraordinary behaviour.
“Isn’t it about time to knock off?”
Number One looked at him. “No, not for another half-hour. If you’ve nothing to do I can give you plenty.”
“Oh, I’ve lots to do, thanks. I’m thirsty, that’s all.”
“Are you ever not thirsty?” Sub ignored the question, went for’ard to talk to Rawlinson.
At lunchtime he was drinking quietly in the bar with Tiny, when he heard his name almost shouted from a distance of about a couple of feet. It was his First Lieutenant, scarlet in the face.
“Come with me.” He followed Number One out of the wardroom.
“Sub, you’re required on board as Duty Officer tonight and every night for a week. I think you’ve been getting rather above yourself.”
“Damn it, Number One! You can’t do that! … I’ve got a date tonight, in any case.”
“No, you haven’t. I’ve explained that you’d forgotten you were Duty. She quite understood. I’ll be looking after her. You’re Duty for a week, and if there’s any argument you can see the Commander, now. All right?”
“All right.” You couldn’t always be clever, he thought. He moved back into the bar, and Tiny gave him a gin.
“Trouble?” asked Tiny.
“Oh, no. Cheers.” Seven days on board, in this heat. It was largely the fault of the heat, anyway. And there was Sheila, or rather the lack of her.
Next day, at about six-thirty, Number One and Tiny were drinking the inevitable pink gin in the bar of the Depot Ship, when Sub strolled in. He had been loading torpedoes into Seahound’s tubes all afternoon, which had been a hot and tiring way of spending an afternoon when it was too hot even to light a cigarette without regretting the extra heat of the match.
“Hello, John,” called Tiny. “What’ll it be?”
“Pinkers, please.”
Jimmy asked him, “Don’t you ever do any drinking in the accommodation ship?”
“Oh, yes. When I’m not Duty.”
“Run two wine bills, I suppose?”
“Sh!” Sub had seen the Commander of the flotilla enter the bar. The Commander had an Army major with him, and they ordered drinks at the other end of the long bar. It wasn’t often that guests were seen in this ship, and Army men were like men from Mars. It was almost a surprise to see that they drank like other people. The Commander looked round, and his eye rested for a long moment on the junior officers. Number One had a nasty feeling that he was about to be informed of something wrong in the appearance of his submarine: the Ensign not flying free, perhaps, some gear left on the casing.
“You Seahound people. Come here.”
Number One and the Sub dutifully left Tiny and approached the two at the other end.
“Evening, sir,” said Number One.
“Evening. Want you to meet these young fellows, Major. Lieutenant Wentworth, Sublieutenant Ferris, of the Seahound. Major Worth.” The Major was a hard-looking soldier with a bayonet scar on his cheek.
They shook hands, and the Commander ordered fresh drinks. He said to the Major, “I’m afraid Lieutenant Commander Hallet won’t be back off leave for another week or so. But you’ll have plenty of time to get to know each other.”
Later, Sub said to Number One, “Looks like we’re taking the Army to sea, this time.”
“A very clever deduction. God damn it: I hate these Special Operations.”
“Why? Makes a change.”
“A hell of a change. Overcrowded in the wardroom, then an operation that’s likely to be bloody dangerous and not even a sinking to show for it. I wonder if the Old Man knows about this?”
“Come to think of it, I reckon he does. He said something about not taking any reload torpedoes, this patrol.”
“Not any?”
“No, just the six in the tubes. That means canoes, I suppose.”
“Yes. Several canoes. And that means it’s not only the Major, but all his pals as well. Christ, why does it have to be us?”
The Captain and Chief were having a party in the small lounge of their hotel. There were the two of them, and two girls: one was a Wren officer, the other an American. They were drinking, and dancing to a radiogram that had seen better days. The Captain had taken first claim on the American girl, and the Chief had the Wren.
Late in the evening, as they put the corks back in the bottles, the Captain made a suggestion.
“Let’s climb the mountain tomorrow, shall we?”
Chief groaned. “It’s a hell of a long way up,” he said.
“Sure!” The Captain’s girl-friend approved. “Let’s go up that Ragalla, or whatever they call it. O.K., Jean?”
“Why, yes. It’ll do us all good,” agreed the Wren, looking at Chief. He winced.
Next morning after breakfast they were given a lift in an Army car up to where the slopes steepened towards the wooded mountain, and from that point the climb began. It was not really a climb, but more of a steep uphill walk.
Three-quarters of an hour later, the American girl stumbled: the Captain grabbed her, held her up.
“Wow!” she shrieked. “That was my ankle! Guess I’ll have to take your arm from here on, Arthur boy.”
Chief and Jean kept well ahead after that. The Captain said, “Those two seem to be hitting it off pretty well.”
Sal laughed. “Jean’s in love with the Navy,” she said. “I guess if she married one of you fellers she’d hang the guy over the back of a chair and hop into bed with the uniform.”
She was leaning her weight on him, and she leant with her body half-turned to his. She knew all about her figure, and she liked to see the effect it had on him. She herself was not unmoved.
Chief and Jean were a good thirty yards ahead.
“Honey,” murmured Sal, “I guess we don’t have to get to the top of this darned hill, do we? How about we wait here and let them go ahead?”
The Captain shouted to Chief, “You two go on. Sal’s ankle’s bad. We’ll see you on your way down.”
Stumbling through a short stretch of forest they came to an open space, the forest behind them and a drop of a thousand feet in front.
Sal laid her long body down: the Captain stood for a moment, looking down into the valley.
“Honey,” she said, “I need some comfort for my ankle.”
His week of penance over, Sub joined the others in the afternoon boat ashore: they took the Major to Sweat Bay, and taught him their own game of “submarines”. For this game it was essential to have Tiny in the party, since his size made him an ideal “convoy”. The others split up into two teams, one of which formed the escort for the convoy and the other a wolf-pack of submarines. The convoy had to proceed from one fixed point to another, and was allowed to zigzag or to make emergency turns, which it signalled in the correct manner to its escorts. The submarines submerged ahead or around the convoy and endeavoured to surface underneath it after avoiding the screen of escorts. To claim a sinking it was necessary to strike the target in its belly: a submarine was sunk when an escort managed to tread on it.
The Major proved to be an excellent submarine, having a remarkable endurance under water and a very accurate aim at close quarters. After three or four attacks the convoy begged to be excused, on the grounds that it was waterlogged.
“I’m afraid we’re going to crowd you out rather, in your little wardroom,” remarked the Major.
“Won’t be too bad there,” the Captain told him. “Two of your officers on hammock mattresses on the deck, under the table, and one in the Control Room. You’ll have a bunk, of course, and my officers will have to work ‘hot bunks’. Every bunk full all the time, you see, but one man always on watch. When he comes off watch he turns in to the bunk his relief came out of.”
“I see. Can’t be very pleasant when it’s hot.”
“Oh, you get used to it. But the Petty Officers’ Mess will be a bit crowded, I’m afraid, with your four sergeants. Can’t be helped.”
The party was to consist of the Major, three other officers and four sergeants. Four canoes were to be stowed in the racks where normally the spare torpedoes were kept. Each canoe would be manned by one officer and one sergeant. The three officers and the sergeants were due to arrive next morning, before they sailed.
“Well,” remarked the Captain, “you can keep your job. I’ll stay in my nice safe submarine.”
“Oh, nonsense. My job sounds a lot more dangerous than it is.”
“It’ll be a good subject for a book, after the war.”
“When the war’s over, people won’t want to read about it. Not for a few years, anyway. As a matter of fact, I have tried writing a few things, but the only really good things that I’ve produced have been after a lot of whisky. That’s all right, but it gets better and better until I can’t read what I’ve written. I wouldn’t be surprised if the world had lost a number of literary masterpieces that way.”
They were sailing next day. In the flotilla, people pretended not to notice the soldiers, their equipment, weapons and canoes. It was all very hushed, and nobody knew anything about it. The monkeys were interested, though: from the bow of the Depot Ship a long cable ran to a palm tree on the shore, and in the cool of the evenings the monkeys used to sit on it, swing by their feet and dip their hands in the water. When they saw the canoes being lowered one by one into the submarine’s for’ard hatch, they danced and gibbered more than ever.