In the summer of 1919, Ordinary Seaman Leopold Sercombe was transferred to HMS Ajax. The ship’s role, along with the rest of the Mediterranean Fleet, was to fly the flag on cruises around that sea. Men were issued with white tropical uniforms. Canvas awnings were raised on poles and spread across the aft decks as protection from the sun.
Operational readiness was maintained by exercises, manoeuvres and inspections. There were flotilla regattas and fleet competitions, on board or ashore.
They anchored off cities: Nicosia, Piraeus, Port Said. Civilians were invited aboard for dances, and for general visits. From Barcelona came a party of children, for whom games were set up. For one game, lots were drawn in Leo’s mess and he lost. His face was blackened with shoe polish and red paint applied to his lips. Thus adorned he had to hide behind two canvas screens, set up on deck some yards apart. As Leo dashed across the gap between them, children threw tennis balls at him. ‘Aim for his face,’ his shipmates urged the children.
Leo lived in a broadside mess with fifteen other men. A long wooden table was hinged to the side and hung from the deck above by a swinging bracket. The long benches could be secured in rough weather with deck bolts. At the head of the table was a locker containing cutlery, plates, basins. There were nests of galvanised steel lockers, one for each man, in which Leo kept his uniform clothes. His daily working rig was a white duck suit worn with a silk lanyard. He wore overalls for dirty jobs out of sight, and his cap at all times. There was also storage for small ditty boxes, containing each man’s private possessions. Photographs, letters from home. Leo had none of these. In his ditty box he placed skeletons of small birds and tiny mammals that he found on his rare forays ashore in the Mediterranean.
There was no privacy in a broadside mess. Leo began to read. There was a small library on board, odd readers scattered amongst the ship’s company who identified each other reading in their hammocks, and passed books back and forth.
The commander’s priority was the appearance of his ship, especially when in harbour, on show. The side party was charged with ensuring the ship’s side was always immaculate, without a single blemish. The quarterdeck was made of oak, rather than teak. A twice-weekly holystone scrub with sand gave it a whiteness teak could not match. The turrets and guns and superstructure shone with fresh enamel paint. Wooden hatches and bollard covers were scrubbed smooth. Brass tompions in the turret guns glistened. Leo’s division worked the upper deck, painting and keeping the forecastle clean. On Sunday mornings, when the skipper inspected the deck, Leo was placed up in the bridge wings with a rifle and a pocket full of blanks, to scare away from the paintwork any insolent seagulls.
The men washed their clothes at set times and dried them on wire clotheslines riven through blocks under the foretop and shackled to eye bolts. The clothes were pegged and the lines triced up taut and the laundry dried in the wind. Only these authorised lines could be used. No clothing could be hung up in the superstructure or on the guard rails that might be visible from outboard the ship. Many foreign ships displayed their crews’ clothes drying. Leo’s fellow hands poured scorn on such indiscipline.
Their day began at five in the morning and ended at nine in the evening, when the commander moved around the ship, preceded by the bugler, the corporal of the gangway and the master-at-arms. At each mess-deck the men stood to attention. When the rounds had passed, hammocks could be unstowed and slung overhead.
When HMS Ajax was in transit, seagulls fell away, and other birds appeared. The Mediterranean Sea acted like a huge barrier between Europe and Africa. Each autumn some large birds went east and made their way to Africa through Turkey and the Levant. Others went west and gathered at the tip of Spain. Thousands of storks and kites waited for thermals to lift them high enough for the wind to help them over to the African continent.
Small birds like chiffchaffs and nightingales flew straight across the Mediterranean. When they grew exhausted, some took the opportunity of a rest on a passing battleship. One early morning on the upper deck, in the middle of the sea, Leo was woken in his hammock by a familiar sound. For a moment he could not make sense of it, and thought that it must have been remembered from his dreams. It seemed to be calling to him from out of his childhood. Then he heard it again, and looked up and saw, sitting on an arm at the top of the mast, a cuckoo.
Across the Royal Navy, the men’s rates of pay were reduced. Those with families had less to send home. Morale fell on the ageing ships. Officers worried they would lose their jobs. At least married officers could bring their wives out to Malta, at their own expense, but crewmen could not. Ratings often ran out of money by the middle of a month and could not afford to go ashore to visit a canteen or cinema. Some scarcely ever left the ship. Leo was one of these. He was resolved to quit the Navy with savings. He bought soap and tobacco cheaply from the paymaster, the cost stopped from his pay. He did not intend to open a pub, like his friend Victor Harris who had sent him a postcard from Cardiff, but he turned other ideas over in his mind. He stayed on board, reading or playing shove-ha’penny in the mess, or else on deck gazing at the land that was always in sight. In Valletta harbour, a fragrance of spice, perfume and oranges wafted out from shore. Occasionally he scented cigar smoke. The buildings on shore were a light sandstone, the cloudless sky pale blue, the Mediterranean Sea a deeper shade. After tea the rig of the day was no longer compulsory. Leo changed into night clothing, an old serge suit worn without collar or lanyard, and watched the lights of the waterfront bars and the bobbing lights of the dghajsas. He listened to the bells of horse-drawn karozzins. His life was temporarily becalmed and there was nothing he could do but wait for the time it would resume.
Leo kept up his diving. On a stormy night in Malta, when HMS Ajax lay to buoys in the Grand Harbour, a steamer came adrift and collided with the bow of the ship. Leo inspected the damage and over the following weeks carried out underwater repairs.
In the summer Leo went swimming. Sometimes others went with him. They took a dghajsa over to the harbour breakwater. At its inner end was an area of flat sandstone, which he made his base for a picnic and a doze in the sun. Periodically he rose and dived into the sea and swam to a buoy moored a hundred yards out. There he heaved his dripping body from the shimmering water, and sat on the bobbing float.
The ship’s plumber bent copper pipe for him with which Leo fashioned a snorkel. He acquired a pair of submarine escape goggles. With these Leo floated in the deep blue water, entering another domain, and watched multicoloured fish dart before him. He saw octopi and eels. His skin turned the colour of hazel.
In the summer of 1923, optional swimming periods were introduced. Between 7 and 7.30 in the morning and 5 and 5.30 in the afternoon, men could rise from the clammy atmosphere below decks and dive into the sea. Leo rarely missed an opportunity. He swam well away from the ship.
HMS Ajax was involved in occasional operations to keep the peace in trouble spots around the Med. From Gibraltar they oversaw the Tangier Patrol, ensuring the security of Tangier against incursion by Berber separatists. There was briefly action against Turkish Nationalists in the Sea of Marmara. In 1922 the Sultan of Turkey was deposed, and the Ajax conveyed him to exile in Mecca.
In April 1924 Ajax returned to Devonport, assigned to the Reserve Fleet. The clear waters and bright sun of southern Europe were replaced by grey seas and grey skies around the grey metal ship. June was dull and unsettled. July was wet and thundery, and cool. August the same, with frequent rain.
Leo asked to see the chaplain. He knew Reverend Martin from the library, and now visited him in his cabin. The chaplain sat at his desk and invited Leo to sit in an armchair beside it. He asked the young seaman if he knew of the damage that insects could do on board. Leo said that of course every sailor gets used to crushing a cockroach beneath his heel. And the cooks complained constantly about weevils in their flour.
‘Silverfish,’ the chaplain said. ‘They’re the most damnable little philistines. I’ve discovered they’re eating our books.’
‘That’s awful, sir,’ Leo said.
The chaplain admitted that in truth the small insects were consuming paper very slowly. The library was not in imminent danger. He asked what it was Sercombe needed.
Leo said that he wanted to ask a question.
‘You may ask anything you like,’ Reverend Martin said. He gestured to the closed door behind Leo and told him that whatever was said in this cosy cabin was confidential.
Leo nodded. He frowned, and bit his lip.
The chaplain waited. Then he said that he had heard so many men express one anxiety or another, he did not believe anything could surprise him. ‘Do you smoke, Sercombe?’ he asked, and offered Leo a cigarette from a silver box.
The tobacco, or perhaps the action of lighting the cigarette and inhaling and exhaling, seemed to make it easier to speak, and Leo said, ‘Do you think it be possible, sir, for a man to find himself in a life that is not his own?’
The chaplain smiled and said he was sure that it was. In fact, it was closer to the natural condition of man than any other.
‘Out a place?’ Leo asked. ‘Out a time?’
‘We are all wanderers,’ the Reverend said. ‘We are exiles upon the earth.’ He reached up to a shelf above the desk and brought down a Bible, leafing through its thin pages. Then he found what he was looking for and, with a finger upon the page, read out, ‘“Here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city which is to come.”’
Leo stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray on the chaplain’s desk.
‘Of course, if you have lost God,’ the chaplain said, ‘I suppose this is scant consolation.’
‘I ain’t sure, sir, that God did not lose me.’
The chaplain shook his head. ‘No, Sercombe. No. If there’s one thing I am sure of it is that God loses no one. He will always be there when we truly need Him.’
Leo nodded slowly. ‘I hope so,’ he said.
‘As you doubtless know, it’s the padre’s job on board ship in time of war to censor letters. To explain to the men what could and could not be said. I must say that I’m very happy to be divested of that obligation, but it did teach me something.’ He passed the box to Leo, and took another cigarette for himself and lit it. He blew out the smoke and said, ‘What I learned is that language is a puzzle. Words can be replaced and taken out and moved around to try to say the same thing in a different way, only for one to find they say something new, or the same thing in an improved fashion.’
Leo said he believed the Reverend was surely right about that, and thanked him, and left the cabin.
In June 1926, a few days after his twenty-seventh birthday, Leo Sercombe completed his twelve years’ service in the Royal Navy, with the rank of Able Seaman, and resigned.