Merrily the ship’s band played a selection from Ivor Novello’s latest show. American tourists in bright tweed knickerbockers and dark glasses threw streamers at the dock. Porters and stewards cursed and puffed red-faced, as they lugged heavy ship’s trunks below. Pursers pushed their way through the excited, shouting throng, engrossed in their checkboards. Elderly women were crying and dabbing their eyes with their handkerchiefs, then laughing merrily the next moment. All was busy, self-important happiness and excitement as the tugs attached their lines to the great liner to tow her out into the Thames where she would begin her long voyage to New York.
The liner’s siren blew three shrill blasts. Stewards with gongs began hurrying through the throng, beating their gongs and crying above the racket, ‘All aboard who’s going aboard!’ Digging in their heels, the cloth-capped dockers took the weight of the gangplanks as they were detached from the ship. On the upper deck the brass band ceased Ivor Novello and began to play Auld Lang Syne. Slowly the great liner headed into the current.
On the third-class deck, clutching his precious bottle of whisky ‘made by them limeys in skirts’ and dressed in a bright red suit from Burton’s ‘the thirty shillings tailors’, Abdul the Terrible cried. ‘Goodbye, Limey gents. Thanks. I had a swell time in London… I’ll write when I learn to.’ He grinned and showed that mouthful of gold teeth of which he was so proud. ‘And don’t take no wooden nickels.’
Smith and Dickie Bird grinned, though they had not the slightest idea what the huge Turkish wrestler meant. C had pulled out all the stops for the three of them during their stay in the capital. For Abdul it had been mountains of beef, washed down with gallons of whisky, a new suit, money, and most important, that faked American passport which Sammy had promised him in Alex. For them it had been nightclubs, willing young flappers who had shed their inhibitions with their corsets, and ‘beaucoup bubbly’, as Dickie had expressed it.
Now hollow-eyed and a little wan, they waved as the great liner drew ever closer to the middle of the river and the crowd on deck started to wander below in search of new pleasure and excitement. Next to them C, dressed as an admiral today, clicked to attention. They could hear the joints of his wooden leg quite clearly. He raised his hand to his cap in salute and said out of the side of his mouth. ‘Some of those Johnny Turk fellahs are not so bad after all. Perhaps we can use your Abdul fellah one of these days, you never know.’
He dismissed the wrestler, who was still waving frantically from the liner, as the music stopped and the ship’s siren howled, indicating that the tugs should cast off; the pilot would take over now. C turned and with the two of them started limping back to the waiting Rolls Royce, his face set and thoughtful.
He ushered them inside and announced completely out of the blue. ‘Swordfish Two is already under construction just up the road from here.’
‘What?’ they exclaimed as one, faces suddenly excited.
C said the words again, pleased with their excited enthusiasm. He told himself it was young chaps like these who made the Empire what it was. ‘You see I’ve got another show for you,’ he went on.
‘A show?’
‘Yes – and I wish you wouldn’t repeat everything I say like a double echo. Yes, a show. I don’t suppose you have ever heard of a German called Hitler?… No, I thought not. Well, this is the story…’