The Ship Read online

  ‘Well,’ said the Paymaster Commander, the struggle between regulations and expediency evident in his face, ‘let ’em have credit. See that every man has what he wants. And some of the boys’ll like chocolate, I expect – take some round as well.’

  The Paymaster Commander really meant ‘boys’ and not ‘men’ when he said ‘boys’ this time – there were plenty of boys on board, boys under eighteen, each with a sweet tooth and a growing frame which would clamour for sweetmeats, especially after the nervous strain of beating off aerial attack for four hours.

  The ‘mess-traps’ about which he had worried – the ‘fannies’ of soup, the mugs and the plates – were already being returned to the galley. Things were going well. The Canteen Manager and his assistant filled mess-cans with packets of cigarettes and packets of chocolate, and began to make their way from action station to action station, selling their wares as though at a football match. Like the Paymaster Commander, neither the Canteen Manager nor the men saw anything incongruous in their having to put their hands into their pockets to find the pennies for their cigarettes and their bars of chocolate. It was a right and proper thing that they should do so, in fact.

  ‘You men return to your action stations,’ said the Paymaster Commander to the galley party.

  He looked round the galley once more, and then turned away. He walked forward, stepped over the coaming, took one last glance backward at the blue sky and the grey sea, and then set himself to climb the dark ladders again back to the coding room. Even if he did nothing else in the battle he had supplied the food and the strength to keep the men going during a moment in the future when history would balance on a knife-edge – his forethought and his training and his rapid decision had played their part.

  2

  From the Captain’s Report

  …At 12.05 smoke was sighted…

  Ordinary Seaman Harold Quimsby sucked a hollow tooth in which a shred of corned beef had stuck apparently inextricably. He ought to have reported that hollow tooth at least a month ago, but Quimsby was of the type of man who crosses no bridges until he comes to them. He did not let anything worry him very much, for he was of a philosophical nature, filled with the steady fatalism to be expected of a veteran of so much service, even though Quimsby was merely an enlistment for hostilities only. Some men would be uncomfortable up here in the crow’s nest – not so Quimsby, whose ideal existence was one something like this, with a full belly and nothing particular to do. As HMS Artemis rolled and corkscrewed over the quartering sea the crow’s nest swung round and round in prodigious circles against the sky, but Quimsby’s seasoned stomach positively enjoyed the motion and untroubled went on with the process of digestion.

  Cold meat and pickles; that made a meal fit for a king. Quimsby liked nothing better than that. His portion of pickles had included no fewer than four onions, and Quimsby breathed out reminiscently, conscious of, and delighting in, his flavoured breath. He had swallowed down his soup and his cocoa, but they were only slop, unworthy of the name of food. Cold meat and pickles were the food for a man. He sucked at his tooth again, and breathed out again, sublimely contented with the world.

  Everything seemed to be designed for his comfort. The chair in which he sat certainly was – the padded seat and back held him in exactly the right position for keeping the horizon under continuous observation through the binoculars laid upon the direction finder before his eyes. As Quimsby rolled and circled round in the crow’s nest he automatically kept the horizon swept by the binoculars; long practice had accustomed him to do so. A thrust of his feet one way or the other kept his stool rotating from port to starboard and back again, while his right hand on the lever kept the elevation in constant adjustment to correspond with the roll of the ship. Thanks to many hours of practice Quimsby was able to watch the whole horizon forward of the beam without allowing any of his automatic movements to break into his internal chain of thought, from the shred of beef in his tooth to the comfortable state of his inside and from that to unholy memories of that little bint at Alex who had made his last shore leave so lively.

  And from there his memories went back to his first arrival at Alex, his first glimpse of the East, and from there to his first voyage to sea back in the almost unbelievably distant days of 1939. He had been up in the crow’s nest then, too, he remembered and his forehead wrinkled in faint bewilderment at the certainty that the scared, sea-sick, self-conscious youth at the direction finder in those days was, unbelievably but beyond all doubt, the same man who sat there so self-assured and competent now. That first report he had to make, when his binoculars picked up the dot on the distant surface and he had rung down to the bridge, his stomach heaving with excitement and sea-sickness.

  ‘Something over on the left,’ he had spluttered, all his previous instruction forgotten.

  The unhurried voice of the First Lieutenant had steadied him.

  ‘Where are you speaking from?’

  ‘Headmast – I mean masthead, sir.’

  ‘Then that’s what you say first, so that we know down here. And you don’t say “over on the left”, do you? What do you say?’

  ‘On – on the port bow, sir.’

  ‘That’s right. But it’s better to give a bearing. What does your bearing indicator read?’

  ‘Twenty-one, sir.’

  ‘And how do you say it?’

  ‘I – I’ve forgotten, sir.’

  ‘Port is red, and starboard is green,’ said the First Lieutenant patiently. ‘Remember that port wine is red, and then you won’t forget. And twenty-one isn’t plain enough, is it?’

  ‘No, sir – yes, sir.’

  ‘Now let’s have your report. Remember to say where you’re speaking from first.’

  ‘M – masthead, sir. Object in sight. Red two-one.’

  ‘Very good, Quimsby. But you must say it twice over. You remember being told that? If the guns are firing we might not hear you the first time.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I mean aye aye, sir.’

  He had been a very green hand at that time, decided Quimsby. He felt self-conscious all over again at the thought of how Number One had coaxed him into making his report in the proper form so that it could be instantly understood. The subject was almost unsavoury to him, and his thoughts began to drift farther back still, to the time when he was selling newspapers in Holborn – the evening rush, the coppers thrust into the one hand as with the other he whipped the copies out from under his arm.

  Then he looked more attentively at the horizon, blinked, and looked again with his hand on the buzzer of the voice tube. Then he rang.

  ‘Forebridge,’ came the reply up the voice tube.

  ‘Masthead. Smoke on the starboard bow. Green one-nine. Masthead. Smoke on the starboard bow. Green one-nine,’ said Quimsby ungratefully, all memory of that early training passing from his mind as he said the words.

  3

  From the Captain’s Report

  … and a signal to this effect was immediately made…

  In HMS Artemis a high proportion of the brains of the ship was massed together on the bridge, Captain and Torpedo Officer, Navigating Lieutenant and Officer of the Watch, Asdic cabinet and signalmen. They stood there unprotected even from the weather, nothing over their heads, and, less than shoulder-high round them, the thin plating which served only to keep out the seas when the ship was taking green water in over her bows. Death could strike unhindered anywhere on that bridge; but then death could strike anywhere in the whole ship, for the plating of which she was constructed was hardly thicker than paper. Even a machine gun bullet could penetrate if it struck square. The brains might as well be exposed on the bridge as anywhere else – even the imposing looking turrets which housed the six-inch guns served no better purpose than to keep out the rain. The ship was an eggshell armed with sledgehammers, and her mission in life was to give without receiving.

  Was it Voltaire who said that first? No, it was Molière, of course. Paymaster Sub-Lieutenant James Jern
ingham, the Captain’s secretary, was sometimes able to project himself out of the ship and look down on the whole organization objectively. It was he who was thinking about Voltaire and Molière as he squatted on the deck of the bridge eating his sandwich. Even after three years in the Navy he still had not learned to spend several hours consecutively on his feet the way these others did – they had learned the trick young (for that matter, save for the Captain, he was at twenty-seven the oldest officer on the bridge) and could stand all day long without fatigue. In the delirious days before the war he had written advertising copy, spending most of his time with his heels on his desk, and to this day he only felt really comfortable with his feet higher than his head.

  One way of thinking of the ship was as of some huge marine animal. Here on the bridge was the animal’s brain, and radiating from it ran the nerves – the telephones and voice tubes – which carried the brain’s decisions to the parts which were to execute them. The engine-room was the muscles which actuated the tail – the propellers – and the guns were the teeth and claws of the animal. Up in the crow’s nest above, and all round the bridge where the lookouts sat raking sea and sky with their binoculars, were the animal’s eyes, seeking everywhere for enemies or prey, while the signal flags and the wireless transmitter were the animal’s voice, with which it could cry a warning to its fellows or scream for help.

  It was a nice conceit, all this; Jerningham summoned up all his knowledge of anatomy and physiology (he had spent hours with a medical dictionary when he wrote advertising copy for patent medicines) to continue it in greater detail. The ratings detailed as telephone numbers on the bridge and scattered through the ship, with their instruments over their ears, were the ganglia which acted as relay stations in the animal’s nervous system. The rating who had just brought him his sandwich was like the blood vessel which carried food material from the galley – stomach and liver in one – to the unimportant part of the brain which he represented, to enable it to recuperate from fatigue and continue its functions.

  The lower animals had important parts of their nervous systems dotted along their spinal cords – large expansions in the dorsal and lumbar regions to control the limbs. The Chief Engineer down in the engine-room would represent the lumbar expansion; the Gunnery Lieutenant in the Director Control Tower would be the dorsal expansion – the one managing the hind-limbs with which the animal swam, and the other the forelimbs with which it fought. Even if the brain were to be destroyed the animal would still move and fight for a time, just as a headless chicken runs round the yard; and, like the very lowest animals, like the earthworm or the hydra, if the head were cut off it could painfully grow itself a new one if given time – the Commander could come forward from his station aft and take command, the Torpedo Gunner take the place of the Torpedo Lieutenant. And, presumably, young Clare would come forward to take his place if he, Jerningham, were killed.

  Jerningham shuddered suddenly, and, hoping that no one had noticed it, he pulled out a cigarette and lit it so as to disguise his feelings. For Jerningham was afraid. He knew himself to be a coward, and the knowledge was bitter. He could think of himself as lazy, he could think of himself as an unscrupulous seducer of women, he could tell himself that only because of the absence of need he had never robbed the blind or the helpless, and it did not disturb his equanimity. That was how he was made, and he could even smile at it. But it was far otherwise with cowardice. He was ashamed of that.

  He attributed to his brother officers a kindly contemptuous tolerance for the fear that turned his face the colour of clay and set his lips trembling. He could not understand their stolid courage which ignored the dangers around them. He could see things only too clearly, imagine them only too vividly. A bomb could scream down from the sky – he had heard plenty that morning. Or from a shadowy ship on the horizon could be seen the bright orange flare that heralded a salvo, and then, racing ahead of the sound they made would come the shells. Bomb or shell, one would burst on the bridge, smashing and rending. Officers and ratings would fall dead like dolls, and he, the Jerningham he knew so well, the handsome smiling Jerningham whose good looks were only faintly marred by having a nose too big for the distance between his eyes, would be dead, too, that body of his torn into fragments of red warm flesh hanging in streamers on the battered steel of the bridge.

  Closing his eyes only made the vision more clear to Jerningham. He drew desperately on his cigarette although it was hard to close his lips round the end. He felt a spasm of bitter envy for the other officers so stolid and impassive on the bridge – the Captain perched on his stool (he was a man of sense, and had had the stool made and clamped to the deck to save himself from standing through the days and nights at sea when he never left the bridge). Torps and Lightfoot, the Officers of the Watch, chatting together and actually smiling. They had been unmoved even during the hell of this morning, when planes had come shrieking down to the attack from every point of the compass, and the ship had rocked to the explosion of near-misses and the eardrums had been battered into fatigue by the unremitting din of the guns.

  Part of the explanation – but only part, as Jerningham told himself with bitter self-contempt – was that they were so wrapped up in their professional interests that their personal interests became merely secondary. They had spent their lives, from the age of thirteen, preparing to be naval officers, preparing for action, tackling all the problems of naval warfare – it was only natural that they should be interested in seeing whether their solutions were correct. And Jerningham had spent his years rioting round town, drinking and gossiping and making love with a gang of men and women whose every reaction he had come to be able to anticipate infallibly, spending first a handsome allowance from his father and then a handsome salary for writing nonsense about patent medicines. He had always felt pleasantly superior to those men and women; he had felt his abilities to be superior to those of any of the men, and he had taken to his bed any of the women he had felt a fancy for, and they, poor creatures, had been flattered by his attentions and mostly fallen inconveniently in love with him. It was humiliating to feel now so utterly inferior to these officers round him, even though war was their trade while he was merely a temporary officer, drifted into the rank of Paymaster Sub-Lieutenant and the position of Captain’s secretary because for his own convenience he had once studied shorthand and typewriting. Those were happy years in which he had never felt this abasement and fear.

  Jerningham remembered that in his pocket was a letter, unopened as yet, which he had picked up the day before when they left Alex, and which he had thrust away in the flurry of departure without bothering to open. It was a letter from that other world – it might as well be a letter from Mars, from that point of view – which ought to do something to restore his self-respect. It was in Dora Darby’s writing, and Dora was nearly the prettiest, certainly the cleverest, and probably the woman who had been most in love with him of all that gang. She had written him heartbroken letters when he had first joined the Navy, telling how much she missed him and how she longed for his return – clever though she was, she had no idea that Dorothy Clough and Cicely French were receiving from him the same attentions as he was paying her. It would help to bolster up his ego to read what she had written this time, and to think that there were plenty of other women as well who would as eagerly take him into their arms. Only a partial compensation for this fear that rotted him, but compensation and distraction nevertheless. He opened the letter and read it – nearly six months old, of course, now that all mail save that by air was being routed via the Cape.

  Dearest J. J.,

  I expect you will laugh at what I have to tell you. In fact, I can just picture you doing so, but someone has to break the horrid news to you and I think I am the right person. The fact is that I am married!! To Bill Hunt!!! I suppose it will seem odd to you, especially after what I’ve always said, but marriage is in the air here in England, and Bill (he is a First Lieutenant now) had a spot of leave coming to him, an
d we didn’t see why we shouldn’t. What will make you laugh even more is that Bill has been doing his best to get me with child, and I have been aiding and abetting him all I can. That is in the air too. And honestly, it means something to me after all these years of doing the other thing. And another thing is I shouldn’t be surprised if Bill’s efforts have been successful, although I can’t be sure yet –

  Dora’s letter trailed off after that into inconsequential gossip which Jerningham made no effort to read. That opening paragraph was quite enough for him; was far too much in fact. He felt a wave of hot anger that he should have lost his hold over Dora, even though that hold was of no practical use to him at the moment. It touched his pride most bitterly that Dora should have even thought of marrying a brainless lout like Bill Hunt, and that she should never have expressed a moment’s regret at having to accept Bill as a poor sort of substitute for himself.

  But this sort of jealousy was very mild compared with the other kind that he felt at the thought of Dora becoming pregnant. This simply infuriated him. He could not, he felt, bear the thought of it. And the brutal phrase Dora used – ‘to get me with child’ – why in hell couldn’t she have worded it more gently? He knew that he had always coached Dora to call a spade a spade – not that she needed much coaching – but she might have had a little regard for his feelings, all the same. Those pointed words conjured up in Jerningham’s mind mental pictures as vivid as those of bombs dropping on the bridge. Dora and he and the others of his set – Bill among them, for that matter – had always assumed an attitude of lofty superiority towards people who were foolish enough to burden themselves with children and slack-fibred enough to lapse into domesticity; and in moments of high altruism they had always thought it selfish and unkind to bring a child into the sort of world they had to live in. And yet if anyone were going to ‘get Dora with child’, he wanted to do the job himself, and not have Bill Hunt do it. Up to this minute he had hardly even thought of marrying, far less of becoming the father of a family, and yet now he found himself bitterly regretting that he had not married Dora before Artemis left for the Mediterranean, and not merely married her but made her pregnant so that there would be a young Jerningham in England today.