by John Winton
The day’s dive was The Bodger’s first opportunity to put his new ship’s company through their paces and it took the ship’s company only a short time to realize that they had taken on board a Caesar. Standing in the control room while his ship’s company raced round him, The Bodger took his ship and made it jump through hoops. They practised putting out a fire in the main battery and restoring electric power by emergency circuits. They exercised the hydroplanes and the steering gear in emergency control. The Chef was required to put out a fire in his galley. The engine room staff rigged emergency methods of pumping and flooding. The Steward steered the ship, while the Coxswain operated the switches in the motor room. The Chief Stoker and his store-keeper, a lanky, saturnine stoker called Ferguson, laboured to bring up fantastically-shaped pieces of spare gear which had not seen the light since the day they were installed. After two hours of it, the ship’s company felt as though they had been put through a wringer.
“If this submarine was an animal,” said Leading Seaman Gorbles, “we’d have the R.S.P.C.A. after us.”
“Keep silence,” said the Coxswain.
“Aye aye, Swain,” said Leading Seaman Gorbles.
Leading Seaman Gorbles disliked the Coxswain. Most of the ship’s company disliked the Coxswain but not because he was the ship’s master-at-arms and responsible for disciplinary matters, nor because he was also the ship’s catering officer and responsible, under the First Lieutenant, for the amount and variety of the sailors’ food. Other submarine coxswains suffered under these disadvantages and still remained popular and respected men. It was not in his professional but in his private life that the Coxswain offended. The Coxswain had, in the distant past before he became a Coxswain, got religion. The normal submarine sailor regarded religion as something to be used when strictly necessary, at its proper time and in its proper place, classifying it in the scale of usefulness after Eno’s Salts but before an appendectomy. They mistrusted anyone except a padre who looked upon it in any other light. It was perhaps this mistrust which led to a poem being pinned on the control room notice board on the day Seahorse commissioned which defined the ship’s company’s attitude to their Coxswain.
“This is the good ship Seahorse,
The home of the bean and the cod:
Where nobody talks to the Coxswain,
Cos the Coxswain talks only to God.”
When Seahorse surfaced after her day’s exercise, The Bodger felt as invigorated as though he had just had a cold bath and a massage. He knew now that he had the structure and potential of a very good ship. All that was needed was to breathe it into life. He was also selfishly pleased with his own performance. He had gained in confidence with each minute. The old commands, the familiar submarine street-cries, had all come back to him, as Captain S/M had predicted they would. Having laid his first foundation, he could safely pass on to the next item.
“Now,” he said, rubbing his hands. “Let me see some of the correspondence.”
Rusty, who was the ship’s correspondence officer, guiltily brought out a file marked “Captain to See”. The worst moment of any submarine correspondence officer’s day was the moment when the Captain called for the correspondence pack. It nearly always meant trouble for someone.
“Yes,” said The Bodger doubtfully. “The one I’d like to see is the ‘Captain Not To See’ pack. I always had one when I was Black Sebastian’s correspondence officer. Who on earth are the EetEezi Catering Company?”
“They supplied the food during our contractor’s sea trials, sir,” said Rusty.
“Why have we got a letter from them still in here? Ditch it. What’s this gauge all this stuff is about?”
“It’s a gadget for the distiller, sir,” said Derek.
“Have you all seen it?”
“I think so, sir.”
“Well, take all this rubbish away and put it in your own pack. I don’t see anything about this place we’re supposed to be going to tomorrow?”
“I’ve made a special pack for that, sir.”
Rusty handed The Bodger a bulky pack marked “Oozemouth--For Sunny Holidays.”
The Bodger rubbed his chin. “I see we’re open to the public every day from two to six. Is that O.K. with you, Chief?”
“It should be, sir,” said Derek. “We haven’t got anything big on, unless something expensive happens on the way there.”
“Good. I don’t see any visits from schools or sea cadets here?”
“We haven’t fixed that yet, sir.”
“That must be done, right way. We’d better have a Schools Liaison Officer. Dagwood. . .”
“Sir?” said Dagwood, apprehensively.
“. . . You’ve been selected from a host of applicants. As soon as we get there, I want you to go ashore and ring up every school in the place and ask them if they’d like to send a team down. Ask them all--sea cadets, girl guides, Band of Hope--everybody. Give the local crèche a ring, too. They may have some embryo submariners for all we know. This is supposed to be a flag-showing visit and we’re going to show the flag if it kills us. I don’t give a damn about the general public. They’ve all seen too many gloomy films about submarines and they’re only coming to satisfy their morbid curiosity. But the schools are a different thing. Unbelievable though it may be, that’s the Navy of the future you’re looking at, under that disgusting school cap and behind those indescribable pimples. You give a boy a good time when he comes to visit your boat and he’ll remember it all his life. So schools and sea cadets are the number one priority, no matter when they want to come and no matter how many they want to bring. They won’t want very much, no detailed descriptions or anything like that. Just being in a submarine will be enough. And if they don’t give the ship a cheer when they leave you can take it that the visit’s been a failure. So don’t forget. It’s Billy Bunter, Just William and the Fifth Form at St. Dominic’s we’re after. Mum, Dad and Uncle Henry can look after themselves. It’ll need a bit of organizing, Dagwood. We don’t want them all at once and yet we don’t want the boat looking like a Giles cartoon twenty-four hours a day for six days. Think you can do it?”
“Oh yes, sir.”
“I’m told we’ll have some boffins, too, from some Admiralty Research Establishment or other. You’d better deal with them, Chief. They’re the worst of the lot, of course, but go easy with them. They've been sitting on chairs so long the iron has entered their souls.”
Dagwood relished the last remark on the boffins. He had been a little overpowered by The Bodger’s speech on Billy Bunter et al. but now he was relieved, and delighted, to see in The Bodger the gleam of a dry sardonic sense of humour. “Have we got a press hand-out?”
“Yes, sir. S/M had a couple of thousand run off before we left.”
“Has it got a photograph?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Splendid.” The Bodger began to turn over the papers in the ‘Oozemouth’ pack. “Football against the police. Cricket against the fire brigade. Badminton against King William IV Grammar School. Visit to a brewery. Visit to a chemical works. Visit to an oil refinery. Reception in the Mayor’s parlour. Free tickets to We Couldn’t Wear Less at the Intimate Theatre. Darts against the ‘Drunken Duck’. We’re going to have our work cut out, men.”
As The Bodger sifted through the invitations, he began to understand that the City of Oozemouth had exerted itself to be hospitable. There were honorary memberships of yacht clubs, tennis clubs and golf clubs; free tickets for plays, concerts and dances; and a card for every member of the ship’s company entitling him to travel free in municipal transport when in uniform.
“What’s this, supper and classical records with the Misses English-Spence, for two sailors? Have we got any classical music fiends, Dagwood?”
“I think the Radio Electrician and the Chef know a bit about it, sir.”
“The Chef! Good God! Well, there we are. Obviously we’re going to have to wave the old flag until we drop. What time do we get there, Pilot?”
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“Nine o’clock tomorrow morning, sir,” said Gavin.
At nine o’clock, in a light drizzle of rain, Seahorse reached the fairway buoy and passed up the channel to the City of Oozemouth. In spite of the rain, they were cheered all the way up. The main road which ran close to the water’s edge for part of the way was packed with drenched holiday-makers. People perched on the roofs of cars and leaned from windows to wave. The inner harbour was swarming with sailing boats and pinnaces. Seahorse’s black hull moved among them like a shark’s fin in a shoal of minnows. A sodden sea cadet band was playing on the jetty as Seahorse secured.
“Zero hour,” said The Bodger. “Synchronize your watches, men.”
3
“But don’t you get terrible claustrophobia?”
“No ma’am, only thirsty.”
“But I thought you got rum?”
“Yes ma’am, but not enough.”
H.M.S. Seahorse was open to the public for the first day and the citizens of Oozemouth were determined to make the most of the first submarine to visit their city since the day the war ended, when a German U-boat stupefied the local coastguards by surfacing next to the fairway buoy and hoisting a white flag. A squad of policemen with linked hands held back a surging, thrusting mass of holiday-makers, sea-cadets, tradesmen and seamen from neighbouring merchantships. Behind the public, mustered in ominous phalanxes, were the First Seven Schools.
Dagwood had spent a lurid two hours on the port harbourmaster’s telephone immediately Seahorse had secured. He had discovered that there were forty-two educational establishments in Oozemouth and district, ranging in size and denomination from Oozemouth Secondary Modern School, with over a thousand pupils, to Miss Elizabeth Warbeck’s Academy for Daughters of Gentlewomen in Reduced Circumstances, with ten girls. Bearing in mind The Bodger’s strictures on the subject of Billy Bunter, etc., Dagwood had telephoned them all and every school had said it would like to bring all its pupils. Dagwood had made a swift calculation. Forty-two schools, in six days, made seven schools a day.
The First Seven Schools had arrived and were being held back by the brute force of the police, assisted by depressed-looking men in faded sports-coats and ginger moustaches and large women in tweed suits and pork-pie hats, who were circulating amongst the tide of coloured school caps, squashed velour hats, satchels, hockey-sticks, and straw boaters like cow-hands at a round-up. A gigantic nun, wearing a headdress reminiscent of the Medici, was laying about her with an implement which seemed to The Bodger, watching in horrified fascination from Seahorse’s bridge, to be a crozier. Hats, caps and satchels were falling into the harbour in a steady rain and were being retrieved by an old man in a blue sweater and three days’ growth of white stubble. The old man had not had such a day in his small boat since the time the brewer’s lighter came apart at the seams and four dozen barrels of assorted beers went floating out on the ebb tide.
When, suddenly, the Seven Schools broke through the police cordon and swept towards the gangway, the Bodger hurriedly left the bridge and went down to the wardroom where he poured himself a stiff whisky and followed it with another. The only other person in the wardroom was Gavin, who was pretending to study a chart.
“What are you doing, Pilot?” The Bodger asked him.
“Sailing plan for Exercise Lucky Alphonse, sir.”
“Never mind about that just now. Get up top and start showing people round.”
“Yes, sir.”
Shortly there were shrill screams from forward, where Gavin had run into a party of girls from the Secondary Modern School.
Left alone, The Bodger was settling down to enjoy his whisky when he became aware of a rich north country voice resounding from the control room outside.
“Bah goom,” said the voice, “Ah wish Ah had a quid for every time Ah’ve whanked one of these.”
Cautiously, The Bodger peered round the corner of the wardroom door.
The speaker was a tubby cheerful-looking little man in a brand-new checked sports coat and a blue shirt open at the neck. With him was a lady who was plainly his wife and there were four children, two girls who looked like their father and two boys who resembled their mother, standing in a row which reminded The Bodger of a cocoa advertisement. It was clear that the tubby little man needed nobody to show him around. He was fingering the shining handles lovingly and passing his hands knowingly over the air valves. He sniffed, and a delighted smile of nostalgia spread over his face.
“Eeh, it hasn’t changed a bit! Diesel an’ cabbage an’ sweat! “
“Bert,” said the wife.
“Maria, Ah was in these things for four years before Ah married you an’ they were the best years of mah life. Ah was Outside Wrecker and Ah remember one day off Sicily we ’ad something loose in the casing an’ the Captain asks for volunteers to go and fix it. So the Engineer and me goes up and fixes it. When we got down again the Captain said to me, Biggs, he said, thart a brave man, Biggs. If an aircraft’d come while ther were up there Ah’d have to have dived without you. And Ah said, No tha wouldn’t, Ah shut off t’panel afore Ah went, tha couldn’t’ve dived. He just looks at me and when we got back he recommends me for warrant officer! “
The Bodger enjoyed the story. It had timing, punch, and a moral. Just as The Bodger was returning to his whisky he heard a small girl who was being held up to the after periscope by her mother squeal: “Look mum, it’s in technicolor! “
A black scowl wiped away The Bodger’s indulgent smile. Up on the casing, in steady rain, Petty Officer Humbold, the Second Coxswain, was showing a party of the general public round the upper deck. The painting and care of the outside of the submarine were the Second Coxswain’s own particular responsibility. He was the Torpedo Officer’s right-hand man when the submarine was entering or leaving harbour. He was a broad-shouldered, bullet-headed man with a torpedo beard and a pugnacious manner, as though he might at any moment punch his audience on their respective noses.
“Up there,” said the Second Coxswain, pointing at the gangling figure of Ferguson, the Chief Stoker’s storekeeper, who was standing in oil-skins, boots and gaiters by the forward gangway, “we have a sailor who’s known as the Trot Sentry.”
The small band of the general public gazed at Ferguson, who was alternately blowing on his hands and making marks in a saturated note-book to note the number of visitors boarding the ship.
“He ain’t good-looking, but like me and unlike you he’s only here because he’s gotta be.”
“Why haven’t you got a gun?” asked a tall pale man in a cloth cap and a plastic raincoat.
“Can’t afford one,” said the Second Coxswain shortly. “Forrard, we have the anchor and cable. We’ve got one capstan, that’s that little drum. . . .”
“What’s your job in this submarine, mister?” asked a youth in a black leather jacket and a crash-helmet.
“When the submarine dives, I run forrard as fast as I can and hold its nose. Back here, we’ve got the tower, where the awficer of the watch keeps ’is lonely vigil. . . “
“Don’t you get claustrophobia in a submarine?”
“Only when I laugh,” said the Second Coxswain grimly.
In the engine room, Derek was entertaining the party of boffins. The Admiralty Research Establishment had provided an assorted collection of representatives, who were led by a senior scientist. There were four physicists, two marine biologists, three metallurgists, a specialist in wave formations, and a visiting professor from Harvard.
Derek led the way on to the engine room platform. In front of them were two panels of gauges, one for each engine, and all about them were the valves and systems for starting, controlling and stopping the engines. The party looked around in silence for a few moments.
“Holy Cow,” said the visiting professor from Harvard, at last. “Rock-crushers! “
Derek bristled. He had cherished these engines from their earliest days. He had watched them grow from bare skeleton frames, lying on a shop floor, to t
hundering monsters capable of driving the submarine across the world. “They’re a little more than that,” he said coldly.
“Tell me,” said the Senior Scientist, “do you go everywhere dived?”
“No. When we’re on passage we go on the surface. In peacetime anyway.”
“Do the engines give you much trouble?” asked one of the metallurgists.
“Only when the Chief E.R.A. has a wash.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“It seems to be traditional that the Chief E.R.A. of a submarine never washes at sea. If he does, something goes wrong with the engines to get him dirty again.”
The Wavemaker looked at the tangle of pipes around him. “How do you figure out all these pipe systems? They don’t seem to lead anywhere.”
“Actually, these systems are better than most,” Derek said. “They’ve been planned on a mock-up first, before they were ever put into a submarine. Most submarine systems look as though they were designed by Salvador Dali. Of course, they were put in under the old Olympic System.”
“The Olympic System?” The Senior Scientist shook his head.
“The fastest dockyard matie won, sir. Every morning while the submarine was building the men from the various dockyard departments lined up on the dockside holding their bits of pipe. Then when the whistle blew they all doubled on board and the man who got there first had a straight run. The others had to bend their pipes around his. The beauty of the system was that it didn’t matter what size the pipes were. If the electrician was particularly agile he could put his bit of quarter-inch electric cable in first and watch the boiler-maker bend his length of eight-inch diameter special steel piping round it.”
“Really?” said the Senior Scientist.
