by John Winton
The officials wrung their hands, re-telephoned and returned with the same story, with the addition of a blue Vauxhall.
“That’s my girl!” cried the Man from the Prudential. “That’s my car! “
“Who’s driving that?”
The officials consulted the list.
“Senor C. Stoker and Senor S. Coxswain.”
“. . And with that report from Arthur Sullivan, our correspondent in Cajalcocamara, we return listeners to the studio. . . .”
“Damn! I wish I’d got that station before. We might have got some idea of how we’re doing, Dan.”
“We’ll know in another half an hour. Can you get the opera again? I was rather enjoying that. Would you like to drive the last bit, Bodger?”
“That’s very generous of you, Dan. I’d love to.”
It struck The Bodger that they had not seen another car for some time.
“You sure we’re on the right road, Dan? We haven’t seen another car for a fair old time.”
“We must be. They seem to be expecting us wherever we go. The Navy must be popularity boys round this neck of the woods, judging by the chuck-up we’re getting. It’s understandable, you know, Bodger. The bright boys can do a hundred and seventy on these stretches. They must be home and dry by now. Our team are all behind us. We’re in between.”
“Between the sublime and the ridiculous,” said The Bodger.
Dangerous Dan looked at his watch. “Still, we’re not doing too badly. We’re averaging a steady fifty. That’s pretty good for beginners. If enough of the lunatics up front pile themselves into brick walls we might even get a place.”
The prospect of being placed in a major motor race went straight to The Bodger’s head like old wine.
“Steady, old fruit,” said Dangerous Dan. “I only said might. Ease off a bit. I’ve got a wife and two kids.”
Antonio Vivaldi, the man with the chequered flag, had once been a matador and he had brought his skill with the cape to the track. His cape-work now had more aficionados on the race track than it had ever had in the corrida. The greatest names in motor racing had flashed under his flowing veronicas. The Targa Mango was his favourite race. He had looked forward to it and had even practised a special pass in its -honour. But, at five minutes to six, Antonio sadly decided that his services would not now, if ever, be required. Stuffing his flag into a hip-pocket, he retired to the staff cantina.
He had barely tipped the bottle to his lips when there came a great growling roar from the crowd outside. Antonio Vivaldi, of all people, did not need to be told the sound’s significance. Such a cheer could only greet the first man home in the Targa Mango.
Spluttering and choking, Antonio Vivaldi was just in time to reach the finishing line, unfurl his flag, and wave it as The Bodger shot past. It was not a graceful movement and would have been hooted out of any bull-ring in Spain, but it was the best he could do with the wine still running down his chin. However, he recovered enough to execute a series of properly elegant passes over the unspeakable Sunbeam, the unmentionable M.G. and the indescribable Vauxhall which followed. Where the other drivers were, Antonio Vivaldi had no idea. He stuffed his flag away again and resumed his bottle, only vaguely conscious that he had played a walking-on part in the twilight of the gods.
There were no other finishers except, at midnight, an erratically-driven Land Rover and, at dawn, a Jaguar containing a dreamy Steward and a rapturous ash-blonde.
When the news of The Bodger’s winning drive was first flashed round the world, incredulous editors searched their press cuttings and cabled their correspondents to come in out of the sun. It was not until a picture of The Bodger, garlanded, dust-stained, smiling, and being embraced by the Chief of Police’s daughter, was radioed to the world’s capitals and the headlines appeared “British Cars, 1, 2, 3 in T. Mango!”, “New Racing Star!”, and “Gentlemen, A Toast--The Bodger!”, that the motor racing press and industry awoke to the fact that they had been the victims of what The Times later described as “the greatest turn-up for the book since David and Goliath”.
The three-legged donkey had won the Derby, slowing up. The tortoise had soundly thrashed the hare. Cartoonists hugged their sides and sharpened fresh pencils. In Modena and Turin and Coventry and Stuttgart men looked at each other in a wild surmise. In Detroit, executives fed the result into computers and said: “Overseas-sales-wise, this is a severe reversalization. It’s gonna cost us several mega-bucks, R.J.” In Paris, small swarthy men tore their berets into shreds and jumped on them, crying: “Nom d’un poisson, alors qu’est ce que c’est que ça, ce Bodgaire?” In London, a bewildered director of the winning firm was shaken from his club armchair and thumped on the back by the committee. All over the United Kingdom, Chief Constables added another name to their lists.
Deep in the unmapped wilderness beyond the mountains of SanGuana, a long line of cars worth over a million pounds had come to a halt because the leading car was axle-deep in a swamp. The magnificent engines were now motionless, gently pinging as they cooled in the shade of a line of mango trees.
The wilderness had already begun the process of assimilation. Ants tentatively probed the superb high-hysteresis racing tyres and wandered questioningly over the mirror-finished engine surfaces. A large green snake dropped with a slithering plop into a bucket seat. The first tendril of a searching vine had completed half a careful revolution around the wire spoke of a wheel.
The drivers had left their cars and were clustered round Wolf-Ferrari who was studying a silver cigarette case on which was engraved a small-scale map of South America.
At half past one the next morning, The Bodger, still wearing his garland, walked back along the jetty towards Seahorse alone. The Bodger could not remember a time when he had been more pleased with himself and with life. He and Dangerous Dan had won the Targa Mango (although exactly how, The Bodger was still not sure). Aquila had been very hospitable. They had all been invited to a ball at the British Consulate where they had eaten Crème de Carburettor Soup, Lobster Thermidor au Armstrong Siddeley, Chicken M.G. with slices of orange Sunbeam, followed by cafe au Vauxhall. The wines had been excellent and plentiful. Afterwards The Bodger had danced with the Chief of Police’s daughter who was South American rhumba champion. All sorts of genial people, and even Commodore Richard Gilpin, had come up and shaken him by the hand. He had refused an invitation to drive in the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort the next week. Over the brandy Aquila had decided to form his own navy and offered him the job of Commander-in-Chief. Altogether it had been a memorable evening.
It had all been splendid, but shortly after midnight The Bodger had felt a need for solitude, a craving for that communion with his inner gods which comes upon many men after an evening’s drinking. The Bodger’s walk through the town led him, with that unerring instinct which leads a naval officer to his bunk like a homing pigeon, back to the jetty.
The Bodger steadied himself on Beaufort shire’s gangway while he measured the remaining distance to Seahorse by eye. His attention was distracted by the row of lights hanging on the gangway rail. The lights fascinated him.
They led his glance towards Beaufortshire’s quarterdeck. It seemed to The Bodger an inviting sort of place.
Carefully, The Bodger mounted the gangway. The quartermaster at the top regarded him with hostility. The Bodger resented the man’s look.
“Where’s the Officer of the Day?”
“Turned in.”
“Well, get him out then.”
The quartermaster hesitated. He had not yet placed The Bodger. He was definitely not one of Beaufortshire’s officers but he had nevertheless an undefinable, familiar look about him.
“Tell him the Commanding Officer of H.M.S. Seahorse wants him.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
All the quartermaster’s doubts were instantly resolved.
“Tell him I want the bar opened. Immediately. Urgently!”
Had the quartermaster then turned back and polit
ely asked The Bodger to leave, all might still have been well. But the quartermaster only hesitated and went to call the Officer of the Day.
The Officer of the Day was the Navigating Officer.
“I’m afraid our bar is closed, sir,” he said coldly.
“Closed!’’ The Bodger pondered upon the enormity of the suggestion. “What a ridiculous idea, if I may respectfully say so.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“Very well. Where’s your captain?”
“The Captain is ashore, sir.”
There comes to every man at some time the sickening certainty that the bartender is not going to give him a drink. The Bodger bowed before the verdict.
“Very well.”
The Bodger negotiated the gangway once more. The quartermaster and the Navigating Officer congratulated themselves that they had conducted a tricky interview with tact and finesse, and retired.
With one foot on Seahorse’s gangway, The Bodger stopped. An idea had just struck him. It was a concept of such imagination, such consummate daring, that The Bodger remained where he was for a moment, quite stunned by his own virtuosity.
Sober, The Bodger could contain his own more outrageous flights of humour; in the cold light of day, he could resist temptation. But under such a starlit night, after such a day, The Bodger resisted only briefly and capitulated.
The Bodger looked cautiously over Beaufortshire’s upper deck. It was deserted. Stealthily he moved along the jetty, removed Beaufortshire’s wires from the bollards, and placed them on the jetty. Then he ran to Seahorse, crossed the gangway, saluted gravely, and mounted to his own bridge.
“Slow ahead together,” he said.
Like a cat The Bodger shinned down the ladders and padded aft to the motor room where he again saluted and said: “Slow ahead together, sir, aye aye, sir.”
The Bodger made the switches and set the submarine’s main motors turning slowly ahead.
“Both main motors going ahead, sir,” he said, in a reasonable imitation of the Signalman’s sepulchral voice.
The Bodger ascended to the bridge and said to the voice-pipe: “Very good.”
He remained for some time looking aft, watching the water churning from Seahorse towards Beaufortshire.
“Stop together.”
Once more, The Bodger descended to the motor room.
“Stop together, sir. Aye aye, sir.”
The Bodger broke the main motor switches, walked forward to his cabin, and stretched himself, still fully clothed and garlanded, upon his bunk.
In the distance, as he fell asleep, The Bodger could hear the sound of voices but they were no more to him than the faraway buzzing of flies around a rubbish heap on a hot summer’s day.
15
A submarine returning from abroad was normally given a very modest press reception--seldom more than a column and a photograph in the local paper and a paragraph in the national press. H.M.S. Seahorse's return from SanGuana was given the most complete press coverage the Submarine Service had ever experienced. A helicopter met the ship in the Channel, before she had raised St Catherine’s, before even Geronwyn Evans had struck his tuning fork and led off “First the Nab and then the Warner”. She was photographed every inch of the way to her berth where Captain S/M and his staff were fighting to keep their feet amongst the television cameras and the clamouring crowd of reporters and families. Photographers swarmed over the jetty and the catamarans, snapping Seahorse’s ensign, The Bodger’s hat, Leading Seaman Gorbles, and in passing, the Naval Correspondent of the Daily Disaster who was struck smartly on the head by Seahorse’s first heaving line.
Some of the press deployed to interview members of the Ship’s Company but most of them made for The Bodger. The Bodger was ready for them.
“It was team-work that did it,” he said, solemnly. “Teamwork all the way.”
“Commander Badger,” said the Naval Correspondent of the Daily Disaster, “do you intend to take up motor racing seriously? Don’t misunderstand me, I mean you’ve won the Targa Mango but. . . .”
“I don’t intend to race again.”
“Commander Badger, is it true that you drove in this race as publicity for the Royal Navy?”
The Bodger thought very hard, very swiftly; this question had a curly, spiked tail.
“My team and I drove at the personal invitation of the President, as his guests.”
“Commander Badger,” said the editor of Woman and Garden coyly, “there’s a rumour of a romance between you and Senorita Alvarez. . .”
“Who’s she?”
“Come, come, Commander. The daughter of the Chief of Police.”
“Oh her! “ A delighted smile spread over The Bodger’s face. This was a moment for which he had waited all his adult life.
“No,” he said slowly, “we are just good friends.”
Whatever the reaction in the national press, The Bodger’s return was only a one day sensation in the Submarine Service. The Submarine Service had more important things to think about. The Reunion was due.
The Reunion was the submariners’ annual beano. Its date was sacred in every submariner’s diary; only death took precedence (and then only after the Mess Secretary had been informed). The Reunion had the same effect on submariners as the Bonnie Prince’s fiery cross had upon the clansmen. For it, they abandoned their wives and families. They left their desks at Lloyds, their farms in Dorset, their market gardens in Leicestershire, their bookshops in Winchester, and their garages in Croydon. They left their offices, their sales rooms, their boards, their spades, their benches, their psychologists’ couches and converged upon Portsmouth like a mass migration of thirst-crazed lemmings. The first of them began to assemble three days before the event and the last of them were not normally carried away until three days after it and while the Reunion was in progress the foreign exchange market could collapse in ruins, the Middle East flame in insurrection, earthquakes devastate the western hemisphere and the whole of England itself submerge under a tidal wave but all those who had ever been submariners would remain oblivious, gathered under one roof and pouring whisky down their assembled throats just as fast as it would drain away.
When they were all present, the submariners could claim at least one holder of almost every honour, medal and decoration in the Gazette. There were men at the Reunion who had fought a submarine through the nets and mine cables of the Dardanelles into the Sea of Marmara and watched a Turkish cruiser settle on the bottom. There were men there who had patrolled in a submarine in the shallow water, the sudden freshwater layers, and the short summer nights of the Skagerrak. There were men who had run blind through the minefields of the Java Sea with a magnetic compass, a stop-watch and several prayers. There were men who had been depth-charged constantly for a day and a half, who had heard a mine-cable scrape the length of the ship before swinging clear, who had swum seven miles to shore after their ship was mined, who had cleared unexploded bombs from the casing in broad daylight, and who had escaped from three hundred feet with buckets over their heads. They represented a weapon which, in its British guise, had borne the heat and burden of the war from the Atlantic to the Pacific by way of the Mediterranean, and which, in its American counterpart, had crippled the Japanese navy and ripped the bottom out of the Japanese mercantile fleet. It was also a weapon which, used by the enemy, had brought the United Kingdom itself within a few months of starvation.
“All I can say is,’' said Dangerous Dan, who was already on his fourth whisky, “you wouldn’t think it to look at them.”
Dangerous Dan had often noticed that the most distinguished submarine officers were also the scruffiest. “There’s normally a fly-button missing for every D.S.O.,” he said.
Dangerous Dan’s eye rested on the Senior Submariner present, a venerable and very distinguished Admiral whose uniform was encrusted with orders and who possessed a row of medals fourteen inches in length and forty years in time. The Senior Submariner was now wearing a very baggy and faded
Glen check with scuffed leather elbow-pieces.
“As I see it,” the Senior Submariner was saying to a circle of clients, “submarines haven’t advanced a bit since I joined ’em. Not one bit! “
The circle of clients clicked their teeth deprecatingly.
“You sir,” the Senior Submariner said to a very young, fair-haired submarine C.O. with brilliant white teeth who had just taken over his first command. “What’s your top underwater speed now?”
“Nine and a half knots, sir.”
“What did I tell you! My first boat did ten! That was in the first world war! “
“We have advanced a little, sir, in many ways.”
“We’ve fitted heads in ’em now, if that’s what you mean. When I joined my first boat as Pilot there were no heads. Used to get pretty constipated, I can tell you. The Captain and I, he’s dead now poor fellow, used to sit out on either side of the tower in the mornings. One morning off the Scillies, I remember it well, we were sitting there, one on either side, when I heard a bloody great thump from the Captain’s side. ‘Well done, sir!’ I said. ‘Well done be buggered,’ he said, ‘that was my bloody binoculars!’”
The Reunion agenda had a reassuring permanence. A submariner returning after many years abroad would find the same people observing the same ritual as on his last visit. The programme was simple. It began with drinks, continued with a speech by the Senior Submariner, more drinks, a speech by the Admiral, more drinks, perhaps a speech by a visiting V.I.P. and ended with drinks.
The Senior Submariner made his speech as though he had left a lighted cigarette at the other end of the room and was anxious to get back to it. He welcomed everyone present to the Reunion, expressed his pleasure at seeing them there, hoped they would all enjoy themselves and stood down to a comfortable and thankful volume of applause.
“That’s what I like about old Glueballs,” Dangerous Dan said to Wilfred irreverently. “He always cuts it short.” “There’s something I’ve wanted to ask you for a long time, Dan. Does the Prime Minister really shoot over your land?”
