by John Winton
“Of course not. We live in South Kensington. But I wasn’t going to let that young snob get away with it. Good heavens, there’s Black Sebastian! He looks more like Old Nick than ever. I wonder what he’s doing here?”
Black Sebastian’s presence at the Reunion had already caused a great deal of comment; his presence there was almost as incredible as the conversion of St Paul. He himself seemed to be aware of the incongruity and was wearing the artificial smile of a medieval torturer unaccountably forced to mix socially with his victims. He was talking to a man who had joined submarines at the same time but who had long ago left the Navy and taken up insurance.
“I can’t think why we don’t have far more Shop-Windows,” Black Sebastian was saying. “Why tell a sailor to look out for submarines when nine times out of ten he hasn’t the faintest idea what he’s looking for?”
“Quite,” said the insurance man politely.
“Whenever a submarine does a Shop-Window for me I have it raising and lowering periscopes, radar masts, and snort mast until every sailor in my ship’s company can tell me exactly which is which as soon as it breaks surface. It takes all day but I do it.”
“You always were an unreasonable sort of bastard, Sebastian,” said the insurance man, and walked away to get another drink.
Nearby, two very aged submariners were laughing into their whiskies.
“. . Nobby, you’ve told me that story every year for forty years. I didn’t think it funny forty years ago and I don’t think it funny now. . .”
Nobby stiffened.
“That’s . . . that’s exactly the sort of ill-mannered remark I expect from a man who never commanded anything better than a C-boat. . . .”
“I may tell you, the C-boats were the best submarines God ever gave this earth. No C-boat captain would have had you anywhere near him. . . .”
After which unforgivable remark, the two very aged submariners moved sharply apart and cut each other dead for the rest of the Reunion, as they had done every year for the past forty.
The Lamm of God had been cornered by another aged submariner.
“. . Then in 1923 I joined K.67 as Jimmy. God, what a boat! The captain, he died a good few years ago, was as queer as a nine-bob note. He used to read Omar Khayyam to the sailors every Sunday. He once shook Chief in the middle of the night because he’d just tried the whistle and thought it sounded A sharp instead of A flat. . .”
The Admiral’s Chief of Staff was hemmed in by yet another short-sighted and arthritic ancient.
“I’ll give you some advice, boy. It was given to me by me first captain before the war, the first war that was, and I never forgot it. It was me first watch and I was as nervous as a virgin. I had the periscope goin’ up and down like a whore’s drawers. Then I heard water rushing somewhere in the control room bilges. When I told the Captain he said ‘Go and see what it is you stupid clot.’ Always run towards the sound of the water, he said. There you are. Always run towards the water at sea and the whisky in harbour. You’re just starting out in life so I pass it on to you. So don’t you forget that, heh?”
“Actually, I’m thinking of retiring next year,” said the Chief of Staff mildly.
“Heh?”
The Bodger was talking to a man who had the dark, ruddy tan of one who habitually worked out of doors. The Bodger was having a busy Reunion. It was some years since he had attended and he had many friends there who came up to shake hands and demand the full story of the Targa Mango. The Reunion also gave The Bodger some moments of nostalgia; it seemed a long time since his first Reunion, when he and Commander S/M had removed the Admiral’s trousers.
“It seems a long time since the first time, Paddy, doesn’t it?” The Bodger said.
“Like last century.”
Paddy was wearing a shabby Cheviot tweed and black boots. He twisted his neck from side to side occasionally as though it was not often he wore a collar. He had long dark sideburns, a broad fleshy nose, and looked like a poacher. He had been a member of The Bodger’s term at Dartmouth and now farmed a hundred acres in Shropshire.
“How’s the farm going now?”
Paddy shrugged. “So so. You can never tell with a farm. It takes about twenty years before you can really say. That’s if you don’t go bust in the first five. One thing is certain,-I work a damn sight harder now than I ever did in the Service. Do my eyes deceive me, or is that Black Sebastian over there?”
“Yes. I was wondering what he was doing here myself.”
“I wonder how he ever lived as long as this. If ever there was a candidate for a quick shove over the side on a dark night, it’s him. But tell me, Bodger, what’s your future now?”
“I don’t know. I was all set on retiring but all of a sudden this job in Seahorse dropped out of the blue. . . .”
“I heard about that. What actually did happen in that motor race. . .”
Black Sebastian was talking to the Admiral.
“. . I noticed when I was in the Med during the war that submarine losses followed a clear pattern. It was like a skiing holiday. You either break your leg on the first day or the last day. When a boat first came out, the first couple of patrols were the anxious ones. They were either so cautious they got thumped without ever knowing what happened or the Captain had been seeing too many Errol Flynn films and got thumped thinking he was God’s gift to the war effort. Then they seemed to get into their stride and all was well. After about a year, the losses went up again. The Captain was over-confident or just plain worn out. I can see the same sort of thing happening again. . . “
“Sir?”
The Chief of Staff appeared at the Admiral’s elbow. The Admiral started, as though from a deep trance.
“Oh yes. . . . My speech. . . . Excuse me. . .”
The Admiral Submarines’ speech was the crux of the Reunion. The Admiral himself once described it as “a mixture of a prize-giving speech, a chairman’s annual report, and What The Stars Foretell.”
“Sssh,” said Dagwood to the group round him, “the Speech from the Throne.”
“Gentlemen,” said the Admiral, “while I was preparing this speech the other day and turning over a few of the things I might say in my mind, I came across some notes left by a predecessor of mine who was Admiral here just after the First World War. What he said then is still true now. The same words still apply. . . .”
“Because we’re still using the same submarines,” a sardonic voice muttered, from the back.
“. . . He said: ‘I am convinced that the submarine has a greater future than any other weapon. I prophesy that one day the submarine will occupy the place the battleship holds now.’ You may think those unbelievably intelligent sentiments for an Admiral. . . .” The Admiral paused for laughter. “. . . But they must have seemed the words of a lunatic thirty years ago. They were said at a time when the Navy was sinking towards its lowest ebb since the reign of Charles II, when there was a strong move in international circles to ban the submarine altogether, as being unfair. That particular Admiral’s listeners must have thought the old boy was a little touched in the head. He was indeed retired very soon afterwards. But now, those words are coming true. They are no longer the mad pronouncements of a visionary. They are almost a cliché. I believe that the nuclear submarine, which can fire a missile while still submerged, is the supreme strategical weapon. The world has seen nothing like it. The Submarine Service has been handed the instrument of Armageddon. It’s a sobering thought to me that the young men we’re now training as submariners may one day be in charge of a weapon which might have been measured for St Michael the Archangel. . . .”
Captain S/M leaned over to the Chief of Staff. “You’ve been letting the Admiral read the newspapers again,” he whispered accusingly.
The Chief of Staff blushed and looked guilty.
“The Submarine Service is now approaching a period of great change. It is assuming greater importance every year. You can tell that it is growing in importance because the Gu
nnery Branch are trying to get in on it. Only today I squashed a proposal from Whale Island that our nuclear submarines should each carry a resident gunnery officer! I’m only sorry that I shan’t be here to see these changes carried out but I know that my successor feels much as I do. . . .“
The Admiral was a moving speaker. He was a dedicated man, but full of humour. He also had an Admiral’s essential quality, of optimism in public. When he had finished, those of his listeners still serving squared their shoulders, confident of good times and more submarines building just around the corner. Those who had retired began to feel that perhaps they had been too hasty.
“With any luck that should be all the speeches,” said Paddy.
“No,” said Commander S/M. “We’ve got the visiting V.I.P. to come. Although it doesn’t look as though he’s turned up yet.”
The visiting V.I.P. did not in fact arrive until the company had been drinking for another two hours and had long forgotten all about speeches.
The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Political Warfare was a political chameleon. Like the Vicar of Bray, he remained whichever government was at Westminster. He had sat for an agricultural constituency in the West of England for more than forty years and had so impressed successive Prime Ministers with his ability that he was even now, at sixty-eight, still spoken of as a coming man. He had been on the fringe of power for so long that he had acquired the mannerisms of power itself. He walked and talked like a cabinet minister. His long years as a politician had given him a touch of absent-mindedness and an ability to speak at any time on any subject. The Chief of Staff had intended to ask the Minister himself but at the last minute had settled for the Parliamentary Secretary because he lived locally.
The Parliamentary Secretary knew exactly what was required of him. Apologizing for his lateness, which he briskly blamed on a late sitting in the House, he brushed through the introductions and edged steadily nearer the dais whence, he knew with the infallible intuition of a born politician, the speeches were made. He was ready to speak long before his audience were ready to listen to him and was actually speaking before half of them were aware that he had arrived.
“Gentlemen,” said the Parliamentary Secretary, reading from a sheet of paper, “may I say that I think it a great honour to be asked to speak at your Reunion. . .”
“Who’s that funny little man?” asked Dangerous Dan, who was on his fourteenth whisky.
“Some friend of the Chief of Staff’s,” said someone, unjustly.
“. . It has always been a pet theory of mine that the Anglo-Saxon races make the finest tank crews of any. If I may roughly paraphrase a favourite saying of the Emperor Charles V, To God I speak Spanish, to women Italian, to men French, and to my tank--English! “
The submariners raised their heads from their glasses in astonishment. The Bodger caught the Chief of Staff’s look of mortal agony and shouted “Hear hear!” in a resonant voice. A few others echoed the sentiment in a bewildered chorus.
“Thank you,” said the Parliamentary Secretary, simply. “After all, we invented the tank! We perfected it. And we made brilliant use of it, all the way from the poppy-fields of Flanders to the desert sands of El Alamein.”
While the Chief of Staff stood wearing the unmistakable look of a Staff Officer when things are going irretrievably, ludicrously, wrong, the Parliamentary Secretary went on to describe a few of the more important technical advances in armoured warfare in recent years, to outline the careers of several outstanding armoured corps commanders, and to express his gratitude once more at being asked to attend the Reunion. It was a carefully composed speech for which someone had plainly done a lot of checking of facts and background and it left the Reunion as well-informed about tanks as any group of submariners had ever been. On reaching the end of his sheet of paper, the Parliamentary Secretary folded it away, stepped down from the dais, accepted a drink, and made general conversation with the Chief of Staff and several other officers.
Anxious not to embarrass their guest, the Chief of Staff racked his brain for tank anecdotes. He saw Captain S/M standing on the outskirts of the circle. “Don’t just stand there,” he hissed frantically. “Don’t you know any Shaggy Tank stories?”
Captain S/M was more than equal to the emergency.
“I well remember taking command of my first Centurion . . .” he began.
The wardroom hall porter touched Commander S/M’s sleeve.
“Signal just come, sir.”
Commander S/M read the signal, gave a great hoot of jubilation, and showed it to Captain S/M. The signal’s contents began to pass rapidly among the crowd. The Bodger, on the other side of the room, was suddenly aware that he had become the centre of attention.
“Congratulations, Bodger!”
In a moment, The Bodger was surrounded by eager hands competing to clap him on the back. A dozen voices shouted their congratulations. The Bodger himself was quite bewildered.
“But I don’t understand it,” he kept saying. “I was passed over. I was passed over some time ago.”
“Well, there it is, Bodger, in black and white!”
“Let me see that signal again.”
“There it is. From Lieutenant-Commander to Commander. Robert Bollinger Badger, H.M.S. Seahorse.”
“Well, fillip me with a three-man beetle! This calls for a drink! This calls for several drinks! But I still don’t understand it. . . .”
“Don’t look so baffled, Bodger,” said Commander S/M. “You had to be promoted. The Press are already clamouring for it. Your drive in that race was the best piece of worldwide publicity for the Navy in many a year. The Army and the R.A.F. are green with envy, I can tell you. They’re already planning their counter-measures, too. I hear the pongos are going in for the America Cup next year and the crab-fats are training a team to climb Everest. . .”
“I must admit I had my doubts about you in Seahorse, Badger,” said the Admiral. “I had a lot of doubts, I confess it. But it wasn’t only that infernal motor race. You’ve made a damned good start in that ship. You were worth it on that alone.”
“I can’t think why you’ve waited all this time, Bodger,” said Dangerous Dan, who was now on his twenty-fourth whisky.
“I’m sorry we’re not all here, sir,” said Wilfred. “I’m afraid the Midshipman is on a dirty week-end in Oozemouth. But for the rest of us, I can sincerely say ‘Congratulations,’ sir.”
“Badger?” said the Parliamentary Secretary. “That’s a familiar name.”
The Bodger prepared to tell the story of the Targa Mango again.
“Oh yes, I remember. Somebody sent me a docket a year or two ago marked ‘New Blood in Submarines’. Well of course I don’t know anything about submarines. Never have. But I did my best. I got out a list of Lieutenant-Commanders and yours was the first name on the list. So I recommended you. Obviously I knew what I was doing, eh? Now, I must go, Admiral. I have another engagement tonight. I have to speak at the Southern Command Royal Tank Corps Old Comrades Association dinner. So I’ll wish you good night. Good-bye, and thank you. Best of luck, Badger! “
Beaming genially to right and left, the Parliamentary Secretary went out to his car and drove off, leaving the Admiral, Captain S/M and The Bodger staring after him.
The Bodger’s promotion set the seal on the Reunion. The noise redoubled. The Bodger’s health was drunk in a variety of liquids. The atmosphere became charged with the authentic crackle of a successful party.
At three o’clock in the morning, The Bodger suddenly said: “What was that the Admiral said in his speech about his successor? Is he going?”
“Haven’t you heard?” said Commander S/M wearily. “It’s all been changed. Black Sebastian was promoted Rear Admiral today. He’s going to be the next Admiral here.”
The Bodger raised his glass. “Ah well,” he said. “It’s a funny life.”
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