by John Winton
‘Pity your father couldn’t see you now, George,’ boomed George’s mother. ‘He’d have had a stroke.’
‘Why, mater?’
‘He told me a thousand times before he died that any son of his would join the Navy over his dead body. You have, so buck up and look cheerful about it, my lad.’
‘I’ll try, mater.’
‘Looking at some of these little tykes you shouldn’t do too badly.’
‘Yes, mater.’
George Dewberry put a finger in the rim of his cap and lifted it from the position of equilibrium it had assumed over his ears. The naval outfitters had given him a cap many sizes too large.
George Dewberry was philosophical about it; it was only one and a minor one of the inconveniences of joining the Navy.
Tom Bowles was alone and walked up the platform and straight into a carriage.
Michael Hobbes was seen off by his mother and father and his eldest sister Susan. Michael was the first of his family to join the Navy and the news that he was about to do so had sent an electric tremor along the family grapevine only equalled by a birth or a marriage. His immediate family were delighted and particularly Susan who was captivated by the uniform. When Susan had first seen Michael in his uniform she had been struck dumb by his transformation from the chrysalis of a rather odious elder brother into the glorious butterfly of a Cadet, Royal Navy. She had regarded him with almost worshipping eyes but now that she saw so many other young men, all in the same magical dress, she was more critical of her brother.
‘They’re quite a lot of them taller than you, aren’t there?’ she said to Michael when they arrived on the platform.
‘Oh shut up. You’re supposed to be seeing me off, not making funny remarks.’
Michael tried to conceal his nervousness.
‘It’s almost like going back to school again isn’t it Michael?’ said his mother.
His mother knew more certainly than any other person in the family that they were about to lose him. She sensed that the break which was just approaching would be far more permanent than a return to school. She also sensed her son’s fear of the future.
‘Don’t you think it’s like going back to school, Michael?’
‘Almost.’
‘Remember to write now, won’t you, and let us know if you’re doing all right.’
‘Yes, mum.’
‘Got your ticket?’
‘Yes, mum.’
‘Handkerchief?’
‘Yes, mum.’
‘Michael, don’t be such a drip,’ said Susan. ‘You’ll be back in three months. Which are the boys who are going to be captains?’
‘How on earth should I know? I’ve never seen them before in my life.’
As the time of departure came nearer, each cadet and his attendant circle tended to draw away from the rest. The families’ reactions varied from the stoical to the wildly tearful. Some families regarded their sons coldly and unemotionally, like Red Indian families sending their young braves out to fight against the white man. Others nearby wept and embraced each other, as though they were saying farewell to their boys before they disappeared into the gas-chamber.
A whistle blew. Mrs Vincent was almost extinguished behind her lace handkerchief and her veil. She could find no words to say to her son at this moment but hugged him tight.
‘Here,’ said Cedric, taking a five pound note from his wallet. ‘Don’t spend it all on one woman.’
The whistle blew twice.
George Dewberry’s mother opened her handbag, which appeared to have been hacked from the carcass of an otter.
‘Here is your ticket, George,’ she said. ‘I’ve kept it as long as I can. You’ll have to look after it yourself now.’
George and his mother kissed briefly, like horses recognising each other.
A third time the whistle blew. Michael Hobbes hurriedly kissed his mother and his sister. He shook hands with his father.
‘I suppose I really ought to have given you some advice,’ said Mr Hobbes. He held out a pound note. ‘Don’t take up smoking too early.’
The whistle blew again, in exasperation. There was a rush to the carriage doors. Michael Hobbes got in with Paul Vincent and George Dewberry. There was another cadet already sitting in the fourth corner.
The train began to move out of the platform. Michael Hobbes leant out and waved and afterwards remembered nothing more of the final parting from his old life than faces sliding by, handkerchiefs waving and a shrouding blast of steam and smoke as they left the platform behind.
The four cadets, in their four corners, surveyed each other.
The fourth cadet in the compartment was a red-faced, belligerent-looking boy with sandy hair and pouting lips. His tie drooped down his collar, exposing his front stud, as though it had been tied by hands unaccustomed to stiff collars. A copy of Life’s Snags, by Baden-Powell, lay on the seat beside him. Paul looked the red-faced cadet up and down and addressed himself to Michael.
‘Michael Hobbes, isn’t it?’ he asked. ‘Weren’t we at the interview together?’
‘That’s right,’ said Michael. ‘You’re Paul Vincent.’
‘How right,’ said Paul. He turned to George Dewberry. ‘You’re Horace, aren’t you?’
George Dewberry winced.
‘That’s one of my names, but everybody calls me George,’ he said.
‘My name is Edward Maconochie,’ announced the red-faced cadet, suddenly.
‘Splendid fellow,’ murmured Paul. He took up a copy of The Connoisseur and began to read it. He had summed Maconochie up already and his manner clearly showed that his conversation with Maconochie had been an ideal one. It had been short, concise, to the point, and was now closed. But Edward Maconochie was not so easily put off.
‘The Troop called me Ted,’ he said.
‘You mustn’t believe everything people say,’ remarked Paul. He turned back to The Connoisseur again. But still Maconochie was not discouraged.
‘Oh, they didn’t mean anything by it! It’s a compliment!’
Paul raised an eyebrow.
‘Of course, not everybody called me Ted. The Tenderfeet didn’t dare!’
‘I should think not!’ replied Paul, righteously. ‘Whatever next?’
‘Though naturally I didn’t want to be too hard on them, I was a Tenderfoot once myself, you know.’
‘Never mind, Ted, I’m sure they’ll overlook it at Dartmouth.’
‘Oh everybody’s got to start at the bottom! Not that I was a Tenderfoot long. It didn’t take me long to get to know who were the important people in the Troop...’
‘Look Ted, old boy, I can think of nothing which interests me less at the moment than Boy Scout politics.’
‘... You see, you start as a Tenderfoot and after you’ve passed your test you become a . . .’
Maconochie continued and Paul, Michael and George Dewberry were compelled by his persistence to listen. Maconochie described for them the primrose path of promotion in the Boy Scout Movement, from obscure and timid Tenderfoot to that glorious and omnipotent being, only a little short of Jove, a County Commissioner. Maconochie himself had done well. At the time of speaking, a Scout First Class and a Troop Leader eke was he.
Paul listened to Maconochie as he might have listened to the dripping of a tap which he thought he had repaired.
‘My!’ he said, at last. ‘Isn’t it strange how history repeats itself? Here we are, like Xenophon’s Ten Thousand on our way to the sea, and we are harried and set about by Babylonians! How many miles to Babylon? Ye gods, only Reading?’
Paul took out his cigarette case.
‘Cigarette, Ted?’
Maconochie recoiled, as though he had come upon two Tenderfeet chalking up rhymes in the Peewit Patrol Corner. He had opened his mouth to speak when his attention was distracted by something outside the carriage window.
‘Look!’
Paul, Michael and George gazed out of the window at the peaceful Berkshire count
ryside speeding past. They searched for a runaway horse, or a fire, or even a Boy Scout.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Just fancy that! We’re just coming to the place where we had our summer camp last year. Yes, look! There it is over by that white house. I passed my axemanship test there, you know.’
‘Drop dead, Ted,’ said Paul.
Maconochie stopped short, his mouth hanging open. Then he picked up Life’s Snags and thumbed through it, almost as though he were looking for a mention of Paul. Michael opened Two Years Before the Mast, which had been given to him by a well-meaning uncle, and pretended to read the first chapter. He wondered what the brave new world of the Navy would be like, that had such people as Paul Vincent and Ted Maconochie in it.
After a time Maconochie tired of Life’s Snags and stood up. He preened himself in front of the mirror. He combed his hair and examined his fingernails. He tried on his cap. It was too small and perched on the top of his head. George Dewberry watched him and then made his first contribution to the conversation.
‘I say,’ he said, ‘would you mind changing caps with me?’
Tom Bowles was in the next compartment. Opposite him sat an old man balancing a pork pie on a cloth on his knees. The old man was preparing to have the pork pie for lunch.
First the old man took out a small penknife and carefully cut the pie into halves. Then he cut the pie into quarters, measuring the quadrants meticulously by eye. Then he took the quarters one by one and neatly bisected them into eighths. But when he attempted to cut one of the pieces of eight in half it crumpled into an asymmetrical mass. The old man grunted.
‘Going to join the Navy, son?’ he asked.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Tom.
‘It’s a great life, they tell me.’
The old man wiped his nose meditatively on his sleeve.
‘If you don’t weaken, that is.’
He gazed ruminatively out of the window, as though he were recalling sailors he had known.
‘Met with some ‘orrible deaths, sailors ‘ave.’
‘They didn’t tell me that, sir.’
‘Oh no. I don’t suppose they would. Not until you’re in, they wouldn’t. ‘Ave you signed anything yet?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Don’t.’
The Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, looked exactly as a tourist or a real estate salesman would imagine a Naval College ought to look. The College looked as though it had been designed by men who planned it so that archaeologists of the future discovering the ruins would immediately drop their spades and exclaim ‘Ah, yes! This must have been where they trained their naval officers!’
The College stood on a hill overlooking the town of Dartmouth. It could not be said to dominate the town because nothing constructed by or for the Royal Navy would commit so flagrant a breach of good manners as to presume to dominate anything; rather was it just there, above the town, so that the locals could look up at it and say ‘Yer, the College.’
The main block of College buildings faced out to the harbour of Dartmouth and the English Channel. Wings jutted out at the ends of the main block forming arms which enclosed the parade ground. The parade ground was separated from the buildings by two roads which swept round on climbing ramps and joined in front of the main entrance. A flight of steps led from the road outside the main entrance down to the parade ground, parting in its descent to accommodate a stone rampart in the middle which served as a saluting base and as the nearest the architect could approach to a ship’s bridge, hampered as he was by being on dry land. A flagstaff flying the White Ensign stood where the two roads met at the bottom of the ramps. Behind and around the main blocks were the subsidiary instructional blocks, the hospital, the gymnasium and swimming pool, the shooting range, the squash and tennis courts, and the pavilion.
The College impressed summer excursionists on the River Dart with a feeling that here indeed was the cradle of Nelson’s descendants and the breeding ground of future sea-dogs. It left in their goggling eyes and ears a composite of Drake drumming up the Channel, Nelson shattering the French, and the chorus of ‘Hearts of Oak’ sung by a watch of bluejackets resembling the man on the Player’s packet. Seen dispassionately from the Kingswear side of the river on a bright summer’s day, the effect was indeed one of dignity and the spirit of Nelson, lightly coated with icing sugar.
When the eighty cadets of several nationalities stood in Kingswear station and waited for the ferry to take them across the river the effect was not one of the spirit of Nelson, but of deep depression. It was raining gently but steadily, and the town of Dartmouth had achieved that chilling appearance of grey hopelessness and damp despair which is nowhere in the world achieved so successfully as by a Devon town in the rain.
The cadets were met on the Dartmouth side by three damp and embittered-looking Chief Petty Officers.
‘Get fell in now!’ bawled the biggest and most embittered-looking Chief Petty Officer. ‘Chop chop now! Slap it about! Them as is keen gets fell in previous!’
‘How can any of us get fell in previous when we all arrived at the same time?’ wondered Paul.
‘Keep silence! Get fell in three deep tallest on the right shortest in the centre!’
The cadets shuffled into three approximate ranks. The three Chief Petty Officers ranged themselves around the squad, as though to prevent any cadet bolting, and counted. After the count, the squad turned right and began to march up the hill towards the College.
‘Swing them arms!’ bawled the large Chief Petty Officer.
As punishment for making the mistake of delaying their entry until the age of eighteen and thus depriving the Navy of its right to educate and train them from the age of thirteen, the Special Entry Cadets, known collectively under the house-name of Beattys, were not housed in the main College at all but in a barracks halfway down the hill towards the river at Sandquay. There, the accommodation and amenities would have excited the admiration of a native Spartan. It was to these barracks that the Beattys marched, swinging their arms, in a long straggling column.
As they marched, the Beattys had their first opportunity to see each other together. Michael Hobbes was amazed at the different nationalities. Besides the R.N. cadets, whom he had expected to see, there were Indians, Pakistanis, Sikhs, Burmese, Egyptians, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders. Michael himself marched between a small Sikh and a tall R.N. cadet whom he later discovered was named Cleghorn. Michael was secretly impressed by the confident manner in which Cleghorn wore his uniform; his cap already had a nautical tilt and looked as though it had borne the brunt of several arctic whaling seasons.
When the Beattys arrived in front of their barracks they were counted again, presumably to check whether any cadets had broken ship already. Then the largest Chief Petty Officer called out each cadet’s name from a list and allotted them divisions, chest flats and bed numbers. Cleghorn was ordered to get a new cap, and the parade was dismissed.
The chest flats were long, bare, forbidding rooms which accommodated twenty cadets in each. A line of beds ran down each side and a line of chests ran down the middle. Single light bulbs hung down from the ceiling. The bare wooden floor had been scrubbed and trodden into an undulating, splintered surface. The windows were high and wide open.
‘Dotheboys Hall,’ said Paul.
On their beds the Beattys found a pile of clothes and assorted gear; it was the complete kit laid down by the Admiralty to be issued to subordinate officers on joining. Trousers, jumpers, shirts, sheets, socks, boots, collars, lanyards, pyjamas, brushes, badges and underwear lay on each bed in a vast amorphous heap. The compilers of the heap had foreseen the cadets’ every need down to the most intimate articles including toothbrushes and razors. The inference was that the Navy regarded each new intake of cadets as being on the mental level of savages; not only had they to be taught the rudiments of their profession but also how to wash. The Navy was starting from the very beginning, as though their future officers had be
en freshly caged and shipped from the Belgian Congo, like specimens for a zoo.
Michael looked round his chest flat. On his side of the room were George Dewberry, a New Zealander, three Sikhs, a Burmese, two more R.N. cadets whom Michael did not know, and Maconochie. On the other side were Paul, Cleghorn, a Canadian, an Indian, four Egyptians and another R.N. cadet.
Michael crossed over to Paul’s bed, where Paul was busy stowing his clothes away in his chest.
‘Quite a mixed lot in here,’ he said.
Paul paused and looked up.
‘Like a bloody United Nations. We’d better not start any arguments or we’ll have a holy war or something before we know where we are.’
‘This is not quite what I expected, I must say,’ said Michael.
‘What in hell did you expect then?’
‘I don’t know. Not this. It seems all terribly, I don’t know, business-like.’
‘Well, it is a business.’
‘I suppose so.’
Michael went back to his bed and began to put away his gear. It took him some time. He was puzzled why they had been left in peace for so long. Michael could only think that perhaps the task of sorting and putting away their clothes was thought to be such a huge one that nothing more was required of them that day. He was vaguely disappointed. He had arrived at the sacrificial taboo ground prepared to undergo the first painful rites of initiation and had found the witch-doctor finished for the day.
But Michael’s thoughts were premature. The witch-doctor was at that moment preparing his welcome.
The burliest Chief came into the chest flat and stood watching the Beattys for a few moments. The Chief had a hyphenated way of speaking, as though he were pausing for effect between each word. He inflated his lungs.
‘All-right-you-lot! Leave-your-camisoles-for-now-and-muster-in-the-Gunroom! Lieutenant-Commander-Badger-wants-to-speak-to-you! At-the-double-now!’
