Miller was a little man with a mumbling way of talking. At some time in his life he had received a blow on the nose that had put that organ permanently out of true. It was as though a pleasant odour to starboard had attracted the nose, and after wandering in that direction it had lost the power or the inclination to return. His face had an unhealthy pallor and was slightly pock-marked, and he had lost two of his front teeth, possibly in the same encounter that had spoilt the look of his nose. Altogether he was not a prepossessing individual, and had made a poor impression on his detachment commander.
Willis spoke curtly. “Get up on watch and stay there, both of you. I’ll have more to say to you in the morning.”
They obeyed him. Willis was not the kind of N.C.O. that men disobeyed lightly. He had the air of authority. Miller said something under his breath, but Warby went without a word. Willis knew there would be no trouble with Warby: he was a slow, plodding sort of fellow—a farm-worker in civilian life. But Miller was different: he certainly might cause trouble. It would be best to keep an eye on Miller.
Day climbed up over the rim of the sea, and with it came squalls of sleet. On the Bofors gun-platform no one had spoken for half an hour. Each of the three men appeared to be occupied with his own thoughts. Miller was sitting on one of the gun-seats, hands thrust into pockets, his head almost lost under the hood of his duffel-coat. He was whistling thinly and tunelessly, blowing through the gap in his front teeth.
Vernon was standing with his back resting against the barrel of the gun; every now and then the barrel would swing with the roll of the ship, and Vernon would lurch a step or two backward or forward.
Warby was standing in the recess where the spare barrel was kept. There was a rail running round this platform at a height of about four feet. Where this rail joined the gun-enclosure it was extended above the opening in the form of an inverted ‘V’ in order to form a barrel-stop and prevent accidents that in the excitement of action might cause damage to the forward parts of the ship.
“You know,” said Warby, breaking the silence, “what we oughta do is tie some canvas to this here rail, so’s to make a windbreak. Then we’d have somethin’ to get behind.”
Vernon eased himself away from the gun-barrel and walked round to the other side of the platform to see what Warby was talking about.
“You see,” said Warby, “we could fix it round the three sides, here and here and here; and then we could sit on the barrel-box and be snug. Take it in turns—two in here, one keeping a look-out.”
Vernon nodded. “I believe you’ve got something there. It’d be better than nothing.”
Miller swivelled round on the gun-seat. “What about Sergeant bloody Willis?” he said. “You don’t s’pose he’ll let you rig up anything like that, do you? You might go to sleep behind a screen like that, ’stead of keeping your eyes peeled.”
Warby was starting a cold, and his nose was running. He wiped it on the sleeve of his duffel-coat.
“Oh, the sergeant ain’t that bad. Can’t blame him for turning us out this morning.”
“I should damn well think not,” said Vernon. “It was asking for trouble, two of you going down. Did you expect him to let you stay there?”
“Ah, he’s too regimental,” grumbled Miller. “There won’t be much rest with him in charge; you mark my words. It’ll be all according to the drill-books. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had us on P.T. every day.”
Vernon began beating his hands to bring some warmth back into them. “According to Ben Cowdrey, the sergeant’s all right. Ben should know; he’s been with him some time.”
“Ben’s a creeper. You want to be careful what you say in front of him; it’ll go straight to the sergeant.”
“Nonsense! Ben isn’t that sort. And I don’t think there’s much wrong with Willis either. You’re just peeved because he caught you toasting yourself in front of the stove when you should have been on watch. In a way, I’m glad he did; and I’m glad he turfed you out. I shouldn’t have thought much of him if he’d done anything else. After all, there’s got to be some discipline, or everything falls to pieces.”
Miller spat on the deck. “All right; all right. Even if you was a schoolmaster we don’t want a lecture now; this ain’t a class of snotty-nosed kids.”
“I wish,” said Vernon, “you’d stop that filthy habit of spitting. It’s disgusting and it’s unhealthy.”
“Come off it,” said Miller. “Where do you think you are? This ain’t Buckingham Palace. It’s about time you stopped being a sissy.”
Vernon’s face clouded. He took a pace towards Miller. “That’ll be just about enough from you. Do you understand?”
Miller looked up at Vernon’s face and laughed uneasily. “No offence, Harry. I was on’y joking. You can take a joke, can’t yer?”
“Not that kind of joke. You’d better remember that.”
“All right; I’m sorry.”
The three men fell again into the silence of their own thoughts, watching the sea, feeling the lift and fall of the deck under their feet, the whip-lash of the wind on their faces. What a vast amount of time, thought Vernon, he had spent like this since the War started—just waiting, waiting, waiting! And millions of other fellows too. What a sum it must add up to, that wasted, empty time! Sometimes you wondered whether the War would ever end; you began to forget what it had been like not to be in uniform, what it had been like to go to bed every night and sleep through the whole eight or nine hours in a soft bed with clean, white sheets.
Miller felt a tooth begin to ache. The wind aggravated it, and the pain shot up into his head. He pulled the hood of his duffel-coat round his cheek and mumbled curses, wondering how much longer it would be before the watch was ended.
Warby was imagining the ship to be a ploughshare drawing a long, long furrow in the great field of the North Sea. Warby stood with his back to the stern looking forward, and imagined he had his hand upon this gigantic plough that drove on and on and never reached the headland. Here were no hedges, no distant trees on which to fix the gaze—only the endless sea rolling in long, white-crested waves like moving banks capped with the froth of lilies.
But the gulls were here. It was the same when he had ploughed the land at home; the gulls had followed him then, hovering and swooping, uttering their strident cries. He could hear the gulls now; it was the same sound, and it made him think of home. But when he looked back over the stern of the ship he saw that the furrow vanished as soon as it was made. There was no end to the labour, and it was all pointless.
Suddenly he felt very tired, as though the whole four hours of the watch had saved themselves up to drain away his energy at the last.
Promptly at eight bells Sergeant Willis, Randall, and Andrews crawled out of the skin of the ship and clambered up the vertical, swaying ladder of the gun-platform.
“All right, lads,” said Willis. “Go and get your breakfast.”
“Is it good?” asked Vernon.
“Bangers,” said Andrews, “or curry.”
Vernon sighed. “Unoriginal, terribly unoriginal.”
The mess-table was a wasteland of dirty plates and mugs. A seven-pound tin of marmalade stood in the middle of the table, its lid roughly cut open and turned up like the one remaining petal of a giant tulip. The marmalade was flecked with butter where knives had dug into it; but the transaction had not been one-sided, for the slab of butter, lying in its paper wrapping, showed an equivalent lacing of marmalade. In the mess there were no such things as jam-spoons and butter-knives. Each man used his own knife both for cutting and foraging, digging here and there at the dictation of his needs. It was no place for the squeamish.
The bread, smeared with oily finger-marks, had been hacked clumsily with a knife that had never been designed for the task. Tea had been spilt on the table, and the loaf had slipped into the puddle, turning its underside to mush. The dishes of sausages and curry and rice had thoughtfully been placed near the mess-room stove to keep them warm; but
this had resulted in one or two cinders falling into them. The room was thick with tobacco-smoke.
Vernon sat on the wooden form with his back to the bulkhead which separated the mess-room from the hold, and thought how greatly these conditions would have disgusted him only a few years ago. Yet now, coming off watch with the ferocious appetite that was the natural result of such a spell of duty, he could look upon the littered mess-table without a qualm, and, sweeping an open space amid the debris, settle down to a breakfast of half-warm sausages and stewed tea with all the relish of a gourmet partaking of the rarest delicacies.
So, thought Vernon, may a man’s sensibilities be blunted; and so may any one of us descend closer and closer to the level of beasts. He wondered whether Warby or Miller had any such thoughts. Miller? Probably not. The fellow wolfed his food with noise and gusto, as though the chaos of the mess-table were his proper element. As for Warby, be ate stolidly, saying little, almost expressionless. You could never tell what Warby was thinking.
Curry and rice followed sausages; bread and marmalade followed curry. Then, pleasantly tight under the belt, they smoked, resting elbows on the table and feeling weariness creep up their bodies.
Then there was the washing-up to do. There was no sink, only a bucket of water on the table and another bucket on the deck for the refuse—the plate-scrapings, the tea-leaves, the unwanted food.
“We ought to keep a pig,” said Warby. “Blessed if we don’t throw away enough grub to feed one.”
Miller sneered. “We’ve got enough to do wi’out looking after a ruddy pig. Where’d we keep it, anyway?”
“We could make a sty for it on deck.”
“It’d be washed overboard in rough weather,”
“Well, it was on’y a idea.”
“You and your ideas! You’ll be thinking of keeping chickens next.”
“One ship I was on,” said Vernon, “took on about twenty chickens in Buenos Aires to bring home to England. It was the Old Man’s idea; he had a run fixed up with fish-netting on the top deck just abaft the after funnel—she was a meat liner, you understand—and had a little house made for them. Our cabin was next to the chicken-run, and half our time was spent rounding up those blessed fowls. They stank too.”
“They would,” said Miller. “What ’appened to them?”
“It was sad, really. Crossing the tropics, they thought summer had come and all went into the moult. Then, when we got farther north into cold weather, the poor devils were pretty well naked. Those which didn’t peg out the cook had. None of them reached England.”
Washing-up was one job Vernon could never become resigned to. He detested the greasy, filthy water and the damp, so-called drying-cloths which always acquired a dark-grey colour, gradually deepening almost to black as the voyage progressed. By all the rules the men ought to contract all sorts of diseases; yet they never seemed to do so.
He dried a plate which Miller handed to him, trying not to notice the bits of food still adhering to it.
“This is all confoundedly unhygienic,” he remarked.
Miller, his hands and wrists covered by the greasy water in the bucket, sniffed. “What do you expect? You ain’t at the Ritz now. It don’t come so much of a change to some of us. We wasn’t all so well off before the War—not by a long shot. I don’t expect you ever knew what it was like to be hungry—real hungry, I mean—and not ’ave any money for food. I don’t suppose you did, did you?”
Miller had become quite excited, so that he had forgotten to go on with the washing-up.
Vernon sighed. “I simply remarked that this is unhygienic. Whether I was hungry or you were hungry before the War makes no difference.”
“It makes a difference to me.”
“I mean it has no bearing on the present state of hygiene.”
Miller rattled the knives and forks in the pail. “All right,” he said, “but just remember we don’t all come out of the top drawer; just remember that!”
Shortly after midday the Golden Ray and a few other vessels broke away from the convoy and headed for the mouth of the Humber. Some time later the Golden Ray came to rest in Immingham docks, to be invaded almost immediately by shore gangs, who rigged the derricks and loosened the hatch-covers ready for the start of loading on the following day.
The gunners, busy on their weapons, looked out over the docks and saw nothing but sheds and railway-lines, with here and there the tall necks of cranes thrusting up from the wilderness.
Payne voiced the general opinion. “Rotten hole,” he said.
That evening Payne and Warby were sitting in a public house drinking mild beer and saying little when a man in a greasy cap spoke to them.
“You two lads are off the Golden Ray, aren’t you?”
Neither Payne nor Warby answered.
The man closed one eye and opened it again. “All right, I know; I saw you down there.”
He took a swig of beer and smacked his lips. “Here, drink up, lads; this one’s on me.”
Payne and Warby allowed him to take their mugs, and he brought them back foaming. He lowered his voice confidentially. “On the Russian run, hey?”
Payne said nothing. Warby lit a cigarette and puffed more smoke into the already overcharged air. The man in the cloth cap sat down, facing them across the bar table, resting his elbows on the polished wood of its top. Over his head on the opposite wall Payne could see a poster with the picture of a sinking ship; the stern was lifting out of the water and the bows had disappeared from sight. Under the picture Payne could read: “Careless Talk costs Lives.” There was another poster which read: “Be like Dad; Keep Mum.” And yet a third read: “Walls have Ears.”
The man in the cloth cap leaned across the table and said, “Sooner you nor me, lads. Know what we’re loading on your ship? Shells! Them and other things. None too healthy, I’d say. I hope you get through, though. They tell me it’s a terrible run—terrible. Glad I don’t have to go. But I did my bit in the last War—on the Somme; I wouldn’t like another sample o’ that, not for a pension. But they tell me it’s right bad up there on the Russian run—Jerry planes and U-boats. They say there’s a battleship up there, too; but of course it don’t do to believe all you hear; there’s that amount of rumours gets about you don’t know where you are. Well, drink up, lads.”
On board the s.s. Golden Ray four seamen gunners and three Army gunners were playing pontoon on the mess-room table. Gunner Cowdrey was lying on his bunk, his shoulders propped up on a folded duffel-coat and his bald head shining under the electric light. He was playing a mouth-organ, churning out tune after popular tune, pausing only to regain his breath and shake the moisture out of his instrument. Gunner Andrews was reading a letter. He had read it before, and he would read it again; and there would still be delight in doing so. The letter began: “George Darling, Just so you don’t forget—I love you—” It was a long letter. Vernon was engrossed in a book, and Bombardier Padgett was making toast.
Randall, lying on his bunk with his eyes closed, heard the sound of Cowdrey’s mouth-organ, the voices of the pontoon-players, and the noise of Padgett poking the fire. Randall heard them all, and they were like waves beating against the shell of his own torment.
CHAPTER THREE
Homecoming
LOADING began early on the following day. Randall borrowed a newspaper from one of the stevedores and glanced quickly through it, his eyes flitting over the headlines, searching for something he feared to discover. But it was not there. War news and more war news, and little else in the few sheets to which all papers had shrunk. Randall folded the newspaper, thrust it into his pocket, and followed the others up to the gun-deck.
Five hundred extra rounds of forty-millimetre ammunition had come aboard, and another spare barrel for the Bofors. They now had three barrels and 1500 rounds to put through them. The morning was spent stowing ammunition and man-handling the new barrel into position.
During mid-morning ‘smoke-o,’ as he sat in the mess sippin
g hot tea, Randall went through the newspaper more carefully, making sure he had missed nothing. No, it was not there—not even in a small paragraph tucked away at the foot of a column. That meant the discovery had not yet been made. But did it? Would it have been a big enough thing to force its way in among the far more important news of the War? Possibly not. Besides, how could he tell that it had not been in yesterday, when they had been at sea?
Randall discovered suddenly that he was being spoken to. Payne was speaking. Randall tried to pull himself together, to focus his attention on what was going on around him, to drag his mind away from that other matter which drew it irresistibly.
“What’s that? What did you say?”
“I said, lend us your paper. You’re in a dream, aren’t you? Still thinking about her? You’d better forget her for two or three months.” Payne laughed.
Randall pushed the paper across the mess-table. Forget her! Ah, if only he could! Forgetfulness would be as balm to his soul; it would be release from the hell of fear in which his mind was imprisoned. But he could not forget her—never, never. Waking, she was there in his mind; sleeping, she was in his dreams—in those nightmares from which he awoke, sweating and trembling.
How many, many times in his mind he had gone over the events of the past two weeks! Only two weeks! Surely it could not be as short a time as that! Yet, so it was. Two weeks ago he had been happy. In those two weeks his world had crashed about his ears.
The babel of voices in the mess-room went on around him, and Randall sat there—alone—more alone than he had ever been. He felt that between himself and these others a wall had grown, a wall that he had been instrumental in building and that he could not now pull down. The din of voices surged around him like a foaming sea, and he was an island, isolated, deserted.
His gaze rested on the head of a rivet; round the rivet was a circle of rust, a red stain upon the white paint of the bulkhead. But Randall did not see the rivet or the rust, for his mind was away again, reliving the events of the past fortnight from the moment when he boarded the train at Southport that was to take him on the first stage of his journey to Yarmouth.
Soldier, Sail North (1987) Page 3
