We Saw The Sea

by John Winton

  In a short time the ship was gone. A quarter of an hour after she had left it was as though she had never been. Nothing of the parting scene was left. H.M.T. Astrakhan with her two thousand passengers and crew was already another world and had gone where other worlds exist, out of this one.

  Michael stood at the rail, looking back, until the dockyard buildings were only distant smudges and the cranes had been lost in the background. Paul pulled his arm.

  “Out finger, Mike,” Paul said callously. “You’ll see her again in eighteen months’ time. Let’s go and see what sort of cabin they’ve given us.”

  They were very lucky. The Purser’s son had just entered Dartmouth as a cadet and the Purser gave all naval officers travelling in his ship, whatever their rank or seniority, the best cabins on A deck. The Army came next, officers of the Brigade of Guards and the Household Cavalry being given cabins on B deck, and the remainder, the hussars, dragoons and lancers, and the regiments of foot and line on C and D decks. (The R.A.F. fitted in as best they could on G and H decks; the Purser’s home was on an airfield boundary and the Purser had long given up all attempts to replaster his drawing-room ceiling. As far as the Purser was concerned, the R.A.F. could just as well doss down in the hold.)

  Michael’s cabin had a bunk, a chest of drawers, a wardrobe, and a wash-basin. It was small but there was plenty of headroom. There was a large scuttle looking out on the boat deck and above all, it was a single cabin. Michael rapped on the bulkhead. It seemed solid. The Bodger had once warned of the dangers of thin trooper cabin bulkheads. Michael went next door.

  “Not bad, are they?”

  “Bloody good,” said Paul. “After my last one, it’s palatial.”

  The hollow sound of a gong floated along the passageway.

  “Dinner. We don’t have to dress or anything the first night.”

  The dining-room was a long compartment panelled in walnut. A row of chandeliers hung from a gilded and ornamental ceiling. The mahogany tables and chairs were bolted to the deck. The room had a faint atmosphere associated with white duck suits and pink gins, as though it were still populated by the ghosts of the civil servants, tea planters and bank managers who had sat and dined there on their way to and from leave in England.

  The seating plan was made out by the Chief Steward who cared for nobody except the six parrots in his cabin and who abided strictly by protocol. At the Captain’s table sat the Lieutenant Colonel, O.C. Troops, the C.O. Naval Drafts, in the person of The Bodger, the Wing Commander in charge of R.A.F. personnel and the Senior Nursing Sisters. Outwards and downwards from the Captain’s table the other officers sat in rigid seniority, wives taking the same precedence as their husbands, present or not.

  The naval party were the first into the dining-room and found their various tables. The rest, not possessing that inbuilt lodestone which guides a naval officer to the food and drink in a strange ship, followed. Michael and Paul were joined by Tommy Mitchell, a lieutenant a year junior to them.

  “How far are you going?” Michael asked him.

  “Honkers. To relieve a character called Freddy Spink.”

  “Freddy Spink? He’s in our term. What’s he doing now?”

  “Rumour’s going round the bazaars that he’s keeping a Chinese mistress.”

  “Freddy Spink?” said Paul, in amazement.

  “Oh yes. He’s engaged already, you know.”

  “I think I heard about it.”

  “Got engaged to a Wren while he was at Lee-on-Solent. Most unoriginal of him, we all thought. Her old man’s a retired Captain and he didn’t go much on it when he heard his prospective son-in-law was shacking up with a heathen Chinee.”

  “I can imagine.”

  The dining-room was filling up. The next arrivals were a plump couple, a Captain and Mrs Featherday of the Pioneer Corps, accompanied by their daughter Phyllis, an anaemic-looking girl of slightly mongoloid features. Then came a swarthy lieutenant of the Black Watch. The last member of the table gave the rest a foretaste of things to come.

  He was a bald-headed captain of yeomanry who was jocularly addressed by officers on adjoining tables as Goldilocks. Goldilocks sat down and tucked his napkin into his collar.

  “Well, well, well, well,” he said, rubbing his hands. “What have we here? Let’s ’ave a look at the menu. Must ’ave a butchers at the scoffcard,” he added, aside, to Michael.

  Goldilocks surveyed the menu.

  “Could be worse. But we must have a little something to wash it away with. Let's 'ave a butchers at the blood-sheet.”

  He took up the wine list.

  “D’you fancy a little rat’s blood to wash down your bangers, ma?” he asked Mrs Featherday.

  “Well, what are we going to have Pibroch, me old jock and sporran?” he asked the taciturn Black Watch subaltern.

  “If you leave your mouth open like that my girl,” he told Phyllis Featherday, “the wind’ll change and you’ll stay like that for ever and then you'll never get a man! “

  Conversation during the meal was a monologue by Goldilocks. He told jokes in Cockney, Welsh, Scots and Liverpudlian accents, explaining the point of each joke. He addressed the Black Watch subaltern as Pibroch so often that Pibroch he became for the rest of the voyage. Captain Featherday’s face was beetroot red as Goldilocks pretended to be ignorant of the Pioneer Corps’ existence. Mrs Featherday crumbled her bread nervously while Phyllis, in spite of her warning, remained open-mouthed.

  After dinner, Paul said: “You meet them now and again.”

  “But all the way to Hong Kong!“

  “Never mind,” Michael said soothingly, “we’ll have to think up some way of nobbling him.”

  “Let’s have a drink. I need it.”

  In the bar they found the other naval officers travelling in Astrakhan. The Bodger was presiding and beside him were Mr Crayshaw, a Commissioned Master at Arms on his way to the barracks at Hong Kong, Mr Pebblethwaite, a Commissioned Writer Officer and Lieutenant (E) Bongo Lewis, a South African, both for Carousel.

  “Let me get these,” said The Bodger hospitably.

  “How many sailors have we got on board, sir?” Michael asked.

  “About thirty, most of them for Hong Kong and a few for Carousel. We’ve got a Chief G.I. so he’ll give a hand with the rum and do all the regulating. We’ll have a duty roster amongst us and the duty boy will muster the hands in the morning and do rounds of the troop deck at night. When we get organized a bit we’ll have a few training classes. That’s about all.”

  When the ship cleared Ushant and began her run south she ran into a full Atlantic gale. With her high top weight and small metacentric height Astrakhan had a slow, leisurely pendulum-like period of roll, remaining for some moments suspended at the extent of her swing before rolling back. Stewardesses hurried between cabins with basins. The Chief Steward’s seating plan was ignored because there were only enough stewards who had escaped seasickness to serve those passengers who were also immune.

  Astrakhan wallowed in the storm for three days until she rounded Trafalgar and passed through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean when she steamed miraculously into calm weather, blue skies and warm sunshine. The passengers emerged on deck as joyfully as Noah after the forty days of rain.

  It was not long before the passengers with shorter memories were sighing for the storm’s return. The gale had been a continuing nightmare, aggravating every sense, but at least it had kept Goldilocks in check.

  Within twenty-four hours Goldilocks had organized a deck-tennis league, a deck-quoits championship, a concert party, roulette twice a week, and bingo on alternate nights. His table talk was confined to new ventures for the passengers’ entertainment. He trotted round the ship untiringly, cajoling or browbeating unwilling passengers to hazard their money, lend their dinner jackets, and sing their songs. His voice became the harbinger of inconvenience; where it was raised somebody found himself committed to something which he had not intended to do, did not
like the thought of doing and which, when he came to reconsider the matter, he would be damned if he was going to do. But Goldilocks had an answer for every excuse. Nobody could plead another engagement. There were no other engagements except those arranged by Goldilocks. Nobody could plead illness. Goldilocks visited the sick bay daily and made a note of the attendance. Nobody could lie in his bunk. Goldilocks reproached all who did so with lack of communal spirit. The English, the most reserved of all races, responded all the more vigorously to the charge of being anti-social; young and old fell into Goldilocks’s traps again and again.

  Across the Mediterranean and down the Suez Canal, while the sun grew hotter, the passengers dealt each other cards and sang each other’s choruses. Some of the more elderly passengers had not indulged in such an orgy of late nights for forty years but, spurred by the fear of being thought unsociable, they played whist, chased quoits and spun the roulette wheel until they dropped exhausted in their cabins at night.

  Goldilocks’s only failure was The Bodger. When invited to take part in the deck-tennis league, The Bodger’s answer was quite definite.

  “Deck tennis? In this climate? My dear old Goldilocks you want your head examined. I leave all that sort of thing to the pongos. Keeps ’em out of mischief. I intend to spend my afternoons in the best traditions of the service, inspecting the rivets in the deckhead of my cabin.”

  The Bodger retired to the bar with a strange gleam in his eye and the regulars there became aware that The Bodger had something on his mind.

  The Bodger’s moment came when the ship headed down the Red Sea. A following wind carried the ship’s fumes through her and the cabins were like tiny dark ovens. The passengers’ tempers grew thin. The lounge was like a forest dried in the summer and, ironically, it was Goldilocks himself who struck the spark. The fatal idea came to him while reading the scoffcard.

  “Soup. Poached Cod. Bangers, spuds, mercy me. Chaps! I’ve got an idea! “

  Captain and Mrs Featherday assumed a hunted look. The rest of the table ignored Goldilocks, except Phyllis Featherday, who gazed open-mouthed.

  “We’ll have an Inter-Service Pentathlon!”

  “What do you mean?” Pibroch asked suspiciously. He fingered the black eye which he had got at the children’s sports.

  “Five sports. Teams from the Army, Navy and the Raff. Let me see. How about bridge, tug-of-war, deck-tennis, quoits. . . . We need another sport. . . .”

  “How about Liar-dice?” Michael said innocently.

  “Liar-dice! Exactly! Everyone can have two days to practise.”

  Goldilocks organized it. He persuaded the First Officer and the Purser to be judges and arbitrators of the Astrakhan Olympic Games. The Purser, who had been combating the idiosyncrasies of passengers for over thirty years without meeting anyone like Goldilocks, agreed to lend his presence and, if necessary, equipment.

  The Army in general welcomed the idea of a Pentathlon. The R.A.F. were sceptical but consented to take part. To the Navy, however, the Pentathlon came as the last straw.

  A meeting was held in the bar at midnight and a Hate-Goldilocks League was formed, with The Bodger as its President. The meeting was also attended by the Purser who had somehow come to hear of it.

  The main resolution of the meeting was proposed by The Bodger and unanimously carried. Something horrible must now happen to Goldilocks, and quickly. The Purser offered the League certain articles he had picked up in Shanghai, Yokohama and Mobile, Alabama. His offer was gratefully accepted and the League left The Bodger to work out the details, whereupon a demoniacal smile spread over The Bodger’s face.

  The Games were officially opened by the O.C. Troops. An embarrassed Royal Norfolk Regiment subaltern in shorts and singlet ran twice round the boat deck with the Chief Engineer’s torch. The O.C. Troops made a short speech and announced the first event, the Deck Tennis.

  The Army’s representatives had spent many hours under a broiling sun perfecting their game but the R.A.F. produced two unknown quantities, two Pilot Officers who had played lawn tennis together at Wimbledon. One of them won the singles and together they won the doubles.

  The Bodger, who had watched Paul and Michael play deck tennis for the Navy from his deck chair, roused himself for the next contest, the Contract Bridge.

  “What about prepared hands and tournament points and all that?” he asked Goldilocks.

  ”Oh, that’s too complicated. We’ll treat it as a whist drive, only we’ll be playing bridge.”

  The Bodger sat down to shuffle the first hand, grinning like a tiger.

  The spectators were chiefly interested in the table where The Bodger and Sam Crayshaw opposed Goldilocks and an Army Padre. The Bodger and Goldilocks were competent players who could normally win from their fellow officers, but Sam Crayshaw was a novice. A bid of two spades was to him the same as a bid of two pounds and he conducted his play on the famous first principle of Hoyle--”When in doubt, win the trick.”

  The Army Padre, on the other hand, was a player of a very different calibre, indeed he was thought indecently skilful at cards for a man of his cloth. His bidding was bold and cool. His card-playing was economical and well-judged. He noted the fall of every card, remembered the play of every trick and was renowned for the occasional psychic bid in which, it was rumoured by the malicious, he received more than earthly assistance. He was a formidable opponent.

  “Forcing Two and Blackwoods, partner?” The Bodger asked pleasantly, as the first hand was dealt.

  “Eh?”

  “Or would you rather play the Vienna Convention?”

  The Bodger glared at Sam Crayshaw who looked concerned until he remembered the coaching The Bodger had given him.

  “That’s O.K. by me, sir,” he said stoutly. “But I’m partial to fourteen points for an opening, if you don’t mind, sir.”

  The Padre picked up his cards and glanced at Goldilocks.

  “Same as usual, partner?”

  “Of course, Padre.”

  The spectators nodded significantly at each other; all agreed that the Padre and Goldilocks had won the first trick of all.

  The cards fell evenly and small scores were made above and below the line by both sides. The Bodger played methodically. Sam Crayshaw went one down, doubled by the Padre. Goldilocks interspersed play with remarks such as “Never send baby to fetch home the beer” when Sam

  Crayshaw trumped too low and “There are more men walking the Embankment because of that” when Sam Crayshaw failed to draw the last trump. The Padre, gauging the mettle of his opponents, brought off a couple of neat finesses and made game.

  On a hand dealt by himself, Goldilocks’s opening bid showed strength. The Padre had support. They bid swiftly to game and finally to a small slam which the Padre made. With one rubber and a small slam behind them, the Padre and Goldilocks were well ahead.

  The Bodger ruefully gathered the cards for the next shuffle while players and spectators relaxed in the bittersweet chatter after a bridge hand. Suddenly, The Bodger’s voice cut across the hum of voices.

  “I say,” he said, in a puzzled voice, holding up an ace and examining it, “I’m sure these cards are marked! “

  Grimly, the Purser made his way across the hushed room. He took a card to the daylight and looked along its edge. He went back to the table, picked up another card and ran a finger over the surface.

  “Yes,” he said reluctantly, as though acknowledging a tragic fact, “they’re marked all right. All the picture cards are nicked. What was the score on this hand?”

  “Small slam,” said Sam Crayshaw.

  “Who dealt it?”

  “I did,” said Goldilocks.

  The Bodger quietly put his cards back on the table. He looked Goldilocks full in the eye and, white-lipped, walked away. The rest of the Navy team, as though taking a cue, followed him. The Wing Commander leading the R.A.F. team went red in the face and then nodded to his team.

  The Padre’s cloth prevented actual physical v
iolence but there was no question of abandoning the Pentathlon. Each service was determined to continue, under martial law.

  The news of the marked cards travelled and a huge crowd watched the teams prepare for the Tug-of-War. (The ship’s officers were also there; they had not had such amusement from the passengers since the Balinese rugby football team attempted to seduce the ship’s nurses, all together and to the beat of gongs and drums.)

  The crowd had come to see fair play and the spectre of the lynching post hung over the Army team as the Purser inspected their rope for anchors and their boots for spikes. When the Purser was satisfied, the Army beat the Navy and the R.A.F. comfortably in straight pulls.

  Another large crowd assembled for the fourth contest, the Liar Dice, because The Bodger was the acknowledged maestro and there were few who could resist seeing a master in play. The Bodger and Goldilocks were again opposing each other and the crowd stood three deep behind them.

  The first four rounds of the dice established that The Bodger was sadly out of form. His subterfuges were easily penetrated and he seemed unable to throw higher than nine or ten. After six rounds The Bodger had been penalized twice and the crowd thickened behind him, anticipating the fall of a giant.

  After his second penalty, The Bodger threw for the next round, covering the dice with the leather cup. He threw two aces and passed them as a pair to the Squadron Leader on his right who threw a third ace. The three aces were passed and accepted as three tens. Sandy, the Royal Norfolk subaltern who had borne the torch, saw a chance of eliminating The Bodger and forced the bidding, calling a full house, aces on jacks. Paul took two dice and threw a fourth ace. A Flying Officer threw a queen.

  Goldilocks was faced with a call of four aces and a queen. Two aces and the queen lay in view on the table but Goldilocks had not seen the dice under the cup. He hesitated before accepting the call, but reflecting that the Flying Officer had never lied yet, he took the cup and saw that there were indeed four aces and a queen. Goldilocks was now squeezed. The Bodger, sitting on his right, had originally thrown and must know what lay under the cup. Goldilocks’s only course was to throw the queen and pass it as a king or as five of a kind, whatever the actual value.