The Lion at Sea

by Max Hennessy

  Kelly gestured. ‘Perhaps I am,’ he agreed. ‘Having a ship sunk under you makes a chap grow up, and I’ve had two.’

  He had been well aware for some time that things which had once interested him no longer did, and on his first day at home he had cleared his room of the belongings that had been in it all his life, his books, the remains of his childhood toys, even the picture of ‘When Did You Last See Your Father’ which had graced the walls from the first day he’d been aware of things.

  He was different. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he was a man. Until now, he’d still been a youth, an efficient naval officer but still only a youth. Now for the first time he was thinking as a man and was beginning seriously to consider his career. He’d had a tremendous start and he could well imagine Verschoyle with his forked tongue talking about influence. But there hadn’t been an ounce of influence anywhere. His father had pulled no strings and on the only occasion when he’d offered to, Kelly had rejected his offer.

  ‘They’re recommending me for another gong,’ he said sharply.

  ‘Another one?’

  ‘They always give one to you if you escape. Sort of consolation prize for being captured, I suppose.’

  Charley’s eyes glowed with pride. ‘I say, how marvellous, Kelly. You will be a swell. But I know you deserve it. Bringing all those men back, too. Especially Rumbelo with his wound. He thinks you’re God.’

  ‘Just his half-brother.’

  ‘He’s hoping you’ll ask for him again. He thinks you bring him luck.’

  Kelly smiled. ‘You can bet your last bob I shall,’ he said. ‘Rumbelo’s a handy man to have alongside you and I think he brings me luck.’

  The air raid sirens had stopped now but they could hear policemen cycling past in the street outside blowing whistles. There were a few screams from women hurrying for the shelters and a little shouting. Being bombed was still a new experience to people who so far hadn’t even been touched by the war.

  ‘Do you get the zeppelins over here much?’ he asked.

  Charley smiled. ‘More than I enjoy. You can always tell when they’re close. There’s a battery of guns in the park down the road and when they start they almost lift the roof off.’ She jerked the curtains tighter across the windows for safety and turned again to Kelly. ‘Was it awful being sunk in a submarine?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kelly said honestly. ‘I was on the bridge.’

  ‘Aren’t you worried about going back in them?’

  ‘I’m not going back in submarines. They’ve slung me out. That pneumonia I had in Afion Kara Hissar. They won’t touch anybody who might have anything wrong with his lungs.’

  She looked concerned. ‘Is there anything wrong?’

  ‘Not now. But it’s the policy. They can’t take a chance. Perhaps it’s as well, anyway. There’s not much of an opening in Heaven for submariners. Because they go down, I suspect they all go to the other place and it’s the Flying Corps who’ll have all their own way upwards. They’re putting me in a destroyer.’

  ‘As captain?’

  ‘Good God, no! First Lieutenant. As soon as I’ve done a short refresher navigation and gunnery officer’s course. Without those I’ll be about as much use as a blind bunting tosser. Or at least, that’s what they think. Mordant’s about the oldest they’ve got in the North Sea, anyway. I expect they think if I get sunk again they won’t have lost much.’

  She looked worried. ‘Don’t you want to be captain?’

  ‘Of course I do!’ Kelly stared at her in amazement. ‘Every naval officer wants to command his own ship.’

  ‘I think they should make you a captain. After all, they’re giving you another medal.’

  ‘Doesn’t cut much ice with the Admiralty. If I suggested that, they’d soon send me away with a naval flea in my ear.’

  ‘Will you stay in this country?’

  Kelly smiled. It was slowly becoming easier to smile. The pain was fading and the anger was dying. ‘If you can call Scapa Flow in this country,’ he said. ‘As far as I can make out, it’s about as far into nowhere as you can get. James Verschoyle’s up there.’

  ‘He’ll go green with envy when he sees you with yet another ribbon.’

  Kelly smiled. ‘I suspect Verschoyle will look after himself. I hear from Kimister that he did well at the Falklands with Sturdee. I expect he’s let it be known in the right quarters.’

  ‘Will there be a battle, Kelly?’

  ‘In the North Sea? Perhaps. I don’t know. The Germans seem to prefer to avoid one. With Tyrwhitt in the Channel and Jellicoe sitting off the north of Scotland, they know damn well that they can never get out. And after all this time, I wonder if we’re all that keen to see ’em. After all, we’re doing exactly what we wish to do without even putting to sea. Principle of the fleet in being.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Exactly what it says. Simply existing there as a permanent threat. If the fleet were scattered the threat would disappear and the Germans could come out.’

  ‘It seems an awfully negative way of fighting a war.’

  ‘It’s a good way of avoiding casualties. Besides–’ Kelly leaned over and kissed her gently on the cheek ‘–sometimes, when I see people like my father, I tremble to think what might happen if they did meet.’

  ‘We’d wipe the floor with them!’

  Kelly wasn’t so sure. ‘There are still a lot of Victoria’s heavy weather men afloat, Charley. The Germans have proved they’re good and I often wonder if we’re as good as we think we are.’

  Charley looked shocked. Set on a path towards being a naval wife, she had tried hard to absorb naval thinking and the habit of naval self-confidence, and Kelly’s ideas didn’t seem to fit into them. ‘But that’s blasphemy, Kelly! The Germans are good only because they’re new. They have no tradition!’

  ‘Sometimes I wonder if we have too much. It’s true you can build a ship in two years and it takes two hundred to build a tradition, but there are a lot of people who think that tradition’s all that’s necessary, and there’s a lot that’s out of date.’

  Charley began to feel she’d got herself in deep waters. ‘I don’t understand, Kelly.’

  Kelly wasn’t sure he did himself. But since his return home, he’d been doing a lot of reading and asking a lot of questions and it seemed to him that, while Germany’s nautical house had been put in more efficient shape since 1914 Britain’s had gone rather the other way.

  He pulled a face and smiled. ‘I’m just wondering if we aren’t placing too much reliance on the big gun,’ he said.

  Charley frowned, puzzled. With the war now two years old, she had begun to grow cynical herself at the pratings of the press and the older generation. With casualties running into hundreds of thousands, the exhortations to fight for God, King and Country were wearing as thin as the claims that Britain had the finest army in the world. Like many of her friends, she had taken to helping in the casualty wards of London hospitals and she had often come away with the thought that those people who talked glibly of a holy war and their pride in the army ought to see the mustard gas cases, while God, King and Country often seemed a dangerously voracious trio.

  Nevertheless, Kelly was still different enough to frighten her a little. Was this the young man she’d promised herself, ever since she’d been able to understand, that she would one day marry? There was a tension about him she’d never seen before. Even after surviving the sinking of Cressy he’d not been quite so hard as he was now. Despite being heavily in touch with the emotions of her friends who’d been caught up in the war, she found his attitudes worried her because he was an extrovert character, self-confident enough to breast the miseries of the times without too much difficulty, and she had a feeling that he knew things she could barely imagine. She had no doubts about his courage, of course. She�
��d never doubted that, and he wore ribbons to prove it, but there seemed an awful lot of sacrilege in what he said. She changed the subject hurriedly.

  ‘Was it awful being a prisoner, Kelly?’

  ‘Bit smelly. The Turks stink like goats – old goats.’

  ‘You were very brave to escape as you did.’

  ‘It wasn’t me. It was the Arabs who died.’

  It was easier, he noticed, to think now of Ayesha dead without something sticking in his throat. There was a lot to be said for the resilience of youth. When he’d left Cairo, he’d promised himself he’d never forget her. Probably he never would but youth continued to find the world full of excitement, and it was hard to dwell too long on death. The best warriors were all young. Not only were their muscles elastic; so were their minds.

  An anti-aircraft gun down the road banged and Charley put her hand on Kelly’s arm.

  ‘I think we’d better hide under the stairs,’ she said.

  ‘I’d rather go outside and have a look.’

  She stared at him in alarm but, deciding that if it were good enough for Kelly, it was good enough for her, she agreed.

  ‘I’m not sure it’s safe,’ she said. ‘Everybody’s picking on the government about the way they’re allowed to come over. Everybody’s very angry.’

  ‘I expect it’s wind-up among the hot-air merchants of the press.’

  ‘Well, people have been killed.’

  ‘Nothing like the number the Government and the Press Lords have killed between them in France.’

  She looked quickly at him, puzzled once more by his bitterness. The telephone went and she answered it, grave, sober and a little anxious. She looked at Kelly as she replaced the instrument. ‘That’s the local police station,’ she said. ‘Mother picked up the sergeant when he ran into a lamp post on his bike in the black-out and filled him full of brandy. Ever since, he keeps us up-to-date with what’s happening. He says five zeppelins have crossed the coast and are headed for London. It looks like being a noisy night.’

  They went on to the front steps. Several people were arguing round a gas lamp which was still alight, then a policeman wearing a placard saying ‘Take cover’ on his chest appeared and a man in ragged clothes shinned tip the post, opened the glass and smashed the mantle.

  ‘Look! Kelly, look!’

  Charley was pointing upwards. Searchlights had sprung up all over London and at the junction of half a dozen beams a long cigar-shaped object, yellow in the light, was lifting its nose lazily upwards. They saw puffs of smoke as though from exhausts as it moved, then, with gathering speed, it vanished from sight in the cloud. Guns began to fire from every direction and they could see the sparkle of shell bursts in the sky. A woman ran along the street in a panic. ‘I can hear another one coming,’ she was screaming.

  Over the city, dark with the absence of lights, they saw the glow of flames and more little red flashes high in the sky over Woolwich, where the searchlights were groping into the darkness.

  ‘They’ve gone,’ Kelly said.

  A searchlight only a few streets away came on, piercing the darkness and illuminating Charley’s upturned face. Following the beam, they saw that the cigar-shaped aircraft had reappeared, above their heads this time, and immediately guns began to fire.

  ‘Oh, Lor’,’ Charley said. ‘They’re right above us! I’m going under the stairs!’

  Kelly grinned. ‘Perhaps I’ll come with you.’

  The Upfolds had cleared the area under the staircase and laid mattresses in there in case of the need for shelter. On a shelf was a bottle of sherry and a bottle of brandy and they helped themselves as they sat on the mattresses.

  ‘I’m told they never hit anything,’ Kelly said self-importantly. ‘At least nothing that they’re hoping to hit.’

  As he spoke there was a whistling noise and then a crash. Kelly looked at Charley in the light of the candle.

  ‘Seems I was wrong,’ he said.

  She looked scared and, as another crash made them jump, she edged nearer. A third crash seemed to shake the house and the brandy bottle tottered and toppled over. Kelly caught it and, as he put it back, he realised Charley was clutching him.

  ‘It’s all right, old thing,’ he said. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

  ‘To me, it is.’

  There was another crash, this time apparently just outside the front door, and they heard glass tinkling. Charley flung herself at Kelly and buried her head in his uniform.

  ‘It’s all right!’

  Tenderly, he lifted her chin and kissed her and, still clutching him, she kissed him back, fiercely, in a way she’d never done before. Immediately, he was aware of a new feeling in his loins. He’d always regarded her merely as the girl next door, the girl he was eventually going to marry, and always in an uncomplicated asexual way, but now, suddenly, with her young breasts pressing against his chest, her legs warm against his, he was aware that she was far more than just that.

  ‘Steady on, old thing,’ he said uncertainly.

  ‘I don’t want to steady on!’ Her voice was shaking and she clearly had no intention of letting go.

  There was another whistle and another tremendous crash and a roar of tiles sliding off a roof, and Kelly pushed Charley down and flung himself across her in case the stairs came down on them. As the din died away he found her staring up at him, her lips parted, her eyes bright and a little worried, but also suddenly full of a new fierce determination.

  ‘Charley–’

  ‘It’s all right, Kelly.’

  ‘Charley–’

  ‘Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Kelly,’ she snapped. ‘Stop pretending!’

  ‘I’m not pretending.’

  ‘Yes, you are. I’m nearly seventeen now and I’m frightened and I want you. And you know I want you. It’s often occurred to me that if they drop a bomb on me and I go to my Maker without ever having you, I shall never have been fulfilled.’

  She took his hand and placed it firmly on her breast and the softness of her flesh under his fingers stirred him.

  ‘Charley–’

  ‘Kelly, for Heaven’s sake, stop saying “Charley!”’

  Guiltily, Kelly still hesitated, but she clutched him more tightly.

  ‘You’re not frightened, are you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What of? Me?’

  ‘No, Your mother.’

  By this time, however, he was ridden full pelt by his desire and he knew it would be difficult to draw back. Navigating carefully through the shoals of thought, he made a last feeble effort.

  ‘Suppose they come back?’

  ‘Suppose they do?’ She sounded indifferent, and, reaching up, she gave him a kiss so experienced it made his blood run hot.

  ‘Who taught you to kiss like that?’ he asked.

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘Then how did you know?’

  ‘Love and how to set about it’s the only thing girls ever talk about.’

  His pulses quickened and their mouths searched for each other in the shadows.

  ‘We ought to be under cover,’ Kelly said insanely.

  Charley giggled. ‘I bet you mean “under covers.”’

  She grabbed for him clumsily and, choked with emotion, he began to fumble with her dress. Her lips sought his again, desperately, urgently.

  ‘Oh, Kelly!’

  There was something in her voice that was plaintive and imploring and young, something that begged him to be gentle, and, realising what was happening, he sat up abruptly.

  ‘For God’s sake, Charley,’ he croaked. ‘I nearly–’

  She drew away from him, her face frustrated and sullen. ‘And why not? I’m not a child!’

  ‘Still too much of a child for that.’


  She started to weep quietly with disappointment and misery. ‘You might be killed,’ she said. ‘I might be hit by a bomb. Anything might happen. I might never see you again, and I’ve never had any – well – any experience. I don’t know what to do and I expect you’ve been with lots of girls.’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’ Well, he thought, not many. Just as many as any normal sailor came across in his life at sea.

  ‘I bet.’ She was still sullen. ‘I know sailors.’

  ‘You only know me.’

  ‘That’s what I mean.’

  He put his arms around her, but this time he was careful not to let his emotions run away with him. ‘Not now, Charley,’ he urged. ‘Not this time.’

  ‘I can’t see why not.’

  ‘Because I promised. That’s why not.’

  ‘You’re very honourable all of a sudden.’

  He stiffened. ‘I’ve always been honourable where you’re concerned, Charley.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s the trouble.’

  Then she gave a little giggle, recovering quickly. ‘It’s all right, Kelly. Mother’s bound to start sounding me out and it’ll be nice to be honest.’ She kissed him gently. ‘And thank you. You are honourable where I’m concerned. I’m not sure it suits me always, but it’s nice to know I rouse such emotions in you.’

  Kelly frowned. ‘I’m damned if you do,’ he said frankly. ‘In fact, you rouse the most dishonourable emotions.’

  Two

  Crammed into the compartment of a train heading north, Kelly began to wonder if he’d been a damned fool. After all, there was a war on and morals had gone by the board a little. All the same, he decided firmly, Charley was different. Charley was Charley and that was all there was to it.

  They’d continued to see each other until his leave had ended. They’d gone to the cinema and the theatre and driven into Surrey for the day in a little runabout Kelly had bought out of back pay, returning almost hysterical with laughter because, unable to get up the Hog’s Back in bottom gear, they had ground up it all the way in reverse, to the amazement of the drivers of motor cars and traps travelling in the opposite direction. Despite their happiness, however, they were both aware of a change that had taken place between them and now, suddenly, they were wary of each other, skirmishing almost, conscious overnight that their relationship was different. They were no longer children, no longer merely next-door neighbours. They were adult and Charley was frighteningly womanly.