The Cruel Sea

by Nicholas Monsarrat

The marine tapped Allingham on the chest.

  ‘What the hell sort of uniform is that?’ he asked thickly. ‘Where you from, bud?’

  ‘Australia,’ said Allingham. He moved to get past.

  ‘That’s a kind of Limey country, ain’t it?’ said the marine, detaining him.

  ‘It’s part of the British Empire, yes.’

  ‘”Part of the British Empire”,’ mimicked the marine savagely. ‘Why you all talk like a bunch of whores?’

  Allingham said nothing.

  ‘God damn Limeys,’ said the marine. His sweating face gleamed in the lamplight from the nearest shop window. ‘Reckon we’ll have to clean you up next, after the Japs.’

  Allingham said nothing.

  ‘No talk, huh? Guess you’re right, bud. No fight, either. That’s what I heard. Come all this way in a pretty uniform, just to eat good American food and lay a lot of our dames. When you going to start fighting?’

  ‘Not this evening,’ said Allingham.

  ‘Not any evening,’ sneered the marine. ‘Leave it all to the Americans – the world’s top suckers.’ He swayed forward against Allingham, who gave way a pace, his fingers twitching. ‘If you won’t, you won’t,’ went on the marine. ‘But don’t get in my way again, or I’ll beat the hell out of you, wherever you come from and however fast you’re running.’

  ‘I’m not running,’ said Allingham hardly. ‘But I’m not scrapping in the street, either.’

  ‘Christ!’ said the marine, ‘they’ve started drafting the fairies . . .’ He turned suddenly, and rocketed through the nearest doorway, leading to a large, brassy bar. The quick disappearance, cancelling the ugly crisis, came as a relief, dissolving some of Allingham’s anger. It was a good deliverance, from most points of view . . . Something unusual about the entrance to the bar attracted his attention, and presently he saw that it was the ornate illuminated sign over the door.

  ‘WELCOME ALL US HEROES!’

  And underneath:

  ‘THROUGH THESE PORTALS PASS THE FINEST FIGHTING MEN IN THE WORLD.’

  Ericson stood on the bridge of the new American destroyer, saying nothing, watching how they did it all. He was very glad to be on board, making the trip down the Sound as a guest on one of the ship’s working-up exercises; a day at sea, after he had been so long tied to the land, was exactly what he wanted.

  The American captain bent to one of the voice-pipes. ‘What are you steering?’ he asked his quartermaster below.

  ‘Two hundred degrees, sir,’ came the answer, in a ripe New Jersey accent.

  The American captain turned to Ericson, smiling in a vague and friendly way. ‘Fine day,’ he said. ‘Glad you came along . . .’ Then, forgetful, he bent to the voice-pipe again. ‘What are you steering down there?’

  ‘Jesus, captain!’ came the same voice in answer. ‘I just told you.’

  ‘They’re not a bit like us,’ said Johnson, the engineer officer, looking round the wardroom dinner table, reproof in his voice. ‘No discipline at all.’

  4

  My darling one [Julie wrote], I’m starting a baby – at least I think I am, and the frogs will say yes or no tomorrow. I’m sorry. I thought of not telling you, and then I thought how close we’ve become, and so I’m telling you after all. But even so it is nothing to worry you with. It hasn’t happened before, because we haven’t been lovers before, but it isn’t the end of the world: I’ll take a quick trip to London, where (you once told me in a lordly sort of way) they understand these things. You are not to worry.

  But come back soon: it is lonely, it is dull, it is a little ache of missing you, all the time. New York women may have everything else to commend them (you must make me a list of what they have) but they haven’t got this heart that beats and warms for you. I will show you what I mean as soon as we are together again: and please make that as soon as possible.

  Lockhart held the letter for a long time, without moving; it was as if her heart were lying in his hand. Swift pictures of her multiplied, just behind his eyes: feelings of shock and of tenderness strove within him, making him guilty and deeply loving at the same time.

  The letter was so exactly like her. There was no panic, no reproach, no query of any sort: she had accepted the situation, and was about to deal with it competently. Perhaps she had done so already. In any case she seemed in no doubt that he would agree to what she had in mind.

  Her ready acceptance, her competent planning, hurt something deep within him. She was accepting the situation, taking for granted her next step and his endorsement of it, because of his own clumsy manoeuvring; because he had said, or implied, many times, that they could not think of marriage until the war was finished with, that their love and their loving had been ‘a break with reality’.

  He remembered the crass words with shame and disgust.

  He knew now that they were not true. She was the person he must have, not some time in the future, but now: he needed her – to love and be loved by, to salve the dreary war, to keep intact the bright warm promise that lay between them, whether they were together or apart.

  The child would be the occasion of their marriage, not the reason for it. That reason was something deeper, stronger, more moving altogether. They had found it when they became lovers – perhaps a moment before – and it was not to be lost again. Not by his act, not by hers.

  The simple fact was that she had become a precious part of his life, always to be cherished and now to be made sure of; and behind this need of her loomed his huge regret, and the hideous idea of her body being tampered with.

  He cabled: ‘Have it,’ and then sat down to write to her all that was in his heart.

  5

  ‘It’s an absolute fact,’ Scott-Brown told them, wonder still lingering in his voice. ‘There were these two people sitting at the next table to mine: an old chap with white hair, the kind you see in Esquire, and a young person with all the bosom in the world, and a mink coat to match it. They were talking of this and that – I couldn’t help overhearing – and then suddenly the old chap leant across – it was lunchtime, mind you, and bright sunshine as well and he said, in a very respectful way: “Little lady, I sure would like to possess you”.’

  ‘What was the answer?’

  ‘She said’ – and here Scott-Brown’s voice reached an extreme pitch of disbelief – ‘she said: “Honey, I’m just brushing and combing my hormones”.’

  ‘Of course,’ said the man in the bar, ‘we Americans take a different view of women altogether, from what you folks do.’

  ‘I understand that is so,’ said Raikes, the navigator, who had been in the bar longer than most people.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said the other man, who had been there almost as long. ‘We put them right high up on a pedestal.’

  ‘Very wise,’ said Raikes. ‘Best way of seeing their legs.’

  ‘And then,’ said the man, who wasn’t listening, ‘we bring them tributes of candy and flowers, and we respect them.’

  ‘That ought to do the trick,’ said Raikes.

  ‘That’s why,’ said the man, ‘America is the only country in the world where women are one hundred per cent safe all the time. Our young American girls,’ he went on, developing his theme with relish, ‘are clean and decent, without a wrong thought in their heads – and that’s particularly so in the State of Missouri, where I come from. Our American homes are sacred, our American mothers are honoured throughout the land, and our American womanhood is universally held to be the purest in the world.’

  ‘Good show,’ said Raikes.

  ‘Did you say something about legs, Captain?’ asked the man presently.

  ‘Yes,’ said Raikes.

  ‘I’m a tit man myself.’

  ‘What have you been drinking?’ asked Lockhart curiously.

  ‘Peppermint frappé,’ answered the midshipman.

  ‘A whore’s drink,’ commented Lockhart.

  ‘Is it, sir?’ said the midshipman, surprised. ‘It was her suggestion.’r />
  ‘I love my husband,’ said the girl, rising on one lovely arm from the pillow, ‘but I’m in love with you. You see?’

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Allingham.

  ‘But honey, you do understand, don’t you? It’s important.’

  ‘Sure I understand. Just lie still.’

  ‘It was between dances,’ said Raikes modestly. ‘We went out into the garden, and she said: “You’re welcome”, and I was.’

  ‘I noticed that it didn’t seem to take you long,’ said Scott-Brown austerely.

  ‘She seemed to have some sort of quick-release gear round her waist. No trouble at all.’

  ‘As long as it doesn’t harm Anglo-American relations.’

  ‘Huh!’ Raikes snorted. ‘It’s nothing to what the Yanks are doing to ours.’

  ‘They’re not a bit like us,’ said Johnson severely. ‘No morals at all.’

  6

  Lockhart wrote to Julie, from the New York hotel where he was spending a week’s leave:

  I’ve been playing poker most of the night, with some newspaper men. What good company they are – and how grand all the Americans have been to us; and, after nearly two months, how I long to get back to you! Now it is Sunday, Sunday dawn: the birds are tweeting, the cards fall from the nervous hands, the Regency scene dissolves. I love and think of you, even in this cold untender hour on the fourteenth floor of a New York hotel: I think of being married to you soon, I think of the child you are guarding for me.

  But are you with me, in this dawn? Are you sleeping, are you restless, do you think and dream of me also? Is our cottage, where we were lovers, in your dream? Are there seagulls crying, is there wet heather to walk through, do we hold hands, is there a stirring somewhere in both our bodies: does love live, does it grow, does it move for us? What are your eyes like, your trembling lips, your breast that stroked my own? What is there for us in your dream, in your waking?

  No, the hour is not cold, not untender: you are ever wanted, ever missed: you are Julie always, my sensual sister and child and loved one. I reach out for you now: we have shared many dawns, we said goodbye on one, many weeks ago: we share this one again, horribly divided – but the same birds sing, the town stirs, the light comes through the curtain, I touch you and hope you will wake. Wake, sweetheart: that was a kiss, that was a hand on your shoulder. But how warm you are. What were you dreaming of? Was it of this?

  Oh sweet, dawns are still like that, even masculine ones when the room is wrecked by empty glasses and cigar ends and smoke and stale water in the ice bucket. Perhaps it is bad to write like this, bad to send it to you; but it is no cruel reminder – these things are there for both of us, all the time, and soon, very soon, we will find them again. And now, in this belated dawn, you are kissed and bidden farewell.

  7

  ‘Halt!’ said Chief Petty Officer Barnard.

  ‘Off caps! Signalman Blake, sir.’

  ‘What’s the charge, coxswain?’

  ‘Did leave a piece of chewing gum adhering to the signal projector, sir.’

  ‘Oh . . . You must keep your equipment clean, Blake, whether we’re likely to go to sea or not. Otherwise you’ll get into trouble. Caution!’

  ‘Caution, sir. On caps! About turn! Double march!’ ‘Chewing gum, coxswain? How revolting!’

  ‘We’ve been here too long, sir.’

  ‘Don’t come down to breakfast,’ Ericson’s host had said, when wishing him goodnight. ‘We none of us do on Sundays. Get your sleep, and I’ll have it sent up to you.’ Now, lying in bed on a bright Sunday morning, listening to a far-off radio and to some vague farm noises below, Ericson waited for the promised breakfast. Physically he was at ease, but his thoughts did not match his body; this bed, this comfortable and cheerful room, this kindly welcome should have been all that he wanted, but they were not – they had a sour taste of guilt about them which he could not dismiss.

  It was the fault of the war, of course, the war they were escaping. Saltash had now been out of action for two months, and she would not be ready to go for another fortnight or even three weeks: though the Brooklyn Navy Yard had proved efficient and cooperative, the delay was due to engine room spares which could not be conjured out of the air.

  Ordinarily, nothing would have been more pleasant than this lazy holiday. But the times were not ordinary, and the holiday could not be accepted save shamefacedly: while they lived on the fat of the land, the war went on, and other people carried it, people who had not had breakfast in bed for five years, and who usually had a rotten breakfast anyway . . . In their welcome, the Americans had been kindness itself – witness the present invitation, a surprise approach by a complete stranger; but Ericson and his ship’s company had been in debt to that kindness for too many weeks, and it was sapping and destroying all the hard, built-up training of the war. The waiting had put everything out of gear – men as well as machinery: Saltash now seemed to him a useless run-down hulk, shirking the battle, and her crew, strangers to the sea, were becoming in the process strangers to all but the most negative aspects of discipline.

  The plain reason was that they had been there too long, and there was no cure except to go away and start being serious again, and that was still out of his hands.

  There was a knock on the door, and a pretty child of ten or eleven, wearing bright red dungarees, came in, bearing a piled-up tray.

  ‘Good morning, Commander,’ she said, with the utmost self-possession. ‘How did you sleep?’

  ‘Very well, thank you.’

  ‘I’ll bring you the funnies just as soon as I can, but’ – she explained seriously – ‘in this family it’s very hard to get hold of them before noontime.’

  ‘There’s really no hurry.’

  ‘Dad says, eat a good breakfast, and then maybe you’d feel like playing a little golf.’

  ‘I haven’t played for a long time,’ said Ericson, ‘but I’d like to walk round.’

  ‘That’s fine . . . Dad also said,’ she went on, eyeing him gravely, ‘that I wasn’t to say anything about your accent. But it sure is cute.’

  ‘Thank you. What’s your name?’

  ‘Ariane. For my grandmother. It’s kind of French.’ She looked down at the tray. ‘Here’s breakfast. Is it enough?’

  Ericson’s eyes followed hers. Breakfast consisted, besides coffee, of one large oval-shaped dish; and on it, neatly arranged, was a composite meal which was difficult to take in at a single glance. Its basic items were bacon, sausages, two eggs, some kedgeree, a piece of fish, four things that looked like scones, mustard, marmalade, a tomato, a fried banana, three slices of toast, and a waffle with a load of maple syrup.

  ‘It’s enough,’ said Ericson. ‘But stay and talk to me.’

  ‘I’d like to. I mustn’t stay long, though – I’ve got work to do.’

  Disputes, sometimes small, sometimes big. Disagreements about how to do things, how to run countries, how to win wars. Arguments with workmen on board, with waiters ashore, with men in bars and women in bed. Slow grumbling in the mess decks, quick flare-ups at parties: stately or sulky anger when other people would not see the point of view. Leave-breaking, coming aboard drunk: a row with a dock policeman, a complaint about molesting which came near to rape. Recollection of what things were like in England; resentment against ease, against luxury, against an undeserved, opulent comfort in the midst of war.

  Gratitude to Americans for being so kind, changing to so-they-bloody-well-ought-to-be when the mood sickened. Laughter, not kindly, at Yanks talking big. Yanks complaining about their rationing, Yanks with rows of medals simply for travelling from A to B, Yanks thinking they were wonderful and saying so out loud.

  Remembering, sometimes mentioning, those first two years of neutrality, while Britain took it and bled and went broke. Fights, arguments, futile comparisons, bitterness, boredom. All part of the stagnation period, the waiting to get on with it.

  ‘Sounds to me like you British are kinda burned up because Patton�
�s troops are going ahead and yours are stuck down somewhere.’

  ‘It isn’t that. It’s just that we don’t like noisy generals.’

  ‘The trouble with these people,’ said Vincent, the quiet soft-spoken young sub-lieutenant who had been in corvettes since 1939, ‘is that they don’t take the war seriously. Even now – in 1944 – they’ve still only got one leg in. Their rationing’s a joke, though they could hardly make more noise about it: you can still get all the meat you want, all the butter, all the petrol – particularly if you know the man behind the counter, or the man who fixes the priorities, or the man at the garage; and it’s still considered a bit of smart operating if you get away with more than your share. But the thing that struck me most is their call-up system. There was a man at a party the other night, sticking his chest out because he had a wife and four children, and he’d got his call-up deferred again because of having them. It doesn’t make sense . . . Anywhere else in the world – in Russia or England or Germany – having a wife and four children is a reason for fighting, not for getting out of it: it means you’ve got something special to defend, instead of being free and on your own, it’s the best argument of all for not hanging back. But when I said that, I might as well have been playing the bagpipes . . . They don’t see the war as a fight at all, they don’t see it as something essential to win: for them, it’s still in the nuisance category, an accident that interrupts the Great American Plan – but if you’re smart you can keep clear of it, you can leave it to the next man to fight or overwork or go short of his comforts. That’s not the way to fight a war . . . Damn’ lucky for them we were there to take the first shock.’