HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbour (1947)

by Monsarrat, Nicholas

  ‘How’s it going?’ asked the warden.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘You don’t want another squad on it, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We’ve sent all the other casualties off,’ said the stretcher-bearer. ‘Eight of them. I suppose we’d better stay on here, though.’

  ‘It’ll be a bit of time yet,’ said Godden.

  ‘Better wait, all the same. Anything I can do down there?’

  ‘Not yet. We might need a couple of slim chaps a bit later.’

  ‘That’s me, for one.’

  ‘Can you hear anything?’ asked the policeman.

  ‘No. Too far away still … Tell you what we could do with – a few cups of tea.’

  ‘The mobile canteen’s coming along soon,’ said the warden. ‘I’ll have some sent down.’

  The All Clear went suddenly. The policeman straightened up, and his head disappeared from view. Godden said: ‘Well, that’s something, I suppose,’ waved to the other two, and went back to take over from Wilensky.

  The tunnel grew. At the end of two hours it was about nine feet long, and nearing the dividing wall between the front and back rooms. The shores and props placed at intervals to hold off the massive weight on top gave it a workmanlike air; but from its entrance it dwindled in height until it was not more than four feet high at the far end. This economy saved time, but it meant working under very difficult conditions: kneeling down in cramped discomfort, swinging the pick at half-arm, elbows close to the sides, attacking the wall of rubble with quick short jabs, which made the sweat pour ...

  Horrocks had now taken the place of Wilensky, who had had to give up working in the tunnel itself – the dust and close confinement had started fits of coughing which made it impossible for him to keep up the pace: but Godden worked on untiringly, picking at the rubble, prising out bricks and woodwork, passing the loose stuff back, working with a sense of timeless effort, automatic and continuous. He had to breathe through his nose to filter as much of the dust as possible: he had stripped down to a pair of trousers only, and the sweat, running in rivulets down his scratched, filthy chest, collected in a sticky band at his waistline. Occasionally he paused, listened for sounds beyond the tunnel, trying to quiet his own laboured breathing in order to catch any faint noise or movement ahead: but there had been no sign of anything so far, and each time he would fall to again, making up for the tiny delay with a sustained spurt of energy.

  Once, when he backed out at the end of his spell to let Horrocks take his place, the latter said: ‘It’s like the Old Firm again, eh?’ Godden smiled without answering, but he liked the idea a lot: sipping his tea from the mobile canteen, he felt glad that the work was so tough and that he and Horrocks were leading this hard-driving effort of rescue.

  It was Horrocks who reached the dividing wall, during one of his spells, and after clearing away the last of the rubble he crawled out to report the fact.

  ‘It’s not much,’ he said. He, like Godden, was dirty and streaked with sweat. ‘Two bricks thick, I should say. Won’t take long to get through.’

  ‘What’s the other side sound like?’ asked Godden.

  ‘Hollow, I think. Looks as if the wall had held up this end of the ceiling, same as in here.’

  ‘Won’t be long now, then,’ said the warden, who was down in the basement with them. ‘I’ll warn the stretcher-bearers.’

  ‘I take a turn now?’ asked Wilensky.

  ‘No,’ said Godden. ‘This bit is mine.’ He took the pick, and a short crowbar from Horrocks, and crawled into the tunnel again. The time was now four o’clock – three and a half hours since they had started. Godden went at the last obstruction carefully, breaking away a brick at a time close to the side wall and the floor, making a sort of little rat-hole in one corner, to keep as much of the wall’s support as possible. Presently he could put his arm right through up to his shoulder, and when he did so, and reached round with his freed hand, he touched nothing. So far so good: this corner of the ceiling still held. He prised away a dozen more bricks, until the hole was big enough to crawl through: then he dropped the little crowbar and eased his body through the opening.

  It was pitch dark inside: no glimmer of light penetrated from anywhere. Godden lay on the ground halfway into the room, his legs still in the entrance hole, and listened. All round him the blackness was still and silent: the air smelt acrid, and he could feel the thick brick dust settling in his nostrils. He stretched out his arm again, and felt all round him, to the full length of his reach: still he touched nothing. Then from somewhere in the room there was a vague stir, which might have been the rubble settling overhead. He cleared his throat, and called softly: ‘Anyone there?’

  There was no answer: not an echo, not the smallest answering resonance, relieved the loneliness of his voice. The darkness seemed to be crowding round him, the weight of the ruined house overhead pressing upon this small threatened space. Then there was a slurring movement from somewhere near by, and a sound which might have been a groan. Godden felt his scalp prickle, and the sweat drying cold on his body as he pictured what the darkness might hold. He called again: ‘Who is it?’

  There was the groaning sound once more and a whimper which seemed separate from it, and then silence.

  He turned his head back over his shoulder and called through the opening: ‘Horrocks!’

  ‘Yes, Bill?’

  ‘Get me a torch, will you?’

  ‘All right … Are you through?’

  ‘Yes. Can’t see anything, though. But there’s somebody here all right.’

  There was a scraping sound along the length of the tunnel: it stopped as Horrocks bumped into his legs.

  ‘Pass the torch through the hole,’ said Godden.

  He felt Horrocks reaching out, and then the torch was in his hand.

  ‘Thanks, George … Wait here till I see what else I want.’ He clicked the torch on, and slowly splayed it round the room.

  The roof first … More than half the ceiling was down, sagging to the floor with the laths sticking through the plaster like dusty ribs adrift from a skeleton. Only the corner by which Godden had entered was still clear, and the small section of the room underneath it was in ruins: the woodwork was scarred, the walls cracked and pitted, the single item of furniture – a settee – overturned and splintered. By this settee a woman lay, face downwards and groaning: she had a deep scalp wound, and her hair spread like a sticky red fan on the floor around her head. Farther away, where the ceiling met the floor, lay another figure, an old man: he had been trapped at waist level by the roof fall, and his thin body seemed to grow out of the ruins like the centrepiece of some tawdry illusion. From him there was no sound: his eyes were closed, and his bony face and bald head seemed to have shrunk to a waxy skull.

  That was the Timsons, anyway … Godden’s torch swung again, attracted by a nearby sound, and found a last surprise. Almost at his elbow, sitting on a stool with her back to the wall, was a child, a girl of about six. She was obviously terrified: her back was braced taut against the wall, her face seemed to have dwindled to a pair of enormous eyes, set above grey cheeks streaked with dust and tears. She was apparently unhurt – in body, at least; but when the torch reached her face she screamed and hid her eyes from it.

  ‘It’s all right, love.’ said Godden. He was deeply shocked. ‘I won’t hurt you.’

  As he spoke there was a cracking sound overhead and some more plaster fell from the ceiling, landing close by his body. The child screamed again. Godden’s torch swung upwards, exploring the battered arch above him: there was nothing new to be seen, nothing to add to the danger or to lessen its menace, but it was clear that he had very little time to play with. Of the whole house, there only remained this tiny corner which had not caved in completely; and by the look and sound of it, it would not last much longer.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Godden again. ‘I’ve come to get you out.’

  The child said nothing. Godden cr
awled forward until the rest of his body was clear of the entrance hole, and then stood upright. Into the small space round him the walls and ceiling seemed to be pressing tightly: it was like standing in a coffin.

  Keeping the torch pointed away, he bent down and touched the child on the shoulder. She shrank away from his arm: under the thin jersey he could feel the small body convulsively jerking, straining against a total collapse with God-knows-what effort of self-control.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he repeated, for the third time. He felt quite inadequate: he had really forgotten how to talk to children, and perhaps he had never known how to talk to a child in so pitiful a state. ‘Can you find your way out, through the hole? That’s the way I came. It’s quite easy. You’ll be outside before you know where you are.’

  Godden indicated the entrance hole with his torch, and then swung the beam round until he could see the child again. She did not answer him, and she had not changed her position; there was no way of telling whether what he had said had got through at all, or whether the child was still too hopelessly dazed to take in anything. He tried again.

  ‘Come on,’ he said gently. ‘Get down on your hands and knees, and see if you can crawl out by yourself.’

  He put out his hand to coax her, and then drew it back again as the girl stiffened, ready to cry out. She made no other move, and there was nothing to show that she had understood his words. Godden shook his head. This was getting him nowhere: he just wasn’t the sort of person who could persuade her to any new action; indeed it was waste of time to try, in this black hole where the horrible thing had happened to her. And there were the others to be thought of, too … A fresh series of cracks from the ceiling, another fall of plaster, reminded him of the true significance of this time-wasting: unless he got moving soon, the whole lot of them would be caught. Standing there in the gloom, exhausted by the physical effort of tunnelling, shaken by the child’s condition and the two prone bloodstained figures, it was difficult to think of the right order of things. He took a grip on himself, put on the torch, and bent down to the entrance hole.

  ‘Horrocks!’ he called.

  ‘Hallo, Bill,’ came the answer. ‘Who was that calling out?’

  ‘There’s a kid in here.’

  ‘Lord!’ said Horrocks. ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘The other two as well. They’re both knocked out. The old man looks as if he’s gone: the woman’s still alive.’ (But was she? There’d been no sound, no movement of that clotted head, for some time.) ‘Send a stretcher-bearer to move them out, anyway.’

  ‘What about the kid?’

  ‘I can’t get her to move at the moment. Shock or something. The stretcher-bearer better have a look at it too.’

  There was a pause, while Godden heard Horrocks at the end of the tunnel repeating the information, and a faint echo in which he could distinguish the warden’s voice. The link with the outside world was tenuously comforting. Then Horrocks called again, a shade more anxiously: ‘Do you need any gear, Bill? What’s the ceiling like?’

  ‘Not too good. But there’s no room to shore up – and too much weight anyway if it starts to go. We’ll just have to try getting them out, and trust to luck … Send a couple of hurricane lamps through with the stretcher-bearer. I can’t see much with just a torch.’

  ‘All right. Watch out for yourself, Bill.’

  Silence fell again. While he was waiting, Godden switched on the torch and went back to the Timsons. The woman had stopped bleeding, which he vaguely knew might be a bad sign: he had been ready to put on a tourniquet, like they’d been shown in the classes, but there didn’t seem to be any need now. (How did you put a tourniquet on a head wound, anyway?) He could not tell whether she was still breathing; his own sounded too loud. Leaving her, he shuffled over on his hands and knees to have another look at the old man: clearly he was pretty far gone – the breathing imperceptible, the face like a thin paper mask with a line of dried froth at the mouth – and there was nothing to be done to help him. Godden didn’t want to start pulling him out before the stretcher-bearer had a look at him: that was what he’d been taught, though it seemed a cruel thing to leave him there with all that weight on top of him ...

  There was a scraping noise in the tunnel, and a thin line of light which grew until it spread over the whole corner of the room. A hand came through, thrusting two hurricane lamps into the open; then a head followed, wriggling and jerking like a moth leaving a cocoon. It turned towards the light. It was the pacifist stretcher-bearer.

  He peered round him, and then his face broke into a grin.

  ‘Hi there, Bill!’

  ‘Hallo, lad. Bit of work for you here.’

  The stretcher-bearer stood up, rather gingerly, and glanced round the room. ‘How long is this going to last?’

  ‘Oh, it’s not so bad.’ Dismissing the state of the ceiling with a carelessness he did not feel, Godden pointed to the Timsons. ‘Three of them to look at, with the kid there. See if she’s OK, will you, and we’ll send her out first.’

  ‘All right.’

  As he knelt down beside the girl, Godden said: ‘She may scream.’

  The stretcher-bearer did not answer, but took the child’s hand, and smiled at her. His face, grimy with dirt from the tunnel and queerly shadowed by the lamplight was not reassuring; but some quality of gentleness in him must have reached the child, for this time she did not cry out. Godden watched as the stretcher-bearer ran his hands swiftly over her body and made her stand up, talking all the time in a soft whisper, which seemed to fill the shattered room with comfort and confidence. It was wonderful to watch his concentration as he laboured to get through to the child’s mind, and the way in which she gradually surrendered to him. Godden wished he had been able to do it himself, but he knew that could never be. He hadn’t the trick of that sort of thing. It was something you were born with, most like.

  Presently the stretcher-bearer stood up. ‘She seems OK,’ he said to Godden. ‘Shaken to bits, of course … Now we want to get you outside,’ he went on, bending down to the child again. ‘Do you think you can crawl through the hole down there?’

  The child followed his pointing arm, looked at the tunnel entrance for a moment, and shook her head. Godden thought: we’ll be all night over this, and the roof will probably go before we’re properly started. From the corner he stared at the pair of them, impatient, wanting to hurry them up, but knowing that he could do nothing: he could only stand by and wait, with no more part in the scene than the enormous crooked shadows the two of them cast against the ruined wall and ceiling. Sweating and half stifled, feeling the drag of the minutes as they stretched out over the limit of safety, he listened to the curious, hurrying, half whispered dialogue of the stretcher-bearer persuading the child to move, and the child delaying in terror. But Godden knew that, in spite of the critical circumstances, it had to be persuasion: unless she were willing to go, it would be impossible to force her down the tunnel without a grim and horrible struggle.

  ‘Don’t want to leave Granny.’

  ‘I’ll bring Granny out in a minute. You go first.’

  ‘Where does it go to?’

  ‘Outside the house. You’ll be out in the sunshine in a minute.’

  ‘It’s too small. It’s a little hole.’

  ‘It’s just big enough for you.’

  ‘It’s too small for Granny.’

  ‘No, it’s big enough for her, too.’

  ‘Will there be somebody there?’

  ‘Yes, there’s a nice man waiting for you outside.’ The stretcher-bearer called, and Horrocks answered faintly. ‘You see – he’s all ready to help you.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Just a nice old man. I expect he’s got a bag of sweets in his pocket somewhere.’

  ‘What’s he doing out there?’

  ‘He’s come to help you.’

  ‘Don’t want to go by myself.’

  ‘Just go a little way, and you’ll see him there waiting for
you.’

  In the end, tearful, trembling uncontrollably she went … Godden heard Horrocks saying: ‘Come on, love – here we are,’ heard the child start sobbing out loud as she reached the tunnel-end, and felt suddenly a huge surge of relief. At least they were free of that bit of the job.

  Swiftly the stretcher-bearer turned to the old woman, examined her, started binding up her head and then putting a long splint on her broken thigh. As he worked, with furious speed, the roof overhead gave an enormously loud crack, and he looked up momentarily.

  ‘Sounds as though the whole bloody issue is coming down … How long have we got, do you reckon?’

  Godden shook his head. He was beginning to feel slightly sick: it was obvious that their small bit of the ceiling would go at any moment. ‘Don’t know, lad … Not too long … Have you finished?’

  ‘Nearly.’ The stretcher-bearer, tying a knot at the bottom end of the splint, glanced over his shoulder. ‘We might as well leave him where he is … I’ll put this old girl out: you follow me.’ He grinned suddenly. ‘Don’t forget the lamps, will you? Council property.’

  ‘All right.’ But Godden knew already that he would not leave the old man until the very last moment. He could still be alive. It was worth a good try, at least.

  After a moment the stretcher-bearer looked up. ‘OK – finished. It’s as rough as hell, but it’ll do for now. Give me a hand up to the entrance.’

  They half pulled, half carried the lolling figure to the tunnel mouth. More plaster fell as they moved, a last warning to speed their exit. At the open corner the stretcher-bearer made a long sling out of the three bandages, looped it over the old woman’s shoulders, and tied the ends round his own waist. Then he said: ‘See you later, Bill – don’t hang about too long,’ and began to crawl out on his hands and knees, dragging the old woman after him like an unwieldy bundle at a rope’s end. As she moved, inch by inch, the hacked-up floor scored her face cruelly. Godden, easing her body through the entrance, thanked God she was unconscious.