by John Harris
He had been watching Skinner for a long time now, wondering which was the safest way to inform him that his best jacket had slipped from the top of the auxiliary engine and dropped into a pool of oil in the bilges.
In the chilly forecastle where Flight Sergeant Slingsby sat on a bunk, drinking out of a tin of self-heating soup, his knees up against the edge of the table to hold himself rigid in his seat, the oilskins on the bulkhead swung in great wild arcs. The maddening cla-clank of empty soup tins in the box on the floor came every few seconds and the bread knife still slid backwards and forwards among the crumbs on the table with the empty tin mug, clicking every time it hit the raised edge. The place was damp and streaming with condensation, like everywhere else on the boat, with a dull film over the polished top of the table, and in the cold light of the deckhead lamps was cheerless and dim.
Rain and water flung by the waves to the cabin tops found its way through inevitably and dripped steadily to form puddles on the sick bay bunks and floor, trickling backwards and forwards and quivering with every wave that hit the helpless boat. Milliken had gone beyond sickness now. He was bruised from head to foot where he had been slammed by the motion of the boat against bulkheads or doors every time he stood on his feet. He sat on the deck of the sick bay, oblivious of the puddle that wet the seat of his trousers and, every now and again, as he listened to the satanic symphony of the sea, the terrifying thought occurred to him that only thin planks of wood stood between him and its fury.
Everyone except Slingsby had long since passed the stage of talking and performed what duties they had to perform with a heavy weariness. The silence of the sick bay, which seemed to exclude the crash of the water and the drum of the rain and the wind, was beginning to get on Milliken’s nerves a little. Opposite him, he could see the feet of Gus Westover, in his usual place behind and beneath the bunk among the spare ammunition, the Mae Wests and the wretched pigeons, rolling with every movement of the boat in lifeless fashion. Every time Tebbitt appeared his face was longer and his complaint louder. “Two o’clock,” he announced bitterly. “Only an hour to get home. We’ll never do it.”
Milliken was impervious at last to Tebbitt’s sorrow for, though his legs ached with bracing himself against the steps, he dared not relax even for sympathy. Once, when they had first started to protest, he had eased them for a while, only for the next lurch of the boat to send him sliding on his back across the wet floor to the bunk at the other side.
He could still hear the cheep of Morse in the wireless cabin and every dot and every dash seemed to split open his aching head. He was back at the state of mind when he wished to die and when nothing short of violent hard work would have made him wish to live. The axe Robb had produced winked dully at him in the light, its blade dark with grease.
He lay sprawled on the floor, hanging on with hands and feet and knees, always in danger of sliding across the deck again, his bagful of bandages and splints and slings moving backwards and forwards beside him, bumping softly first on the starboard side, then on the port side. And Milliken, in his misery, was indifferent to its fate.
Only Robb, eating his colossal sandwiches with a voracity and an obvious enjoyment that made Milliken in his misery detest him, and the boisterous, bounding little Flight Sergeant seemed undisturbed. Slingsby had visited the engine-room with monotonous regularity until Skinner, in one of the periods when Slingsby was on the bridge, had burst out: “That little swine wants examining! He’s persecuting me!”
Throughout the rolling Slingsby had been all over the boat at once, down in the engine-room, in the wireless cabin listening in with Knox and Botterill to the progress of 7526, highly delighted at their difficulties with the tow, asking the wretched Milliken how to set a fractured arm or treat a cracked skull, arguing boats with Robb in the forecastle over the self-heating soup and the corned-beef sandwiches, and finally in the sick bay again, helping Milliken to his unsteady legs and sending him reeling to the ghastly confines of the galley to help Tebbitt clear up the mess there where the cupboard doors had burst open and pots and pans had exploded in glorious confusion to the floor with the knives that were scattered from the upturned drawer. The crockery had fallen from the fiddles above the sink and their only attempt at tea-making had come near to scalding Tebbitt as the lurch of the boat had wrenched the kettle from the stove, breaking the cord with which he had tied it on.
Jammed in the narrow galley with Milliken, Tebbitt had mopped up most of the water and picked up the broken crockery that slithered and rolled noisily back and forth, with a dull misery born of the knowledge that his wife was gone from his life for ever. Vaguely, he still had hopes of searching for her, or even that she had waited for him at the station. But he knew that neither could be the case and that he would never see her again.
“She’s gone now,” he announced wearily to Milliken. “I’ve had it. She’ll be in London before morning.”
“And a damn good job, too,” Milliken said sourly, his face screwed up and his mouth pursed with the dislike of his job and the smell of paraffin, his frayed nerves rubbed raw by Tebbitt’s chant. “’Cos I’m jolly well sick of her.”
He had the malicious satisfaction of seeing the startled Tebbitt’s eyebrows shoot up almost out of sight before he bent over the powdered crockery with the brush and shovel again.
The long hours trudged wearily through a nightmare of noise and movement. No one could sleep or even rest with the seas yelping down on them like a pack of hounds, and the cold seeping up through the hull and the bilge boards and biting through sodden clothes.
Then Botterill brought a message to Slingsby in the forecastle. “Gale warning, Flight. Everybody recalled.”
“That’ll be nice. Especially as we’ve got to stay here.”
“And there’s this one, too. Came straight through after the other one.”
Slingsby glanced up sharply and took the proffered slip of paper.
“What’s this?” he demanded. “Engine serviceability permitting, request early morning inshore search of Belgian coast in area Becq-le-Plage – Zeemucke. Hell, they don’t intend to let us get away with anything. Engine serviceability permitting. Nice of them to grant us that. Perhaps they’d like us to row the bastard.” He squinted at the paper again and read on. “Dinghy possibly in this area. VVIP in aircraft crew. Request launch crew do utmost – repeat utmost – to effect rescue. Hm. England expects that every blasted man this day will do his duty. I know. I’ve heard it all before. And Sunday tomorrow, too. Come on, Robby. Let’s tell the Lad.”
He went off, trailing Corporal Robb, towards the Skipper’s cabin and the next moment the noise of the three of them climbing the wheelhouse ladder was followed by the rattle of the charts on the chart table.
“Schouwen Bank. Wandelaar. North Hinder. West Hinder. Oostekerke.” Milliken and Tebbitt, silent in the sodden galley, alert for news, their feet crunching the broken crockery, heard Slingsby hesitantly reading the names of the charted Belgian light vessels and small villages, making them sound like South Yorkshire mining towns in his north country accents. Milliken could almost see his square, spatulate finger moving slowly across the orange-tinted chart. “Zeebrugge. Mariendaele. Oudenberg. Wuyndelen. Here we are. Becq-le-Plage. Zeemucke. Nice big sandbank in the way, Skipper. It runs all down here on and off from Brown Ridge and Ostende Bank. We’d have to go in parallel with the shore and be a sitting duck for shore guns. I know the place. There’s a hell of a tide-race inshore of that bank. Christ, will I be glad to see the Shipwash and the Sunk Lights again and know we’re only a mile or two from England, home and beauty!”
Their voices died away to a murmur and Milliken found himself dropping off to sleep on his feet from sheer exhaustion. Then Robb brushed past him into the forecastle and picked up his sandwich again slowly, with an air of sober weariness.
“Engines permitting,” he said. “God, what a hope!”
Milliken had hardly returned to his place in the sick bay when he was st
artled out of his half-doze by Robb’s shout and the sound of running feet and Tebbitt’s great boots clumping to the deck as he leapt for the door. Milliken sat up, convinced that his nightmare voyage was going to be brought to an abrupt end by drowning, and he leapt after Tebbitt for the door only for an unexpected swing of the boat to fling him into the doorpost with a smash that knocked him silly.
Later, clinging dazedly to the lifeline on the after-deck, he watched the violent moment of excitement round the mast where the rolling had caused one of the stays that held it upright to snap and set it heeling dangerously, groaning in its socket. Westover, Tebbitt and the Flight Sergeant were holding on to it as it threatened to go over the side with every roll and carry away their wireless aerial and their sole means of communicating with the shore. Slingsby, lost in the scramble, was cursing steadily in an unbroken flow which, in spite of the tenseness of the moment, shocked Milliken by its carefully thought out balance and the very absence of panic in its obscenity.
“God damn Rollo to hell,” he ended in a snarl. “If he’d used his flaming tallow on these instead of his jaw there’d be nothing much wrong.”
For a moment Tebbitt was magnificent as he reached above the smaller figures of Slingsby and Westover and held the mast mostly by the strength of his own great forearms while Robb got a heaving-line round it and lashed it to the handrail by the cabin top. There followed a panting huddle on the bridge, all four of them occasionally lurching in a knot of cursing humanity across the deck and back again, while Robb secured another line round the mast and made that fast too, before Milliken returned to the sick bay, trembling and afraid of the violence of the night-black seas and firmly convinced that nothing – not even if it should mean the defeat of the Allied Armies in Europe – would ever get him to set foot on a high-speed launch again if he should ever reach home.
He had just sat down, wedged in position by his heels and his straining muscles and frozen by the wind blowing down the bridge companionway, when Slingsby lurched into the sick bay. His immaculate uniform was soaked with spray and rain but the quiff on his forehead was still quivering in its place.
“You – Billycan–” He pointed an accusing finger at Milliken. “On the bridge, smartly! At the double! You’re doing bridge look-out!”
“Bridge look-out?” Milliken climbed unsteadily to his feet. “What’s that?”
“Keeping your silly little eyes open. That’s all. You know how to do that, don’t you? Like this.” Slingsby blinked his own two bright eyes sharply at Milliken. “My boys need a rest and that mast needs someone handy. You’ve had it easy, sitting there like Lord Muck all day, wearing your behind out.” – Easy! Milliken almost laughed in his face. – “Report anything you see. That’s all. Go on now. Off! Away!”
Milliken staggered to the doorway.
“Not that way, you benighted bloody fool!” Slingsby shouted. “Through the galley.” – Milliken thought with a retching nausea of the paraffin fumes. – “You’ll go and fall in the drink. We’ve enough to bother about without fetching you out. If you go in, you stay in. Medical orderlies are two-a-penny, anyway.”
By the time he’d fallen into the galley well and stumbled up the swaying ladder to the wheelhouse and the bridge and got more than a lungful of those dreaded paraffin fumes, Milliken was glad to get his head into the fresh air. Robb dressed him in an oilskin and helped him outside where the lurch of the boat immediately slung him against the starboard side of the bridge, so that he lost his footing and sat down heavily.
He had slid across to the other side of the bridge and halfway back again before Robb got him on to his feet and clamped his hands to the handrail.
“You look like Captain Bligh,” he said as he fastened the sou’wester on. “How do you feel, doc?”
Milliken’s humiliated soul by this time detested Robb for his smooth mockery and apparently unlimited capacity for food when he ought to have been seasick. His calm infuriated him for its kinship in its smugness with Slingsby’s angry egoism, and Milliken’s reply was a fretful snap.
“Like death,” he said.
“Good! That’s grand.” Robb chuckled in the darkness. “If you’d like to sit just inside the wheelhouse you can watch the mast from there. I’ll stand your look-out.”
Milliken had the grace to feel ashamed of himself and he decided for the first time that day that Robb already did enough. “Thanks,” he said, thinking also of those galley fumes coming up from just below the wheelhouse. “I can lean here. That is,” he added wryly, “unless the Flight Sergeant’s coming up. He’s not keen on people leaning.”
“Don’t worry about Chiefy, doc. He doesn’t bite.”
“He’s a bit of a terror, though, isn’t he?” Milliken said with a nervous but more friendly laugh.
“Terror? Chiefy? Not he. Don’t kid yourself. Listen to him now.”
Milliken put his head inside the wheelhouse and Slingsby’s voice floated up to him from the forecastle with the paraffin fumes.
“If we find this lousy VIP, all the newspapers will be full of how hard it was for him, after being used to a plush-lined office, to spend a night on the ocean. But there won’t be any mention of Mrs Slingsby’s lad, Jimmy, having to miss his breakfast and dinner two days running to get him home. And when the war’s over he – being one of God’s chosen few – will get knighted and earn a thousand a year, which is a lot of potatoes, whichever way you look at it. And we’ll be door openers and night watchmen. That’s what we’ll be. And I’ve got a lousy figure for a commissionaire.”
Robb laughed and Milliken felt better.
“The big shots won’t admit us,” Slingsby’s voice went on, ebullient and fierce, as though he were enjoying his complaint with all the energy that he put into everything he did. “The Navy don’t like us using their sea, but we’ve pulled a few thousand men out of the drink in our time and put ’em back in flying. And only the Yanks have a good word to say for us. The Navy won’t thank us and that’s a fact.”
Milliken could just imagine the sour-smelling forecastle, perhaps with someone listening to Slingsby with one arm round the forward-hatch ladder, trying to saw a slice off the crumbling loaf without cutting his arm off as he swung backwards and forwards to the motion of the boat.
“We can’t march,” Slingsby ground on heartily. “They say we’re sloppy. No duty-free fags like the Navy. When we sleep aboard, the place gets as stale as an old dog’s basket. It’s a lousy life. Nobody loves us. It’s boring and cold and miserable. But” – his voice rose to a challenging shout – “did you ever hear of anyone ratting on us and wanting to go back to a shore job?”
Milliken suddenly got a lungful of paraffin fumes and hastily withdrew his head as the boat lurched sharply again. Below there was the sound of crockery crashing and an oath.
“Don’t take too much notice of Chiefy’s purges,” Robb advised. “You know why he does it, don’t you?” Milliken shook his head. “Why do you think Donald Duck makes so much noise? No one would ever notice him otherwise. No one ever notices little blokes and Chiefy’s got too much about him to put up with that.
“You know who holds this boat together?” he resumed casually. “Not the rivets and the nails. It’s Chiefy. He’s not exactly out of the top drawer, if you like, but the best don’t always come out of the top drawer. After all, a better man than me said that the sailors weren’t gentlemen and the gentlemen weren’t sailors. Make no mistake about it, these old flight sergeants are the backbone of this game. You watch him handle this boat if there’s trouble and then you’ll know.”
Milliken began to see where the link lay between Robb and the vulgar little Flight Sergeant. It came from mutual respect and admiration and he suddenly began to see them both differently. He realised there was a wisdom and skill behind Robb’s mockery as there was behind Slingsby’s garrulous obscenity that was beyond his own experience and comprehension and years.
As he was pondering it, braced with all his nerves and strength o
n the bridge while the boat did its slow hanging rolls on to its beam ends, all its timbers creaking, they heard the faint sound of firing, dim over the crash of the weather, and Robb was out of the wheelhouse in a flash, his boots thumping on the steps.
In the distance, sharp against the blackness of the night, they saw the streaking fireflies of tracer bullets sweeping in slow curves over the sea. Then he heard the broken hum of engines.
“Skipper!” Robb called and Treherne joined them on the bridge. A moment later Slingsby arrived alongside them.
“I heard launches,” he said. “More than one by the sound of ’em.” There was no hint now of the fierce grouse in his voice.
The four of them stared silently over the swinging bow and across the black mountains of the waves.
“Due east of us,” Slingsby pointed out, listening hard like an old setter.
“They’re not Air-Sea Rescue launches,” Treherne declared.
“Bet your life they’re not, Skipper,” Slingsby agreed. “We’re right in E-boat alley here.”
“Could they be Navy boats?”
“Yes. But not our navy. Not here. We’re too close inshore and Jerry’s got too many bases in this area. Our boys wouldn’t be firing there without somebody firing back. They’re testing guns. They’re on their way out.”
“Will they run into us, Flight?” Treherne asked quietly.
“Not this trip, I reckon, Skipper,” Slingsby answered. “They probably will on their way in. Hell, fancy that lot coming out on a night like this! Hope to God they’re not around if Skinner gets his engines going again and we find ourselves inshore at first light with nowhere to manoeuvre at Becq-le-bloody-Plage.”
Milliken, forgotten at the back of the bridge, his heart fluttering with excitement at their tense figures, leaned forward. “Is it the enemy?” he whispered.
“Enemy?” Slingsby barked. “No, son. This is the enemy. This all around us. This waste of bloody wet water. It’s been a sailor’s enemy ever since I was a kid and long before. Those bastards are only an incidental unpleasantness.”