The Sea Shall Not Have Them

by John Harris

  Now, remembering the incident, he walked across to the office building where his car was parked, his hands deep in his pockets, his shoulders hunched, his hat jammed down over his eyes.

  The camp was silent in the black-out. Over by the hangars, where there was usually the gleam of red lamps against the sky and the glow from the chance-light at the end of the flarepath, there was nothing tonight but darkness, and no sign of a star through the low, folding clouds. There were no searchlights on the move in the distance either, as there normally were, lighting up the roadway with their reflected glare.

  What buildings he could see loomed in bulky shadows above him, their black sides picked out here and there by the dim blue lights in the barrack-rooms. In one of them, late as it was, he could hear an argument taking place – obviously some roisterer who had taken advantage of the absence of flying to get himself drunk.

  Taudevin glanced up in the direction of the disturbance but his mind was still busy with his thoughts. One half of his brain was struggling with what he was going to tell Waltby’s wife, the other half was wondering what he could do about Scotty.

  Obviously Scotty couldn’t be allowed to go on as he was doing. They couldn’t go on for ever picking up the bricks he let fall. He’d have to go eventually. The time would inevitably arrive when he would make the most ghastly bloomer imaginable that no amount of effort could cover up. But Taudevin shrank from the job of personally getting rid of him. Scotty was rather a pathetic individual, with his slang and his prancing walk and his pilot officer’s moustache and that unhappy air of failure that brooded over him. After all, Scotty’s only crime was that he was too old for his job – not too old by any means in years but too old in manner. He’d lost his vigour and clarity of thought – if indeed he’d ever had any – far too soon. He was nothing more now than an old woman, and it was only his old-womanish manner that had caused him to mislead Ponsettia’s little WAAF. He’d obviously only been trying to comfort her and no more. But – Taudevin’s mouth set hard – he’d still no right to buoy the child up with false hope when there was precious little.

  Taudevin turned into headquarters and went to his office, in case any messages had been left for him since his return. On his desk was the usual pile of papers left for him by Scotty, business that Scotty should have handled on his own. On the top was the copy of an order for the Officers’ Mess, typed out, signed and left for Taudevin’s approval.

  In accordance with King’s Regulations and Air Council Instructions, officers are reminded that Dress Regulations state that flying boots will not be worn in the Mess except by crews returning from operations and then only…

  Taudevin read the document through carefully then slowly drew a pencil through the first half of it. Trust Scotty to make it as legal as he could and drag in airmanship and loyalty and all his other little tin gods. His own name and rank underneath the order were sufficient to make it stick, without invoking King’s Regulations and Air Council Instructions.

  Beneath the order there was a batch of applications for commissions and it startled Taudevin to realise that one of them concerned Mackay, Harding’s wireless operator. Apparently Mackay had been passed fit by everyone concerned – the Medical Officer, his squadron commander – and the paper required only Taudevin’s signature to make the commission certain. He studied it for a while, trying to read into the replies to the printed questions some of the angry thwarted character of Harding’s operator; then he began to put the applications on one side, his mind still on the fringe of that search across the dark sea and the storm that was now upon them, the gale that would make useless all their work unless the dinghy were found quickly.

  He glanced at the window. The rain was rattling in gusty blasts against the panes now.

  Taudevin thoughtfully laid the sheets down, then he noticed another one on his desk, half-hidden by all the other matter – a carbon copy of a charge sheet from the Station Warrant Officer’s department, obviously made out by the Station Police and passed along by someone for Taudevin’s information. Suddenly suspicious, he picked it up and glanced at the name on it then he slammed it down on his desk.

  “Damn Scotty,” he said aloud.

  He lit a cigarette and stood looking at the charge sheet on his desk for a while, then he picked it up again and studied it more closely. Obviously the Station Warrant Officer, a far wiser man than Scotty realised, had spotted the name on the sheet and decided Taudevin would want to know about it. Taudevin silently thanked God that the old SWO, with his leathery face and his iron lungs and sarcasm, had more intelligence than Scotty had ever credited him with.

  He slipped the charge sheet into a drawer and went out and up the stairs towards the Operations Room. The Controller was still there and Taudevin was pleased to see Howard, the Meteorological Officer, with him too, tired-looking and pale but obviously still working. He had not suggested to either of them that they should stay on duty, but he felt relieved and pleased that both had done so willingly.

  Neither of them spoke as he entered, and he crossed the room in silence to stare at the map. The marker for Harding’s dinghy was still there, further south and almost touching the Belgian coast – but the other markers, representing the rescuers, had been moved away. They were all of them off the board now, except for two, one off the English coast near Felixstowe, the other off the Belgian coast north-west of Antwerp.

  Jones, the Controller, moved to his side.

  “One of the launches has broken down, sir.” He tapped the map with his pointer and his manner told Taudevin there was fresh news. “She’s about here. Nothing serious in itself, I gather. If she’s serviceable by morning they’re going to call her into the search again. That is, providing the weather makes it possible for them to operate. I gather it must be pretty grim by now.”

  “The Navy at Dover report heavy rain and wind up to forty-five miles an hour and still rising,” Howard put in.

  Taudevin struck a match as he listened, the matchbox held awkwardly in those raw talons of his. His eyes did not move from the plotting table.

  “This German prisoner the naval launch brought in–” the Controller continued – “you’d get the message about him. It was passed on to you at Group HQ.” Taudevin nodded. “The naval people have questioned him closely and from the position he gave they’ve worked out from their tide and wind tables that if the dinghy is afloat at all it can only be in this area here by Becq-le-Plage and Zeemucke. About there.” He tapped with his pointer.

  “As close in as that?” Taudevin raised his eyebrows as he put his matches away, his eyes on the tip of Jones’ pointer.

  “As close in as that,” Jones repeated soberly. Taudevin was aware of Howard’s face, watching the two of them closely. The sergeant plotter had stopped working and was listening, motionless, with all his attention on them as Jones continued. “The Navy says they’ll be right on the beach by mid-morning.”

  “It’s a devil of a place for a launch to go. I wonder if we ought to ask them to – right under the shore batteries.”

  “They’ll go in if they’re told to. The weather we’re getting now might be on their side if they can only spot the dinghy. It will make visibility difficult from the shore. Pity it also makes air cover difficult.”

  Taudevin said nothing. He was thinking of his own cold spell in a dinghy and the awful sense of being forgotten by the rest of the war.

  Jones waited for a while for him to make some remark, then he went on.

  “If only we could have kept the fighters flying a little longer, sir, we might have found them. As it is, with this weather blowing up and due to reach them any minute their chances are growing shorter all the time, I’m afraid.”

  “If they can hold out until daylight there’s still a chance,” Taudevin said, his mouth hard. “We’ll get everything that can fly off the ground over there at first light, unless there’s thick fog or heavy rain. I’ll ring up Group myself and suggest it if they haven’t laid it on already. One or
two of those Mosquito pilots would be willing to have a go, I’m sure. If only the dinghy doesn’t capsize,” he ended slowly.

  He studied the operations board for a while. The space opposite Harding’s name and the number of his aircraft was still blank, but while his name remained there seemed to be hope.

  He straightened up, shrugging off his depression.

  “I must go down to the station,” he said sharply. “My wife’s down there. I expect she’s finished off the night porters’ tea by now. She usually does. She’s getting pretty well known now, meeting odd wives as she does at all hours. I’ll find her in the night porters’ room as usual, I suppose.” He glanced up at the others and suddenly his eyes looked haggard. “I’ve got the job of telling Waltby’s wife,” he said.

  The train was just pulling into the station as Taudevin left his car and walked on to the platform. He found his wife quickly in the dim lights of the station, as he had expected just coming out of the night porters’ room where there was the only fire available.

  She jumped as he took her arm, then she turned and smiled up at him, her face shadowed in the feeble lights. Their ears were full of the hiss of steam and the roar of the engine as the dimly lit carriages slid to a stop, doors half-open, the porters shouting the name of the station.

  “Before Eve arrives,” Taudevin said quickly above the noise. “Sydney’s missing. The aircraft disappeared during the day and nothing’s been heard of it since. You’ll have to help me.”

  His wife flashed a quick look of fear at him. It was a look he’d seen before during the war on many occasions – fear not for herself but for other people or for him.

  “They’ve been searching all day,” he went on. “Everything that will float or fly. Nothing’s been heard. But we’re still hoping.”

  His wife stared at him silently for a while, moving a little closer to him as she turned her attention to the carriages once more.

  The train had come to a stop now, sighing noisily like a tired animal, and people were descending – a few airmen and sailors with late passes, clutching bags, hurrying towards the exit with their tickets to be the first for lifts or late taxis. The station seemed a mass of movement for a moment, all in one direction. Then they saw Waltby’s wife in her old-fashioned green hat, one of the last to descend from a first-class carriage crammed as usual with third-class passengers, stuffing her knitting into a bag and hefting a suitcase from the rack.

  A tall, handsome, hard-faced blonde woman in a plaid coat was standing in the doorway of the carriage. As Taudevin watched her she stepped down and accepted a suitcase from an American sergeant who was standing behind her – one of the green naval suitcases, Taudevin noticed – with the letters HT painted on it in a clumsy attempt at artistry.

  “He’s not here, Carl,” she was saying. “The big soft clot. I knew he wouldn’t make it. He’s too slow to catch a cold.”

  Eve Waltby had to push past her towards Taudevin and his wife as she stood irritably tapping her foot. Taudevin took the bag and stood in silence as the sisters kissed.

  “Hello, Chris,” Eve Waltby said at last. Then her expression of pleasure changed quickly. “Sydney? Where is he? I thought he was going to be here to meet me. He said he would. I expect those precious statistics of his are holding him up again, are they?”

  Taudevin’s wife flashed her look at Taudevin again and Eve Waltby saw it and looked up too.

  “What is it, Chris?” she asked quietly. “Has something happened?”

  Taudevin suddenly found he could not look at her. He was staring over her head, his eyes on the hard-faced blonde woman with the naval suitcase. The American sergeant had returned to his compartment and the woman was standing alone on the platform, still tapping her foot.

  “I’m afraid Sydney’s missing, Eve,” he said slowly, drawing his breath in deeply. “The aircraft he was returning in from the Continent disappeared during the day and nothing’s been heard of it since.”

  Eve Waltby continued to watch him, saying nothing. Taudevin was still staring over her head. The train must have been late arriving, for the porters had already finished slamming in the mail bags and were moving along the platform, pushing the doors to. One of them touched the blonde woman on the arm as he passed, and she shrugged his hand off angrily.

  “They’ve been searching all day,” Taudevin went on, aware that he was repeating to Waltby’s wife the exact words he had used to his own wife. “Everything that will float or fly. Nothing’s been heard yet, but we’re still trying and we’re still hoping. We believe he’s in a dinghy.”

  Eve Waltby’s expression showed no fear – not even the quick darting glance his own wife had shown. She had trained herself well to calmness over the years she had been married to Waltby. She had forced it on herself to soothe her husband’s nervous brilliance and quieten him when he got too irritably tired over some job that couldn’t be left.

  “In a dinghy?” she said. “It’s terrible weather for that.”

  “Yes, I’m afraid it is, Eve,” Taudevin said, aware of the inadequacy of his words. “But those dinghies are pretty foolproof you know. We’re hoping to pick them up at first light.”

  As he spoke he knew he was indulging in the same false optimism that had caused Scotty to distress Ponsettia’s little WAAF with unfounded hope, and he suddenly sympathised with the older man.

  “Well–” Eve Waltby seemed to clutch at her courage as though it had been in danger of suddenly running away from her. Her voice was stronger and firmer than normal “–I suppose this is no place to do our worrying. Shall we get on?”

  Taudevin’s wife took her arm to guide her through the dark station to the exit and Taudevin turned to follow. As he moved away he heard the guard’s whistle blow, and he saw the blonde woman in the plaid coat climb back into the train. The American sergeant, standing in the corridor now, offered her a cigarette and they stood leaning on the handrail, saying nothing as he lit it for her.

  Taudevin heard the first deep, stomachic puff from the engine and the slam of the carriage door, then, as he followed his wife and Eve Waltby, he caught sight of the dimly lit windows of the train starting to move forward.

  By morning the rain lay heavily over the land, making the outlines of the hangars dim and silvery in the grey daylight. The straight tall poplars outside the main gate of the aerodrome were flinging their bare spars in a frenzy as the wind lashed at them across the wide fields, and the ensign rippled straight and hard from the top of the flagstaff which drummed in the beating of the weather.

  Sick with disappointment, Taudevin stood at his streaming window and stared out, his vision blurred by the raindrops which hammered occasionally at the glass, breaking up the view across the wide entrance to the aerodrome as though it were a picture that had shivered suddenly to a thousand fragments. The sentry by the gate huddled inside his box and the canvas cover on the lorry just passing him fluttered and whipped in the rising gale.

  From the hangars, Taudevin knew, the tethered Lancasters would be misty in the distance across the perimeter, their great wings gleaming in the slashing rain, their wheels standing in puddles of shining water which reflected their ebony undersides. The whole grass area of the field would be sparkling and jewel-bright, patches of water lying in the shallow folds between the runways. Beyond the perimeter the farms would be hazy and with a twilight look about them through the rain that came across the field in driven flurries as though from a waved hosepipe.

  The office was stuffy and airless and Taudevin, nervy and irritable after a poor night, found it unbearable. He had left his wife and Eve Waltby eating breakfast in fits of flat conversation, finding it hard to be interested in anything when the only thing that lay at the back of their minds was the fact that Eve’s husband was at best probably in a dinghy and that a gale was blowing.

  He moved away from the window and sat down at his desk, resisting the desire to hurry upstairs to the Operations Room where he could learn only what he already knew
. Nothing had been heard of the dinghy yet. Nothing, in fact, had even been heard of the launch which had been marooned not far from the Belgian coast with unserviceable engines. Messages kept coming in which were passed on immediately for his perusal, but they told him only that the launch towing the Walrus had had to report casting off the tow, that shortly afterwards the Walrus had been smashed below the surface by a wave catching its wing, and that naval vessels were beating their way out through the weather in the direction of the lost launch and the possible vicinity of the dinghy – if, indeed, there were a dinghy.

  None had yet been spotted. That fact kept recurring to Taudevin with sickening insistence. He had no sure knowledge yet that Waltby and Harding and the others had even escaped from the aircraft. “No one got out.” That phrase cropped up often enough in reports of aircraft ditching for him to know only too well what the chances were.

  With the low cloud and beating rain, the Fighter people had not been able to get off the ground. They were willing enough to try at the first break in the weather and, while he itched to ask them to chance it, he knew their task was hopeless even if they reached the area of the search. They could never have seen anything – let alone a tiny yellow dinghy on the vast surface of the sea.

  Taudevin lifted the papers on his desk and was perusing them when the door opened and Scotty entered.

  “Good morning, sir. Wizard weather, isn’t it?”

  Taudevin pushed his chair back as Scotty slammed a sheaf of papers on his desk and started off in his normal boisterously youthful manner: “This bus service we’re trying to start from the camp–” he began, when Taudevin cut him short with a wave of his hand.

  “Not now,” he said. “There’s something else I want to talk to you about.”

  “Roger, sir,” Scotty said heartily. He made a great show of being energetic and efficient, but he wasn’t even efficient at that, and Taudevin could see he wasn’t keen to have any more work pushed on to him that might cut short his tea-drinking and his morning chat with the station Adjutant. He pranced forward and, picking up the papers on the desk again, swept his moustache upwards with the back of his hand and waited with one foot splayed forward in a picture of interested attention.