The Boy and the Battleship

by Christopher Cummings

  The policeman stared hard at his face. “I can see you’ve been crying. Why? What’s wrong?”

  “My… my (sniff) girlfriend just… (sniff) b… broke up with (sniff) me!” Graham sobbed. He tried to hold back the tears but couldn’t.

  “I see. A lady phoned us saying there were two kids here; a boy and a girl. You are a bit young to be having woman trouble aren’t you? How old are you?”

  “Nearly… th… (sniff) thirteen,” Graham answered.

  The policeman nodded. “Much too young.”

  “Th… that…(sniff) that’s what I told her,” Graham sobbed. If they know I may as well tell the truth, he reasoned.

  But the two policemen just laughed and the other one said, “Never mind son. Plenty more fish in the sea. Now get going and don’t come here except for Scouts.”

  They turned and walked away and Graham followed them, puzzled and miserable. Am I in trouble or not? he wondered.

  He wasn’t. The policemen got back into their car and drove off leaving him upset and confused. Sadly he made his way home. Seeing the police had been a terrible shock. It had seemed like the wrath of God being instantly visited upon him. Then another thought came to him. If I had said yes then they would have arrived while we were doing it. Then we would both have been in terrible trouble.

  Picturing that scene brought him out in a cold sweat and made him doubly glad that he had been brave enough to say no. I did the right thing, he told himself. But Oh! How he still yearned to try it!

  At home Graham made a point of avoiding his mother as he felt sure she would be able to tell there was something wrong. The easiest way for him to do this was to work on his model battleship so, even though he did not feel like making models at all, he sat himself at his desk.

  After a while his mood lightened as he became absorbed in the problem of putting the masts and rigging on the model. Here his vast experience with sailing ship models came to his aid. To make the lower masts he used bamboo skewers, cut to suitable lengths. The forward lower mast he made into a tripod. The photos showed this but also into his mind came two dramatic quotations he had read. One of them was from Warren Tute’s book The Admiral when he had described the reaction of Admiral Graf von Spee when he sighted tripod masts in Port Stanley as the German cruiser squadron he led approached the Falkland Islands in December 1914.

  “Some officers on the Gneisenau thought they could see the tell tale tripod masts of capital ships… it was not for another half-hour that the appalling truth revealed itself to the Germans and immediate flight began,” Graham quoted, imagining the scene and wishing he had been present on one of the British battlecruisers.

  The other quote had been in C. S. Forester’s novel Brown on Resolution when the captain of the fleeing fictional German cruiser Zeithen saw the tripod masts of a British Dreadnought battlecruiser on the horizon and knew, “There was death in that insignificant little speck.”

  Graham sat and pondered what it might have been like. I think I would have been brave enough, he thought. But then he remembered Cindy’s scathing words and they scorched him. Am I really a coward? Was it because I have no guts that I wouldn’t do it? he agonized. For quite a few minutes he replayed the scene and tried to remember every word. It so upset him that tears came and he had to blink these back to hide them from Kylie as she went past. Once again he bent over a model as a refuge from anyone noticing how unhappy he was.

  Up on the tripod mast Graham glued four cardboard triangles and on top of that a balsa platform. Underneath he glued on a yardarm. On top of the platform he added two balsa blocks to represent the spotting top and range finder. A thin upper mast of balsa coloured black was then glued above the top.

  The second mast on the aft superstructure block was merely a thin upright. To this he added only a gaff. He then used thin black thread to add some rigging; from the top of the forward mast to the end of each yardarm and down to the superstructure where it was glued. The loose ends were then trimmed off with a craft knife. These represented the signal halyards and he contemplated making tiny coloured flags out of paper to attach to them. A second thread ran from the main mast head to the end of the gaff and then down to the superstructure. This thread supported the gaff and also gave a halyard to glue the white ensign to.

  When that was done Graham sat back and looked at the model with satisfaction. For the first time in hours he smiled. The model really looked like a battleship now! He admired it from several angles then flicked over the pages of the book he was using for ideas. His eyes settled on a large colour picture of the last HMS Vanguard. It was one of his favourites and he really enjoyed looking at it for inspiration.

  Prominent in the picture was a naval fighter aircraft; a single-engine, propeller driven type. It was racing across the foreground of the picture, just above the waves.

  A plane. Big ships used to carry them, he mused, remembering the scene in The Battle of the River Plate when one of the British cruisers had launched a float plane from a catapult. That made Graham re-examine his plans. Could I fit on a plane?

  He decided that he could, if he placed a catapult athwartships just abaft the second funnel. But should I? he wondered. His reading told him that the Iron Duke actually did carry planes but from platforms on top of B and X turrets. They were only Sopwith Camels or Pups, he thought. After a few minutes he decided that it would be all right to add a catapult for a single-engine, low wing monoplane.

  That is how she might have been for World War 2, he reasoned. The next half hour was taken up with constructing a balsa catapult, which he placed on top of Q turret. The catapult consisted of two pieces of balsa glued across the top of the superstructure. On the sides of each piece Graham drew a criss-cross of black lines to represent the latticework frame. This slightly overhung Q turret on each side.

  There was then the ordeal of pretending everything was normal during the evening meal, bath time, TV watching and so on. For once Graham did his homework without being prompted and he managed to stay out of trouble. But he was terribly torn as he crept miserably into bed. There he lay awake, tormented by doubts about his courage and by his physical urges. He even began to wonder if he could make it up to Cindy.

  Finally, he slipped into a troubled sleep.

  Chapter 18

  ANOTHER LESSON IN LIFE

  Graham stared up at the superstructure of the French destroyer. The pamphlet in his hand said she was FNS Montcalm, a C70-class ship of 4170 tonnes full load; 139 metres long, 14 metres broad and with a draught of 5.7 metres. The destroyer was armed with missiles, guns and torpedoes. From where he stood at the bottom of the gangway Graham could clearly see the Crotale Surface to Air Missile launcher on the superstructure abaft the funnel. The 100mm main gun was also just visible, but he had to look to find one of the two 20mm guns. It was hidden away among a jumble of fittings and boxes just behind the bridge. He presumed there was a matching one on the other side. The Surface to Surface and Anti sub missile launchers and torpedo tubes were not obvious to him.

  Stephen nudged him. “This thing’s got two helicopters on it.”

  Graham had already noted the flat helicopter deck at the stern with the square box-shaped superstructure forward of it which must be the hangar. “I know,” he replied.

  Peter waved a pamphlet he had just been handed by a French sailor. “It doesn’t go very fast,” he commented. “Only 30 knots. That’s no faster than ships a hundred years ago.”

  Graham nodded. “Mr Conkey said something about that the other day; that ship speeds had plateaued a long time ago. He said that in the age of the jet fighter and the guided missiles the speed of the ship wasn’t all that important, except to get from one area to another. It’s their electronics that matter.”

  “This thing has got two lots of engines,” Stephen said. “Two gas turbines and two diesels.”

  “That is normal,” Graham replied. He felt himself to be very much the resident expert on matters naval and tried to act that way.

>   Behind him Cindy spoke up. “Two hundred and sixteen men. Now that sounds hopeful!” The girls with her giggled. Graham frowned and was not amused. Nor could he bring himself to face Cindy. Instead he burned with a mixture of frustrated dejection, humiliation, regret and lust. He had only seen her briefly that day as they got on the bus and when their eyes had met she had scowled and looked away. Now he wondered if she was deliberately taunting him. I still did the right thing though, he told himself. But it still hurt!

  Stephen tapped Graham’s arm and pointed along the wharf. “There’s your anti-French protest.”

  Thankful for the distraction from his jangled thoughts Graham looked through the milling throng of students. Near the bow of the ship stood five people holding placards, which read: Stop Nuclear Testing! and Ban nuclear weapons! Two policemen stood nearby. Graham recognized the same people who had been at the previous demonstration and the term he had heard, ‘Professional demonstrators’, flashed through his mind.

  Their leader, he noted, was the same skinny, bearded man but this time he had no megaphone. Beside him stood two girls. One was his girl friend, the big blonde. The other girl with the black hair stood on the leader’s other side.

  Stephen called to Janet: “Hey Janet, is that your sister?”

  Janet nodded: “Yes it is.” She stepped out of line and waved. “Hi Danielle! Hi Paula!”

  The girls smiled and waved back. The bearded man ignored her. Peter looked around. “No TV cameras today,” he observed. Graham nodded. That just increased his sense of grievance.

  After a security check with metal detectors the long line of students began to move. There were two hundred of them and most were in a holiday mood. They started filing up the gangway with much calling out and giggling, a few teachers intermingled to maintain law and order. Graham tore his eyes from Thelma, who was just ahead of him, to study the French sailors.

  Matelots is what they are called, he remembered. He found it interesting to see the different uniforms: the blue and white striped jersey and the white tops with a collar scarf similar to those worn by Australian seamen in their dress whites, but with a different cut and different badges. But it was the white sailor cap with its bright red woollen pom pom on top which was the most distinctive item. As always Graham was surprised at how pale-skinned and clean the ship’s company were, from living much of their working life inside in air conditioning.

  As he walked up the gangway Graham noted the eyes of the French sailors. They were openly appraising the girls, one by one. The girls knew it and mostly played up to it, although a few looked embarrassed or annoyed. Graham felt resentment stir. Bloody Frogs! Ogling our girls, he thought. Then he went back to studying the ship, in between ogling the girls himself.

  Cindy stopped beside him as they moved slowly along the crowded main deck. She was very excited and was looking at every Frenchmen she passed. Just once she met Graham’s eyes and she half-sneered, half-smirked before looking away.

  Graham shook his head. What a bloody flirt! At least Thelma won’t behave like that.

  The students were not given any choice about which way to go. The route was marked and sailors stood to usher them past the roped-off and guarded out-of-bounds areas. But it was still very interesting. There seemed to Graham to be lots of places open to visit that had not been possible on the Australian ship. The route took them forward to the focsle, past the 100mm gun in its mounting. Graham had a good look at this and touched the grey steel as he passed. Then, with ship modelling in mind, he studied the arrangement of anchor chains, capstans and hatchways on the focsle itself.

  A mooring rope led down to the wharf through a fairlead. Graham looked over to see how far down it was. He noted that the five demonstrators still stood on the wharf with the two policemen. He shrugged. They weren’t causing any disturbance. He turned his attention back to the ship, looking up over the main gun to the bridge and radars.

  His friends took his interest as natural and stayed with him as the less interested students flowed past. Cindy and her friends vanished, still flirting with every sailor they met. Thelma and Janet also moved slowly and seemed to be looking carefully at everything, which surprised Graham. They even struck up a conversation in halting French with two young French ratings.

  Graham was jealous, but only a little. The girls are actually trying out their French, he told himself. And obviously with limited results, he decided, judging by the good-humoured laughter of the two men.

  Peter was the only one in Graham’s group who learned French and he acted as their interpreter whenever they had a technical question to ask.

  The route led across to the other side. Graham was really enjoying the visit by then. He stood and gripped the rail, inhaling the medley of sea smells: salt water, mud, paint, diesel; and rotting god-knows-what. He looked out over the water of the inlet and then up at the superstructure. For long minutes he swept his vision slowly over the array of masts, rotating radars, aerials and grey steel. They passed the outlet of a forced draft fan and the hot, oily stench engulfed them briefly. Graham loved the way the whole ship throbbed as engines and machines worked. It made it feel alive.

  Thelma, Janet and Louise were still just ahead of him with the two young ratings showing them around. Graham and his friends stayed with them. The ratings opened a steel watertight door and led them inside. Graham followed and was surprised and intrigued to find that they were in an accommodation area. Several other groups of students were also there, being shown around by ratings.

  Graham felt a bit embarrassed as it was the living space of the crew and there were men sitting and lying around, reading, writing letters and playing cards, many just in shorts and sandals. The ratings seemed to take it in good part and grinned good naturedly and tried to answer the questions in schoolroom French.

  The guides then led them along a narrow passage way. Ahead a door slid aside and out stepped a sailor wearing only a towel. He had obviously just had a shower. The two guides said something to him and he grinned and chattered back then stopped and slid the door open as the girls reached it. He pointed in and grinned.

  The girls peered in and then shrieked. Graham was close behind and looked in as well. It was a shower. Several naked men stood there washing themselves. At the girl’s squeals they turned to look. The man nearest the door turned and grinned as his mates called to him. Graham saw that the sailor had what appeared to be a very long penis. With a flourish he waggled it at the girls and they shrieked again.

  Graham was embarrassed and jealous. He did not want Thelma to see such things—yet she looked again as the ratings all laughed and the man waved it at her. Graham noted that most of the girls, while red with embarrassment, were laughing or only pretending to be shocked, their excited eyes and giggling suggesting they weren’t offended.

  The girls moved on past the door and the grinning matelot in the towel, but more girls, attracted by the shrieks, came along the corridor, wanting to know what was going on. The door was slid open for them as well and those girls shrieked as well. Graham blushed and walked quickly away.

  More shrieks and more girls. The boys mostly tried to pretend they weren’t interested or, like Graham, were stony faced. Then a teacher’s voice; Miss Boyland’s, sounded, telling the girls to get back out with the others. There was a mass scampering of giggling girls, which swept Graham and his friends out onto the main deck once more.

  There Graham got another shock. Behind some lockers and gear beside the funnel were Cindy and a girlfriend with two young matelots. One of the French sailors was standing very close to Cindy and had his arm around her. He had his hand firmly on her bum. She was staring up into his eyes and smiling in a way Graham knew only too well. He experienced a sharp stab of hurt and jealousy but did not know what to do.

  At that moment Miss Boyland arrived and she spoke very sharply to Cindy and her friend, telling them to behave. Cindy gave her a sulky and rebellious look in return and reluctantly moved on. The matelot winked and
said something in French to Cindy. Miss Boyland snapped back at him fluently in the same language. Graham could not understand what she said, but he could guess. The young matelot who had been touching Cindy stepped back and looked abashed, but his friend grinned and winked at Miss Boyland and said something which made her snort and blush. She moved on after Cindy and her friend, ushering them on.

  Graham’s group, still with its two guides, went up a steel ladder to the next deck and along past the boats and the 20mm guns to the bridge. To Graham’s chagrin the two young matelots were giving a lot of attention to Thelma and Louise, and they appeared to be returning it. Janet appeared to have frozen them out, but still kept asking questions.

  The bridge was interesting. Graham looked carefully over all the controls and stroked the captain’s chair, then peered in turn with everyone else into the repeater screen of the navigation radar. He wanted to visit the control centre but that was not allowed. An armed guard blocked access. But seeing the matelot’s sub-machine gun and knowing it was almost certainly loaded with real bullets was still a good thrill. The group ended up on the roof of the bridge beside the mast and various aerials and antennae.

  Graham leaned over the rail and slowly scanned the length of the ship, noting details and soaking up the atmosphere. As he did he noted the flow of students around the decks below and waved to some. Already students were leaving the ship and a check of his watch told Graham that their visit was more than half over. He looked aft to check what else he wanted to see. As he did he noted Cindy and her friend go down the gangway to the wharf; and just behind them the same two young matelots.

  At least Graham thought they were the same two. He could not be sure at that distance. With a catch in his heart he watched as they went across the wharf and into the shops beyond. They shouldn’t be going in there, he thought. They are supposed to stay with the group and come back to school.