Paradoxically, having come to this conclusion, he felt a wave of relief sweep over him, and, turning on his breast, he began to swim away from the sinking ship.
He had jumped over on the starboard side, and all the activity was on the port. He seemed to be alone in the water —quite alone. But no, not quite alone! There was one other man on the starboard side; a man in a life-jacket; a man crying out for help; a man in agony.
Randall swam towards the man, and saw that it was Sergeant Willis. He saw, too, that something had happened to Willis’s eyes, and that blood was running down his face. It shocked him to see Willis so helpless.
He shouted, “All right, sarge. It’s me—Randall.”
Willis cried, “My eyes! My eyes! I can’t see. I’m blind. Something’s bust my eyes.”
“You’ll be all right,” said Randall. “Don’t struggle now. Don’t talk. Just leave everything to me.”
He felt strong and capable. He was at home in the water, and he knew that he could save Willis. It was a job to do—something useful. For the first time in months he felt almost happy.
He slipped his hands under Willis’s arm-pits and began to swim on his back, heading for a raft that he had seen floating about thirty yards away. He had to struggle hard to drag Willis on to the raft, but he succeeded.
From the raft they were picked up by a corvette.
As he felt the ship sinking Bombardier Padgett locked his arms round Higgins and drew in a deep breath of air. Then the water closed over his head, and he went down and down.
He kept his eyes open, and he could see light filtering down through the water and bubbles floating upward, passing him in a never ending stream. There seemed to be layer after layer of water, and it was cold, icily cold.
And still Padgett went down, caught by the suction of the ship. His chest seemed to be on fire; there was a drumming, throbbing sensation in his head, and he wondered how much longer it would be before something burst inside him. He knew that he could not endure much more of the pressure. Was the ship going to drag him to the bottom of the sea? He might as well have remained caught in the cabin if this were to be the end after all.
But he did not release his grip on Higgins, and when a sudden upward rush of water caught him and flung him out into the blessed air he still had Higgins locked to him, as though his arms had grown round the boy. Looking back on it afterwards, he could only think that he had been saved by a blast of air or steam bursting out from the boilers like an exhalation of breath and carrying him up with it.
He had never realized that air, good, clean air, could taste so sweet as when his head broke the surface and he was able to suck it into his lungs in great, gasping breaths. So for a time he floated—unmoving—letting his life-jacket support the two of them, while he gasped and panted, feeling life flow back into his body.
It seemed a very long while, but in fact was probably no more than a few minutes. Then he heard a shout, and, looking up, saw a corvette looming above him, with a net hanging from a boom thrust out over her side. Then hands were reaching down to haul him in, and other hands were lifting Higgins, and in a moment he was on board with warm blankets wrapped about him and hot cocoa pouring down his throat.
But all the time he was concerned for Higgins. In a way, he felt now that Higgins was more important than himself.
“Is the boy all right?” he kept asking. “Is the kid safe?”
When they told him that Higgins was dead he burst into tears. It surprised them. They had not expected such weakness in a man who looked so tough. They turned away, embarrassed by his tears. They turned away and left him to the bitterness of his grief.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Survivors’ Leave
A WEEK had passed since the Golden Ray had blown her whistle for the last time, and Willis’s gun-team was scattered. As a team it would never come together again. That was the way of things. For a few weeks, a few months, a year, perhaps, a little group of men slept and ate, toiled and played, grumbled and laughed, were happy and sad, within the narrow confines of a ship. They had less privacy, one from another, than a man has from his wife. They grew to love and to hate one another. Soon it was as though they had been together from the beginning of time; they were compact, a unit, an indivisible whole. It was unthinkable that they should ever again be split up, that they should ever forget.
But the bond of their unity was as nothing before the blind, unfeeling forces of war, which tore them apart and flung them hither and thither. And soon the memory of former comrades blurred. There were so many of them—a long line stretching back into the past; and some were dead; it was impossible to remember all of them. Each man found new comrades among those around him and forgot the past. It was more bearable that way.
A week had passed, and Vernon was saying, “Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars—” He held up his mangled thumb. “Though, really, it could hardly be called a battle wound. It was jammed under the lid of an ammo-box. Still, it’s something.”
Mr Tennyson smiled. It was typical of Vernon to make light of things in that way; but the experience must have been unpleasant. How cold it must have been—the ice and the snow and the winds. Mr Tennyson shivered at the thought, and put another log of wood on his study fire.
“Were any men lost when your ship sank? Those two—ahem!—shellbacks, as you call them—what happened to them?”
“Donker and Agnew? They were all right; it would take an earthquake to ruffle those lads. They stepped calmly on to a raft and waited for the corvette to pick them up.”
“And the—er—Old Man?”
“Waited till the last and had to swim for it. He was all right, though—a tough old boy—in a blazing rage at losing his ship—so close to home, too. Some of the engine-room crew were trapped. They went down with the ship.”
Mr Tennyson was silent for a while. Then he said, “Let us hope it will soon be over. It is difficult for me also—very difficult. I was lucky to obtain this house—a manor, you know—Elizabethan—capacious but archaic. Much needs doing to it; but in these times, how? How? Still, it is something to be able to keep the school going at all. Staff is the great problem. You have seen Forster?”
Vernon nodded.
“Fossilized—completely fossilized! But that’s the sort we have to put up with now. It throws a great burden on me—too much. I am not as young as I was; I feel it.”
Vernon lay back in the headmaster’s armchair, smoking one of the headmaster’s cigarettes, and thought that there was some truth in what he was saying. He looked much older than he had done only a few years ago. Well, he was no longer a young man. Sixty? Sixty-five? Possibly more. The school was probably a worry to him; there were so many added complications in wartime.
Mr Tennyson said, “I want to keep the school from disintegrating. I want to keep things going until peace comes. What I should wish then would be to take a partner—a younger man whom I could trust and respect—a man I should feel safe in handing the school on to when I am no longer able to continue….”
Mr Tennyson got to his feet and walked to the window, turning his back on Vernon. With his curved shoulders and rather shiny black jacket, he looked from the rear like an immense beetle.
“Have you thought,” he asked, “what you will do when you leave the Army?”
“No.”
“It is not too early to begin thinking about such matters,” said Mr Tennyson. “There will be a lot of jockeying for position when the War ends. It might be well to have something in view….”
He opened the window suddenly and shouted, “Not on the grass, Temple! Not on the grass!”
Closing it again, he observed, “Boys are so unoriginal; generation after generation play the same pranks, break the same rules; and all feel that they are doing something that has never been thought of before.”
He pulled the lobe of his left ear, stretching it downward, as though it were made of rubber.
“A school,” he said, “is somet
hing worth working for. There is satisfaction in a school. Also—and this is a point not to be ignored—it pays tolerably well; yes, I think I may say tolerably well.”
He turned and looked at Vernon from under his bushy white eyebrows.
“Think it over,” he said. “Think it over. You have plenty of time.”
Seated at the headmaster’s table at lunch with the prefects on either side, Vernon felt almost as though he had never been away. It was a different room, of course, but, apart from that, everything was just as it had been before the War. There were six long tables flanked by boys of varying ages. At the head of one table sat the fossilized Mr Forster, at the head of another the matron; three other masters sat at the three other tables. There was a clink of knives and forks, a buzz of conversation, a surreptitious glancing at Vernon—the centre of interest. How unchanged it all was!
And how like, Vernon thought, was one generation of boys to another! The straight-haired, the curly-haired, the freckled, the snub-nosed, the spectacled, the podgy, the weedy—crop after crop they came, superficially indistinguishable. Sometimes you wondered whether these broken-voiced, pimply creatures would ever develop into normal human beings; then, suddenly, the pimples were gone; the voice had healed, and they were men. But always there was the influx of raw material at the bottom, growing, expanding, feeling its way upward, groping for knowledge and liberty.
“I suppose, sir, it’s hard at first—the Army, I mean, sir—the training.”
Vernon focused his attention on the boy who had spoken, trying mentally to remove three years from his age and recall his name. With an effort he succeeded.
“It’s not a holiday, Meadows; but one gets through it. Which service do you intend to join when the time comes?”
Lord, he thought, the boy will be going soon, and he is little more than a child.
Meadows said, “Well, sir, I should prefer the R.A.F. After all, it is the Service today, isn’t it, sir?”
Vernon smiled. “That, of course, is a matter of opinion. Some of us are old-fashioned enough to suppose that the Army and Navy still have their uses.”
He looked along the table at the young, eager faces—the boys who were almost men and soon must go into the fighting. He supposed many of them were thrilled with the idea of flying, of performing wonderful feats of single combat in Spitfires. Well, let them have their dreams; they would find out soon enough that there was precious little joy in battle, whether on sea or land or in the air, precious little joy and plenty of terror and discomfort. If he were to tell them about Miller and Higgins and Willis and Panton-Smith, would they be so eager then? Yes, he supposed they would. You never imagined things like that would happen to you—to the other fellow, perhaps, but not to you.
“So you are intent on returning to London this afternoon,” said Mr Tennyson. “You know you are welcome to stay here for the night if you wish.”
“Thank you,” said Vernon. “You are very kind, but I must get back.”
Payne had picked the girl up in the street. She had blonde hair shading off into a darker colour near the roots. She had a pale, rather shapeless face with a bright red gash of a mouth. When she smoked Payne’s cigarettes she left a red smear staining the butt-ends.
Payne and the girl sat at a small marble-topped table in the corner of a crowded saloon bar. Payne was drinking mild and bitter from a pint mug; the girl drank port and lemon, lifting the glass daintily to her lips and sipping in a ladylike manner, over-emphasized.
Payne was saying: “You don’t know what cold is till you bin up there. The wind cuts through you like a knife. You can’t keep warm—not nohow. The spray comes over and freezes where it lights. Everything’s icy—everything. And then there’s subs and Jerry planes—a proper hell’s kitchen, and no mistake.”
The girl said, “Fancy!” and lit another cigarette from the stump of the old.
Payne went on talking. “We shot some planes down—two certain, two other possibles. We had a time getting through. Jerry sent everything at us. And then there was the storm. I’ve seen some storms, but never one like that. You’d have bin scared, I bet. But we got through, got nearly home, so near we could see the coast of Scotland. Then—whoosh!—a bloody mine gets us.”
The girl said, “Well, I never!” She was wondering how much money Payne had—how much of it she could coax out of him. He looked big and soft; it ought not to be too difficult.
Payne was half-drunk, and his face was flushed. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table and breathing beer over the girl.
“Want another drink?”
She nodded, and he got to his feet, a little unsteadily, feeling his head swim slightly. He picked up the empty glasses and elbowed his way to the bar. When he returned the girl was repairing the ravages of time with more lipstick.
“Coo! You bin quick. I d’know ’ow you get through that crush.”
“Trust me; trust old Ted.”
She said archly, “I don’t know as I should.”
He let his hand fall on her knee.
“Now!” she said. “Naughty, naughty!” But she did not draw away.
“You got to make the most of leave,” Payne said. “You don’t get too much of it. So you got to make the most of it when it comes round.”
“That’s right enough. How long you bin ’ome?”
“Two days—not two yet—one and a bit, really.”
The girl was thinking: If ’e’s only ’ad two days as yet ’e won’t ’ave spent ’is pay; there’ll be a good bit left. Specially if ’e’s bin at sea all that time like ’e said. There’d be back-pay to draw. That’s if ’e wasn’t just shooting a line.
“Yes,” she said, “you got to make the most of your leave. Don’t want to spend it on your Jack, do you? You want somebody to keep you company—to make things jolly.”
Payne drank some more beer and felt suddenly ill.
He said, “I must go outside a minute.”
The girl looked up at him. He looked properly sick, almost green.
“I think you’d better. But don’t forget to come back.”
He was only just in time. The beer and the fish and chips he had eaten earlier in the evening came surging up. He felt as though he were vomiting up the walls of his stomach, and the taste was bitter in his mouth. His head reeled, and the light hurt his eyes. He felt very ill indeed, and he wanted to lie down somewhere—anywhere. He wanted to go to bed and sleep. He leaned his forehead against the cold, damp bricks of the lavatory and groaned.
“You got to make the most of leave!”
Tommy Hewitt ran his hands over Padgett’s muscles and shook his head.
“Too much flesh, Dick boy. You’ve put it on since you joined the Army. Too much flesh—far too much. It’s fat, you know—no good to you—no good at all.”
“I know,” said Padgett. “I’ve got soft. I know.”
He was stripped to the waist, looking like an advertisement for some physical-culture course as he tensed and slackened his muscles. He had wide shoulders and a strong, thick neck, a deep chest tapering down to a surprisingly slim waist. When he breathed in deeply his ribs lifted like an expanding cage, and his stomach receded. To the ordinary eye there did not appear to be much wrong with him.
But Tommy Hewitt’s was no ordinary eye; it was the eye of an expert. Tommy was P.T. instructor at the young men’s club to which Padgett had belonged before the War. Together they had built up Padgett’s body. In a way, neither of them looked upon it simply as a human body; it was something made up of biceps and triceps, of flexors and tensors, a thing of bone and sinew and muscle, a thing of beauty, not so much by reason of its appearance, but because of its measurements, its proportions, its ability to lift weights, to extend springs, and to bend bars.
Tommy was like an artist who, himself withered and old, yet produces a work of beauty, youth, and vigour. For Tommy was grizzled, stringy, and toothless, a man from whom all the juice seemed to have dried out, so that the dirty white
sweater and baggy flannel trousers hung as it were on the very husk of a man. The way his hands moved over Padgett’s body, feeling this muscle, testing that, might have put an onlooker, had there been one, in mind of a sculptor. There was the same sensitive touch, the same delicate assessment, and the same dissatisfaction with something not perfect, something that might so easily have been better.
“They aren’t getting enough exercise, Dick. You aren’t working them enough.”
“I know; I know,” Padgett said. “But how can I on board ship? It’s not so easy, I can tell you. I do my best; I do exercises; but I go soft.”
“You have your springs, your chest-expanders?”
“I had them; they went down with the ship. But it’s not that so much; it’s the road work I miss—that and the punchbag.”
“What about skipping?”
“Have you tried skipping in a ship when she’s rolling and pitching like nobody’s business?”
“Well, there’s only one thing; we shall have to see what we can do while you’re on leave. How long have you got?”
“Fourteen days.”
“Two weeks. We can get a lot of that flesh off in two weeks if we really go at it. You want to, don’t you?”
“Why, of course, Tommy; of course.”
“O.K., then. Here’s the routine….”
“Well, now,” said Mrs Cowdrey, “and what is his lordship thinking of doing this evening?”
“His lordship,” said Ben, “thought of going down to the local. Might meet a few of the boys. How about you? Will you come?”
“Of course I will. I wouldn’t trust you else. Might get off with some flighty piece—an At or a Waaf. Wouldn’t put it past you.”
Soldier, Sail North (1987) Page 22