Soldier, Sail North (1987)

by Pattinson, James

Ben Cowdrey’s eyes twinkled. “How do you know I don’t when I’m away? You can’t keep your eye on me then.”

  “Oh, go away with you! Making out to be a Don Juan at your age! What girl would look twice at you, may I ask?”

  “Oh, lots. I’ve got polish; that’s what it takes—polish.”

  Mrs Cowdrey snorted. “Well, Mister Casanova, if you’ve got so much polish you can go and polish my shoes. Get a move on, or we shan’t be down there before the place is full.”

  When the Cowdreys used to go to the ‘local’ before the War it had been a quiet little pub with a handful of regular customers and only an occasional outsider. Now all that was changed; now it seemed to be bursting at the seams with customers; beer flowed like water, and, so said the older ones, was almost indistinguishable from it. And the price! Oh, dear, dear! It was sinful.

  Ben was glad to see that Lucy was still serving behind the bar; the War had not taken her away yet. She was almost rushed off her feet, but she had time for a word with an old customer.

  “Evening, Mr Cowdrey. ’Aven’t sin you for quite a time. Bin fighting the War, I s’pose.”

  “A bit of it, Lucy—just a bit.”

  “Some ’as to; but some manages to stay at ’ome feathering their nests—mentioning no names. Beats me ’ow they do it, some of ’em. Well, what’s it to be?”

  “The usual, Lucy. Don’t say you’ve forgotten.”

  “No bitter, I’m afraid, Mr Cowdrey; no more bitter till the end of the week. Will you ’ave mild?”

  “As there’s no choice, I shall have to. No bitter! Dear me! Things are getting bad. I hope you’ve got a nice port for the missus. Never hear the last of it if I don’t get that.”

  When Lucy brought the drinks Ben said, “Guess where I’ve been.”

  “You tell me.”

  “Russia.”

  “Russia,” Lucy said. “Fancy that!”

  Ben was disappointed with the reception of his revelation. If he had told her that he had spent his last holiday at Margate he felt that she would have used precisely the same tone of polite but very meagre surprise. “Margate. Fancy that!” “Russia. Fancy that!” Really, he thought, Russia ought to have been worth a little more astonishment, a shade more interest.

  But Lucy was away serving another customer, and there was nothing for Ben to do but pocket his change and take the drinks.

  “What a crowd!” said Mrs Cowdrey. “You can’t hardly move.”

  “Like it everywhere now,” Ben said. “It’s the War.”

  He was looking for a familiar face—for some one he knew. He spotted old Bunty Caggs on the other side of the room, and pushed his way over to him. Bunty put an arm round Ben’s shoulders and his face close to Ben’s.

  “Well, if it ain’t old Bennie! Where’d you spring from?”

  “I’m just back from Russia,” Ben said.

  “Russia, hey?” Bunty had had just a little too much to drink; it made him garrulous. He closed one eye and laid a finger along his nose.

  “I hear the Russian women are pretty hot stuff. I bet you had a time up there. They play the ballyliker, don’t they? I bet you had a time.”

  “A hell of a time,” said Ben.

  “Yes, I bet you did. You have the times, you soldiers. Us civvies has to take it back here. We don’t grumble, though. But you have the times, you warriors.” He laughed and dug Ben in the ribs with a dirty finger. “Warriors, hey!”

  Ben said, “Our ship was blown up by a mine. We had to take to the boats.”

  “You did?” Bunty was silent for a moment, digesting this information. Then he said, “Did you hear what happened down our street last week?”

  “No,” said Ben, “no, I didn’t.”

  “I says to the old woman, ‘That’s a Jerry plane,’ I says. I can always tell Jerries by the engines, see. ‘What’s more,’ I says, ‘he’s bang over the top of our house. You’d better get under the table,’ I says. So that’s what she done; and lucky, too, as it turned out.”

  “Look,” said Ben, “you’ll have to excuse me. I’ve got the missus. Excuse me.”

  “In some ways, old girl,” Ben said, “I shall be glad to get to sea again—straight I shall.”

  Warby tilted his stool forward and rested his forehead on the cow’s soft hide. His fingers worked automatically. He did not have to think about what he was doing. He had learnt this drill years ago when his legs were scarcely long enough to reach the ground from the milking-stool. His father had taught him to do this job, just as he had taught him to do the thousand and one other jobs that there are on a farm, just as he had taught Warby’s elder brothers, Harry and Walter.

  Warby’s had always been a family farm. Before the boys grew up there had been old Grandfather Warby, doing a full day’s work seven days of the week, and one hired labourer. Then, as the brothers became old enough to leave school and work on the farm, the hired man had gone. Then Grandfather Warby died, and Walter had married and gone off on his own.

  So Warby, Harry, and their father had worked the farm until the outbreak of war. Then Warby had joined up. He supposed he might have avoided it if he had tried; but somehow he felt that one of the family at least ought to go and fight. It did not seem right to him that all of them should stay safely at home working in the fields—necessary though that work undoubtedly was. So he had gone, not because he wanted to, not because he had any false ideas of glory, but because, in his slow undemonstrative way, he had felt that it was his duty.

  Now Harry and his father did the work that three of them had done before. There was not much rest for them; but they were strong—both of them; they never grumbled about hard work, only about the weather and forms and Government inspectors wasting their time. And when Warby had a bit of leave he lent a hand.

  Warby listened to the squirt, squirt, squirt of milk spattering into the pail, a cock crowing in the distance, and the sudden squeal of a pig. He was half asleep, his eyes closing and opening as he gazed at the warm white froth on the milk. Then overhead he heard the drone of aircraft engines, and suddenly the milky froth was the wind-beaten foam of tumbling, icy waves, and he was back in the Arctic with the bitter lash of the gale and the drum, drum, drum of depth-charges. He had stopped milking; he was listening to the planes, his body rigid and tense.

  Then the cow moved, swishing her tail impatiently, and Warby relaxed. In a moment the milk was again hissing into the pail.

  Jacqueline Cooper had not received the letter which George Andrews, at so much pains, had written in the cabin of the Golden Ray. The letter had gone down with the ship. And because she was not his next-of-kin she had not heard what had happened to him. It was to be a long and weary time before the news leaked through to her, chilling her heart. Even then she would not hear the full details. George’s father and mother would never hear them. Sometimes official messages are merciful in their brevity. Lost at sea—that was all any of them would ever know. It was enough.

  It was well that Jacqueline could never know how futile, how unnecessary, that “lost at sea” had been; how easily it might have been avoided. For if George Andrews had not had such a burning desire to live he might not have died. It was his desire for life that had made him run to the lifeboat, his desire for life that had urged him to get into the boat while it was still hanging from the davits. Then the boat had shot stem first towards the sea, tipping out the men who were in it. And Andrews had found himself hanging head downward, caught by the foot, had found himself struggling, screaming, and weeping, while the boat swung from one twisted fall. And in a moment it was over.

  It was Randall, watching calmly from the flooding deck, Randall, casting away his life-jacket, Randall, wanting to die; it was he who had lived. It was Andrews, leaping to the lifeboat, Andrews, with all the hot, ardent desire of youth for life, Andrews, with love waiting for him; it was he who died.

  It was well that Jacqueline would never know the details.

  There had been no need for Randall to go back to
Yarmouth. It was a senseless thing to do. And yet he had felt that he must go, that he must see for himself.

  Not that there was much to see when he got there: a few heaps of rubble, some charred timber, blackened and rain-sodden plaster, a strip or two of wallpaper still miraculously clinging—little else.

  Mrs Hawkins’s house had gone too. It had been a direct hit with a heavy bomb. You had to go four houses along the street to find a habitable dwelling.

  Randall had heard about it as soon as he had landed; but it had happened weeks before that. Two bodies had been recovered from the debris; both had been unrecognizable. It had been assumed that they were the bodies of Mrs Randall and Mrs Hawkins.

  Randall stood on the pavement and gazed at the rubble-heap, trying to figure out the bearings. It was all unfamiliar; none of it made sense; even the backyard did not look the same now that he could see right into it from the street. He wondered idly what had happened to the dust-bin and the tin bath that used to hang on the outhouse wall. He tried to work out exactly where the cupboard had been where he had hidden Lily’s body; but there was nothing to work on, nothing but rubble and charred wood and plaster.

  He started when the man’s hand fell on his arm. The man was red-faced, cheerful-looking. He smelt of fish.

  “Not much of it left, eh, soldier? Did you know the house?”

  “I lived in it,” Randall said.

  The man shook his head sympathetically. “Too bad!” He appeared to hesitate, not quite knowing how to word the question. “Anybody—”

  Randall said, “My wife was killed in that house.”

  The man gripped his arm more tightly. “I’m sorry, mate. I am reelly.” He looked at the bricks and the mortar and the sad remnants of wallpaper.

  “Bloody swine!” he said. “Filthy rotten bastards!”

  His face was even redder than it had been. Suddenly he said, “What you need, mate, is a drink. Come and have one on me.”

  Randall went with him. A drink was exactly what he did need—a strong one.

  Sergeant Willis lay on his back enveloped by the darkness that had closed over him when the Golden Ray was blown up. There was a bandage over his eyes, and little flickering currents of pain still shot now and then up into his brain. But he was not unhappy; he knew that it might have been a great deal worse; he might have lost his sight for ever. As it was, he had been assured that he would be blind only in one eye. After a time, after the wound had healed, his left eye would be as good as new. That was something to be happy about.

  Willis felt warm and comfortable; the mattress was soft beneath him, and the sheets smooth and clean; the bed did not leap and tilt, and he was able to lie, gently dozing, in the certain knowledge that he would not suddenly be lashed to action by the urgent ringing of an alarm-bell. For the first time in months he felt free from care and worry and responsibility. Nothing now depended on him; he had no orders to give, no equipment to maintain, no watches to set. All he had to do was to sleep and eat, to eat and sleep, while others waited on him, washed him, saw to his every want.

  Lying there, he tried to calculate what effect the loss of an eye would have upon his life. Perhaps it was the end of sea-going for him. Perhaps when he was well again he would be given a staff job, even become one of the chairborne brigade he had always despised. ‘They,’ the omnipotent ‘they,’ who ordered such things, might make him an instructor, training recruits in the intricacies of gun-drill. The thought did not greatly please him; he was a man who had always preferred active service, liking the men in forward positions better than those at base. Yet, what had to be must be; he would have no cause to grumble. Better that than St. Dunstan’s; better ten thousand times.

  He felt the nurse smoothing out the sheets of his bed, raising his head and puffing up his pillow. Her hands were cool and capable. He tried to guess which nurse it was by the feel of her hands, trying to connect the hands to a voice; for it was as voices that he knew the nurses.

  “Are you comfortable? Is there anything you want?”

  He was boyishly pleased to find that he had guessed correctly. He had decided that he was in love with this nurse —in love with a voice.

  “Yes,” he said, “I want to see you.”

  “You will,” she said, “when your eye is well. You’ve just got to be patient.”

  Her voice said she was young. Willis’s imagination added that she was beautiful.

  “When my eye is all right,” he said, “I’m going to take you to the pictures, then supper afterwards.”

  “That will be nice.”

  “It’s a date, then?”

  “It’s a date. Now you’d better go to sleep.”

  She moved away, and he followed her movement with his unseeing eyes. But the picture of her in his mind was slim, graceful, infinitely attractive. In that picture she was the girl he wanted her to be.

  “It’s a date,” he whispered. “It’s a date.”

  After a while he drifted off into sleep. When he awoke tea was being served. After tea he dozed again. It was the new pattern of his life.

  Miller was dead—dead and buried. Fathoms deep he lay, where the waves no longer had any power to rock his stunted body, where no wind could flay and no bullet rend.

  Soon the flesh would be off his bones; soon he would be nothing but a whitened skeleton. Mud would filter through the bars of his hollow chest, slimy growths stop up the sockets where once his eyes had been, and submarine creatures slither over his grinning jaws. And there he would lie amid the wasted iron and the wasted dead, the red hulks of ships and the white hulks of men, the metal and the bones.

  Other convoys would pass over his head, fighting their way to Russia, and he would hear nothing of them. Bomb, torpedo, shell—they could hurt him no more. Communism, Fascism, Democracy—they were all one to him now. He had passed into oblivion or clearest light; now he knew all or nothing.

  The ships would pass above him over the cold sea-miles, and blood would be the price of passage, as it had always been—a costly dye to sprinkle so uselessly upon the vast tapestry of waves, a dye lost immediately and for ever in the infinity of tumbled waters.

  But Miller would sleep on in the long sleep from which there is no awakening. And his name would go down upon the roll of honour with those of better men and of worse. And the years would pass and the centuries, and the roll of honour would crumble into dust. Then Miller as an individual would vanish from the minds of men, to become just one of a great and nameless army, an army numberless as the stars, an army of Tartar and of Turk, of Goth and Mongol, Prussian and Spaniard, Saxon and Dane—an army without end.

  Also from James Pattinson on Kindle

  The Golden Reef

  Sea Fury

  Ocean Prize

  The Rodriguez Affair

  The Spanish Hawk

  Copyright

  © James Pattinson

  First published in Great Britain 2009

  This edition 2014

  ISBN 978 0 7198 1395 5 (epub)

  ISBN 978 0 7198 1396 2 (mobi)

  ISBN 978 0 7198 1397 9 (pdf)

  ISBN 978 0 7090 8740 3 (print)

  Robert Hale Limited

  Clerkenwell House

  Clerkenwell Green

  London EC1R 0HT

  www.halebooks.com

  The right of James Pattinson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988