Good Enough For Nelson

by John Winton

  ‘Farewell, Mr Spicer,’ said Caradoc. ‘Where are you now?’

  ‘You,’ said the Buffer, pointing to him, ‘get down the gear- room. Now, them as is fo’c’s’le party follow me, get the cable deck ready for leavin’ ‘arbour.’

  The Buffer led the way forward to Rowbotham’s cable deck, where Blue Watch joined the small cable party led by the Cable Officer, who, like Smythe-Smith, felt the pressure of eyes on the back of his neck. In spite of all the lectures they had had, none of Blue Watch could fathom the workings or the purposes of any of the wires, cables, slips and stoppers they could see around them. It all looked different on a real fo’c’s’le. But they hauled and carried and pulled wherever the Buffer told them, and miraculously Rowbotham slipped from her buoy at the right time, when she was pointing in the right direction.

  ‘Well done forrard there!’ boomed Tremendous Mackenzie through his loud-hailer. ‘Well done, Charlie!’

  Charlie, Rowbotham’s cable officer, who had been at Dartmouth himself only two terms before, beamed. Blue Watch also beamed, taking vicarious credit. ‘Well done, Buffer,’ said Charlie. Even the Buffer’s lips relaxed into the wisp of a wan smile.

  ‘The Field Marshal asks me to say how much he enjoyed the chain-dance,’ said Sub-Lieutenant Ahmed.

  ‘Chain-dance!’

  ‘Again, sir, the word the Field Marshal used is difficult to translate accurately into English. But in our country we have such dances, with chains, and ropes and flags and flutes and men dancing together.’

  ‘I must say,’ said The Bodger admiringly, ‘what a very poetic description of anchor and cable work!’

  HMS Rowbotham was over thirty years old and was feeling her age. As she went astern on one screw and ahead on the other to turn for the harbour entrance, her decks throbbed underfoot until it was almost painful to stand on them, and her low bridge bulkheads hummed and twanged in sympathy. A sound-powered telephone receiver jumped off its hook. Bombulada, who was bridge messenger, replaced it. It jumped off again. This time Bombulada thumped it into place with his fist. It stayed in position but almost at once wailed to be answered. Bombulada had pressed it in so firmly he could not now get it off.

  ‘Good God,’ said Cassidy-Jones, watching, ‘they really ought to melt this down for razor-blades. It really would be kinder to put the old girl down.’

  Tremendous Mackenzie pursed his lips and said nothing.

  Once clear of the harbour entrance, Rowbotham’s bows lifted easily to a slow south-westerly swell. To starboard, in the blue-grey haze of another beautiful summer’s day, lay Slapton sands and behind them the green hills and combes of Devon shimmering in the intense sunlight. The Bodger took a deep satisfied breath. This was better. This was more like it. This was what the sailors called ‘signing on weather’. God was in His Heaven and all was right with the world. To put it another way, every prospect pleases, and only man is--

  ‘Don’t you ever exercise the sea-boat?’ said Cassidy-Jones.

  ‘For exercise, for exercise,’ bellowed Tremendous Mackenzie into his loud-hailer, ‘man overboard! Away sea-boat’s crew ...’

  McAllester and Bingley, who were just passing the davits of the motor cutter, stood transfixed by the pipe. A young leading seaman appeared and motioned to them with his thumb.

  ‘Get in.’

  Another young sailor, wearing blue overalls, climbed in after them. ‘Cheers, Bungs,’ he said to the leading seaman.

  ‘Cheers Stokes,’ said Bungs.

  Stokes pressed the engine starter button. The engine whirred, without starting, for what seemed some time. Meanwhile the cutter was being rapidly lowered by some agency above McAllester’s and Bingley’s heads, and was already sinking below upper deck level.

  ‘Life jackets’ roared the Buffer’s voice from above, ‘not got yer bloody life jackets! ‘

  Four yellow life jackets thudded down into the boat. One hit Stokes quite heavily between the shoulder blades.

  ‘Cor fuck,’ said Stokes fervently. ‘Can’t get the fuckin’ engine started, hit in the sodding back by a fuckin’ life-jacket, what a fuckin’ day, my old man must have fucked a black donkey on a dark fuckin’ night.’

  The engine fired and began to run. The Buffer roared ‘SLIP!’ The cutter seemed to drop sickeningly several feet and hit the water with a shattering crash which threw all four of her crew on their backs in the bottom of the boat.

  ‘Gawd, he’s treating it like a fuckin’ whaler.’

  ‘Slip the boat rope!’ McAllester was the nearest to the bows and luckily remembered enough of his lectures to know what to do.

  Bungs wound the kitchen rudder gear full ahead. ‘Let’s have some more urge, Stokes,’ he pleaded. ‘Full ahead, Stokes!’

  ‘Full ahead fuck, said Stokes, blood pouring from what looked like a deep cut above his right eye. ‘Engine’s fuckin’ stopped.’ He pressed the starter button, vainly, again.

  ‘You checked everything?’ said Bungs anxiously. Rowbotham was drawing ahead alarmingly quickly, and was already three hundred yards away.

  ‘Maybe you just fitted a new starter and it’s turning the engine the wrong way round?’ said McAllester.

  Stokes stared at Bungs. ‘What’s he rabbiting on about?’

  On Rowbotham’s bridge, Tremendous Mackenzie beckoned to a pale young midshipman with pre-Raphaelite red hair, a supply officer, called O’Hare. He was officially a bridge messenger of the Red Watch but he had been lurking at the back of the bridge praying that he would never, ever, be noticed.

  ‘Something wrong with that motor cutter,’ said Tremendous Mackenzie. ‘You take charge. Get the ship alongside and pick them up again.’ He bent to the voice-pipe. ‘Who’s on the wheel now?’

  ‘Sub-Lieutenant Subramanyandaoshah, sah,’ said a beautifully modulated voice up the voice-pipe.

  ‘God, I won’t ask that again,’ said Tremendous Mackenzie, aside, to The Bodger. ‘Stand by for manoeuvring. Warn the engine-room for engine movements. Here we go! Right, O’Hare or whatever your name is, you’ve got a motor-cutter broken down out there on the port quarter. They need help. You’d better go and get them, hadn’t you?’

  O’Hare swallowed silently. No sound of any kind came from him.

  ‘Come on man! They’ve got three feet of water in the bilges! It’s coming over the gunwhales green! Can’t you hear the coxswain calling? O God our help in ages past, he’s saying! What are you going to do about it?’

  O’Hare remained, frozen, beside the voice-pipe.

  ‘Abide with me, they’re singing! They’ve got yellow jack, malaria, and scurvy on board! And beri-beri! They’re dying like flies out there! Can’t you hear them crying out save us save us save us?’

  O’Hare, still petrified, wetted his lips with his tongue, but still no sound came. At last, he did look over his shoulder at the motor-cutter, now a faraway dot, but whether in compassion or not, nobody could tell.

  ‘You’re their last hope, man!’ thundered Tremendous Mackenzie into O’Hare’s ear. ‘They’ve been six weeks at sea in an open boat! They drank the last of their fresh water thirty-six hours ago! Do you want their wives and families on your conscience for the rest of your natural? What are you going to do?’

  ‘Inform next-of-kin, sir, please?’ whispered O’Hare, faintly.

  ‘Inform next-of-kin! ‘ howled Tremendous Mackenzie. ‘Holy Mackerel, a right bloody ray of sunshine you are! You’d have all our wives having kittens before we’d even shuffled off this mortal coil, you would! Hop out of the way. Starboard thirty...’

  ‘Starboard thirty, sir,’ replied Subramanyandaoshah, in an exquisitely fluting voice. ‘The wheel is now registering thirty degrees of starboard wheel, sir.’

  ‘Helmsman,’ growled Tremendous Mackenzie, ‘the correct acknowledgement is “Thirty of starboard wheel on sir.” No more, no less.’

  ‘Thank you sir,’ Subramanyandaoshah replied, still speaking in a terribly clear voice. ‘Thirty of starboard wheel on, sir.’
>
  ‘Ease to ten...’

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

  ‘Ease to ten. Let the wheel come back until you have only ten degrees of wheel on. It’s spring-loaded.’

  ‘Goodness gracious so it is, sir! Ten of starboard wheel on, sir.’

  ‘Very good. Midships. Port ten.’ Tremendous Mackenzie grasped O’Hare by the shoulder and drew him to the voice- pipe. ‘Now there’s nothing to be alarmed about. Imagine you’re driving a motor-cutter and you’re going to pick up a dan-buoy. Just think now, think what to do, and what you’re doing now.’ At last, after what seemed a thousand helm and engine movement orders, the motor cutter was eventually alongside, hooked on the falls and hoisted. To Tremendous Mackenzie, and to The Bodger, the mishaps of the morning were normal. The comings and goings, misplaced ropes, misunderstood orders, fluffed telephone messages, the black smoke pouring from the funnel, the hesitations when any fresh evolution was ordered, the motor cutter slipped with a dead engine, O’Hare’s stage fright, these were all to be expected. If everybody already knew how to do these things then there would hardly have been any point in sending them to sea in Rowbotham to learn.

  The visitors, too, for the most part, seemed content and ready to enjoy themselves. The Field Marshal, clearly a poet of great primitive power and insight, continued to draw choreographic comparisons with what he saw enacted before him. The Marshal of the Air Force buffed up his wings and enjoyed the sunshine. Sub-Lieutenant Ahmed wallowed in a long bath of nostalgia, swopping atrocity stories of their own time at the College with Charlie the Cable Officer.

  Only Cassidy-Jones was malcontent. He could not see the sustained shambles all around him as a classroom with work in progress. To him this was evidence of slackness, inefficiency, a poor state of training, failure to plan and failure to carry out. He became ever more restive, sucking his teeth, stamping up and down the bridge, rolling his eyes despairingly to the sky, shrugging his shoulders, exhibiting every sign of outward symptom of an otherwise reasonable man unreasonably tried by others’ incompetence. He seemed irritated by what he saw as Tremendous Mackenzie’s complacency.

  ‘Those Zhanaians you took out last term,’ he said.

  ‘Yes sir? Very pleasant crowd, I thought.’

  ‘Maybe so. But I thought I ought to tell you they have decided to send their officers to China after all. Heavens know what they’ll do there.’

  ‘Backward swimming lessons in the Yangtse with Chairman Mao, I expect, sir,’ said Tremendous Mackenzie.

  ‘We seem to be making an awful lot of black smoke all the time? In my last sea command I was very punctilious about smoke. Came down on it like a ton of bricks.’

  Tremendous Mackenzie looked up at the impressive curl of smoke from his funnel.

  ‘It’s the OUTs changing the sprayers on the boilers - they’ve not had much practice at it. We must be about the last ship in the Navy still burning the old Furnace Fuel Oil in Admiralty pattern boilers.’

  Cassidy-Jones grunted, and muttered something more about razor-blades which Tremendous Mackenzie could not catch.

  Tremendous Mackenzie gave the visitors lunch in the spacious Byzantine splendour of his own day cabin. It was a meal entirely dominated by Cassidy-Jones, who indulged his maddening habit of beginning nearly every sentence with the preface ‘In my last sea command ...’ His anecdotes eventually reduced everybody, even The Bodger, to a state of numbed resignation. His only competition was a snore from Wilhelmina, curled up asleep in her basket. The Bodger thought bleakly of the afternoon to come. The forenoon with Cassidy-Jones had been an ordeal. What would the afternoon bring?

  ‘In my last sea command, we commonly had Irish coffee after lunch.’

  ‘Irish coffee!’ Tremendous Mackenzie leaped up. ‘Of course! We often have that ourselves! ‘The Bodger could not remember Tremendous Mackenzie ever having Irish coffee before, but Cassidy-Jones was obviously delighted that his suggestion had been so quickly and enthusiastically taken up. Tremendous Mackenzie mixed the coffee and the Irish whiskey in glasses and served it himself.

  ‘Milk instead of cream, I’m afraid,’ he said.

  ‘Never mind,’ everybody reassured him.

  ‘The Field Marshal says this very much reminds him of a drink at home. There is no English word for it, but it is made of blood and milk.’

  ‘What’s our programme this afternoon?’ Cassidy-Jones asked, draining his glass. ‘I must say, that was delicious.’

  ‘More of the same. One of the College powerboats is going to come out and we shall lay out the gear for taking her in tow, and then the gear for transfer by jackstay, although we shan’t actually do that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The College powerboats are not nearly big enough. We should pull her over if we tried. Then we shall be receiving the helo sometime to take off Trubshaw. We shall be carrying out radar plotting exercises with passing ships in the Channel, and we’ll probably try out the sea-boat again.’

  In retrospect, lunch was clearly the turning point of the day. The afternoon could not have been in greater contrast to the forenoon. The College powerboat arrived on time and was duly taken in tow. The gear for transfer by jackstay, and for refuelling at sea, was successfully laid out. Trubshaw was lifted off in the helicopter. The motor cutter engine started.

  But the greatest change was in Cassidy-Jones. He hardly seemed the same man. He no longer prowled the bridge as though the deck were red hot. Marvellously mellowed, he stood in the upper-deck sunshine, smiling seraphically, and saying ‘Good show, good show’ over and over again. What had previously offended now quite clearly charmed him. The crooked in Rowbotham was now evidently straight and the rough places plain.

  ‘I’m going to send a signal to the Ministry,’ he announced, ‘recommending this training programme.’ The Field Marshal and the Marshal of the Air Force also professed themselves wholly delighted and begged, through the offices of Sub-Lieutenant Ahmed, to be allowed to affix their signatures to the message of goodwill.

  Cassidy-Jones’s state of euphoria continued until the day’s exercise programme was over, and Rowbotham was once more secured to her buoy in the Dart.

  ‘I’ve much enjoyed my day with you,’ he told Tremendous Mackenzie, as he said good-bye on the gangway. ‘It’s very reassuring to see the College keeping the old traditional standards up. I’m sure these darkies appreciate it. I know this lot did. In my last sea command, I always laid a lot of stress on doing things the old traditional way.’

  Watching him, The Bodger felt more charitable towards Cassidy-Jones. The man obviously needed reassurance as much as anyone else. Plainly, he had been compensating for a lack of recent sea experience. The Bodger turned to shake Tremendous Mackenzie by the hand.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it turned out OK in the end.’

  From forward, by the galley, Wilhelmina gave one short sharp bark. It was time for her supper.

  ‘Good girl,’ said Tremendous Mackenzie warmly.

  Suddenly, an association of ideas, linking Tremendous Mackenzie, Cassidy-Jones, Wilhelmina and Irish coffee, struck The Bodger with such blinding force he felt momentarily dazed.

  Tremendous Mackenzie said nothing. The Bodger pressed his hand. ‘I don’t want to know any more,’ he said. ‘Except, one large bottle of pills for Wilhelmina. Charge it to my mess- bill.’

  CHAPTER VIII

  ‘Most naval officers,’ said The Bodger, ‘are mediocre. Like most other men, in most other professions. Mediocre men need a modicum of help, to get them through their careers. They haven’t the sheer native talent, so they must have something else. In the Navy that means the knack of being sociable. It means making small talk. Polite conversation. PC, as they used to call it. It’s all right for the great naval genius, the superb naturally gifted administrator, the natural leader of men in battle, it’s all right for him to be socially heavy-handed and not bother to make himself agreeable. But for the other ninety-nine point nine nine nine per cent of the rest of us
, PC makes the world go round. PC lubricates life. All officers under training are to learn how to make PC.’

  Without crudely announcing it in so many words, The Bodger effectively put PC on the College syllabus by instituting regular sherry parties on Sunday evenings before supper, in the main sitting room of the Captain’s House with Julia and himself presiding. Polly made out the invitations which in the case of OUTs were, at The Bodger’s insistence, formal cards requiring a formal answer. Polly worked steadily through the list of OUTs and everyone could expect a PC invitation once or perhaps even twice a term. Those who had distinguished themselves in any particular way during the week could expect an extra invitation for the following Sunday. Officers and lecturers, and their wives, were invited less formally and more often.

  The sherry was always of a particular type which Purvis purchased by the gallon jar from some unnamed source down in the town. The Bodger called it Rich Tawny British Wine of a Sherry Character, but served by Purvis from decanters on silver trays, it was passable stuff, as everybody agreed, especially as it had some rarity value: it was to be encountered nowhere but at The Bodger’s PC parties and even there Purvis saw to it that nobody, but nobody, had more than two glasses.

  Everybody who came to one of The Bodger’s PC evenings was expected to begin making PC to everybody else on arrival and to carry on making PC until he, or she, left. Sometimes, as The Bodger moved around amongst his guests, he overheard the PC taking some unexpected forms. A midshipman called Mellard was talking to Julia, and his opening gambit was so striking The Bodger lingered to hear more.

  ‘Well, there was this chap who had three balls,’ Mellard was saying, ‘which you must admit is pretty unusual.’

  ‘Yes it must be,’ Julia said.

  Mellard, The Bodger could see, was an unusual young man, unselfconscious and unembarrassed. He enjoyed talking to older women, gaining a kind of sexual frisson from the contrast of his youth with them. But in spite of his blasé appearance, he was vulnerable to alcohol. As he had already told Julia, one sherry and I’m anybody’s. He had somehow circumvented the Purvis blockade and had had three sherries.