by John Winton
‘Yes?’
Polly waited for the proposal she knew was coming. He had that broody look on his face which showed that something was imminently about to happen to him which was not in the little red book. Polly had never been proposed to before, and she waited with a mixture of excitement, and apprehension and curiosity. How exactly was it done? How exactly would Lionel Tinkle do it? Polly hoped that he would propose almost as hard as she wished he would not. For she had not the slightest intention of marrying him. Polly had no finished conception of her destiny in life but it certainly could not include the prospect of Lionel Tinkle as her husband.
‘Polly?’
Lionel Tinkle wondered how best to avoid disappointing her too much, how to let her down as lightly as possible. He was very fond of her, more than fond. But marriage was out of the question.
‘Yes?’
Polly rehearsed how she would phrase her refusal as gracefully and as tactfully as possible. He was a dear little chap, and the best of company in his own peculiar way, and Polly was very fond of him. She had no wish to hurt him. But marriage would be unthinkable.
‘Polly.’ But, after all, she was the most gorgeous girl he had ever clapped eyes on in his entire life. And she was intelligent, too. Not just a pretty face. She was, in her own sledge-hammer way, a fearsome debater and a worthy opponent. With her encouragement and criticism, he would be able to do the research he had always longed to, perhaps publish the books he had always dreamed of.
‘Yes.’ There was much more to Lionel than most of the men one met. He had this silly blind spot about the bourgeoisie, and he was extremely vulnerable when he met a certain kind of naval officer. It sometimes made her weep inwardly to see the way they treated him. But he had tremendous guts. He never let them get on top of him and he was very considerate to other people.
‘Polly? There simply was no concealing a certain animal lust. It could not be entirely coincidence that he longed for her so much. Supposing he said nothing now? Would that mean more months, a lifetime even, of lying awake, sweating with yearning and frustration?
'Yes’ He was his own kind of aristocrat. He really did treat all men as equals. Except the Royal Marines. Lionel could not abide Royal Marines. He said their heartiness made him feel ill. But then, not everybody loved Royal Marines.
The clock suddenly gonged out resonantly seven times. The cat jumped lightly down to the floor and walked over to the door. The canary leaped on to its highest perch and butted its bell like a punch-bag, making a tiny silvery tinkling sound.
‘Polly, will you marry me?’
‘Yes, I will.’
The Prof. also watched, on the small portable set in his kitchen. He thought it ironic that The Bodger, the first prophet of the media, who had proclaimed its advent in the College and had prepared for its coming with Superjack’s lectures, should now be the first to experience their effects: Prometheus, struck by the lightning of his own fire. Listening to the interview, the Prof. recognised that it was gibberish, but in its way it was clever gibberish. The Bodger was employing that clearly enunciated non-language which the media welcomed as their own. It was all the more demeaning and contemptible that the interviewer and his audience should accept it without protest, because it was no more than reassuring vowel sound, phonetic pap. But nobody scoffed at it. Nobody threw a boot through the screen.
The Prof. thought it odd that The Bodger should be so convincing. For he was convincing, there was no doubt about it. In theory, a professional naval officer should have been all at sea in such circumstances. But although The Bodger patently was a stranger to television, he still had a certain gracefulness under scrutiny, like some great denizen of the forest suddenly caught in a spotlight. Not for the first time, the Prof. conceded that The Bodger and others of his ilk had a kind of residual professional cunning. Maybe even to become a senior naval officer at all required theatrical talent of some kind. But they also had a talent for survival, a knack of adapting to changed circumstances. The Prof. could discern the first stirrings of this professional resilience already in the faces of many of the OUTs at the College. Again, the Prof. considered whether he ought not to recast his opinions of the Service and offer his son the first encouragement and approval he had given him since he joined. For his son was unquestionably as good at it as all the rest.
The Captain’s Secretary also watched, on the set high up on the wall at one end of his ward. Through the haze of his sedative drugs, it all sounded to him like underwater Chinese, but he was satisfied that The Bodger seemed to be winning.
Simon Lefroy also watched, on the set in the Dean of the Faculty of Arts office. With no prior warning about the interview, Simon Lefroy was surprised and delighted to see The Bodger’s face and the College buildings. The mention of ‘riots’ sounded ominous, but The Bodger appeared to have the situation well under control. Once the interview was over, Simon Lefroy could not have explained what it had been about, but it had been enormously reassuring to see it. Somewhere outside this university, civilised life was still going on.
It was the sixth day of the sit-in, and there was still no sign of a break in the deadlock. Both sides had settled into fixed, non-negotiable positions. Simon Lefroy was now resigned to student demonstrations, which seemed to follow him from campus to campus. His arrival seemed to be the signal for demonstrations. The Dean’s office was a shambles, the floor covered with torn books, ransacked files, and papers, the bulkhead covered in graffiti scrawled with aerosols. Squalor was a word specially coined to describe student sit-ins. Simon Lefroy was kept under guard, being escorted to the lavatory along the corridor once a day. Otherwise, he was half-starved, and hourly and hoarsely harangued by hairy hooligans on the iniquities of capitalism.
‘OK Lord Nelson.’ It was one of the hoarsest and hairiest of the hooligans, standing with hands on hips by the television set. ‘You can split now.’
Simon Lefroy had no idea what he was talking about.
‘You can split now Horatio. Scarper, get lost, push off, remove yourself. We don’t need you. If the revolution’s come to the Naval College at Dartmouth, we don’t need you any more, man.’
This might be an excuse, or a face-saver, or a base for new demands, but Simon Lefroy did not pause to debate it. The logic behind his release was as amazing as the logic behind the whole sit-in, but Simon Lefroy stood not upon the order of his going, but went.
Lucy and Isaiah Nine Smith did not watch, because they were both at sea, Lucy as Isaiah Nine Smith’s guest in Pegasus, one of the College yachts. Every term, every OUT was expected to take a test and qualify as coxswain of every kind of boat in the College fleet. For experience in seagoing yachts, a staff officer normally took a crew of OUTs to sea for about twenty-four hours. Depending upon the weather and upon the force and direction of the wind, they either spent the night at sea in the Channel, or sailed to Salcombe or Torquay, sleeping on board, before returning to the College for debriefing the following evening. The yacht trips had recently tended to degenerate, in Isaiah Nine Smith’s opinion, into holiday ‘jollies’ and he had recently discussed with The Bodger ways of making the training more intensive and more realistic.
Lucy had been prepared to resent being automatically appointed cook, as girls normally were, but she found that McAllester had drawn up a correct roster of duties, so that everybody in the crew, including Lucy, took their turns at steering, watch-keeping, and cooking. Lucy joined the others in handling Pegasus out of harbour. They were so agile, so willing, so sexually attractive, she thought. Even the foreigners - that intense Malaysian, so moody and so determined to succeed. Lucy could feel the almost physical force of his determination to do well; he would have shinned up to the top of the mast, or dived overboard and down to the bottom of the sea, if Ikey asked him.
Lucy marvelled at the mysterious power the College seemed to have. These boys had all been so different such a short time ago. Now, they were beginning to look and act the same. It even affected their accents. S
he could not be sure, but Lucy fancied that even in the short time she had known them that Welsh midshipman, and the one from Yorkshire, were both beginning to speak in the same neutral ‘Navy’ way.
But the biggest change had been in McAllester. He had always been a very confident, rather brash young man at university, but now he seemed to have acquired an extra dimension of confidence. He had been forced to extend himself temperamentally as well as physically. He had met his peers, and matched himself against other young men who could do as well.
Lucy watched the panorama of the Dartmouth estuary hillsides slide by, the town houses with their gardens and walls, the other boats at their buoys, the wooded slopes, the Castle, Froward Point, the great cliffs outside with their green grass crests, and a line of bright white coast-guard cottages. Outside, Pegasus met a great heaving swell running up Channel from the south and west. She climbed up each gleaming silvery side of water and slipped easily down the other, as comfortably as breathing in and out. The light wind was astern and Isaiah Nine Smith soon ordered the huge red-and-white envelope of the spinnaker hoisted. To starboard opened the long expanse of Start Bay, and in the hazy distance Lucy could see the waves breaking on Slapton Sands, each one glowing white, ever extending its line of foam, until it sank from view and another took its place. To port, further out in the Channel, lay the long black pencil hulls and yellow superstructure, like a block of town flats, of a pair of super-tankers. They were so big they appeared stationary, whereas in fact they were rapidly slipping northwards.
With Isaiah Nine Smith in charge, there was to be little time for sightseeing. This was a working, instructional trip, with the inevitable College evolutions. McAllester and Bingley and Caradoc and Bombulada and Syllabub and Persimmons and Adrianovitch and Chung Toi and Lucy all took turns in steering a set course, in taking charge of hoisting and striking every sail in the locker, in rigging and replacing all standing and running rigging. They learned how the sheets ran best, how to work the winches, how to light the primus stove and heat the oven, how to operate the short-range radio set, how to take bearings with the compass, how to switch on navigation lights and how to place and light emergency lanterns, how to lay out gear for taking another yacht in tow, how to load and fire the Verey pistol, how to connect up and flash a message with the Aldis lamp, how to rig lifelines for rough weather. Isaiah Nine Smith had a check list and worked methodically through it: where and what was in the First Aid Kit, how to take a barometer reading and enter it in the log, how to estimate wind speed and direction, how to use the tide tables, how to put a position on the chart, how to hoist out and hoist in the dinghy, how to start the diesel engine and what to do if it stopped, and how to calibrate the Decca navigation aid. Lucy had some previous experience of sailing, but she had to concede how little she actually knew.
By the time Isaiah Nine Smith was satisfied with the evolutions, it was well on into the evening. There was, he reckoned, only just over an hour of daylight left. The wind was still north and east, but dropping slowly, with the sun. They might possibly make Salcombe at midnight, or early the next morning. But Isaiah Nine Smith decided it would be better to stay at sea on such a fine night and push gently southwards down the coast with the tide until morning, and then make an inshore beat at first light, and hope to arrive in Salcombe for a lunch-time glass of beer.
McAllester, who was steering, had been keeping a regulation eye on another sloop-rigged yacht, with a white hull, of about Pegasus’ size, about a mile and a half further out to sea. She seemed to be steering almost the same course before the wind, but Pegasus was slowly catching her up. The light was just beginning to thicken, and for the first time Isaiah Nine Smith noticed a darkening cloud astern of them. That might turn into a squall later. Just possibly, he fancied he saw the faintest paling of the cloud, as though lightning were playing across its surface. It was so quiet, with the wind still dropping, they could hear the water hissing along Pegasus’ side.
‘Sir,’ said McAllester, ‘I think that yacht out there is signalling us...’
There certainly was a light flickering on board, but it failed and came again, so irregularly, it was difficult to tell whether it was intended as signalling.
‘Could be somebody flashing a torch,’ said Bingley.
‘Bloody big torch at that range.’
‘Somebody have a look through the binoculars,’ said Isaiah Nine Smith.
Caradoc took up the binoculars. He could see two figures on the yacht’s deck aft, and then, as he watched, a great billowing cloud of what looked like flame and smoke from the stern sheets.
‘Hell’s teeth! That’s not signalling, sir, they’re on fire!’
The bright light showed again from the other yacht, and a red rocket soared up, followed by another. There was now no doubt they were distress signals.
‘Come on McAllester,’ said Isaiah Nine Smith, ‘you’ve got the watch, what are you going to do?’
McAllester had expected Isaiah Nine Smith to take over command, but he reacted quickly. ‘I’m steering towards now, sir. Start the engine. Down spinnaker!’
‘Who’s the communications number for this watch?’ Isaiah Nine Smith asked.
‘Me, sir,’ said Bombulada.
‘See if you can raise the coast guard and the College. Tell them we may need the helicopter flight, if it’s available. That flash of flame didn’t look good to me. Chop chop, with that engine!’
There was a whirring and a coughing and a cloud of blue smoke astern, and Bingley had the diesel going. Pegasus began to pick up speed, while Chung Toi and Syllabub handed down the spinnaker and unshipped the boom.
Pegasus was now heading across a quartering wind, and as her speed was greater than she could have achieved under sail the wind made her fore and main sails flap from side to side and to and fro with an uneasy, unnatural sound and motion. The bows rose and dipped with the same hissing of water sliding by.
Isaiah Nine Smith had taken up the glasses. ‘Get out the first aid kit. Somebody put the kettle on and brew up some tea. I’ve an idea we’re going to put all our drills into effect before we thought. Any joy on the set yet?’
‘Just getting them, sir.’
‘Adrianovitch, get the Aldis out and flash them up.’
‘What shall I say, sir?’
‘Good God, anything! Anything reassuring. Just say we’re coming.’
Watching and listening to him, Lucy acknowledged that Ikey’s speed of thought was that much quicker than her own. She could have thought of everything, in her own time, but he got there first. Lucy herself felt very glad that Ikey was in charge.
Almost unnoticed at first, it had begun to rain. But as it grew heavier, they all got out oilskins and put them on, their bare legs looking incongruous beneath the heavy black capes.
The wind had backed and freshened and was blowing from dead astern again. McAllester wondered whether to order the spinnaker hoisted again. But the other yacht was now only a quarter of a mile or so away, and they were closing her fast. A spinnaker might obscure his vision forward. McAllester looked about him. The light was going much more rapidly.
‘College asking for confirmation we need the helo, sir,’ said Bombulada.
It was ten o’clock at night and only another bare three-quarters of an hour of usable daylight left. The other yacht was still flashing, but they could see that the light was actually a sail on fire. Flames seemed to have consumed all her mainsail, except a brown rag of remnant hanging from the peak. They still had their foresail, a large genoa, set and drawing.
‘Yes please, Bombulada, confirm that we do need the helo flight.’
‘Aye aye sir.’
‘I hope they have the wit to lower that genoa,’ said McAllester. ‘She’s still making way on it and making it that much harder to catch her.’
‘Helicopter will be ready in thirty minutes, sir.’
''Gosh! ’ said McAllester. Ten o’clock on a weekday evening and the helo flight would be ready in half an
hour. That was either amazing luck or very good management.
‘Tell the flight to go ahead. Somebody, here Persimmons, take a bearing to Start Point lighthouse. Make to the Flight Commander, we are now bearing... come on come on ... what bearing, Persimmons?’
‘Start Point two eight zero, sir.’
‘Two eight zero magnetic is the proper report. Make to the Flight Commander My position now Start Point bears two eight zero magnetic, distance... what would you say was the distance, Persimmons?’
‘Three miles, sir?’
‘Call it four. Distance four miles. My course is at the moment one-one-zero magnetic, steering to close the yacht in distress.’ Isaiah Nine Smith looked at the coast-line again. ‘I should say we’re only about ten miles from the College as the helo-crow flies. Should be here in a few minutes’ flying time.’
The other yacht, with its genoa still hoisted, had sagged away off the wind and was lying broadside on to the swell when McAllester ran Pegasus smoothly alongside her. They could see the name Shangri La, of Dartmouth, on her counter.
‘Stop the engine. Here, you steer, Lucy. Just keep steering south-east, dead out to sea.’
Thunder broke overhead with a violent clap that made everybody jump and duck. The rain fell with such weight Lucy could actually feel it drumming and pressing down on her oilskin hat. Clutching Pegasus' tiller in frozen and wet hands, Lucy watched, as though she were dreaming, the rescue taking place. McAllester and Bingley and Chung Toi leapt on board with fire extinguishers. The rain streaming down plastered their hair on their foreheads, and they held their mouths gaping open as though under a shower, as they splashed to and fro on Shangri La's deck. The gear was strange to them and the nylon sheets appeared to have fused in the heat but they soon had the genoa down. The crew were helped on deck. There were three of them, a middle-aged man, his son and daughter.
‘The Navy’s here!’ the man cried. He looked as if he were crying with relief. The phrase made Lucy tingle all over, as though an ancient memory had been revived, but she could not recall where she had heard those words before.