by John Winton
“It’s pointless testing communications really,” Bongo said to Michael. “There’s never anything wrong with the telephones. The trouble is getting somebody to speak on them the other end. This section is so big once people get away from the base you can never find them again. They just disappear like water in the sands of the Nile. It’s all right for people like Paul. His base is next door to his cabin and he’s got everything all round him. I have to keep half a dozen hands outside the door here so I’ve always got someone I can send right away. Who are you?”
The crouching figure in the corner stood up.
“I’m a . . .”
“Take that cigarette out of your mouth! “
“I’m a steward, sir.”
“Yes, but what are you?”
“I’m the runner, sir,” the steward said shamefacedly, as though he were confessing to some loathsome disability.
“The runner! Didn’t know we had one. Well, run round to the Chief Stoker in the Capstan Flat and tell him to start getting his pump down into the Naval Store. We’ll be needing it.”
Bongo sat down and put his feet up on the table.
“It always takes them a quarter of an hour to get themselves sorted out in H.Q. One,” he explained to Michael.
Michael looked outside. He was repelled by the hostile stares of six stokers who were squatting on the deck. They all wore blue overalls with their names painted across the pocket. Michael noticed that the names fell into clearly defined groups. There were names of purely geographical significance, such as Scouse, Geordie and Jan; alliterative or traditional names, such as Bomber and Dusty; and names referring to their owner’s physical properties, such as Lofty. Michael was intimidated by the stares and withdrew his head. But he had been noticed.
“Who’s that --- , Scouse?”
“Some --- from the upper deck.”
“What’s he --- doing here?”
“ --- goofing.”
“Cor --- “
“The ship will shortly be listed to an angle of ten degrees. This is being done to give damage control parties experience in working under action conditions.” snarled the broadcast.
The stokers outside sucked their teeth.
“First they list the ship so we can all learn to walk --- sideways,” said Scouse, “then I suppose they’ll go astern so we can all walk --- backwards.”
Michael watched the heel indicator. It was already beginning to swing. Yorky was still testing communications.
“Paint Store this is D.C. Base One. Testing communications, how do you hear me? Paint Store how do you hear me? Eh? Can you hear me that’s all I want to know. Well, pull your finger out lad, I haven’t got all day. Loud and clear, Roger.”
“The ship has just received a torpedo hit starboard side forrard. All sections report damage”
Without a break in his voice, Yorky put himself through to H.Q. One.
“ . . This is D.C. Base One. Torpedo hit starboard side forrard. Free flooding between eighteen and sixty-eight frames, up to five deck, starboard side. Flooding boundary being established from seventy-two frame forrard. Free surface in Communications Branch messdeck, cofferdams now being rigged. Complete electrical failure forrard of ninety-seven bulkhead. Two small fires in the Acetylene and Dope Store and one in the Forward Cold Room now under control. Firemain break both sides at eighty-four bulkhead being isolated at a hundred and three bulkhead. Casualties unknown. More assistance required with medical aid, pumps and fire-fighting equipment. Got that? Well, why the bloody hell don’t you listen? What’s the use of me spieling away here? I say again. Torpedo hit starboard side. . .”
“He’s done these exercises before,” Bongo said to Michael apologetically.
“Yes, I can see that,” Michael said admiringly. He looked at Yorky w'ith newly-awakened eyes; he realized, for the first time, that he was in the presence of greatness.
The E.R.A. wearing the headphones was covering a large board with hieroglyphics in coloured pencil. He seemed absorbed in his task, dwelling on each symbol with loving significance. Bongo poked him.
“What are you doing, Bodily?”
Bodily removed his headphones.
“Incident Board, sir,” he said.
“I know that. What’s that thing there?”
“Electrical fire in the Forward Compressor Room, sir.”
“Did you report an electrical fire in the compressor room, Higgins?”
“No, sir,” said Yorky.
“Scrub that out. You must keep the Incident Board accurate, Bodily.”
“Yes, sir.”
“For exercise, for exercise, fire in the Forward Compressor Room”
E.R.A. Bodily looked reproachfully at Bongo Lewis.
“I should have known better,” Bongo said to Michael. “Bodily’s done these exercises before, too.”
“D.C. Base One, this is H.Q. One, rig portable pump in G Naval Store.”
Yorky twirled a handle.
“Rig portable pump in the Naval Store.”
“What’s that?” shouted the voice at the other end of the line. Michael could hear the tinny sound from where he stood.
“Rig portable pump. . . .”
“Who’s a chump?”
“Now don’t be funny, Wings, rig portable pump. . . .”
“What pump?”
“The message is ‘Rig portable pump. . . .’ “
“I know, I know!” yelled the voice excitedly. “I know what the bloody message is and my message to you is ‘Get knotted! ’ “
Yorky held the dead telephone for a moment. Then he looked round and Michael was surprised to see him blushing.
“I’m sorry, sir. I got the Chapel by mistake.”
“Never mind, they’re doing it anyway.”
“D.C. Base One, this is H.Q. One, for exercise, for exercise, flood ‘A’ Magazine.”
“Now get this one right, Higgins,” said Bongo. “We don’t want any more trouble with Mr Broad.”
Yorky repeated the message.
“You may think this all a bit of chaos, Mike. . . .”
“Oh, not at all.”
“But it’s surprising, if you have enough of them the troops do get the idea eventually. But you’ve got to keep on at it, just like everything else. It’s no good having an exercise once in a blue moon, everyone’s forgotten where everything is. You’ve got to have lots of exercises. Trouble is that it’s usually the engine-room department who get clobbered for them. They close up while every other bastard in the ship goes to standeasy. . . .”
A flying figure scattered the stokers by the door. It was Slim Broad, the Commissioned Gunner. Bongo’s welcoming smile faded when he saw Slim Broad’s face.
“That’s the second time I’ve caught that moron on the flooding cabinet swinging off on the valves,” Slim Broad said grimly. “You might get the buzz to your blokes that this is an exercise.”
“Message from ‘C’ Pump and Flood, sir! Will you send an S.B.A. down to the Naval Store quickly, sir, the Chief Stoker’s hurt himself with that pump.”
The ship will shortly be closed down to Action! State One to exercise attack by atomic warfare.”
“They’re always trying to make you do without --- food,” Scouse said bitterly. “Now they’re trying to make you do without --- air as well.”
7
Michael, Paul and Tim Castlewood, the Sports Officer, were walking the quarter-deck. The quarter-deck, after dinner, was the recognized time and place for officers to promenade and take the air.
“I wonder how they’re getting on down in the laundry?” said Tim Castlewood casually.
“What do you mean?” Michael demanded. As Laundry Officer, he was sensitive to the subject.
“I must pay a visit there some day. I want to see the machine that crushes the buttons on my shirts.”
Paul saw his cue joyfully. “And the machine what drills holes in my pants. . .”
“And the gadget that puts brown stains on my collars...
”
“Now look. . . .”
“It’s all right, Mike. I’m only getting at you. Laundry officers are always got at.”
“I’m getting fed up with it.”
“It has been a little erratic in the past, Mike, you must admit.”
“Only once. That was that bloody feud.”
Michael had known nothing of laundries when he joined Carousel. His first visit had been a terrifying experience. He was met by the Laundry Manager, a Chinese known as Number One Boy, who led Michael through a succession of dark, steamy caverns containing small, weird machines which were like nothing Michael had ever seen before. Tiny pistons worked to and fro, spouting steam. A press like a giant hand descended with a vicious sizzling. Chinese faces, inscrutable, indistinct, peered at Michael through the gloom. After that first visit Michael left the running of the laundry to Number One Boy and confined himself to standing rounds once a week, and sending in his own laundry every day.
Michael heard of the laundry feud from The Bodger.
“Hobbes! One of your bloody Chinamen has disappeared! Get down there and find out what Number One Boy’s been up to! “
Number One Boy had been up to nothing. It was two of his nephews (all the laundry boys were Number One Boy’s nephews) who had been causing trouble, Number One Boy explained.
The Chinese on the collar-shaping machine had a long feud with the Chinese who worked the shirt-presser. Michael could not uncover the original cause of the dispute but Collar-Shaper Boy had confided to Spin-Dryer Boy, his particular friend, that it was his intention to murder Shirt-Presser Boy. The news travelled down the subterranean corridors of the laundry to Shirt-Presser Boy and made him wary. The rest of the laundry boys observed the feud dispassionately; sooner or later the laundry would need either a new Collar-Shaper Boy or a new Shirt-Presser Boy. Nor was Number One Boy himself concerned. He had a nephew in Hong Kong who could work either machine. (He would, however, have preferred the feud to smoulder until the ship reached Hong Kong so that the new nephew could take over with the minimum of delay.)
As the weeks of the feud passed, Collar-Shaper Boy gained a moral ascendancy; he seemed to exert a subtle, enervating influence upon Shirt-Presser Boy. Day by day, the laundry’s collars were more superbly turned out, the shirts more poorly finished. Shirt-Presser Boy was moody, listless and lackadaisical. The grin on Collar-Shaper Boy’s face grew broader and he flexed his fingers eagerly. Number One Boy wrote to his nephew in Hong Kong.
But one morning, a wonder came to light in the Laundry. Shirt-Presser Boy appeared for work. Collar-Shaper Boy did not. Michael could not penetrate further than the fact that one evening a Collar-Shaper Boy had been at work and the following morning none had appeared. Number One Boy pointed to the idle collar-shaper as proof.
“No piecee collar,” he said. “Boy gone no work.”
Down the gangway, Michael could see a Chinese loading towels into the spin-dryer and keeping his face turned towards the shirt-presser. The message had been passed that Shirt-Presser Boy intended to exact revenge on Spin-Dryer Boy for the part he had played in the feud with Collar-Shaper Boy. Number One Boy was not concerned; he had a nephew in Hong Kong who could work the spin-dryer.
“I must go down there one day,” Paul said. “I want to see the thing that shrinks my overalls.”
“Oh, drop it,” said Michael. “I don’t suppose your department is all that hot either.”
“By no means.”
Paul, too, had his problems. Outside Machinery embraced all the machinery in the ship which was not covered by definition in other departments. Its scope ranged from the capstan forward to the steering gear aft, and from the freshwater tank on the main mast to the fresh-water pumps below the stokers’ messdeck. “All the odds and sods,” as Ginger explained it to Paul. Paul’s chief assistant was an aged mechanician named Fogarty, a Yorkshireman and a philosopher. It was Fogarty who taught Paul an ancient engineering truth.
“All machines like to be visited, sir,” said Fogarty. “Even if you don’t do nothing, they likes you to stand and look at ’em.”
Paul discovered that there was much in Fogarty’s theory. Paul found that it paid him to make a daily round of his department and he performed it religiously, as though making a daily obeisance at each individual shrine.
Fogarty had no truck with modern methods of maintenance. To each emergency call he took a hammer and a handful of cotton waste.
“There’s only two reasons why it don’t work,” he explained to Paul. “The seamen have bunged it up wi’ paint or it’s stuck.”
Fogarty had yet another remedy.
“If it still don’t work, Ah fetches a bigger hammer.”
Paul had one responsibility about which neither he nor Fogarty could do anything. Paul visited it every morning but was not permitted to do more. It had been fitted by the dockyard before the ship left England and it stood on the fo’c’sle, motionless, tarpaulined and sinister. The ship’s company nicknamed it The Thing and forgot it until The Bodger, reading signals in the wardroom log, indirectly drew attention to it.
“Goddamn a thousand damnations! Talk about security! No wonder the Americans get cheesed off with us.”
The Communications Officer, who sensed an attack on his department, assumed mental guard.
“What’s the matter, Bodger?”
The Bodger ignored him. “Just put me in a sealed room ashore somewhere and give me nothing to read except the unclassified unrestricted signals published every day and
I’ll bet within a week I could tell you the name of every ship in the harbour, its training programme, and its state of readiness for war. Give me a fortnight and I could tell you the name of the Chief Cook and the crew of the Captain’s gig! “
“Oh come, Bodger. . .”
“Goddamn it man, you can get a list of ships from the football fixtures! Here’s somebody wants some more duffle coats. They’re hardly likely to be going to the Equator, are they? And here’s Tadpole, being visited by the C.-in-C. with his flag flying and getting fuel from a lighter and giving an R.P.C. all on the same day. It doesn’t take an Einstein to work out what they’re doing, does it? Quite correct, they’re leaving the station. All you’ve got to do is lie off the Limoun Pass in a submarine and monitor a couple of wavebands and after three weeks you could go home with a better idea of the working of the station than the C.-in-C. himself!”
“What’s the excitement, Bodger?” asked the rest of the wardroom.
“For months,” said The Bodger, “we’ve had that Thing on the cable deck. It’s so damn secret we’re not even allowed to touch it, let alone know what it is. And now this signal, in plain language, says ‘Mr Merrydown, of Admiralty, trials party of three, and one press representative will be joining Carousel a.m. Tuesday for duration of trials. Request usual facilities.’ I ask you!”
“It does seem to be a slip-up in the drill,” the Communications Officer admitted. But the rest of the wardroom were intrigued by the chance of actually seeing The Thing.
“You don’t mean they’re actually going to let us have a look at it?” said the Gunnery Officer. “I thought it was all ‘for Kremlin eyes only, burn before reading’ stuff.”
“I wonder if there’s anything at all under there?”
“That reminds me Bodger,” said the Commander. “Will you look after the boffins when they arrive? Give them cabins and see they don’t fall through any holes in the deck. One of them is supposed to be a very important chappie. He’s the only man in the U.K. who knows how it works.” The Bodger allocated cabins, arranged a boat and forgot about the whole matter until a very stout man in a green sports coat and grey corduroy trousers stopped him in the passageway after breakfast one morning.
“I say,” said the man in the sports coat coyly, “could you tell me where to go to spend a penny please?”
The Bodger’s jaw dropped open.
“A what a what?”
“Spend a penny, please?”
> The Bodger tossed the penny to and fro until it dropped. “You must be the trials party?”
“Right. My name is Merrydown. We’ve just come on board. . .”
“But where are the rest?”
“On the quarter-deck.”
The other members of the party were standing on the quarter-deck by a pyramid of suitcases, tape recorders, tripods and strangely-shaped leather cases. Mr Merrydown introduced them.
“Masterson. Known to everybody in A.R.L.E.F. as Bat. This is his show really. He designed it.”
Bat Masterson was a tiny man with white hair which shot straight up from his head.
“Beetle, D.E.E.M.E.D.’s representative and Cowplain, from Barwick and Todhunter’s, the makers.”
Beetle had horn-rimmed spectacles and khaki shorts. Cowplain was bald-headed and had a figure which reminded The Bodger of a Conference Pear. The Bodger shook hands.
“Stephen Ropehead, naval correspondent of the Daily Disaster”
Stephen was wearing a chrysanthemum-dotted purple shirt and a green Tyrolian hat. The Bodger shook hands with a wince.
“Don’t I know your face?” he asked sternly.
“I covered the fire in Voluminous and the mutiny in Wave Osteopath. You may have seen me then.”
“No, it wasn’t then. I’ll remember later.”
“Or perhaps it was the wreck of the Snarkfish? Or you weren’t a witness in that incest case were you?”
“No. No. No. Proper Jonas, aren’t you?” The Bodger said. “Gentlemen, the midshipman of the watch will show you your cabins and I’ll have a steward to collect your gear.”
“Is this a happy ship?” The Bodger heard Stephen ask the quartermaster as he went down the hatch.
The news of Mr Merrydown and his party flashed round the ship and a large crowd gathered round The Thing on the first morning at sea when Bat Masterson was seen approaching.
Bat Masterson had longed for an appreciative audience all his life. Conscious of the intent eyes upon him, he very deliberately loosened the guy-ropes and carefully took off and coiled down the lashings. He twitched the edge of the tarpaulin and then, with a quick tug, uncovered The Thing.