And for some unknown reason, Sharky Beal took a shine to ‘the Professor’ and me. Provided he wasn’t rabbiting on about how desperate he was to ‘see some action’, he could be pretty good company. So, when we weren’t doubling around the parade ground or practising our bends and hitches (‘You do not call them knots!’), the three of us would gather outside the NAAFI (a sort of naval canteen), with a cup of filthy coffee, to chew the fat.
But you know, Sam, Tommy did have a secret. And although it pales in comparison with the whopper I’ve carted around for the last sixty years, it wasn’t exactly the sort of thing you’d boast about to your shipmates. On our last day at HMS Raleigh, I found out what it was.
‘Right, lads,’ said Tiddley Norton, a curmudgeonly Chief Petty Officer who’d been brought out of retirement for the duration. ‘Before we let you loose on the enemy, there’s one last thing we have to do.’
He marched us over to a Nissen hut on the edge of the parade ground and told us to strip off. After six weeks of naval discipline, we knew better than to question orders. Two minutes later, fifty bemused recruits were standing to attention in only their underpants.
‘’Ere, Chief,’ said Sharky. ‘It’s another one of them medicals, isn’t it? Is matron going to feel my wotsits?’
Tiddley Norton grinned sadistically. ‘You’ll feel my boot up your jacksie if you don’t shut up, Beal. And seeing as you’re such a comedian, you and your oppos can go first.’
In the middle of the hut stood a round metal tank, about ten feet in diameter and eight feet deep, with an iron ladder leading over the side into the water and a viewing platform manned by an officer with a long bamboo pole in his hand.
Tiddley Norton handed out some lifejackets and instructed us to put them on. ‘God willing, it won’t happen to any of you,’ he said, ‘but if the worst comes to the worst, like it did for my old oppo Dusty Miller at the Battle of Jutland, you’ll need to have confidence in your equipment. That’s what this exercise is all about.’
On Tiddley’s command, each man was to get into the water and climb down the ladder to the bottom of the tank. When (‘and only when’) the man with the pole tapped you on the shoulder you were to let go of the ladder and float to the surface.
‘Right then, Beal,’ said Tiddley Norton. ‘Why don’t you show us all how it’s done?’
As Sharky made his way to the foot of the ladder, I felt a clammy hand on my shoulder.
Tommy’s voice was so brimming with terror that I hardly recognised it. ‘I can’t do it, Ray. They can’t make me, can they?’
‘What do you mean, you can’t do it?’
‘I can’t swim,’ said Tommy, his fingernails digging deeper into my shoulder blade. ‘I’m terrified of water.’
At first I thought he was joking. His wild, staring eyes told me otherwise.
‘Why did you join the navy then?’
‘My dad was on the Indomitable in the last war. He practically marched me down to the recruiting office. What am I going to do, Ray?’
‘You’ll be fine,’ I said, trying to convince myself, but not really succeeding.
Meanwhile, Sharky’s head had disappeared beneath the murky water.
‘I’ve got to get out of here,’ said Tommy.
I told him that orders were orders.
‘That’s what I hate about this place: orders, orders and more bloody orders.’
I told him he shouldn’t let it get to him.
‘What, ‘‘Illegitimi nil carborundum’’ you mean?’
I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about.
‘It’s pidgen Latin,’ he said. ‘It means, don’t let the bastards grind you down.’
Sharky broke the surface of the water like a tin-fish (torpedo) and clambered out of the tank. ‘All aboard for the Skylark!’
‘Well done, Beal,’ said Tiddley Norton grudgingly. ‘Now then, Riley, seeing as you seem to have ants in your pants, you’d better go next.’
Tommy’s face was as white as asbestos. ‘I can’t do it, Chief.’
Tiddley’s face was as red as Mr Punch. ‘What did you say, lad?’
‘Let me go next, Chief,’ I said. ‘Riley’s not feeling too clever. He’ll be all right in a minute.’
‘Probably coming down with psychotal-clapsica,’ volunteered Sharky.
‘All right,’ said Tiddley Norton, casting a quizzical eye over Tommy’s ashen features, ‘but you’re next, Professor, so you’d better pull yourself together.’
The tank held no terrors for me. I loved being underwater. I’d spent most of my childhood on Brighton beach, and liked nothing better than to dive down to the sea floor and time how long I could sit there. (The trick is to empty your lungs first, Sam.) It’s so peaceful beneath the waves. It’s one of the few places you can really hear yourself think.
And there at the bottom of the tank, I suddenly had the most terrible thought: What if Tommy didn’t make it? I know it sounds selfish, but I was terrified they’d have him court-martialled for insubordination. Life without Tommy would have been unbearable, as I was soon to find out.
By the time I came up for air, all hell had broken loose. Tiddley Norton’s parade-ground holler rose above the feverish chatter of his young recruits. ‘Come back here, Riley. Where the hell do you think you’re going?’
The door of the hut was wide open. Tommy was nowhere to be seen.
‘Riley, get back in here now!’
But it was Sharky who appeared at the door first. ‘It’s all right, Chief,’ he said, dragging Tommy behind him. ‘Riley come over a bit queer, so I had to take him outside to be ill.’
‘To be what?’ barked Tiddley Norton.
‘Must have been that suet pudding, Chief,’ said Sharky. ‘But he’s tickety-boo now, aren’t you, Professor?’
Tommy nodded unconvincingly.
‘All right, Riley, this is your last chance, lad. Get up that ladder now!’
I could hardly bear to look. Tommy’s face had acquired a greenish tinge. He stood staring up at the tank, motionless but for the almost imperceptible quiver of his knees.
‘Go on, Tommy,’ I whispered. ‘Illegitimi nil carbo whatdoyoucallit.’
He managed a sickly smile and shuffled towards the ladder like someone approaching the scaffold. At first, every rung was sheer torture. But slowly he gathered momentum until, by the time he’d reached the top, he almost looked like a real sailor.
I’d seen the terror in his eyes. It was little short of a miracle. Bravery has nothing to do with what you’re frightened of, Sam. We’re all afraid of something, sometimes with good reason. It’s how you deal with your fear that really counts.
There was a wry smile on Tiddley Norton’s face as he signalled to the man with the stick. I can’t tell you how proud I was when Tommy’s face appeared above the side of the tank.
Of course, had I known what was going to happen little more than a month later, I would have made him swear a solemn oath never to set foot near water again.
The next day we were ordered to Pompey Barracks (where the food was slightly more tolerable, you’ll be pleased to hear) to await our first posting. Two weeks later, Tommy, Sharky Beal and I had commandeered a plot not much bigger than a postage stamp, on the vomit-strewn lower deck of the troopship Orion.
‘Gonna see some action,’ muttered Sharky. ‘Gonna make my family proud.’
We’d had six weeks’ training, we hadn’t a clue where we were going, we hardly knew the difference between a bulkhead and a butterfly clip and most of us were barely out of short trousers, but according to the ‘Ministry of Twerps’, we were ready for war.
9.43 p.m.
I didn’t feel like reading any more. All that stuff about Granddad and Tommy Riley being such good friends had left me really fed up. Me and Alex had been like that in the ‘good old days’, but now he wouldn’t even sit next to me on the bus, and every time he saw me he was like, ‘Get out of my face.’
I lay back on the bed, thi
nking that things couldn’t possibly get any worse when Mum knocked on the door and proved me wrong again.
‘Letter for you, Sam,’ she said, handing me a brown A4 envelope, like the ones she sometimes kept her case notes in. ‘It arrived just now. Someone rang the bell, but by the time I got there they’d vanished – must be from your girlfriend.’
I studied the neat, old-fashioned writing on the envelope: For the attention of Master S Tennant.
‘Yeah, ’spect so, Mum.’
She hovered expectantly beneath my Grade Three clarinet certificate. ‘Bit formal, isn’t it? I thought you guys didn’t believe in snail mail. And come to think of it, I wouldn’t be particularly thrilled for any daughter of mine to be out delivering love letters at this time of night.’ Her face softened a little. ‘Still, it’s very romantic, I suppose.’
‘Yes, Mum.’
‘Well, come on, aren’t you going to open it?’
‘In a minute, Mum.’
‘Ah well, you can’t blame a girl for trying.’ She sat on the edge of my bed and pulled me towards her in a sort of motherly headlock. Her hair smelled of green apples. ‘Which reminds me, I need to talk to you about Thursday.’
‘It’s not recycling day again, is it?’
‘I’m going to be working late, I’m afraid. So after you’ve seen your granddad, I want you to walk up to the clinic to meet me.’
I hated that CAMHS place. It was full of weirdo kids and stupid posters with totally obvious stuff on them like, Be careful with boiling water. ‘Couldn’t you do it some other day?’
‘This is serious, Sam. I’ve had to schedule an extra session with the whole family. The panic attacks are getting worse. If we don’t get to the bottom of this child’s problems soon, someone could get hurt. I mean I know that wild threats are part and parcel of the whole adolescent Jekyll-and-Hyde scenario, but just occasionally one of them actually means it.’
‘OK then,’ I said, shaking the envelope like a Christmas present, knowing in my heart that it wasn’t the latest Bond DVD. ‘I’ll come straight over after I’ve been to Granddad’s.’
‘Night love, sleep tight, don’t let the . . .’ Sometimes Mum looked at me as if I was the most precious thing in the world; it was nice, but kind of scary too. ‘Enjoy your letter.’
As soon as I was certain she wasn’t going to barge in again and remind me about my PE kit or something, I ripped open the envelope and slid out a single sheet of white A4.
The words jumped out at me like the knife guy in that movie Mum said I shouldn’t really have been watching. I didn’t want to look but, just like that movie, I couldn’t help myself.
I must have read it at least ten times before I stuffed the horrible thing under my pillow and tried to figure out what to do next. I can’t have been thinking straight because the first thing I wanted was some music. If the Duke couldn’t help me to get my head together nobody could.
I grabbed my rucksack and rifled through the front pocket. Mum was right – it did need a ‘good old clear out’. It was like a lucky dip in there: I found half a packet of Polos, a protractor, fifty cocktail umbrellas (don’t ask), the tooth that came out in German, a Lego Hagrid, my lesson planner, and something soft and sticky . . . but no iPod.
Perhaps it had fallen out in food-tech (that couldn’t be right; I was always so careful with it), or maybe I was doing what Mum called ‘boys’ looking’, and it was right at the bottom somewhere. So I carried on rooting around for a bit, like a doctor trying to resuscitate a patient he already knew was dead. In the end the diagnosis was obvious: someone had stolen my iPod.
But how? I’d had my rucksack with me all day. And why? You have no idea how much chicken poo I’d had to clean up before Mum would let me order it. This couldn’t be happening. My life was such a total disaster area, I almost wished I was de— No, no, it hadn’t quite come to that yet. What was Tommy Riley’s motto? Illegitimi nil carborundum? And what did it mean again?
There was only one thing for it. I took out the Dad Phone, already feeling slightly better in the warm glow of its illuminated keypad. Just to hear his voice would be enough. If I’d been more of a Hardman like him I wouldn’t have been in this state in the first place.
‘Is that you, Sam?’ said Dad.
‘I just called to say hi.’
‘Great to hear from you son, but I’m just running through my race plan. Can I call you back afterwards? It wasn’t anything urgent, was it?’
I couldn’t let him hear that I was nearly crying. ‘No, Dad.’
‘Listen Sam, how’s your granddad?’ he said anxiously.
‘He says he’s going to . . .’ (It was no good, I couldn’t tell him. I knew how upset he got if he thought Granddad was unhappy.) ‘He says he’s going down to the lounge for the sing-song tonight.’
‘Great,’ said Dad, sounding mightily relieved. ‘Now if you don’t mind, son, I need to get on. I’ll call you after the race.’
‘Good luck, Dad. Oh and Dad . . . Dad? Dad . . .’
He’d gone. That was it then. What else could I do? No iPod, I didn’t dare go on the internet in case some idiot started emailing me, and even my own father hadn’t got time for a chat. There was nothing to stop me reaching under my pillow and pulling out The Emperor’s letter. But I didn’t need to read it again. The words were light-scribed deep into my memory bank for all eternity.
THURSDAY
(WEEK TWO)
10.57 a.m.
The phoney war was nearly over. In a funny sort of way, I was relieved. Even though I’d stopped catching the bus and done everything in my power to keep a low profile, hidden menace lurked everywhere and I had a horrible feeling it could all kick off at any second.
On Tuesday lunchtime, they’d pinned a photograph of my infants’ school nativity play to the noticeboard. Actually I was supposed to be a camel, but underneath, someone had scrawled Kentucky Fried Chickenboy in big red letters. On Wednesday, I was so spooked by their whispered threats and chicken noises that Mrs Mendoza gave me my first ever detention for ‘persistent inattention in class’.
They were the loneliest forty-eight hours of my life. Mum was too wrapped up in her work to notice I was constantly on the verge of tears, Dad obviously didn’t have time to return my calls, and Granddad kept insisting he was ‘not long for this world’. By Thursday morning, I was a bleary-eyed wreck.
The bell for first break felt like a death knell. There were a million and one things I’d rather be doing, but something told me I’d have to go through with it.
‘Betcha can’t wait till tomorrow, eh, Chickenboy?’ said Callum Corcoran.
And his words were still ringing in my ears as I slipped out of the IT suite and made my way across the courtyard, scanning the home economics block for hidden assassins, praying that I wasn’t being followed.
Callum was right of course, Friday couldn’t come soon enough, but I had a nasty feeling he was talking about the HMS Belfast trip and not that glorious moment when the last bell went and school was over for another week.
I crouched behind one of the new wastepaper bins that no one used (there was a special section for recycling cans) and waited for the rest of my ‘classmates’ to pass by on their way to the canteen. They looked so happy, laughing and joking and doing that thing where you slap another kid’s head and shout ‘spam’. Ever since The Emperor arrived on the scene, feuds that had festered since primary school seemed to have gone out of the window. Chelsea was showing Gaz Lulham her new mobile, Pete Hughes and Animal were discussing that website where they randomly microwave stuff, and suddenly Callum Corcoran was everybody’s best mate. Even Dimbo lumbered along happily, squinting in the late-morning sun and munching an egg sandwich.
As soon as they were out of earshot, I scuttled over to the medical suite, taking the shadowy route beneath the covered walkway until I was standing in front of the music block. And that’s when I started having second thoughts. I approached the automatic doors like a bomb-disposal guy
inching towards an abandoned rucksack. If it wasn’t for something Granddad had said, I wouldn’t have been there. ‘It’s how you deal with fear that really counts.’ It was my chance to prove him right. I was going to confront my nemesis. It was time to meet The Emperor face to face.
But supposing it was a trap? Supposing they were all hiding in the cubicles? Supposing it was an ambush and they were going to beat me up? I swallowed down a mouthful of vomit and looked up at the menacing skies. I could just hear Mum breaking into one of her global warming medleys. When I looked down again, the music-block doors were sliding open. As the first drops of rain started drumming on the covered walkway, I reached into my jacket pocket for the blob of Blu-Tack I sometimes used as a worry ball, and stepped inside.
I ran up the concrete staircase, but the bleak fluorescence of the music-block corridor soon took the spring out of my step, and I made my way towards the boys’ toilets like an over-cautious snail. For the first time, I clocked that Miss Hoolyhan had plastered the walls with stuff about ‘the great composers’. I was just reading that Russian genius Dimitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) was also a qualified football referee, when I’m sure I heard a stifled laugh.
‘What’s that? Who’s there?’
There were no music rehearsals first break on Thursdays. Apart from someone torturing a cello somewhere, there didn’t seem to be anyone else about, but by now the mocking laughter was so overpowering it felt like it was inside my head. By the time I realised it was coming from the speakers above me, there was also a thunderous drum track (like the stuff Callum Corcoran gave Miss Hoolyhan when she let us bring in our own CDs) and an echoey chorus of the saxophone part from ‘In The Mood’.
‘Shut up, shuuuut up!’ I screamed. But it only got worse: on top of the mix was the unmistakable sound of Mum’s telephone voice going, ‘Who is this please? Who is this please? Who is this please?’ on a continuous loop.
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