by Nevil Shute
“So long, old thing,” he said. “Look after yourself.”
She said a little tremulously: “So long, Nolly. Don’t go and bump another mine before I get back.”
He left her, and the train carried her away into the night. He went back to his duty in Grimsby Emerald, and Marjorie arrived in London next morning, fresh and cheerful after a good night. The train was three hours late, on account of the raids, and everybody seemed to think that it had done very well to lose so little time.
She had heard nothing from her friend at Harrow, and so rang her up. It seemed that there was trouble: mother had bronchitis and there was a trained nurse sleeping in the spare room. Marjorie was really very glad. Honour was satisfied; there was now no alternative to sleeping in Helen’s flat in Dover Street, and it would be great fun if there really was a raid.
She went to Dover Street and saw the caretaker who lived down in the basement, a Mrs. Harrison. Helen, it seemed, had gone to Yorkshire for a few days, but she had left word with Mrs. Harrison that Mrs. Boden might turn up to use the flat, so that was quite all right. Marjorie went up to the top floor and unpacked her things; she had slept there before. Each time she used the flat she envied Helen again, for living free and independently in London in a real flat of her own, in Dover Street.
She went out, and walked down Piccadilly, looking in the shop windows. She bought a warm blue scarf for Nolly in the Burlington Arcade because it took her fancy, and she bought a little silver cigarette-lighter at Dunhill’s, which she would keep for his birthday in November. Then she had lunch at the Chinese restaurant, partly for the novelty and partly because it was quite cheap, and she was Yorkshire bred.
And after lunch she went to the Radiant Cradle Company in Bond Street and spent two hours with them. She came out a little dazed, having spent a good deal of money on little bits and pieces that were obviously necessary. Having a baby, she thought, was a terribly expensive matter, but quite fun. Everybody in the shop had been so very, very nice to her. Her heart warmed to the Radiant Cradle Company.
She went back to the flat and made herself a cup of tea, feeling rather at a loss. It was fun to be alone in London, but she felt she wouldn’t like to have too much of it; she was almost glad to be going back to Port Edgar the next day in spite of the boredom when Oliver was at sea. It would be awful fun if he could come to London next time with her. She could not think of anyone in London at that moment that she knew, so when her tea was finished she went out and saw a film.
She came out of the cinema at about seven, on a warm September evening. There had been a raid warning while she was in it, but ten minutes later the All Clear had sounded, and when she came out there was nothing unusual to be seen. She knew little about London restaurants except the Piccadilly Hotel, and she did not feel like going there alone. So she went back to the Chinese restaurant again and had another peculiar meal, and so back to Dover Street in the gloaming.
The warning sounded again as she went in, at about nine o’clock, and gave her a tremendous thrill.
It was hot in the flat beneath the roof, though all the windows were wide open. She took off her shoes and her dress, put on a kimono and went and leaned out of the window. There were a few searchlights stabbing the evening sky and a low rumble of gunfire in the distance to the south; she listened to it with pleasurable excitement. Perhaps it would develop into a real blitz, with fires and bombs and everything; something to brag about when she got back to the Lothian Hotel. In the street below her people seemed to be scurrying quickly to their homes.
The blue sky darkened into night; at about ten o’clock the first bombs fell. Overhead, very distant, she could hear the faint noise of an aeroplane; from that time onwards the drone was continuous. Whatever aeroplanes they were, she thought they must be flying at a very great height, five or six miles, perhaps. She wondered if they were German bombers or British fighters; there was no means of telling which.
Presently bombs began to fall all over London, some not more than half a mile away, it seemed to her. There was the glow of fire towards the east, and several times from Piccadilly she heard the clang and rumble of fire engines coming from the west. The gunfire from the park not far away was continuous; each time that one particular gun fired her window rattled and the floor shook a little beneath her feet. Splinters of shell fell down from time to time upon the roofs with a sharp rattle, and once a large piece, probably a fuse, fell with a great crash of slates not far away. She kept back under cover after that, and only gazed diagonally upwards through the window at the little bursting stars spattering the sky above.
After a time it seemed to her that her top room was not the safest place of all to be in at that time. She opened the door of the flat and went downstairs in her kimono to see what anybody else was doing. She found a little knot of people sitting on the stairs of the bottom flight; there was no cellar or shelter to the house. She went upstairs again and fetched a cushion and her eiderdown, and came down again to join them, sitting most uncomfortably upon a stair.
The raid went on and on, the detonations sometimes distant, sometimes very close at hand. She stayed down there on the cold stairs for over two hours, weary and bored and rather cold, and most uncomfortable. At about one o’clock the bombing and the gunfire died away, and for the first time there was no sound of aircraft overhead.
Somebody said at last: “Sounds like the end. Give it another ten minutes.” Ten minutes passed, a quarter of an hour. There had been no All Clear, but people started drifting up to bed; Marjorie went up too, took off her clothes and put on her pyjamas, and slipped thankfully between the sheets. In five minutes she was asleep.
A second wave of bombers came half an hour later, and the gunfire began again and woke her up. She did not stir from bed, being very tired. She lay and listened to the raid for nearly an hour, and presently dozed off again, accustomed to the noise.
She woke to the shrill scream of the bomb that hit the house next door, an instant before it burst. She had no time to do anything, hardly time to realize what the noise denoted, before the appalling thing happened. Her bed was lifted bodily up into the air and slammed down again upon the floor, and a great pressure blast came on her that made her cry out with the pain in her ears. Then, as she watched, the solid wall at the end of her room split and crumbled and dissolved in shreds of plaster, and was gone, and a thick, choking cloud of dust was over everything that made her gasp for breath. She lay petrified with fright in bed; then something happened to the roof above her. A half-ton coping stone came crashing through the ceiling and fell down on to the lower half of the bed. The bed collapsed down on to the floor and she lay pinned there, stunned with the shock and with the pain in both her legs.
She struggled to sit up, and the pain bit and gnawed her legs, piercing, unbearable. She lay back white and trembling, and fearful of what this might mean for her. She thought: “This is the sort of thing that gives people a miscarriage”; indeed, it seemed to her that people had had miscarriages for something rather less than she had got. She felt that she must try to lie back quietly and rest. Presently, when she was a little calmer, she would cry out, and somebody would come.
Below her, in the street, there were confused noises of men shouting and the rumble of falling masonry and brick. Slowly the thick choking dust began to settle; it settled thickly on the ruins of her bed, upon the sheets, upon her arms, her face, her hair. As the cloud slowly cleared she found that she could see straight out ahead of her where the wall used to be; she looked into a torn, incredible gap, vacant, that had been the house next door. Above the shattered roof of the next door but one she could see the stairs pin-pointed in a deep blue sky.
Suddenly, from the stairs outside the door behind her head there was a sound of scrambling, and a man’s voice. It was calling:
“Is anyone up there in the top rooms? Is anybody up there?”
She answered weakly: “Yes, please. Me. I’m here.”
“Which room are you in?�
��
“In the front, on the top floor.”
“Can you get out on to the landing, where I can see you? Come carefully, because the stairs are down.”
She said: “I can’t move. There’s something lying on my legs.”
There was a momentary pause. Then the voice said: “All right, lady — take it easy. I’ll come up to you.”
The scrambling noises recommenced. She heard a voice say: “Bert, there’s a woman up on the top floor. I’m going up. Stand from under, case the whole bloody lot comes down.” And presently, crawling upon his belly on the floor that swayed and teetered beneath his added weight, a man came to her.
She saw him faintly in the starlit darkness, through the fog of dust. He was a very dirty man, in a tin hat and a blue boiler-suit, with an armlet bearing the letters A.F.S. He was a man of about fifty, still lean and athletic. He said: “This floor isn’t quite what it might be. Come on, lady. Let’s get out of this toot sweet.”
She said: “I can’t move, I’m afraid. I think both my legs are broken. Look.”
He switched on an electric torch and examined the wreck of her bed. He tested the weight of the coping stone with his hands: it was utterly beyond his power to shift it. In three weeks of intensive raids this man had learned a great deal, had amassed a sad store of experience. He knew that there was only one thing that could save this girl. A doctor must come up, alone, because the floor would bear no more than one, and amputate both legs where she lay. And he must do it quickly.
He said: “Look, lady, I’m going down to fetch my mate to give a hand with this. We’ll get you down okay. Just lie there quiet and stick it out, and don’t move round more’n you’ve got to. I’ll be back inside ten minutes.”
Then he was gone, and she was left alone again.
She heard him slithering and scrambling down the staircase well. His visit had comforted her, had eased her fears; she knew now that everything was going to be all right. The little noise of the incendiaries, the six or seven quick plops as they fell among the wooden ruins of the roofs and floors, passed her unnoticed; she heard the growing clamour in the street, but did not understand.
A sharp, bitter smell of smoke was blown to her. In sudden fear she raised her head and saw, arising from the ruins of the house next door, a tongue of flame. She stared at it dumbfounded. Then she realized it meant the end.
In those last moments she was agonized by thoughts of Boden, and of their dependence on each other. She cried: “Oh, Nolly dear, I’ve gone and let you down! Whatever will you do?” The smoke came pouring up the staircase well and gushed around her, products of combustion, stifling and merciful. In a few moments she lost consciousness.
The fire shot up into the starry night, enveloping the ruined houses, violent, uncontrollable. It made a flaming beacon in the night a hundred feet in height; the Germans took it for an aiming point and sowed the area with bombs. It was two hours before the sweating, cursing firemen got it down.
The news came to Boden forty hours later, in this way. H.M.T. Grimsby Emerald came in at about seven in the evening and dropped anchor off the trawler base. A lamp began to flicker from the signal tower. The captain stood in Monkey’s Island beside the signalman and spelled it out.
He turned to the lad. “All right. Nip down and tell Mr. Boden.”
The signalman went up to Boden on the forecastle. “Captain said to tell you, sir, there’s been a signal. You’ve got to report to the captain’s office, on shore. They’re sending the launch out for you.”
Boden glanced ashore; already the launch was casting off from the quay. “My Christ!” he said. “I’d better go and get clean.”
Ten minutes later, in a collar and his best monkey jacket, he slipped over the side into the launch. He landed at the harbour steps still straightening his tie. There was an officer he knew slightly waiting for the ferry, an R.N.V.R. serving in Rodney. To this chap Boden remarked “Baa,” according to the custom of the service at that time, and passed on to the Naval Centre and the office of the captain (Mine-sweepers).
In the outer office he asked the secretary, another R.N.V.R. officer: “What does he want me for?”
“I don’t know, old man.” Instinctively, Boden knew that he was lying.
He went into the inner room, his hat under his arm, and there was his father, standing with the captain.
“Eh, lad,” George Boden said directly. “I’ve brought bad news, and you must take it like a man.”
And then, in plain unvarnished terms he told him what had happened.
The next few days passed in a horrible, unreal dream. He went in to Edinburgh with his father and they caught the night train down to London. His captain with unobtrusive naval kindness had telephoned to C.-in-C. Rosyth, the admiral himself, explaining the position, who in turn had telephoned demanding sleepers at an hour’s notice, so that on that first night young Boden had a chance of sleep. His father dosed him well with allonal, and he slept fitfully to London.
They went to Dover Street and saw the blackened ruin of three houses, with men working to dislodge the crumbling, tottering walls in clouds of dust and filth. They went to the A.F.S. station, a garage in a near-by mews, and there they interviewed an awkward, embarrassed man of fifty with grizzled grey hair, still wearing a tin hat and a dirty boiler-suit. They gave a statement to the police for records. There was nothing more that they could do in London, and they went home to Yorkshire.
Oliver Boden stayed there for three days. Then, because there was nothing for him to do there, and because he ached to get away from everything, he took the train north to Port Edgar, and reported back for duty.
He made two more sweeps in Grimsby Emerald. They anchored off Elie, on the north side of the Firth, one evening; the captain let a few of the ratings go on shore to stretch their legs. He pressed Boden to go with them, but the boy refused.
“I don’t feel like it, sir, if you don’t mind,” he said awkwardly.
The late bank manager went himself, and walked about the little greystone town for an hour, and had a drink at the hotel. And coming back on board in the twilight, he saw Boden standing alone up in Monkey’s Island, and went up to him.
“Fine night,” he said, for want of something to say. “Anything doing?”
“No, sir.” The boy hesitated, and then said: “Sir, would you mind very much if I put in to leave the ship?”
The older man said: “I should mind the hell of a lot. Probably help you over the side with the toe of my boot.” Boden smiled faintly. “Still, I’d probably get over it. If that’s what you want, I’ll see the captain for you, if you like. What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know. But I want to get away from here.”
The other nodded. “I know. Not much fun going on shore.”
“No, sir.”
Two days later he was saying the same thing to his captain in the Naval Centre at Port Edgar. “I don’t like coming on shore here, sir,” he said awkwardly. He was flushing, and fumbling with his cap. “Do you think I could get in some ship going overseas?”
“I don’t know about that. Sit down, Boden. Have a cigarette.” He made the boy comfortable, and a little more at ease. “You’ve only been in trawlers, haven’t you?”
“Yes, sir. I was in a ship called Harebell before this.”
“I remember,” said the captain directly. “She was sunk. You haven’t had much luck.”
“No, sir.”
“I don’t think you’ll get overseas at once, Boden. You’re not a gunner, and you’re not a navigator. You’re a trawler officer. I tell you what I can do for you, though. I can put you forward for an anti-submarine course, and you can go on in an A/S trawler on the west coast somewhere. Would that suit you, do you think?”
“I’d like that, sir.” Boden hesitated, and then said: “I’d like to do something a bit more active than just sweeping up mines all the time.”
The older man nodded. “If you go in now for anti-submarine work, an
d if in a year’s time you still want to go overseas, you probably won’t have much difficulty in getting a destroyer or a corvette, as a qualified A/S officer. I think that’s your best course.”
They talked about it for a time, and the senior officer gave him a cup of tea. In the end:
“All right, Boden,” said the captain. “I’ll put you in for that course right away. You’ll probably be going in two or three days’ time — I’ll let you know.”
The young man got up to go. “I’m terribly sorry to be leaving,” he said awkwardly.
“I’m sorry to lose you, Boden,” said the other. “You’ve done very well, and I shall say so in your record. I’m very sorry that you’ve had this bad luck. I think you’re doing right to make a change.”
“Thank you, sir.”
A week later he left Grimsby Emerald and travelled to a far part of the country, to a place that he had never seen before, where nobody knew anything about him. Here he began his anti-submarine course, and for a month he learned the technicalities of Asdic and of depth charges, and of the methods of attack. He passed out well, and found himself with a second stripe upon his arm, a full lieutenant. Having been in two ships already, and been sunk in one, he found himself regarded as an officer of some experience.
He was posted to a trawler based on Dartmouth, H.M.T. Gracie Fields. His captain was another officer of the last war, a printer in civil life, who ran a little business of his own in Exeter. He was a pleasant, easy-going man and reasonably competent. Boden settled down to his new work with him quite happily; that was in November, 1940.
The work absorbed him; the long hours of watching, hunting, were a pleasure to him and an occupation for his mind. Three or four times in those first winter months they made a contact and dropped depth charges with indeterminate results. Once, with an M.L. and another trawler to assist, they kept the contact for two hours, and started leaks in their own ship with the continual detonations of their charges. They produced a wide slick of oil upon the surface of the sea and a great mass of bubbles in the dusk of a winter afternoon. The water was too deep for sweeping to investigate effectively, and at the conference on shore the team was credited with a “probable.” Young Boden got the keenest pleasure out of that.