by Nevil Shute
About the girls they were completely at sea. Each of them felt, inarticulately, that only the very best was good enough for the girls, but what the best was they were not quite sure. Henry Chalmers, turning in his perplexity to the guidance that had never failed him, came to the conclusion that since the best goods cost most money, Crowdean School near Lympne, on the south coast of England, must be the best school in the country for girls. He sent all three of them there. They came out four years later polished till they shone, but thanks to the sturdy simplicity of their parents, quite unspoilt.
Boden, yielding in his perplexity to the opinions of his wife, sent his two to an academy for young ladies in Harrogate. Then, at the age of sixteen, he sent them to a finishing school at Lausanne in Switzerland, for two years. He spent the next ten years kicking himself for a mug.
Oliver Boden, the second son, was born in 1916. He started working in the business in the autumn of 1934 when he was eighteen years old; to console him for the loss of liberty he was given a Norton motor-bicycle, capable of an incredible speed. The first day he had it he rushed round on it to show it to Marjorie Chalmers, then fifteen years old and home on holiday from Crowdean. He always wanted to show things to Marjorie. She went off on the back of it with him far up into the hills, to Malham Tarn among the bleak crags and the moorlands. It was a fine, exciting day. They were late home for tea.
During the years that followed he showed Marjorie a twelve-bore shot-gun, a Harley Davidson motor-bicycle, a trout fly-rod, a Jantzen swimming-suit, a Brough Superior motor-bicycle, the inside of the Piccadilly Hotel in London, a Morgan three-wheeler, most of the dance-halls in Yorkshire, and how not to fly an aeroplane. He showed her everything he got as soon as he got it, and she was always interested. The parents looked on with amused resignation. It was quite obvious to everybody what was going to happen, and most satisfactory. The wool trade was built up on unions like that.
It was in 1936, I imagine, that he took to racing outboard motor-boats. He had a little thing more like a tea-tray than a boat that the two of them could just squeeze into, with a very large racing engine pivoted on the stern. To get it moving Boden used to open out the engine full and then stand up and rock it up on to the step, while Marjorie lay out upon the curved deck of the bow to bring the weight forward. Then it got going and they grabbed the steering-wheel, slipped back on to the thwart, and went flying down the river to the first turning-point. They raced a good deal, that summer. Frequently they upset at a turn and had to swim ashore; each time that happened the engine took a long drink of cold water at six thousand revs and had to be rebuilt. They thought it was tremendous fun.
Islanders have curious traits in them that break out in the oddest places. Neither the Bodens nor the Chalmers ever had much truck with the sea; for generations they had lived and worked in the West Riding. But presently it came to Oliver and Marjorie that there were more amusing ways of playing with the water than just flying over it upon a skimming-dish before a racing engine. Somewhere or other they saw a fourteen-foot International sailing dinghy, a beautiful, neat, delicate little thing, and longed for it with all their souls. The skimming-dish went on to the scrap-heap; in 1937 Boden got his dinghy and learned to sail it, more or less, before Marjorie came home for the holidays. It was another thing for him to show her, that, and a new electric razor.
Racing the dinghy took them to the tideway, and they began to learn something about mud and moorings and gum-boots. And presently, one day in September, they were staring thoughtfully at a two-and-a-half-ton sloop, a little yacht in miniature. She was Bermudian-rigged and had a little engine and a little cabin with a little galley, and berths for two. She was not much bigger than the dinghy, really.
“You could go anywhere in her,” Oliver said thoughfully “I mean, you could sail her round to Bridlington or Scarborough.”
Marjorie said: “Do you think one’d be sick?”
“I don’t know. I wouldn’t mind trying. You’d have to have charts and things.”
“And a sextant,” said Marjorie. “That’s what they have in books.”
They crawled all over it, opening all the lockers, examining the warp and anchor, enormous to their eyes. They were enchanted with the little boat. “It would be good fun to have a thing like this,” said Oliver. “Fancy anchoring off somewhere for the night, and getting up and cooking breakfast in the morning!”
“All very well for you to talk like that,” said his young woman. “I’d never hear the last of it from Mummy.”
They stared at each other in consternation. Both of them realised that they were up against a major difficulty. They always had done things together in the holidays, ever since they could remember. One day, they both knew, it was extremely probable that they would marry, but that time was not yet. It seemed such a soft, unenterprising thing to do to go and marry the kid next door, just because you’d known each other all your lives.
“We could get over that one somehow,” said Boden unconvincingly. “Anyway, there’s an awful lot of day sailing we could do.”
The International dinghy went, and by the Christmas holidays he had his little yacht. She was all new and shining, with stiff white sheets and halliards, and tanned sails. She was laid up that holiday, but they had fun with her all the same. They called her Sea Breeze, a name which they considered was original, and were only slightly dashed when someone showed them seven others in Lloyd’s Register. They bought charts of the Humber and the Yorkshire coast, and binnacles, and patent logs, and signal flags, and a foghorn, and distress flares, and all the books that they could find in Yorkshire dealing with yacht cruising. They had a fine time that holiday, quite as good as if they had been sailing.
Sea Breeze was laid up at Hornsea, rather more than eighty miles from Ilkley. If anything, that made her more attractive still. Two or three days each week—the firm was generous to young Oliver Boden during the school holidays—he would get up at half-past six and drive over to Ilkley. A sleepy maid would let him into the big greystone house, and Marjorie would come down and they would drink a cup of tea. And then they would start off. He had a little Aston Martin at that time, a two-seater very low upon the ground and capable of a high speed, pretty with French blue paint and chromium plate. In the half-light they would set off with a thunderous exhaust and step on it to York, where they used to stop for breakfast at the Station Hotel. Then on to Hornsea, to paddle about in gum-boots all the day, painting and varnishing and doing minor carpentry. They would have tea in Hornsea and be back in Ilkley by seven o’clock, in time to change their clothes and join a party to go dancing at the Majestic in Leeds. They were never tired.
The Easter holidays came round, and the fitting-out season, and the spring. They got Sea Breeze afloat before Easter, and for a week the firm saw nothing of young Oliver. He was over at Hornsea every day, ecstatic at his new possession, and every day Marjorie went with him, because there was always something new that he wanted to show her. And if he wanted to show her something, she just had to go. It always had been like that, ever since they could remember.
But there were complications now.
It occurred to Oliver Boden that his Marjorie had changed, disturbingly. All his life he had taken her for granted; she was just Marjorie, somebody that he might marry one day if he couldn’t find anybody more exciting and if she didn’t marry someone else. He could hardly have described her, unless to say that she had short brown hair and danced quite well. He knew she smoked De Reszke minor cigarettes, because that was what he paid her when he lost bets with her, and he knew that she liked ices, but that was all he really knew about her tastes.
Now, rather to his own embarrassment, he found himself glancing furtively at her long, slim, silk-stockinged legs as she got into the car, at the line of her figure, and at the nape of her neck. She had filled out since Christmas and had changed a lot; she was nearly nineteen and she was leaving school at the end of the summer term. She was learning to wear pretty clothes. She was sti
ll the same old Marjorie, but Boden was forced to admit that she was turning into a very pretty girl, and a most disturbingly attractive one. He did not know what might not happen if the night was warm, and the moon shining on the water, and soft music in the distance; certainly something that he had never before associated with Marjorie.
It was all very difficult.
They did a good deal of sailing together during the Easter holidays, in short, timid ventures of an hour or two on calm days between Hornsea and Bridlington, and they did a good deal of dancing. Then Marjorie went back to Crowdean in the south to complete her education, and Boden began to venture farther each week-end upon the deep. Sometimes he took young Freddie Chalmers with him, Marjorie’s brother, but Freddie was frankly bored by sailing and only came for the sake of driving the Aston Martin. By the end of the summer term they had worked the little yacht round to Brough haven, in the Humber. That was in the summer of 1938.
Marjorie came home then for good, and as soon as Oliver Boden set his eyes on her he knew, deep down inside him, that there would probably be trouble before the summer was out. Marjorie’s mother had the same feeling, and for all I know Marjorie had it herself, but nobody seemed to be able to do much about it. They plunged into the usual round of dancing and sailing together. And presently, the inevitable happened. They went sailing too far down the Humber and got stuck on the mud at about seven o’clock at night, upon a falling tide. At least, that’s what they said.
They turned up at Ilkley the next morning at about ten o’clock looking rather sheepish. I do not know what Mrs. Chalmers said to Marjorie; I only know what Marjorie’s father said to George Boden in the pub that night.
He said: “Eh, George, what’s this I hear about your lad and my lass beating t’ starter’s pistol?”
“I dunno. Do you think they did?”
“I dunno. Do you?”
“I dunno.”
There was a long, slow pause. Two more tankards were pushed across the counter to them.
“Don’t like going home to-night,” said Henry Chalmers. “The wife’s got precious fussed about it all.”
“It’s all your lass leading my lad into evil ways,” said George Boden. “He’d never have done a thing like that upon his own.”
“He couldn’t have,” said Mr. Chalmers simply. “But next time he wants to, I’d just as soon he didn’t pick my Marjorie.”
“I spoke to Oliver. He said they didn’t do nothin’. But who’s to tell?”
“That’s what Marjorie said to the wife. Flew into a proper temper when the wife suggested it, and said she wished they had.”
“Aye,” said George Boden. “So does young Oliver, I’ll be bound.”
They stood gloomily discussing it for a quarter of an hour. Finally common sense asserted itself.
“Well,” said George Boden, “either they did or they didn’t. If they didn’t, then there’s no harm done and the less said the better. If they did, well, they’re both right young folks and they’ll want to be married. I shan’t stand in their way.”
“I’d like to see you try it on,” said Mr. Chalmers, “if your young Oliver got my lass into trouble.”
So the row simmered down, but left behind an atmosphere of uneasy expectancy in both families. The old relationship between Marjorie and Oliver was obviously a thing of the past, and nobody quite knew what would succeed it.
And then ten days later, I’m blessed if they didn’t go and do it again. This time they hadn’t even got the decency to turn up early. They arrived home at three o’clock in the afternoon, arm-in-arm and beaming all over their faces in a most discreditable manner. They said cheerfully that they had been stuck on the mud all night, and they’d slept late, and they had talked things over and they wanted to get married.
“And about time, too,” said Henry Chalmers. His daughter turned and made a face at him.
They were married in October, 1938, when she was nineteen and he was twenty-two. They were married in Ilkley and there was a reception in the Magnificent Hotel in Harrogate, which most of the wool trade attended. They left from there in the little Aston Martin for their honeymoon in the Lakes, and everybody heaved a great sigh of relief that they were safely married without any scandal getting out.
They came back after a month, and settled down into a little flat in Harrogate. The Boden family had given Marjorie a little coupé as a wedding present, and this made her tree to run around and meet her family and meet her friends when Oliver was at work with the Aston Martin. They had a fine time in those last few months before the war. They ranged the country in their little cars, motoring, sailing, dancing, and having fun together with a young crowd of their friends. All Yorkshire, and all life, was open wide for them.
Then the war came. A war is not at all a bad time for young people; it brings movement to them, travel, and adventure—all the things that young people long for. In the Yorkshire set that the Bodens moved in there was great excitement. Most of the young men wanted to go into the Air Force and be pilots; Oliver Boden was unusual in that he plumped for the Navy. He knew a little about navigation and the tides by this time, and the thought that one day he might rise to command a trawler as a naval officer thrilled both Marjorie and Oliver. A trawler was a real tough, man-sized job; better than sitting in a mouldy aeroplane and dropping things.
He got his commission in October, 1939, and went down to Brighton for his training, to a large, new municipal casino newly christened H.M.S. King Alfred. Marjorie went with him and stayed in a hotel on the sea-front which was his billet, thrilled to the core with all the uniforms and signs of war at sea. For the five weeks it took to turn him into a naval officer they had a lovely time. The work was not too strenuous and he could spend each evening with her in their billet. They drank a good deal of beer and saw a good many pictures, and they met a great number of young R.N.V.R. officers from all corners of the world. They felt that they had never had such a good time before.
He passed out of King Alfred after five weeks, a full-fledged sub-lieutenant with a wavy golden ring upon his arm. He had put in for trawlers, and a trawler it was that he got, though not the sort of trawler that he had envisaged. He was posted to a very old, decrepit ship at Portsmouth that tended the buoys in the swept channel; her name was Harebell. She could do six knots after a boiler clean, not quite so much before it. She was commanded by a very old R.N.R. lieutenant who kept a little newspaper shop in Southampton in the days of peace, and her duty was to waddle out and replace buoys in the approaches to the harbour that had been blown out of place.
Young Boden knew it was a dud job, but it thrilled him to be doing it. He knew that it was an apprenticeship for better things. He went at it in the right frame of mind, humbly learning from his captain the rudiments of his trade—how to handle stiff wire ropes and how to handle ratings with a grievance; how to read a hoist of signal flags and Admiralty Fleet Orders.
Marjorie went with him to Portsmouth and lived in the Royal Clarence Hotel in some considerable luxury. Each morning he would have to go off at about seven o’clock unless he had had a night on, when he did not come home at all. Each morning she would walk down to the Battery and watch the ships going out; usually she would see Harebell waddle out at half the speed of other ships, with Oliver very noble in a duffle coat upon the bridge, or standing over men who worked with ropes and winches in the well. In the late afternoon she would walk down to meet him at the dockyard gate; then they would go back to the hotel and have a few drinks with their friends, and a grill, and then perhaps the pictures.
He went to Portsmouth in December, 1939. In April, 1940, Harebell was blown up, and sunk in three minutes.
Oliver Boden never had a very clear idea of what really happened. A couple of Heinkels had paid their nightly visit to the Solent to drop magnetic mines, and the trawlers had been out at dawn as usual and pooped three of them off. Harebell had pottered out in the forenoon to shift a buoy and Oliver was up upon the bridge with the skipper as t
hey passed the Elbow. He remembered saying “Starboard Five” down the voice-pipe, and then he glanced ahead. He saw the water cream on both sides of the ship beside the well, and he felt through the deck a tremendous jolt beneath his feet. He saw the well deck split, and a vast mass of water coming up towards him; then the blast took him and threw him back against the binnacle, breaking two ribs. He remembered falling from a height into the water, and a great pain in his chest, and the salt down in his lungs. Then he was up again upon the surface coughing and choking, and feebly trying to blow air into the life-saving waistcoat that Marjorie had given him to wear instead of a Mae West. There was the mainmast of the Harebell sticking up out of the water near to him, and eight men of a complement of twenty-one struggling to reach it with him. There was no sign of the skipper. A motor-pinnace picked them up in a few minutes, and took them all direct to Haslar Hospital.
Marjorie heard about it from the Captain of the Dockyard. She was having lunch alone in the hotel when she was called to the telephone, and suffered a succession of irritating commands to wait a moment, please. She could not understand who was calling, or what they wanted, but a vague apprehension grew in her. It could not be that anything had … happened.
Then Captain Mortimer himself came on the line. She had met him once at a sherry party, and she was rather frightened of him. He said: “Look, Mrs. Boden. We’ve had a bit of bother here this morning, I’m afraid. Your husband is in Haslar Hospital, but he’s not badly hurt.” There was a silence. “Are you there?”
She said: “I’m here. What was it—what happened?”
“I don’t want you to ask that, Mrs. Boden. You know how it is these days. I don’t talk about things that happen here, and you’ve not got to, either. Your husband’s got a couple of ribs broken, but they tell me he’s quite comfortable. You can see him for a very short time this afternoon at about four o’clock. Do you know where to go?”