Down The Hatch (11 page)

“Good God, that’s the unkindest cut of all! You’d better tell them who we really are. And tell them those ships out there are really the Russians. Who’s the Officer of the Watch now?”

“I am, sir,” said Wilfred.

“I want to stay up here as long as it’s dark. Keep in the middle of this fishing fleet but try not to hit any nets or anything. You’d better try and smell of garlic and fish, too. Have you got a beret?”

“I’m afraid not, sir.”

“Pity. You’ll just have to hum a few snatches of the ‘Marseillaise’ now and then. Let me know if Black Sebastian comes too close or if he looks as though he’s got us. Dagwood, have you got your tape-recorder handy?”

“It’s in the wardroom, sir.”

“You’d better get it warmed up. I want to use it.”

Seahorse
remained inside the fishing fleet (contrary to Admiralty Instructions, but The Bodger was a desperate man) until dawn and then dived. Black Sebastian and his two henchmen probed cautiously along the fringes of the fishing fleet but their radar was defeated by the multitude of echoes and their sonar listening was confused by the water disturbances under the fishing fleet. The two henchmen moved out to seaward, pinging disconsolately as they went. Black Sebastian stayed with the fishing fleet, like a terrier refusing to leave a rat-hole. Just after dawn he was rewarded by a contact.

“Underwater telephone, sir.”

Black Sebastian lifted a weary head. “Put it over the bridge broadcast.”

There came a hollow roaring, as though Neptune himself were clearing his throat, and then unmistakably the throbbing of drums, the wailing of a clarinet and the cheeky metallic voice of a calypso steel band singer.

“
Where
did the naughty little flea go? Nobody know, nobody know! “

Black Sebastian glanced round his bridge team. They were all poised, ready to start the attack again.

“Where did the naughty little
flea
go? Nobody
know
, nobody know! “

The bridge action team tensed.

“Where did the
naughty
little flea go?
Nobody
know, nobody know! “

“Switch that thing off,” said Black Sebastian. “Pilot, give me a course to rejoin the Task Force.”

At breakfast time, The Bodger sat down to as fine a grilled sole as he had ever set eyes on. Two bottles of whisky had procured fish for breakfast, lobster for supper, and three bottles of a violent purple vin ordinaire.

“I’m very grateful to Black Sebastian,” The Bodger said. “If it hadn’t been for him we’d be sitting down to the same old bangers and train smash. It’s almost worthwhile meeting him again.”

But they did not meet Black Sebastian again. They did not in fact meet anyone again. One day they saw an aircraft pass low on the horizon and on another day they investigated a target which proved to be a whale factory ship, but the main battle had passed them by. From time to time they intercepted signals which plotted the path of the Task Force eastwards and northwards as the submarines, one by one, rose to attack it like dogs leaping at a bear. The rest of the time they spent waiting for the signal which would release them.

As soon as the magic signal was received, submarines popped to the surface all over the Western Approaches and set off determinedly towards hot baths, liquor and women. Most of them arrived together and the water around Spithead was soon churned into a foam by submarines of various nationalities queueing up to enter the channel, getting in each other’s way and sending each other fatuous signals.

Seahorse
joined the queue with her control room watch singing their home-coming song: “First the Nab and then the Warner, Outer Spit and Blockhouse Corner” led with great feeling by Able Seaman Geronwyn Evans, to the tune of Cwm Rhondda.

When The Bodger saw the milling throng of submarines he felt that he was among friends again. He had had a good exercise, for a new boy (The Bodger was sure that even his most jealous critics in the Staff Office would admit that) and it was good to be home again. The Bodger’s heart swelled. He wanted to be hospitable.

“When’s the Wash-Up?”

“Tuesday, sir,” said Wilfred.

“Tell the wireless office to make to all submarines in company: R.P.C.
Seahorse
, 1900, Monday. We’ll have a Wake. If we’re going to tell lies we might as well all tell the same one. Who’s that just ahead of us?”

“
Terrapin
, sir,” said Wilfred.

“Who’s driving her now?”

“Lieutenant-Commander Lamm, sir.” Lieutenant-Commander Lamm was one of the keenest captains in the submarine service, so much so that he was known as the Lamm of God. He had reasonably expected to be given the command of
Seahorse
himself.

“Make to Terrapin. You’re a Blue submarine, I’m a Pink submarine, do we both use the same toothpaste?”

The Bodger was enormously amused by his own joke. Looking at him, Dagwood was reminded of the schoolboy coming home for the holidays.

Meanwhile, the Signalman was occupied with his lamp. “From
Terrapin
, sir,” he said. “Negative. Pepsodent.”

The Bodger groaned. “My God, what can you do with a bloke like that? Ask him where the yellow went. . . . No, no forget it.
Now
, what have we here?”

The latest addition to the queue was a huge steel-grey vessel with blunt bows and a swollen body. The short Channel waves were sweeping over her casing. She was as plainly out of her element as a whale in a backwater stream.

“There,” said The Bodger, “goes the future. Actually, it’s the present now. This mighty vessel of ours is the biggest, fastest and most dangerous submarine we’ve got but compared with that ugly-looking lump over there we’re about as lethal as a baby’s bottle! “ The Bodger put up his binoculars. “That monstrosity is the biggest technical break-through since . . . since the discovery of the wheel. She can stay at sea as long as Moby Dick, she’s faster than a destroyer and she’s got a weapon that can blast across the Arctic Circle and blot out a whole city. They’ve pinched a bit of fire from the sun and put it inside that submarine.”

“Cor chase me old Aunt Fanny round the dockyard clock,” said the Signalman to himself, “the Captain’s a bloody poet! “

“Stop
muttering
, Signalman! “ said The Bodger.

Exercise “Lucky Alphonse” had been important enough--in its own way. It had provided a great many people with harmless employment and with justification for their existences. As Exercises went, it had been a fair success. But “Lucky Alphonse” was only a prelude and insignificant beside its aftermath, the Post-Exercise Analytical Discussion, known colloquially as The Wash-Up.

“Lucky Alphonse” had been a mock battle. The Wash-Up was a real and bitter struggle. It was the battleground of the Staff, the faceless officers who stood behind the Admirals, the authors of the indecipherable signatures on the minute sheets. The Wash-Up was not concerned with the security of nations, nor the exchange of tactical information nor the learning of lessons taught at sea but with the more urgent and personal matters of furthering reputations and consummating careers. Those officers who would have agitated for commands in wartime, in peacetime angled for staff appointments. Command in peacetime was too often the prelude to retirement. It was not fashionable to step on to one’s own bridge and take command of events. It was more profitable to stay ashore and create the events. A successful exercise was therefore not one which tested the defences of the nation at sea but one after which the entire staff were promoted.

There were no Orders for the Wash-Up. Only sham battles needed Orders. Real battles took their cue from a hint, from a judiciously-timed signal, from a face-saving suggestion or a tiny oversight in the opposition planning. The real battles did not take place in the sonar and radar control rooms but in the signal centres and the plotting floors. The sounds of victory were not uttered by gunfire but by the clatter of cryptographic machinery.

The Bodger took Wash-Ups, like everything else, in his stride.

“They’re all the same,” he said to Gavin, who was hard at work preparing
Seahorse
’s track charts and attack narratives. “You never get a word in edgeways anyway. The R.A.F. will be there in force. I sometimes wonder if the R.A.F. don’t keep a special Wash-Up Regiment. You never see them any other time. The Staff will be there, of course, unto the seventh generation. You can always tell them by their brief-cases and the Japanese binoculars slung round their necks. They’re the chappies who always know everything. They tell you all about radio reception conditions over the South Pole and what the correct recognition procedure is when you’re challenged by an Abyssinian flying-boat dropping shark repellent but they never tell you anything you really want to
know
, like who that dangerous lunatic was who nearly ran you down the second night out. Then there will be a few blokes like you and me who actually
did
the exercise, and a little man at the back who’s waiting to straighten the chairs and empty the ashtrays and get back home to his football pools. And that’s about all.”

The Wash-Up was held at nine a.m. in the Royal Naval Barracks cinema, the duty R.P.O. having first ejected a class of Upper Yardmen who had been waiting since a quarter to eight to see an instructional film entitled “The Ammeter”. The first arrivals were two staff captains of the Indonesian Tank Corps and the last were the Commander-in-Chief, Rockall and Malin Approaches and his staff who included a bewildered young man in a white coat with blue cuffs who had driven a van full of mineral-water bottles up to the Barracks wardroom and had been directed by the hall porter to the cinema along with everybody else.

By nine o’clock the meeting had taken shape. The first three rows bristled with the intelligent faces, clean collars, brief-cases, Japanese binoculars and aiguillettes of the Staff; they formed a barrier of erudition, culture and enthusiasm which it would be difficult to pierce. There was among their ranks much nodding, winking, and secret signs of conspiracy; they were the Magicians who sat pulling strings while their own Petroushkas capered about on the stage.

The next seventeen rows were occupied by R.A.F. officers. They were all moustached, all serious of face, and all holding a sheaf of papers. Behind them sat the hard core of the conference, the captains of
Little Richard, Great Christopher
and the guided-missile cruisers, Black Sebastian and the other escort captains, the Master of the fleet tanker
Wave Chiropodist
and several rows of ship’s officers who, through many sleepless nights, had made the Exercise work.

In the very back row, in an aura of alcohol, sat the submarine captains and their officers. The Bodger’s Pre-Wash-Up Wake had been a spectacular success. At midnight, the captain of the Italian submarine
Farfarelli
had executed a variant of the Limbo Dance which had fetched him up under the wardroom table where he lay babbling faintly of the waters of the Po; he was now leaning back in his seat staring at the ceiling, his face drawn in a mask of torment similar to that of Count Ugolino, who was trapped in the lake of eternal ice and condemned to gnaw upon the skull of his murderer for ever. At two o’clock in the morning, two very correctly dressed officers from the biggest technical break-through since the wheel had called on
Seahorse
to collect their captain, whom they knew affectionately as Ole Miss, who had by that time gone critical. Ole Miss was now sitting propped up at the arm-pits by his Navigating Officer and his Exec, beaming round him with a genial, if slightly vacant, smile. At three o’clock in the morning, the Lamm of God had politely taken his leave, steered himself towards his cabin, and solemnly shut himself in the wardrobe where he spent the rest of the night; he was now sitting bolt upright at one end of the row, looking carefully to his front as though he were afraid that any sudden movement would topple his head from his shoulders. The Bodger himself was flanked by Wilfred, Gavin and Dagwood, all four concentrating on preventing their eyelids meeting.

The proceedings were opened by the Commander-in-Chief, Rockall and Malin Approaches, under his abbreviated international title of CincRock, in whose domain a great part of the Exercise had taken place.

CincRock hated international maritime exercises and in particular he hated “Lucky Alphonse” because he had been unable to go to sea for a single day of it. He had, in his own words, been “stuck in a damned beer-cellar gawking at a bloody stupid Monopoly board”. CincRock was a plain seaman who had had greatness thrust upon him. He had served almost continuously at sea until he was promoted to Captain when the shortage of ships forced him for the first time in his life into the Admiralty. There, he was an innocent set adrift in a paper jungle and his immediate impulse had been to retire from the Service. But CincRock possessed one of the most priceless assets of a successful naval officer; he was adaptable. In a paper jungle, he became the most ferocious paper tiger of them all. His other qualities, of remembering what was said last week without looking at the minutes, of dealing with papers within twenty-four hours of receipt, and of catching up with the latest scandal in the pubs of Whitehall, made him tolerated, respected, and then feared. The men who sat at desks and administered the Navy began to speak of him with awe, as a naval officer who had civilized the civil servants.

Nobody suspected that CincRock paid only lip service to Whitehall. None of the men who gazed so benignly at him over their committee tables were aware that CincRock was their implacable enemy. It was CincRock who was responsible for the closure of the forty-one stores depots scattered through the United Kingdom which had long since ceased to issue stores and were quietly administering themselves. It was CincRock who obtained a new class of ship for the Navy by unobtrusively crossing out the title “Cruiser” and substituting “Destroyer” as the relevant correspondence passed through his office (the Treasury subsequently decided that the country could afford a new class of destroyers but not cruisers).