Down The Hatch (14 page)

“Have you met your Boffin yet?” Commander S/M asked The Bodger as he arrived one morning.

“What Boffin?”

“The one you’re taking with you. The one you docked
specially
to fit an echo-sounder for.”

“He’s not coming until tomorrow.”

“It’s all been changed. He’s joining you this morning and he’s going to stay with you for about two months, while you amble down to the Equator and take a few readings for him. Don’t ask me what sort of readings. I was on the blower to Barwick & Todhunters last night and they say they’re sending someone who’s been in submarines before. So he should be fairly well house-trained.”

Barwick & Todhunter’s representative could fairly be described as home-trained. He was at that moment standing at the end of
Seahorse
’s gangway, waiting for the stream of sailors carrying bags of potatoes to die down so that he could cross himself. He himself carried a small hold-all bag and a slightly larger black box. He was dressed in a black jacket, striped trousers, an Old Harrovian tie, a white carnation in his button-hole and a black homburg hat. On raising his hat as he stepped on to
Seahorse
’s casing he revealed smoothly brushed blond hair, a pink complexion and an air of politely-concealed dismay. He gave Wilfred, who met him on the casing, the impression that he had come expecting to stay for the week-end but had, by some monstrous social mischance, mistaken the time, the date, and the place. He shook hands with Wilfred warmly and produced a card.

“Mr Lancelot Sudbury-Dunne.”

“How do you do,” said Wilfred. “I’m the First Lieutenant.” Wilfred eyed the small hold-all bag and the black box.

“Is that all you’ve got?”

“Yes,” said Mr Sudbury-Dunne. “And it’s quite enough, I think, to take in a submarine, don’t you?”

“Why yes,” said Wilfred. “I’m sorry I sounded surprised. It’s just that the last, um....”

“Boffin?” inquired Mr Sudbury-Dunne.

“. . . bloke we took to sea arrived twenty minutes before we sailed with seventeen packing cases of stuff. And when we got to sea he announced that he wanted three holes drilled in the pressure hull.”

“How trying for you.”

“If you just leave your stuff there I’ll get a sailor to take it down to the wardroom for you.”

“Oh, don’t bother,” said Mr Sudbury-Dunne and collecting his bag and his box he slid through the fore hatch like an eel. It struck Wilfred that they had been given something extraordinary in the way of boffins.

“I’m afraid the Captain’s not here yet,” Wilfred said, after he had introduced Mr Sudbury-Dunne to the rest of the officers. “He should be down very shortly.”

“Good. I’m anxious to meet him.” Mr Sudbury-Dunne was well aware that the Captain’s personality was of considerable importance to his experiments. He knew that his own presence had been imposed upon the ship and he would be a guest of the wardroom for two months. A hostile or even an uninterested captain could seriously hamper his work.

The Bodger was just as anxious to meet The Boffin. “I hope to God he’s not one of these pale-faced state-scholarship trogs who puke all over the wardroom table and tell me I’m running my ship all wrong.” The Bodger knew that he was stuck with this boffin for two months. “If you get up one morning and don’t like an officer’s face you can tell him to go away and put a turk’s head on it and paint it yellow. But with a boffin you’ve got to be polite, if only for the sake of the Navy Estimates.”

In the event, neither need have worried.

“Bodger! “

“Dan! “

Mr Lancelot Sudbury-Dunne was no ordinary boffin. He was an old friend and drinking partner of The Bodger’s. They had once suffered together under Black Sebastian. In spite of his faultless social appearance. Mr Lancelot Sudbury-Dunne was a man after The Bodger’s own heart, so much so that he had earned the nickname of Dangerous Dan. The wardroom were greatly relieved to hear it. Plainly Dangerous Dan could be told to take his face away and put a turk’s head on it and paint it yellow, just like anyone else.

The Bodger was delighted to see his friend again and a little remorseful over his remarks about boffins.

“I take back all I said about boffins, Dan,” he said.

“That’s all right, Bodger. We’re a pretty thick-skinned lot.” Dangerous Dan, on his part, was just as pleased to see The Bodger, although he was secretly overawed by The Bodger’s present status as the commanding officer of a modern submarine.

“If it wasn’t for that dirty laugh, Bodger, I would hardly recognize you,” he said. “You’re looking so prosperous! Shades of Black Sebastian. He didn’t hold out much prospect for the future for either of us, did he?”

“As a submariner,” The Bodger quoted, from memory, “this officer is earnestly recommended for duties with the Fleet Air Arm. That’s what he wrote about me! But to get back to the main thing Dan, what exactly do you want us to do on this trip?”

“Well, it’s like this.” Dangerous Dan’s manner became precise and business-like. “As you probably know, everybody is looking for the big technical break-through in submarine detection, though nobody knows what form it will take yet. But first of all, we’ve got to know a lot more about the sea itself. After all, if you were hunting leopard or something you would be a bloody fool if you didn’t take the trouble to find out about the sort of country where it lived. And so with submarines. Do you know, most of the earth’s surface is covered in water and we know almost damn all about it! Just take the average chart. Have you got a chart handy, Pilot?”

“Any particular chart, sir?” said Gavin.

“Any one will do and I’m Dangerous Dan to you.”

“O.K., Dan.” Gavin went to his locker and pulled out the first chart which came to his hand. It was a small-scale chart of the Western Approaches.

“Just the job,” Dangerous Dan said briskly. “Now, just look at all these soundings here. They look impressive enough and obviously someone in the past has been to a lot of trouble getting them. But as you go more than a hundred miles or so from land the soundings are spread out in lines, each sounding miles from the next one and each line miles from the next line. Anything might be happening between those soundings. It’s like trying to find your way through a dark wood using every other eye once every quarter of an hour. Then there’s tides. You all know that the tidal streams the average Joe uses on the surface bear no relation at all to the tides at five hundred feet or even at a hundred feet. In the Straits of Gibraltar for example, there are two or three different streams all on top of each other.”

“I know just what you mean,” said the Bodger. “Do you remember that time with Black Sebastian when we’d been dived for hours and hours and I was trying to make a landfall on the Needles? I can still hear his voice when he looked through the periscope. ‘Pass the message to the Navigating Officer, Portland Bill loud and clear dead ahead’!”

Dangerous Dan chuckled. “I believe Black Sebastian was a little shaken himself. It’s to try and avoid that sort of thing that we’re making this trip. What we’re trying to get is a three-D, wide screen, stereophonic picture of the sea. It’ll take years to do, of course, and I have a nasty feeling we haven’t got years to do it in, but anyway Bodger, I’ll be doing all the work. Even I haven’t got anything to do until we get down to the Equator. It should be a bit of a jolly for you lot.”

Seahorse
sailed on a calm summer evening, with St. Catherine’s light winking in the dusk and the lights of passing ships glowing like jewels. The engines threw out two long trails of vapour which lay on the water without dispersing. Overhead, the stars lit the sky down to the horizon where the red glow of the sun still lingered. It was the weather the sailor knows as “Signing-On Weather”.

Gavin read the weather reports and prophesied a falling barometer, high seas and head winds but day after day the miraculous weather persisted. As the reports deteriorated, the weather improved. Each morning the sun rose behind a shining veil of low cloud, shone all day in a cloudless sky, and set in a spectacular display of colour.

“If you saw that on a postcard,” Dagwood said of one sunset, “you’d call the artist a liar.”

The Bay of Biscay was like a plain of mobile glass, with a long swell running from the Atlantic.
Seahorse
rose and dipped steadily, the water foaming and tumbling off her bows and washing along the ballast tanks. The sea seemed to have a hypnotic effect upon Dangerous Dan. He spent hours at a time studying the water welling up and pouring away again, his eyes fixed on the changing surface of the sea as though he were already trying to penetrate its depths.

The Bodger made his landfall on the Canaries at dawn. The islands appeared magically through the morning mist, their heads wreathed in thin layers of cloud and their bases jutting suddenly from the sea, like the bastions and turrets of a sorcerer’s castle. It did not seem possible that such islands could be inhabited by humans; they were more like the homes of fairies who played in the gardens which had once tempted Hercules.

Seahorse
fuelled and collected mail at Las Palmas and then set out for the tropical Atlantic. There, it was as though the sea claimed the ship for its own. Dolphins shot up and over in beautiful curves through the wake. The startling water spouts of whales appeared on the beam. Flying fish hopped and scattered at the bows and sea-birds swooped, wailing and watchful, around the bridge. At night
Seahorse
swam through a milky sea of phosphorescence. Fire streamed along the hull leaving sparks which still shone after the wave had receded. The bow wave was an ever-renewing ridge of silver light which flashed and sparkled as it broke and opened out from the ship.

Down below, the ship’s company passed the time between watches sleeping, arguing and playing crib, draughts or uckers. The morning rum issue, the afternoon sleep and the evening film-show were the main events of the day. The Petty Officer Telegraphist produced a daily news sheet from the B.B.C. but the items seemed to the men in
Seahorse
to come from another world; it was difficult to relate the events described in them to
Seahorse
, a solitary ship upon a wide sea.

The wardroom grew tired of uckers and tried Monopoly but after the Midshipman had won the first three games The Bodger banned it as bad for discipline.

“I’m not going to have my wardroom’s morale undermined by a bloody stupid parlour game,” he said. “Besides, Mid, it brings out all your worst instincts.”

The wardroom returned to uckers, where The Bodger was on more familiar ground. Uckers bore a family resemblance to ludo but Submarine Uckers, and particularly The Bodger’s Uckers, was to ludo as National League baseball is to girls’ school rounders. It was a merciless game. It was mandatory to sneer at a losing opponent and to accuse a winner of cheating. The game lent itself to psychological warfare. Innuendo and insult could reduce an opponent to a state where he could barely bring himself to pick up the dice. The Bodger and Dangerous Dan were experts.

Dangerous Dan introduced the wardroom to Chinese Chess. The winner was he who manoeuvred his opponent into taking the last match from three piles of varying size. Dangerous Dan won so consistently that The Bodger insisted on an explanation. The solution, expressed in binary notation, left The Bodger as baffled as before. Dangerous Dan took on the whole wardroom at Fan Tan, selling them the pack for a penny a card and paying tenpence for every card they succeeded in laying out. The wardroom only desisted when they had lost most of the remainder of their month’s pay and the ship’s welfare fund was beginning to be in jeopardy.

Dangerous Dan was the complete gamesman. Even Dag-wood, the wardroom’s acknowledged conversationalist, could not outploy him.

“You may be right,” said Dangerous Dan, while they were discussing road traffic. “I can only repeat what the Minister of Transport said to me . . .“

“I’ve always regretted,” he said, when they were discussing Lawrence, “that he didn’t sign my copy of
Lady Chatterley
for me . . .“

When the conversation ranged as far as Freud and Jung, Dangerous Dan clinched the social aspects of psychology with: “I’ve always been told that an
introvert
marries the first girl who’ll sleep with him and an
extrovert
marries the first girl who won’t.”

Though over-shadowed by Dangerous Dan in the broader issues, Dagwood had one particular game which he had perfected himself. It was called the Needle Game and was played between two players, Dagwood and his victim. The rules were simple. Dagwood won if he succeeded in provoking his opponent into a display of bad-temper or, better still, rage. His opponent won if he kept his temper.

Dagwood often tried Derek, though he was too amiable to make a good opponent. But Derek did have two
bêtes noire
on which he could be relied upon to comment strongly. One was Planned Maintenance, and the other Work Study.

“We don’t seem to get much time for maintenance these days, do we, Derek?” Dagwood remarked casually after lunch one day.

Derek raised his head warily from his pillow, like a bull catching the first sight of an intruder far away on the other side of the meadow.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I mean they never seem to give us any time to . . .”

Derek rose like a game-fish. “We’ll never get submarine maintenance periods on a basis until they become a submarine commitment, like an exercise. The date of something like ‘Lucky Alphonse’ is sacred. Why shouldn’t a maintenance period be sacred as well? We should be like the air boys. If an aircraft’s routines are not up to date, it just doesn’t fly. If the day ever comes when a submarine is not allowed to
dive
because it’s routines are not up to date,
then
we’d see a difference! But it won’t happen. They arrange the programme first and any gaps they find they give to maintenance. Now shut up Dagwood and let me get some sleep for God’s sake. . . .”

Dagwood chalked up the exchange as a draw and lay in wait for his favourite opponent--Wilfred.

Wilfred was almost impregnable as far as the Needle Game was concerned but he had one vulnerable spot. As First Lieutenant, Wilfred was responsible for the sailors’ food. In practice the Coxswain ordered, administered and mustered the food but in theory Wilfred was the ship’s catering officer and responsible to the Captain. Wilfred took his supervisory duties very seriously.