Down The Hatch (2 page)

“How about you, Chief? All parts taking an even strain in your part of ship?”

“Yes, sir.”

Derek Masonwyck, the Engineer Officer, was the wardroom’s senior lieutenant and oldest inhabitant. He had joined
Seahorse
before she was launched, before she had even been a ship and was still several hoops of steel on a wet, windy slipway. He had stood by her while she grew from a shell into a submarine. He had watched and advised while she was transformed from an imaginary conception, represented by lines on thousands of drawings, into a solid entity with life and dimensions. He was a small man, with hunched shoulders as though from much crouching in the basements of submarines. He alone of the wardroom had known The Bodger when he had last been in submarines and while he remembered The Bodger as an excellent fellow, he had yet to be convinced of his qualities as a submarine captain. The Bodger recognized that Derek would probably be the hardest member of the wardroom to win over.

“Well, if nobody has any ideas about tomorrow, we’ll leave that and see how we get on on the day. The day after tomorrow we set off for Oozemouth to show the flag. The idea is to show the great British public that we actually have got a submarine that Nelson didn’t fly his flag in. . . .”

“Oozemouth?” said Dagwood Jones, the Electrical Officer. “I had a great-aunt who lived there once.”

Dagwood Jones had a sharp, ferret-like face and black hair brushed straight back on his head. A degree at Cambridge, at the Navy’s expense, had left him unusually erudite for a naval officer and he still wore a faintly donnish air, as though he were merely present in
Seahorse
’s wardroom to lend a little tone to what would otherwise have been classified as a thieves’ kitchen. He had a waspish sense of humour and a disrespectful choice of words which had often run him foul of senior officers.

“She used to breed miniature pekingeses and was a wizard at the horses,” said Dagwood. “She made a lot of money in half-crown bets. My mother told me the biggest wreath at the funeral was from the local bookie! “

“Have we got charts of Oozemouth and all that, Pilot?” “Oh yes, sir. Everything’s under control in that line.” Lieutenant Gavin Doyle, R.N., was the ship’s Navigating Officer and lady-killer. He had thick curly black hair, blue eyes, full lips and a reputation of which Don Juan himself might have been envious. Gavin’s taste for fast sports cars and svelte girl-friends provided gossip for most of the Wrenneries in the Service.

The last member of the wardroom, who had not spoken and who in fact very rarely spoke, was Rusty Morgan, the Torpedo Officer and the ship’s sports officer. He was a large, placid officer with red hair and a pleasantly freckled face. He was a particular friend of Dagwood’s, being as good-humoured as Dagwood was prickly. He had played rugby football for Dartmouth and for every ship and shore establishment he had served in since and was now on the verge of a Navy trial. The Submarine Service thought of him as a resoundingly good chap and the finest open-side wing forward to join submarines since the war.

“We’ll stay six days in Oozemouth,” The Bodger went on, “and sail immediately for Exercise ‘Lucky Alphonse’. That lasts three weeks. After that we get a fortnight’s maintenance here and then go off to the Equator somewhere to do something for the boffins, but that hasn’t been settled yet. And that’s as far as the Staff Office crystal ball goes.

By the way, Number One, I almost forgot to tell you, we’ve got a Midshipman R.N.V.R. joining us for training. He’s a National Serviceman and I understand he’s pretty green. I don’t know exactly when he’s joining. . . .”

There was a knock outside and the curtain was flung aside. The Bodger’s jaw dropped open.

Framed in the doorway was a very parfait young naval officer. His doe-skin uniform still had its virginal sheen, his patches were dazzlingly white, his buttons blindingly bright, his cap stiffly grommeted, and his face was composed in a grimace of concentration. Just visible behind him was the dazed countenance of the trot sentry.

The apparition gave The Bodger an elbow-cracking salute.

“Midshipman Edward Smythe, R.N.V.R., come aboard to join, sir!”

The Bodger recovered himself.

“Ah. Ah, yes. Do come in.”

“Aye aye, sir!”

The Midshipman seated himself in the one vacant chair and fixed The Bodger with a stare of furious zeal. The Bodger was disconcerted.

“Do take off your cap and hang it somewhere, old chap,” said Wilfred.

“Aye aye, sir! “

The Midshipman whipped off his cap and held it, peak forwards, on his lap. The Bodger winced.

“Slow down a bit, Mid. Relax. What are you going to have?”

“What am I going to have, sir?”

“Yes, what would you like to drink?”

“Oh. Can I have a glass of beer please, sir?”

“Beer?”

“
Beer?
” The wardroom looked at each other as though the Midshipman had asked for a draught of hemlock.

“We don’t keep beer,” Derek said mournfully. “We haven’t got room for it.”

“Can I have a glass of sherry, please, then?”

“Sherry?”

Dagwood began to search in the wine cupboard.

“Sherry, sherry, sherry. We’ve got a bottle somewhere. Derek won one in a raffle.”

“Have a horse’s neck, Mid,” said The Bodger kindly. “It’s brandy and ginger ale.”

“I’m afraid I’ve never tried brandy, sir.”

“How old are you, boy?”

“Twenty, sir. Nearly twenty-one.”

“Nearly twenty-one and you’ve never tried brandy,” said Dagwood.

The wardroom gazed at the Midshipman as though he were an aborigine newly emerged from the remotest depths of the Matto Grosso.

“Anyway, you’ve come just at the right time, Mid,” said The Bodger. “Always join a new submarine when the bar’s open. Softens the blow a bit. On both sides.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t come earlier, sir. I only heard about it as I was going into lunch. I didn’t get an appointment or anything. Someone just stopped me and told me.”

Wilfred snorted. “Good heavens, you never get appointed to any submarine. You just think to yourself, I think I’ll relieve old Charlie in the good ship Venus. So you stand up at the bar inboard and when anyone asks you what your next job is you just say, I’m going to relieve old Charlie in the good ship Venus. You keep saying that and after a month or two a little man calls you into his office and tells you, in the strictest confidence, that your next job is to relieve old Charlie in the good ship Venus! “

“Don’t you believe it, Mid,” said Dagwood. “If you do that you’ll find yourself in a boat day-running from the Outer Hebrides with a Quaker wardroom and a Captain S/M whose wife you insulted at the last Summer Ball! No, the answer is to get a monk’s habit and walk around the depot-ship, genuflecting every fifteen paces and chanting from S.G.M.s. . . .”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what S.G.M.s are, sir.”

“S.G.M.s stands for Submarine General Memoranda. Equal to but under the Koran. Every night at sunset the duty submarine staff officer climbs up to the roof of the Admiral’s office and rings a bell whereupon all submariners all over the world turn and face Gosport while the chapter for the day is read out. My God, you’d better bone up on S.G.M.s, Mid. When a submariner is buried lie’s laid out like a Crusader with his sword in one hand and his copy of S.G.M.s in the other! “

The Bodger saw the beginnings of panic in the Midshipman’s face.

“Now that we’re all together for the first time,” he said firmly, “I want to make a few points about the way I intend to run things in this boat. I don’t intend to do this again. I hope this will be the last time I’m going to talk in this rather pompous manner. As you all know, I’ve just come back to this after rather a long absence. I’m out of practice and I look to you for your full support while I get my eye in again. My way will probably be quite different to the way you did it in your last boats. But different boats, different cap tallies and I expect you to back me up in whatever I’m doing. I shan’t hesitate to replace any officer who doesn’t. In return, you can be sure that I will back you up all the way. I think that’s enough for general matters. Now for particular things. Drinking. Your wine-bills are no concern of mine unless you choose to make them so. All of you, except the Midshipman, are sufficiently experienced to know when enough is enough. When I first joined submarines we weren’t allowed to drink down in the boat while we were alongside the depot-ship. We had to do all our drinking up in the depot-ship where Commander S/M could keep an eye on us. I’m not suggesting any such arrangement nor do I intend to set an arbitrary limit on how much or what you drink but you can be sure that I’ll come down like a ton of bricks on any officer I find drunk on duty. Now, smoking while dived. Various captains have various ideas on this. I’m going to try a new way and abolish the old ‘One All Round’ idea altogether. I’m going to allow smoking anywhere in the submarine while dived except in the control room, where there will be no smoking at all unless the submarine is on the surface. I don’t know how it will work but we’ll see as we go along. In the meantime, as I said earlier, I’ve got a bit of leeway to make up and I shall need all your support. We shall have the eyes of the whole Submarine branch on us the whole time, but I think with a bit of luck we should have a very good commission.”

The wardroom picked up their glasses again. Fair enough, they said to themselves.

Wilfred leaned over the after end of
Seahorse
’s bridge, drew in a deep breath, and cupped his hands.

“
Midshipman!
What’s happening down there? What’s the delay?”

The Midshipman, very self-conscious in his brand-new yellow lifejacket, was still too new to have developed the submarine casing oflicer’s superb disregard for the oaths and exhortations hurled at him from the bridge. He looked up nervously.

“Just coming in now, sir,” he said.

“Well chop chop! We were supposed to be singled up five minutes ago.”

“Aye aye, sir.” The Midshipman turned to the leading seaman in charge of the party on the after casing, a squat, swarthy man named Gorbles who wore a prophet’s beard and had been handling berthing wires on the casings of submarines for years.

“Can we hurry it up please, Gorbles?”

Leading Seaman Gorbles spat leisurely into the creek. “All ready now, sir.”

The Midshipman relayed the news to the bridge and was rewarded by a furious scowl from Wilfred.

“Don’t you worry about them up there, sir,” Leading Seaman Gorbles said, confidentially. “They got nothing better to do. You be like the Torpedo Awficer, sir. When they shouts at you, tell ’em to go and take a running poke at a rolling doughnut.”

Seahorse
was ready for sea. Everyone was now waiting for The Bodger who, true to the tradition of submarine captains, was standing on the jetty, brief-case in hand, delaying going aboard his ship until the last moment.

An impressive committee had come to see The Bodger off, consisting of Captain S/M, Commander S/M, the duty staff officer, several heads of departments in the submarine depot, a few captains of other submarines, and a quartermaster with a bosun’s call waiting to pipe The Bodger over the side. “Sir Bedivere and friends,” said Dagwood, watching from the bridge.

The Bodger knew exactly why he had such a large and high-powered audience, gathered like vultures, to see him off. They were all curious to see how the new boy would shape. The Bodger suspected that they had all come half-hoping to witness a startling display of ship-handling. The Bodger could even see the figure of the Admiral, watching from his office window.

Commander S/M glanced at his watch. The other submarine captains assumed an expectant look. Captain S/M shook hands with The Bodger.

“Good luck, Bodger. It’ll all come back to you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The Bodger sensed the same expectancy when he reached
Seahorse
’s bridge, where Wilfred, Gavin, Derek and Dagwood were waiting to report their departments ready for sea. The Bodger knew by their faces that they too were curious to see their new captain perform. Even the sailors busy taking in the gangplank, although they moved unconcernedly, were plainly conscious of a change of management. Down below, the control room watch devoutedly hoped that the new boss would not hit anything.

“Right, Number One,” said The Bodger. “Let’s go.” Wilfred waved a nonchalant hand forward, and again aft. The breast ropes dropped. The Union Jack at the bows was struck. The Bodger seized his microphone.

“Slow astern port. Slow ahead starboard.”

The water whipped and frothed round the stern.

“Port screw going astern starboard screw going ahead sir,” intoned the Signalman. When the ship was manoeuvring alongside, it was the Signalman’s duty to stand at the back of the bridge and report to the Captain the actual-- as opposed to the ordered--movement of the screws. It was not a part of his profession that the Signalman took seriously; he had long been convinced that nobody listened to a word he said. “One of these days,” he frequently promised himself, “I’ll say, Both screws dropped off, sir, and I bet no
bastard
takes any --- notice.”

Seahorse
’s stern swung away from the jetty. The Bodger caught the swing and the submarine backed slowly out into the main harbour, the Signalman keeping up a steady monotone commentary. The committee on the jetty watched her go and then broke up, feeling vaguely cheated.

The Bodger could not have picked a more testing occasion for his first day. It was a fine sunny spring morning and everyone who had any business on the river was afloat. A dockyard tug shot across
Seahorse
’s stern as The Bodger completed his turn. A ferry passed close down the starboard side as The Bodger was lining up his ship for the harbour entrance where, just outside on the western sand-bank, a dredger was lying half-way across the channel. A motor boat crammed with sightseers darted in front of
Seahorse
’s bows as she picked up speed. The Bodger could hear the guide’s voice over his loudspeaker.