Down The Hatch (21 page)

Some of the press deployed to interview members of the Ship’s Company but most of them made for The Bodger. The Bodger was ready for them.

“It was team-work that did it,” he said, solemnly. “Teamwork all the way.”

“Commander Badger,” said the Naval Correspondent of the
Daily Disaster
, “do you intend to take up motor racing seriously? Don’t misunderstand me, I mean you’ve won the Targa Mango but. . . .”

“I don’t intend to race again.”

“Commander Badger, is it true that you drove in this race as publicity for the Royal Navy?”

The Bodger thought very hard, very swiftly; this question had a curly, spiked tail.

“My team and I drove at the personal invitation of the President, as his guests.”

“Commander Badger,” said the editor of
Woman and Garden
coyly, “there’s a rumour of a romance between you and Senorita Alvarez. . .”

“Who’s she?”

“Come, come, Commander. The daughter of the Chief of Police.”

“Oh
her!
“ A delighted smile spread over The Bodger’s face. This was a moment for which he had waited all his adult life.

“No,” he said slowly, “we are just good friends.”

Whatever the reaction in the national press, The Bodger’s return was only a one day sensation in the Submarine Service. The Submarine Service had more important things to think about. The Reunion was due.

The Reunion was the submariners’ annual beano. Its date was sacred in every submariner’s diary; only death took precedence (and then only after the Mess Secretary had been informed). The Reunion had the same effect on submariners as the Bonnie Prince’s fiery cross had upon the clansmen. For it, they abandoned their wives and families. They left their desks at Lloyds, their farms in Dorset, their market gardens in Leicestershire, their bookshops in Winchester, and their garages in Croydon. They left their offices, their sales rooms, their boards, their spades, their benches, their psychologists’ couches and converged upon Portsmouth like a mass migration of thirst-crazed lemmings. The first of them began to assemble three days before the event and the last of them were not normally carried away until three days after it and while the Reunion was in progress the foreign exchange market could collapse in ruins, the Middle East flame in insurrection, earthquakes devastate the western hemisphere and the whole of England itself submerge under a tidal wave but all those who had ever been submariners would remain oblivious, gathered under one roof and pouring whisky down their assembled throats just as fast as it would drain away.

When they were all present, the submariners could claim at least one holder of almost every honour, medal and decoration in the Gazette. There were men at the Reunion who had fought a submarine through the nets and mine cables of the Dardanelles into the Sea of Marmara and watched a Turkish cruiser settle on the bottom. There were men there who had patrolled in a submarine in the shallow water, the sudden freshwater layers, and the short summer nights of the Skagerrak. There were men who had run blind through the minefields of the Java Sea with a magnetic compass, a stop-watch and several prayers. There were men who had been depth-charged constantly for a day and a half, who had heard a mine-cable scrape the length of the ship before swinging clear, who had swum seven miles to shore after their ship was mined, who had cleared unexploded bombs from the casing in broad daylight, and who had escaped from three hundred feet with buckets over their heads. They represented a weapon which, in its British guise, had borne the heat and burden of the war from the Atlantic to the Pacific by way of the Mediterranean, and which, in its American counterpart, had crippled the Japanese navy and ripped the bottom out of the Japanese mercantile fleet. It was also a weapon which, used by the enemy, had brought the United Kingdom itself within a few months of starvation.

“All I can say is,’' said Dangerous Dan, who was already on his fourth whisky, “you wouldn’t think it to look at them.”

Dangerous Dan had often noticed that the most distinguished submarine officers were also the scruffiest. “There’s normally a fly-button missing for every D.S.O.,” he said.

Dangerous Dan’s eye rested on the Senior Submariner present, a venerable and very distinguished Admiral whose uniform was encrusted with orders and who possessed a row of medals fourteen inches in length and forty years in time. The Senior Submariner was now wearing a very baggy and faded Glen check with scuffed leather elbow-pieces.

“As I see it,” the Senior Submariner was saying to a circle of clients, “submarines haven’t advanced a bit since I joined ’em. Not one bit! “

The circle of clients clicked their teeth deprecatingly.

“
You
sir,” the Senior Submariner said to a very young, fair-haired submarine C.O. with brilliant white teeth who had just taken over his first command. “What’s your top underwater speed now?”

“Nine and a half knots, sir.”

“What did I tell you! My first boat did ten! That was in the first world war! “

“We have advanced a little, sir, in many ways.”

“We’ve fitted
heads
in ’em now, if that’s what you mean. When I joined my first boat as Pilot there were no heads. Used to get pretty constipated, I can tell you. The Captain and I, he’s dead now poor fellow, used to sit out on either side of the tower in the mornings. One morning off the Scillies, I remember it well, we were sitting there, one on either side, when I heard a bloody great
thump
from the Captain’s side. ‘Well
done
, sir!’ I said. ‘Well done be buggered,’ he said, ‘that was my bloody binoculars!’”

The Reunion agenda had a reassuring permanence. A submariner returning after many years abroad would find the same people observing the same ritual as on his last visit. The programme was simple. It began with drinks, continued with a speech by the Senior Submariner, more drinks, a speech by the Admiral, more drinks, perhaps a speech by a visiting V.I.P. and ended with drinks.

The Senior Submariner made his speech as though he had left a lighted cigarette at the other end of the room and was anxious to get back to it. He welcomed everyone present to the Reunion, expressed his pleasure at seeing them there, hoped they would all enjoy themselves and stood down to a comfortable and thankful volume of applause.

“That’s what I like about old Glueballs,” Dangerous Dan said to Wilfred irreverently. “He always cuts it short.” “There’s something I’ve wanted to ask you for a long time, Dan. Does the Prime Minister really shoot over your land?”

“Of course not. We live in South Kensington. But I wasn’t going to let that young snob get away with it. Good heavens, there’s Black Sebastian! He looks more like Old Nick than ever. I wonder what he’s doing here?”

Black Sebastian’s presence at the Reunion had already caused a great deal of comment; his presence there was almost as incredible as the conversion of St Paul. He himself seemed to be aware of the incongruity and was wearing the artificial smile of a medieval torturer unaccountably forced to mix socially with his victims. He was talking to a man who had joined submarines at the same time but who had long ago left the Navy and taken up insurance.

“I can’t think why we don’t have far more Shop-Windows,” Black Sebastian was saying. “Why tell a sailor to look out for submarines when nine times out of ten he hasn’t the faintest idea what he’s looking for?”

“Quite,” said the insurance man politely.

“Whenever a submarine does a Shop-Window for me I have it raising and lowering periscopes, radar masts, and snort mast until every sailor in my ship’s company can tell me exactly which is which as soon as it breaks surface. It takes all day but I do it.”

“You always were an unreasonable sort of bastard, Sebastian,” said the insurance man, and walked away to get another drink.

Nearby, two very aged submariners were laughing into their whiskies.

“. . Nobby, you’ve told me that story every year for forty years. I didn’t think it funny forty years ago and I don’t think it funny now. . .”

Nobby stiffened.

“That’s . . . that’s exactly the sort of ill-mannered remark I expect from a man who never commanded anything better than a C-boat. . . .”

“I may tell you, the C-boats were the best submarines God ever gave this earth. No C-boat captain would have had you anywhere near him. . . .”

After which unforgivable remark, the two very aged submariners moved sharply apart and cut each other dead for the rest of the Reunion, as they had done every year for the past forty.

The Lamm of God had been cornered by another aged submariner.

“. . Then in 1923 I joined K.67 as Jimmy. God, what a boat! The captain, he died a good few years ago, was as queer as a nine-bob note. He used to read Omar Khayyam to the sailors every Sunday. He once shook Chief in the middle of the night because he’d just tried the whistle and thought it sounded A sharp instead of A flat. . .”

The Admiral’s Chief of Staff was hemmed in by yet another short-sighted and arthritic ancient.

“I’ll give you some advice, boy. It was given to me by me first captain before the war, the first war that was, and I never forgot it. It was me first watch and I was as nervous as a virgin. I had the periscope goin’ up and down like a whore’s drawers. Then I heard water rushing somewhere in the control room bilges. When I told the Captain he said ‘Go and see what it is you stupid clot.’ Always run towards the sound of the water, he said. There you are. Always run towards the water at sea and the whisky in harbour. You’re just starting out in life so I pass it on to you. So don’t you forget that, heh?”

“Actually, I’m thinking of retiring next year,” said the Chief of Staff mildly.

“Heh?”

The Bodger was talking to a man who had the dark, ruddy tan of one who habitually worked out of doors. The Bodger was having a busy Reunion. It was some years since he had attended and he had many friends there who came up to shake hands and demand the full story of the Targa Mango. The Reunion also gave The Bodger some moments of nostalgia; it seemed a long time since his first Reunion, when he and Commander S/M had removed the Admiral’s trousers.

“It seems a long time since the first time, Paddy, doesn’t it?” The Bodger said.

“Like last century.”

Paddy was wearing a shabby Cheviot tweed and black boots. He twisted his neck from side to side occasionally as though it was not often he wore a collar. He had long dark sideburns, a broad fleshy nose, and looked like a poacher. He had been a member of The Bodger’s term at Dartmouth and now farmed a hundred acres in Shropshire.

“How’s the farm going now?”

Paddy shrugged. “So so. You can never tell with a farm. It takes about twenty years before you can really say. That’s if you don’t go bust in the first five. One thing is certain,-I work a damn sight harder now than I ever did in the Service. Do my eyes deceive me, or is that Black Sebastian over there?”

“Yes. I was wondering what he was doing here myself.”

“
I
wonder how he ever lived as long as this. If ever there was a candidate for a quick shove over the side on a dark night, it’s him. But tell me, Bodger, what’s your future now?”

“I don’t know. I was all set on retiring but all of a sudden this job in
Seahorse
dropped out of the blue. . . .”

“I heard about that. What actually did happen in that motor race. . .”

Black Sebastian was talking to the Admiral.

“. . I noticed when I was in the Med during the war that submarine losses followed a clear pattern. It was like a skiing holiday. You either break your leg on the first day or the last day. When a boat first came out, the first couple of patrols were the anxious ones. They were either so cautious they got thumped without ever knowing what happened or the Captain had been seeing too many Errol Flynn films and got thumped thinking he was God’s gift to the war effort. Then they seemed to get into their stride and all was well. After about a year, the losses went up again. The Captain was over-confident or just plain worn out. I can see the same sort of thing happening again. . . “

“Sir?”

The Chief of Staff appeared at the Admiral’s elbow. The Admiral started, as though from a deep trance.

“Oh yes. . . . My speech. . . . Excuse me. . .”

The Admiral Submarines’ speech was the crux of the Reunion. The Admiral himself once described it as “a mixture of a prize-giving speech, a chairman’s annual report, and What The Stars Foretell.”

“Sssh,” said Dagwood to the group round him, “the Speech from the Throne.”

“Gentlemen,” said the Admiral, “while I was preparing this speech the other day and turning over a few of the things I might say in my mind, I came across some notes left by a predecessor of mine who was Admiral here just after the First World War. What he said then is still true now. The same words still apply. . . .”

“Because we’re still using the same submarines,” a sardonic voice muttered, from the back.

“. . . He said: ‘I am convinced that the submarine has a greater future than any other weapon. I prophesy that one day the submarine will occupy the place the battleship holds now.’ You may think those unbelievably intelligent sentiments for an Admiral. . . .” The Admiral paused for laughter. “. . . But they must have seemed the words of a lunatic thirty years ago. They were said at a time when the Navy was sinking towards its lowest ebb since the reign of Charles II, when there was a strong move in international circles to ban the submarine altogether, as being
unfair
. That particular Admiral’s listeners must have thought the old boy was a little touched in the head. He was indeed retired very soon afterwards. But now, those words are coming true. They are no longer the mad pronouncements of a visionary. They are almost a cliché. I believe that the nuclear submarine, which can fire a missile while still submerged, is the supreme strategical weapon. The world has seen nothing like it. The Submarine Service has been handed the instrument of Armageddon. It’s a sobering thought to me that the young men we’re now training as submariners may one day be in charge of a weapon which might have been measured for St Michael the Archangel. . . .”