Down The Hatch (3 page)

“. . . Here we have a bit of luck, ladies. Here we have H.M.S.
Seahorse
, the Navy’s latest submarine. You can see the ship’s company all wearing life jackets in case the submarine sinks. . .”

Outside in the main channel, The Bodger twice had to slow down as sailing boats tacked across his bows.

“All right for some,” said the Signalman bitterly, as he watched a yacht glide by. “Not like Jolly John, in Daddy’s yacht here.”

By the time
Seahorse
cleared the outer buoy, The Bodger could feel sweat on his back, his legs were aching, and he realized with some surprise that his whole body had been fiercely tensed, with every muscle knotted, since
Seahorse
left her berth. When he came down from the bridge, leaving Gavin on watch, The Bodger felt as though he had run a Marathon.

“Coffee, sir?” said the Steward, as The Bodger sat down.

“That’s the most civilized suggestion I’ve heard today.”

“Just coming up, sir.”

The Steward was the ship’s company’s equivalent of Gavin Doyle. He was a dramatically good-looking young man with curly blond hair and a dimple on his chain. His face had a quality of innocence which, framed in a sailor’s uniform, made nine out of ten girls feel, as they expressed it in their letters, funny all over. The Steward’s private mail was the largest of any on board and was almost entirely composed of letters written on green, pink, or pale blue paper, perfumed, and with crinkled edges. They earned for the Steward the nickname of Mr Wonderful and gave the ship’s company, to whom Mr Wonderful passed most of his mail, some of their most enjoyable reading.

“What’s the matter with that signalman?” The Bodger asked, as he stirred his coffee. “He keeps muttering and grumbling in the background like a sort of Greek chorus.”

“He’s in love with a policewoman, sir,” said Dagwood. “He’s taken her out every leave for two years and last leave he tried to kiss her. Apparently she immediately seized him in a sort of judo grip and nearly broke his back!”

The Chief Stoker appeared at the wardroom door. The Chief Stoker was a giant Irishman with a broad beaming red face. He weighed nearly eighteen stone and had a belly laugh which could tremble a glass of beer at ten paces. “Trim’s on, sir,” he said to Wilfred.

“Thank you, Chief Stoker.”

“That reminds me,” said The Bodger. “In future, I want the trim put on before we leave harbour. And go to diving stations and open up for diving as soon as we get outside. Mid, you’d better go with the First Lieutenant and see how to open up for diving.”

Most of the machinery outside the engine room of the submarine was maintained by a tiny bald-headed man with huge projecting ears who was known by the traditional submarine title of the Outside Wrecker. The Outside Wrecker was a Lancastrian and leg-spinner for the ship’s cricket team. He had a poor idea of any officer’s knowledge, particularly non-technical officers, and when he walked through the submarine with Wilfred he leaped forward to check every valve and system himself, as though the First Lieutenant’s touch would infect the metal.

“When yer openin’ oop fer divin’,” he told the Midshipman, “yer gettin’ the boat ready to dive. There’re certain things which moost be open and others which moost be shut. If yer miss one out, she won’t go down and if she does happen to go down, she won’t coom oop! “

“I see,” said the Midshipman.

“. . . And if yer in any bloody doubt whether to open or shut it, fer Chris-sakes leave it shut.”

“I see.”

There was still one thing puzzling the Midshipman. He ventured to ask the Outside Wrecker.

“What’s the trim, please?”

“It’s what the Jimmy makes a balls oop of,” said the Outside Wrecker cryptically and sidled off towards the artificers’ mess.

The Midshipman decided to put the same question to the oracle himself.

“Every time we go to sea,” said Wilfred, “I work out a little sum about how heavy the boat is and how much water to have in the tanks. I give the figures to the Chief Stoker and he makes sure the right amounts of water are in the right tanks. That’s what he means by ‘The trim’s on’.”

When they got back to the wardroom, The Bodger said : “Mid, go up and relieve the Navigating Officer and dive the submarine when I tell you.”

“Aye aye, sir.” One of the cardinal rules drummed into the Midshipman as an ordinary seaman had been: “Obey the order first, ask questions afterwards.”

Gavin was surprised to see him.

“Hello, old boy. Come up for a bit of freshers?”

“No, actually I’ve come up to relieve you.”

“Oh.” Gavin thought for a moment. “Oh, splendid. Well, let me see now. We’re a mile inside the diving area, steering one-nine-four, both telegraphs half head, four hundred revolutions. Patrol routine, ‘Q’ flooded, radar in the warmed-up state. Only one ship in sight, that’s that one, and she’s going away. O.K.?”

The Midshipman, to whom the traditional catechism of the officer of the watch’s turnover was so much gibberish, swallowed and said: “Yes, but I’ve got to dive the submarine! “

“Bully for you, boy. Don’t pull the plug until I get down there, will you?”

“No, I won’t, I promise.”

Gavin softened. “D’you know how to do it?”

“I-I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“It’s not all that difficult. When the Boss tells you to dive the boat, all you’ve got to do is tell the look-out to clear the bridge, shut the voice-pipe cock, take a quick look round to see if you haven’t missed anything and then climb into the hatch yourself. Just on your right you’ll find a little tit. That’s the diving klaxon. Press the tit twice. You must do it twice. If you only do it once nothing’ll happen. Then all you’ve got to do is shut the hatch before the cruel sea comes in. Got that?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“Right. It’s all yours.
Don’t
look so worried, boy. You’ve got lots of time. This boat takes so long to dive you’ve got time to walk round the bridge and have a quick drag after the main vents open. Don’t forget, two presses on the tit.”

“No. I mean . . . yes.”

Gavin disappeared and the Midshipman was left in command. He looked about him as though he expected the gigantic bows of a liner to crash into the submarine at any minute. But, as Gavin had indicated, the horizon was almost empty. The Isle of Wight lay far astern. A fresh wind was blowing from the south-west. There was no swell, only short waves with plenty of white horses to hide the feather of a periscope. It was, though the Midshipman could not appreciate it, perfect submariner’s weather.

“Nice day, sir, isn’t it?” the look-out remarked conversationally.

The Midshipman noticed the look-out for the first time. He was a young sailor in a duffle coat and a woollen ski-cap on which “Ripper” was embroidered. He had a perky, Cockney face which suggested costermongers’ barrows, programme sellers at Lords and jellied eels.

“Yes it is,” said the Midshipman.

“This your first submarine, sir?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a
hell-ship
, sir,” said Ripper earnestly.

“Is it?”

“I should say so. It's. . . .”

“
Midshipman
“ The Bodger’s voice crackled over the broadcast. “
Dive off the klaxon!”

While the Midshipman remained paralysed, Ripper leaped round the bridge, shut the voice-pipe cock, collected the binoculars and vanished inside the tower. All at once the Midshipman found himself alone, the last man on the bridge of a submarine about to dive. It was the loneliest moment of the Midshipman’s life.

The klaxon button was where Gavin had described it. The Midshipman pressed it twice and far below, as though on a different planet, he heard its sound in the control room. At once, there was a roar of escaping air from outside the submarine, the engines stopped, and there was silence, in which the Midshipman could hear his breath rasping through his throat as he struggled with the top hatch.

The hatch would not budge. In a frenzy the Midshipman seized the handle and pulled with all his strength. The hatch swung shut with a violence which knocked the Midshipman off balance. One of the clips removed his hat and dealt him a stunning blow on the head. He had not been prepared for the complete blackness when the daylight was shut out and he hung on the ladder, unable to see, dazed by the blow on the head, incapable of finding the clips and appalled by the thought of the sea by now rising steadily up the outside of the tower.

“Here, sir.”

The Midshipman felt Ripper’s hands guide him to the clips. He tightened them and slipped in the securing pins.

The Bodger was already at the periscope when the Midshipman reached the bottom of the ladder.

“Well done, Mid,” the Bodger said, without looking up. “Bloody good for the first time.”

Standing at the bottom of the ladder, rubbing the bump on his head, the Midshipman experienced a soaring exaltation of his spirit; he felt, for the first time, a proper member of the ship’s company. The Midshipman in that moment, was unwittingly bitten by the submariner’s disease. It was an affliction which would remain with him all his life and would make him run to the rail whenever he saw a submarine pass by and stand a-tiptoe when they were named.

The day’s dive was The Bodger’s first opportunity to put his new ship’s company through their paces and it took the ship’s company only a short time to realize that they had taken on board a Caesar. Standing in the control room while his ship’s company raced round him, The Bodger took his ship and made it jump through hoops. They practised putting out a fire in the main battery and restoring electric power by emergency circuits. They exercised the hydroplanes and the steering gear in emergency control. The Chef was required to put out a fire in his galley. The engine room staff rigged emergency methods of pumping and flooding. The Steward steered the ship, while the Coxswain operated the switches in the motor room. The Chief Stoker and his store-keeper, a lanky, saturnine stoker called Ferguson, laboured to bring up fantastically-shaped pieces of spare gear which had not seen the light since the day they were installed. After two hours of it, the ship’s company felt as though they had been put through a wringer.

“If this submarine was an animal,” said Leading Seaman Gorbles, “we’d have the R.S.P.C.A. after us.”

“Keep silence,” said the Coxswain.

“Aye aye, Swain,” said Leading Seaman Gorbles.

Leading Seaman Gorbles disliked the Coxswain. Most of the ship’s company disliked the Coxswain but not because he was the ship’s master-at-arms and responsible for disciplinary matters, nor because he was also the ship’s catering officer and responsible, under the First Lieutenant, for the amount and variety of the sailors’ food. Other submarine coxswains suffered under these disadvantages and still remained popular and respected men. It was not in his professional but in his private life that the Coxswain offended. The Coxswain had, in the distant past before he became a Coxswain, got religion. The normal submarine sailor regarded religion as something to be used when strictly necessary, at its proper time and in its proper place, classifying it in the scale of usefulness after Eno’s Salts but before an appendectomy. They mistrusted anyone except a padre who looked upon it in any other light. It was perhaps this mistrust which led to a poem being pinned on the control room notice board on the day
Seahorse
commissioned which defined the ship’s company’s attitude to their Coxswain.

“This is the good ship
Seahorse
,
The home of the bean and the cod:
Where nobody talks to the Coxswain,
Cos the Coxswain talks only to God.”

When
Seahorse
surfaced after her day’s exercise, The Bodger felt as invigorated as though he had just had a cold bath and a massage. He knew now that he had the structure and potential of a very good ship. All that was needed was to breathe it into life. He was also selfishly pleased with his own performance. He had gained in confidence with each minute. The old commands, the familiar submarine street-cries, had all come back to him, as Captain S/M had predicted they would. Having laid his first foundation, he could safely pass on to the next item.

“Now,” he said, rubbing his hands. “Let me see some of the correspondence.”

Rusty, who was the ship’s correspondence officer, guiltily brought out a file marked “Captain to See”. The worst moment of any submarine correspondence officer’s day was the moment when the Captain called for the correspondence pack. It nearly always meant trouble for someone.

“Yes,” said The Bodger doubtfully. “The one I’d like to see is the ‘Captain
Not
To See’ pack. I always had one when I was Black Sebastian’s correspondence officer. Who on earth are the EetEezi Catering Company?”

“They supplied the food during our contractor’s sea trials, sir,” said Rusty.

“Why have we got a letter from them still in here? Ditch it. What’s this
gauge
all this stuff is about?”

“It’s a gadget for the distiller, sir,” said Derek.

“Have you all seen it?”

“I think so, sir.”

“Well, take all this rubbish away and put it in your own pack. I don’t see anything about this place we’re supposed to be going to tomorrow?”

“I’ve made a special pack for that, sir.”

Rusty handed The Bodger a bulky pack marked “Oozemouth--For Sunny Holidays.”

The Bodger rubbed his chin. “I see we’re open to the public every day from two to six. Is that O.K. with you, Chief?”

“It should be, sir,” said Derek. “We haven’t got anything big on, unless something expensive happens on the way there.”

“Good. I don’t see any visits from schools or sea cadets here?”

“We haven’t fixed that yet, sir.”

“That
must
be done, right way. We’d better have a Schools Liaison Officer. Dagwood. . .”

“Sir?” said Dagwood, apprehensively.

“. . . You’ve been selected from a host of applicants. As soon as we get there, I want you to go ashore and ring up every school in the place and ask them if they’d like to send a team down. Ask them all--sea cadets, girl guides, Band of Hope--everybody. Give the local crèche a ring, too. They may have some embryo submariners for all we know. This is supposed to be a flag-showing visit and we’re going to show the flag if it kills us. I don’t give a damn about the general public. They’ve all seen too many gloomy films about submarines and they’re only coming to satisfy their morbid curiosity. But the schools are a different thing. Unbelievable though it may be, that’s the Navy of the future you’re looking at, under that disgusting school cap and behind those indescribable pimples. You give a boy a good time when he comes to visit your boat and he’ll remember it all his life. So schools and sea cadets are the number one priority, no matter when they want to come and no matter how many they want to bring. They won’t want very much, no detailed descriptions or anything like that. Just being in a submarine will be enough. And if they don’t give the ship a cheer when they leave you can take it that the visit’s been a failure. So don’t forget. It’s Billy Bunter, Just William and the Fifth Form at St. Dominic’s we’re after. Mum, Dad and Uncle Henry can look after themselves. It’ll need a bit of organizing, Dagwood. We don’t want them all at once and yet we don’t want the boat looking like a Giles cartoon twenty-four hours a day for six days. Think you can do it?”