Most Secret (12 page)

They turned up at Ilkley the next morning at about ten o’clock looking rather sheepish. I do not know what Mrs. Chalmers said to Marjorie; I only know what Marjorie’s father said to George Boden in the pub that night.

He said: “Eh, George, what’s this I hear about your lad and my lass beating t’ starter’s pistol?”

“I dunno. Do you think they did?”

“I dunno. Do you?”

“I dunno.”

There was a long, slow pause. Two more tankards were pushed across the counter to them.

“Don’t like going home to-night,” said Henry Chalmers. “The wife’s got precious fussed about it all.”

“It’s all your lass leading my lad into evil ways,” said George Boden. “He’d never have done a thing like that upon his own.”

“He couldn’t have,” said Mr. Chalmers simply. “But next time he wants to, I’d just as soon he didn’t pick my Marjorie.”

“I spoke to Oliver. He said they didn’t do nothin’. But who’s to tell?”

“That’s what Marjorie said to the wife. Flew into a proper temper when the wife suggested it, and said she wished they had.”

“Aye,” said George Boden. “So does young Oliver, I’ll be bound.”

They stood gloomily discussing it for a quarter of an hour. Finally common sense asserted itself.

“Well,” said George Boden, “either they did or they didn’t. If they didn’t, then there’s no harm done and the less said the better. If they did, well, they’re both right young folks and they’ll want to be married. I shan’t stand in their way.”

“I’d like to see you try it on,” said Mr. Chalmers, “if your young Oliver got my lass into trouble.”

So the row simmered down, but left behind an atmosphere of uneasy expectancy in both families. The old relationship between Marjorie and Oliver was obviously a thing of the past, and nobody quite knew what would succeed it.

And then ten days later, I’m blessed if they didn’t go and do it again. This time they hadn’t even got the decency to turn up early. They arrived home at three o’clock in the afternoon, arm-in-arm and beaming all over their faces in a most discreditable manner. They said cheerfully that they had been stuck on the mud all night, and they’d slept late, and they had talked things over and they wanted to get married.

“And about time, too,” said Henry Chalmers. His daughter turned and made a face at him.

They were married in October, 1938, when she was nineteen and he was twenty-two. They were married in Ilkley and there was a reception in the Magnificent Hotel in Harrogate, which most of the wool trade attended. They left from there in the little Aston Martin for their honeymoon in the Lakes, and everybody heaved a great sigh of relief that they were safely married without any scandal getting out.

They came back after a month, and settled down into a little
flat in Harrogate. The Boden family had given Marjorie a little coupé as a wedding present, and this made her tree to run around and meet her family and meet her friends when Oliver was at work with the Aston Martin. They had a fine time in those last few months before the war. They ranged the country in their little cars, motoring, sailing, dancing, and having fun together with a young crowd of their friends. All Yorkshire, and all life, was open wide for them.

Then the war came. A war is not at all a bad time for young people; it brings movement to them, travel, and adventure—all the things that young people long for. In the Yorkshire set that the Bodens moved in there was great excitement. Most of the young men wanted to go into the Air Force and be pilots; Oliver Boden was unusual in that he plumped for the Navy. He knew a little about navigation and the tides by this time, and the thought that one day he might rise to command a trawler as a naval officer thrilled both Marjorie and Oliver. A trawler was a real tough, man-sized job; better than sitting in a mouldy aeroplane and dropping things.

He got his commission in October, 1939, and went down to Brighton for his training, to a large, new municipal casino newly christened H.M.S. King Alfred. Marjorie went with him and stayed in a hotel on the sea-front which was his billet, thrilled to the core with all the uniforms and signs of war at sea. For the five weeks it took to turn him into a naval officer they had a lovely time. The work was not too strenuous and he could spend each evening with her in their billet. They drank a good deal of beer and saw a good many pictures, and they met a great number of young R.N.V.R. officers from all corners of the world. They felt that they had never had such a good time before.

He passed out of King Alfred after five weeks, a full-fledged sub-lieutenant with a wavy golden ring upon his arm. He had put in for trawlers, and a trawler it was that he got, though not the sort of trawler that he had envisaged. He was posted to a very old, decrepit ship at Portsmouth that tended the buoys in the swept channel; her name was
Harebell
. She could do six knots after a boiler clean, not quite so much before it. She was commanded by a very old R.N.R. lieutenant who kept a little newspaper shop in Southampton in the days of peace, and her duty was to waddle out and replace buoys in the approaches to the harbour that had been blown out of place.

Young Boden knew it was a dud job, but it thrilled him to
be doing it. He knew that it was an apprenticeship for better things. He went at it in the right frame of mind, humbly learning from his captain the rudiments of his trade—how to handle stiff wire ropes and how to handle ratings with a grievance; how to read a hoist of signal flags and Admiralty Fleet Orders.

Marjorie went with him to Portsmouth and lived in the Royal Clarence Hotel in some considerable luxury. Each morning he would have to go off at about seven o’clock unless he had had a night on, when he did not come home at all. Each morning she would walk down to the Battery and watch the ships going out; usually she would see
Harebell
waddle out at half the speed of other ships, with Oliver very noble in a duffle coat upon the bridge, or standing over men who worked with ropes and winches in the well. In the late afternoon she would walk down to meet him at the dockyard gate; then they would go back to the hotel and have a few drinks with their friends, and a grill, and then perhaps the pictures.

He went to Portsmouth in December, 1939. In April, 1940,
Harebell
was blown up, and sunk in three minutes.

Oliver Boden never had a very clear idea of what really happened. A couple of Heinkels had paid their nightly visit to the Solent to drop magnetic mines, and the trawlers had been out at dawn as usual and pooped three of them off.
Harebell
had pottered out in the forenoon to shift a buoy and Oliver was up upon the bridge with the skipper as they passed the Elbow. He remembered saying “Starboard Five” down the voice-pipe, and then he glanced ahead. He saw the water cream on both sides of the ship beside the well, and he felt through the deck a tremendous jolt beneath his feet. He saw the well deck split, and a vast mass of water coming up towards him; then the blast took him and threw him back against the binnacle, breaking two ribs. He remembered falling from a height into the water, and a great pain in his chest, and the salt down in his lungs. Then he was up again upon the surface coughing and choking, and feebly trying to blow air into the life-saving waistcoat that Marjorie had given him to wear instead of a Mae West. There was the mainmast of the
Harebell
sticking up out of the water near to him, and eight men of a complement of twenty-one struggling to reach it with him. There was no sign of the skipper. A motor-pinnace picked them up in a few minutes, and took them all direct to Haslar Hospital.

Marjorie heard about it from the Captain of the Dockyard. She was having lunch alone in the hotel when she was called
to the telephone, and suffered a succession of irritating commands to wait a moment, please. She could not understand who was calling, or what they wanted, but a vague apprehension grew in her. It could not be that anything had … happened.

Then Captain Mortimer himself came on the line. She had met him once at a sherry party, and she was rather frightened of him. He said: “Look, Mrs. Boden. We’ve had a bit of bother here this morning, I’m afraid. Your husband is in Haslar Hospital, but he’s not badly hurt.” There was a silence. “Are you there?”

She said: “I’m here. What was it—what happened?”

“I don’t want you to ask that, Mrs. Boden. You know how it is these days. I don’t talk about things that happen here, and you’ve not got to, either. Your husband’s got a couple of ribs broken, but they tell me he’s quite comfortable. You can see him for a very short time this afternoon at about four o’clock. Do you know where to go?”

He told her, and impressed on her again the necessity for reticence. She rang off, and went back to her lunch in the dining-room, but she ate nothing more. Presently she went up to her room, and threw herself down upon the bed. There were nearly two hours to wait till she could go to Haslar.

In that two hours she changed a good deal. She was only twenty and life had never hit her very hard. The war had been a great game up till then. People got killed, of course; she knew that in the abstract. But not people that you
knew
, people that really belonged to you. For the first time she faced the fact that Oliver might have been killed that day—in fact, had probably escaped it very narrowly.

Later she went to Haslar, and heard from an over-garrulous sick-bay steward that two-thirds of
Harebell’s
complement had, in fact, been killed, including the captain. She saw Oliver for about two minutes, white and motionless in bed, his head red on the pillow, smiling at her with his eyes, but drowsy with the drugs that they had given him for shock. Then she went back to the hotel.

She sat for a time in the lounge, hoping that some other officer’s wife would come in that she knew, that she could talk to. But no one came, and presently she went and dined alone. By nine o’clock she was in bed, but not to sleep.

The appalling nature of the disaster that might have come to her shook her very much. She came of Yorkshire stock,
accustomed to face facts; she now faced the fact that she had very nearly lost Oliver. She might still lose him; she had heard of deferred shock. She simply could not visualise what life would be like without him. Oliver had always been there, ever since she could remember. They always had done things together, all their lives. All their lives they had given their spare time to each other. All of their lives, unknowing, they had been in love.

She lay for hours, blindly miserable, hating all ships, and the war, hating the Royal Clarence Hotel, and the grill-room, and the drinks, hating Portsmouth and the Navy. If only they could be back in Yorkshire as they had been once, forgetting all this beastliness! All their lives they had been so happy there. She saw Chalmers’ greystone house, and she saw the Bodens’ greystone house, and she remembered all the fun that they had had together, with all the fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters, for so many years. And now, in contrast this.…

She cried a little into her pillow, and presently she cried herself to sleep.

She did not sleep for long. She was awake again by about four; she got up and sponged her face. Then she lay down again, grave and thoughtful. She knew quite well now why everything had been fun up in Yorkshire in those days. It was because her father had been in love with her mother, and George Boden had loved Mrs. Boden, and there had been lots of children. People without children lived in flats and places like the Royal Clarence Hotel, but when you had a family you had to do things differently. A family meant you had to have a house, and the bigger the family the bigger the house—a big greystone house in Ilkley or in Burley, with lots of children and young people in and out of it. That was what she wanted now, with all her heart and soul.

They had avoided children; she now felt that they had been very wrong. Marriage without kids was a silly business, an affair of flats and cocktail-bars that held no solid Yorkshire happiness. A family mean home and happiness. And anyway, she thought with grim realism, if they had a baby there’d be something left for her if Oliver were—killed.

Oliver did not die; in fact, he made a very quick recovery. She used to go and sit with him each afternoon; he had a cabin overlooking the garden quadrangle, bright with spring flowers. And suddenly one afternoon she said: “Nolly, I vote we have a crack at a kid pretty soon.”

There was a pause. “They slobber,” he said gently.

“I know they do.”

“And they get sick all over you.”

“I know.” She was holding his hand.

“It must be pretty lousy for you, all alone and doing nothing all day,” he said. “If that’s what you want, it’s all O.K. with me.”

She said: “You’d like it too, wouldn’t you? I mean, it’d be rather fun.”

He temporised. “They smell just terrible …” he said.

“Not if you manage them right.” She made an appeal to his better instincts. “I mean, it’d be just like haying a puppy and seeing it grow up into a decent dog.”

“You wouldn’t like to have a puppy instead?” he enquired. “You’d see the results quicker.”

She said: “I won’t be fobbed off with a puppy.”

He said: “All right—have it your own way. I was only trying to help. If we don’t like it we can always leave it on a doorstep, and get a puppy.”

Presently he was up and about, walking with difficulty, and later they went back to Yorkshire for three weeks’ leave. In that time the battle of Flanders reached its climax and everybody who was fit to handle a boat went over to Dunkirk; in Yorkshire they knew little of what was going on. Oliver was irritated and upset when he discovered from the newspapers what he had missed. His leave, which had been pleasant enough when it began, now irked him, and he began to write letters to the Admiralty for another ship.

He applied this time to be posted to a trawler in the Humber or Mersey area, in order to be closer to their home if Marjorie were going to have a baby. He did not get it; he was posted instead to a trawler in the Forth, based on Port Edgar. Marjorie went up there with him and stayed in the Lothian Hotel, overlooking the Firth of Forth, with the other naval officers’ wives; Boden was able to spend about two nights a week on shore with her.