Most Secret (15 page)

He lived in a bed-sitting-room in a little house in a suburb of Bristol, and he lived quite alone. His landlady was a widow who looked after him quite well; on his part, he made very little trouble for her. He was a very shy young man. He was good company in the office and quite popular with the staff, but outside office hours he had little contact with his fellow-men. He joined no sports clubs because he was not interested in sports. He did not go to dances because he felt himself to be shy and awkward with young women, and consequently he had an idea, that they were laughing at him. He did not drink at all before he joined the navy, and he smoked very moderately. In consequence of these ascetic habits he was rather a lonely young man, and that loneliness made him more shy and more awkward still. He spent most of his evenings and week-ends in long, solitary walks, or brooding on the solubility of substances in soya oil. Occasionally he went to the pictures.

In the autumn of 1937, when he had been at Bristol for about a year, a great interest came into his life. He had been to Derby for the week-end to see his mother, and returning late to the little house outside Bristol on Sunday night, he was surprised to find a very large black dog upon the doorstep. It slunk away into the front garden as he entered the front gate. He looked over his shoulder at it, curiously and uneasily, as he let himself in with his latchkey. It was a very big dog indeed, and very black and fierce-looking.

His landlady met him in the hall, fussed and a little frightened. It seemed that the dog had been standing up against the front door for the last two hours and blowing through the letter-box; in that position he could look in through the little windows of the door like the Hound of the Baskervilles.
The snuffling snorts in at the letter-box, the blood-curdling whines, and the fierce glaring eyes had troubled her considerably.

Rhodes went to the door, opened it, and looked out. The dog pushed past him and stalked into the sitting-room, wagging his stern. He saw the gas fire and sat down in front of it, beaming up at them. He took up most of the hearth-rug.

“Coo, look at that!” said the woman. “Makes himself at home, don’t he?”

They stood and marvelled at the dog. It was a very large black Labrador perhaps three years old, short-haired, with a great dripping jowl, brown eyes, and a permanent expression of perplexity. It weighed a good six stone. They very soon became accustomed to it; indeed they had to, for it obviously meant to spend the night with them. They tried it with a bit of bread and it ate that ravenously; it ate the rest of the loaf and the rest of the cold lamb and a lump of suet pudding and a good many biscuits, and asked for more. It made no objection when Rhodes scrutinised its collar, but there was no name on it.

In the end, of course, it stayed for good and Rhodes paid his landlady another five shillings a week for its food. He took it next day to the police, who offered to destroy it for him. He took it to the local veterinary surgeon, who told him that it was a Labrador but much too big, and did not recognise it. He kept it for a few days in constant trepidation that an owner would turn up and take it from him, but no owner came.

After a fortnight he gave the dog a name. He called it Ernest, after its expression; he bought it a new collar with his own name on it, and paid seven and sixpence for a licence. The police saw to that.

From the first it slept in his bedroom, curled up on a rug in the corner at the foot of his bed. Out of the office it became his constant companion. His walks grew longer and more regular; each evening after tea he started out for his three miles with Ernest ranging on ahead of him. There was frequent trouble. Ernest, too old to learn new ways, chased everything that ran, from sheep to partridges, with gleeful abandon. Rhodes used to thrash him for it without any noticeable effect; his hide was thick. Grieved words of reproach could reduce him to abject misery, but only for five minutes. He needed constant watching, and this in itself was an occupation and an interest for the young man.

The dog, in fact, became Rhodes’s principal spare-time
interest. The regulation of his diet and his exercise, and the tending of cut paws and cat scratches, the daily grooming and the occasional major operation of a bath took an appreciable proportion of his leisure after the daily work. On his part the dog became dependent on his master, as dogs will. He developed an engaging trick of sitting in the sitting-room window in the late afternoon, watching the road. As the first men came streaming past from the factory soon after half-past five Ernest would go scratching at the door to be let out; released, he would bound up the road till he found Rhodes among the crowd, snuffle his hand, and come back at his heels.

Rhodes took the dog everywhere with him. At week-ends when he went back to Derby to see his mother he took Ernest with him sitting beside him in his Austin Seven; with some difficulty he took Ernest on a fortnight’s summer holiday in Cornwall. He liked summer holidays in Cornwall, poking about among the fishing-boats in the little harbours, from Helford to Port Isaac, from Padstow to Polperro. Like most young men in England, he had a genuine affection for the sea, though when he was out upon it he was frequently sick. He could manage a harbour rowing-boat and he knew something of the rudiments of sailing, but till he joined the navy he had never been more than a mile from shore.

Rhodes had had Ernest for the best part of two years when war broke out. He was settled deeply in his Bristol groove. His salary was increasing much more slowly than he once had hoped; still, there was a perceptible increment every year, and it was sufficient for him in his modest style of life. He calculated that if the rate of promotion were maintained, after forty years’ service with British Toilet Products Ltd., he would be getting nearly seven hundred a year, and that, he thought, was quite a decent salary. War, when it came, was not a bad thing for Rhodes.

At first, the war did not affect him; indeed as a scientific worker in industry he was classified at first as in a reserved occupation. The Company had a very considerable export trade throughout the world, and in the autumn months of 1939 it was common ground that the war could not be paid for unless export trade were maintained. On the outbreak of war those of the Company who were territorials were called up at once, but they were not numerous. A few of Rhodes’s fellow-scientists sneaked off and joined the Royal Air Force. Everybody admired them for their disregard of danger, but there was a
feeling at the luncheon-table that they had taken the easy path regardless of the real interests of the country. The hard path was to go on with the humdrum task that lay to hand, devising cheaper and more fragrant bath-salts, foamier shampoo-powders and shaving soaps.

This attitude of mind lasted for nine months or so. Then in May, 1940, the Germans invaded Holland, Belgium, and France; in June the British Army evacuated from Dunkirk.

In those weeks of troubled humiliation Rhodes went through the spiritual changes that were common to most people in the country. It seemed to him that all this talk of export trade to pay for armaments was bunk. If things went on the way that they were going there would be no need for further armaments, for the country would be beaten by the Germans. Not all the toilet soap in Bristol, Rhodes concluded, would prevent the Germans landing on the coast of England in the next few weeks. The only things to stop them were young men with guns, and he himself was young.

It became clear to him that whatever the pundits of the luncheon-table in the Middle Staff Room might declare—and they were not now giving tongue so readily—his study of the solubility of substances in soya oil was drawing to a close. He could not bring himself to concentrate upon it, and he did not want to. When Rotterdam was bombed he knew in his own mind that he would have to go and fight, but it was three weeks more before he actually handed in his notice to the Company.

For that three weeks he hung on, miserable, irresolute, desperately hoping that in some way the cup might pass from him. And the reason for his trouble was simply this: that he had nobody with whom he could leave Ernest.

Rhodes was a sensible young man, and he could face up to the fact that Ernest was not everybody’s cup of tea. He was now about six years old, growing a little grey about the muzzle and a little more portly, as a Labrador will in middle age. He was a very large dog indeed, and though for Rhodes he had the imperishable affection of a dog, there was no denying that he was sometimes a little short with the neighbours. There were complaints about Ernest growling and frightening people from time to time, which had to be smoothed over. He now ate over a pound of meat a day, which took some finding in a time of growing scarcity, and if he had less he got eczema. He was also subject to a more indelicate internal trouble.

In those weeks Rhodes searched desperately for a solution to
this problem, while at the same time he found out particulars of entry into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. If he had to go and serve he wanted most of all to be a naval officer; his holidays in Cornwall had done that for him. But Ernest was an obstacle that seemed insuperable. He could not leave Ernest with his mother; it would not be fair on the old lady. His landlady, although she tolerated the dog and liked him well enough, could never cope with an ageing dog of that size in the difficulties of war-time rationing That, as Rhodes realised in sick despair, would not be fair to Ernest.

A lonely man who has a dog grows almost as dependent upon him as does the dog upon his master. In the end, in the tension that came after Dunkirk and nerved by the words of the Prime Minister, Rhodes did what many people had to do. He took Ernest on his last walk to the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals and paid ten shillings to a sympathetic veterinary surgeon, with a muttered request that he would make it snappy.

He walked home alone. Ten days later he was a sub-lieutenant in the R.N.V.R. at H.M.S. King Alfred undergoing training.

The loss of Ernest made a great gap in his life, that the new interests crowding on him failed to fill. He was unused to spending evenings with other men. He did not mind the change of circumstances that was imposed on him; indeed he felt that it was not unhealthy to be shaken from his rut. He was most bitterly resentful of the sacrifice imposed upon him in the loss of his dog. He brooded over this, until a hatred of the war and of the Germans who had made the war became the main preoccupation of his mind. A girl could have got him out of that obsession, possibly, but he was too diffident a man to have much truck with girls.

The naval duty to which he was eventually posted only made things worse. At his medical examination the surgeons very soon found out a fact that secretly he knew already; that he was colour-blind. A naval officer who cannot easily distinguish red from green is not much use in the executive, and they told him so. In view of his experience as a scientist they offered him a commission in the Special Branch, which meant that he would spend the war mostly on shore, wearing a green flash between the gold bands on his arm and working upon technical matters. Indifferent in his unhappiness, he took it.

He spent five weeks at King Alfred, and was drafted out. And two weeks later he found that he was living in a shore job
down at Dartmouth, and quite likely to stay there for the duration of the war. He was billeted in rooms just like the rooms that he had had at Bristol, but here he had a good deal more leisure time. His work was necessary and useful but not strenuous. Most of his fellow-officers kept dogs for company. If Ernest had been alive, he could have had him in Dartmouth perfectly well, with more time than ever to look after him.

The thought of that weighed on his mind, making him sullen, bitter, and morose. He felt that he had done a cruel, beastly thing; he had taken the dog who loved him and depended utterly on him, and he had had him killed, unnecessarily and wantonly. It was the war that had tricked him into doing such a thing, a thing he would not have dreamed of a year previously. The war was made by Germany. He had joined the navy to fight the Germans and here he was, stuck in a shore job on the coast of England, never to see a German, likely as not. He had been tricked all round, and Ernest was dead, and he was desperately, desperately lonely.

I do not want to paint him as a very tragic figure, though in those first months of his naval service he was not a very happy one. The work absorbed him and occupied a good deal of his waking thoughts, and if in leisure moments he was moody and distrait, so much was true of many temporary officers whose lives had been disrupted by the war. The long dark months of winter dragged by in anxiety and preparation for invasion. Rhodes spent his time divided between working in the office, working at gear disposed about the harbour mouth, in launches or on shore, often wet and often in some danger, and watching and waiting for the enemy in a little stone control hut on a headland.

Loneliness, and the aching void caused by a personal loss, do not endure for ever. Old wounds heal; new friendships and associations come as anodynes. In the spring, Rhodes got a rabbit.

I am not joking; that is literally what happened. His landlady, a Mrs. Harding, took to breeding rabbits for the pot to eke out the meat ration. She had a very small back-yard to keep them in, and in a short time had acquired three breeding does. A buck was evidently necessary if the flow of little rabbits was to proceed according to the plan, and she got a large grey buck for ten shillings in the market. His presence in a hutch adjacent to the does did not induce the quiet contemplation proper to a maternity home, and for three days there was wild
excitement in the hutches, culminating in the death of three tiny, rat-like rabbits through neglect. Mrs. Harding discussed the tragedy at length with Sub-Lieutenant Rhodes, who offered to accommodate the buck in the yard of the net defence store down the road. This yard was a naval establishment, lately a motor-bus garage, and was forbidden ground for Mrs. Harding. That did not matter much because Rhodes went there every morning and could take a bowl of apple cores and cabbage stalks and potato peelings to the rabbit in a little covered basket. An elderly torpedo rating undertook to clean the hutch out once or twice a week, and everyone was satisfied.