The Dangerous Years (30 page)

A spell at home, when the marriage had appeared to pick up a little, had been followed by a tour in the Mediterranean in command of a destroyer. For that, Christina had condescended to appear at Malta. She had taken a house on Piéta Hill, not among the other lieutenant-commanders but in that part known as Snob Street because the illustrious and wealthy had taken mansions there. It had not been a successful commission, either from the point of view of his marriage or from the point of view of his career.

Somehow, Roger Keyes, the commander-in-chief, had not come up to his expectations. Polo seemed to matter most and to someone like Kelly, whose only connection with a horse was falling off it, the whole place smelled of privilege. A roll call of the staff in the flagship sounded like a court circular, and officers were said to be reporting for duty with a pair of polo mallets and a copy of Debrett’s under their arm. What was worse, he had had nothing to do. Under Keyes, orders were so intricate, detailed, and prepared so far in advance, a ship’s captain could use his initiative only to arrange the time when he wanted calling in the morning. The Mediterranean, those disgruntled officers who were not favoured claimed, had become not the Italians’ Mare Nostrum but Keyes’ Mare Meum, and manoeuvres were nothing but waterborne square dances.

Christina had loved the excitement and the glitter that went with the social season surrounding the flagship, but had not been impressed by the pink glow of mighty fortifications in the world’s most magnificent naval shelter, and still less by the great grey warships. She had quite failed to sense the atmosphere in Grand Harbour, and was unmoved by the things that touched Kelly’s heart – the dghaisas swaying alongside to ferry ships’ complements, the shouted orders you could hear from on shore, the clank of anchor cables, the charging of submarines’ batteries and the sad sweet notes of the Last Post across the water at night. They had meant absolutely nothing to her and, while Kelly had seethed at the lack of personal command, she had noticed only the fashionable people who followed the fleet.

It had all come to an abrupt end with the cataclysm known as the
Royal Oak
Affair, when a cause célèbre rose from the unfortunately close proximity in the same ship of a choleric squadron admiral, a dogmatic flag captain and a neurotic commander. When Keyes had misjudged the situation, the result had been that the Navy had made a fool of itself, and the odium that had rubbed off had ruined Keyes’ chances of becoming First Lord. Kelly had gone to the Mediterranean looking forward to his own command – and in a destroyer, too! – but he’d been glad in the end to leave for England, only to find command of a shore station was one degree worse.

He sighed at the disappearance of so many hopes and went to seek out
Rebuke
’s key officers and ratings. These were the men he would come to know individually as the ship settled down, the men on whom the ship and his own reputation would ultimately depend. It seemed wiser to put the past firmly behind him and try to make something of the present.

When he arrived on board to take command – immaculate in full rig of sword and frock coat – Captain George Major Mason Harrison turned out to be a dark lean saturnine individual not unlike Tyrwhitt in looks but by no means blessed with Tyrwhitt’s keen common sense.

The officers were drawn up on the quarter deck, the key ratings standing behind. The new captain shook hands with them all as Kelly introduced them but only as though it were a chore he had to get through quickly. To the Heads of Department, it seemed as if he were already looking for faults in them, and his first walk round the ship was done at the gallop because he was clearly more eager to get Kelly alone in his cabin to make his attitude to command plain at once.

‘I like discipline,’ he announced in a high-pitched aloof voice that was already beginning to grate on Kelly’s nerves. ‘And I’m fussy about the honours done to visitors by the side parties. I’ve already – even in so short a time – noticed a great many errors and omissions and from now on I’d like to meet every new officer immediately he comes aboard.’

He stared coldly at Kelly. ‘I notice you wear a medal we all cherish, but I’d have you know, Commander, that it’s no answer to slackness. Too many people have won that medal by being brave in the heat of the moment and have had no further success in their career because they’ve not had the staying power to be courageous when there’s no danger. Do I make myself clear?’

Kelly said nothing because Harrison obviously didn’t expect an answer. There was nothing like a new broom, he thought.

‘I’d be glad if you’d inform those of the ship’s company who’re already on board,’ Harrison went on, brushing invisible fluff from his spotless sleeve, ‘that I prefer to have things done by the book. It saves a great deal of trouble later.’

‘Indeed, sir,’ Kelly agreed.

‘I expect both officers and men to be in the correct rig of the day at all times – and I expect it to be immaculate. I shall also check my predecessor’s order books as soon as possible, because I feel sure there will be items I’d prefer changed. Orders will remain as they are, however, until I’ve considered them, and I’d be grateful if you could make time as soon as possible to meet me here and discuss the changes I’d like made.’

Kelly made his escape hurriedly. Harrison seemed to be a glutton for protocol and as pernickety about behaviour as he was about dress. He’d met his type before. The captain of his first ship had been exactly the same, with every man in his place and knowing his place, and woe betide anybody who tried to step out of it. His written orders would cover every eventuality – chiefly as a means of clearing his own yardarm if things went wrong – a bureaucratic system which, to Kelly, seemed to show a lack of self-confidence and a penchant a mile wide for old-woman hood. That’s how the Good Book says it should be done, he thought, and that was how it was going to be done. It was going to provide some sticky moments in the wardroom, he felt sure, and a great deal of tooth-sucking below decks; in his experience there had always been and always would be moments that were quite definitely not covered by the Good Book. But perhaps George Major Mason Harrison’s career had run so far either on oiled wheels or in the more sober backwaters of the Service where everything could he relied on to be covered by orders. He decided he wasn’t going to enjoy
Rebuke
.

In his office, to his surprise he found Seamus Boyle, wearing spectacles and with white between his gold stripes.

‘Seamus! What are you doing here? Last time I saw you was in Russia.’

Boyle jumped to his feet, smiling. ‘Transferred to Paymaster Branch, sir. Started having a bit of trouble with my eyes and it seemed the best thing to do because I didn’t wish to leave the Navy. I came aboard just behind the captain.’

‘I remember you were all dewy-eyed over the Baptiste girl – what was her name?’

‘Anne-Marie, sir.’

‘What happened to her?’

Boyle grinned. ‘I married her, sir. Three years ago.’

Kelly laughed, feeling that he had at least one ally on board who would understand him. ‘Well, that’s wonderful!’ he said. ‘And for me, too, to have you aboard. Are you getting the hang of everything?’

‘Just taking a look at the order book, sir.’ Boyle cleared his throat. ‘I gather from your writer that the captain doesn’t approve of orders as they stand.’

‘I think you’ll be working on them a great deal before you’ve finished.’

It was a pleasure to see a familiar face, but
Rebuke
herself didn’t fool Kelly. As he and everybody else with any sense knew, she belonged to a fleet that was becoming rapidly out of date. Battleships no longer had a place in a modern world and, though everybody had them still and the Germans were reported even to be planning new ones, the Americans had proved years before that bombs from an aircraft could sink them without a great deal of difficulty, and since a youngster called Lindbergh had proved the potential of the aeroplane by flying the Atlantic non-stop and alone while Kelly was still in Shanghai, the world’s navies were beginning to take heed and were thinking of weighing down their great ships with an enormous amount of anti-aircraft guns and an armoured deck.

‘Thinking’ was the operative word, Kelly knew, because it hadn’t taken him long to notice that despite her long refit,
Rebuke
still had the great defect of a lack of strengthened steel on her upper decks. She had been laid down before Jutland where three British battle cruisers had been destroyed in seconds by heavy German shells, which had plunged vertically down on them to explode their magazines. Though all big ships built since had strengthened decks, in the financial and international crises of the years since the war, with
Rebuke
they had never quite got around to it. She even had little or no defence against submarines, despite the vast torpedo bulges which had added to her already enormous girth and reduced her speed still further. And, while the new streamlined funnel made the ship look new, no one aboard was kidded that the millions of pounds which had been spent on her modernisation had made her anything else but a done-up battlewagon.

Like an old tart with new false teeth, Kelly thought.

Harrison made no objection to Kelly’s request for Rumbelo, who arrived within a fortnight. He stared around him and sniffed.

‘Big,’ he observed, and that was all he said.

Christina showed roughly the same amount of approval.

‘And where are
you
going to live?’ she demanded.

‘On board.’

‘And me?’

‘Wherever it suits you.’

‘I’m certainly not going to camp out at the Keppel’s Head on Portsmouth Hard,’ she announced firmly. ‘I tried it once, and it’s not a hotel for my fastidious taste.’

‘I could get a house,’ Kelly suggested.

‘Buy one?’

‘Naval officers don’t buy houses because they never live in them.’

‘Well,
I
don’t intend to live in a rented maisonette, with intimidating brown walls, all aspidistra and brown furniture with the stuffing oozing out; any more than in a basement flat looking at other people’s ankles. It’s a pity you haven’t noticed yet that there are plenty of other jobs far better paid.’

Kelly frowned. ‘I’ve been in the Navy too long to want a change,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t be easy now to take to another life or, for that matter, find another job.’

‘My father could fit you up with an excellent job.’

‘I prefer to stay in the Navy.’

She looked at him coolly. ‘Suffering from promotionitis all the way. A very prevalent complaint, it seems, because those stupid idiots who run the show consider naval officers don’t need wives or children.’

‘
We
don’t have any children,’ Kelly pointed out.

‘
I
do.’

In fact, one of the few joys of Kelly’s life was Christina’s son, Hugh. A dark-eyed shy boy, rather in awe of his mother, his habit was to turn to Kelly when in trouble. He was at a preparatory school in Sussex, a thin child half-swamped in the red cap and blazer he had to wear. Since the school was handier for Portsmouth than for London, invariably the visits he received were from Kelly.

‘In a hurry
,’ a note would come from Christina.
‘See Hugh for me, there’s a dear.’

Kelly knew perfectly well that she simply had no interest in the boy. He looked like Withinshawe, and for Withinshawe she’d had nothing but contempt and simply couldn’t be bothered to interrupt the life she was leading in London to spend what was inevitably a dull weekend taking the boy to the cinema, to the beach or to restaurants watching him eat with all the silent gluttony of all small and growing boys.

The year 1930 ended in a strange sort of gloom. The Navy was not the sharp-edged instrument it had been, and though Britain had won the war it had lost the peace. There had been a reaction everywhere against huge fleets and America had emerged from the manoeuvrings as the major power. She had started building to produce fifty-one first-line capital ships while Britain had ended the war with only forty-two, thirteen of them obsolete and all of doubtful value. At the end of the naval conferences, twenty more ships had been listed for scrapping and four partly built battle cruisers had been demolished so that that navy in which Kelly had grown up had been reduced to a skeleton of its former pride. The panache had gone and the Geddes axe which had carved ruthlessly into the Navy List had destroyed confidence; while, because the country was in the middle of its worst-ever financial crisis, the ratings who were joining now were all too often only avoiding unemployment.

Everywhere there was a feeling of resentment and disappointment. The high social and ceremonial factors of naval life had gone, with the brilliantly uniformed etiquette, the shining brass, the spit and polish; yet nothing had taken its place, and England was no place to enjoy the blessings of the shore. The country had avoided the political upheavals that had followed the war in Russia and Germany, but there had been seven governments in power since 1918, and with hostilities abroad never really ceasing, there was a crescendo of industrial action.

There had also been the most awful financial crash in the United States and Kelly had heard that it had hit Kimister, whose father, fearing a financial crash in England, had invested heavily across the Atlantic. Out of the three of them, only Verschoyle seemed to be content with his lot. Now back in London and on the staff of the Third Sea Lord, he seemed entirely untouched by the crisis. His family, with the cool cunning and experience of their kind, had not only kept their fortune but, with wages dropping everywhere and prices dropping to keep them company, were actually better off. It was from Verschoyle that Kelly learned what Christina did in London, because it seemed their paths crossed from time to time as they moved among the same set of people.

It was early in the year and the weekends in the ship were cold and uncomfortable. Most of the officers and ship’s company had not yet joined and the great vessel was still more than half empty. Many of her messdecks were uninhabited and her long passageways were unheated. There were only skeleton staffs on duty and the hot water supply, heated by steam from two donkey-boilers on the jetty, was often only lukewarm or dried up altogether, while electric power, supplied by cables from the dockyard, fluctuated erratically, and lights and fires frequently went out without warning. The men on board behaved like arctic explorers – inhabiting isolated colonies of light and warmth about the ship.