The Lion at Sea (20 page)

Kelly shook his head. ‘I don’t think I want to go into a battleship, Father,’ he said.

The admiral’s eyebrows rose. ‘Don’t want a battleship? Good God, boy, that’s where the excitement’ll be.’

‘I’ve seen quite a bit of that already, Father.’

‘I mean when the Germans come out. We’re still waiting for the fleet action.’

‘Perhaps there won’t be a fleet action, Father. Perhaps Fisher was wrong to plan for a big gun duel. Perhaps there’ll be nothing except squadron skirmishes like Heligoland and, anyway, I’m due for submarines.’

The admiral gestured irritably. ‘Nobody ever reached flag rank from submarines, boy.’

‘We haven’t had ’em very long, Father. One day somebody will.’

‘I could get you into
Iron
Duke.
Jellicoe himself would have an eye on you.’

Kelly’s voice became dogged. ‘It’s not for me, Father.’

‘For God’s sake, boy!’ The admiral’s plump hand flapped peevishly. ‘You’re just wasting your time in those tin-fish things!’

Kelly found he was losing his temper. ‘Tin fish be blowed, sir,’ he snorted. ‘One could sink
Iron Duke
without blinking an eyelid. Just pop up every now and then to get a sighting and let go while Jellicoe’s flag captain was seeing defaulters on the quarter deck.’

‘Submarines are defensive weapons!’

‘Father!’ Kelly’s voice broke in his earnest rage. ‘Not very long ago I saw three twelve-thousand-ton armoured cruisers torpedoed and sunk in less than an hour with the loss of nearly two thousand men! Anything that can do that is damned
o
-ffensive!’

When Rumbelo drove Kelly over to the Upfolds that evening, he was very thoughtful. The war had already proved that there’d been a lot of wrong thinking in the past few decades and that great battle between the rival fleets for which the whole country had been waiting ever since August – what the lower deck called ‘The Big Smash’ – might never occur. Faced with the Grand Fleet at Scapa, it seemed obvious that the policy of the Germans would be one of hit and run, catching isolated units whenever possible but avoiding any great action as if it were the plague.

As they rolled up the drive Charley was waiting, wearing an old-fashioned look.

‘Isn’t it awful, Kelly?’ she said. James Verschoyle’s had an accident.’

Kelly’s face was equally blank. ‘Never!’

‘Yes. In that car of his. He was due to take Mabel out for a spin but he sent a message round to say he couldn’t make it. He skidded and was flung out, he said. He has a black eye and a broken nose.’

‘Poor chap,’ Kelly said.

She looked hard at him. ‘What did you hit him with, Kelly? An iron bar?’

Kelly’s face gave nothing away. ‘I didn’t hit him,’ he said.

‘Oh, yes, you did! I found the place where you did it, too. That shrubbery near the gate. The grass was all trampled and there was some blood. Mabel said he was a bit of a boxer. Champion of the Navy or something.’

Kelly grinned. ‘Well, he isn’t any longer.’

She smiled back at him. ‘Your mother telephoned my mother. She said you’re going to get another medal.’

‘So Father says.’

‘For being at Antwerp?’

‘For running in terror to Holland to get myself interned.’

‘Don’t be a goose! What’s next on the agenda?’

‘Submarines.’

‘Aren’t they dangerous?’

‘I’m told disasters are of common occurrence.’ Kelly was suitably nonchalant. ‘But the pioneering stage’s finished now. Submariners aren’t experimenting any more now.’

‘What are they like?’

‘A sobersided lot. But sobersides aren’t the only ones who’ll enter the Kingdom of Heaven, and perhaps I can shake ’em up a bit.’

She blushed and shyly took something in a screwed-up piece of paper from a drawer. ‘Kelly, would you wear this? For me?’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s a St Christopher medal. Everybody’s giving them to soldiers and sailors. I bought it with my own money.’

She laid the little trinket in his hand, and he was surprisingly touched by the gesture.

‘It’ll keep you safe.’

‘I’m not worried about that.’

‘I am. The things you get up to, I think you need it.’

‘I’ll have a word with Rumbelo. He’ll keep an eye on me. I’m going to get him posted to the same boat if I can.’

‘That’s a good idea,’ she said seriously. ‘When do you have to go, Kelly?’

‘Plenty of time, yet.’

‘Phyllis Menzies is giving a dance at the week-end. Will you come?’

‘I can’t dance for toffee.’

‘It doesn’t matter. Neither can I.’ She looked at him eagerly. ‘Will you? Phyllis Menzies will be green with envy. She’s potty over a cousin of hers and he’s only just joined the army and hasn’t got any medals at all. Will you be wearing both yours?’

‘I haven’t got the second one yet.’

‘You couldn’t wear one just for the night, could you?’

‘Shouldn’t think so. That sort of thing gives rise to what in the Navy they generally call tooth-sucking.’

‘Well, never mind. I’ll
tell
her you’re going to get it.’ She looked at him gloomily, suddenly worried by his appearance of self-confidence and experience. ‘I bet medals are good for getting girls.’

‘Not half,’ Kelly said cheerfully. ‘Fall over themselves. Especially you.’

That night Kimister turned up on week-end leave from Harwich. There was talk in London of zeppelin raids and bombs, and his parents had left for a house they owned in North Wales so that he had nowhere to go. Somehow it seemed typical of them and Kelly began to see why Kimister was as he was. He was expecting a posting to a battleship.

‘Destroyers aren’t my cup of tea,’ he said in his self-effacing way.

Come to that, he thought, neither were battleships or cruisers. He’d often wondered, in fact, what he was doing in the Navy at all. His parents, unambitious, retiring people themselves, had wanted to be proud of their only son and, in a day and age when the Navy represented the top of the social ladder, they had pushed him towards it, never forcefully but nevertheless inevitably.

Kelly was smiling. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I certainly heard that anyone who can survive a tour in them without going off his rocker or dying of seasickness can take anything.’

Kimister shrugged, wishing he had Kelly’s self-assurance. ‘Verschoyle got a posting, too,’ he said. ‘He’s gone to
Inflexible.
I
must say Scapa would have been a pleasanter place without him near.’

Verschoyle had been his bête noire since the first day he’d picked on him for blubbing on arrival at Dartmouth and the thought of having him near depressed him.

Kelly tried to cheer him up. ‘You’d better come to the dance,’ he said. ‘I expect they’ll be glad of another male, with everything in trousers in the army.’

‘Will Charlotte Upfold be there?’

Kimister cheered up at once and Kelly looked quickly at him. ‘Why?’ he demanded. ‘You got a crush on her or something?’

The dance was a lively affair of bright-eyed girls and young men in brand-new uniforms. Kelly was still wearing Kimister’s second-best and it didn’t fit him very well, but at least it made him look like an old campaigner and, with a ribbon on his chest, he wasn’t at all averse to the glances of envy that were directed at him.

Kimister’s eyes, dark, gentle and sad, were always on Charley and, when the music started, he came to life with a jerk and was quick to grab her and whip her on to the floor. Since she’d taken great care that the story of Kelly’s new medal had already gone the rounds, he found himself in great demand among the older people, who had acquired from the newspapers an idea that war at sea was a bit like Henley regatta, except that people occasionally got hurt, and that sailors were a type of merry assassin who enjoyed blowing other men to pieces for sport with their great guns. He finally broke free from them to snatch Charley from Kimister and stumble round the floor with her.

‘Told you I was a rotten dancer,’ he said.

‘No, that’s my fault.’

In fact, Charley was good enough to feel weightless in his arms and he even felt skilful enough to try a few extra steps that inevitably ended in disaster.

‘You have to concentrate,’ she said in a fierce whisper as he sorted out his feet.

‘Well, stop taking my mind off it. How do you find Kimister? I think he’s got a crush on you.’

‘He always has had. Ever since I met him at Dartmouth. Poor Kimister.’

‘
Poor
Kimister?’

‘He’s so nice. But there’s nothing there, Kelly.’

The words seemed to damn Kimister completely but they were true. There was nothing to Kimister, no backbone, no determination, not even any personality. In a strange way, Kelly realised he was closer in spirit to Verschoyle, in spite of everything. At least Verschoyle had the moral courage to be something – even if it was only a cad.

After the dance, he drove them all to Esher in the dog cart to put Kimister on the last train for London. He was stumblingly shy with Charley as they stood on the platform waiting for the train and, to the forthright Kelly, embarrassingly unassertive as he said goodbye to her.

‘Poor old Kimister,’ Kelly said as the train drew away.

‘Now
you’re
at it,’ Charley pointed out.

Kelly shrugged. ‘Well, the poor cuss is so lacking in go.’

‘He needs a girl.’

‘Maybe he does,’ Kelly agreed. ‘But he’s not having mine.’

Half-way back to Thakeham, he slipped his free arm round her, and she wilted against him, sighing happily. Nothing in the world could have stopped her being in love with him.

‘Won’t it seem funny when we’re married after knowing each other all these years,’ she murmured.

What crossed Kelly’s mind was something quite divorced from the romantic notions that were filling Charley’s. ‘With you Army and me Navy, we’d have a family of Marines.’

She gave him a startled look as she suddenly grasped that the implications of the statement overshadowed her own naïve romanticism, then she seemed to accept it quite capably and nodded.

‘I expect it’ll be all right,’ she said.

‘It won’t be yet, of course,’ Kelly said. ‘They don’t regard you with much favour if you marry before you’re thirty.’

‘Thirty!’ She sat up abruptly. ‘But that’s lifetimes away!’

‘I couldn’t afford it before anyway,’ Kelly pointed out.

The pony had ambled to a halt and was cropping the grass. Charley chewed over what Kelly had said then she accepted that, too, confident she could handle it. ‘Doesn’t it seem strange to be talking like this,’ she said. ‘It’s not all that long since you were teaching me how to work ferrets and not long before that hitting me over the head with my own dolls.’

Kelly was suddenly sober. ‘Things happen quicker in wartime,’ he said.

She nodded agreeably and turned to him in a way that was quite natural and unaffected and reminded him of birthday parties he’d been to before the war when girls in frilly pink frocks had lifted up their faces to him behind the door as they played Postman’s Knock. She seemed so young and untouched, he felt almost middle-aged as he kissed her.

She sighed. ‘I wondered when you were going to get round to it,’ she said.

Without a ship to go to, Kelly had expected his leave to last at least until the New Year but, at the end of October, Jacky Fisher returned unexpectedly to the Admiralty and immediately, it seemed, he noticed that George Kelly Maguire was still kicking his heels in London. With Rumbelo long since departed for
HMS Dolphin,
the submarine school in Portsmouth, a telegram arrived instructing him to report as torpedo instructor to
HMS Defiance,
the torpedo school at Devonport.

Even as he arrived, news broke of another naval disaster off the coast of South America, and a total stranger with a face as long as a fiddle greeted him with the information as he stepped aboard.

‘Von Spee caught the South American Squadron off Coronel,’ he said. ‘Cradock’s gone, and we lost
Good
Hope
and
Monmouth.
They were Third Fleet ships full of reservists and didn’t stand a chance.’

The story was implemented as soon as he reached the wardroom. Caught in thick weather and silhouetted against the evening glow, it seemed that Cradock had remembered the scandal that had followed the escape of
Goeben
and
Breslau
and the still-pending court-martial of the admiral concerned, and had decided that, despite his undergunned, obsolete ships, no one was going to accuse him of hesitancy and had preferred to risk annihilation rather than hazard his reputation. The blame clearly lay with the Admiralty where, despite the time available to send reinforcements, he had been allowed to face a much superior German squadron with old and inadequate ships.

‘Seems to me,’ Kelly said grimly, ‘that the naval staff in London exists chiefly to cut out and arrange foreign newspaper stories in scrap books.’

Added to the escape of
Goeben
and
Breslau
and the disaster on the Broad Fourteens, this new defeat could only shake even further the confidence in the Navy. Somewhere, somehow, something was still radically wrong and the newspapers were not backward in their criticisms.

The effect of the battle in Plymouth was pall-like. Utter strangers were stopping each other on the Hoe to ask ‘Have you heard?’ Coming after the loss of
Aboukir, Hogue
and
Cressy,
this latest disaster was almost too much to bear, and there was a great deal of argument about the value of the Grand Fleet sitting up in Scapa.

The answer came with the arrival of the battle cruisers,
Invincible
and
Inflexible,
from Cromarty. They had been detached from Jellicoe’s command and were already in dry dock having their bottoms scraped and painted, while stores for six months’ sailing were being trundled aboard before they left to seek out the victorious German squadron and bring them to book.

‘Thank God for Jacky Fisher,’ Kelly said. ‘At least he has the initiative to go after the Germans’ guts.’