The Sea Shall Not Have Them Read online

  ‘I see, Flight.’

  ‘Christ,’ the Flight Sergeant said to the open door of the sick bay. ‘“I see, Flight”, he says. Just like that. As if we were all pals together and had been for years. And me with twenty years’ service on me back. Jesus, what a war does to the Air Force! They give you a number, a uniform and a cup of canteen tea, and you start thinking you’re an airman, just because some son of Satan from Whitehall said you were a bit good during a Wings for Victory week in Wigan or somewhere. When I joined up, it was “Yes, Flight Sergeant” and “No, Flight Sergeant” and “Three bags bloody full, Flight Sergeant” Nowadays, you stand about looking as though you don’t know whether you want a belch or a haircut. Stand up!’ he bawled unexpectedly, so that Milliken, who had been listening breathlessly to the diatribe, jumped with sheer nervous terror.

  To him, the little ginger-quiffed man was suddenly all the authority of all the non-commissioned officers in the whole of the Royal Air Force, terrifying, awesome, vulgar and noisy, and possessed of that biggest of all big sticks – superiority in rank. He was the parade ground, the drill book, and all the vast secretive, sly knowledge that was vested in every one of the older hands with their wrinkled grey-black uniforms and battered hats which made Milliken’s new blue, his still yellow buttons and sleek forage cap look indecent.

  Just when his soul was racked by his hatred the Flight Sergeant, his face red, the quiff on his forehead quivering with his anger, a tight, bounding rubber ball of a man, taut and energetic and evil, suddenly grinned, a surprising grin which changed his whole face and put lights into his eyes that Milliken had never expected.

  ‘My name’s Slingsby,’ he introduced himself more calmly. ‘Jimmy Slingsby. Jimmy the Bastard, they call me. Known throughout the Air Force. I drink blood and eat rivets.’

  With this last terrifying announcement he disappeared below, leaving Milliken feeling as though he had been swept backwards by a gale of wind.

  While he was still recovering he heard the thump of feet on the black wooden piles of the jetty and other members of the crew began to drop aboard, all of them in various stages of untidiness and carrying side-packs, oil-skins and sea jerseys. It was only then that Milliken realized, just how incredibly smart the Flight Sergeant had been. Unlike the others, he spurned a jersey and he was shaved immaculately. Every button had shone despite the early hour, and his uniform looked as though it had recently been washed. When Milliken was to know the Flight Sergeant better he would find out that it had.

  While he was still standing in amazement at the thought, Treherne, the skipper, arrived, hurrying down the ladder; young, eager as Milliken, and like Milliken a little dubious about his own ability still. Milliken saluted him carefully, as he had been trained to do on the parade ground, ‘Up, pause, two, down,’ but Treherne, in his haste, took not the slightest notice of him and then Milliken saw that no one else took the slightest notice of the skipper in their hurried efforts to prepare for sea, and he felt incredibly foolish.

  By this time the deck crew were loosening the ropes which connected 7525 to the next boat in the trot in a bewildering maze which looked to Milliken like a cat’s cradle. With an explosion that made him leap round in startled fear, certain that the stern of the boat had been blown off by a mine, the engines leapt to life one after the other and the vessel surged forward for a second at the creep of the propellers.

  ‘Let go springs.’ Bewildered by the activity, none of which he understood, Milliken turned round, aware that Treherne had reappeared on the bridge, still struggling into a duffle coat.

  ‘Let go springs, Skipper!’

  ‘Let go aft!’

  ‘All gone aft.’

  ‘Let go forrard.’

  ‘All gone forrard.’

  The deckhand on the foredeck, standing alongside the winch, thrust gently at the boat alongside with his foot, and 7525 started to glide slowly across the basin towards the river.

  From inside the sick bay the cheeps of the wireless set began abruptly. Milliken took up a position on the after-deck, where he had a good view, and prepared to enjoy the trip. But as he peered into the wind made by the boat’s movement, and tried to take in everything at once, he was pushed aside by a red-haired individual minus a front tooth, whose name Milliken had discovered was Corporal Robb. He emerged from the sick bay door eating a colossal corned-beef sandwich and stood on the after-deck, taking in at a glance that everything was in order.

  To Milliken, very stripe-conscious still and unaware of the enforced casualness of dress and discipline on a crowded small boat at sea, it seemed vaguely unfair that Robb should wear no badges of rank, no hat, no tunic – nothing, in fact, beyond a thin brown civilian sports shirt, a pair of Air Force issue trousers held up by a length of heaving-line, and a pair of boots which appalled Milliken, fresh from his training, by their lack of polish and the salt rime which gave them a pale grey colour.

  ‘Where can I lay my stuff out?’ Milliken enquired as he came back along the deck.

  ‘Stuff?’

  ‘My bandages and things. I brought a few of my own.’

  ‘Doc,’ Robb said, ‘if you’re looking for a table or a dispensary or something, we don’t possess one. But, as far as I’m concerned, you can lay your little whatnames out in a neat line all the way from bow to stern if you like. Only I advise you to tie ’em all down separately or you’ll lose ’em overboard.’

  As he disappeared, still eating, Milliken reflected that somebody was pulling his leg.

  He blushed a little, classing Robb with the Flight Sergeant, and decided to keep his own counsel in future. He soon recovered from his humiliation and even began to feel heroic and strong in the sharp breeze. Not long from his aeroplane models and Modern Boy, he could almost imagine himself – quite forgetting the role he’d been trained for – preparing to give battle to the enemy. He knew suddenly how Drake and Hawkins must have felt as they’d beat down on the Armada, and the emotions Nelson must have experienced as he first sighted the great white warships of France in Trafalgar Bay. Then, just on the peak of his surging excitement, the wind whipped the top off a wave on the port bow and a bucketful of icy water slashed across his face, with a shock that took his breath away, and began to trickle down his neck.

  Milliken ducked hurriedly, wiped himself dry with his handkerchief, and looked about him again more cautiously. Treherne was huddled on the bridge now, his cap jammed low over his eyes, looking to the envious Milliken incredibly young to have command of this thundering, powerful boat. He was staring into the wind over the port bow at the spit of land they were passing that ended with the wreck of a ship, red-brown and rusty, its masts at a crazy angle, a gaunt, cigarette-shaped smoke-stack cocked drunkenly over.

  ‘Going to be rough, Flight,’ Milliken heard him call into the wheelhouse where, he presumed, the terrifying Flight Sergeant was handling the wheel.

  He failed to hear the Flight Sergeant’s reply above the din of the engines but he decided that if this was what the skipper himself called rough he had nothing to fear.

  Even as the thought crossed his mind the launch left the lee of the spit of land and hit the first of the waves that were sweeping across the mouth of the river. Her bow rose abruptly and smashed down in a stomach-catching drop into the valley of the next wave, with a crash that seemed to Milliken to have shattered the whole bottom of the boat to flying splinters of matchwood. For a second his feet were clear of the deck as it fell away beneath him, and a stifled yelp of fear escaped him. While he was still in the air he grabbed for a handhold, and just then his heels hit the deck again with a jar that shook every tooth in his head.

  ‘Throttle her back a fraction, Flight,’ Treherne said and, to the chastened Milliken’s astonishment, there appeared to be no trace of alarm in his demeanour.

  The boat continued to plunge into the waves in a manner that set the mast rattling as though it were loose. Milliken glanced upwards and with each shuddering jar saw the stays and halliards quiv
ering and the masthead racing across the clouds. He looked hurriedly away as he felt the first tremors of sickness in his stomach, then, wondering what he had let himself in for, he heard Treherne speak again to the Flight Sergeant.

  ‘All right, Flight, bring her on to course now.’

  Above the tumult of the engines Milliken heard the groan of planks as the boat swung from south-west to south-east in a ninety-degree turn. She canted slowly over at a forty-five-degree angle, so that the starboard side of the hull vanished beneath the white foam that raced hissing past, and Milliken was startled to realize that the waves washed only a few inches from his feet now instead of five feet as before. As he felt the drag of the boat’s swing pulling him over the side, and he imagined himself flung into the boiling foam and lost for ever before they had even noticed his departure, he held on tighter to the handrail and, clenching his teeth in terror, dug in his toes as the boat heeled further over.

  For a moment it seemed to hang shudderingly on its beam ends, its masthead along the wave-tops, on the point of turning turtle before it disappeared beneath the water. Then slowly, terribly slowly, it heaved itself up on to an even keel again, and Milliken’s breath came out in a heavy sigh of relief.

  Dray, in the engine-room, was still singing unmoved, his husky voice rising thinly above the roar of the engines – ‘Amour, Amour, Amour’, by this time, it appeared.

  All the deck crew beyond one look-out on the bridge had disappeared below. The cheeps still came from the wireless cabin. No one except Milliken seemed to be at all disturbed.

  * * *

  Long after Milliken had been frozen stiff by the bitter wind that was blowing, the corkscrewing of the boat through the water had continued – long after he had lost the first fine rapture of excitement and was crouched down on the sick bay steps trying to keep warm. It went on through the red blur of sea-sickness that welled up suddenly and left him sprawling on the deck retching his heart up, his blue fingers clutching the lifeline; it went on while he crawled miserably back to the sick bay, wondering painfully how he could ever be expected to attend to the injured feeling as he did, wondering in fact how he could ever even get on his feet again. He suffered it through a period of purgatory in the paraffin-scented galley, whither he was driven by the iron voice of the nightmarish little Flight Sergeant to help cut sandwiches for the crew, chivvied in addition as he stumbled over the high step to pick his bloody feet up. It went on while, his job accomplished, he slowly recovered once more in the sick bay, his head ringing with the metallic howl of the engines.

  He had lost all sense of time by now and, as the cork-screwing had continued, all thought had finally disappeared, too, in a misery of cold and damp and weariness. Then without warning, and when he was least expecting relief, the engines stopped in a thankful silence that came like a shock and the boat slowed down as it lost its way through the water. Corporal Robb, on his way aft through the sick bay with a message for the wireless operators, threw a white submarine jersey at Milliken. ‘Better put it on, doc,’ he said. ‘It’s cold. Smells like frost. There’s a duffle coat, top, if you’d like one.’

  ‘What do we do now?’ Milliken asked through stiff, chilled lips as he pulled the jersey on.

  ‘Get your swede down, doc,’ Robb said. ‘You’ve a long wait ahead of you. We’re on rendezvous now and we stay here till we’re sent for or told to go home. This is the exciting part.’

  * * *

  Over six boring, weary hours had elapsed since the engines had stopped and since then the boat had rolled monotonously and inevitably port and starboard, port and starboard, port and starboard. Beyond the look-out and a brief attempt by Robb at fishing from the stern, no interest seemed to be shown in anything – least of all in Milliken – by anyone, and the sky seemed to grow greyer and chillier as it pressed lower down on the swaying masthead where the rag of ensign flapped noisily.

  As the first violence went out of the motion of the boat Milliken had thanked God for the relief it brought but now, as she swung beam-on to the waves and the roll took the place of the cork-screwing, a short, vicious roll due to the narrow beam, Milliken realized he was worse off, not better. For a while he tried hard to sleep, but he was cold and with every lurch he had to dig in his elbows to keep himself on the bunk, and in the end he gave it up, more exhausted by his efforts than by the jarring crashes at speed that had wearied the muscles of his legs…

  Feeling like a pea rattled round inside a dried pod, he sat upright on the bunk, only to find in his misery that he was obliged to listen to the incessant talking of Tebbitt, the deckhand on the other bunk.

  ‘Never get back to base in time to meet that damned train,’ seemed to be the gist of what he was saying, and it kept coming across to Milliken like a Greek chorus to everything Tebbitt had to say, in waves of despair that filled the sick bay with gloom. ‘Blasted tub will never make it back for me to get to the station. Always my lousy luck. Whenever I want to go somewhere, we don’t get the ‘Return to base’ until it’s too late.’ He was reciting his worry like an incantation and even Milliken, young as he was, could see he was trying to invoke good fortune by a reiteration of possible bad fortune.

  ‘It’s due in in the early hours,’ he went on, ‘and I’ve got permission to be out of camp to meet it. Gus Westover’ – he indicated the man lying among the ammunition and spare Mae Wests below him and to his right – ‘he’s offered to do my boat guard tonight so I can get away. But I never shall. We’re bound to be late.’

  Tebbitt was a big man with a fresh round face in which his eyes seemed oddly out of place. His cheeks were those of a farmer, pink and white and plump, yet his eyes were those of a worried city clerk.

  ‘It’s my wife, Hilda,’ he went on, and Milliken, who had tried to listen at first as a means of taking his mind off the incessant rolling of the boat, was by now silently praying in his nightmare of sickness to be allowed to die in peace. ‘She’s coming down to stay with me in the town for a week or two. Canteen-worker, you know. Londoner by birth. I met her up in Tyneside when we were stationed at Blyth. Doesn’t like north country people though. And now she’s coming down to stay here for a bit. Hoped she might get a job round here, so we could be near each other. But it’s a bit near London for her and she might not settle.’

  It was beginning to dawn on Milliken by this time that Tebbitt was bewailing not a missed train but an unhappy marriage, and he began to take a distinct and hearty dislike to the absent Hilda Tebbitt. ‘Likes to be called Linda,’ Tebbitt pointed out, pressing his woes on Milliken as though the sharing of them would make his load easier. ‘She always did say that if she had half a chance to get back to London I wouldn’t see her out of it again in a hurry. And sometimes I think she’s in dead earnest.’

  Milliken began to be certain of it, deciding privately in a burst of bad temper which made him feel a little better that if Tebbitt was the only example of a northerner she’d come across he wasn’t surprised.

  ‘Reckon she’s been saving as hard as she can for the train fare home for some time.’ Tebbitt was sitting on the opposite bunk with an ease that Milliken envied, swaying backwards and forwards, his hands miraculously in his pockets instead of gripping the bunk. ‘Only she’s that daft with money. Always blues it on some soft knick-knack. Last time it was a plaid coat to go with a green suitcase I bought for her at Christmas. Daft with money, she is. Dead daft.’

  The boat gave an unexpected lurch which slung Milliken sideways on his back to the deck. Tebbitt picked him up, still talking, and helped him back on to the bunk. He was obviously sick with worry and anxious to share it with anyone, even a stranger. Milliken was beginning to suspect that the rest of the crew had heard his story so often they wouldn’t listen any more and that Tebbitt had to take advantage of any uninitiated audience whose attention would give him courage. Milliken even began to think the frightening Flight Sergeant might be a pleasant change.

  ‘Says she wouldn’t mind the V.IS or the V.2S if she
could only get back to London,’ Tebbitt was saying earnestly. ‘All she wants is London again – with shelter-life and everything, too! She says she misses the pubs and the dance halls and things. So I’ve persuaded her to come down here for a bit and see if she likes it. I’ve got her some digs for a week or two. She’ll be on her way now, I suppose.’

  He fished in his wallet and produced a photograph which he passed over. Milliken was already quite used to the nostalgic Service ritual of photograph-showing and he studied with over-elaborate interest the picture of a tall handsome blonde whose good looks were marred by her tight mouth and her too strong chin.

  ‘She says if I’m not at the station to meet her she’ll get back in the train – it’s a London train – and go straight on with it.’ Tebbitt laughed nervously and mirthlessly. ‘“I’m not going to be on my own in some strange town,” she says. “Not on my Jack Jones.” She’s like that. Straight John Bull. Says what she thinks. And it’ll be just my luck to get back too late to meet her. I’m sure we shan’t make it. Aren’t you?’

  Milliken hadn’t the slightest idea but he nodded and said he thought they’d make it all right.

  ‘Well, maybe we will,’ Tebbitt agreed gloomily, suddenly cast down into a vast huddled heap of despair, a colossus of unhappiness, so that Milliken wasn’t sure whether he wanted to get home in time or not, whether he wanted to meet his wife or be free of her for good.