The Cruise of The Breadwinner (3 page)

“Don't you believe it,” Gregson said. “Coming in and machine-gunning kids at low-level. That ain't brave.”

“This was brave,” the young man said.

He spoke with the tempered air of the man who has seen the battle, his words transcending for the first time the comedy of the moustache. He carried suddenly an air of cautious defined authority, using words that there was no contesting.

Gregson, pondering incredibly on this remark about the
bravery of enemies, said: “What happened to you then after that?”

“Pranged,” the pilot said. “Couldn't pull out. Hit it with a bang.”

“And what happened to him?”

The young man looked steadily over the sea, on which the yellow winter sunlight now lay with a sort of hazy unripeness, dissolving itself tenderly towards the almost colourless edges of sky.

“That's what I want to find out,” he said.

“You better have a cuppa tea,” Gregson said. “Never mind about Jerry. If he's in the sea we'll find him plenty soon enough. He'll wash up.”

“I'd like to see what he's like,” the boy said. “God, he was brave.”

“You think you hit him?” Gregson said.

“I know I hit him.”

“Then that's bleedin' good enough, ain't it?” Gregson looked round, heaving his belly, with an air of heavy finality. “Snowy, git us all another cuppa tea!”

The boy turned and went instantly down the hatchway, sliding the last four steps on the smooth heels of his sea-boots. The largeness of the world of men on deck seemed now to narrow down and diminish the already awkward spaces of the tiny cabin below. It oppressed him terribly. He lumbered about it as if he were as large as Gregson, partly stupefied with excitement, partly trying to listen through the cabin-roof to whatever might be going on above. He found an extra cup in the cupboard under the bunks and put it on the table with the two others. He saw it was slightly dirty, and wiped it with his sweater. Then he filled the cups with tea that was in colour something like dark beer. The teapot held about three pints of it, and he
filled it up from the big tin kettle before putting it back on the stove. Then he spooned quantities of soft sugar into the cups and stirred each of them madly before taking it upstairs. The whole business took him about three minutes, and he did not think that in this time anything of great importance could have happened on deck.

He was astonished, coming up into the sunlight with the three cups of tea skilfully hooked by their handles into the crook of his first fingers, that even in those few moments a change had taken place. He came up in time to hear Jimmy saying:

“I never knowed it was part of the game to go cruisin' round picking Jerries up.”

“I don't know that he's there to pick up,” the pilot said. “The bastard is probably dead. All I'm saying is he was a brave bastard.”

“That suits me,” Gregson said. “If he's dead he's dead. If he ain't he ain't. Have it which way you like, it's all I care.”

The boy came with the tea and stood silent, fascinated, while each of the three men took their cups from him. He watched the young pilot, holding his tea in both hands, the fur collar of his flying jacket turned up so that the scarlet muffler on his neck was concealed, look away southward over the sea. It was very like a picture of a pilot he had once cut out of a Sunday paper. To see it in reality at last held him motionlessly bound in a new dream.

“How far do you cruise out?” the young man said.

Gregson had a superstitious horror of cruising down Channel to the west. Fifty years of consistent routine had taken him eastward, fishing in unadventurous waters somewhere between South Foreland and Ostend. He did not like the west for any reason he could say; he did not, for that matter, like the south either. There lurked within him
somewhere the cumbrous superstition born of habit, never defined enough to be given a name.

“Well, we're out now about as far as we reckon to go. Don't you wanna git back?”

The pilot, not answering, seemed to measure the caution of Gregson as he gazed across the water. And it occurred suddenly to the boy, watching his face, that he knew perfectly that there were no limits to which Gregson, in human need, would not go. But eastward or westward it was the same as far as enemy pilots were concerned.

And then suddenly the boy remembered something. He spoke to the pilot for the first time.

“How far out did you fire?” he said.

“Smack over a Martello tower,” the pilot said, “on the shore.”

“Then it wasn't you firing,” the boy said. “What we heard was right out to sea.”

“Be God so it were,” Gregson said. “So it were.”

“Mean there was someone else having a go?” the pilot said.

“Sounded like gun-testing,” Jimmy said.

“Don't take no bleedin' notice of him,” Gregson said. “Was they any more of your blokes out?”

“A whole flight was up.”

“There y'are then!” Gregson said. “What are we farting about here for? Warm her up, Jimmy. Let's git on!”

As
The Breadwinner
swung round, turning a point or two south-eastward, sharp into the sun, the boy went forward into the bows and discovered a second or two later that the pilot was there beside him, still warming his fingers on the tea-cup and sometimes reflectively drinking from it, balancing the two wings of the ridiculous corn-ginger moustache on its edges. It did not occur to the boy that he
did not look like a fighting man; it occurred to him instead that he might be a man with binoculars. “If we had a pair o' glasses we might pick things up easier,” he said.

“Never carry any,” the pilot said.

If there was any disappointment in the boy's face it was lost in the ardent gleam of steady and serious wonder which he now brought to bear on the sea. Gradually the sunlight everywhere was losing its lemon pallor, but it was still low enough to lay across the water the long leaf-broken path of difficult and dazzling light. The boy shaded his eyes against it with both hands. He desired to do something remotely professional; something to impress the man of battles standing beside him. He longed dramatically to spot something in the sea. They stood there together for about five minutes, not speaking but both watching with hands framing their faces against the dazzle of sea-light, and nothing happening or moving except
The Breadwinner
lugging slowly south-eastward out of sight of either shore, the sea emptier and more peaceful than on a peace-time day, until suddenly far behind them Gregson called the boy:

“I'm gittin' peckish, Snowy boy. Ain't peeled them taters yit, ayah?”

“No, mister,” the boy said.

“Well, you better git in and peel 'em then. Peel a double dose. Pilots eat same as we do.”

The boy said, looking up at the pilot: “I gotta git below now. I'll take your cup down if you've finished.” Hating to go, he came also within a short distance of hating Gregson. The pilot finished the tea. “Want another cup? I can bring it,” the boy said. “Easy bring it.”

“No,” the pilot said. “That was fine.”

The boy went below, stumbling about the gangway and the cabin as if partially blinded by sun. The remoteness of
the world above him was exaggerated by the sound of Jimmy going up the hatchway, leaving him alone with the fire in the toy galley, a sack of potatoes and a jack-knife. He glanced about the box of a cabin, hating it without really seeing its dingy and confined outlines. He thought dismally that nothing ever went on below, that nothing could ever happen there. He longed passionately to talk to the pilot, up in the sun.

Sometimes as he sat there peeling potatoes at the cabin-table he could hear the voice of Gregson from up above, always huge and violent, never articulate except for strong half-words that the noise of the engine did not drown. He was driven by the maddening isolation of this to go and stand at the foot of the hatchway, and one by one peel the potatoes there. If Gregson's order were to be taken literally he would peel about forty of them. He stood there looking up into the shaft of sea-light, peeling his fifteenth potato, when Jimmy came sliding down the hatch without any warning except a violent and wordless sort of bellow. The boy watched him disappear into the tiny and confined engine-cradle that was not big enough to be called a room, and then bawled after him: “What's up, Jimmy? What's up now?”

“Somebody in the sea!” Jimmy said.

The boy went up the hatchway with a half-peeled potato still in his hands. The engine died behind him as he went, and Jimmy followed him a moment later.

On deck Gregson and the pilot were up in the bows. Gregson was lumbering about in a state of heavy excitement. The pilot seemed, to the boy coming up into the sharp winter sunlight out of the gloom of the cabin, about seven feet tall and crowned by a crumpled hat of coffee-brown fur. He was at that moment about to pull his flying
jacket over his head. The sharp released pressure of it shocked the wide moustache into a dishevelment that was for some reason more serious than even its bushy correctitude had been. The pilot took off his white under-sweater, and then began to take off his boots. He seemed to hesitate about his thick grey under-socks and then decided to take them off too. “Is he still coming in?” he said to Gregson; and Gregson, leaning heavily over the side bawled, “He's floatin' on his back. He's a Jerry all right too.”

“Yes, he's a Jerry all right,” the pilot said, and stood ready, side by side with Gregson and the boy, watching about sixty feet away the floating and feebly propelling body of a man awkwardly moving across the face of the sea like a puffing yellow crab.

“Want a line?” Gregson said.

“Want a line?” the young man said. “I could swim to France.”

He went over the side a moment later in a smooth and careless dive that took him under and brought him up, fifteen or twenty feet away, with the shaking howl of a dog having fun. He began to strike out with strokes of deep power, turning backward with each of them a moustache that looked suddenly as if it had been pasted on to the strong wet face. All the fancy oddities of the man became in those few moments washed away. He seemed to be feeling forward to grasp the solid fabric of the sea so that he could tear it with his hands. He reached the other man, now moving with spidery feebleness parallel to the boat, in about twenty seconds, and rolled over beside him, coming up a moment later underneath and slightly to one side. The blue sleeve of his arm came up across the yellow inflated German life jacket, and then sleeve and jacket and the
yellowish heads of both men began to move towards the boat together.

The boy stood fascinated. Every now and then Gregson, huge and majestic, pushed his body a foot or two along the boatside, moving in time with the swimming pilot and at the same time pushing the boy along with him too. The boy was sometimes half-obliterated by the bulk of Gregson, and Gregson in turn was impeded by the boy. Neither of them seemed to notice it.

The curiosity of the boy was so intense that it almost blinded him. The blob of yellow and blue coming in towards the boat sometimes receded and was lost for a second or two like an illusion. When it reappeared it seemed gigantic. The boy could then see clearly the water-flattened moustache of the pilot every time the head was thrown back, and he could see the upper half of the body of the rescued man. It seemed quite lifeless. But suddenly as it came nearer the boy could see lying across the chest of it a leather strap. It was attached to a leather case that appeared every second or so from below the sea and then was lost again. The boy in a moment of painful and speechless joy knew what it was.

At that same moment Gregson, excited too, flattened him against the boatside so that he could not move. And since he could not move Gregson could not move either, and Gregson in that moment became aware of him again.

“What the pipe, Snowy! Git out on it!” Gregson bawled. “Git down and git some tea! They'll want it. Go on. Git crackin'! Git that tea.”

With a curve of his hand Gregson hooked the boy from the boatside. It was a sort of friendly blow and it took the boy across the deck and down the narrow hatchway and into the cabin below before he was aware of it.

He stood there for some moments in an excited stupor before realizing that he still had in his hands a half-peeled potato. It had on it the oily imprint of his fingers where he had clenched it. As he stood holding it he heard Gregson bawling on deck. He tried to hear what Gregson was saying, but the words were confused and he got the impression only of mighty, exciting events overhead.

This impression exploded his stupor. He was filled with violent energy. His head rocked with the astonishing possibilities of the leather case slung across the body of the German, and he ached to be part of the world of men.

He put fresh tea into the teapot with his hands and then poured water on it and found two extra cups in the locker by the stove. Nothing like this had ever happened before: no pilot, no rescue, no Jerry, no binoculars. He heard Gregson shouting again: this time much louder, something about a gun. The boy, standing with head upraised, listening, was swept by a torrent of new possibilities. Back in the pub, at home, there were boys with the luck of the gods. They owned sections of air cannon-guns, belts of unfired cartridges. He suddenly saw before him the wonder of incredible chances. He did not know what happened to the guns and binoculars of dead pilots or even captured pilots, but now, at last, he was going to know.

He poured tea into the two cups and was in the act of stirring sugar into them when he heard, from overhead, two new sounds. Somebody was running across the deck, and from a south-easterly direction, faint but to him clear enough, came the sound of a plane. He did not connect these sounds. He had momentarily lost interest in the sound of aircraft. Something much more exciting was happening on deck. Gregson was shouting again, and again there was
the sound of feet running across the deck. They were so heavy that he thought perhaps they were Gregson's feet. But it was all very confused and exciting, and he had no time to disentangle the sound of voices from the sound of feet and the rising sound of the now not so distant plane. Nor did it matter very much. He had in that moment reached the fine and rapid conclusion that war was wonderful.