The Cruise of The Breadwinner (8 page)

At times he looked up at the face of Gregson. It was thrust outward into the rain with its own enormous and profound aggression. The boy sometimes could not tell from its muteness whether it was angry or simply shocked into the silences it held for half an hour or more. He wanted to talk to it. There rose up constantly in his mind, tired now and dazed by shock, images of the cabin below. They troubled him more each time he thought of them. Their physical reality began to haunt him much more than the reality of the dead engineer, who lay not ten feet before him, like a piece of sodden and battered merchandise, his blood washed away now by constant rain. He thought often of the conversation of the dead pilot. He thought less often of Messner. There were to him very subtle differences between the men, and death had not destroyed them. When he thought of Messner it was with dry anger. He conceived Messner as the cause of it all. It was something of a low trick. Then he remembered Messner as the man who also carried the binoculars, and he remembered that the binoculars were the only things that had come out of the day that were not sick with the ghastliness of foul and indelible dreams.

He was very tired. The way the sea hit
The Breadwinner
also hit him in the stomach, a dozen times or more a minute, kicking him sore. He had not eaten anything since coming up from the cabin. There had been no more shouts from Gregson, no more cups of tea. Gregson remained for the most part vastly mute, the light beaten out of his face.

When the boy had to talk to him again, he said:

“When will we be in, Mr. Gregson, skipper?”

Gregson did not answer. He kept his face thrust forward into a gigantic pout, angered into a new and tragic sullenness. The boy had not known this face before. There were times when he had been afraid of Gregson; they were separated by what seemed to him vast stretches of years by the terrifying vastness of the man. Now he was comforted by the gigantic adultness of Gregson. It shut him away, for a time, from the things he had seen.

They were coming in towards the estuary now, Gregson giving the wheel a hard point or two to port, and then another, and then holding
The Breadwinner
hard down, her head a point or two west from north. The face of the sea was cresting down a fraction; the wind gave a suck or two at the sail as the boat turned and lay over, loosing it back as she straightened. The boy could see the shore clearly now, misty with rain, the dunes in long wet brown stripes, the only colour against the winter land beyond. And suddenly, looking up at Gregson, he thought for a moment he detected there a slight relaxation on the enormous bulging face. He saw Gregson lick the rain from his tired lips. It gave him courage to think that at last Gregson was going to speak again.

“Almost in, Mr. Gregson, skipper,” he said.

The violence of Gregson's voice was so sudden that it was like the clamour of a man frightened by his own anger.

“God damn them!” he roared. “God damn them! All of them, God damn them! Why don't they let us alone? Why don't they let us alone! Why don't they let us alone! How much longer? Why don't they let our lives alone? God damn and blast them—all of them, all of them, all the bastards, all over the world!”

Gregson finished shouting and gave an enormous fluttering sigh. It seemed to exhaust him. He stood heavy and brooding across the wheel, his body without savagery, his face all at once dead and old and colourless, the rain streaming down it like a flood of tears.

He put his hand on the boy's shoulder, as if he now suddenly remembered he was there. The sea was calming down at the mouth of the estuary, and
The Breadwinner
was beginning to run lumpily in towards the narrow gap in the steel defences, rusty for miles along the wild and empty shore. There were no lights in the dark afternoon, and the rain darkened a little more each moment the farther hills, the cliffs and the low sky. The boy did not move again. All the time he had wanted, at this last moment, to raise the binoculars to his eyes. For some reason he did not want to raise them now. There did not seem much use in raising them. He was not even sure that there seemed much use in possessing them. As he stood there with Gregson's arm on his shoulder he remembered the dead engineer; he remembered Gregson's violent outburst of words; and he remembered the dead pilots, lying in the orange lamplight in the small cabin darkened by his own shadow with their dead fair faces, side by side. And they became for him, at that moment, all the pilots, all the dead pilots, all over the world.

At that moment they ran into the mouth of the estuary. Gregson continued tenderly to hold him by the shoulder, not speaking, and the boy once more looked up at him, seeing the old tired face again as if bathed in tears. He did not speak, and there rose up in him a grave exultation.

He had been out with men to War and had seen the dead. He was alive and
The Breadwinner
had come home.

H. E. Bates was born in 1905 in the shoe-making town of Rushden, Northamptonshire, and educated at Kettering Grammar School. After leaving school, he worked as a reporter and as a clerk in a leather warehouse.

Many of his stories depict life in the rural Midlands, particularly his native Northamptonshire, where he spent many hours wandering the countryside.

His first novel,
The Two Sisters
(1926) was published by Jonathan Cape when he was just twenty. Many critically acclaimed novels and collections of short stories followed.

During WWII he was commissioned into the RAF solely to write short stories, which were published under the pseudonym “Flying Officer X”. His first financial success was
Fair Stood the Wind for France
(1944), followed by two novels about Burma,
The Purple Plain
(1947) and
The Jacaranda Tree
(1949) and one set in India,
The Scarlet Sword
(1950). Other well-known novels include
Love for Lydia
(1952) and
The Feast of July
(1954).

His most popular creation was the Larkin family which featured in five novels beginning with
The Darling Buds of May
in 1958. The later television adaptation was a huge success.

Many other stories were adapted for the screen, the most renowned being
The Purple Plain
(1947) starring Gregory Peck, and
The Triple Echo
(1970) with Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed.

H. E. Bates married in 1931, had four children and lived most of his life in a converted granary near Charing in Kent. He was awarded the CBE in 1973, shortly before his death in 1974.

Discover other books by H. E. Bates published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/HEBates
.

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For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain references to missing images.

First published in Great Britain in 1946 by Michael Joseph Ltd

This electronic edition published in 2015 by Bloomsbury Reader

Copyright © 1946 Evensford Productions Limited

The moral right of the author is asserted.

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eISBN: 9781448215393

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