We Joined The Navy

© Copyright 1959 by John Winton

The President of the Admiralty Interview Board had been a naval officer for a very long time. He had started as a scrubby-faced boy at the Admiralty Interview and he had served as a Midshipman in a battle-cruiser at Jutland, as a Sub-Lieutenant in a Yangtse gunboat, as a Lieutenant in a cruiser on the South Atlantic station, as a Commander in a battleship of the Home Fleet, and as a destroyer Captain in the North Atlantic. He had served in every sea from the Timor to the Adriatic, in every strait from the Bering to the Magellan, and had suffered every wind from the sirocco to the trades. Now, by hard work, attention to detail, and marrying late, he had become an admiral and was once more at the Admiralty Interview, interviewing another generation of scrubby-faced striplings, one of whom would grow up to be an admiral and interview a further generation of scrubby-faced striplings and so on and so on. Never had he had so clear a vision of the slow process of evolution in the Royal Navy. Never had he seen that evolution entrusted to poorer hands. In the Admiral’s opinion, the mighty tree of the Navy, which had produced such magnificent branches in the past, was now dying at the roots. He and his colleagues were gathering the last diseased twigs before the final crash. The Admiral leant his forehead in the palm of his hand and sighed.

The remainder of the Board, the Headmaster, the Civil Servant, the Psychiatrist, the Commanders (E) and (S), and the Lieutenant-Colonel, Royal Marines, marked their President’s sigh and hunched their shoulders. They dropped their heads and waited expectantly, like Victorian children waiting for Papa to say grace.

The Admiral sighed again.

‘Well, gentlemen,’ he said at last, ‘here we are again. I hope I see you refreshed and ready for one more battle with the latest products of our present day and age? Frankly, I don’t know what the schools
do
to them these days. I can’t believe that the basic stock has changed. It must be the environment. By the time we get them at eighteen years of age it takes us five whole years or more to make them any damn use to man or beast. Here we have a country bleeding itself white to provide education for all and what happens? We spend half our time interviewing cretins and morons and the other half interviewing communists and embryo politicians. It takes us all our time to find enough boys in one year who are not clearly destined for the Old Bailey to keep the service going.’

The Admiral shook his head and sighed a third time. The Board listened with pleasant approving smiles on their faces. One or two of them nodded. These were the very phrases with which the Admiral opened each fresh series of interviews. The Board sat like contented members of an audience who hear again the well-loved curtain-raising words of a familiar play. Not that the Board did not entirely agree with the Admiral. It was Monday morning, the first morning of a new Interview Board, and each member of the Board knew that several weeks of trying work lay ahead.

The Admiral passed a hand wearily over his forehead.

‘As this is the first day,’ he said, ‘I may as well refresh your memories on one or two items of policy.’

The Board slumped in their seats.

‘Remember we are not looking for normal boys. We are looking for boys who will make naval officers. There’s a difference. We are looking for half-wits. The service will add the other half in its own way and in its own time.’

The Board nodded.

‘None of these boys will be very intelligent. If they had any intelligence they wouldn’t be here. They’d be applying for jobs outside which carry more pay and less work, like most of their contemporaries. But lack of intelligence need not concern us. An intelligent man never makes a good naval officer. He embarrasses everybody.’

The Board glanced briefly at their President and nodded again. After all, he had been a naval officer for nearly forty years. He should know.

‘I need not tell you not to be surprised at anything you hear in this room. I myself have long since lost the capacity for amazement.’

The Board pursed their lips. They remembered the candidate who had tried, with a pin, to convince the Admiral that Christian Science worked for the common man.

‘Keep off religion and politics. They know more about that sort of thing than we do.’

The Board began to rouse themselves. The Admiral was approaching his peroration.

‘One last point. Make sure, I
implore
you, gentlemen, make sure you know what the boy’s father does for a living. If the man’s an admiral then of course you can be as facetious as you wish, but if he’s a plumber or a boilermaker or anything which remotely sounds as though it has a trade union then I must beseech you to be careful. We just cannot afford any more questions in the House. It upsets the First Lord and I get it all back from him later.’

The Admiral wound up his watch, shot his cuffs, gathered some papers together, and looked round the Board.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Who have we first?’

The Civil Servant consulted a list.

‘John Paul Henry Marchant Vincent, sir.’

The Admiral frowned.

‘What nationality’s his father?’

‘American, sir.’

‘What does he do?’

‘Not recorded, sir. His people appear to be divorced.’

‘Never mind. Let him in. Nerve yourselves, gentlemen.’

‘John Paul Henry Marchant Vincent.’

Vincent was a tall dark boy with thick black hair and brown eyes. He looked less American than French. His rangy build and slightly hooked nose reminded the Admiral vaguely of pictures he had seen of young men in berets who pedalled furiously across France with bicycle tyres wound across their chests. The boy looked clever, perhaps too clever, as though he might be more than a match even for the Admiralty Interview Board. The Admiral wondered what had prompted a boy like this to try for the Navy.

‘Sit down, Vincent,’ said the Admiral hospitably.

The tables in the board-room were arranged in the form of a capital T. The Board sat along the cross-piece and the candidate sat at the bottom of the tail, confronted with a long expanse of bare table which ended in the formidable array of the Board’s faces. It was an intimidating prospect, and the Board were accustomed to seeing candidates sit down as though they expected the seat to burn them. They had seen candidates miss the chair altogether and sprawl upon the floor. One candidate had sat down and immediately slid off the chair in a dead faint. The Board had seen many candidates, but Vincent was the first in their experience to take his seat and wait for their questions as calmly as though he were waiting for his mid-morning aperitif.

The Admiral placed his elbows on the table, clasped his fingers together and stared at Vincent from under his bushy eyebrows.

‘Now, Vincent. Why do you want to join the Navy?’

It was a crucial question. It was asked of every candidate and although it seemed an obvious question to ask of a prospective naval officer, the Board were no longer surprised at the number of candidates who were nonplussed by it. It was the jackpot question.

But Vincent appeared to be ready for it. His might almost have been called the jackpot answer.

‘Well, sir,’ he said, ‘that is a very fundamental question for me to answer in a short time. Briefly, I have always felt that everyone should make an attempt fairly early in life to choose the way in which he can best serve the community. You may then say, and rightly, sir, how can one be sure which is the best way? Some people are lucky. They don’t have to make a choice. They know. They have a vocation. I’m not quite so lucky as that, but I do think one can choose something and persevere at it. I chose the Navy, sir.’

Vincent leaned back and shrugged his shoulders. He appeared to be waiting now for the Admiral to counter with the reason why he joined the Navy.

‘Is that why you have chosen to be an engineer officer, Vincent?’ asked the Headmaster.

‘Yes, sir. I realise that the Navy offers many spheres of opportunity and I think that offers the most. For me at any rate, sir.’

‘Quite, said the Headmaster. Vincent seemed to have left none of the usual loopholes in his answer. The Headmaster decided to change the subject. He asked his favourite question, one which he asked of every candidate whose Christian names permitted it.

‘Vincent, your name is John. Can you tell me any famous Johns in history?’

Vincent considered. He was marshalling his facts.

‘Off hand, sir, I would say the Apostle John, John Bull, Don John of Austria, John of Gaunt, John Knox, John Gay, John Paul Jones, John Masefield, John Milton, John Keats, John Nash, John Jacob Astor, John Barbirolli, Augustus John perhaps, and if you take the foreign equivalents there’s Johannes Brahms, Jan Masaryk, Ivan the Terrible, Ian Hay, Jacques Fath--’

‘Thank you, Vincent. You have answered that reasonably well, I think. There are a few notable omissions, of course. Jack the Ripper might have been worth a place. You might have mentioned the distaff side. Joan of Arc, for instance. And the animal kingdom you have left completely untouched. Brown Jack springs to mind. . . .’

‘Thank you, Headmaster,’ interrupted the Admiral sharply. He had noticed the Headmaster’s tendency to dwell on this question. ‘I see you played cricket at school, Vincent. Were you in the Eleven?’

‘I was captain of it, sir. But I’m afraid cricket was my only sport.’

‘I see. Did you bat or bowl?’

‘Bat, sir.’

‘What was your highest score?’

‘A hundred and sixty-four, sir.’

‘I
see
. Who was that against?’

‘Incogniti, sir.’

‘Are you the Vincent who opened for the Public Schools, Vincent?’ put in the Headmaster.

‘Yes, sir.’

The Board beamed at each other. A wave of approval passed amongst them like a Pentecostal wind. A boy may look like a Parisian apache but there cannot be much wrong with any lad who can knock up a hundred against respectable club bowling.

‘You say you play no other games? None at all?’

‘I play a bit of tennis occasionally, sir.’

‘Don’t you ever play golf?’ asked the Lieutenant-Colonel of Royal Marines. A lad with a natural eye like this could probably get down to scratch, given a few years in the right hands.

‘No, sir. I have always thought golf a game for revoltingly healthy young spinsters, and revoltingly senile old men, sir. One of the few things I can remember my father saying was that he thought golf was a good walk spoilt and I agree with him, sir.’

There comes a time in the stage run by an Olympic torch-bearer when the torch becomes almost too heavy to bear and the distance too far to run. At such a time he is only too glad to hand over the torch to his successor. The Admiral looked round his Board for support.

The Commander (E), a thin angular man with a profile of a Caesar, caught the eye of his stricken chief and hurriedly made up a question which had been debated in that morning’s
Times
.

‘Vincent, how far would you say that young men entering the engineering profession today should be engineers? What I mean to say is, do you think that engineers need a broad education? Or just one in engineering subjects?’

‘I would say the broader the better, sir.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s obvious, sir.’

‘Why is it obvious?’

‘You wouldn’t go to a doctor who only knew how to doctor and who couldn’t have a round of golf with you occasionally, would you, sir?’

‘A hit, a palpable hit,’ murmured the Headmaster under his breath.

‘You’re trying for the wrong profession, young man,’ remarked the Admiral viciously. ‘The House of Commons would welcome you. Now, I want you to look at that picture on the wall and tell us what you can deduce from it.’

The picture was of a sailing boat leaving a narrow wooded harbour. On the nearest hill was a church. Various posts, buoys and anchored boats lay in the channel. It was an ordinary water-colour which could have been bought at any seaside resort. Vincent could see nothing remarkable in it, but the picture plainly had some significance for the Board. He studied it carefully.

‘The boat is a ketch, sir.’

‘How do you know?’

‘The rig, sir.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Two masts, the after one smaller than the for’d but placed before the rudder post, sir.’

‘Good. What else can you see?’

‘Tide is ebbing, sir.’

‘Why?’

‘You can see by the buoys and the other boats, sir.’

‘Good. Go on.’

‘I can see a weather vane on the top of the church. I think the harbour is on the south coast. It’s evening.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘The shadows of the trees are very long, sir. And one side of the harbour is lit up by the sun and the other is in shadow.’

‘Very good, Vincent. That’s not at all bad.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

The Commander (S) was a portly man who greatly resembled Mr Pickwick. He realised that he had not yet asked Vincent a single question and heaved himself up in his chair.

‘Vincent, what’s the difference between a planet and a star?’