We Joined The Navy (20 page)

‘Me?’

‘Haven’t you got the buzz? You’re in the wardroom boat. Bow.’

‘But that’s impossible!’

‘Not at all. Dickie asked me had we got a crew and I said we’d got you and Pontius and Chris and Mr Piles would cox.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m stroke.’

‘Ye gods!’

The Regatta held a peculiar position in the affections of the Fleet. Boat-pulling had very little place in the Fleet except as physical training and excited little interest except on one or two days in the year, Regatta Days, when it became the outlet for all surplus energy and the subject of every conversation. Although its detractors said that boat-pulling was only an archaic survival from the Navy of long ago, a ship could romp through her football matches, win all her cricket fixtures, and defeat all comers at the Fleet Athletic Meeting, but only if she won the Regatta was she entitled to call herself Cock Ship.

In
Barsetshire
the Regatta passed through the stage of being a ship’s activity and rose to the height of a frenzy. It was an event which aroused fanatical enthusiasm in any ship but in the Cadet Training Cruiser it reached the plane of a religious mania.
Barsetshire
prepared to enjoy the Regatta as a dervish enjoys thrusting knives through his own flesh, approaching a state of exaltation through self-mortification.

The crews were arbitrarily selected by the Chief G.I. in the same way as he selected cadets for other duties. Cadets who found the rare button coloured red and numbered thirty beside their names were plunged into a rigorous training schedule. They pulled a mile in a boat twice a day, did P.T. in the afternoons, and were personally sighted in their hammocks by the Duty Cadet Instructor at nine o’clock every evening. They were encouraged to eat more and discouraged from going ashore. Their only consolation lay in seeing that those who were not in the Regatta crews were just as busy doing evolutions.

Once a cruise,
Barsetshire
indulged in a colossal convulsion of Seamanship. Under the Commander’s direction, the cadets ran through the Seamanship Manual. They spread, furled and respread the quarterdeck, foc’s’le and waist awnings. They laid out the gear for fuelling at sea, abeam and astern; towing, forward and aft; and for transfer by jackstay, heavy and light. They struck and housed the top mast, hoisted and lowered accommodation ladders, and sent away kedge anchors, sea anchors and the Gunnery Officer’s motor-cycle in cutters. They rigged sheer legs. They practised securing to, and slipping from, a buoy, and they rehearsed mooring, cheering, and abandoning ship. They pulled boats away to retrieve buoys, torpedoes and men overboard. They put out fires, electrical and carbonaceous, rigged emergency lighting circuits, shored up bulkheads, and donned breathing sets. They weighed the anchor, moved the rudder, and trained the guns by hand.

‘All we’ve got to do now,’ Paul said at the end of a week, ‘is raise steam by hand.’

‘How do we do that?’ asked George Dewberry.

‘Haven’t you noticed those pulleys on the funnels?’

‘You’ve nothing to complain about,’ said Raymond Ball. ‘You haven’t got to pull a boat miles every day. I shall be damned glad when this bloody Regatta’s over. It’s so pointless. You sweat blood to get a piece of wood from one end of the harbour to the other and when you’ve got it there you sweat more blood to get it back. It’s not as though you were even going to fetch something.’

To air such opinions aloud in
Barsetshire
on the eve of the Regatta was tantamount to questioning the validity of the Holy Sacrament in St. Peter’s on Easter Day. The rest of the gunroom looked cautiously at the scuttles and drew slightly away from Raymond Ball; cadets had been summoned before the Captain for less.

‘You’d better pipe down a bit if you want to pass out of this outfit,’ Tom Bowles said.

‘I still say it’s a waste of time.’

‘I know you do, dear boy,’ said Paul, ‘but if you want to live a bit longer, I should keep quiet about it.’

‘I hope it pours with rain.’

Raymond Ball was disappointed. The first day of the Regatta dawned clear and bright. The sun shone and there was a slight breeze, enough to cool but not enough to disturb the surface of the sea. It was a perfect day for boat-pulling.

No ship in the Fleet intended any of its crews to pull without audible support. Every ship lowered all its boats and filled them to the gunwhale with chucking-up crews carrying instruments for producing noise. Some ships had bands, but most were forced to improvise. There were trumpeters, drummers, guitarists, trombonists, men with triangles, hunting horns, washboards and horseshoes, a string quartet, and lines of men holding nothing but empty tins which they struck with mallets, or empty shell-cases which they struck with hammers. When the gun fired for the start of the first race, every band launched a different tune, every sailor with an instrument played, and those with empty tins or shell-cases beat them in time to the oar-strokes of their ship’s boats. Those without any instruments shouted through megaphones and cupped hands. All together, the chucking-up crews made a sound like a massacre.

As the Regatta progressed, it was clear that though
Barsetshire
’s crews were good, they were not good enough. They were the most stylish crews in the Regatta, but they were not prepared for the sheer ferocity with which some of the other ship’s crews pulled.
Barsetshire
’s crews led in race after race but were finally beaten by some destroyer or frigate’s crew who were pulling on the last shreds of their energy before exhaustion overtook them.

The Officers’ Race was typical.
Barsetshire
’s boat, the formidable combination stroked by The Bodger and coxed by Mr Piles, led to the finishing line when they were caught by the crew from a Tank Landing Ship, whose boat included their whole wardroom.
Barsetshire
were beaten into third place by the Fleet Tanker
Wave Chiropodist
.

At the end of the second day,
Barsetshire
finished fifth in the final placing, which The Bodger thought was good considering that they had pulled in a standard boat.

‘I had a look at that L.S.T.’s boat this afternoon’ he said. ‘If I’d pulled in that I could have won that race single-handed. They had the hull sandpapered down and varnished. They’d taken the bottom boards out and planed down the seats. They all had specially fitted cushions. I suggested doing all that to our boat but everyone said it would be setting a bad example to the cadets. Can you beat it?’

‘Ah well, that’s life.’

The sailing Regatta was held a week later. The Fleet raised steam and steamed round to a bay along the coast of Malta where the course was laid out.

Barsetshire
’s chief hope for the sailing Regatta was Tom Bowles. He had fufilled the promise he had shown at Dartmouth and had become the best coxswain in the ship. There are some who have an instinctive sympathy with any boat they sail, just as there are some men whom any horse will obey, and Tom Bowles had matured into such a coxswain. It was a compliment to be asked to crew for him and when Tom asked Michael and Paul if they would crew in his boat they were as flattered as though they had been asked by Drake to make up the numbers in the
Golden Hind
, particularly as neither of them sailed often and knew very little about racing. Maconochie was also asked and was as flattered.

None of Tom’s crew knew that he had asked them because he liked to sail an important race with a crew who would do exactly as he told them without any notions of their own.

The weather changed for the sailing races and as the time of the race came nearer, it was clear that all Tom Bowles’ skill would be needed. A lively north-east wind, whose local name is the gregale, the Euroclydon which wrecked St. Paul, freshened through the forenoon and showed signs of becoming a gale by the evening. White horses covered the bay and raced down past the ships. The boats at the booms rose and plunged with the send of the sea until it became difficult for the crews to man them. Most of the cadets looked hopefully at the quarterdeck, expecting the races to be cancelled, but the Regatta flags still flew. The races were still on.

Two of
Barsetshire
’s dinghies, one sailed by David Bowie, capsized before they had sailed more than a hundred yards from the ship. They were caught by a sudden gust and their coxswains had no time to luff up, no time even to let go the sheets, before they were swimming in the sea. To the cadets watching from the quarterdeck, it was an omen.

The first whaler away sheered from the boom on a reach, forced hard over by the wind. Her crew hung out over the weather gunwhale, their huddled figures disappearing in the sheets of spray which leapt as high as the mast. When the boat came round out of
Barsetshire
’s lee the main halliard parted with a crack and the mainsail smothered the crew and pulled the boat broadside on to the sea, almost capsizing her. The watchers on the quarterdeck could see the whaler’s coxswain trying to keep the boat head to the wind while his crew rigged a jury sail from the remains of the mainsail.

Tom Bowles’ crew were not optimistic as they manned their own boat. Maconochie was openly pessimistic and ostentatiously counted the lifebelts. Michael and Paul felt no better even when they swore at Maconochie. Cartwright and the senior cadet, Denis Hubert, the remaining members of the crew, were resigned; they seemed anxious to get the race over quickly.

Maconochie made the first mistake. Hardly hearing Tom Bowles’ orders over the sound of the wind, he slipped the boat while her bows were swinging in towards
Barsetshire
. In spite of Tom Bowles’ efforts to make the boat pay off and the crew’s efforts to bear the bows off with boathooks, the boat drifted inexorably along the ship’s side and fouled under the gangway.

The heads of the spectators appeared over the guardrail. They saw the boat and began to curse Tom Bowles and all his crew.

Tom Bowles and his crew were cursed by bell, book and candle; they were cursed waking and cursed sleeping, eating and drinking, living and dying. The Bodger and the Communications Officer, in particular, gave a recital of profanity, with recitative and aria, theme and variations, and obbligato for solo oath. When at last Tom Bowles extricated his boat, he and his crew had been cursed as comprehensively as the Jackdaw of Rheims.

Paul decided afterwards, though he never mentioned it to anyone, that the incident at the gangway clouded Tom Bowles’ judgment.

Half a mile away from the ship, when Tom Bowles was feeling the capabilities of the boat and establishing his command over her, Paul looked back. The recall flags were flying.

‘Tom, they’re flying the recall!’ he shouted.

Tom glanced over his shoulder.

‘Oh hell. I suppose we’d better get back. Ready about!’

Tom put the tiller over and the boat started its swing. But the boat was clumsy and turned too slowly. A gust caught her and she sagged away down wind, tilted on the very top of a wave, and heeled over.

Caught unprepared, the crew slid down to the lee side and tried to climb back again, except Maconochie who was sitting high on the weather gunwhale staring at the water which was beginning to lap over on to his feet. When the water reached his feet he began to pay out the main sheet.

He was still paying out when the water reached his waist and closed over his head. Paul heard him shout as he went down into the water.

The crew swam round the boat and collected a lifebelt each and tied them on. By the time they had all found and put on a lifebelt, only the tip of the mast and the stern of the boat were showing above water. The weight of the sodden sail, still fully rigged, had dragged the bows down.

Paul grasped the stern of the boat next to Tom Bowles. He glanced at Tom’s face.

‘Never mind, Tom. Don’t take it to heart, there’s a good chap. It happens to everyone. You saw them all today, going over like ninepins. It happens to everyone sooner or later, honestly?

Michael swam next to them, pushing the hair from his eyes. His teeth were chattering.

‘God, it’s damn cold, isn’t it? It’s a good job old Ted counted those lifebelts after all. . . .’

Michael stopped and looked round. He caught the horror stilled in Tom Bowles’ eyes. His voice rose shrill and high above the sound of the wind.

‘Ted! Where’s Maconochie?’

They dived together. Their lifebelts buoyed them up. They tried to untie them but their fingers were wet and cold and shaking with haste and they could not unfasten the knots which were already swelling in the water.

Tom Bowles succeeded in slipping out of his lifebelt and disappeared. When he came up and shook his head, Denis Hubert dived. They all tried, one after the other. Cartwright stayed under longest but when he too came up alone, they lost hope.

Cartwright shook the water from his eyes.

‘He’s not there now, I’ll swear,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Must have got caught under the sail, poor joker.’

Commander Richard St. Clair Gilpin, D.S.C., Royal Navy, the Executive Officer of H.M.S.
Barsetshire
, strode up and down the quarterdeck, his telescope clasped behind his back.

The Commander paced the quarterdeck alone. Cadets working nearby avoided his eye. The quartermaster, the bosun’s mate and the sideboys had vanished into the lobby. The Cadet of the Watch had taken the opportunity to go forward to look at the boats. Only Pontius the Pilot, the Officer of the Watch, stood waiting anxiously for the Commander to speak.

It was half past six on a cold morning, the first morning of a new cruise. The Commander, who was an impatient man, had not yet had his breakfast and his temper had not been improved by the sight of the new cadets who had joined the day before.

The Commander roused himself and glared about the quarterdeck. Pontius the Pilot tensed.

‘Officer of the Watch!’

‘Sir!’ Pontius the Pilot leapt forward, placed himself in front of the Commander, and saluted.

‘Why is that cadet,’ demanded the Commander, pointing at Paul who was lethargically cheesing down a rope by the after capstan, ‘not wearing a lanyard?’