At the head of the table, Leading Seaman Ted Hoggan, the acting gunner’s mate and killick of the mess, was engrossed in darning a seaboot stocking, his eyes screwed up with concentration. Some hammocks were slung, their owners, mostly watchkeepers, apparently able to sleep despite the blare of music from the tannoy and the noisy conversation from the mess opposite, where a game of uckers was in full swing.
Hoggan eyed Boyes thoughtfully. ‘You can sling yer ’ammock over there on them ’ooks, lad. Young Tinker is ashore for a spot o’ leaf.’ He gestured with the seaboot stocking to a small oval hatch in the deckhead where Boyes had struggled down with his bag and hammock. ‘When Action Stations goes you fly up that ladder like a bat from ’ell, see?’
Boyes nodded. He had changed into a sweater and overalls, apparently the rig except for those on watch in harbour. If anything it made him feel more of an intruder. The other seamen who lounged about writing letters, yarning, or watching the uckers game, wore overalls scrubbed and cleaned so often that they were pale blue, almost white in the harsh deckhead lights. Boyes’s were still dark, regulation colour. He concentrated on the leading hand, a real-life seaman. Tough, with a wind-reddened face, and a snake tattooed around one thick wrist.
Hoggan had returned to his darning. ‘Just keep yer nose clean, an’ do wot you’re told. If you wants to know summat, ask me, got it? Don’t ’ave no truck with the officers.’
‘Why is that, er, Leading—’
‘Call me ’ookey.’ He tapped the killick on his sleeve. ‘You’re Gerry, right?’ He did not see Boyes wince. ‘Well, there are officers and officers, Gerry. Some are better than t’others, of course, but deep down they’re all bastards.’ He gave a slow grin, ‘I should know. My boss is Mr bloody Bunny Fallows, the gunnery officer ’e calls hisself. Nice as pie one minute, the next, phew! Specially when he gets pissed.’
A seaman who was stitching a new leather sheath which he had fashioned for a formidable-looking knife, said, ‘Which is all the bleedin’ time in ’arbour!’ He glanced casually at Boyes. ‘You a C.W. candidate?’
Boyes flushed. ‘Well, no, actually.’
’No, actually,’ the other man mimicked him and brought grins from the others until Hoggan said quietly, ‘Leave it, Sid.’
The seaman shifted along the bench and touched Boyes’s sleeve. ‘No ’arm done.’ He grinned. ‘You’re not old enough to draw a tot yet?’
Boyes shook his head. It was a question he was asked quite a lot.
‘Well, you come round for sippers tomorrow, eh, Gerry?’
Hoggan watched them, pleased they had accepted the youth. It was not his fault, the way he spoke.
He said, ‘Yeh, meet Sid Jardine, a real old sweat, eh? Must be twenty-one at least! Roll on my bloody twelve!’
Boyes wondered when it would be prudent to sling his hammock. He was not very good at it yet. Even in a big destroyer there had not been room enough, especially for a C.W. candidate, a potential officer.
He glanced with interest at his companions. Most of the mess were ashore, on a ‘short run’ as Hoggan had explained. They might return aboard by ten o’clock either in silence or fighting drunk. After ten they would arrive back with an escort of the naval patrol. Boyes wondered what his mother would make of these men.
’Tea up!’ An elderly seaman with three stripes on his sleeve banged down the ladder with a huge fanny of tea.
Hoggan put down his darning. ‘Teaboat’s alongside!’
What sort of craft was that, Boyes wondered?
The old seaman glanced down at Boyes and then filled a cup of typical sailors’ tea, almost yellow in colour from tinned milk, and so much sugar you could stand a spoon in it.
‘’Ere, this one’s free, son!’
The sailor called Jardine exclaimed, ‘Free, Stripey? Do my ears deceive me?’
Another called from the opposite mess, ‘Better keep your overalls on in your hammock when that old bugger’s about!’
Boyes had heard much the same banter before. He took the sweet, sickly tea and thanked the three-badged sailor for it.
He did not care any more. He was accepted. The rest was up to him.
The chief petty officer Wren from the Welfare Section stood beside the khaki-coloured car, and watched the young sailor called Tinker as he stared at the ruined house which had once been his home. She was a severe-looking girl, with her hair set in a tight bun beneath her tricorn hat. It was not that she did not care, but she had seen too many broken homes and shattered marriages to let it reach her any more.
She said, ‘The bomb hit the front of the house.’ She gestured with her cardboard file. ‘There was a whole stick of them right across three streets. They were both in bed. They wouldn’t have felt anything.’ She watched his silent anguish. ‘I checked with the A.R.P. people and the Heavy Rescue chaps.’ He gave no sign and she said, ‘The police too.’
Tinker stepped amongst the rubble and peered up at one bare wall. The same striped wallpaper, a pale rectangle where one of his pictures had hung. Next to his old toy-cupboard. His eyes smarted again. His own little room.
The rest of the housefront lay at his feet. He heard the car engine turning over behind him and clenched his fists tightly. Bloody cow, couldn’t wait to be off! What did she know?
Something like panic gripped him. He had nobody, and nowhere to go! It was like a nightmare. All the fear and tension of minesweeping was nothing by comparison.
He said quietly, ‘I had to see it.’
She nodded. ‘Very well. The salvage people have all the recovered property in store in case—’ She did not finish it.
Tinker remembered a time, one month after he had joined Rob Roy, when they had sighted an airman in a dinghy. He had turned out to be a German, shot down in the Channel, and almost overcome by exposure and exhaustion.
Tinker had been one of the hands to go down a scrambling-net and pull the airman on board, who had fetched him coffee laced with rum. He clenched his fists tighter until the pain steadied him.
‘I wish I’d killed the bastard!’ he whispered.
He heard footsteps on the fallen fragments and the Wren call sharply, ‘Not this way, sir!’
Tinker swung round, hurt and bewildered by the intrusion. He stared and thought his heart had stopped completely.
Then he was running, his cap fallen in the dust as he threw himself into the arms of a man in heavy working-clothes. ‘Dad! It can’t be!’
The chief petty officer Wren gaped at them. ‘But I was told you were dead! They said you were both in bed!’
The man clutched his son’s head tightly against his chest and stared fixedly at the remains of his house.
‘She was in bed right enough! But the other bastard wasn’t me!’
He lifted his son’s chin. ‘Pity I wasn’t here in time. Come, we’ll go to Uncle Jack’s.’ He turned the youth away from the house. ‘But then it seems I was never here when I was needed.’
The Wren watched them walk away without a backward glance.
Her driver said, ‘Wasn’t your fault, Miss. There’s more to this bloody war than bein’ blown up.’
She slid into the car and adjusted her skirt.
It sounded like an epitaph, she thought.
No Safe Way
Lieutenant Commander Ian Ransome sat behind his small desk and tried to relax his mind. The cabin looked bare as it always did prior to leaving harbour. Books secured on their shelves, his gramophone records carefully wedged in a drawer with newspaper between them. It was a trick he had learned after his first collection had been broken when a mine exploded almost alongside. He was dressed in his old seagoing reefer; the wavy stripes on the sleeves were so tarnished they looked brown in the glare of the desk-lamp.