All The Nice Girls (10 page)

‘Patricia normally looks after that,’ said the Admiral.

The Admiral raised and lowered the periscope several times.

‘Have a look through it, Jones!’

Dagwood was not an expert on periscopes but he knew enough about them to appreciate that the Admiral’s periscope was in superb condition. There were no specks or flaws in the top face and there was not a suspicion of damp mist in the glass. The ranging mechanism moved like silk. Dagwood swung the periscope, expecting the tell-tale shudder of an imperfect bearing, but the instrument slid round without a tremor.

‘It seems in very good nick, sir,’ he said.

‘It’s as good as the day it was made. You can say what you like about Jerry but his glassware is still the best in the world. Always has been. I’ve always believed that the Germans made the best periscopes in the world. I also think they made the best submariners too, though I suppose I shouldn’t say that. It must be something in their national temperament. Scratch a German and you find a submariner. Even their language suits submarines perfectly. I remember meeting Max Horton just after the war. It was the last time I saw him. He told me he’d just come back from Londonderry where some of the captured U-boats were lying. He told me about the German submarine crews. He said they were sullen, they were scruffy and smelly. He said they were the bolshiest-looking lot of ruffians he had ever seen and some of them had hair as long as a girl’s
but
. . .’ - the Admiral shook an emphatic finger at Dagwood - . . this is the point. They didn’t carry themselves like beaten men! They were all ready to carry on the war with the Russians! Remember, this was at a time when the U-boat Command had lost seven hundred boats out of a total of eleven hundred and half their officers and men were pressed men from the Luftwaffe! It hardly bears thinking about, Jones.’

‘No, sir,’ said Dagwood, seriously.

The Admiral leaned forward to emphasise another point. ‘I was telling our local Member the other night, the stupid little man doesn’t believe me, I said you will never stop the Germans messing about with submarines. You might as well try and stop the people of this country playing cricket. If you stop them building real ones they’ll build model ones. And if you take your eye off him for a moment Jerry will have a first-class, fully-trained U-boat fleet again before you can say Jack Robinson. That’s why I’m not worried about a Russian fleet of so many hundred submarines. There’s more to a submarine fleet than building submarines. The history of Russian submarines has been one long disaster. But if those submarines are designed by Germans and if their crews are German-trained and have a sprinkling of Germans amongst ‘em,
then
I’m ready to listen . . .’

‘Would you like lunch now?’ Patricia asked.

‘Take your glass in with you, Jones,’ said the Admiral.

They moved next door to the dining-room. Dagwood was struck by the room’s size. The table could have seated twenty people, but only three places were laid. The Admiral sat at the head of the table with Dagwood and Patricia on either side of him.

‘We don’t do much entertaining since my wife died,’ the Admiral explained.

The long shining plane of polished table, the tiny patch of silver, cutlery and glass at one end, the portraits along the walls, the high oak sideboard with its knobs and ornamentally- carved drawers, all reminded Dagwood vividly of nights when he had dined in large wardrooms where most of the members lived ashore and only the duty officers dined in. There was the same sense of continuity, the sense that the figures seated at table were the tangible representatives of a far greater company, invisible, yet whose spirits still permeated the room.

Without any warning, the Admiral bent his head and said grace. ‘No padre, thank God,’ he barked.

Patricia served them with vegetable soup. The Admiral shook his napkin from its folds and swept it across his lap. Dagwood followed suit although, he admitted to himself, with far less panache.

‘Help yourself to sherry, Jones,’ said the Admiral hospitably.

‘Thank you, sir.’

The Admiral crushed a piece of toast with his fist. ‘How’s our nuclear programme coming along, Jones?’

‘I don’t really know, sir. It’s all on a need-to-know basis and I don’t expect I know any more about it than the average member of the public can get from the newspapers.’

‘Are Harvey McNichol & Drummond going to get a contract for a nuclear submarine?’

‘There again I don’t know, sir. Nobody’s mentioned it.’

‘Knowing them,’ said the Admiral, ‘I don’t suppose it has occurred to them. If I was their managing director, what’s his name again?’

‘Sir Rollo, sir?’

‘That’s the fellow. If I was him I would be on the telephone every day and submitting a tender once a week.’

‘I haven’t heard anything about it, sir.’

‘I wonder what sort of man will command these submarines, when we get ‘em,’ the Admiral said. ‘When I pressed the button in the old days I only sank some terrified little coaster. Sometimes the fish came back and nearly sank me! But when these fellows press the button they’re going to destroy the equivalent of half the population of London! They’re going to have more power in their little fingers than Nelson and all his captains had in their entire fleets. I trust they don’t get a sudden rush of blood to the head one day. If you let one of those off by mistake you can’t turn round and tell Admiral Submarines you’re very sorry and you promise not to do it again, eh? Can’t laugh one of those off, eh Jones?’

‘No sir, you can’t,’ said Dagwood.

The Admiral finished his soup in half a dozen quick mouthfuls. ‘Our local schoolmaster was telling me an interesting thing. It seems that when a Roman general had a triumph and rode through the streets of Rome in his chariot he always had a slave standing beside him who whispered in his ear to remind him that he was only mortal and not a god. In case the whole thing went to his head, I suppose. The Romans had as good an idea of the psychology of power as we have. Better, in some ways. But who’s going to stand behind these nuclear boys and whisper in
their
ears, eh Jones?’

‘That’s
a point, sir,’ said Dagwood.

The Admiral wiped his mouth with his napkin. ‘Met a fellow once, called himself a novelist. R.N.V.R. during the war. Said he was in corvettes. He had the infernal impudence to tell me that all submariners were either power maniacs, sadists or nautical romantics. Damned impudence! ‘

There was no doubt that the Admiral did himself well. After the soup, Patricia brought in grilled trout with white wine sauce, followed by beef olives tightly rolled in bay leaves sprinkled with mint, new potatoes and artichokes, Welsh rarebit with bitter sauce, and frozen chocolate mousse with grated nutmeg. By the time Dagwood started on his Caerphilly and his Ryvita biscuits and the Admiral passed round his madeira, Dagwood was beginning to feel quite groggy with food and drink.

Dagwood was puzzled by the absence of servants. There seemed to be nobody in the house except themselves. Patricia fetched the food from a hatch by the sideboard and took the plates away again afterwards. When Dagwood attempted to help, the Admiral said, ‘Sit down Jones, it’s better if one person does it and Patricia knows where everything is.’ It was as though the house were solely dedicated to keeping alive the Admiral’s dying spirit, with Patricia the acolyte tending the flame. Dagwood was awed by the girl’s fortitude; he wondered at the qualities of patience and self-denial which kept her here to look after her father instead of running off to marry a groom, or getting a housekeeper’s job in Ross & Cromarty, or emigrating to Australia, or doing any of the things Dagwood imagined girls in her position did. Patricia seemed to sense that Dagwood was wondering about her.

‘Tell us what you do in the dockyard, Mr Jones,’ she said.

‘Oh, I’m just standing by while the firm refit the submarine.’

‘How’s that rogue Tybalt?’ asked the Admiral. ‘Been battering at you with his theories about what’s wrong with the Navy, has he?’

‘Not yet, sir.’

‘He will. He’s a good fellow but some of his staff are a bit dubious, eh?’

Dagwood thought of Mr Swales. ‘I have had a bit of trouble with one or two of them, sir.’

‘It’s a good thing you don’t always agree with the civil servants, Jones. Tybalt’s not a civil servant of course, but the rest of that crew are. There are two forces that get things done in the Navy and one of them is the friction between civilians and serving officers. Friction leads to frustration and frustration is a powerful source of energy. Some of those civil servants hold a good deal of responsibility and handle large sums of money. Who do they think they are, they say of us in the Navy, they look down on the civil servants yet they can’t see further than their present appointments and they won’t give us the facts we need. The Navy, on the other side, deal with actual men and conditions. Who do they think they are, we say of the civil servants, sitting in their damned little offices and telling us what to do? They ought to come down and actually see what goes on for a change. Both sides swear at each other and the remarkable thing is, something happens!’

It was a good point. Dagwood acknowledged it. ‘But what’s the other force in the Navy, sir?’

‘Ah, I thought you’d ask that! It’s the struggle against chaos, Jones. The Navy is always on the brink of chaos. I served for forty years and I never took over a job that wasn’t in a state of chaos. I worked for two years to put it right and the man who came after me always thought he’d taken over the job in a state of chaos. The Navy runs in a state of suspended dissolution. Always has. Always will.’

It was now very plain to Dagwood that he had gravely misjudged the Admiral. All that business with the postman dodging and jinking across the lawn had been very misleading. The Admiral was not, as Dagwood had first thought him, just another retired flag officer quietly going bonkers in the country. He was still very much alive and sensitive to the changes taking place in the world and the Navy.

As if to prove that he was not yet a doddering old fool, the Admiral suddenly switched his attack on to Dagwood himself. ‘You’re a technical officer, aren’t you, Jones?’

‘An electrical officer, sir.’

‘That’s a pity.’

Dagwood reddened. ‘I don’t think so, sir.’

‘Of course it’s a pity! The Navy’s a damn fine life for a young man, whatever his particular expertise is, but there’s only one job in the whole Navy that makes the whole lot worthwhile and that’s to command your own ship. It doesn’t matter how old or how small she is, once you’ve commanded her the Admiralty won’t owe you a penny. There’s no other job like it and once you’ve done it every other job, no matter how responsible or interesting, seems flat and stale. I know.’ Dagwood was not disconcerted by the attack. He relished it. Beneath the Admiral’s dogmatic assertions and massive blockbuster arguments, assembled piece by invulnerable piece, Dagwood perceived the charm of manner for which Rob Roy was still remembered in the service.

‘If you didn’t have technical officers, sir, the most you could command nowadays would be a dumb lighter.’

‘Of course! And that’s my answer! ‘

The Admiral, too, was enjoying himself; it was seldom someone came to see him who spoke his own language (albeit a primitive dialect of it). The Admiral began to talk of his early days in the Navy. ‘ . . . Submarines were just starting when I joined. When they asked me why I wanted to join the Navy I said I wanted to be a submariner. In those days I might just as well have said I wanted to practise robbery with violence! I was nearly failed out of hand! Submariners were supposed to be pirates you see, and there was a suggestion that they should be hung from the yard-arm if they were captured in time of war . . .’

The Admiral remembered the days in E-boats in the Dardanelles. ‘ . . . Sometimes we were not sure we could dive and when we did dive we were not at all sure we would ever come up again. Everything was new and raw. It was like living in the early days of the wild West. All the fun’s gone out of it now.’

He talked of the grotesque, steam-driven K-boats. ‘ . . . They were meant to be a submarine which could work with the fleet, like a submersible destroyer. It was a contradiction in terms. The submariner is the cat who walks by himself. Any destroyer captain worth the name will never stop to have dealings with a submarine in war-time. He’ll sink it first and ask questions afterwards. And quite right, too.’

He spoke of the huge M-boats, one of them fitted with an aircraft in a hangar and another with a battleship’s gun. ‘ . . . I never commanded one myself but they used to tell me that gun was very useful. Not as a gun, of course. As an extra hydroplane. Even if you had a bad trim, the gun helped you get down!’

It was very late in the afternoon before Dagwood said good-bye.

‘Glad you came, Jones. You must come again. Come in the evening next time. We’ll have a real talk. Is that the baker’s van, Patricia?’

Dagwood left them in the early stages of the attack.

On Sundays Dagwood went to morning service at the Church of St Giles, Little Binton. Little Binton was almost twelve miles from the Watsons’ farm and Dagwood might have thought it an unreasonable distance to travel to a church service, were it not for the Vicar of St Giles.

The Reverend Godfrey Potter, M.A., had been padre to submarine flotillas for twenty years until the end of the war when he retired from the Navy to become a country parson. Despite the ancient superstition which forbade padres to go to sea in a submarine or even go on board one except by express invitation of the Captain, the Reverend Godfrey had come to be recognised as padre to the Submarine Service. Perhaps there was some quality in the boats and the men who went to sea in them which fascinated him but he still spoke wistfully of his days on the China station, in Malta, in Scotland, and wherever submarines were gathered, as the happiest of his life and he was always extravagantly delighted when any submariner called on him. He himself was a short, thickset man, almost bald except for a ring of ginger hair round his scalp. His figure suggested that he wore a suit of armour under his vestments and indeed he might have been a throwback to one of those formidable, warlike bishops of the Middle Ages who were quite capable of enforcing Holy Writ with a spiked iron ball on a length of chain.