Owning Up: The Trilogy (47 page)

I said goodnight to Lucien and walked towards Victoria Station, where I’d booked in at the Union Jack Club as I was due back on board at 0800hrs. In Regent Street two grotesque old whores were pissing in the gutter. ‘Don’t look sailor,’ they shouted, rather unnecessarily, ‘we’re ‘avin a piss.’

When I got back to
Argus
I found the ship’s cat had done a shit on my hammock. I was not pleased but, before the end of the day, I was to receive an infinitely more traumatic shock: the Navy had discovered I existed. I was posted to a sea-going ship.

I was on watch on the Quarter Deck when I spotted, scurrying along the dockside, a small and agitated Lieutenant with a file in his hand, projecting much of the fussy panic of Alice’s White Rabbit. He eventually found his way aboard and after I’d saluted him he asked my name and number.

‘Ordinary Seaman AGH Melly, CJX/732558,’ I told him.

‘Well, where have you been for the last year?’ he asked me accusingly.

‘Here, Sir,’ I said.

He rifled through his papers, muttering that they’d had me down as a writer. I explained that I had indeed been a writer but, after failing every exam, had been transferred back into bellbottoms. He looked as if he’d have very much liked to have put me on a charge if only there’d been one relevant in King’s Regulations. The best he could do was to accuse me, accurately enough, of not bringing myself to the attention of the naval authorities. I remained silent, excusing myself with fake efficiency to examine the credentials of a Petty Officer returning from compassionate leave.

The White Rabbit stood by, impatiently cracking his knuckles. ‘Well, now you
have
turned up,’ he squeaked crossly, ‘you are to report at noon to the main barracks with your kit’ (I thought with some dismay of my hammock with its all-pervasive smell of cat shit) ‘with a view to joining, as soon as possible, the ship’s company of the cruiser
Dido,
part of the Home Fleet, and currently at anchor at either Portsmouth or Southampton.’ (The Lieutenant seemed to specialise in haziness as to detail.)

My ‘cushy number’ was at an end, but I felt no justification in complaining. It was well over a year since the Petty Officer on duty at the entrance to Chatham Barracks had told me that he’d ‘ ’ave me out East before the fuckin’ week’s out’.

9

After a day of medical and dental check-ups, of long waits in offices to have papers stamped and travel warrants issued, after a night in barracks among uniformed strangers, I reported at 0815hrs to be driven down to Chatham Station in a naval bus. There was one rating on draft with me bound for the same ship. I was delighted to find out it was Tom Dash, as plump and grubby as ever, with the same mole halfway up his nose. I was delighted because I knew him. We hadn’t really got on all that well at Pwllheli towards the end. His refusal to compromise, his working-class chauvinism, his reproachful attempts to dictate who I saw and what I said and did, made me frequently both angry and guilty. He could be charming, though, and funny, but only when alone. The sound of a middle-class voice, the expression of a middle-class attitude, turned him sullen and boring. He mistrusted my gregariousness, was ever alert for any bourgeois weaknesses.

We held at least the love of both jazz and Anarchism in common, and there we were struggling into the van carrying, not only our hammocks, kit-bags and ditty boxes, but our wind-up gramophones and cases of records as well. I’d almost lost touch with Tom since our training camp days. We’d met once in London and he’d taken me home to his parents’ prefab in Dalston but it had not been a success. His father, the dustman, looked at me with silent and gloomy suspicion. One of Tom’s posh friends, he’d decided. Tom’s cleverness, I suspected, had made him something of an outcast there too. Nor did he want to meet ELT – nor even the Anarchists. Now we found plenty to talk about. On the train to Portsmouth we played each other new records we’d bought over the last year. Outside the carriage windows the sky darkened and the trees’ began to claw the air. We arrived in a storm. There was no bus to meet us so we took a taxi. They weren’t expecting us at the dockyard but told us, with that grim satisfaction of those who are the bearers of bad news, that the
Dido
had sailed that morning for Portland.

We tried the barracks, who didn’t want us at all, but finally said we could sling our hammocks in one of the offices. As we weren’t there officially, they told us, would we kindly fuck off ashore for the evening, We left our things, fought our way in a head wind across the dock road to a dirty little café for greasy pie and chips and then into a squalid and unfriendly little pub next door, where we got very drunk on mild. Staggering back through the howling darkness we missed the entrance to the barracks and found ourselves soaked to the skin and hysterical with laughter, tripping over some railway goods tracks leading down to a jetty and assaulted by angry waves. Somehow we found our way back and, as there was a smelly coke fire still smouldering in the office, were able to dry out our uniforms while we slept.

Next day we awoke with splitting headaches and mouths like Turkish wrestlers’ jockstraps to face a freezing blue sky washed clean by the storm and, returning to the station, spent the day meandering westward along the south coast in a series of ancient and unheated trains. At dusk we arrived at Portland, and there lay the
Dido
at anchor in the Sound. A liberty boat, full of cheerful ratings, tied up at the dockside and we, rather gloomily, took their place and were rowed out to the ship. Stumbling up the gangway to report, I became very much aware that, for the first time since I’d joined the Navy over two years earlier, I was aboard a commissioned vessel.

To begin with it was total confusion, but after a day or two it began to make a little sense. I came to realise that everybody in the ship’s company held a different if partial view. For the stokers and engineers, it was the engine-rooms and propellers that signified; for the gunnery officers and ratings, the neatly stacked shells and turrets; for the electricians, the ship was a nervous system of cables and power points; for the writers, a list of names, each entitled to different rates of pay; for the cooks, the galleys and store rooms; for the Master at Arms, rebellious stirrings and acts prejudicial to naval discipline; for the Captain and senior officers a view of the whole, detailed or vague, according to their competence; for the ship’s cat, areas of warmth and comfort, and a jungle where the prey squeaked and scurried behind the bulkheads and sacks of provisions.

Yet there were also intricate private relationships, both official and unofficial. Every mess had its friends, enemies, and neutrals. Shared duty led to liaisons or enmities. Between ranks, commissioned or otherwise, there were tensions, tolerance, fierce vendettas fought out with the aid of King’s Regulations or the sympathetic bending of the rules. There were rogues, poets, morons, conformists, wits, psychopaths, religious maniacs, revolutionaries, buffoons, arse-lickers and good men, all within the outer bulkheads and between the decks. The
Argus
had been no more than a hulk in which we associated out of self-interest and to avoid notice. The
Dido
was a real community, a steel village. At first enormous and confusing, it soon became cosy, not as intimidating as a battleship, not as cramped as a destroyer.

That first night, however, was a mere jumble of impressions and none of them pleasurable. We were shown our lockers, and our mess, ate some disgusting supper where my attempts to make conversation were blocked by the ‘I say old boy, what, what,’ treatment, told we’d have to rise and shine at 0530hrs to scrub the decks, and slung our hammocks, too tired even to unpack. As soon as the tables were cleared I fell asleep, rather apprehensive about what tomorrow might bring. My basic training was so long ago I’d forgotten almost everything. I felt very much the new boy.

I was woken by the Tannoy telling me to rise and shine and suggesting we all took our hands off our cocks and transferred them to our socks; a hoary nautical joke which seemed rather less than hilarious at such an hour. On deck it was still pitch dark and there was a medium squall blowing. I was detailed off to sand and canvas the gangway, and then wash it down with cold salt water. While at work on the bottom platform, a large wave soaked me to the skin. I thought regretfully of the
Argus
rusting fuggily in distant Chatham. By the time we’d finished, a few streaks of baleful light offered the minimum in cold comfort along the eastern horizon.

Breakfast made me feel more cheerful, and afterwards I unpacked my kit-bag and stuck up a reproduction of Magritte’s
Le Viol
on the back of my locker door. I’d changed my soaking overalls for rather creased number twos, and had a shit and a smoke in the heads, which were doorless and much favoured as a conversation centre, most of the emphasis resting on the erotic adventures of those who had been ashore the night before. Sitting directly opposite me, and regaling the company with such a tale, was a rating I recognised as belonging to my mess. He was large and had the look of an outsize, extremely decadent cherub, but his use of erotic metaphor was far superior to the usual rather tedious norm.

‘She was as tight as a mouse’s earhole,’ he was saying in a flat Midlands accent, ‘but so wet that when the cinema organ come up,’ and here he splayed out his fingers and looked through them, ‘… I could play stained glass windows.’

After I’d washed and shaved and done my teeth, Tom and I went off to see the Master at Arms to be detailed off for jobs. I had met this man briefly the night before, and thought him as frightening as an ogre. He had a ferocious eye, a snarl and a very black beard. Much to my surprise his office was full of large felt animals – rabbits, teddy bears, and monkeys – which I found inexplicable, but discovered later that he made them for sale and that it was considered judicious insurance to buy one for a child, whether real or fictitious, before going on long leave.

He was very sarcastic, particularly as neither of us had taken any specialised courses, and possessed in consequence no skills beyond basic seamanship. As I was what he called ‘posh ignorant’, he made me Officer of the Watch’s messenger, a cushy enough job with many a chance for skiving while pretending to look for somebody. Tom was put in charge of a cupboard full of mops and squeegees and had to polish a certain amount of brass-work. We left the Master at Arms, ‘the buffer’ as he is known in naval terminology, with some relief. ‘If I had the wings of an angel,’ runs a nautical parody of a lachrymose Victorian ballad, ‘And the arse of a fucking great crow, I’d fly to the top of the mainmast, And shit on the buffer below.’ I felt further acquaintance with the
Dido’s
Master at Arms might well give these words a certain sincerity and I was pleased to escape from both him and his beady-eyed toy animals.

*

Being Officer of the Watch’s messenger didn’t excuse me from general duties like swabbing decks, painting ship nor, during gunnery practice, a position in the magazine chamber heaving shells and charges from their racks to the hoists. We put out to sea to do this a day or two after I arrived and very unpleasant it was. Choking from cordite fumes, stomach and arm muscles on fire, the machinery making regular snoring noises like the Red King asleep as it shot the ammunition up to the gun turrets far above, and then the thundering and monotonous vibrations, while enough money to buy a Rembrandt was blown through six barrels.

At 2015hrs a shell jammed, and we were ordered to climb to the top of the turret to remove it. To do this we used an instrument like a giant’s flue brush. It was pitch dark and the wind howled like forty devils. Nor was the worst over. Crawling down to the mess in expectations of a warm supper and a fuggy unwashed sleep in the grey blankets of my hammock, I discovered that some newly arrived rating with no seatime (it could have been me but, as it wasn’t, my indignation was the equal of anyone else) had been feeling queasy and opened the porthole for a breath of air. With the high sea running, a wave had swept him backwards across the entire mess and by the time those present had got the porthole shut again there was a foot of water to be mopped up. Supper was a cold pie. On the wireless a crooner sang of moonlight and roses. Before crashing I went up on deck to smoke a final cigarette. It was bitterly cold but much calmer. One of the fleet had turned its searchlights on. In its blue beam the seagulls mewed sadly as they wheeled and turned.

Once the gunnery practice was over things became much pleasanter. In a few weeks we were going to sail to Chatham for Christmas, and I was due for a fortnight’s leave so that was something to look forward to. Then we were off to the Mediterranean for a goodwill cruise and I was really pleased about that, as I had never been abroad at all. My father had travelled as a young man (he had started his business life in the family shipping firm) but, during my childhood in the 1930s, he was far too broke to consider foreign holidays, even if my mother had been in favour of them, which she was not. She had a terror of the sea, and had only once been out of England and that as a child to the Isle of Man. So it was Wales or the Lake District for us each summer and that was why I was so excited about the cruise.

Meanwhile we sailed rather aimlessly along the south coast, putting into Portsmouth for a couple of days, stopping at Weymouth for no obvious reason. It was a cold stormy winter in 1946. The ship rolled and staggered very badly at times, and I was quite often sick. I particularly loathed that curious feeling of weightlessness followed by the nauseating reassertion of gravity. My Mess Deck, badly ventilated, was hard to take in the mornings; a
mêlée
of armpits, hairy calves, meaningless obscenities, farts and coughing fits. My fellow ratings, who the night before had seemed in most cases so charming and in some so attractive, were transformed into red-eyed, green-toothed, pustular horrors. Me too; my feet dirty from the midnight rush to be sick in the heads, I stood in my grey, slept-in underwear and scratched my arse. None of us bothered to wash before our greasy breakfast.