We Joined The Navy (4 page)

‘Oh, they didn’t mean anything by it! It’s a
compliment
!’

Paul raised an eyebrow.

‘Of course, not everybody called me Ted. The Tenderfeet didn’t
dare
!’

‘I should think not!’ replied Paul, righteously. ‘Whatever next?’

‘Though naturally I didn’t want to be too hard on them, I was a Tenderfoot once myself, you know.’

‘Never mind, Ted, I’m sure they’ll overlook it at Dartmouth.’

‘Oh everybody’s got to start at the bottom! Not that I was a Tenderfoot long. It didn’t take me long to get to know who were the important people in the Troop...’

‘Look Ted, old boy, I can think of nothing which interests me less at the moment than Boy Scout politics.’

‘... You see, you start as a Tenderfoot and after you’ve passed your test you become a . . .’

Maconochie continued and Paul, Michael and George Dewberry were compelled by his persistence to listen. Maconochie described for them the primrose path of promotion in the Boy Scout Movement, from obscure and timid Tenderfoot to that glorious and omnipotent being, only a little short of Jove, a County Commissioner. Maconochie himself had done well. At the time of speaking, a Scout First Class and a Troop Leader eke was he.

Paul listened to Maconochie as he might have listened to the dripping of a tap which he thought he had repaired.

‘My!’ he said, at last. ‘Isn’t it strange how history repeats itself? Here we are, like Xenophon’s Ten Thousand on our way to the sea, and we are harried and set about by Babylonians! How many miles to Babylon? Ye gods, only Reading?’

Paul took out his cigarette case.

‘Cigarette,
Ted
?’

Maconochie recoiled, as though he had come upon two Tenderfeet chalking up rhymes in the Peewit Patrol Corner. He had opened his mouth to speak when his attention was distracted by something outside the carriage window.

‘Look!’

Paul, Michael and George gazed out of the window at the peaceful Berkshire countryside speeding past. They searched for a runaway horse, or a fire, or even a Boy Scout.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Just fancy that! We’re just coming to the place where we had our summer camp last year. Yes, look! There it is over by that white house. I passed my axemanship test there, you know.’

‘Drop dead,
Ted
,’ said Paul.

Maconochie stopped short, his mouth hanging open. Then he picked up
Life’s Snags
and thumbed through it, almost as though he were looking for a mention of Paul. Michael opened
Two Years Before the Mast
, which had been given to him by a well-meaning uncle, and pretended to read the first chapter. He wondered what the brave new world of the Navy would be like, that had such people as Paul Vincent and Ted Maconochie in it.

After a time Maconochie tired of
Life’s Snags
and stood up. He preened himself in front of the mirror. He combed his hair and examined his fingernails. He tried on his cap. It was too small and perched on the top of his head. George Dewberry watched him and then made his first contribution to the conversation.

‘I say,’ he said, ‘would you mind changing caps with me?’

Tom Bowles was in the next compartment. Opposite him sat an old man balancing a pork pie on a cloth on his knees. The old man was preparing to have the pork pie for lunch.

First the old man took out a small penknife and carefully cut the pie into halves. Then he cut the pie into quarters, measuring the quadrants meticulously by eye. Then he took the quarters one by one and neatly bisected them into eighths. But when he attempted to cut one of the pieces of eight in half it crumpled into an asymmetrical mass. The old man grunted.

‘Going to join the Navy, son?’ he asked.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Tom.

‘It’s a great life, they tell me.’

The old man wiped his nose meditatively on his sleeve.

‘If you don’t weaken, that is.’

He gazed ruminatively out of the window, as though he were recalling sailors he had known.

‘Met with some ‘orrible deaths, sailors ‘ave.’

‘They didn’t tell me that, sir.’

‘Oh no. I don’t suppose they would. Not until you’re in, they wouldn’t. ‘Ave you signed anything yet?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Don’t.’

The Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, looked exactly as a tourist or a real estate salesman would imagine a Naval College ought to look. The College looked as though it had been designed by men who planned it so that archaeologists of the future discovering the ruins would immediately drop their spades and exclaim ‘Ah, yes! This must have been where they trained their naval officers!’

The College stood on a hill overlooking the town of Dartmouth. It could not be said to dominate the town because nothing constructed by or for the Royal Navy would commit so flagrant a breach of good manners as to presume to dominate anything; rather was it just there, above the town, so that the locals could look up at it and say ‘Yer, the College.’

The main block of College buildings faced out to the harbour of Dartmouth and the English Channel. Wings jutted out at the ends of the main block forming arms which enclosed the parade ground. The parade ground was separated from the buildings by two roads which swept round on climbing ramps and joined in front of the main entrance. A flight of steps led from the road outside the main entrance down to the parade ground, parting in its descent to accommodate a stone rampart in the middle which served as a saluting base and as the nearest the architect could approach to a ship’s bridge, hampered as he was by being on dry land. A flagstaff flying the White Ensign stood where the two roads met at the bottom of the ramps. Behind and around the main blocks were the subsidiary instructional blocks, the hospital, the gymnasium and swimming pool, the shooting range, the squash and tennis courts, and the pavilion.

The College impressed summer excursionists on the River Dart with a feeling that here indeed was the cradle of Nelson’s descendants and the breeding ground of future sea-dogs. It left in their goggling eyes and ears a composite of Drake drumming up the Channel, Nelson shattering the French, and the chorus of ‘Hearts of Oak’ sung by a watch of bluejackets resembling the man on the Player’s packet. Seen dispassionately from the Kingswear side of the river on a bright summer’s day, the effect was indeed one of dignity and the spirit of Nelson, lightly coated with icing sugar.

When the eighty cadets of several nationalities stood in Kingswear station and waited for the ferry to take them across the river the effect was not one of the spirit of Nelson, but of deep depression. It was raining gently but steadily, and the town of Dartmouth had achieved that chilling appearance of grey hopelessness and damp despair which is nowhere in the world achieved so successfully as by a Devon town in the rain.

The cadets were met on the Dartmouth side by three damp and embittered-looking Chief Petty Officers.

‘Get fell in now!’ bawled the biggest and most embittered-looking Chief Petty Officer. ‘Chop chop now! Slap it about! Them as is keen gets fell in previous!’

‘How can any of us get fell in previous when we all arrived at the same time?’ wondered Paul.

‘Keep silence! Get fell in three deep tallest on the right shortest in the centre!’

The cadets shuffled into three approximate ranks. The three Chief Petty Officers ranged themselves around the squad, as though to prevent any cadet bolting, and counted. After the count, the squad turned right and began to march up the hill towards the College.

‘Swing them arms!’ bawled the large Chief Petty Officer.

As punishment for making the mistake of delaying their entry until the age of eighteen and thus depriving the Navy of its right to educate and train them from the age of thirteen, the Special Entry Cadets, known collectively under the house-name of Beattys, were not housed in the main College at all but in a barracks halfway down the hill towards the river at Sandquay. There, the accommodation and amenities would have excited the admiration of a native Spartan. It was to these barracks that the Beattys marched, swinging their arms, in a long straggling column.

As they marched, the Beattys had their first opportunity to see each other together. Michael Hobbes was amazed at the different nationalities. Besides the R.N. cadets, whom he had expected to see, there were Indians, Pakistanis, Sikhs, Burmese, Egyptians, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders. Michael himself marched between a small Sikh and a tall R.N. cadet whom he later discovered was named Cleghorn. Michael was secretly impressed by the confident manner in which Cleghorn wore his uniform; his cap already had a nautical tilt and looked as though it had borne the brunt of several arctic whaling seasons.

When the Beattys arrived in front of their barracks they were counted again, presumably to check whether any cadets had broken ship already. Then the largest Chief Petty Officer called out each cadet’s name from a list and allotted them divisions, chest flats and bed numbers. Cleghorn was ordered to get a new cap, and the parade was dismissed.

The chest flats were long, bare, forbidding rooms which accommodated twenty cadets in each. A line of beds ran down each side and a line of chests ran down the middle. Single light bulbs hung down from the ceiling. The bare wooden floor had been scrubbed and trodden into an undulating, splintered surface. The windows were high and wide open.

‘Dotheboys Hall,’ said Paul.

On their beds the Beattys found a pile of clothes and assorted gear; it was the complete kit laid down by the Admiralty to be issued to subordinate officers on joining. Trousers, jumpers, shirts, sheets, socks, boots, collars, lanyards, pyjamas, brushes, badges and underwear lay on each bed in a vast amorphous heap. The compilers of the heap had foreseen the cadets’ every need down to the most intimate articles including toothbrushes and razors. The inference was that the Navy regarded each new intake of cadets as being on the mental level of savages; not only had they to be taught the rudiments of their profession but also how to wash. The Navy was starting from the very beginning, as though their future officers had been freshly caged and shipped from the Belgian Congo, like specimens for a zoo.

Michael looked round his chest flat. On his side of the room were George Dewberry, a New Zealander, three Sikhs, a Burmese, two more R.N. cadets whom Michael did not know, and Maconochie. On the other side were Paul, Cleghorn, a Canadian, an Indian, four Egyptians and another R.N. cadet.

Michael crossed over to Paul’s bed, where Paul was busy stowing his clothes away in his chest.

‘Quite a mixed lot in here,’ he said.

Paul paused and looked up.

‘Like a bloody United Nations. We’d better not start any arguments or we’ll have a holy war or something before we know where we are.’

‘This is not quite what I expected, I must say,’ said Michael.

‘What in hell did you expect then?’

‘I don’t know. Not this. It seems all terribly, I don’t know, business-like.’

‘Well, it is a business.’

‘I suppose so.’

Michael went back to his bed and began to put away his gear. It took him some time. He was puzzled why they had been left in peace for so long. Michael could only think that perhaps the task of sorting and putting away their clothes was thought to be such a huge one that nothing more was required of them that day. He was vaguely disappointed. He had arrived at the sacrificial taboo ground prepared to undergo the first painful rites of initiation and had found the witch-doctor finished for the day.

But Michael’s thoughts were premature. The witch-doctor was at that moment preparing his welcome.

The burliest Chief came into the chest flat and stood watching the Beattys for a few moments. The Chief had a hyphenated way of speaking, as though he were pausing for effect between each word. He inflated his lungs.

‘All-right-you-lot!  Leave-your-camisoles-for-now-and-muster-in-the-Gunroom!     Lieutenant-Commander-Badger-wants-to-speak-to-you! At-the-double-now!’

The Gunroom was a large room provided for the Beattys’ recreation. It was not, however, a room which inspired gaiety. It was whitewashed and cheerless like the chest flats and contained half a dozen tables and a dozen long wooden forms. The forms had been arranged to face the door and on them the eighty Beattys sat down in silence to await the coming of the man who, for the next three months, would be more powerful than Jehovah.

Jehovah was preceded by his runner. He was a small, fair-haired man with the face of an ancient angel and the voice of a brazen bull-frog. He was Mr Froud, the Cadet Gunner. Mr Froud had served in the Navy for over twenty years and the experience had given him the Navy’s unique mixture of uncompromising official dogmatism and wise tolerance of human eccentricities. There was no provision or regulation concerning the welfare of men which Mr Froud did not know, no offence which he had not seen committed before, and no excuse which he had not heard before. Nothing surprised Mr Froud. He loved the Navy and he loved his cadets, but he was careful to conceal his affection. He was more closely concerned with the welfare and discipline of the Beattys than Lieutenant-Commander Badger himself; if Lieutenant-Commander Badger was Jove, then Mr Froud was his thunderbolt.

Mr Froud stood at the head of the room. The Beattys did not know it, but Mr Froud was thinking the same thoughts as the President of the Interview Board.

Here, thought Mr Froud, is another shower. God knows what’ll happen to them or to the service before they’re finished.

‘Pay attention this way!’ said Mr Froud. ‘My name is Mr Froud. I’m the Cadet Gunner. I hate cadets. This evening I’ll be kind to you. But from tomorrow onwards I’ll be watching you, so look out! Just before Lieutenant-Commander Badger comes in, I’ll call you to attention. Don’t stand up, sit to attention with your arms folded, head and eyes to the front.’

Steps sounded outside the Gunroom.

‘Attention in the Gunroom!’

‘Carry on please,’ said Lieutenant-Commander Badger pleasantly. The three lieutenants who had entered with him sat down in chairs placed for them in front.