HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbour Page 19

  The same old couple, still shivering, still talking disjointedly, joined them on the corner.

  ‘Are they coming again?’ asked the old woman.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Godden.

  ‘I think too light,’ said Wilensky.

  ‘What’s he say?’ asked the old man.

  ‘It’s too light – too near daytime,’ explained Godden quietly. He looked at the old woman: her wispy hair seemed almost transparent, the skull showing through. ‘Why don’t you go in, mother? We’ll look after you.’

  ‘Eh?’ said the old woman. She was staring up at the sky. ‘This terrible night,’ she mumbled. ‘They oughtn’t to allow it.’

  ‘You’ll be better inside.’

  ‘I thought we had to come out when the warning went,’ said the old man. ‘Didn’t the newspapers say that?’

  The All Clear siren sounded its long cheering note.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked the old woman nervously. ‘Are they coming again?’

  ‘No,’ answered Godden. ‘That’s the All Clear.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘It’s all over. You can go in now.’

  ‘This terrible night,’ she repeated. ‘If we have much more of them I don’t know what I’ll do.’

  The old man led her away. Wilensky shook his head: there was compassion and anger in his face.

  ‘Better that she was dead,’ he said harshly. ‘Like many others. War is too much for the old people.’

  ‘She’ll be all right,’ said Godden, rather shocked. ‘Got to get used to it, that’s all.’

  He went off duty at eight o’clock, strolling home slowly in the fresh morning sunshine, feeling the stiffness of his cramped body melting away gradually. The first night of the war, and Jerry hadn’t come after all … But he felt no sense of anticlimax; if not last night, then tomorrow or the next one: there’d be plenty to do, and the right sort of people to do it for. He’d been dead right to take this job, and he was going to make something of it. They all were: they’d be the best squad in the best depot in London.

  He was happier that morning than he had been for many years.

  2: CHRISTMAS

  The depot was now a going concern, disciplined, organized, and settled down to its job. A routine for the day-to-day timetable was now properly worked out – so much time for drill, so much for practices and lectures, so much for the slightly unpopular fatigues, such as sweeping the mess hall or swabbing out the lavatories, which they shared with the stretcher-bearers. The first process of shaking down together, as a body of men, was over: it had been aided by a change in the hours worked (now twenty-four hours on duty and twenty-four hours off), which allowed them time to know each other better and gave them a sense of solidarity. Actual physical conditions within the depot, too, had been much improved since the discomfort of that first makeshift night: there were now beds and blankets for every man on the shift, and some of the upstairs rooms had been taken over and converted into dormitories, so that the squads which were off-duty could get a reasonable amount of quiet and sleep.

  The canteen, with a proper full-time staff, also showed a distinct improvement, the unvarying fried bread, egg, and chips which was the sole menu for the first few weeks had been superseded by a full midday meal and a choice of supper dishes which went a long way towards brightening the evenings. The nightclub singer, Cuthbert, had moved out with the egg and chips; he was rumoured to have gone down to one of the Chelsea depots, where they had murals, titled volunteers, and a better class of stretcher-bearer altogether.

  He was not the only one to move on: there had been a certain amount of judicious weeding out which, after the come-one-come-all system of the first days of the war, had become glaringly necessary. The drinking types were the first to go: there were not many of them, but in this small close-knit organization they stuck out a lot – slipping out to the corner pub when they should have been on sentry duty, raising hell when they returned, keeping the off-duty squads awake, and initiating a slightly scandalous pile of empties in the mews. They did not last long … Then there was an outbreak of petty thieving, which led to the dismissal of two more men, ingenious fellows, who built up quite a line in stolen gumboots and bottles of iodine from the first aid kits before they were traced. Another malefactor, more ambitious and more socially prominent, was taken off by the police: he adorned the headlines a few days later as a ‘Mayfair Man’, with a mink coat on his conscience and a background of bouncing cheques and straying diamond bracelets, which made life at the depot seem very drab by comparison.

  Isaacs also had been sacked, after a final collision with Watson over fatigue duty – his method of cleaning out the lavatories was to lock himself in with a newspaper for several hours on end, and his excuses were a blend of argument, protest, and straightforward lying, which could not hope to succeed more than a certain number of times. Wilensky’s comment, when he heard of it, was: ‘I am a Jew, too – but not such a one,’ one of his few remarks on any subject which did not directly concern the job in hand.

  Wilensky, indeed, was turning out to be one of the best workers in the depot. He picked up the technicalities of the job very quickly: he was willing and entirely trustworthy; and Godden, working alongside him on many occasions, felt all the time the force of a single-minded purpose, which would not let the other man rest until whatever they were doing was properly finished and rounded off. Obscurely, Godden knew what it was that drove Wilensky on, that made him concentrate all his abilities no matter how trivial the job. It was Poland – Poland by now submerged in a wave of horror and destruction, which seemed to have engulfed the whole country. Wilensky, the exile, was working to stem that wave and ultimately to drive it back; and as he wedged a shore in position, or made a competent job of rigging a derrick, he was thinking of it as a tiny part of the future’s huge struggle to rescue and to reconstruct.

  But they were all working hard, that Christmas time, in the bitter weather, which turned the depot into a drab and draughty barracks. Though there was surprise at the continued respite from bombing, there had been no appreciable relaxing of the tension: the job still seemed a vital one, with the possibility of sudden action at any hour of the day or night, and after the initial period of learning and sorting themselves out they remained tuned up and on edge, ready and waiting to meet what lay ahead.

  With their eye on that meeting the whole depot, rescue men and stretcher-bearers alike, was caught up in an intensive effort to prepare itself, not to be found wanting when the time came. The breathing space could hardly last much longer, and there was a lot to learn and to perfect; so all through those weeks and months, while the Western Front hung fire and the troops in the Maginot Line wondered what it was all about, they set to with a will. For the heavy and light rescue squads (the difference lay in the type of equipment they used rather than in any personal attributes) there were daily exercises, among themselves and in competition with the other depots: rigging various kinds of lifting gear, practising quick demolition work to get at the heart of a building, sending down a loaded stretcher (with no great rush to be the first patient) from the roof of the depot to the street level. They were given their grounding in first aid, shorn of some of its terrors in the form of Latin technical terms, which occasionally defeated the stretcher-bearers, but not the less useful for that. At times some of it seemed a trifle irrelevant. ‘It is important,’ said one lecturer, who was ploughing through the whole syllabus, whether applicable or not, ‘to distinguish carefully between the measures necessary to counteract the two main forms of bite – the bite of the dog, and the bite of the snake.’ (‘Blimey!’ said one awed rescue worker, ‘What does he think Jerry’s going to drop on us?’)

  The stretcher-bearers had a full programme of training also. First aid certificates had to be won before their jobs were confirmed: ‘incidents’ were organized, with six or seven patients to be dealt with by each squad, and marks given for diagnosis, treatment and handling of them: many of the stretcher squad
s attended at nearby hospitals, which were evacuating their patients to the country as soon as they could safely be moved, and lent a hand there. They kept the same hours as the rescue squads, so that the whole personnel of the depot, divided into two shifts, spent twenty-four hours at a time working together: when they went off-duty at eight in the morning, feeling tired, looking ‘rough’ and untidy after a night spent in their clothes, there was a sense of comradeship and communal purpose among them which made the tiredness and the discomfort seem worthwhile.

  Nor was this community spirit confined only to the work they shared. Several football matches were organized that winter, with the other shift or with other London depots: the rules about drinking were relaxed so that a small proportion of them could visit the local pub at some time during their twenty-four hours on, and within the depot darts, dominoes, and a wave of shove-halfpenny tournaments all contributed to this solid sense of unity. For all of them, at this stage, it was not quite an ordinary life, and not quite an ordinary job: the long hours, the ‘disciplined’ atmosphere, the very nature of what they were waiting for, together gave it a special quality. Above all, it was worthwhile, as a safeguard and an insurance against danger; and it might become of paramount importance at any moment.

  Godden felt this quality more than ever, after three months on the heavy rescue side. He had worked hard, done his share and a bit more, made a success of the novelty of finding himself part of a team again. Since that first night, and the old couple he had tried to look after (they were in the country now, and the house was shuttered and empty), he had never ceased to find in the job the same special attribute that Wilensky felt, and the pacifist stretcher-bearer too: that it was part of something much larger, tremendously worth doing, and linked in some subtle fashion with the way people ought to behave towards each other, if the world was ever to be a decent place. To the depot, and the work he did there, and his ambitions for the future, he transferred all the love and care which would, ordinarily, have been centred on his own family and friends.

  For things were no better at home; and always in the back of his mind was the feeling that this job would have had more point – would indeed, have had a sort of final justification – if he had had behind him the home life and the loving welcome which Edie used to give him when they were first married. But there it was – she didn’t give him anything, except a running, nagging commentary on what she thought was little better than a loafing waste of time: as far as home was concerned he was on his own, and all that he might have felt towards his family was given towards this job, or kept in readiness for anyone who might need it in the future.

  Certainly Edie was a trial. In fact she would have come near to spoiling the taste of the whole thing, if he had let her, and if the other feelings hadn’t been so strong.

  There was that business about the stretcher-bearers’ show, for instance. Over that he’d come near to – well, to doing a lot of things that didn’t bear thinking about in cold blood. Godden hadn’t been too sure about inviting Edie and Edna to the show which the stretcher-bearers put on just before Christmas; and looking at them through a crack in the curtains during the interval, he was even less sure about it. Edie, six rows back in the audience, was looking pretty sour, no doubt about it – that was because of his get-up in the Arab scene, probably, and Edna, dressed up to the nines in pale blue, was trying (trust her!) to get off with a couple of fellows farther along the row. Godden thought: you’re the wrong side of the curtain, my girl, with all that stuff on your face; and he wondered what the rest of the chaps would say when they knew that this fluffy bit was his daughter, after all … Well, if Edie hadn’t enjoyed it, just because he’d taken part in it and had a little fun, everyone else had: the laughter all the way through the first half, and the applause at the end of it, had been a riot.

  It was the stretcher-bearers who had had the idea of giving a show at Christmas: they were doing most of it themselves, but they had co-opted several of the rescue men, Godden among them (after enormous persuasion), to take small parts and supply the spear-carriers generally. The costumes, where necessary, had been made by one of the girls from the local pub, who was also lending a hand with the make-up. The programme was the usual mixture: sketches, songs and choruses, a refined ballad singer, and a distinctly unrefined cross-talk act; but the audience – mostly ‘friends and relatives’, strengthened by two rows of Borough Council worthies – had eaten it up, and now, with the interval here, the cheerful buzz of conversation was a good measure of its success.

  Godden had only made one appearance so far, as an ‘Arab’ in a snake-charming scene: the dusty make-up, flowing robes, and high turban had made him look rather a dashing character, in a religious sort of way, and the scene had gone down well. But the success of the show, so far, had been a domestic sketch with Hitler, Goering and Goebbels as the protagonists – ready-made characters for farce, and very much to the audience’s taste. It finished up with the young pacifist, who played Hitler, standing on the table and making a rousing speech on the theme, ‘We have no living room’, to be countered succinctly by a charwoman who popped her head round the backcloth and remarked: ‘You wouldn’t say we had no living-room if you had to clean the bloody place out!’ This piece of homely philosophy had brought the house down.

  Now as Godden peered through the curtain, they were getting ready for the second half of the programme. Edie was still looking annoyed about something, he noticed. Well, she’d get an eye-opener in a minute or two.

  Someone bumped into him from behind, and he turned round. It was Horrocks, who had been roped in as an odd-job man and was now setting out some chairs on the stage. When he caught sight of Godden he laughed out loud.

  ‘You look a proper sketch,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Hope your missus will like it.’

  Godden was quite sure that she wouldn’t, but he didn’t give a damn. He was enjoying himself enormously, in a way he had almost forgotten even existed.

  There was something about the sheer fun of this evening, the excitement behind the scenes and the obvious enjoyment of the audience, that took him right back to the old days, to other Christmases before the last war when dressing up was part of the ritual, and there was ten times more colour in a single day than there was from one year’s end to another now. This was more like a real Christmas party, this was more like the sort of life he had once hoped for; and here he was, right in the middle of it, and not exactly being coy about it either … Godden was dressed, at that moment, for his part in the ‘Fairy Ballet’, which figured later in the programme: the frilly white skirt and tight bodice gave his stocky figure a ludicrous air of virginality, the wreath of pink roses crowning his rather solemn face had an almost blasphemous inappropriateness, like Judas Iscariot, wearing somebody else’s halo after a party. It had taken a good deal to persuade him to make up the number in the corps de ballet; he would never have done it, indeed, if there had not been seven others, equally daft, to join in. But what Edie would have to say about it when she saw him, was another matter.

  ‘It’s a bit cold, this get-up,’ he answered Horrocks. ‘Kind of draughty here and there. What do they think of the show out in front?’

  Horrocks laughed again. Godden had never seen him in such good spirits during all the last few months: it was like coming round a corner and suddenly meeting the old Horrocks, cheerful and self-reliant and ready for anything. The Old Firm might set up in business again, if he was getting back into this form ...

  ‘They’re loving it – eating it up,’ Horrocks replied. ‘Remember those old concert parties back at the base? Something like that, only of course you’re keeping it a bit cleaner … What have you got under that skirt, by the way?’ he added, following a natural continuity of thought.

  ‘Football shorts,’ answered Godden. ‘Only thing we could trust.’

  ‘Thank God for that.’

  The stage manager hurried on, and said: ‘All off, please – curtain going up.’

  ‘S
o long, Bill,’ said Horrocks. ‘I’m going round in front again. Good luck with it.’

  Godden looked down at his frilly skirt, and said: ‘We’ll need it.’ Then he retreated into the wings.

  The curtain went up, to a burst of clapping, and a St John Ambulance sergeant began to sing ‘Trees’, with an absence of any feeling on the subject, one way or the other, which would not have disgraced a civil servant in the Forestry Commission. He was followed by a tap-dancer, who lost the beat halfway through but continued to plough a lonely furrow right to the end – a manful effort, which earned a lot of applause and a shout of, ‘He can do it with music, too!’ from a sarcastic onlooker at the back. Then it was the turn of the cross-talk act, two stretcher-bearers dressed as charwomen, relying largely on ‘family’ jokes about the depot, which mystified some of the audience but went down well with their fellow workers. And then it was time for the ‘Fairy Ballet’.

  This had been very carefully worked out and rehearsed till they were all heartily sick of the music – one of Chopin’s waltzes. But the rehearsals certainly paid a dividend. The curtain rose on a group of fairies – that actual grouping borrowed wholesale from ‘Sylphides’, but stopping right there as far as any other attributes were concerned. The volunteers for the ballet were of assorted types: big men who lumbered, skinny little fellows who hopped about like fleas, sturdy performers who shook a leg as if it were a length of two-inch planking; but they all wore the same frilly skirts and wreaths of roses, and they were all united in frowning determination over one thing – to follow the pattern and the music as they had been taught.

  Their performance lasted for three and a half minutes altogether, and the audience rocked with laughter throughout. After a few preliminary twirls by the corps de ballet, the only male character (he was actually the only stretcher-bearer who was at all effeminate) struck an attitude of anticipation, and the Queen of the Fairies, artificially buxom, bounded onto the stage, jumping down from a box in the wings and landing with a thud which nearly jerked the record from its groove. Solemnly the corps de ballet, in their absurd frills, capered about them, their faces set and preoccupied: one of them, just behind Godden, was counting, ‘Hop two, three … hop! two, three …’ in an urgent voice, which the music and the laughter only just drowned. The two principals had a set-to in the middle, sinews cracking as they went through the motions of enchantment and despair which the story (a confused one) dictated. Then, to end it, the corps de ballet formed up behind Godden and lumbered in solemn procession round the stage: the male figure took up a welcoming stance in the centre, the other dancers stopped in their tracks, breathing heavily, and the Queen of the Fairies, hurrying to join her partner for the fall of the curtain, over-reached herself in a final entrechat royale and landed in a sitting position with a crash that shook the hall. On this scene of transcendental beauty, as the programme notes would normally have had it, the curtain fell.