Alexander Fullerton - Surface!

Bird muttered, “Captain coming, sir.”

Sub moved aft to where the plank rested on the casing, waited there and saluted the Captain as he stepped on board and turned away to the bridge.

Rogers murmured, “All aboard the flippin’ Skylark, trip rahnd the ’arbour ’alf a tanner!”

Sub glared at him, shouted: “Away plank!”

Two men of the Spare Crew, on the inside submarine, hauled it off. Number One yelled from the bridge, “Let go aft!” and a minute later, as the stern swung out, “Let go for’ard!” The ropes were thrown off the bollards, and the submarine backed away from the Depot Ship, driven by her electric motors. Clear of the side, she swung her bow away towards the harbour entrance, and at the same time her diesels roared into action. A shrill pipe was answered once more by the bugle on the high quarterdeck: gathering speed, Seahound headed for the open sea and the Malacca Straits.

“Well,” said the Captain, “before we leave for the next patrol, Chief, we may have seen our wives. Number One: when do you plan to get married?”

“Not in a hurry, sir. When we get back to U.K. Think this war’s going to last long, sir?”

“Don’t ask me.” There had been a lot of rumours going around in Trincomali: one of an imminent Japanese surrender, and one of a Second Front being opened in Malaya. There was no doubt that the Fourteenth Army in Burma was moving steadily, rapidly forward: but there were always these rumours, in every ship, and they always started on the messdecks.

The Captain’s cup and saucer began to slide slowly across the table. He pressed the bell for the messenger.

“Ask the Officer of the Watch what the weather’s doing.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Presently the man returned.

“Officer of the Watch says it’s blowing up a bit, sir.”

Number One patted the Engineer Officer on the shoulder.

“That’s it, Chiefy: you’re looking paler already.”

“You go to hell. Let’s have the dice out, shall we?”

“Wants to take his mind off it,” observed Number One as he reached into the locker and brought out the dice.

“Ace up, King towards.” He flipped the dice with his finger: it trickled along a few inches and rested with the Ace on top again.

“Mine, by the looks of it.”

When the messenger of the Watch shook Sub at ten minutes to two in the morning and shouted in his ear that he was due to be on watch in ten minutes’ time, Sub felt more than usually disinclined to leave his bunk. He was tired, and the violent motion of the submarine as she rose and fell to the sea left little doubt in his mind that this was one of the nights when a bunk was by far the best place. He tried to pretend that it was all a bad dream, this listening to the sea crashing on the hull over his head, but the messenger knew his job, and sharp at two o’clock Number One was delighted to hear the helmsman ask permission for the relief Officer of the Watch to come up. Number One, of course, was wide awake, and cheerful at the prospect of getting down to a cup of the Cox’n’s cocoa before turning in for four lovely hours in his comfortable bunk, but his gay conversation was quite lost on the Sub, who had caught a bucketful of flying sea in his bleary face the moment he rose out of the hatch.

“Get your nose out, you old cow!” The bow digs deep into an enormous wave, then soars, flinging back a ton of salt water at the bridge. Sub ducks, cursing, cracks his head on the edge of the voice-pipe and curses more wildly as the water drenches him. Now the bow stands clear, the stern low and buried in the sea: a huge gulf opens ahead and the submarine swoops forward, her bow crashing down like a giant hammer. Bow up, roll to port: bow down, roll to starboard, swinging over until it looks as though she’s going all the way. But she never does, she staggers for a moment then comes back fast while the bow swings up, up, high over the bridge while she stands on her tail and you hang on for your life. The sea crashes over, slams into the bridge and bursts like flying shrapnel up through the holes in the platform.

It’s strange to think that at other times you feel like a trespasser, spoiling the smooth flat mirror of the ocean. This is the sea as you know her when her mood is bad, and you know all the moods she has. She’s like the girl in that song that the sailors sing, a fascinating bitch. A bitch that has the devil’s temper, and she lets it rip whenever she feels like it. Look down at the bow, at that crazy hammer-head that swings in a great arc up and down a dozen times a minute. Inside that thing are men asleep in their hammocks: asleep, in that! At home they used to pay sixpence a time to have that done to them in a fun-fair: at home they were woken if the wind flapped a curtain in the bedroom.

Keep your watch. This is your life, the one you chose.

The sea had changed her mood when the submarine approached the entrance to the Straits, two days later. Not a ripple, not a single streak of white showed that twenty-four hours earlier this placid beauty had been a chaos of pounding waves and flying foam. She was the Indian Ocean again: she had worn herself out pretending to be the North Atlantic.

“Why don’t you get a new pipe, Chief?” The Captain looked critically at his Engineer Officer’s briar, which had half the mouthpiece bitten off.

“I like this one,” answered Chief, with his usual simplicity.

“What made you bite the end off? Lose your temper?”

“Well, it’s rather a long story, really. And I don’t think I ought to tell it, with this youngster here… sorry, Sub, I was forgetting you’d come of age.”

“Let’s have it, Chiefy.”

Chief thumbed down the mixture of Admiralty Issue and Three Nuns, and said, “I was training at Keyham at the time.” He struck a match, and puffed hard at the blackened object in his mouth. “Very young and inexperienced. I’d been rather flirting with a bit of stuff called Elsie, who used to dish out fish and chips in a café that we used quite often. Nice-looking girl. Well, we decided, three or four of us, including old Batchy Wilson, who went down in the Med., to have a party. Took the girls out to dinner and dance in some local dive. Mind you, I’d had practically nothing to do with women. Nothing much, anyway. Party ended: I was quite sober. She asked me to see her home to her flat, so I did, and she asked me to come in for a cup of coffee. Nothing else entered my head, you know: it was bloody cold, and coffee sounded just the job.

“We went up, and she said she was just going into the kitchen to put the coffee on. I sat down and lit my pipe: this one. A few minutes later I heard her coming into the room, and I looked up, expecting to hear her say that the coffee wouldn’t be long, or something of that sort. But she didn’t say a word. Just stood there. And she’d taken all her clothes off.”

Chief puffed strongly at the jagged mouthpiece.

“That,” he said, “was when I bit through the stem of this ancient burner.”

They were silent for a moment. Then Number One said, “I suppose you thanked her for a lovely evening and shook her warmly by the hand on the way out.”

“As a matter of fact, I did, more or less. I felt sort of shell-shocked, you know.”

The Captain was looking steadily at Chief.

“Chief,” he said, slowly, “you’re either a born liar, or a bloody fool.”

Southwards again through the Malacca Straits, slowly and very quietly southwards into the bottleneck. By now it’s all routine, not only the patrol and the watch-keeping but also the boarding, the Gun Action: all of it is taken as a matter of course, performed easily, effortlessly, with quiet efficiency.