HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbour (1947) (27 page)

Edie took a look at Horrocks and the old clothes he still wore, decided that he wasn’t worth making an effort over, and nodded. Edna, from different motives, exhibited the same disdain. There was another pause, and then Horrocks said: ‘Pleased to meet you, Mrs Godden. Hope you enjoyed the show.’

‘Can’t say I did,’ answered Edie shortly. She was still in a violent temper, and this shabby old chap wasn’t going to change it.

‘What, not even old Bill capering round like a two-year-old?’ said Horrocks, surprised. ‘You ought to be proud of him. Quite the artist, he was.’

‘She didn’t care for it,’ Godden mumbled.

‘I should just think I didn’t care for it!’ Edie burst out again. ‘I told him he ought to be ashamed of himself dressing up like that, and I’ll say it again to his friends.’

Horrocks, red and embarrassed, said nothing. Godden, unequal to making a scene before a third person, muttered: ‘Steady on, Edie!’ which only infuriated her further.

‘It’s you that ought to steady on, acting the fool like that at your age.’ She really was in a towering rage. ‘Catch me coming down here again. If that’s what they teach you in the rescue, then God help us when the raids start. Strikes me they ought to get some men for this job, not a bunch of kids dancing round the stage.’ She pulled her coat round her roughly. ‘Come along, Edna – we’ll go home, now we know the sort of place this is. I can’t say I’m much surprised, either.’

There was a silence after they had gone; Horrocks still embarrassed and Godden very much ashamed. Finally: ‘Sorry, George,’ Godden mumbled. ‘Bit of a row before you turned up. Ought to have warned you, but I hadn’t time.’

‘Stuck my neck out a bit, didn’t I?’ Horrocks laughed, beginning to recover his spirits. ‘Let’s forget it … I had the best laugh for years, seeing you up on that stage. You deserve another medal for that.’

Godden laughed in turn. ‘Well, you see what I got instead … What about a cup of tea?’

‘There’s a bit of a party after they’ve cleared up here,’ answered Horrocks. ‘Borough Council’s had some beer sent up, and the canteen are doing the sandwiches now. Proper Christmas do, it is.’ He patted Godden on the back. ‘Cheer up, Bill – forget about it. It’s too good an evening to spoil.’

That turned out to be true, not very much later. The crowded mess hall, with the beer going round and the trestle tables loaded with sandwiches, was overwhelmingly cheerful; and Godden, as the rescue squad’s star performer, came in for a lot of good-natured chaffing, which pointed the fact that he was now accepted as a personality, and a well-liked one. Expanding in the warmth and comradeship he forgot about Edie and all the rest of it, and slipped easily into the place he’d made for himself.

He was in a good job. He was twice the man he’d been a few months before. He was happy.

It was a grand Christmas after all.

In the asphalt courtyard enclosed by the school buildings Godden’s squad was rigging a sheer-legs. This straight-forward job, which comprised three scaffolding poles lashed together in the form of a tripod, with a block and tackle hanging down centrally for lifting any heavy weight below, was a favourite exercise with the rescue workers. They had done it lots of times, and they were good at it. As Number Three got busy on it now, the other squads, and some of the stretcher-bearers, formed a ring of spectators round them, enjoying the sun and the sight of someone else working, and offering comments and suggestions as the work progressed.

One of the Peters brothers, the least expert of the squad, was having trouble with the top lashing, and the remarks from the peanut gallery made it plain that they didn’t think much of his efforts.

‘What sort of a clove hitch is that?’

‘That’s the knot my old woman uses for the kid’s nappies.’

Peters looked up, his face red as he wrestled with the refractory knot. ‘You — yourself!’

‘Not with that bunch of bananas, I won’t.’ There was a ripple of laughter round the courtyard. ‘Call that a sheer-legs? It wouldn’t lift a dog’s hind leg.’

Godden, bending down beside Peters, straightened his back. ‘Haven’t you got anything better to do?’ he asked shortly.

‘Wouldn’t miss this for a quid, Bill,’ said the most persistent of the interrupters. ‘Number Three squad goes into action. Stand clear, Adolf, you might get hurt!’

There was more laughter, good-natured and friendly. Godden bent down again, and took over the lashing from Peters. He didn’t mind the chaff, but it was his job to see that there was nothing to find fault with, as far as his squad was concerned.

For it was now his squad; he had been made a squad leader a couple of weeks previously, to his enormous surprise. Indeed, he had hardly known what to say, when Watson called him into the control room one morning, and asked: ‘Think you can take over the squad from me?’

Godden swallowed and stared. ‘What, do you mean leader? What about you, then?’

‘I’m off to another depot, taking charge of one of the shifts. I thought you could move into my job. You know the work all right. How about it?’

Godden thought. ‘Well, there’s Wilensky.’

Watson nodded. ‘He’s good, too. But I think you’d be able to handle the squad better.’

‘Some of the chaps can’t always understand what he’s saying,’ remarked the officer-in-charge, who was also present. ‘It might make a difference in a crisis.’

That seemed fair enough … Godden grinned suddenly, and said: ‘All right, then.’

Watson smiled in answer. ‘Makes you think a bit, doesn’t it? But you’ll get used to the idea.’

And there he was – a squad leader. ‘That’ll worry Hitler,’ said Edie sarcastically, when he told her about it. ‘What do you wear now? Lace knickers?’ What he actually did wear was the secret pride of his life at the moment: a white-painted steel helmet with a star and a big ‘R’ on it, the badge of his leadership. As Watson had remarked, he was getting used to it: it had been a bit strange at first, and some of the others were inclined to resent the promotion and pass a remark or two, but he’d gone about it quietly, not chucking his weight about, and it seemed to be working out very well. It meant a lot to him, more than he could express even to himself: he remembered being made a corporal in the war, and how proud he had felt then, but this was somehow even better, after all the past years without any sort of distinction or any progress except the slow way downwards. Now he’d taken this terrific stride, back to self-respect and a position with a proper label to it. No wonder, as he directed the squad on their present job, that he felt ready to cope with whatever trouble they ran into. Number Three Squad had the right idea – and the squad leader was all right, too ...

The sheer-legs took shape gradually: the block and tackle was rigged and secure, and Godden began to attach the ropes for hoisting it upright, while Wilensky, turning as always to the next part of the job, without prompting, paced out the spread of the tripod legs and laid them in position. Some of the onlookers wandered off, down to the end of the mews, where three ambulance drivers, girls, were cleaning their cars. The rescue men and stretcher-bearers always watched these girls at work, and talked to them when they had the chance: two of them were slim and rather pretty, in an immature, coltish way, and the sun was like a warm bond between them all, and it was part of the spring. To each other the men made remarks about them, coarse in expression, but not vicious in spirit: the girls were just kids really, but nice-looking ones, and they were there, in the hot sunshine, to be watched and talked about.

‘Look good on a pillow, that hair would.’

‘Lovely pair that little one’s got.’

‘Bet she’s covered a bit of carpet in her time.’

The girls were innocent, in fact, and they all knew it and it pleased them as much as making these remarks about them did. The pretence of their wantonness was all part of the same thing: looking at pretty girls, wanting them and yet not wanting them at all, being glad to be men with all this fabulous choice of women at their disposal; drifting along on a lazy, faintly erotic harmless tide of manhood which had no real desire to assert itself.

Spring had brought other developments to their corner of the world, besides this easy stirring of the senses. Some of the younger men had been called up, and those who came to replace them were mostly the same type – old soldiers, or small shopkeepers and stallholders, whom shortages and the beginning of rationing were forcing out of business. There was a curious outbreak of minor sabotage among the stretcher-cars, which on two occasions had sugar tipped into their petrol tanks and were put out of action. It was thought to be nothing more sinister than a reprisal for an earlier dismissal: but it earned some fluent cursing from the drivers, who had to clean out everything – tanks, petrol pipes, and carburettors – before their engines would function again.

With the warmer weather, too, much of the depot’s activity had moved out-of-doors. Exercises and full-scale ‘incidents’ were arranged with a muster of all the other services – wardens, fire brigades, first aid parties, and mobile hospital units: when they were all collected in the park, and were running through the sequence of events, from the first bomb damage to the final dispatch of casualties to the hospital, it was rather like an old-style field day. The mobile unit set up its standard in one corner, and spread out its tables and stretchers: the casualties lay about in attitudes of abandon, to accord with their ticketed injuries: the men and their equipment covered a sizeable area, through which Borough officials wandered, to ensure fair play and a reasonable standard of zeal: and rate-paying citizens hung about on the outskirts, watching their money being spent with a mixture of pride and alertness which did them equal credit.

It was very pleasant to work out-of-doors in the sun, after being co-oped up for so long in the depot, where the rate of colds and mild flu had been high all through the winter. These exercises were enjoyable for another reason, too: there was a strong feeling of comradeship when all the air-raid services were collected together, engaged on different parts of the same job, and when, at the end, they gathered round one of the mobile canteens at the edge of the park, for a cup of tea, this comradeship made itself felt more strongly still. There were few enough compensations on this job: the pay was low, the uniform none too dashing, the living conditions inside the depot still fairly stark; but when they could meet like this they felt that they had allies after all, and they understood each other without effort – a shabby army talking the same language and waiting for the same signal.

Godden, satisfied at last with every detail of the layout of the sheer-legs, gave the order to hoist it; and as the squad tailed on to the ropes it rose slowly and evenly upright. The spectators gathered again to watch them and see that it was done properly: last week, for instance, Number Six Squad had forgotten one of the steadying lines, and the whole thing had toppled sideways and broken a skylight. They might as well see how Number Three shaped, anyway, even if they didn’t provide a bit of drama of that sort: the ambulance girls had gone back into their garage, and there was nothing else to look at or to do until the canteen had supper ready in a couple of hours. Till then, it was just waiting, as usual.

That was the trouble nowadays – the aimless waiting about. They knew by heart the work they did in the exercise hours, and when the day’s routine had been completed, with perhaps a lecture or a first aid demonstration thrown in, there was nothing left for them. It was only just starting, that feeling, but it could be met, in embryo, all over the building: creeping into their job at the depot, against the tide of spring, was the beginning of boredom.

Six months of ARP, three quid a week, and nothing to do but hang about … That was what the neighbours seemed to think, anyway: some of them were always passing remarks, particularly about the Fire Service, which for some reason was pictured as nothing but a lot of girls in trousers gossiping over the tea-things. But it covered all the services really: here and there the whole thing was beginning to be thought of as a joke, and if you said you were in ARP it was good for a laugh any time – and not always a pleasant laugh either. For, of course, the joke was a sight too expensive, if you think it out: costing the country thousands, it was, and nothing to show for it, except a few chaps loafing round the park and some silly old wardens creating about the black out … That was the kind of thing you heard, now and again, and before long it began to spread inside the depot. Perhaps the people outside were right, and they were just wasting their time.

‘By God, I’m going to join up!’ was the reaction to that: but you couldn’t – you had to wait your turn. Private war, that was what it was: run by the bosses, all making hundreds a week, and you couldn’t even get into it if you wanted to: you had to hang on in this flaming place, practising things that would probably never be needed in any case, and getting a lot of funny looks from the people next door when you came home in the morning. Some people left to get jobs outside, and they were the smart ones: there were good jobs if you only knew how to get them – six quid a week making tea in a shipyard, it was in the papers yesterday, it’s a fact … So, within the depot, the talk went on: making the boring job seem trivial and useless also, making the men who did it feel cheated of their share in the war. For whether they had joined the ARP to help things along, or whether they saw the war as a chance of bettering themselves, they were not doing either, and weren’t likely to if they stayed where they were.