Mother’s Boy, page 19
Charles’s chalet partner, Newby, the birdwatcher, was a big-eared, raw-necked lad from Bridlington. He was painfully shy and clearly horrified at having to undress in front of another man. He was already in bed in his well-buttoned pyjamas when Charles came in that first evening, after a stroll around the camp to get his bearings in the moonlight. And in the morning, he woke Charles as he hurried out, still in his pyjamas but clutching his uniform and boots, presumably planning to change into them in a washroom cubicle.
‘I’ll be one of the ones they kick out early,’ he told Charles gloomily. ‘I’m a sparks by trade. I’d rather be a telegraphist or a radio operator.’
The speed with which he could identify any passing bird and provide its Latin name made Charles less certain. The more likely candidates for failure, he felt, were the crossword fiends, since it soon became clear that cryptic interpretation was less what was needed than blind obedience to a system. They were not to be code-breakers but coders, taking messages in and out of an agreed code as swiftly and accurately as possible. Incoming messages were doubly encoded, of course, being received in Morse. The boarding school element – being far from home, having to take showers in rowdy company, daily PE sessions and having to master the art of sitting on a filthy lavatory with one boot firmly against an unlockable door – might have proved less of a shock to the privately educated, but as soon as he was back in a classroom, Charles felt entirely at home.
They learned in classes of around twenty in Nissen huts still smelling strongly of creosote. They sat at school desks slightly too small for comfort for the taller men, and those not lucky enough to be seated near the end with windows had to squint in the dim light to read. Charles was saved having to learn flag-wagging (semaphore) or how to read a message delivered by hoisted flags or the flashes of an Aldis lamp, but everyone in the camp had to learn Morse as a basic skill, and in case a wireless telegraphist was, cue euphemism, ‘out of action’. It was the first time since being expected to learn the basics of Latin on arrival at the grammar school that Charles could remember having to digest and memorise such blocks of information. At first it seemed impossible, but he was determined not to be demoted, as he already thought of it, to a different task, and the more the other men moaned and huffed, the steelier he found his determination becoming. It helped that their teacher was a kind older officer, not unlike the most effective grammar school maths teachers, who taught with patience rather than fear.
‘You could learn Morse code in twenty minutes,’ he said when they started, ‘but I’m giving you a week, because you’re human.’
They were to forget about the alphabet, he said. Instead they would memorise the code by use of mnemonics that linked the letters linked in Morse. So FUEL helped them remember that F, which was dot-dot-dash-dot was the exact opposite of L, which was dot-dash-dot-dot. On this principle ATE I’M SO HOT would remind them T and E were one dash and one dot respectively; I, two dots; M, two dashes; S, three dots; O, three dashes and H, four dots, followed by the three dashes of O and the one dash of T.
Other phrases they had to learn were ANN BEE VEE, D’YOU FEEL GREAT WAR ’CUTELY – which undoubtedly worked better in Newby’s Yorkshire accent – and KAISER PAX. This last illustrated what were called the Sandwiches.
‘We and our allies are dots and the enemy are dashes. Kaiser began the war and hemmed us in, thus K is dash-dot-dash. R is the end of the Kaiser, when we turn the tables, thus dot-dash-dot. P stands for peace, for which the enemy sued once surrounded by the allies, thus P is dot-dash-dash-dot. X, confusingly, is the end of peace (pax) with the allies in the centre sending the defeated armies home; thus X is dash-dot-dot-dash. Got it? You at the back, see if you can repeat all that back to me.’
The awkward buggers, the letters with no opposites, were C, Z and J. One memorised these as SEIZE JEREMIAH. C was dash-dot-dash-dot and Z, as an emphatic C was double-dash-double-dot. J was plain awkward. For that they had to memorise JEREMIAH IN THE BIBLE MOANING ON HIS OWN to remind them that J was a dot and three dashes, as in the short vowel of Je and the three long ones of re-mi-ah.
After a few minutes of thinking these mnemonics astonishingly unhelpful, Charles found they had stuck in his head and won full marks when they were tested on them at the first lesson’s end. Far harder were the numerals. Whereas he found he could accept the letters as a given, something about numbers made him expect logic.
‘Pivot. Do you see? The single dot of 5 is the pivot,’ their teacher kept saying. ‘Before that it’s 1, 2, 3 or 4 out of 10; after that it’s 10 minus the number of dots. Easy, really.’
Charles’s brain rebelled at this point, so he scored less well on day two and was riled to hear not so quiet jeers when it was heard that he hadn’t made the top ten a second time.
The coding classes were smaller. Coders were dotted through the camp’s intake but were under strict instructions never to describe their work to their messmates, even in the broadest terms. Their teacher for this was not an officer but a civilian from a ministry, Charles assumed. They all simply called him sir, although he could only have been thirty at most. He certainly hadn’t fought in the last war, like their Morse trainer. The coded messages had to be decoded using complex substitution codes, which would be changed regularly. They were also given messages to put back into code the same way. The decoding and coding were relatively simple; what at first seemed impossibly hard was to do the tasks at speed. Just as the desired speed to reach for Morse proficiency was eighteen words a minute, it made sense for the coder working alongside the telegraphist to be able to work at the same speed to avoid a backlog of potentially important signals. They were introduced to code books. These were small, about two inches square, with a dull grey binding. Each page displayed a different date in the month above a grid on which letters in black were shown alongside their code substitute numbers. A Greek theta and an underlined R were also used. Signals, or messages, were inscribed on signal pads as they came in, which were divided into columns. The first letter in each signal told you which code book to use, the second, the page to use in it and so on. They were taught to recognise recurring patterns to save time. Ships, places, common phrases, all had their own four-letter codes, again to save time.
The pace of the coding classes was relentless and usually began with quick-fire mental arithmetic around the group. Much of them took place in a sort of frenzied silence at the end of which, as their work was checked for errors, Charles would feel his heart racing. At the end of each class every single scrap of paper written on was burned in the stove in the centre of the hut, while the code books were locked away in an attaché case their teacher brought in every day.
Each day began with some form of physical training before breakfast. Usually this was a run several times around the playing field or out on to the adjacent beach for punishing routes up and down the high bank of sand. There were also gruelling rounds of physical jerks: scissor jumps, press-ups, running on the spot with knees brought high. Many of the recruits seemed to be weekend footballers or rugby players and relished all this. For Charles it was a humiliating torture but, just as at school, it helped him find his fellow misfits: the skinny, the bookish, the sharp-tongued outcasts. They would often sit together at meals and he soon found he wasn’t the only one instructed to send home parcels of dirty laundry to his mother. He endured football, gym, endless drills in marching and in learning to ground and slope arms, and submitted to needlessly fault-finding kit inspections. He became sunburnt from all the hours outside in the bracing Skegness breezes without a hint of shade, and the blue serge of his collar dug painfully into his skin and stained it where his sweat made the dye run. His fingertips ached from endlessly slapping his rifle and from taking it apart and putting it back together again until he thought he could weep from the pointlessness and tedium of it all. The epilogue to every day was the melancholy cleaning and polishing of damp boots.
His chalet proved to be on the wrong side of the camp’s sewage plant, so it reeked when the constant wind was in the wrong direction, and the summer heat and blackout blinds made it like a little oven long after sunset. Every night was broken by air raids, the shrieking siren Charles longed to ignore, then the hasty tugging on of dressing gown and slippers and stumbling trudge with all their neighbours to a horribly cramped and airless shelter. Sleep there was impossible for all the chat, the enthusiasts watching the high-up flashes and dogfights and providing running commentary, and the ceaseless round of dirty jokes and competitive farting. When he dared to complain he was told, ‘You think this smells bad? Just you wait till you’re living in a mess on board!’ and ‘Just pray you’re not made a submariner!’
A sizeable group left Skegness after the first week, among them, Newby, his lugubrious chalet mate. This gave Charles the luxury of snoreless nights, which he dared not mention in case someone else was assigned Newby’s bed. He was certain everyone was worrying and no one was letting on. He worried, too, that all the others were bonding, forming swift and easy friendships while he not only found himself inhibited by constantly remembering they were in competition, but also that they would soon be split up and scattered. There would rarely be more than two coders to a ship – possibly only one at first, as it was a newly created rank – so what was the point in friendships that could go nowhere? Charles knew that he was not popular. Just as at school, popularity seemed to go hand in hand with being good or at least fearless at games, with being able to climb the ropes in the gym without worrying about the height or being able to intercept and tap to a mate a ball kicked at cannonball speed. And being good-looking.
Still, quiet alliances of a sort developed, often based on something as simple as overhearing a Devon or Cornwall accent. His Devonport nickname, Jan, had mysteriously travelled with him, presumably spread by the two older, superior coders with whom he had caught the train and no longer seemed to encounter. He hated them for it, although he did not feel compelled to correct its inaccuracy, as he had done before it was shortened.
They had evenings off occasionally and would catch buses into town, or walk there along the featureless beach, past the hospital for miners with damaged lungs. Skegness was a curious place. He found its lack of cliffs and utter flatness disturbing, though there was a bleak beauty to the sand dunes beyond the edge of town, where he could walk to the mouth of the Wash, and where the drama of the enormous skies reminded him of climbing Rough Tor. Most of the men headed straight to noisy pubs. Charles usually went to hide in the cinema, watching whatever was on just as he had always done at home, briefly losing himself in a tangle of narrative and newsreel, heady glamour and tawdry crimes. He fretted that his piano playing would be suffering; it was the first time since boyhood he had not been practising every day, and he was sure all the sloping of butts and bruising on sports fields would not be good for his hands.
One evening, he emerged blinking from a surreal double bill of Rebecca and My Favourite Wife and was caught up in a group heading to a nearby seafront hotel for a drink before the long walk home with their handful of carefully shaded torches. Unable to enter any of the conversations, his head still full of silk gowns and preposterous breakfast china, he spotted a piano in the corner of the saloon bar. Without thinking, he sat at it and played a version of ‘Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life’, which must have been slightly showy, as it earned a round of applause, and suddenly he was surrounded by beery messmates shouting requests. There were soldiers there from another camp as well, and a strikingly handsome one bought him a whisky and soda and shouted, ‘There you go, Jack,’ in a way that made Charles blush.
Out of the blue, in the week before their exams, they were sent home on leave for just forty-eight hours. They were issued with identity cards and a swift lecture.
‘Liberty men, ’shun! Now pay attention, liberty men. Remember your leave expires at 10 p.m. back here in the camp, not on a train halfway across the country from wherever you’ve been. Look after your identity cards. They are your birthright. They are your property. Loss of your card is liable to land you in serious trouble. Carry on, liberty men.’
Most of the precious leave was eaten up in train journeys – to Grantham, to King’s Cross, crawling out of Paddington at nearly 2 a.m. in a train grey with cigarette and pipe smoke, to Plymouth, then on to Launceston at eight thirty in the morning. Mother was hard at work when he arrived. Gertie, the evacuee, was hiding in her room with the baby, or not yet up. Charles fell asleep in a blissfully hot and soapy bath, then again in his bed, where Mother woke him to say she had lunch ready, and aunts and uncles and cousins keen to see him. Everyone said he looked fitter and taller, which might have been down to all the PT but was probably just the heels on his boots and the effect of wearing uniform. Then he was asked to play at a dance and Mother said to do it as it would be a chance to catch up with everyone. It was a public dance, crammed with soldiers, and she came along and sat happily at a table with her sisters.
Charles woke the next day in a kind of anguish at finding himself back in his boyhood room, even though the bed was shorter than the chalet one. Mother delayed starting work so as to enjoy breakfast with him. She must have used up her week’s ration on the bacon, even though he insisted the one thing the Navy didn’t stint on was food, and there was a sweetness to sitting with her, eating toast and hearing chat about who was doing what and what the soldiers got up to, and how poor Gertie didn’t understand the countryside.
‘Did you mean it about putting an evacuee in your room?’ she asked.
‘Of course,’ he said, and told her he would empty his wardrobe into a suitcase under the bed for her before he left.
‘Thank you, Charles,’ she said. ‘It will feel odd. You will write when you can?’
‘Of course,’ he said.
‘And so will I,’ Mother said. ‘Though you know mine won’t be clever. It’ll be like when your father was out there.’
‘Did he write?’
‘Not much.’
She batted away a tear with the heel of her hand. She had cried when she saw him off the last time and it had been almost more than he could bear.
‘When’s your train?’ she asked. ‘Are you on the three o’clock?’
‘I’d better go before that. I have to change three times and there are bound to be delays. It amazes me Plymouth still has a station to change at, with all the bombing they’ve had.’
‘Don’t.’
They’d been spared in Launceston, apart from a single bomb dropped without killing so much as a cow in a nearby field, but had been watching poor Plymouth’s fiery glow in the sky night after night. Between sets at the dance he had noticed how older men, not in uniform, were keen to impress on him how close the war was getting. Asked about the Home Guard, Mother pulled a wry face and said it stopped old men’s pride being wounded.
She insisted on making him a picnic for his journey, as it might take all day. She packed corned beef and pickle sandwiches, apples, slices of fruit cake and three bottles of Eyre’s ginger beer to remind him where he came from, all of it wrapped in the waxed paper she always smoothed out and cleaned and saved when she unpacked shopping. Charles let her, because he knew she needed to be occupied.
‘When will you go to sea?’ she asked.
‘As soon as they’ve done training me, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Assuming I pass.’
‘You’ll pass. You know you will. Boiled egg?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Will you tell me? Just so I know. I know you can’t give details but . . .’
‘Yes,’ he told her. ‘Of course I will. Mother, I don’t know when I’ll get back here again.’
‘Don’t,’ Mother said. ‘Just . . .’ She wiped the bread board and put away the knife with a click. ‘Just come home safely when you do.’
He said goodbye in the kitchen rather than let her come with him to the station. She hugged him tightly. Wang left his basket and came wheezily over to them to turn slow circles, sensing emotion but too old to bark.
GERTIE
Waving Charles off for the second time felt far more painful than the first. The first time, less than two months ago, had been the first time in their life together they had parted for anything other than an overnight school trip to London or the short holidays he sometimes took with Maggie in Trusham. The first time, Laura had little idea what to expect. His second departure, after a cruelly short leave, felt like a bereavement compared to a serious illness. While he was in training, she entertained all sorts of unpatriotic fantasies that he would be found wanting and sent back home. She had hoped they would find him too weak, they would discover he had failed the medical after all but that the paperwork had been muddled or, all too probably, they would find him too insubordinate. But this second time he was in uniform and almost certainly bound for the sea and danger within days.
Laura had promised not to come with him to the station because she had found it hard not to cry when waving him off before and sensed he had found that unbearable. But then, after Charles had left, she realised she couldn’t bear not to. If she followed him directly but only came on to the platform a few minutes before the train was due to leave, she could wave at him and he could wave back. He’d be gone, but at least she’d have blessed him on his way. What had begun to make her weepy last time had been the waiting together, the awful sense that he was having to make conversation to fill the void, the sense of her own flesh and blood feeling awkward with her.
