Mother’s Boy, page 22
Rather than head straight to the mess, he found his way round to the other side of the ship and down through the first mess to Cushty’s one beyond. The air was ripe with the sailors’ night smells combined with those of breakfast, and he was abashed to be faced with several cheerfully naked men, none of whom was Cushty.
‘I . . . I brought back Cushty’s duffel coat,’ he blurted, glad he had at least thought to rinse out and stow the bucket on his way.
‘Oi! Cushty?’ one of them shouted towards the bunks. ‘One of your fancy men’s brought your mink back.’
There was a grunt.
‘I’ll give it to him,’ one of the naked men said, taking it from his hands, and Charles fled.
He obediently nibbled dry toast and sipped brutally strong black tea for breakfast while all around him were feasting on fried eggs and asking if they could eat his share of sausages. Then he began to be sick again, while mopping and scrubbing out the mess. When he finally tumbled into his bunk, the air thick with the same disinfectant he had smelled the day before, he turned to the bulkhead in an effort to block out the light and the cheery chat of messmates, and craved the crisp, clean smell of Mother’s ironing.
GIB – 1942
‘Let’s take it from the top again,’ Charles called out, ‘but this time try to take your time. It’s a love song, not a school hymn. Try to relax.’
‘I am perfectly relaxed,’ Rusty told him, sounding as relaxed as a Home Service announcer.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Maybe try to show it!’
He played the introduction with an extra lilt he hoped might infect her style but once again Rusty sang ‘Bill’ like a head girl itemising the failings of a junior prefect, whereas the whole poignant appeal of the song, one of the reasons he’d chosen it, was that Wodehouse’s lyrics celebrated ordinariness and would make all the ordinary men in the audience feel a little better about themselves and a little more hopeful romantically.
The audience would be almost entirely male as the population of Gibraltar currently was. The local women and children – the ‘useless mouths’, Churchill chillingly called them – had been abruptly and inefficiently shipped out at the start of hostilities so that the colony could become a garrison. Spanish women came over the border every day to work, of course, as cleaners, cooks and waitresses in the bars and, in some cases, on their backs in upper rooms with an impatient queue of men on the stairs, but Rusty was one of a tiny cluster of Wren signallers living in a well-guarded house, working punishingly long shifts in the tunnels high on the Rock. The population was so overwhelmingly male and loveless that these few women were in a strange, unenviable position: subjected to constant lewd advances from the men wherever they went and loudly accused of snobbery or lesbianism when they didn’t respond in kind. They were regularly condemned for pip-hunting – only walking out with officers – but Charles could see no blame was called for if they did; a civilised evening’s dinner and dancing at The Rock, the good hotel requisitioned as the officers’ mess, was surely preferable to the mauling, or worse, any woman would get who braved the overflowing bars of Main Street.
As one of the few acknowledged pianists, he had been charged with throwing together a Twelfth Night fundraising concert for the Red Cross. Any of the women who could perform anything, from a song to reciting limericks, had been co-opted, along with the inevitable female impersonator, Taffy, a burly cook from Newport – who could have sung ‘Bill’ with far more kindness and emotion than Rusty’s clipped manner could convey – and a tall, very camp messmate of Charles’s everyone called Clara because his surname was Bow. Clara had been a choral scholar at Cambridge, where he was a star of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society, so was to give a couple of patter songs in his unexpectedly fulsome baritone. One girl was doing magic tricks involving an amazingly compliant dachshund and another was to play Handel’s ‘Largo’ and ‘The Sailor’s Hornpipe’ on a violin.
Because rehearsals in the Theatre Royal were throwing them together with Rusty and the others, Charles and Clara and Taffy were subject to noisy envy from the other men and pestered with requests to put in a word or even pass on letters and photographs from the lovelorn. Charles soon realised the girls regarded them as no threat.
‘Oh, you’re all right,’ Rusty had said on the first day. ‘Anyone can see you’re safe in taxis.’ Her tone was dismissive, even by her head-girlish standards. She was used to telling people what to do and didn’t like it when she realised Charles wasn’t merely her accompanist but also her artistic director for the entertainment.
She was spectacularly attractive, a sort of Home Counties Ginger Rogers, tall and athletic with legs up to here, as Mother would have said, and he suspected that her singing would be largely drowned out by wolf whistles and drunken invitations to forget Bill and take up with Alf or whoever, but it was such a delight not to be coding for a change or swabbing out or chopping onions or delousing the beds. It was disconcerting, though, after uninterrupted months in the company of men, to be alone with an attractive woman and feel nothing, to feel himself, in fact, a kind of eunuch.
‘Will you be a brick, Charles, and walk me back to the Wrennery?’ Rusty asked once he’d realised no number of repetitions were going to wring a more heartfelt performance from her. ‘I thought Diana or Bridget could scoop me up in the Jeep but they’ve had to go on watch early so I’m on Shanks’ pony and defenceless.’
‘Of course,’ he said, although he was fairly sure a stinging rebuke from Rusty would have brought any leering mariner to his senses.
The freshness and light when they emerged from the old velvet gloom of the theatre was startling. It was one of the good days when the Rock hadn’t gathered a heavy cloud above it. There was real warmth to the sun and a delicious smell of caramel and frying nuts was drifting from a nearby kitchen. It was said that several local men had succeeded in hiding wives or daughters in cupboards or secret rooms and were looking better fed and more contented than most of the servicemen. Quite apart from his daily relief at no longer being at sea, Charles rather loved Gibraltar. He had written to Mother that it was like an exotic version of Launceston, with the houses stacked up against the rock-face, the preposterous warren of alleyways and dwellings seemingly built one atop the other, giving the sense that everyone knew everyone else’s business. Just as at home, there was the frequent smell of baking or laundry, and yet there were also marauding apes, orange trees, a beach with sand often too hot for bare feet, and a view of Africa. The place names bore testimony to a salty Englishness even as the weather and plentiful fresh fruit belied them.
‘So how did you end up here and not at sea?’ Rusty asked, cutting in on his thoughts. ‘Friends in high places?’
‘Seasickness,’ he admitted. ‘Everyone said it would clear up, but it didn’t. We sailed to Scapa Flow, Iceland, Londonderry, down to Freetown, back up to Londonderry and it was still as bad as ever.’
‘Grim.’
‘Yes. Finally I dared to go and see the skipper about it since nothing the MO did was helping. I’ve never forgotten the shock, after months of our cramped little mess with its hard leather cushions and narrow bunks, of being admitted to his cabin and finding chintz armchairs and silver photograph frames. He seemed completely unimpressed but it turned out he’d recommended I be given a post here. Actually how he worded it was “unsuitable for small ships”.’
‘Oh, you were on a little one? They’re the worst. You need something the size of a Cunard liner.’
‘I’d rather just stay here.’
‘You all get sent back to sea eventually,’ Rusty said. ‘It’s just turnover. Christ. Here we go. Do you mind?’
She firmly took his arm as they turned the corner on to Main Street where there were already beery crowds spilling out of every bar and café.
‘It’s just if they think I’m yours, they’re a little less likely to think I’m theirs.’
Her arm was strong – from swimming and playing tennis, he imagined – and he felt she was leading him as much as he, her.
The effect of Rusty appearing on the street was almost instantaneous. Every conversation seemed to break off. Every head to turn. Walking so close beside her, arm in arm, Charles felt the massed male attention on him as much as on her, or felt the stares pass through him to get at her. Then the comments started: ‘Hello, darling’, ‘Try me on for size’ and ‘What’s your poison, love?’ It struck Charles the men didn’t really expect her to respond – if she had, they might have been at a loss. Rather it was as though they needed to signal to each other that she was what they really wanted, that the company of men was always second best. It was an assertion of polarity as much as of desire. Every now and then a man would lurch out of his group and half-block their way along the narrow street, reaching for Charles’s arm or shoulder, or Rusty’s, with some stupid comment like, ‘Are there more where you’re from?’ or ‘What’s he have that I don’t?’ and Charles would summon up a voice not really his and say, ‘Now steady on,’ or ‘Show some respect, man,’ as he felt Rusty’s grip on him tighten still further.
They neared the Catholic cathedral and the pavement crowds lessened. Whether by accident or design, the bars were mainly clustered towards Casemates Square and the stretch from the Catholic cathedral past Government House to the Southport Gate was more genteel and residential, dotted with shoe shops, druggists, bakers and barbers. He felt Rusty relax beside him and at last she let his arm go free.
‘Thanks for that,’ she said shortly.
‘It’s a myth, then,’ he said, ‘that women like all the attention?’
‘Some might,’ she said, ‘but they’d be braver than me. I hate it. I was in all-girl schools until three years ago. And I’m an only. The Jennies with brothers, like Bridget, are better prepared.’
‘But you seem so confident.’
‘That’s just war paint,’ she said. ‘And years of riding and ballet lessons. The thing I really dread, the thing I have nightmares about, is that one day I might be in the middle of a crowd like that when there’s an air raid. I think I’d rather take my chances out in the open.’
They were passing the chapel attached to the Governor’s residence – the church of what had once been the convent.
‘I love it in there,’ Rusty said. ‘It’s like going into a village church back home. You almost expect to be asked if you’d join the flower rota or give some tinned peaches for the harvest festival.’
‘I know what you mean,’ said Charles. Although God had departed for him when they suffered a direct hit somewhere in the Atlantic. He had to take a signal to the skipper in person and came out on deck to a scene of carnage: not just wounded men, but pieces of men. ‘But I think God has taken a leave of absence,’ he told her. ‘At least he has for me.’
‘But surely you believe he’s on our side?’ Rusty asked, her little frown making her look more than ever like a symbol of home and glory, a poster girl for whatever it was people were dying for in such obscene numbers.
‘Don’t you think both sides have to believe that to keep going?’ he asked, and her frown deepened. ‘Did you go to the Nativity play?’ he asked.
‘We did,’ she said. ‘I sobbed. Hadn’t registered how homesick I was until then. When we all had to sing “Away in a Manger” I couldn’t get beyond “crib”.’
‘Well, that carol would undo anyone.’
‘What was your favourite bit?’
He thought, remembering the crammed chapel, a delicious smell of tangerines cutting through the pervasive fug of under-washed men, tobacco and massed duffel coats and British Warms. He remembered being especially struck by the young recruits playing the angels, dressed in a dazzling combination of snowy white robes and gleaming silver breastplates from some regimental armoury or museum. ‘The trumpet playing,’ he told her. ‘That was what undid me.’
There was a little café-cum-newsagent in the small run of shops between the Government House and the Southport Gate. He had developed a taste for the tarry little Italian coffees they served – infinitely preferable to the watery brew served up at the mess. These and extremely fresh oranges had become his two luxuries and he had taken to trading half his tobacco allowance with Clara, who boasted he was a professional smoker, so as to indulge himself.
The place was fairly busy but there were a few free tables outside in the winter sunshine.
‘Can I get you something?’ he asked. ‘The coffee’s good here. Have you time?’
‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Perhaps a bitter lemon. Thanks.’
He installed her at a table and went in. The place was loud with sailors inside. Charles guessed they had just come ashore and not yet worked out that the bars proper lay further into town.
He had just seen a couple of faces he thought he recognised when a familiar voice said, ‘Jan?’ and he turned in the midst of being served to find Cushty standing right behind him, his left arm done up in a fetching navy-blue sling. Most reunited shipmates shook hands or slapped one another about the shoulders, but Cushty used his good arm to pull Charles into a hug that went on so long someone shouted, ‘Leave it out!’
Charles could feel other people touching him on the back as though their reunion gave off a kind of good luck. He felt simultaneously flustered and deeply comforted.
They soon established that the Starburst had docked to refuel and take on supplies and that Cushty and the others would be shipping out that night or towards dawn.
‘But your arm!’
‘Ooph, it’s only a burn. I’m walking wounded.’
‘What happened?’
‘A very close shave is what. I can still lift the shells when I need to, it’s just less sore if I wear this and it gets me sympathy bevvies.’
‘Well, there you go!’ Charles handed him the pint he had ordered along with the coffee and bitter lemon. Cushty widened his eyes at the abstemious drinks. ‘I’m on the next watch,’ Charles explained, ‘and I’m escorting a Wren back to her nest.’
‘You’re with that glamour puss?’
‘It’s not like—’
‘Dark horse. We miss you, Jan. I miss you.’
‘You don’t miss me throwing up all the time. Anyway, I never saw you.’
But Charles knew what he meant. They would see one another on shore leaves when the tight tribal loyalties of the various messes slackened the further one went from the ship. They would walk and talk and drink, although he couldn’t fathom what pleasure lay in it for Cushty. Mainly Charles talked, prompted by Cushty’s questions, and his own slight nervousness that his increasing fondness for the man was a wild, even dangerous misreading of simple courtesy and curiosity. Cushty teased him and took mischievous pleasure in getting him drunk, but also liked to say he was ‘better than school’. Weeks would pass between shore leaves but then, when they met up on the dock of Belfast or Freetown or wherever, it felt like the entirely natural resumption of a briefly interrupted conversation.
Cushty never tired of hearing stories about Launceston people, which of course Charles would embroider to make them funnier or more scandalous, and Charles in turn prised stories out of Cushty about his huge family in Liverpool, presided over by a tiny matriarch who kept his father’s earnings in a teapot from which she gave him drinking money on receipt of his wage packet.
If anyone had noticed their curious friendship, nobody commented on it, at least not to Charles. It was one of the strengths of naval life that it had learned to compensate the men for an unnatural life without women, and far from home, by imposing on them an intense surrogate domesticity. Each mess was a miniature household with its routines of cleaning, feeding, socialising and sleep, as regimented as those for the watches and, deprived of choice, men swiftly adapted to and embraced them as the most natural thing in the world. Within those households there were friendships, sometimes more-than-friendships, tantamount to undeclared marriages, which were only challenged or acknowledged when booze-fuelled strife broke out away from the ship. In his own mess there was a pair of signalmen – a radio operator and a coder – who had adjoining bunks, always worked the same watches, and spent all their leisure time together, the one compiling cryptic crosswords, the other executing meticulous watercolours of seabirds, quite like two unmarried sisters. Assuming such alliances and loyalties were fairly common, they could only enhance the social cohesion and networks of mutual support on board. Cushty had an older brother who had done time for housebreaking and subsequently gone into the Merchant Navy, who assured him that prison life and shipboard life were not so very different.
Cushty followed Charles outside, presumably hoping to be introduced to Rusty. Charles had become so used to the willowy presence of Clara, who often joined him on excursions into town, that he had forgotten how walking anywhere with Cushty always felt like taking a dancing bear for a walk, only without the cruel chain. He never walked beside Charles but always loomed slightly behind, representing at once comfort, threat and responsibility. He was helpful now as in his short absence the other two chairs at Charles’s table had been taken by sailors intent on chatting up Rusty, who cast a despairing glance Charles’s way as he approached.
‘Sorry, lads,’ Charles said.
‘Hop it,’ growled Cushty, and the chairs were relinquished as they never would have been had Charles been on his own.
‘What took you?’ Rusty said.
‘Sorry. This is an old friend from the Starburst, Cushty. Cushty, Rusty. Oh, look. Ha! You nearly rhyme!’
They both looked at him blankly. Then, having established that Cushty was shipping out that night, Rusty lost interest and Cushty fell to quizzing Charles about his life in Gibraltar and, rather touchingly, asking if he’d had any news from Launceston. Charles said that he’d heard nothing from Mother for weeks then had six letters from her in a bundle. He told him about her adventures with evacuees and rabbit pie, how the town’s businesses were all thriving again thanks to all the soldiers flooding through. As they spoke, he found Cushty’s craggy, familiar face and close attention were making him almost more homesick than the funny specifics and newspaper clippings in Mother’s letters had done.
