Mother’s Boy, page 23
There was a sharp little cough from Rusty and Charles became aware that the evicted sailors and their friends had taken advantage of her tuning out of his conversation to gather round and try to involve her in theirs.
‘Charles, we really should be going. If you can bear to . . .’
‘Yes, of course,’ he said, getting up. ‘Sorry, Cushty. I promised Rusty I’d see her home.’
‘We’ll see you home,’ one of the sailors shouted.
Rusty came round to Charles’s side of the table, ignoring the men, and firmly took his arm again. Cushty stood politely. For a moment Charles thought he might be about to hug him goodbye as tenderly as he had greeted him, but instead Cushty made a sort of respectful bow and muttered to the men to show some respect for a lady. Charles wanted to explain but could hardly say it was duty, not pleasure in front of Rusty and, anyway, Rusty was tugging him towards the Southport Gate.
‘So sorry about that,’ he told her. ‘I hadn’t seen him since they put me ashore here months ago and you know how sentimental sailors get.’
‘I’m learning rapidly,’ she said, then added more kindly, ‘Perhaps you could hurry back from the Wrennery to find him and carry on chatting. I feel bad now.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ he told her, but as they passed the pretty little graveyard with the exotic trees and the gravestones for the dead from the Battle of Trafalgar, he glanced back and saw that, entirely characteristically, Cushty had turned potential confrontation into new friendship and was strolling slowly along the street towards the chaos of Casemates Square with the other sailors.
The Wrennery, formerly the old Naval Hospital, had been chosen because it was both on the quieter end of town and handy for the road that led past the officers’ mess and on to the tunnels of the Rock where most of the Wrens were working. It was a handsome building with a garden and even a tennis court, Rusty confessed, though the blessedly cool courtyard was spoiled by a huddle of Nissen huts. ‘And in the heat we’d happily have exchanged tennis for a swimming pool. We can’t really enjoy Catalan Bay without being pestered.’
Rusty hadn’t admitted that she had an arrangement for the evening. When they drew near an army major climbed down from a Jeep to greet her. He received Charles’s salute and took Rusty off his hands with a muttered, ‘I’ll take over from here, thank you.’
Charles heard Rusty make a rapid excuse about the rehearsal having run on rather and needing to change, then she hurried inside without a backwards glance, embarrassed lest the officer had seen her on Charles’s arm.
Gibraltar’s naval dockyard had come as a benign contrast to the Devonport one. Smaller and friendlier, with its half-built motor launches like boy’s toys, the buzz of its sawmill reminding Charles of home, the smell of its paint shop, its cobbles and a railway line like something a boy would play with on his bedroom floor. The Signals quarters were friendly too – a far cry from the huge granite walls of the Plymouth barracks. They were in low timber and concrete buildings which, especially on sunny days, reminded Charles of the flimsy-looking buildings in cowboy films. The quarters formed three sides of an oblong, with thirty cabins along each of the long sides. The central space was slung with dhobying on washing lines and dominated by a huge, precious and temperamental fridge forever being cosseted by the wireless operators and just as regularly catching fire or flashing violet lightning. The short side of the oblong housed the galley, the chief and petty officers’ mess and the general mess, which contained an inexplicable spinet Charles coaxed into badly tuned life when persuaded. The tin roofs of the cabins made them hot and airless in summer and deafening when it rained. The cabins were cherished for having army cots rather than hammocks, although some, like Clara, reverted to their hammocks because the cots were on the short side and subject to regular louse infestations.
Charles gathered from Rusty that the Wrens’ sleeping arrangements in the Wrennery were little more comfortable, squeezed into a row of extremely leaky Nissen huts. Added to which they worked their long watches in chambers carved into the upper Rock, where the damp from the clouds that regularly gathered there turned all their bedding soggy and musty.
He arrived back just in time to catch a plate of cottage pie and cabbage but had barely wolfed half when the deafening dockyard hooter warned of an air raid and sent everyone rushing for cover. Their officially designated shelters lay in tunnels in the base of the Rock, some two hundred yards away, so most men simply dived under bushes or pressed themselves against walls with some overhanging shelter. Clutching a slice of bread and butter, Charles raced over to his usual hideaway – a gnarled old fig tree that spread out from the base of a stretch of historic wall. He had lost none of his fear at the rumbling approach of enemy bombers, though, irrationally he knew, found it less terrifying than the shriek of diving fighter planes he had learned to dread during sea attacks. The target here was mainly the harbour, along with its fuel stores and any ships or submarines at anchor. The main risk to the signallers came when the huge home gun batteries let rip at the enemy aircraft and their shrapnel began to tumble. It was lethally sharp. Charles had seen a boy running for cover trip just in time to be horribly peppered with it down his back and legs, and had never forgotten how they all had to remain in hiding, listening to his screams, until the shrapnel shower ceased and they could drag him, too late, to shelter, where he bled to death among friends.
He heard it landing now, its deceptively pretty tinkling on the tin roofs all around. One bomb fell somewhere far off, then another closer to, and then the raid ended as abruptly as it had begun. A Levanter, the warm wind from the east, had started blowing and was bringing in the usual muggy ceiling of cloud to obscure the upper Rock, which presumably made it extremely difficult for bombers to work with any accuracy over such a tiny target.
As he headed to begin his watch, past the men with big yard brooms who were already sweeping up the shrapnel into piles, Charles thought of all the men in the bars along Main Street and around Casemates Square. He had only once been caught up in an air raid along there and the shelter had been unbelievably noisy and sordid, with men pissing and brawling in a dank space so overcrowded he felt the buttons of the man behind him pressed into his back. Perhaps Cushty had already re-embarked before the alarm had sounded, but he would be all right if not; Cushty never seemed unnerved by crowds as Charles was. He said it was growing up in a packed tenement in a city where all entertainment – football or drinking, basically – involved standing in noisy crowds and shouting.
The Signals Tower stood almost like a lighthouse in a clutch of balconied Spanish buildings at the southern end of the dockyard, only a short walk from the mess. It was spacious compared to the hot, cramped signals room on the Starburst, but housed over five times as many men, with sixteen on duty there at each watch. And unlike a ship’s signal room, it constantly received and processed flag and light signals as well as wireless messages. Like the beehive it resembled, it was tiered and regimented. First there was the signal distribution office – a noisy flurry of telephones, typewriters and signal pads with such a constant whirl of paper from desk to pigeon holes and such an omnipresent fug of sparks and smoke from Spanish cigars and navy-issue cigarettes that the fire hazard barely bore contemplation, especially as Charles worked up at the top of a wooden tower above it all.
The way upstairs took Charles past a huge carbon machine where there was always someone churning away at the handle with purple-stained hands, duplicating every signal, however insignificant. The telegraphists manned a wireless office on the next level of the hive. Above them the leading signalmen and two or three juniors occupied a sort of draughtily glazed birds’ nest from where they could officially communicate directly with ships at anchor, but also unofficially spy on locals through their telescopes and binoculars. In one corner of the room, they maintained a nest of mouldering flags on an antique daybed on which they would take turns to nap. Cups of tea were regularly requested from the telegraphist one floor down, who had a jealously guarded kettle and supply of condensed milk. The cobwebby voice pipe used to place the orders was also handy for the sharing of filthy jokes and any choice gossip gleaned by way of the misdirected telescopes. Charles worked in the cyphering office, along a little balcony. It was the only one of the top-storey rooms to boast a coal fire but also felt like a quiet refuge from the mayhem down below. When he came on watch in the small hours he was woken for it by the coder coming off duty and would arrive at the desk to a slightly panic-inducing backlog of messages awaiting decoding. Arriving on the kinder side of midnight, Charles was able to take the previous coder’s still warm seat with no backlog, so the process felt calmer.
At sea he had to filter out the messages that were either routine or irrelevant. Here there was no filtering and every single message was decoded, duplicated and circulated. It was startling to discover that he could decode at a respectable speed, keeping pace with the signals coming in, yet think of other things while doing it. At some miserably nauseated point between Belfast and his second voyage to Freetown, he had imperceptibly begun to memorise and recognise the forty or fifty commonest number clusters, most of them representing destinations, ships’ names or words like ‘proceed’, ‘refuel’, ‘attack’, ‘damage’ or ‘assistance’.
War had blasted all his old dreams to shreds. Despite agreeing to things like organising the Red Cross gala, Charles no longer thought of himself as a theatre animal waiting for his day to come. He had even begun to wonder if his playwriting, like his playing Frederic in The Pirates of Penzance and even his working in two dance bands, hadn’t been a kind of metaphor in action: that what he yearned for wasn’t to emerge into an actual spotlight to applause, for all Mother’s teasing about silk dressing gowns, but to emerge into his true self. Whoever that might be.
He continued to keep a diary, all written very small, in tiny books, although he was fairly sure it was illegal for a serviceman to do so. He was scrupulous about leaving out all geographical specifics and any references to what his work involved, but he was aware that the process had become precious to him as the sole surviving thread of literature in his days. When he couldn’t sleep – usually after a night watch when his brain was fizzing from code and the sugary tea at breakfast, and the Spanish sunlight was blazing into his curtainless cabin – he would often reach into the hiding place he had created inside his mattress and take out one of the earlier diaries to squint over and reread. It was strange to encounter his younger self and find him already a stranger: so snobbish, so judgemental, so wilfully closed to Mother’s good influence. But then he would stumble on something that made him smile: a dry account of ‘the afternoon at the pool declining into a melancholy spitting match with the Cocks children’ or ‘an encounter with a pink, fishy young man from Sennen with false teeth’ or read something that seemed queerly prophetic like, ‘Oh, the letters I would write were I free! Or would I?’
After the things Charles had seen, his plays now seemed utterly self-centred and facile, the work of an over-indulged child. He knew he should be writing furious, Orwellian reportage and had made a few attempts, especially when he first arrived at Gibraltar with the scenes from life at sea still vivid in his mind, but what he now recognised as an arch tone kept creeping in. He burned the attempts, in any case, knowing they’d be even more frowned upon than the careful notes he made in his diary. He had tried writing short stories instead, boiling down incidents and people into terse narratives but time and again these threatened to turn confessional, leaving him too unambiguously exposed for comfort and he burned most of these too. Just one or two he carefully edited for the censor, excising anything specific, and posted them home to himself, disguised as letters and marked ‘to await return’ lest Mother well-meaningly forwarded them back to him.
The mess always offered up the Gibraltar Chronicle, its news up to date but its pages shrinking by the week, thanks to paper shortages, which also left its heavily doctored reports ever more drained of colour. Then there was an array of local papers, all weeks out of date but sent with love from families back home, deeply reassuring reminders of the constants of life from Bradford, Caerphilly, Lowes-toft and Kirkcudbright. Mother had several times added to the library of newsprint, with carefully ironed and folded copies of the Cornish Guardian or Western Morning News. There were months-old copies of the New Statesman, which Charles read far more assiduously than he had at home, and regularly, garishly printed in red or blue on paper so rough it often caused the pictures to bleed, there was a magazine called The Rock. Far trashier than the sober Gibraltar Chronicle, it was produced in the handsome Garrison Library, a civilised building, much as he imagined gentlemen’s clubs in London must look, from which all women and other ranks were excluded. Its editor set no such limitations on inviting contributions. The writers all seemed to be servicemen and the numerous poems, inevitably signed only with an initial, had titles like ‘Middle Watch Musings’ and ‘Home Thoughts from Alex’.
Charles read these poems with far more patience than he’d have shown a few years before, because he recognised the pain from which so many of them arose. He found himself analysing why so few of them worked. It was the tone, he realised. They were reaching, as he himself had once reached, for a high tone, like something in a hymn book, when what was needed was candour and directness. The sort of candour you heard any night in air-raid shelter or bar. Without the swearing, naturally, but with the conversational directness the swearing would bring.
The few poems he had written since leaving school were heavily influenced by Spender and Auden and, he saw now, were often quite witty but as arch as his plays had been. Almost without meaning to, he had recently begun to attempt poems in his head. He kept them in his head on purpose, enjoying the discipline of holding and turning and refashioning a few lines while he scrubbed out his cabin or chopped onions for the Spanish cook, walked through the tunnel for a bracing swim at Catalan Bay or even as the other half of his mind deciphered signals. If the lines couldn’t be remembered, then he felt they were lacking and deserved to be forgotten. It was fast becoming his equivalent of the old sailor’s patiently whittled piece of scrimshaw or the intricate jigsaws or needlework fashioned by his messmates on the Starburst.
Tonight, as signals came through from his old ship reporting no damage sustained in the attack on the harbour and requesting a progress report on a boat they were to escort, he started to work up a poem about the frustratingly cut-short meeting with Cushty. As he flicked rapidly through code books and neatly deciphered signals about bunkering, about enemy sightings and engagements, and damage on either side, the other part of his mind, which he began to picture as the poet, shaped one line, then a second.
The poet was at work in a quiet room, perhaps one floor up still from this one, with a view of the ships at anchor and the oily reflections of the lights in the water. He thought about Cushty’s dimple, the beefy arm rendered powerless by its navy-blue sling. He tried to make a link between the sling and the two misinterpretations he had felt unable to correct: both Cushty’s and the army officer’s assumption that there was more to Rusty’s arm on his than simple support.
VALLETTA – 1942
Nobody in the Gibraltar signal station would have admitted to having begged to be there but plenty would have begged to be allowed to remain. From the resentful conversations Charles sometimes overheard in washhouse or mess, some would gladly have picked a colleague to go back to sea in their stead. The summonses to rejoin a ship arrived with the swiftness of calamity in an old play. Sailors were profoundly superstitious, even enlisted ones soon became so, and whenever there was news that so-and-so had been called back to sea, an unseemly hilarity often broke out for an hour or two among those who felt they had been stroked by the black wingtip but spared the talons.
When the Starburst was safely out of harbour, any anxiety Charles felt for his former shipmates was shot through with shameful relief at not being with them. Nowhere in the theatre of war was safe. Air raids were almost daily events and everyone was aware that, caught between the enemy in North Africa and the not-quite-enmity of Spain, Gibraltar might be snuffed out by a concerted effort, but working there was an idyll compared to being strafed in the Med or torpedoed in the Atlantic. Being able to loll on the broiling sand of the beach or gorge on fresh oranges in the Alameda Gardens, or standing in a cloud of cigar smoke outside one of the countless barbershops on Main Street to watch a mule train bringing in barrels of Rioja and sherry to the bars meant it was sometimes easy to forget the war was still all around.
Spring rapidly unfolded into a long and broiling summer. As the war progressed, Charles began to work regularly in the Government House, in what was formerly the ballroom. Chandeliers and mirrors had been bundled up against air-raid damage, royal paintings left to glare down on the assembled desks and tables. On the first floor of the house, facing the street, it was mercifully shady compared to the coding room on top of the Signals Tower, which became like a greenhouse in the August sun. He knew from the signals he was decoding that something big was in the offing, involving several ships, mercantile as well as naval, but hadn’t pieced together the details when, quite suddenly, the Starburst was back, having failed in a mission to escort a supply ship safely past the Italians. Within days Charles’s long summer idyll of coding and beach trips was shattered and almost a third of the signallers and coders found themselves summoned back to their ships, including him. Missions were always carried out on a need-to-know basis, with mariners, stokers and even gunners often barely aware of where they were going or why until it became obvious. Men only had to cast an eye across the ocean around them in the dawn light following their departure to appreciate the scale of the operation underway.
