Authors: Jonathan Raban
S
tretched barefoot on the starboard hand settee, George dozed and read and dozed again. Briquettes of charcoal whispered in the brassbound stove on the bulkhead; the fenders belched and sighed as the gale shunted the boats around against the quay. Away from the ancestors, away from the bureau drawers full of his father’s papers and from the faint, mothball smell of his mother’s widowed life, George was happily far out at sea. Captains kept him company: he dipped into Captain Slocum, he followed Captain Cook into the Pacific, he listened to the wind in his own rigging as Captain McWhirr drove stolidly for the eye of the typhoon. He re-read
The Riddle of the Sands
for the first time since he was thirteen. Galebound himself, all George required of a book was that it had the sea in it, and he read these voyages as impatiently as if they were thrillers. They piled up in the saloon, their pages splayed on the teak floor. When George slept in the boat he was a crucial eighteen inches—a whole world—away from Cornwall; when he dreamed, as he did almost continuously, the horizon was always empty and enormous.
It wasn’t the first time that he’d run away to sea. George was an old hand at this game. In May of ’43, when he’d been sitting his exams for School Cert, he had prayed for the war to go on long enough for him to get into the Navy. He grew more anxious at each new advance of the Allies. There was another, undeclared war on then, between Mr Churchill and G. P. N. Grey’s first gold stripe. It was a close-run thing between George and Admiral Doenitz as to who was keenest to keep the U-Boat fleet on station in the Atlantic. All George wanted
was the view from the bridge of some dumpy little corvette on convoy duty, with the sea high and the sound of the engines broken by the monotonous pinging of the Asdic. He didn’t want to kill anyone—he hated the messing about with—303 rifles and Bren guns that went on every Saturday morning in the school O.T.C.. He just ached to take ship.
His father, of course, wanted George to go into the Army. Denys Ferguson Grey had spent the Great War as a chaplain in Poperinghe, and he still enjoyed being called “Padre” by his more military parishioners. He had never learned to swim; though rather a fat man, he had the kind of weighty bulk that looked as if it was designed to sink. You only had to see him in a bathing suit to imagine him going straight down in a stream of bubbles. Whenever George thought of the sea, it seemed to him a kindly place mainly because he imagined himself floating away on it leaving his unbuoyant father stranded on the beach.
On summer holidays, first in Dawlish, then in Ilfracombe, Mr Grey led his family to this dangerous element like Moses going at the head of the Israelites on their passage through the wilderness. In his old school boater and black and burgundy striped swimming costume, he made strangers look up from their deck chairs and snigger. He always carried an upended prawn net like an episcopal staff. George’s mother walked six paces behind him with the picnic hamper (an aeon later, in Aden, George realized that his mother was a model Arab wife); George himself skulked twenty, thirty, forty yards behind, and did his best to announce to the world that he was in no way related to the odd couple ahead. Hands deep in the pockets of his long short trousers, he put on his Edward G. Robinson scowl, kicked moodily at the sand and kept his eyes on the horizon, where colliers and cruise liners left their smoky prints upon the sky.
“Oh, do buck up, old boy, for heaven’s sake! Stop
loitering!”
his father shouted, and George, aged eleven, would slowly turn his head and peer behind him, searching the beach for the truant child of the fat man in the straw hat.
Mr Grey had no more liking for the sea than he had for charabancs, garlic or flappers. He found it disorderly and vulgar. But year after year he visited it—in much the same spirit as he visited the sick; a regrettable duty whose chief merit was that it chastened the soul. When he retired to the seaside, and not just to the seaside but to a house called Thalassa no less, he must, George thought, have been carrying his holiday principle to its logical, dutiful conclusion.
Now he remembered his father bending shortsightedly over a rockpool. Mr Grey was parting the oarweed with the cane of the prawn net. “Blenny,” he said. Then, “Starfish”. Then, “Anemone”. It was as if by naming each sea animal he could rob it of further interest. When the oarweed closed back on the pool, it was like the curtain coming down at the end of a play; the story was over, it was time to go home.
On the cliff path back to the hotel, his father took the same melancholy pleasure in pointing out the fossils embedded in the soft grey limestone. Every few yards he would tap the rock with the prawn net and say “Hmm? Hmm? What do you make of that?”
“Ammonite,” George said, and the tribe of three was allowed to move on a little further up the cliff. The handle of the net rattled on the rock again. “Trilobites,” George said; but his father had found the flaky remains of yet another prehistoric something.
“Old bullets,” George said and giggled, hoping to make his mother giggle too. “Oliver Cromwell’s toenails.”
“Lipsticks!” his mother said, and laughed at herself for daring to say such a thing.
“Belemnite guards, old boy, belemnite guards.” His father gave a weary sniff. There was so much silliness around in the world today; was there, the sniff asked, any need to add to it?
Seven years later, George got away to sea. At least, he had got as far as the requisitioned Butlin’s holiday camp at Pwllheli, where he apprenticed himself to Commander Prynne and had already got drunk, twice. He was both on the run from his father and trying to beat his father at his father’s own
game. All through his childhood he’d been licked hollow by his father—at fossils, at names of the English Kings and Queens, at Greek mythology and the county cricket scores. (Denys Grey was solid for Worcestershire, so George, who hated cricket, was credited with a passionate loyalty to the fortunes of Surrey, the one county for which his father expressed complete contempt and which he always referred to as “Surburbery”.) After each tea-table defeat, his father would put on his most polite and inquiring voice to ask: “I do sometimes wonder, old boy, if they teach you anything at all, nowadays, at public school?”
Well, George was learning a thing or two at Pwllheli. His father could bloody well keep Harold Larwood and the belemnite guards; for George now had cocked hats, starsights, distances-off, bowlines and tidal streams. On his first weekend leave he came back to the Rectory with his new sextant, Tyrrell’s
Principles of Marine Navigation
and Volume 3 of the
Admiralty Sight Reduction Tables
.
On Saturday morning George set out his books conspicuously on the dining table. His father watched him from over the top of
The Times
. “Swotting?” He let out a little whistle of disdain. If you had to swot on a Saturday, you must be a pretty dim bunny, by his father’s lights.
“We’ve got a Nav. test next week.”
“I suppose it’s all done by numbers nowadays, is it? Maths was never my strong point.” His father went back to his paper.
“You have to get into the top five to make the Nav. Officers’ course. Otherwise it’ll just be Deck for me.”
“The Whitaker boy … what’sisname?”
“Nick?”
“Yes. He’s doing awfully well. In North Africa, now. With Monty. His father says he’s up for his third pip.”
At Matins on Sunday, George’s father preached on a text from Ephesians. “I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called.” George sat with his mother in the seventh pew from the front.
All through the Confession, the
Te Deum
and the Creed, George was wishing that he’d worn his uniform. On the far side of the aisle, Colin Mansell, a flight lieutenant in Bomber Command, was stealing all the thunder reserved for our boys on their home leaves. Girls who wouldn’t spare a second glance for George were favouring Mansell with shy stares. His boiled face still lumpy with acne, Mansell wore the pious smirk of the returning hero, squared his shoulders and joined in the singing of “Now Thank We All Our God” in a voice designed to carry to the most distant of his admirers.
Then the Rector was up in the pulpit, framed by the blue banner of the Women’s Institute, and George listened to him speaking with the odd feeling that this Sunday’s text had been chosen as a private code between father and son. It was—wasn’t it—the Navy that his father was talking about? When the Rector said “vocation”, George knew exactly what he meant—it was the North Atlantic, the nightwatch, the line of pencilled positions marching across the empty chart.
“Today,” his father said, his voice booming in the rafters, “that word
vocation
has a special meaning for us as we approach the end of yet another year of war, and come to terms once again this Advent with the unfamiliar callings of war. Many of us in this parish have loved ones fighting—some held as prisoners—in foreign lands; men, and women too, who are indeed walking worthy in ways that those of us who are left at home may find it hard to accept or comprehend …”
Was
that
what he had really meant when he had peered disdainfully at the
Admiralty Sight Reduction Tables?
And was he now using the pulpit to say all the fatherlike things that he somehow couldn’t say over the dining table? Hopefully, uncertainly, George searched his father’s face, willing his father to meet his own gaze. But the Rector refused to be drawn: he went on addressing the flaky duck-egg paint on the church ceiling, telling it old, over-rehearsed home truths about duty, honour, love and labour (which the Rector called “getting one’s nose down to the grindstone”). George had lost him. He was like the big trout that always got away the moment you
thought you had him hooked.
In the pew in front, Vivienne Beale was leaning forward, her woollen coat stretched excitingly tight around the slender stalk of her back. George worked out exactly where the elastic yoke of her bra-straps was hidden under the wool. He thought he detected a tiny lump, just to the left of her spine, where the fiddly hooks and eyes joined up. After last year’s Harvest Supper & Dance, she’d let George slide his hand inside her blouse, but she’d wriggled away when his fingers found a wired and bolstered nipple. At Pwllheli, he’d got as far as Number 4 with a girl called Judith Pugh. Received wisdom had it that once you’d made 5, you were as good as home to 10; and Judith Pugh had the reputation of being a real goer. George reckoned that he stood a damned good chance of not being a virgin by the time he came back for his next leave. Everything would look different then.
“In Saint Paul’s words, we must forbear one another in love …” The Rector was beginning to wind down now. George, moving with extreme caution, crossed his legs to hide his hard-on.
“And now, to-Gahd-the-Father-Gahd-the-Son-and-Gahd-the-Holyghost …” His father, like a fat bride in his surplice, swung to face the altar as the congregation came to their feet and George rose, crippled; his knees bent, chest thrust forward, clasped hands shielding his delinquent pelvic section. “Beallhonourandglory, nowandevershallbe, worldwithoutendamen-hymnnumber …” By the time the organ started up on “Jerusalem My Happy Home”, George was able to stand upright.
His father drove him to the station in the car that his mother called Horace the Morris. On the windy platform, his father said, “Well … best of luck with the exam, then. Do hope you make the, ah, Navigation course.” George was surprised, and pleased too, that he’d remembered. When the train came in, though, they shook hands like strangers. “Try and remember to write to your mother, will you? It means a lot to her.” Did that mean it meant a lot to him as well, or did it mean that it
was the sort of boring thing that was only of interest to women? George couldn’t tell.
The slow train to Crewe was unheated. To start with he had the compartment to himself, where he sat huddled by the window in his stiff blue greatcoat. He tried and failed to read the
Lilliput
that he’d bought at Wyman’s. He stared out of the window, fogging the glass, and watched the rolls of thick steam from the engine blot out the sodden countryside. There was steam in the compartment, too; cold, acrid, bowel-smelling. He made a list of all the things that he might have said to his parents but hadn’t. He saw himself as the life and soul of the Rectory; his father beaming with pride, his mother full of earnest questions. Then he thought that he would probably be killed at sea. He imagined Mrs Norris from the post office bringing the telegram up the Rectory drive on her bicycle. There’d be a memorial service at the church, and Vivienne Beale would be there, dressed in black lace (including suspenders), head bowed, weeping quietly behind her veil.
“We never knew how brave he was,” his father said.
“I did,” said Vivienne Beale quietly. Then she whispered—she had told no-one this, not even her own mother—“I am carrying his child.”
At Didcot, a man got into George’s compartment. He was, George thought, rather too well dressed to be travelling in Third. He settled himself on the seat opposite, looked across at George and said, “Going back to your ship?”
On one side of the compartment, below the sagging hammock of the luggage rack, was a gouache of Weymouth seafront before the war; on the other was a cartoon of a bullet-headed German snooper with the caption, “Remember—WALLS HAVE EARS”.
In his best officer-of-the-watch voice, George said: “Shouldn’t you know better than to ask a damnfool question like that?” It sounded good, said out loud; a pretty stiff reproof.
The man, who was old, forty at least, said, “Sorry I spoke,” and laughed. “You don’t mind if I light my pipe, do you?”
George stared pointedly at Oxfordshire and said, “Not in the least,” in a way that made it plain as daylight that he minded very much indeed. The man shrugged, smiled, lit up and read—or rather pretended to read—a book with a yellow cover. He looked a thoroughly slimy type. As the train pulled out of Stafford station he went off to the bog at the end of the carriage and George was able to take a close look at the chap’s reading matter. It was called
The State in Theory and Practice
, and it was published by the Left Book Club. The man was obviously a bolshie—a bloody fifth columnist for Uncle Joe.