Page 37 of The Ship of Brides
Margaret was shocked into silence, but a voice came from above: ‘If you’re going to be so coarse as to discuss these matters in company,’ it said, ‘you could at least do it quietly. Some of us are trying to sleep.’
‘I bet Avice knows,’ giggled Jean.
‘I thought you said you’d lost a baby,’ said Avice, pointedly.
‘Oh, Jean. I’m so sorry.’ Margaret’s hand went involuntarily to her mouth.
There was a prolonged silence.
‘Actually,’ Jean said, ‘I wasn’t exactly carrying as such.’
Margaret could hear Avice shifting under her covers.
‘I was... well, a bit late with my you-know-what. And my friend Polly said that meant you were carrying. So I said I was because I knew it would help me get on board. Even though when I worked out the dates I couldn’t really have been, if you know what I mean. And then they had to postpone my medical check twice. When they did it I said I’d lost it and I started crying because by then I’d almost convinced myself that I was and the nurse felt sorry for me and said no one needed to know one way or the other, and that the most important thing was getting me over to my Stan. It’s probably why they’ve stuck me in with you, Maggie.’ She took a deep drag of her cigarette. ‘So, there you are. I didn’t mean to lie exactly.’ She rolled over, picked up a shoe and stubbed out her cigarette on the sole. Her voice took on a hard, defensive edge: ‘But if any of you dob me in, I’ll just say I lost it on board anyway. So there’s no point in telling.’
Margaret laid her hands on her stomach. ‘Nobody’s going to tell on you, Jean,’ she said.
There was a deafening silence from Avice’s bunk.
Outside, an unknown distance away, they could hear a foghorn. It sounded a single low, melancholy note.
‘Frances?’ said Jean.
‘She’s asleep,’ whispered Margaret.
‘No, she’s not. I saw her eyes when I lit my ciggie. You won’t tell on me, Frances, will you?’
‘No,’ said Frances, from the bunk opposite. ‘I won’t.’
Jean got out of bed. She patted Margaret’s leg, then climbed nimbly back up to her bunk, where she could be heard rustling herself into comfort. ‘So, come on, then,’ she said eventually. ‘Who likes doing it, and what is it that makes you actually get a baby?’
On the flight deck, a thousand-pound bomb from a Stuka aircraft looks curiously like a beer barrel. It rolls casually from the underbelly of the sinister little plane, with the same gay insouciance as if it were about to be rolled down the steps of a beer cellar. Surrounded by its brothers, flanked by a bunched formation of fighter planes, it seems to pause momentarily in the sky, then float down towards the ship, guided, as if by an invisible force, towards the deck.
This is one of the things Captain Highfield thinks as he stares up at his impending death. This, and the fact that, when the wall of flame rises up from the armoured deck, engulfing the island, the ship’s command centre, its blue-white heat clawing upwards, and he is possessed of the immobilising terror, as he had always known he would be, he has forgotten something. Something he had to do. And in his blind paralysis even he is dimly aware of how ridiculous it is to be casting around for some unremembered task while he faces immolation.
Then, in the raging heart of the fire, as the bombs rain around him, bouncing off the decks, as his nostrils sting with the smell of burning fuel and his ears refuse to close to the screams of his men, he looks up to see a plane, where there is no plane. It, too, is engulfed, yellow flames licking at the cockpit, the tilted wings blackened, but not enough to obscure, within, Hart’s face, which is untouched, his eyes questioning as he faces the captain.
I’m sorry, Highfield weeps, unsure if, through the roar of the fire, the younger man can hear him. I’m sorry.
When he wakes, his pillow damp and the skies still dark above the quiet ocean, he is still speaking these words into the silence.
7
I, like many others, had developed a love-hate relationship with theVic. We hated the life, but we were proud of her as a fighting unit. We cursed her between ourselves, but would not hear anyone outside of the ship say anything derogatory about her... she was a lucky ship. Sailors are so superstitious.
L. Troman, seaman, HMSVictorious,
inWine, Women and War
Two weeks previously
According to her log, HMSVictoriahad seen action in the north Atlantic, the Pacific and, most recently, at Morotai where, carrying Corsairs, she helped force back the Japanese and bore the scars to show it. She, and many like her, had stopped repeatedly over the past few years at the dockyards at Woolloomooloo to have her mine-damaged hull repaired, bullet and torpedo holes plugged, the brutal scars of her time at sea put straight before she was sent out again, bearing men who had themselves been patched up and readied for battle.
Captain George Highfield was much given to fanciful thinking, but as he walked along the dry dock, staring up through the sea mist at the hulls ofVictoriaand her neighbours, he often allowed himself to think about the vessels as his fellows. Hard not to see them as suffering some kind of hurt, as having some kind of personality when they had allied themselves to you, given you their all, braved high seas and fierce fire. In forty years’ service, he’d had his favourites: those that had felt undeniably his, the occasional alchemic conjunction of ship and crew in which each man knew he would lay down his life willingly for its protection. He had bitten back private tears of grief when he left them, less privately when they had been sunk. He often supposed this was how previous generations of fighting men must have felt about their horses.
‘Poor old girl,’ he muttered, glancing at the hole ripped in the aircraft-carrier’s side. She looked so much likeIndomitable, his old ship.
The surgeon had said he should use a stick. Highfield suspected that the man had told others he shouldn’t be allowed back to sea at all. ‘These things take longer to heal at your age,’ he had observed, of the livid scar tissue where the metal had sliced through to the bone, the ridged skin of the burns around it. ‘I’m not convinced you should be up and about on that just yet, Captain.’
