The Cruel Sea (1951) Read Online Free PDF Page A

to come back with the right answer. But this did little to dispose of the work that piled up, day after day, in the hut alongside Compass Rose.
    Gradually, however, he had his reward: gradually there came to be less noise on board, less space cluttered up with tools and dockyard equipment, less untidiness, less oil and dirt. The workmen thinned out, until only a thin trickle of them mounted the gangway every morning: stores were stowed, cabins carpeted, the mess decks fitted with their cots and lockers. Compass Rose took on, at last, the shape and feeling of a ship; it was time to transfer aboard her, and they were all glad to do it.
    But when the main draft of the crew – sixty-odd men – arrived from Devonport Barracks, they lost little time in echoing, with choice variations, Petty Officer Tallow’s strictures on their accommodation. The mess decks were small, and intolerably crowded: the hands were all lumped together – seamen, stokers, signalmen, telegraphists: they had to take their meals in the sleeping spaces, and read or write letters with other men jammed up against them on either side. And if it was like this in harbour, what was it going to be like at sea, with the ship rolling her guts out and everything wet through as well . . . Lower deck wit, which flourishes (in the true English tradition) on discomfort and adversity, had plenty to play with; the first few days in Compass Rose, before the hands were acclimatised, produced as crisp a crop of invective and blasphemy as was ever crammed into a space two hundred feet long and thirty-three broad.
    Ericson was conscious of this feeling of discontent, as he surveyed the muster of hands at the commissioning ceremony. It was not that they looked sullen or mutinous: simply disinterested and perhaps a little cynical, not seeing the point of dressing up so smartly (and being ticked off for wearing a dirty jumper) just to commission a funny little sod of a ship like this. It must be his first care, he realised, to alleviate the discomfort on board: he had thought of improvements in ventilation, and in the cooking arrangements, already, and an energetic captain could do a lot with a new ship at the experimental stage, as long as the shoreside cooperated. And the job itself, with its prospect of a tough ordeal, might do much more than alleviate, by giving the crew a conscious pride in hard living and fighting. That was the thought that struck him most strongly, as the bosun’s pipes sounded the ‘Still’, and the spotless ensign and the commissioning pendant were broken out. Compass Rose, with a new coat of paint, looked clean and workmanlike: she had her numbers painted on her bows, she was nearly ready to move . . . As he started to read the Articles of War a moment later, his firm clear voice matched the first stirring of his pride in the ship. She might be ‘only a corvette’, not much better than a deep-sea trawler, but she could make a reputation at any level, and that was going to be his target from now on.

    Meals in the cramped wardroom never seemed to progress beyond the sort of constrained artificiality which marks a public banquet attended by people who are complete strangers to one another. The Captain was usually preoccupied with the last job or the next one; he sat in silence at the head of the table, staring straight ahead or occasionally jotting down a note. Ferraby, naturally shy, was still finding his way and never volunteered either a direct statement or a direct question: and Lockhart, who was the most articulate of the four, struggled through successive monologues which only rarely inspired any kind of answer. Bennett’s contribution lay in the realm of eating . . . He had formed an attachment for the crudest item in the wardroom store cupboard, tinned sausages, which he knew colloquially as ‘snorkers’: they made an almost daily appearance on the menu, either at lunch or dinner, and the recurrent exclamation – ‘Snorkers! Good-oh!’