Gibraltar Road Read Free Page B

at a stretch, wet through and hungry and shivering in the icy gale until their messmates could venture from below and slither across the reeling iron deck to the guns and the bridge; each passage had been ten days of hell for Midshipman Shaw, who had been a victim, an agonized victim, of shocking sea-sickness. Shaw’s Commanding Officer had noticed his midshipman’s travail, though Shaw himself had never said a word about it to anyone. What that Commanding Officer had failed to notice was that Shaw never ate a thing at sea, except the occasional ship’s biscuit which was all he could keep down; and that when they returned to swing round a buoy in the blank grey dreariness of Scapa for a couple of days between trips Shaw had made up for lost time, and had grossly over-eaten. All that, for too long extended, plus a couple of sinkings and some days adrift on a Carley float on the Atlantic rollers, had resulted in an ulcer. That ulcer had in turn resulted in Shaw being consigned, at least temporarily, to shore service. It had eventually been cut out; but the indigestion and the discomfort had returned and had remained, his constant legacy—and so, to his intense disappointment, had the ‘shore service only’ note on his papers, for by that time the Admiralty had found excellent use for a loyal and intelligent officer whom they considered had been wasted for too long in a job for which he was not, because of his disability, wholly suited. Shaw had thenceforward ceased outwardly to be a naval officer, and for the rest of hostilities he exchanged the bitter North Atlantic for the heat of the Western Desert and for the fleshpots and intrigues and dangers of Egypt, North Africa, and Spain, and for many other places, and he wore his uniform only when on leave.
    Except for one sea commission, peace and the cold war had perpetuated Shaw’s special duties, to his great dismay.
    All this Latymer knew—and knew, too, what Shaw’s thoughts were as he sat before his desk; he knew, because those thoughts were in so many ways like his own. Thoughts that circled nostalgically round a British Battle Squadron at sea in line ahead, the strings of coloured bunting blowing out from the signal halyards, or the winking masthead lights at night; a great concourse of grey ships entering Malta’s Grand Harbour to anchor together on the signal from the flagship, the lower- and quarter-booms being extended, the boats and gangways lowered, and the anchors let go at split-second timing, all together, as the engines thrashed astern to bring the ships up; misty dawns in Scottish anchorages, with a red sun behind the haze rose-tinting the distant, towering hills as the White Ensign was broken at the jackstaff, the bugles echoing savage and triumphant as they blared out for Colours; a picket-boat coming alongside a cruiser’s quarterdeck ladder, her crew soaked in spray, caked with the salt of a brisk, windy morning; a vanished Light Cruiser Squadron steaming at speed into a West Indian sunset; the Northern Lights, viewed from a destroyer’s bridge off Lyness, or the Old Man of Hoy standing out to starboard, in broad daylight even at two bells in the middle watch, as a ship steamed north about through the Pentlands from the Firth of Forth to the Clyde; the wondrous, fairy-like beauty of the Kyle of Lochalsh and a night passage under moonlight of the Minches with the Isle of Skye to port and a wind blowing through the Sound of Harris; an old County-class cruiser, battling through boisterous seas in the Great Australian Bight with a roaring wind coming straight off the southern ice; China-side, and the mysteries and glamour of the East, and dances on the quarterdeck beneath the awnings in Trincomalee and Singapore, of laughing, sun-browned girls in summer frocks on golden sandy beaches fringed with the dark green of palms and the bright blue sea beyond . . . old days, and all gone now . . . memories or ambitions, perhaps, of a once seasick midshipman