Out of India Read Free

concentration. Young men volunteered to help but were turned back with brusque unfriendly shakes of the head. The seamen had enough to contend with already. Panic, if it were panic, was beginning to lap at the common expectation of the onlookers, like the damp creeping through the thrown-on slippers of the passengers, who now had to pull back from the rails at which sailors were bumping and cursing.
    But no, it wasn’t panic. The danger was not yet so extreme. We were facing adversity, not annihilation, and we were gathering ourselves for another display of fortitude. This was the year of Dunkirk, and the summer’s evacuation from the beaches was strong in the memory. Our people knew what was expected of them. We acted now under the compulsion of our history and psychology. Was it any the less heroic to do so?
    So this unspoken mass-history seemed to make even small children stoical. Did we feel it in our bones, my brother and I, a sort of perverse rectitude, a good behaviourfar beyond our years and quite alien to frightened children? There we stood quietly, in a quiet crowd, clutching our mother’s hands. I could not see our tall father but no doubt he was in his proper place, for this was an orderly event. In any case I was small and hemmed in by legs. From my low level I had a view of naked ankles, bare feet thrust into slippers, gym-shoes, unlaced army boots, polished brogues, even court shoes with improbably giddy heels. Looking up a little I saw nightdresses with pretty frills peeping below the hem of bright dressing-gowns, striped pyjamas tucked into boot-tops, the jacket of a battle-dress buttoned over an evening shirt with a wing collar, a long scarf in school colours wound around an old woman’s neck. Men were unshaven, with the smudged look of interrupted sleep; women patted unkempt hair, or hugged a winter coat tight above the slinky material of nightclothes. For us children, all this was neither comic nor monstrous. Caught by the sobriety of our surroundings, we thought it an unusual prelude leading to some unknown grown-up ritual. Some enactment, we felt with more interest than alarm, was about to begin.
    The big moon radiated a calm light, clarifying even the smallest movement, making it look weighty and deliberate. We watched, holding a collective breath. At a distance, another ship was foundering. Then somewhere below our feet, in the bowel of our ship, there was a crump and a slight shudder. Then an intensified silence. An effervescent flurry of small bubbles popped out of the crack between the hull and the ocean, dancing in moonlight. The jolt shook the doubt from the face of the crowd. Now we knew for sure, the worst expectation was realized, but the knowledge gave a certain courage.
    The fate of the ship was now decided, but the percussion below had led to no sudden appalling consequence and the discipline held along the decks. After a while there seemed to be a hardly perceptible tilt to the hull. Only thenow furious action of the crew warned of the inevitable denouement.
    A rush of feet, shouts of authority, flushed faces under naval caps waving blue sleeves circled with the rings of their rank. A young officer’s voice choking on an embarrassing squeak. Sailors cutting into the crowd on the decks like handlers at a cattle-drive, rounding up nervous groups, heading off the lost or the maverick. Distortions bawled over the loudspeakers of the public address system, barely comprehensible – ‘Calling Muster Station G’, ‘Officers’ wives and dependent children’, ‘Starboard evacuees’, ‘Remember your lifeboat drill’. The whirr of electric motors, wire screaming off the drum, lifeboats plunging downwards and banging brutally into the water. People getting hastily into lifejackets, puffed as turkey-cocks, the bulging canvas of the jackets soiled by water-stains. Rope ladders flung over the rails, uncoiling like strange probosces. Bosun’s