Cocky understood. “You seen the notice board?” he asked.

  “About five times a day,” said Gellatly ungraciously.

  “You seen it this afternoon?” Cocky persisted.

  Gellatly was mildly interested at his tone. “No,” he said. “Should I have?”

  “You’d get all the stoushin’ and runnin’ around you wanted there,” Cocky told him mysteriously.

  “What,” said Gellatly, “in hell are you gabbing about?”

  But Cocky was enjoying his obviously superior knowledge.

  “You whip down and take a dekko,” he advised. “You’re silly enough to volunteer—bein’ a pom-pom bloke. You’ll get all the runnin’ around you want,” he said again. “No, leave the base clips on the starshell till night-action.”

  His last words were in answer to a question from one of the gun-crew behind him. He turned away from the guard-rail above Gellatly, and the petty officer walked thoughtfully along the deck aft. Gellatly had been at sea more than long enough to know that in the Navy—as in another service—you never volunteered for anything. You volunteered to show a parcel of Tivoli showgirls round the ship and some witty-minded chief had you cleaning out the double bottoms in the bilges. But Cocky had mentioned exercise—maybe some sports officer in the Fleet was trying to whip up a football team, or even maybe a water polo side. The fact that it was now high summer in the tropics had no bearing on the sport played—if there were more football players than cricket devotees, then football was the game—at 102 in the shade.

  It wouldn’t do any harm to nip down and see what the hell Cocky was crowing about.

  Gellatly stood in front of the notice board in the foretop mess deck for close on five minutes. It is no indication of the patriotism or courage of Wind Rode’s crew to report that he was the only one interested. It is, indeed, a criterion of their common sense. Bentley had been right when he had assumed that he would not be inundated by a rush of volunteers to exchange their comfortable, if somewhat dangerous, billet for one of toil and filth and acute risk, one in which you crawled on your belly thirty feet under water and fiddled with such niceties as magnetic mines and underwater booby-traps.

  Gellatly walked a few paces away from the notice board, and then he came back and read the notice again. There was a slow stirring of excitement in his guts. Cocky had been right. This would be right up his alley. Swimming—constant swimming—with strong and regular exercise as much a part of the training as instruction in delousing bombs and blowing up obstructions. And there was something weirdly mysterious about frogmen, at least he had decided that from the few official propaganda films he had seen of their work. He would not be losing the peculiar camaraderie of the boats, either. Clearance diving surely must be one of the most highly specialized jobs in the Navy, one in which discipline stemmed from the character of the men in charge, and not what they wore on their uniform sleeves. As in destroyers.

  He did not give his commission a thought. His sluggish body was prompted solely by the delicious thought of hard, regular exercise—and swimming.

  Chief Petty Officer Smales, the ship’s coxswain and chief of police, was in his office when Gellatly poked his head in the door and said:

  “Got a request form, ’Swain?”

  “Sure,” Smales grunted automatically, hardly looking up from the captain’s request book he was working on. He handed the small form across. “Putting in for a month’s leave?”

  “That’s right,” Gellatly matched the facetiousness. “What d’you think of my chances?”

  “Pretty good.” Smales said, and made an entry. “Just like an ice block in hell.”

  “Thanks.” Gellatly grinned, and walked forward to his mess. One or two of the petty officers there noted idly that he was making out a request, but no one bothered him. Gellatly could be asking the captain’s permission to increase his allotment, or cut it down, or for another good-conduct badge, or to grow a beard. He wrote:

  “Request to see captain through first lieutenant for recommend for clearance diver’s course.”

  That was all. A dozen terse words which were to plunge him into risks that made his present employment about as dangerous as calling the odds at Randwick.

  Lieutenant Randall saw the entry in the request book the next morning. He looked up at Gellatly standing stiffly before him, and he thought of a lot he wanted to say. Reflection told him that the captain would certainly say the tame things, only better.

  “Granted,” he said briefly, and Gellatly marched off, the wheels of routine in motion.

  They spun considerably faster than usual this time. Smales told him that the captain would see him directly after lunch. Gellatly received the summons with surprise—the captain saw request men and defaulters only once a week, and there were four days to go before the next session. But this prompt reaction to his request had forewarned him; by the time he was to see the captain he had all his answers ready to what they would say about the blasted pom-pom. Gellatly’s determination to undertake the frogman’s course was indicated by what he now thought of the weapon which could hold him back from it.

  To say the request had thrown Bentley and Randall into a flat spin would be exaggerating a little. It was just an ordinary spin. Randall was in the sea-cabin now, and he was talking vehemently.

  “He can’t go! You saw what happened to that bomber yesterday. Perfect shooting! We’ll never get another layer like him.”

  Bentley was sitting back in a big armchair, his right ankle drawn up so that it lay comfortably across his left knee. His hand was holding it there.

  “We can’t hold him, Bob,” he answered quietly.

  “Eh? Of course we can! You’ve only got to say the word.”

  “That’s right. And he’ll say—with complete justification—that laying the pom-pom is not a petty officer’s action position.”

  “But he’s the only man in the ship who can handle the thing like that.”

  “Yes, but it isn’t his fault if nobody’s been trained to his state of efficiency.”

  “All right, then. But it’s a matter of the ship’s efficiency. Tell him that it’s his duty to the ship to stay.”

  Bentley looked up at him, his brown face serious. “And if he reminds me of my duty—that a job which is irregular in the first place shouldn’t be allowed to stand in the way of his bettering himself?”

  “Bettering himself? Hell! He might as well cut his silly bloody throat now and be done with it!”

  “Maybe, maybe.” The cool, shrewd eyes were fixed on Randall’s flushed face. “I suspect you and I might have been in it if things were different. Eh?”

  A grin came to life at the corners of Randall’s wide mouth. It was still-born. He was the gunnery officer, and his professional wishes easily out-argued his personal feelings.

  “I must say you’re giving this away pretty easily,” he growled.

  “Not at all. I know when I’m beaten, that’s all. It’s unfortunate—but we can’t do anything about it And you know it.”

  A knock sounded at the door. The coxswain poked his head in. “Ready for request men, sir?”

  Bentley nodded. He rose lithely, and said to Randall:

  “I’ll try and talk him out of it, naturally.” He bent sideways and took up his cap. “But I know Gellatly.”

  “Hammer the old commission,” Randall advised in a low voice as he reached the door. Bentley grinned a little, and stepped out into the passage.

  Petty Officer Gellatly was completely respectful, polite, rigidly at attention—and adamant.

  “All right, then,” Bentley said, and leaned his spread fingers on the baize-covered table. “I concede your point of view. We can train someone else for the pom-pom. But what about your commission? Do you realize this course will put it back? If another class of gunners starts, you’ve just begun qualifying a diver’s course. You won’t be pulled out, you know.”

  Gellatly looked down at the table. For a moment Randall thought they had him. Then his clear stare came up and met the captain’s.

  “Yes, sir. I realize that. I’ll just have to take my chance that I can get it later.”

  Bentley cleared his throat. There was a limit to a captain’s dependence on a petty officer, no matter how good a shot he was, and an even narrower limit on how far that dependence could be revealed.

  “Very well,” he said crisply. “Request granted. Good luck.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Gellatly smiled. He saluted smartly, turned about and marched from the chartroom.

  Chapter Two

  THE AIR FORCE Douglas landed him at Bankstown. Gellatly had heard so much about the U.S.S. monopoly on taxi transport in Sydney that he didn’t even bother to wave the passing cab over. He nearly fell over when a harsh voice reached him:

  “Wanna cab, mate?”

  Recovering himself, the petty officer walked across—it was too much to expect, of course, that the cab would come to him. He reflected that Bankstown was so far off the normal track of shore-going Yank sailors that the driver was glad of a fare back. Probably he had brought some high-ranking R.A.A.F. officer out here—or, more probably, that officer was on the payroll of Uncle Sam. However it was, Gellatly was grateful. He sank back against the rear seat and feasted his eyes on the evidence of war-ignorant placidity as the cab rolled along the sun-warmed streets.

  It was a Saturday morning. Children chased balls in the street, just as they used to; from the wide open doors of a hotel the same confused surf of voices reached out to him, and he had a glimpse of the jammed bar, dim and hot and wreathed with smoke. He wet his lips. A frosted glass would go very nicely at this moment.

  “Watta ya like for this afternoon, mate?” the harsh voice broke into his thoughts.

  “What was that again?” He leaned forward a little.

  “The races. Heard anythin’?”

  Gellatly sat back again. “No,” he smiled. “Not a thing.”

  The driver bluffed his way across an intersection to a screech of brakes and an inaudible curse from the motorist on his right, and commented:

  “I thought you Navy blokes was on the ball. Now I gotta good thing for the second. Wanna hear it?”

  Gellatly looked at the thick red neck, crinkled where the driver was half turned round to him, and he thought of the “good things” he had just come from—that bomber, for instance, and the destroyer changing its chemical components from steel to smoke. And then he thought of what the Fleet might be doing on this Saturday afternoon north of the Halmaheras—torpedo attack, covering a landing somewhere, swerving to avoid a shoal of torpedoes? Whatever it was they were up to, they would not be going to Randwick. He supposed that there must be some reason why jockeys and trainers and stable hands and taxi drivers should not go to war.

  He kept the distaste from his voice at sight of the thick, pitted neck in front of him and answered:

  “No, thanks. I wouldn’t know one end of a horse. And I have to report for duty when I get in, anyway.”

  The head swung back fore and aft.

  “You fellers want to relax now and again,” he said. And, after a pause: “You got any Yank fags you wanna get rid of?”

  This time the petty officer’s voice was short and curt.

  “No,” he said.

  There was no more conversation until the cab had strung left from Edgecliff Road and swerved round the curves edging the harbour. It pulled up outside the tall wooden gates of the naval depot and the driver growled: “That’ll be ten bob, mate.”

  Gellatly gave him a half-note, and ignored the hand still outstretched. He was almost across the footpath when the voice snarled behind him:

  “Don’t break yerself, will yer!”

  He turned and in a flash was back beside the cab. His face, brown and hard, came within a foot of the driver’s.

  “Another crack out of you and I’ll break your bloody nose!”

  The driver was not a small man. He glowered back, and intention resolved on his heavy face. But something he saw in the clean-cut, seasoned face opposite him changed his mind. He growled something obscene and then the gears of his car snarled and he had swung round in a tyre-screeching turn. A tight little grin on his face, Gellatly picked up his gear and walked to the gate.

  He checked in with the sentry there and was directed where to report. The sentry was normally respectful, as a petty officer might expect, and so there was nothing yet to mark this particular depot from any of the others he had been in. Rushcutters was new to him—it was mainly anti-submarine training—and he looked about him with interest as he walked towards the pier sulking on long legs out into the harbour.

  On his right—bolted down to final immobility, but still graceful—was a huge painted figurehead. It had once led the bluff bow of a ship of the line, and now it looked across the other side of the roadway at a brass cannon, silent and crouching, and patina’d with the weathering of centuries. Beside the cannon, each of them flanking the entrance to a large drill-hall, sat a brass culverin. His mind excited to musing, for he was something of a willing student of naval history, Gellatly was wondering what sail-flung wooden hull the layer of that gun had seen over his rude sight, when he heard a sound which jerked him instantly back into the present of modern warfare.

  He could not determine accurately the point of origin of the sound, but there was no doubt about what it was—he had heard its resonance coming from the bridge every day he had been at sea, from the time the ship left harbour until it returned; the ringing ping of asdic transmission. Then he heard the sharp-pitched peep of a submarine contact, and a curt voice giving orders. Smiling a little at his earlier thoughts of muzzle-loading cannon and tall topmasts, he realised that he was listening to drill on an anti-submarine attack teacher.

  Now he was on the expanse of parade ground, and across its width of bitumen was the harbour. Lying alongside a pier, its sharp nose looking down on bitumen, a training corvette waited her Monday asdic classes. Two or three piers ran in from the harbour to meet the edge of the parade ground at right angles, but he could see nothing that might look like a training section for frogmen. He turned left round the corner of the drill-hall building, as directed by the polite sentry, and then stopped. His eyes narrowed in interest.

  What he was staring at was both interesting and ominous. He knew enough about diving—all ships carried standard divers—to realize the purpose of the long, grey cylinder. It rested its steely weight in heavy chocks; its girth reached up higher than his head; and the side facing him was starred with valve-wheels. This was a recompression chamber, into which were hurried divers who had surfaced too quickly from a dangerous depth, or who had accidentally “blown-up” to the top. Its purpose was to simulate with compressed air, a diver’s going down again to his original depth; the pressure in the chamber would be gradually lessened, to correspond with a safe rise to the surface, and so prevent, or mitigate, the effects of the dreaded “bends”.

  Gellatly realized now that he was in the frogman section. In the next instant he was given more definite proof of his whereabouts, though he did not realize it until some hours later. A cheerful voice said, in this naval depot where an even stricter discipline might be expected than in a ship:

  “How are you, cobs? You just joined?”

  He turned quickly. He looked into a burned, pleasantly ugly face, distinguished only by an impression of toughness. But the distinction Gellatly was looking for was in his uniform—and he found it. The man who addressed him as “cobs”, the Navy diminutive of “cobber”, was an able seaman.

  The instant retort which sprang to Gellatly’s lips was held back—there had been something so natural about the intimate term, and the seaman obviously was no raw recruit. Even so, his voice was curt when he answered:

  “When did you join?”

  “Oh, I’ve been here close on a month.”

  That was not what the petty officer meant. His question had been a sarcastic reference to the ignorance of an able seaman who called a senior petty officer “cobs”.

  “The sweetest berth ever I landed.” the seaman added, and his tough features cracked into a wide grin.

  He gestured with his head to the pier behind him. “She’ll do me, cobs. Your name must be Gellatly? We been waiting for you to turn up. That makes the gang complete. You’re the last—now we can get stuck into it.”

  He held out a large hand. “Taplin. Last ship, Vendetta.”

  So he was a destroyer man. Vendetta was one of the spunky little boats, one of Goebbels’ “nut and wire contemptibles”, which formed the Scrap-Iron Flotilla supplying Tobruk. Gellatly’s quick common sense told him that there must be some unusual circumstances about this frogmen section which allowed a seasoned able seaman to address him so familiarly and naturally. He took the proffered hand, and felt its strong grip.

  “Clive Gellatly,” he said on a sudden impulse. He looked at the other’s bare head. “Alias Bluey?” he smiled.

  “Eh? Oh, yeah—or Ginger or Carrothead. Take your pick.”

  Gellatly’s smile widened, and not at Taplin’s fiery head-covering or freckles. His amiable acceptance of his ugly nicknames, indeed his proffering of their variety, spoke volumes to a man of Gellatly’s experience of his fellow men. He picked up his kit-bag and looked about him.

  “Where the hell is this joint?” he asked, puzzled.

  Bluey fastened his ham of a hand round Gellatly’s lashed up hammock and flipped it over one broad shoulder. “Follow me,” he advised, and strode off ahead.

  A few paces past the recompression chamber they came to the end of a pier and a large notice forbidding smoking in the vicinity.

  “All sort of gases—oxygen, nitrogen,” Bluey explained over his shoulder. He turned right on to the pier and said: “There she lies. Home.”

  Now Gellatly realized why he had not seen his new base earlier. He stood on the edge of the pier and looked down on a long, broad craft which looked as though it had been an ammunition lighter. It seemed to be built of concrete, and squatted low and heavy in the water. But the wooden quarters built on its deck were new and freshly painted; he could see into a wide mess room which looked airy and comfortable.

 

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