We Joined The Navy by John Winton

Author:John Winton [Winton, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Comedy, Naval
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Towards midnight, the bars and the curtained spaces behind them began to empty. Paul and Michael walked arm in arm up the street back to the frontier, following in the zigzag wake of Maconochie and George Dewberry just ahead.

As they passed the first bar they had visited, they saw the tall woman in the black dress talking to The Bodger.

‘Come to bed, Bodger,’ she was saying. ‘Forty-five pesetas!’

8

Barsetshire was an elderly lady who needed more time and care than most to make up her face and complete her toilette. Each cruise she retired to a secluded spot to paint ship; in the Mediterranean cruise she anchored in a remote Sardinian bay.

The bay was a desolate spot, with bare brown hills on either side, empty of life or habitation of any kind. In the afternoons the water stretched as smooth as sheet glass and the outline of the shore was distorted by dancing heat vapours. Barsetshire lay at anchor, still and motionless, like a painted ship upon a painted ocean. Here, the ship’s company settled down to paint ship, or rather, the cadets painted, and the ship’s company settled down to watch.

The junior cadets, in their innocence, could not have imagined that there was more to Paint Ship than merely taking paint from a pot and applying it to the ship’s side. But they were to learn better. There is more to the art of cosmetics than the mere taking of cream and colour from bottles and putting it on to the skin. Paint Ship in H.M.S. Barsetshire was attended with all the rites and ceremonies of a Pompadour’s levee.

Able Seaman Froggins and the other lockermen marshalled an awe-inspiring parade of scrapers, buckets and scrubbers (Paint Ship was for them the high moment of a cruise, just as Mr Piles’ was a Gun Salute). The Bosun and his party provided a forest of stages, bosun’s chairs and ropes. The Painter mustered bundles of brushes and drew off pot after pot of grey paint. The Ship’s Band filled a motor cutter and cruised round and about playing excerpts from the operas of Wagner, the Bandmaster conducting from the sternsheets, while the Commander, surrounded by a retinue of divisional officers, captains of tops, the Mate of the Upper Deck and the Chief Bosun’s Mate, drove round the ship in the Captain’s Motorboat pointing out weak patches in the ship’s side with the pomp and authority of a Doge going out to wed the Adriatic.

Before actual painting, there was scrubbing. Stages were lowered over the ship’s side, two cadets were lowered on to each stage, and two buckets and two scrubbers were lowered down to each pair of cadets. Every scrubber was attached to a cadet by a lanyard. It might have been assumed that the lanyards were provided so that the scrubbers might in some measure act as marker buoys for cadets who fell from the stages into the sea. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The cadets were intended to act as marker buoys for the scrubbers.

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