We Are For the Dark: Fragments of a Biographical Reverie

Before all the details of the recent war fade from the memory, I wish to record some aspects of the life of those much-abused men who, often from no choice of their own, ceased to be men dressed as seamen and became civil ser­vants dressed as naval officers.

I

Acting Sub-Lieutenant Julian Penworthy, Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, stood on the steps of the National Gal­lery.  He gazed across Trafalgar Square and self-consciously shifted his shoulders so that his single stripe showed to best advantage.

Three buses roared past him.  He shied, and blanched a little under his tan; for he had come straight from a de­stroyer which had been tasting the violence of the enemy.  He remembered distinctly the pang of despair and nostalgia that he had felt as the Scapa drifter pulled away from the destroyer’s side.  He had watched her with delight, noting the lovely clean sheer.  It was at that moment that he had said to himself, “It will never be the same again.”

Penworthy's face was weatherbeaten; otherwise his whole aspect was faded and salty.  His No. 1 uniform had been stolen in Greenock last Christmas; and this uniform, despite the careful scrubbing of Able-Seaman Pingo, showed unmistakable marks of grey paint, salt water and hard wear.

The noise of the buses and the clouds of dust swirling malignantly in the August sunlight were worse than that last medium level bombing attack.  He shrank in on him­self.  Another bus swept past.  The oil fumes struck hot in his face.  The reverie was broken.  He hailed a taxi; for in those days before the American invasion it was still pos­sible to engage a taxi and still within the means of a Sub-Lieutenant to pay for one.

"Admiralty Whitehall."  The driver raised his eyebrows very slightly; but who was he to question an Officer of His Majesty?  In thirty seconds the taxi had completed the half-circuit of Trafalgar Square, gone 50 yards down Whitehall and turned to the Admiralty entrance.  Penworthy stepped out of the taxi and paid the fare.  The driver mistook Penworthy's preoccupation for self-posses­sion and felt a secret glow of admiration for him.

While Julian explained his business to a deaf doorman and started to write out an application for permission to request a temporary pass, a plaster replica of Nelson gazed at him dispassionately from its niche facing the entrance.

II

Senior Officers enter a boat last, but it was quickly drawn to Julian’s notice that Senior Officers enter a lift first.  The Commander who had just explained this point of etiquette walked through the door marked with the number Penworthy had been told to find.  The door slammed.  Penworthy was crestfallen.  He paused outside to compose his spirits as well as his features.

"It will be a large room.  There will be a very long, very highly polished table, probably made out of wood from the Victory.  At the end of the table will be seated a Very Senior Officer, perhaps even a Captain.  He will have beetling eyebrows and steel-cold eyes and steel-grey hair.  The light will be at his back, and when I come in and say “Penworthy reporting for duty, sir,” he’ll look up and say “Come in, Penworthy, and take a seat.  We’ve been expect­ing you.  Let me explain the U-boat situation.”  And there will be a deep rug, so that I’ll have to step high, not to trip and make a fool of myself.  And I’ll feel like a worm because I don’t know what a junior officer does with his cap when a Very Senior Officer asks him to sit down and hear about the U-boat situation.

He gave the toes of his shoes a guilty polish on the backs of his trouser legs, swallowed twice and knocked timidly on the door.  Now he could hear a murmur of voices and a sound of crockery.  Again he paused.  “Per­haps he’s entertaining.”  He knocked again, more loudly this time but with no less modest persistence.  A voice roared “Come in.”

He opened the door, tucked his cap under his left arm and stood smartly to attention.  His mouth opened but no words came.  He shaped the words in his mind; but no words came to his lips.  His eyes roamed unhappily about the room.  Nobody seemed to urge him to speak, nobody looked at him.  He closed the door softly behind him.

Indeed it was a large room; but there was no deep rug, no rug at all.  Not one man, but several.  The light came behind; but the men sat with their backs to the door.  Five men sat at desks, looking out from three windows; and across the end of the room there was another desk with raised pigeonholes.  All the desks were heaped with papers and telephones and teacups.  On the right of the door stood three telephone booths without doors; one was marked Portsmouth, another Devonport, and the third Out of Order.  There was a constant buzz of conversation and a continuous ringing of telephone bells.

Determined to cling to the last shred of tradition, de­termined to hold to the last fragment of his dream, Penworthy cleared his throat.  His lips were shaping the words “Penworthy reporting” when the door opened behind him and struck him sharply in the back.  An old uniformed messenger passed through the doorway, trod on Penworthy’s foot, and without apology glided past him like a sleep­walker.  In his arms he held a bundle of papers in the man­ner of a mother holding a baby.

Limping slightly, Penworthy approached the desk at the end of the room.  It looked different from the others.  A large officer was speaking into a telephone.  There were two other telephones on the desk and both were ringing.  The deep voice said “Yes, Bill.  Send me a paper on it.  I’ll get cracking in the meantime.”  He listened, then laughed loudly. “Silver Cross at six. Right.”  He put the receiver down, picked up another and laid it on the desk, picked up a third and roared, “Jenks.  This is for you.”  At the other end of the room a mild man in gold-rimmed spectacles picked up a phone on his desk and spoke into it in a tired mild silky voice.

The large officer gathered himself together, removed the third receiver from its cradle and laid it on the desk, turned in his chair and said, “I know.  You’ve come from M.W.T. to say there won’t be any shipping space for 13 months.  Never mind.  I know it’s not your fault.  Have some tea."  He shouted “Marchington.  Another cup of tea here.”

Penworthy shifted on his feet.  "Well, sir.  Actually I’m not from M.W.T.  I don't know what M.W.T. is, and I don’t know the first thing about shipping space.  I’ve come from sea.  From a destroyer, actually.”

The large officer looked at him as though he expected to find seaweed behind his ears.    Penworthy again shaped the formal phrase in his mind.  It still seemed pale and in­adequate. But it was the tradition. 

“Penworthy reporting for duty, sir."

"O yes.  I remember now.  We sent a panic signal.  You were on leave or something.  Pity you came down so soon.  Your boss is away on a fortnight’s leave.”  A mixture of anger and grief clouded Penworthy’s vision for a moment.  “But we’ll find something for you to do.  Ever use a tele­phone?  You’ll be responsible for the selection of Leading Ratcatchers.  That’s your card index over there.”  He waved his hand towards a table littered with small cards some of which were tied in neat bundles with white tape.

“But I don’t know anything about ratcatchers.”

“That’s all right, old boy.  No Naval Officer knows anything about anything. You’ll learn.”

“But I thought – I was told – I mean, my C. O. said it would be an operational job.” The mood of high endeavour had now quite passed.

“I see what you mean.  Tea?  In a sense it is operational – surgical, rather.  Trying to get Leading Ratcatchers out of a bone-dry barrel.”           

Penworthy felt a little like crying.

“Here.  Read this.  This is Admiralty Organization.  This one tells you how to write letters.  Ever seen a docket?  Ever heard of a docket?  Don’t suppose you have, except in a bad joke.  Dockets are an art – like judging distances.  Can you judge distances?”

“I’ll try.”

Across the street workmen were converting the foun­dations of a bombed building into a large static water tank.

“We’ve worked it out that you could float a Prince of Wales on that amount of water.  You’re a university man.  Just check up and see if we’re right.”

Penworthy gazed from the window, made his estimate and ended up with a credit balance of 723 tons.  Then he read the two typed instructions.  The afternoon was draw­ing on, the evening coming.  The telephones rang, the voices were a shifting patchwork of sound.

At four o’clock the large man said, “What are you waiting for, Penworthy?  Go away and take some leave.  Come back a fortnight from yesterday.”

Penworthy walked mournfully to the door.  A little notice read “Don’t Hurry – It’s Going to be a Long War.”  He went down in the lift, out into the last of the sunlight and walked slowly up Whitehall.

“If only they’d left me on leave.  Now I have no money.  And I have to get a new uniform.”

He turned around suddenly, walked back at a brisk pace, walked up the stairs two at a time, knocked on the door, approached the large man, and said “If you don’t mind I’d like to start work tomorrow, sir.”

“Very well.  We start at 9.  Come in at 10.”

As Penworthy closed the door behind him he heard the deep voice say “Keen type.”    Everybody else in the room laughed.

III

After Sub-Lieutenant Penworthy had untied, sorted, classified, resorted and reclassified all the cards for his in­dex, he tied them all up in neat bundles with white tape.  After an intensive search lasting for several days he found a box for the cards, untied the white tapes and arranged the cards in the box according to a system that Einstein would readily have understood.  Another week or two was spent in the minute analysis of the contents of the index, as a result of which Penworthy produced a number of elaborate graphs in several colours.  These were hung on the wall above his table, a map of Hadrian's Wall having been removed to make space for them.  From the graphs Penworthy could prove almost anything; it is said that even officers from the Naval Intelligence Division came to consult these oracles.

In this way Penworthy had soon exhausted the possi­bilities of his card index; had exhausted too his own curi­osity and the patience of everybody who worked in the office with him.  Now that all that was settled he grew restless.

IV

It is not necessary to explain how Acting Sub-Lieuten­ant Penworthy came to be confirmed in rank, nor how, by a clerical error, he was shortly afterwards promoted to the rank of Lieutenant.  His Confidential Report in October stated that he had “conducted himself very much to his own satisfaction.”  Their Lordships were apparently no less pleased with his handling of the card index and the tele­phones; for, as the autumn afternoons shortened into winter evenings, Penworthy found himself appointed to another department.

He is now an experienced not-too-junior officer.  He has spoken to a Rear Admiral, lunched with a Captain and sometimes has the courage not to say “Sir” to a Comman­der.  In the new appointment his look of inscrutable de­tachment has quickly earned him a reputation for omnis­cience.  But his two companions (themselves suffering from the triple solitude of an expensive education, impeccable manners and fair wavy hair), are in no wise able to relieve Penworthy's isolation.

The winter advances, and we find Penworthy alone one day at lunchtime, standing on the verge of the lake in St. James’ Park.  His mood is only a little less suicidal than it appears to be.  Behind him the new Fortress is rising, look­ing at this stage like a ferro-concrete replica of a 15th century galley.  But he has no eyes for the new temporary building, nor for the dyspeptic officers and prattling typ­ists who pass in an unbroken stream behind him.  He is gazing at a cormorant sitting on a small raft moored in the lake.

Penworthy often stops these days to gaze at the cormo­rant.  Nothing else seems able to assuage the sharp nostalgic hunger in his heart.  Penworthy is by instinct a symbolist; and the cormorant is a symbol, an ironical symbol.  In Penworthy's present mood, the impersonal irony of fate is as honey under his tongue.

Like himself, the cormorant had come in from the sea and found himself inappropriately and without explanation in London.  The cormorant was moody and of uncertain temper, refusing to be comforted by swan, dab-chick or pelican; a solitary unhappy figure, shoulders hunched, head poked forward, brooding darkly behind boot-button eyes,

“What brought him here?  Why does he stay?  Is it some hard penance, self-imposed?  Or is he visiting the scene of some dimly remembered ecstasy?  He too is a seafaring type.  Perhaps he has come here to rest.  But he is not happy.  His heart is elsewhere.  I think he too has been talked into this, has listened to round reason, accepted advice against his better, more instinctive, judgment; and now he finds in his heart bitterness and regret, the remorse that can only spring from a soundly reasoned decision.  He will find no peace in his melancholy.  He is waiting for a sign, a light, the spring in his marrow-bones.  And presently he will go.  He will suddenly say ‘Hell with this’ and he’ll go.  And one day I shall find that he has gone and that some comfort has gone with him.  That will be a sign.”

Penworthy, sunk in moody thought, shoulders hunched, head poked forward, the teeth of sound reason and of frustration gnawing at his resolution, moved off towards his place of duty.  On his way he failed to originate or return any salutes.  By that time it was raining again and nobody seemed to notice.