I Was There

SHE was a lovely boat, and a thousand times during that long trip across the Channel and up the French coast, from Southampton to Flushing, I found myself wishing she were mine. But country lawyers in a small way of business don’t own sixty-ton diesel-powered yawls like the Ariadne: if they are lucky, they get the job of delivering them from their builders to other, more fortunate people. That was what I was doing, that June evening, and not hurrying the job either; we had a fortnight to make the trip, ironing out the snarls on the way, and none of us wanted to cut that fortnight short.

“Us” was three people altogether: myself, on holiday from the dry-as-dust legal business of an English market town; George Wainwright, about whom I knew nothing save that he was on the fringe of London’s theatrical world and an excellent small-boat navigator; and Ginger, who tripled as steward, deck hand, and running commentator. “Call me Ginger,” he had said, in a cheerful Cockney voice, as soon as we met on the dockside. “My mother was scared by a carrot.”

I had left it at “Ginger” ; he was the kind of man who didn’t need a second name.

This was the sort of holiday I took every year, signing on with a yacht-delivery service and pulling strings to wangle the best boat and the best trip I could. It was the only way I could get to sea nowadays; the war had taken my own boat, and the post-war my bank balance. George Wainwright told me, airily, that he was “resting between shows,” though I fancy he was glad enough to pick up free quarters, and £20, for making what was virtually a pleasure cruise. He was a big man, sinewy and tough; I had the impression that he had done a lot of ocean racing at one time, in other people’s boats, though I couldn’t imagine him in any conceivable part in any West End play.

Ginger, the steward, didn’t volunteer anything about himself. He never stopped talking, for all that. The crew on these “builder’s delivery” jobs was usually a scratch lot, though it struck me that this time we were remarkably assorted. Middleaged lawyer, forty-year-old actor, a redheaded Cockney who might have been fresh out of jail — the crew of the Ariadne seemed to have been picked at random from the Yellow Pages. But we had made her sail like a champion, all the same.

We had made her sail to such good purpose that now, with two days in hand, we were loafing along on the last hundred miles of the journey. Earlier, we had come smoking up the Channel before a force 6 gale; Ariadne, handling beautifully, had logged a steady ten knots under her storm canvas. But then the wind had fallen light, and the leg from Dover to Calais had become a gentle drifting under hazy sunshine, while the decks and the sails dried out, and we made what small repairs were necessary. Nothing had gone wrong that didn’t always go wrong in a boat fresh from the builders — a leaking skylight, some chafed rigging, a cupboard door that wouldn’t stay shut in a seaway. By and large, she went like a dream — as far as I was concerned, an envious dream of ownership that I would never live in reality.

George Wainwright and I had taken turn-about at the wheel, with Ginger filling in for an odd trick or two, to give us an extra margin of sleep. We had lived on tea, corned beef, beans, and something which Ginger called “cheesy-hammy-eggy” and which, for cold, hungry, and tired men, was a banquet in itself. Rum, twice a day, completed our paradise.

Now, towards the end of that paradise, we were punching eastwards against the ebb tide, at six o’clock of a magic evening. Ariadne, under all plain sail, could not make much of the light air; we were barely holding our own, creeping up the flat coastline with the sun warm on our backs. I had the wheel, letting the spokes slide through my fingers with a sensual joy. Ginger, standing with his head poking out of the cabin top, was drying cups and saucers. George Wainwright, his elbows planted on the chart, stared landwards through his binoculars.

“We’re not making any headway,” he said, presently. “Barely a knot, I should say.”

“Suits me,” said Ginger. He could never resist a comment on anything, from UN politics to juvenile delinquency. “I’ve got all year.”

The water gurgled at the bow. The sail slatted, empty of wind. “We might as well anchor,” I said. “The tide will be against us for another four hours. What’s the depth here?”

George Wainwright glanced at the chart. “About four fathoms. Sandy bottom. She’ll hold all right.”

“We’ll anchor till the flood,” I decided. “Give us a chance to catch up on our sleep.” I eased Ariadne up into the wind, and our way fell off. Ginger went forward to see to the windlass.

“How far are we off shore?” I asked George.

“About a mile,” he answered. “The tide sets us inwards.”

“And where, exactly?”

“Off Dunkirk.”

DUNKIRK. . . . As the anchor chain rattled down through the leads, and Ariadne swung and settled to her cable, I was conscious of an odd foreboding. It was true that we were a mile off Dunkirk: I recognized, as if from a hundred photographs, the oily swell, the sloping beaches, the flat mainland enclosing a loose-knit gray town. Here were the waters, full of ghosts, full of sunken ships and dead men, which a decade earlier — no, it was now nearly two decades — had resounded to a murderous uproar. In my mind’s eye I saw them all again: the straggling lines of men wading through the shallows, crying out for rescue or waiting in dull stupor to be picked up; the burning town behind, the Stukas overhead; and the small boats darting in and out — going in light, coming out laden to the gunwales — on an errand of mercy and salvage that went on hour after hour, day after day. That was what Dunkirk would always mean to me — a name at once grisly and proud, a symbol, a haunting from the past. I was curious to know what it meant to the other two, and I did not have to wait long to find out.

Ginger, having secured the anchor, came aft again; George Wainwright looked up from his chart, where Ariadne’s observed position was now marked by a neatly penciled cross. There was no need to wonder which of them would speak first. It would have been an easy bet to win.

“Good old Dunkirk!” said Ginger jauntily. He wiped his hands, greasy from the windlass, on a bunch of cotton waste and looked round him at Ariadne’s benevolent anchorage. “Makes you think a bit, don’t it?”

“How do you mean, Ginger?” asked George Wainwright.

“All this . . .” Ginger waved his hand round vaguely. “It’s seventeen years ago now, but by cripes it’s like yesterday! . . . The bombers coming over as thick as bloody fleas, the lads waiting. . . . I’ll never forget it, not as long as I live. By cripes, skipper!” — he turned to me, his creased leathery face alight — “I could tell you a yarn that would curl your hair. A yarn —”

. . . a yarn which, as the sun sunk to the westwards, and Ariadne’s wavering shadow lengthened and faded on the tranquil waters off Dunkirk, recalled all the horrors, terrors, anti triumphs of those mortal days. Ginger told it well; I knew that he must have had many audiences, many chances to polish and perfect.

The lads, he said (and we could all see them as lads, beefy Lancashire lads from the mills, gravfaced lads from the Yorkshire coalpits, likely lads from Bermondsey and Bow) — the lads were fed up. The officer had promised them they’d be taken off that night, and they’d been content with that, after a week’s dodging the bombers on their way back to the coast, and they’d settled down on the beach to wait. But they hadn’t been taken off, not that night, nor the next, nor the next. That was the army for you—waiting about, nobody knowing what was happening, all a lot of bull, put that bloody light out! . . . First they had waited on the beach; then at the water’s edge; then chesthigh in the water itself.

The straggling line inched its way outwards from the shallows to the deep water. Link arms, there! said the officer; so they linked arms, and with the other hand held their rifles above water. Because you’ll be using those rifles tomorrow, said the officer. Keep them dry, keep them ready for instant action! ‘Ark at ‘im, said the lads.

They waited in the shallows and the deeps. It was cold at night; then it was hot; behind them the town was burning, and the perimeter force kept blazing away with everything they’d got, and the Stukas circled, and swooped, and roared away again, leaving behind them a salty human flotsam — men mixed with sand, men mixed with water, seaweed, other men, all draining slowly away as tlte tide ebbed. Where’s the bloody air force? asked the lads, scanning the alien sky between waves of noise and pain. Tucked up in bed with anyone they can get hold of. . . . Heard from your missus lately? . . .

It was cold at night, then it was burning hot. Men got hit, and dropped out; men got cramp, and floated away; men went mad, and tried to hide beneath the waves. There were other straggling lines within sight, like feelers weaving and groping towards home. Their own line grew thinner; sometimes part of it disappeared altogether, as if by weight of noise and pressure. Close up! said the officer. And no smoking there! Might give away our position.

The officer was the last to go. He was one of the lads himself, only a bit lah-di-dah. . . . When it was their turn to be taken off, the boat from the destroyer, bobbing inshore after a stick of bombs had straddled the shallows, drew alongside the wavering line.

Look lively! said the sailor at the helm, as cool as fresh salad, and they looked lively — as lively as they could after three days of it. There was one lad going off his head with the noise and the sun, and he tried to clamber on board, suddenly screaming with mingled pain and joy, and the officer came up behind and gave him a heave into the boat, and then himself crumpled up like a sodden newspaper and disappeared without a trace.

They fished around for him, couldn’t find him, suddenly abandoned the idea and drew swiftly away. Better to save twenty lives, they reassured themselves. . . . But it was funny how surprised he had looked, after three such days, just before he faded out.

DUSK came down like a blessing. Ariadne rode to her anchor proudly; she was gleaming new, and the white of her doused sails seemed to hold the sunlight long after it had dipped below the horizon. I would have needed a lot of things — a lot of luck, a lot of horse sense, a lot of drive I had never had — to possess a boat like this. But somehow, sitting relaxed in the cockpit, nursing a rum-and-water, I found it easy to imagine that it had all happened, and that she was mine.

The lights of Dunkirk were coming on one by one. George Wainwright took an anchor bearing from them, satisfied himself that we were not dragging, and sat down by my side again. He raised his voice, against the lap and gurgle of the tideway.

“That was a good yarn of yours, Ginger,” he said. “I know exactly how you must have felt. . . . But it was just as bad for the little ships that had to come close inshore and take the troops off. If you want to hear a story . . .”

. . . a story about a big man in a small boat (and looking at George Wainwright’s broad shoulders as he lounged at the after-end of the cockpit, we both knew that it was his story). Hundreds of little ships played their part in the evacuation of Dunkirk; everything from old paddle-wheel ferries to ship’s lifeboats, nursed across the Channel by a man and a boy. Their job was to run a shuttle service — to come close inshore, load up with troops, and bring them out to deeper water, where the bigger boats and the destroyers were waiting.

Some of the little ships kept it up for three or four days. The two-and-a-half-ton sloop Tantivvy was one of these.

Tantivvy (said George Wainwright) was nothing to look at, though she was the owner’s pride and joy. She’d sailed across from Dover with the rest of the mob, following a call on the radio which asked for every small ship that could stay afloat to report for emergency duty. The motley fleet fanned out like a crazy Armada, then converged on Dunkirk. Dunkirk, with its pall of smoke, its mass of shipping, its hurricane of gunfire, was something you couldn’t miss.

Tantivvy, drawing less than four feet, could get within half a mile of the shore; and there she anchored, and presently launched from her upper deck a small pram-dinghy, propelled by a large man whose bulk left room for, at the very most, two other passengers. . . . All day, and most of the night, the dinghy plied to and fro‚ taking off two soldiers at a time from the waiting hordes, loading them onto the deck of Tantivvy, and then going back for more.

There came a time, towards dawn, when Tantivvy had fifty passengers. They sprawled in the tiny cabin, gray-faced, dead to the world; they lay about on the upper deck, soiling it with their blood; they sat with their backs to the mast, staring at nothing, waiting for peace. After his twenty-fifth trip, the big man looked at them and said, “Not many more, I’m afraid.”

One of the soldiers, still awake and still able to talk, waited for a lull in the bombing and called out: “Let’s get going, for God’s sake!”

“We might manage two more,” said the bigman, resting his swollen, aching arms on the oars.

“Don’t be a bloody fool!” said the soldier, in a cracked voice. “You’ll lose the lot of us if you do. We’re damn near sinking already.”

A bomb fell with a screaming crump! and a shower of dirty water, close beside them.

“Well . . said the big man. His face was deadly tired, his eyes puffy and discolored.

He climbed on board, secured the dinghy to the sternpost, and started up the tiny motor. “Help me with the anchor,” he said to the soldier.

The two of them shambled forwards, picking their way between half-dead men who, even when kicked out of the way, could not spare them a glance. They heaved on the anchor and finally brought it home. The big man stood upright and then suddenly stiffened.

“You stupid bastard!” he said to the soldier.

“What?” said the soldier, in amazement.

There was an enormous explosion ashore, and the small boat, gathering way, rocked as the hot shock-wave reached them.

“Don’t you know better,” asked the big man. with murderous sarcasm, “than to walk on a wooden deck in those blasted hobnailed boots?”

THERE was a breeze coming up from the southward‚ sending the small ripples slap-slapping against Ariadne’s shapely hull. An hour before moonrise, it was now very dark; Dunkirk’s glow was reflected in the sky overhead, but between the town and the boat there was a waste of inky black water, deserted, featureless. It was as if the soldiers had all been picked up and we were free to go.

In the glow from the binnacle, Ginger’s perky face was somber. Perhaps, for him as well, the ghosts were still thick around us. If only for our comfort, I knew that I had to tell them about the triumphant part, the end of the story . . .

. . . the end of the story, which I could see now, as clearly as the others had seen theirs.

She was an old destroyer, a bit cranky in her ways (which were the ways of 1916, not 1940), and bringing her alongside at Dover, feverishly crammed with shipping, was not easy. Not if you’d been on the bridge for thirty-six hours, and made two trips to Dunkirk, and dodged the bombers all the way there and all the way back, and waited offshore, sweating, while eight hundred sixty-two men scrambled, clawed, and bullocked their way on board. Not if you had to go back, as soon as this lot was landed, and do the whole thing over and over again till there were no more soldiers showing above water.

The old destroyer slipped between two trawlers leaving for a routine minesweep, stopped in her tracks with a sudden boiling of foam aft, and edged sideways towards the quay. The lines went snaking ashore, the windlasses took in the slack; presently she was berthed, and the hum of the main engines ceased. The captain walked to the back of the bridge and looked aft along the length of his ship.

This was the dividend, this was what the excursion had been for. There wasn’t an inch of the deck that was not covered with men — men in khaki. On the trip home, they had lain there as though stunned or dead; now they were stirring, moving towards the gangway and peering down at the Dover dockside as if they could scarcely believe their eyes. Their uniforms were filthy, their faces unshaven, their many bandages bloodstained; they looked like a wretched scarecrow army in some hollow Shakespearean comedy. About half of them had rifles. There was no other equipment.

The destroyer-captain thought, if this is what’s left of the British Army, then God help us.

They began to disembark, shambling down the gangplank like men sleepwalking in a dream of death. They collected in groups, and then in ragged lines, filling the whole quayside. There was a bunch of them directly below the bridge, standing as if in a shattered trance.

Suddenly one of them, a small lance-corporal, looked up at the bridge, and then directly at the destroyer-captain himself. For a moment they held each other’s eyes, as if they were seeking some rare, unheard-of element that could bridge the ground between a stunted Cockney soldier and a tall, beribboned Royal Navy captain; and then the small lance-corporal grinned, and looked round at his weary comrades, and shouted, on a cracked note of energy: “Come on, lads! Three cheers for the bleedin’ Nyvy!”

They could hardly be called three cheers; they were like the thin rise and fall of a groan, or a spectral sighing from an army of ghosts. But they did emanate from those bedraggled ranks, and they did reach the gaunt, teak-faced destroyercaptain on the bridge.

The captain, when he went ashore, was the elder son of an earl; and, when afloat, an unbending disciplinarian who had been known to deal out exemplary punishment for a sloppy salute. It was a difficult moment, covered by no textbook, no family code, and indeed no war so far. But he also had something important to express, and he did the best he could. He leaned over the wing of his bridge, stiff as a rod in spite of his weariness, and enunciated very clearly:

“My compliments to you, gentlemen — my best compliments.”

THEY liked my story, I could tell that; it reminded them that the Dunkirk disaster could be read two ways. In the binnacle glow, Ginger’s face grew cheerful again, and George Wainwright took a swig of his rum as if toasting Victory herself. The night breeze, from landwards, brought a warm homely smell of Flanders fields. At anchor off Dunkirk, we had mourned long enough; for the tragedy had a happy ending after all.

“That’s what we tend to forget,” said George, echoing my thoughts. “We did take off more than three hundred thousand of them, and they did get back again, in the end.”

Looking up after the long spell of talking, I became aware that the lights of Dunkirk were no longer on Ariadne’s starboard beam, but traversing slowly round astern of her. The Channel tide was flooding.

“We’re swinging, skipper,” said George Wainwright, noticing at the same moment. “The tide’s with us now. The wind’s got some weight in it, too.”

I clicked the switch of the navigation lights, and the friendly red and green eyes brought Ariadne to life.

“Let’s get under way,” I said.

“Now you’re talking!” said Ginger. “This place gives me the creeps.”

We were all standing up, ready to go about our tasks — hoisting the foresail and the main, getting up the anchor, putting ourselves and Ariadne to work again.

“Of course Dunkirk is haunted,” said George Wainwright, suddenly. “But it gave us something to be proud of, all the same.”

Some equality of wistfulness in his voice prompted me to ask a question which had been in my mind ever since the three of us started talking.

“Tell me something,” I said. “ Were you at Dunkirk?”

It was light enough to see him grin. “Not actually, old boy,” he answered. Suddenly he did sound like an actor, and rather a good one too. “I was touring with ENSA at the time. Private Lives — eight shows a week. I wasn’t actually at Dunkirk.”

It seemed right that he did not sound sheepish. ... I turned towards the slight figure clambering up to the fo’c’sle deck.

“Ginger? Were you?”

“Not me!” I might have been charging him with picking pockets. “1940, wasn’t it? — I was in the glasshouse already. Asleep on sentry go, the man said. What a liberty!”

I knew what was coming next.

“Were you there?” George Wainwright asked me.

I didn’t want to embarrass either of them; in any case, I couldn’t be sure that, even now, they were telling the truth. One of them was an actor, the other a liar; they lived, congenitally, in opposite corners of the same dreamworld. And I myself led such a dull life nowadays.

“Afraid not,” I answered. “Bad heart, you know. ... I was doing civil defense work in London, all that summer. I wasn’t at Dunkirk either.”

But the moment of revelation did not make us ashamed among ourselves, nor were we truly liars, whether we were lying or not. For our last three answers had all been wrong. Every Englishman was at Dunkirk.