Now they had been two and a half hours on the boat, and Victor was just beginning to see their destination through the sea-rain. The ever-present fine mist – the sort which seemed to hang in the air and soaked right through - settled on his face to such coldness he could feel his skin shrinking away from it, contracting red and raw. He knotted his hands in his useless gloves once more.

The Justinian lay at berth in Spithead, sheltered from both the worst of the weather and the sea beneath. Every now and then a ripple of precipitation would render it visible. It was a squat, ugly little thing which hung half underwater. Even at anchor it was trailing smoke. It looked like a steam engine had come detached, thought Victor, with some venom. His experience with ships thus far had been the few mercy ships he’d happened to glance being slipped free of the Thames in the early morning. If that was all the acquaintance they came to, it would be no great loss.

The woman in front of him moved her pipe to the corner of her mouth in order to better shout at her companion in utterly incomprehensible West Country. A clammy hand tapped him from behind. It made him shudder, like a nerve going sour. A voice climbed into his ear.

“We’re not too far from ‘er now. Polly reckons another five minutes or so.”

Victor nodded, biting his tongue. He was determined to appear as stoic as possible. The fewer words than came out of his mouth, the fewer could be wrong. He felt a surge of envy for the two VAD women either side of him. Although he supposed they would be Navy now. Coarse, with salted hair and big hands. The woman in front – Polly – had two tattoos wrapped around her huge, visible forearms. Every spare inch of Victor’s skin was hidden behind as many layers as he could get between him and the sea. He could ask them, ask if their particular volunteer detachment had merged with the Women’s Royal Naval Service yet, but he didn’t. Decided it could be a topic of conversation on the Justinian. He doubted they could cross that boiling swell in five minutes.  He blinked against the backdraft of pipe-smoke into his eyes.

The sea groaned.

The woman behind him grinned. “Nothin’ to worry about, my love. Not for us.”

There was a particular adage about the guns in Flanders, how they could be heard from London when the wind was right. What would happen to the guns of a ship, he thought. What would happen when they sank.

All at once, the finer points of the Justinian hove into view. The sea mist had disappeared somewhat around its bulk (or maybe they were just that far out to sea), leaving behind it a screaming spindrift off the side. There was another deep groan, followed by a subtle but unmistakable shudder. The feeling something was terribly wrong. The woman at the back of the boat tapped his shoulder again and pointed silently to their left. He allowed his eyes time to adjust to the water and the mid-afternoon gloom. All that he could see was grey, the sky and the sea and the ships. The wide spread of it and the poor visibility it yielded obscured anything that might have been a landmark. Even the Isle of Wight lay in an inglorious bulk almost utterly indistinguishable. He couldn’t see anything, until he thought he could see something. Then it was gone.

“Submarine,” came the burr from behind. “One of them new E-classes.”

Victor trained his eyes on the horizon again, determined to rake out a view. He could see nothing, which made it worse. The image of it slinking off, deep and dark beneath them.

“Darling!”

Victor’s neck snapped up.

“That’ll be your welcome, lad,” said Polly, pulling an oar into the little boat and using her free hand to pull them in closer. “I’ve got this end of the scramble. Been a pleasure. Good luck, Sub-Lieutenant.”

Victor nodded, and tried to stand. He decided that standing would not be viable in this water.

“Jump!” Came the same distant voice from the top of the scramble net. “You’ll be alright!”

Victor clenched his teeth.

“He’s not wrong,” said the voice of the woman behind him, whom he’d never learnt the name of. “Worst comes to the worst, we’ll fish you out.” She clapped him heavily on the back, which seemed to serve to propel him further forward than he’d like to go.

He tried to raise himself again, tentatively, determined not to look like how he felt in front of his new companions. Who he’d be ensconced with for who could tell how long.

The rope was salty and rough. “You just climb!” called Polly over his shoulder, one of her big, strong hands attached to the netting alongside his. “Ain’t as far as it looks!”

He doubted that.

The metal was bruisingly cold. The first contact skinned all the skin from his knuckles, the soft pads of his fingers red raw from where they held the rope and where he’d held them so tight to each other against his poorly knit gloves. He felt a faint pang of disgust for himself; the obvious lack of seamanship and masculinity he showed. Then he bit his tongue and resolved to climb and said, “I’m sure you’re right.”

The enormous glut of the ship served to shelter him from the worst of the wind scything in from the Channel. The height, which he’d found so repellent at first, may well be for the best, he decided. It couldn’t be too far to fall if we sank. He hadn’t even got his sea-chest. It was just his own sorry self he had to haul up. Wet and slightly wind-lagged. Minor wool-soaking. If he was in the Army he’d be able to sit beside a fire in the Officers’ Mess. God knows what the Navy had in lieu. A boiler. The engine room.

“That’s it, it’s not much farther!” The voice from the deck seemed a lot closer, now. Victor chanced a glance up. Not far. Still too far. The metal slipped against his hands, grating on the wet neophyte skin beneath it. A hot burst of energy materialised in his stomach to propel him, through discomfort and hatred alone, to the top of the scramble net.

A firm set of hands grasped the back of his overcoat and helped to heave him aboard. He landed, undignified, in a heap alongside the ship’s low walls. The deck was wooden, he noticed. Somehow he hadn’t been expecting that.

“Oh, bugger. Are you alright?” The owner of the voice squatted next to him, almost invisible between the weather and the dark shadow his peak cap cast with what little remained of the light. “Are you alright?”

“Fine, fine.” Victor picked himself up, slipping again on the wet wood. He dug his feet in, the heels of his new boots sticking.

“Takes some time,” said the voice, utterly incongruous with its surroundings. “Never easy to get your legs right, even if you’ve been at sea before. Every ship reacts differently to the swells. She’s got her own set of quirks. You’ll come to realise.” He held out his hand, beaming.

“Sub-Lieutenant Coleridge. Alex.”

Victor nodded soberly and took the hand. The wet wool of his charity gloves squeezed water out over the fingers of Alex’s. Regulation leather. Soft as butter.

Alex either did not notice or did not mind. He kept his smile, which only made his round face look more boyish.

“Victor,” said Victor.

“Victor,” repeated Alex. Then he let go of Victor’s hand and said brightly, “Welcome to purgatory!”

Victor, while attempting to shift his weight from one foot to the other, glanced up at Alex. The switch in his concentration almost caused him to lose his balance.

 “Surely it can’t be that bad?”

 Alex cocked his head, still grinning. “Come on. Let me show you to your berth, at least”.

 He pulled a door open - rust-encrusted and at total odds with the wooden deck. It had left deep gouges on the wet woodwork. All the while, Alex talked.

“You’re not too far from the back, with me. I think it’s the idea we should be stationed together. Not that that should usually be the case with the junior officers, but we’ve got half a dozen Marines on board and they’ve got to fit somewhere. So it’s the subalterns who take the cut, as per usual.” He held open another door, this one leading down a set of viciously spiralled stairs. Victor put his foot on the first one, gingerly, and waited for Alex to overtake.

“You lead the way, I’ll point you out if you go too far wrong. Not that there are too many places to go. Ever been on a half-jack before?”

“I’ve never been - on a ship before,” said Victor, pausing his speech to allow space for a particularly big wave. Alex didn’t seem to notice.

“Half-jack’s not a bad place to start. Big enough to be comfortable, not big enough to lose you in it. Did you have a chance to get on the ships-of-the-line at Dartmouth? They’ve got a second and a third rate there. I spent half my bloody life up and down them. Of course, I heard they’re cutting the training time, so maybe they’ve taken out the on-decks. Not that it did a lot. That’s it, straight down. Strange choice for you to go into the Navy? Father a Navy man, is he?””

Victor hoped his bitter silence would do instead of a reply.

“They wouldn’t accept me, at first. Got in on my third attempt. Not that there’s been a lot to see, Victor. I just got in for the tail end of Dogger Bank and then it was time to go home again. We’ve been here since March.”

“Just, sitting here?”

Alex turned around and winked. “Bricks in the wall”

Half-jacks were modelled on the Borodino class, with minimum specifications and maximum inconvenience. They were built low and ugly. They were also exceedingly cheap to produce, Victor supposed bitterly. Bricks in the wall, indeed. Union Jacks, Jacks-of-the-Line, Jack of all trades. Depending on whom you listened to.

Although he was still talking, Victor imagined that he felt Alex’s disposition dissipate the further into the ship they got. They were deep here, he supposed. Not deep as below the waterline, as such, but deep into the workings of the ship. The engine room, the boilers. Somewhere where you might not want to be, if the worst came to the worst.

Alex stopped and knocked on another door to their left. They had, so far as Victor could tell, all seemed to be identical. Alex met his eye and raised cocked his eyebrows once. He had visibly clenched his jaw.

“Gunroom,” he said. He didn’t explain why he knocked.

The door opened from the inside, rather than be opened by Alex himself. A good natured face appeared round it. “Alex!”

“Hi, Pete,” Alex replied, wrapping him in a loose, one-handed hug. “Look who I’ve got.”

Pete did, and his face didn’t change. Whether he wasn’t impressed or he didn’t care, Victor didn’t know, and couldn’t seem to muster up the ability to care himself. It didn’t help the queasy fluttering of his stomach.

Anxious to sit down, Victor took Alex’s silent hand wave as an invitation into the gunroom and sat rather hurriedly on the first chair he could manage to find. Satisfied he could use the excuse of taking the weight of his feet, at least, he allowed himself the minor luxury of scanning his surroundings, for what felt like the first time since he’d left the the Naval Board hours ago.

Like everything else he had seen thus far - and, he suspected, most things in the Navy as a whole - the ship’s anterior was coloured entirely in shades of grey. Two buzzing electrical lights sat embedded in the wall, augmented by three paraffin lamps swinging from the low ceiling. The chairs, which sat in odd clumps of three, one of which he was sitting in, were the same gunmetal grey. It looked like the entire ship had been outfitted had been welded out of one huge sheet. A symbolic attempt to vary the fittings was present in a large wardroom table, which took up almost every spare inch of viable floorspace and created a narrow moat in which all movement had to be undertaken. A seamap was half open, held down by two dinner knives and an orange.

“This him?”

Alex looked up from the position he’d let himself relax into, on the opposite side of Victor in an almost perfect mirror. Now that his duty was done, he’d become very quiet. The one time that Victor wished he would continue talking. Worse, Alex inclined his head towards Victor. Pete redirected the question to him.

“You him?”

Victor cleared his throat.

“By ‘him’....”

“He’s the new subbie,” said Alex, apparently not all as silent as he looked.

Pete regarded him under his shadowed brow. “I thought so.”

Victor didn’t know what to say. He gave Pete a tight smile.

“First time on a half-jack?”

“First time on a ship.”

Pete sat heavily on the chair next to Alex. “Well, fuck me.”

Victor had been expecting this. Alex put what appeared to be a warning hand on Pete’s leg. His demeanour, however, indicated he felt more or less the same. So, to be honest, did Victor.

They let an uncomfortable silence pass through them.

Victor coughed. “How… many are there?”

“Berthed here?”

Victor, not sure entirely what he meant himself, nodded.

“The five of us. Senior officers at the top.”

Victor allowed his gaze to drift to the pole in the corner of the room. Pete followed his gaze. “Wardroom’s above.”

Victor nodded, as if this made sense.

“I think he needs something to drink, Pete.”

Victor started, panicking about what would happen to his already frail stomach. “Oh, no please-”

Alex, not to be defeated, was already on his feet.

Amidst the general clutter of the room was a large, cast iron urn. It was wedged on top of a tiny sideboard, itself looking defeated in the shadow of the enormous table between him and it. There was a sink, he noted, and some used-looking cups. Victor wondered vaguely where the water came from.

“Gunfire?” asked Alex

“I… excuse me?”

Alex, pulling down the lever on the urn and turned to face him. His good natured expression hadn’t changed. “Do you want rum in it?”

“Oh. No, thank you.”

Alex exchanged a glance with Pete. Victor did his best not to question it and to feel the indignant burn in his chest.

The cup was delivered to him. The tin made it too hot for Alex to hold in his bare hands, so he’d wrapped it in a teacloth, which he left with Victor. “Milk and sugar are in there already,” he said apologetically. “They put them in at the source. Sorry.”

“Just sits there and stews,” said Pete. He offered Victor a cigarette. Victor took it, feeling like he ought to.

They sat and smoked in silence. Victor wondered when his tea would be cool enough to drink. Tin mugs.

Alex was looking down at his feet. Pete, with his head back against the wall, was following the trajectory of his gaze to the ceiling. Victor felt like he should say something.

In the end, Pete broke the silence.

“You been briefed yet?”

Victor shook his head, firmly, once.

“You going to be?”

“I- hope so.”

“So do I.”

They let the silence lapse again.

There was a metallic clanking from down the hall. They all listened to it grow until it coalesced itself at the door.

A man in sub-lieutenant’s epaulettes walked in, took a tin from the sideboard and left without saying a word.

The silence doubled in intensity. Victor felt that he should question it, but if any time was wrong to, he supposed it would be this one. He caught his two companions looking at each other again. What relationship was it they had, he thought, where so little could be conveyed with a glance? As if they understood each other? Would he find himself a friend like that, or was it unique to them? Was it camaraderie bourne from mere time alone? From shared experiences?

Experiences. Those, more than anything, put the fear of God into him. The sea, the sea. The open sea. The worse things which happened. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair and thought, unbidden, of that submarine which had slipped so easily beneath the waves.

Alex and Pete were speaking in low voices. Alex got up. He beamed at Victor.

“Come on, then. Let me show you to your berth.”

Victor followed him, feeling none more settled than he had done from when he first arrived on board. Alex took him back through the gunroom door, and Victor’s heart sank at the thought of navigating those stairs again in reverse. However, Alex directed him left, and almost immediately stopped.

“Well. It’s not much. They never are.”

The room in front of them was stacked in three bunks, each screwed to the wall and rusty with sea water. High above and between two of them shone the weak dregs of the afternoon light. His sea chest, which he had forgotten about, was at the foot of one of them.

“You’re on the bottom, Victor. I hope you don’t mind. We moved Styles up to the top. In case there’s any sort of - emergency in the night.”

The catch in his voice caught Victor right in his insecurity.

“What do you mean by that?”

“We’re at war, Mr. Darling. Anything could happen. Better to have three officers on duty immediately than two and one of them still struggling out of his bunk.”

“And this Styles doesn’t deserve the privilege because-?”

Alex blinked at him. “Oh, Styles. He isn’t an officer. There are too many beds for all of them so one of the more senior ratings berths with us. Else we’d waste a bed. He’s not a problem.”

“I wasn’t insinuating that he was,” said Victor distractedly, taking in his surroundings. The bedclothes were made of rough wool, but the sheets themselves looked clean and serviceable enough. The ever-present fug of smoke was thicker here than in the gunroom. He thought of his unsmoked cigarette by his unfinished tea.

Alex was surveying him out of the corner of his eye. “You seem to have a rather radical edge to you, Mr Darling.”

Victor was rather taken aback. “Oh?”

Alex looked at him benevolently, appearing amused.

“Yes. I rather think that’s the impression I’m picking up from you.”

“Well.” said Victor.

Alex cracked a grin. “I’ll keep it in mind if I hear any rumblings of dissent. I’ll leave you get yourself unpacked; Pete and I will be in the gunroom, I daresay. Pop back in and finish your tea. I’ll take you up to number one later on. He’s expecting you to want some time to get yourself equated.”

Victor nodded. He felt as if he’d done nothing except nod since his arrival.

Alex gave him a final smile and left the room, shutting the door quietly behind him.

Next Chapter: Chapter Two