HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbour (1947) Read Online Free Page B

midshipman, the signalman, Adams, the look-outs, the hard-breathing Bridger – all waiting for the one plain order which they now knew must come. Until that moment he had been refusing to look squarely at this order as it drew nearer and nearer: he could not believe that his loved ship must be given up, and even now, as he hesitated, and the men round him wondered, the idea still had no sort of reality about it. For this man on whom they all relied, this man to whom they attributed no feelings or qualities apart from the skill and forethought of seamanship, was not quite the stock figure, the thirty-eight-year-old RN Commander, that they all took him to be.
    True, he fitted the normal mould well enough. He had always done so, from Dartmouth onwards, and the progress from midshipman to commander had followed its appointed course – twenty years of naval routine in which a mistake, a stepping-out-of-line would have denied him his present rank. He never had stepped out of line; he had been, and still was, normal about everything except this ship; but for her he had a special feeling, a romantic conception, which would have astounded the men waiting round him. It was not the Navy, or his high sense of duty, or the fact that he commanded her, which had given him this feeling: it was love.
    The old Marlborough … The Captain was not married, and if he had been it might not have made any difference: he was profoundly and exclusively in love with this ship, and the passion, fed especially on the dangers and ordeals of the past three war years, left no room for a rival. It had started in 1926 when she was brand new and he had commissioned her: it had been his first job as First Lieutenant, and his proudest so far. She had been the very latest in ships then – a new sloop, Clyde-built, twin turbines, two four-inch guns (the twin mountings came later), and a host of gadgets and items of novel equipment which were sharp on the palate … There had been other ships, of course, in the sixteen years between; his first command had been a river gunboat, his second a destroyer: but he had never forgotten Marlborough . He had kept an eye on her all the time, checking her movements as she transferred from the Home Fleet to the Mediterranean, thence to the China Station, then home again: looking up her officers in the Navy List and wondering if they were taking proper care of her: making a special trip up to Rosyth on one of his leaves, to have another look at her; and when, at the outbreak of war, he had been given command of her, it had been like coming home again, to somebody dearly loved who was not yet past the honeymoon stage.
    She was not, in point of fact, much of a command for a commander, even as the senior ship of an escort group, and he could have done better if he had wished. But he did not wish. Old-fashioned she might be, battered with much hard driving, none too comfortable, at least three knots slower than the job really demanded; but she could still show her teeth and she still ran as sweet as a sewing machine, and the last three years had been the happiest of his career. He was intensely jealous of her efficiency when contrasted with more up-to-date ships, and he went to endless trouble over this, intriguing for the fitting of new equipment ‘for experimental purposes’, demanding the replacement of officers or key-ratings if any weak point in the team began to show itself. In three years of North Atlantic convoy work he had spared neither himself nor his ship’s company any of the intense strain which the job imposed; but Marlborough he had nursed continuously, so that the prodigious record of hours steamed and miles covered had cost the minimum of wear.
    He knew her from end to end, not only with the efficient ‘technical’ eye of the man who had watched the last five months of her building, but with an added, intimate regard for every part of her, a loving admiration, an eye tenderly blind to her shortcomings.
    Now