“Oh. Hurt bad?”
“They got him in the mess deck; on a table.”
“How’d he do it?” he asked, slicing carefully down the right side of his jaw with the safety razor.
“Fell down the wheelhouse ladder.”
“Mmm! What’s on for breakfast?”
“Shirred eggs, the cook says,” answered the other, brought back to the realization of his duties by the question.
“What the hell’s shirred eggs?”
“You know, done in the oven, in a bake-tin like.”
“Okay. You woke the watch yet?” asked Collet, as though to end the conversation.
“I’m going to as soon as I get this coffee down below.” The messman turned from the doorway, and gripping the hot handle of the coffee pot through the thickness of a handful of cloth waste, he manoeuvred himself down the heaving steps to the mess where the engine room watchkeepers and the ship’s coxswain were sitting at the table awaiting breakfast.
As he finished shaving and wiped his face on a bath towel Jimmy Collet was thinking of the news he had just received. It was tough on the kid, getting hurt on his first trip. Seemed to be a nice kid too, not a Jack-Me-Hearty like some of the punks they were getting these days. Probably wasn’t hurt very bad.
He cheered himself with the thought that in a couple of days they would be in port, and making ready to proceed to Canada for a refit. The thought of a refit made everything, including the seaman’s hurts, seem very inconsequential. As he rubbed his face vigorously with the rough towel he contemplated the good times waiting for him on twenty-eight days’ leave at home in Hamilton.
He thought, it will be around the end of March when the first half of the ship’s company take leave, and around the end of April before they come back. If I wait for the second shift, it will get me home in May for the warm weather. I’ll go down to the plant and see the boys, and maybe take a bottle of hard stuff with me. After that I’ll go up to the Delight Café and see Daisy — that is, if she’s not in war work at the Canadian Car or Westinghouse. Anyway, I’ll go and make the round of the hotels, and see who is still around…. He began to whistle as he gathered up his things, and made ready to go below for his portion of shirred eggs.
The ship’s sick berth attendant swung gently in peaceful slumber in his hammock, on the port side of the communications mess, which was reserved for the miscellaneous ratings: cooks, stewards, supply assistant, and himself.
He was dreaming that he was berry picking in a heavy wooded copse that lay about a half-mile behind his father’s farm in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley. Somehow or other he was accompanied by his old school teacher, Mrs. Gregory, and she was shouting to him to move along the raspberry patch, for the berries he was picking were blue ones, when they should have been red....
“Hey, Tiffy!” somebody was shouting as they grabbed him by the shoulder.
“W-w-what!” he yelled, automatically grabbing for the deck-head pipe which he used for a trapeze in getting in and out of his hammock.
“Come on up top, somebody’s hurt!”
“Hey?” Wiping the sleep from his eyes, he looked over the side of the hammock at the face of a seaman who was standing on one of the lockers beneath.
“Come on, one of the new kid’s hurt himself. They’ve got him on a table in the seamen’s mess!”
“Okay,” he said, as the reality took precedence over the dream. He swung himself over the side of the hammock and dropped in his stocking feet upon the deck.
“Are you coming right away?” asked the seaman, whom he now recognized as the bosun’s mate of the watch.
He shook the last vestiges of sleep from his eyes. “Sure. Let me get my boots on first. How bad is he hurt?”
“I guess his arm’s broke, and he’s unconscious.”
He pulled on his sea boots and unslung his first-aid bag from its hook on the bulkhead. Then he followed the seaman up the ladder.
CHAPTER TWO
Ransome Shelley Bodley — to give him his complete name, although he never gave it to himself except when sheer necessity compelled — was twenty-two years old, a retail clerk in civilian life, who had joined the navy as a sick berth attendant under the mistaken impression that he would be employed solely in hospitals ashore. It was to his credit that when he had found out the fallacy of such reasoning he had not attempted to back out of going to sea, but had accepted the draft to the Riverford with a sang-froid which was as brave as it was pretentious. Now that he had been a member of the ship’s crew for a year he was glad that things had happened as they had. The mere thought of serving as a pot juggler in a hospital had now lost its allure, and the only time he wanted to visit a hospital was on his infrequent trips to Halifax when he could call on some of his old classmates and let them see what a real sailor looked like.
He was a very handsome young man, was Shelley, with straight white teeth, a mother’s boy complexion, and black oily hair which he arranged in a series of waves by a deft, practised chop of the heel of his hand. He was not effeminate, although some of the more rough-and-ready members of the crew were under the impression that all sick-bay tiffies were.
On the morning when he was so rudely awakened by the bosun’s mate he was attired in his regular sea-going night clothing consisting of two-weeks’-old underdrawers, a pair of regulation heavy serge trousers, a once-white collarless shirt, a hand-knitted blue sleeveless sweater (a donation by the Imperial Order Daughters of The Empire of Quebec City) and a pair of black cotton-and-wool socks. It was his boast that the action station bell would never catch him unprepared, and his affairs were so arranged that it was only necessary to step into his boots and pull his duffle coat over him before he raced for the upper deck.
He followed the bosun’s mate up the slightly weaving ladder, and they crossed the narrow space which lay between the wooden safety door at the top of the companionway, and the steel bulkhead, behind which was the small canteen. They went to starboard, passing the forward food stores, and climbed across the foot-high coping beneath the heavy watertight door which gave access to the seamen’s mess deck. Immediately inside the door was the ship’s refrigerator, and as they passed it they looked inside where the supply rating was struggling with a welter of piled-up meat, trying to retrieve a cellophane-wrapped cottage roll. The bosun’s mate could not resist the opportunity to make a remark about the supposed state of putrefaction of the food which the icebox contained. “Phew!” he exclaimed, so that the supply rating could hear him. “What the hell you got in there!”
“It smells like a bag shanty,” commented the sick berth attendant, playing along with the joke despite his eagerness to get to his patient.
They pushed past the open door of the icebox and entered the mess deck. It was a chamber stretching across the width of the ship at their point of entry, and narrowing towards the bow, where it ended at a watertight door opening on a paint locker. The low deckhead was a maze of pipes, air ducts, and hammock bars sprayed with a cork solution to keep it from sweating. This, however, was hidden at the moment by a false ceiling of undulating hammocks which covered every available inch of space, and narrowed the head room beneath to about five feet. The deadlights were battened down over the portholes, and the
