The newcomer perched against the Flight Deck Plot, the ten feet long table shaped exactly like the Perseus’s flight deck upon which, when the carrier was operating aircraft every kite and item of topside equipment – everything from the size of an oxygen bottle to a recovery tractor or a Goshawk or Sea Eagle – was represented by models and symbols by a team of a dozen movement masters. Prior to joining the ship Alex had always assumed that the Navy had some kind of high-technology, super-duper machine that kept track of what was going on, or that in some way the Mark I eyeball of whoever was in charge, sufficed to choreograph affairs. He had very swiftly been disabused of any notion that a single man, or any, as yet un-invented, non-existent electronic or mechanical brain, could possibly manage the horrendously dangerous environment of the flight deck of an operational carrier. Thus, when Perseus was conducting flying operations this compartment, like the huge deck below, was the scene of semi-orchestrated… mayhem.
But not today, so, Alex’s boss, the ships’ CAW, had temporarily abandoned his ‘office’ to spend a while in his cabin catching up with his department’s paperwork with his two loyal, hard-pressed ‘writers’. Alex was still too new to the ways of the Royal Navy to begin to understand why the CAW’s two secretaries, one a junior petty officer and the other a senior rate, were ‘writers’, not ‘secretaries’, when the Captain’s secretary, was always referred to as a ‘secretary’. But then in his bones Alex was still a Major in the Colonial Air Force, compensated for coming to sea – with all its myriad of new perils – with a temporary commission at his present exalted ‘on board’ rank.
In fact, his status on the Perseus was a thing which he well knew might easily cause friction. The CAW, Commander Andrew Buchannan, a forthright ruddy-faced veteran naval aviator, and his deputy, Lieutenant-Commander Thomas Brooke, a taciturn Irishman from County Meath, both sat above him in the Air Wing’s pecking order, yet Alex’s rank meant that he was automatically included in the Captain’s Departmental Heads Command Group, whereas, Brooke, his operational superior, was not…
Both Buchannan and Brooke had told him not to worry about it. Basically, the Navy was so grateful to ‘chaps like you’ who had ‘the gumption to turn yourself into deck jockeys at the drop of a hat’ that it would forgive, forget, and applaud, practically anything he or his men got up to!
Actually, apart from being separated from his very expectant wife, whom he missed with a passion that seemed wholly incompatible with his formerly jaundiced outlook on life, and things in general, Alex was having a whale of a time.
It was small comfort that he and Leonora had known that there would be periods, possibly long periods, of separation when they had fallen into each other’s arms. That he had finally married a woman who understood that he was never going to be one of those tame nine to five ‘city men’, and seemed, thus far at least, to be at peace with it, was perhaps, the most extraordinary of all the adventures of his life to date.
And now he was, literally, all at sea with a true band of brothers!
“This really is the best view in the house,” Simon Foljambe chuckled. He was the youngest son of a prominent Whig family which, he joked, ‘owns half of Cumberland, which probably explains why the family has been on its uppers for as long as anybody can recall!’ His father was a sometime Member of Parliament, regularly voted in and out as one election followed another, and his mother a well-known children’s author – who published under the pen name of Dorothy Malone, her mother’s maiden name – whose books sold well in several of the First Thirteen.
“I don’t know about that, old chap,” Alex objected, grinning broadly and flicking his eyes to the deckhead. The Flying Control Compartment was directly below the ship’s bridge. “On a day like this we get to enjoy the view; upstairs, it’s business as usual all the time!”
The two men were of an age, and like the New Englander, Foljambe was a relatively recent recruit to the Senior Service. He had transferred to the RNAS from the Royal Air Force some eighteen months ago, spent a year or so at an operational training unit in Canada, and joined Perseus while she was still fitting out at Wallabout Bay, Brooklyn.
Upon first acquaintance Alex had been afraid Foljambe was just another stuffed shirt type, a notion comprehensively exploded when Simon and his ‘Sea Eagle Boys’ had mucked in with the New Yorkers ‘doing the town’ in Perseus’s recent visit to St Margaret’s Bay. Oh, there had been the normal manly arm-wrestling, and a few of the chaps had been inclined to knock heads with Foljambe’s mostly ex-RAF long-service men. However, as the party progressed from one hostelry to another the Goshawk men and their Sea Eagle comrades in arms had buried the hatchet and together, they had had a right royal old time of it!
It seemed Simon Foljambe had married a Canadian woman, a widow with two young sons. He had planned to move his new family down to Norfolk, Perseus’s likely home port in North America; but like many men he was holding fire on that for the present. Nobody really took seriously rumours that the ship was going to be sent to the Mediterranean or the Far East, not now that it was obvious that there was going to be trouble down south, much closer to home. That said, in the Navy nobody took anything for granted until they saw it in writing.
The two men watched as the mighty Tiger buried her fo’c’sle in a big wave and green-grey water submerged her stem.
“We do seem to be in rather a hurry to be somewhere else?” Simon Foljambe observed ruefully.
Alex was thinking of something pithy to say when the bell rang and the Tannoy blared into life.
“NOW HEAR THIS! NOW HEAR THIS!”
The two men waited.
“ALL DEPARTMENT HEADS AND COMMANDERS TO REPORT TO THE CAPTAIN’S STATEROOM AT THIRTEEN HUNDRED HOURS!”
The order was repeated.
“THAT IS ALL!”
“Oh, well,” Foljambe grimaced. “It sounds as if we’re about to find out what the hurry is, old man?”
“In that case,” Alex concluded, laconically, “I won’t pop outside for a quick smoke, then!”
The appointed hour was some twenty-five minutes yet.
The Captain’s stateroom was below the island bridge, a spacious suite of cabins incorporating a conference-dining room large enough to comfortably accommodate twenty or more at a sitting. Situated between the hull and the armoured starboard flank of the hangar deck, it could be accessed directly from the bridge, however, that afternoon Alex and Simon Foljambe diverted to the great, long, two deck-high clammy steel cathedral of Perseus’s hangar deck. The structure was contiguous for almost three-quarters the length of the ship, with great elevators at the bow and stern ends, and cut into by a third, midships elevator half across it, the only major structural obstruction in its otherwise uninterrupted six-hundred-foot length. Other than where the midships elevator impinged, it was between sixty and ninety feet wide, its width reduced where additional armoured boxes protected key fuel pipes and pumps, and guarded the hoists to the magazine rooms buried deep beneath the waterline. The hangar deck crew lived and worked in shops, messrooms and supply stores located, like the Captain’s Stateroom, between the hardened carapace of the giant armoured box and the outer hull. Even in heavy weather, the hangar deck was never quiet, never still, although today, with every aircraft tied down and the deck gyrating unpredictably underfoot, only routine maintenance was being attempted.