Authors: Nevil Shute
“I don’t want a big one,” Colvin said.
“You cannot cross La Manche to England, rowing.”
He said: “I can that.”
“You must be mad.”
“Sure I’m mad,” he said. “So would you be, in my place.”
There was a momentary pause.
“Is there a rowing-boat that I can take?” he asked.
The man said slowly: “At Le Conquet, when the fishing-boats are out at night, they leave a boat upon the mooring—a very small, old boat, you understand, that they can get to shore in when they have moored the fishing-boat. But since the Germans came the boats, even the little ones, are padlocked to the mooring chain, and the oars are taken away. Each night the German soldiers go to see that all the boats are properly secured.”
By his side the woman said suddenly: “There are oars here in the loft, but they are not a pair.”
Colvin said: “That don’t matter. Let me have a look at them?”
The man said: “Would you swim out to the boat, in the black night?”
Colvin showed them his Mae West, which he still wore beneath his jacket, and they fingered it with interest. “Such thick rubber!” said the man, “in time of war!”
The woman turned away to the fire, lifted a pot and poured out a great bowl of the same fish soup. She set it on the table with a length of bread. “Eat this,” she said. “I will fetch the oars.”
He sat down gratefully to the meal, and she went out. The man followed her, but returned after a minute. In his hand he carried a small, rusty hacksaw. He laid it on the table in silence.
Colvin took it up, smiling. “Say …” he said. He felt the serrations with his thumb; they were well worn, but it was sharp enough. “You got everything.”
The woman came back with the oars. They were worn half
through by the thole-pin and one was a foot longer than the other. “They’ll do,” he said. “Now, how do I find this boat?”
“Finish your meal,” the man said. “I will guide you there.”
Colvin ate every morsel that he could; he ate on steadily for half an hour. Then he leaned back and pulled out a wet, stained pocket-book and searched in it. He found two sodden one-pound notes.
He got to his feet and laid the notes upon the table. “You folks been pretty nice to me,” he said in halting French. “Oars and a hacksaw, they cost money, and not easy to get. And then there’s the food, and that. I’m real sorry that it’s only English money I’ve got, but maybe you’ll get change for it one day.”
The man shook his head, and pushed the notes back towards him. And then he did what seemed to Colvin a queer thing. He stood straight up, as straight and serious as a priest at the altar, and he made the V sign with two fingers.
Colvin stared at him. He had seen the V sign in England chalked on walls by little boys,
ad nauseam
. He had seen it in the newspapers, in advertisements for motor-cars, salad cream, and tooth-paste. He had seen a red-nosed comedian in a London theatre chalk it on the backside of a young woman who happened to be bending over. Never before had he seen it used by people who believed in it.
After a moment’s hesitation, he stood up straight himself and repeated it self-consciously. Then he turned to the woman.
“Madame,” he said, “the British Admiralty will repay me this money, and you have children to think of. There are children, are there not?” A little enamel pot standing in the corner had not escaped his notice.
She said: “I took them to my mother to-day, in case they should talk.”
He said: “When next you go to Brest, buy them a present from the British Admiralty. Perhaps a ship would be most suitable.”
They both laughed at that, and she took the money and stuffed it in the pocket of her dress.
Ten minutes later he was standing in the darkness with the man, the oars over his shoulder and the thole-pins in his pocket. Wrapped round the oars there was a sheet of canvas that had covered a leaky pigsty roof, and once had been a portion of a sail. It was all the fabric that they had to give him. He stood with the man while their eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, the echoes of the woman’s ‘
Bonne chance!
’ ringing in his ears.
“I will go first, and noisily,” the farmer whispered. “Follow me at a hundred metres, and as quietly as you can. If I meet Germans I will make sufficient noise that you will know.”
The wind was still south-east, but it had strengthened; the sky was mostly obscured by cloud, though here and there patches of starlight showed. It was about half-past eight when they left the farm. The man led Colvin by roads and lanes for nearly two hours, strolling ahead, singing or muttering to himself.
They met one German picket. Colvin heard the challenge, and a long incoherent argument commence, and he got over the hedge into the field. He made a detour round the argument, and when he heard the man proceeding on the road he followed on beside him in the field. Presently they were going on upon the road as before.
They walked for about two hours in that way through the night. Then the lane that they were following petered out into a grass pasture, and here the man was waiting for Colvin.
“This is the place,” he whispered. “You must go very quietly now. Upon the other side of this field is the sea, the north side of the little bay that is Le Conquet. The village is on the other side, the south. Over there,” he pointed to the west, “is Kermorvan. I do not think that there are any Germans here, but there are land-mines in places. In those places there is one strand of barbed wire, on posts.”
They went on towards the water over the field. They found a patch of land-mines and followed the wire along until it ended; then they came to a formidable hedge of wire. They threw the piece of sail on this and negotiated it without great difficulty; then they were on the shore with water lapping on the rocks at their feet.
The man pointed over the water at a dim mass, seen very faintly in the thin starlight when you put your head down very near the surface. “There is one boat,” he said. “There may be others, but I cannot see.”
He stood up. “There you are,” he said. “This is all that I can do for you. You have boat and oars now; may the good God be with you.”
Colvin said: “One day, when peace comes, if I am still living, I will come back here and we will talk of this.”
He went back to the wire and the farmer recrossed it on the sail; Colvin regained the sail with some difficulty and went back to the shore. It struck him then that he had never learned the farmer’s name.
Ten minutes later he was in the water again, swimming to the dimly seen boat, towing the oars behind him by a cord around his shoulders. It was not a long swim, not much more than a hundred yards, and that now to him was nothing, helped by his Mae West. Before he reached the boat he saw another one, a little to the west.
He climbed into the boat and examined it. It was about twelve feet long and heavily built; it was fouled with sea-gull manure and seemed very old. There was a little water in the bottom of it and there was a cigarette tin at the stern, evidently used for bailing. A stout chain over the bows, with a padlock, held it to the mooring.
He dropped into the water again and swam over to the other one, but that was in a worse condition than the first, and he swam back again.
It was not much of a boat to cross the Channel in, but it would have to do. He pulled himself into it and then, cold in the wind, he set to sawing through the mooring chain. The wind was still in the south-east, and freshening.
Presently the chain parted quietly in his hand. He made it fast with a bit of cod-line, and then considered his position. He had oars and thole-pins, and a piece of canvas that he hoped would make a sail. He had no food or water; he had not attempted to bring any since he had to swim out to the boat. He was wet to the skin, and his boat was very old. Probably she would leak like a sieve.
“I pretty near chucked it up,” he said to me from the bed. “But then I thought that if the Jerries got me I’d be shot, as like as not, ’n if that was to happen I’d be better off at sea. And so I went.”
What he did was this: The wind was very nearly fair to carry the boat out to sea into the Four Channel. He dropped into the water again with very little buoyancy in his Mae West, and, swimming, tried to push the boat towards the south. The wind took her and he worked on her, ready to duck round to the other side of her if any firing started up. But no fire was opened on him, and no light came. He slid past the rocks of Kermorvan, fifty yards clear, and the wind carried him out into the rocky channel.
The tide was running very strongly to the southwards round the land, and the wind was southerly. The boat spun round and round in a heavy tide rip; he had great difficulty in getting into her. When he was in her the motion was so violent that he had
difficulty in rowing, and in an hour he was carried south nearly to Pointe St.-Mathieu. But by that time he was about two miles off the land.
Then, with the moonrise, the tide turned and the wind veered more to the south, and began to blow quite hard. Rowing north before it he was carried up to Le Four at a great speed; he could not judge exactly where he was, but he was probably off Le Four at about three in the morning.
There were still three or four hours of darkness before him. He had stopped once or twice to bale out with the cigarette tin, but the leaks were not too bad. He now stopped rowing, and bent about half the area of canvas that he had to one of the oars as a sail, and stepped the oar at the bow thwart, and sailed on northwards, steering with the other oar over the stern.
“It was just dandy, that,” he said. “I went on a couple of hours that way, ’n if it hadn’t been for the weather I’d have felt like a million dollars.”
But the weather was against him. In the dark night he went rushing in his crazy little boat down the steep slopes of sea, with the water tumbling and crashing all around him and a high crest raised behind him overhead that threatened to fall down upon him and engulf him. Then, at the bottom of the trough, his clumsy vessel would broach to and need the whole of his strength and skill upon the steering oar to get her straight again. While he was heaving and labouring she would rise sluggishly as the swell passed beneath her, and then forward once again in her mad rush.
“I was a durned fool,” he said weakly. “But I wanted to get right clear of the coast before the day. And then I broke the oar.”
Struggling to get her straight after one of those rushes, he put too much weight upon his steering oar, and it broke off at the worn part by the thole-pin. He grabbed for the blade and missed it as it floated from him; then she had broached to and in the dim light a wave crest towered above him and crashed down.
“Lucky she didn’t turn clean over,” he observed. “Durned lucky.”
He did the only thing; he threw himself down in the water on her flooded bottom boards. A swamped boat with the weight well down in her seldom turns over, and in a minute or two he got the oar down that had served him as a mast. And sitting so, up to his neck in water as she rode over each swell, he set to
work to get her free of water, first by rocking her and then by scooping out the water with his folded canvas. Time after time she filled again just as he thought to get a little freeboard showing, but in the end he won. The first light of dawn found him sitting on the bottom boards of the lightened boat, bailing down the water that he sat in with the cigarette tin.
“It was blowing pretty near a gale by that time, from about south-west,” he said. “I reckoned that I’d better stay down, lying in the bilge, ’n let her go.”
In that weather it was all that he could do, and the safest course, but there was another side to it. He was still very near to the French coast. An open boat with a man rowing or sailing it northwards would be an obvious target for machine-gun fire from any German aeroplane. But a boat drifting in a rough sea with a body lying motionless in the bottom of it was a common sort of sight; the German gunner might well think of the labour of cleaning his guns when he got home again before he fired on a thing like that.
He stayed down like that all day, numb and soaked and bailing every now and then with his tin. Towards evening he got up on the thwart, thinking to try to sail again, but the motion when he raised the oar was so sluggish and alarming that he quickly struck his mast again, and slipped down on the bottom boards. “She went easily that way,” he said. “With any weight up top, she wasn’t so good.”
The wind in the Channel was about Force 7 that night, south-west, and the temperature about 38 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit. The wind kept up all the next day and the following night, but it grew gradually colder.
“I thought I was done for,” he said simply. “Days ’n days, and each day worse and colder than the last.”
All of us may one day have to face that sort of thing. It had never come to me, nor has done yet, but I was curious to know what the threshold of death looks like. “Did you think about things much?” I asked. “Or was it kind—of numb?”
“I didn’t seem to have no control,” he said. “Half the time I was blubbering like a kid.”
“Because you knew that you were for it?” I said gently.
“Oh shucks, if wasn’t that. It was Junie’s watch. She bought it with her own money ’n give it me, back in San Diego. It was the only thing I had of hers, and it was stopped and spoilt, with the water all in it.”
The sick-bay steward came in for the second time, and I got
up to go. “Don’t worry about that,” I said. “I’ll have it cleaned for you.”
I travelled back to London that afternoon, and went straight to my office. There was a note there asking me to ring McNeil as soon as I came in; I picked up the telephone and spoke to him at once.
“Is that Martin?” he said. “I’ve got a bit of news for you from the other side. Two messages.”
“I’ve got a bit for you,” I said. “I’ve seen Colvin. He’s in Haslar Hospital.” I told him very shortly how he had been picked up.
“That’s fine,” he said. “Look, would you like me to come round to you?”
“No, I’ll come to you,” I said. “I’ve got to go out anyway. I’ll be with you in half an hour.”