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Updated: May 8, 2025
Later they filed on board, and were taken, each unit to its own mess-deck, to deposit their gear. Mac's own troop had just completed the disintegration of themselves and their kit and the satisfactory stowage of it, when it was discovered that they were in the wrong part of the ship.
"Singing 'I'm afraid to go home in the dark," interposed the India-rubber Man dryly. He got down off the table and stretched his arms. "Well, I shan't be sorry to get some sleep." "Sleep!" echoed Thorogood. "You ought to see the stokers' mess-deck. The watch-off have just come up from below after sixteen hours in the stokeholds.
Everybody was jolly that evening as we bowled along before the spanking breeze, fresh sail being set every watch, until the corvette was presently clothed in canvas from truck to keelson, the commodore wishing to take every advantage of the fair wind we had; but, though all the rest, sailor-like, were laughing and joking on the mess-deck forwards, I could not so soon forget the poor chap who had gone, his noble self- sacrifice being ever in my mind.
There were twenty men in each mess, and seventeen messes on that particular mess-deck, and here the members simultaneously ate, slept, sang, washed their clothes, cursed and laughed, skylarked or quarrelled all round during the waking hours of their watch-off. Still Nosey did not forget. Then came Janie's letter from the Middlesex Hospital. Janie was in a "decline."
Nosey returned to Portsmouth and his ship. His mess the mess-deck itself was agog with rumours. Had he heard the "buzz"? Nosey had not. "I bin to London to see a fren'," he explained. Then they told him. The battle-cruiser to which he belonged had been ordered to join the Mediterranean Fleet. That was Monday; they were to sail for Malta on Thursday. And Janie was dying in the Middlesex Hospital.
We took all necessary precautions, of course, but the Germans were very well behaved and gave us no trouble at all. They were a particularly fine and intelligent-looking lot of men, and presently, when the wounded had been attended to, our fellows were filling them up with food and cocoa on the mess-deck.
An operation was quite out of the question, and as the poor chap was obviously in great pain our Surgeon-Probationer put him in a hammock on the mess-deck and gave him morphia. Soon afterwards the skipper asked to be allowed to visit him, and when the Doc. next went forward he found him swabbing the patient's brow with icy cold water to bring him to! The Doc. was rather peevish about it.
The Quartermaster of the Morning Watch made a motion with an enormous freckled paw as if stroking an invisible kitten. "I ain't sayin' nothin' against 'em. Nothin' at all. What I says is, 'Wait an' see. I ain't a bettin' man, not meself. But if anyone was to fancy an even 'arf quid " The shrill whistle of the call-boy's pipe clove the babel of the crowded mess-deck.
"Pull away, ye divvle!" cried Mick. "One more stip, begorrah, an' we'll be landid on the dick!" "Shove up, you fellers below there!" shouted Finlayson, in response to this, to myself and another boy who had come forwards from the after part of the mess-deck to our assistance, but whose face I had not seen, from the fact of my back being turned to him. "Shove up, carn't you!
The sleepers, meanwhile, hearing unusual sounds of revelry, woke up to see a wild-looking animal seeking another victim, and thinking that Bostock's menagerie had broken loose, rose from their couches and stampeded for the mess-deck. The bear then waddled aft in search of further recreation, and seeing the curtained doorway of one of the upper deck cabins, promptly elbowed his way in.
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