w of a Whitehall post office. It conjured up a vision of a roving,
care-free life . . . of illimitable spaces and great healing winds. . . .
A life of hard living and hard drinking, when a man could forget.

But somehow Nosey didn't forget.

* * * * *

The Navy received him without emotion. They cut his hair and pulled out
his teeth. They washed and clothed and fed him generously. He was
taught in a vast echoing drill-shed to recognise and respect authority,
and after six months' preliminary training informed that he was a
Second-class Stoker, and as such drafted to sea in the Battle-Cruiser
Squadron.

Here Nosey found himself an insignificant unit among nearly a thousand
barefooted, free-fisted, cursing, clean-shaven men, who smelt perpetually
of soap and damp serge, and comprised the lower-deck complement of a
British battle-cruiser.

He worked in an electric-lit, steel tunnel, with red-hot furnaces on one
side, and the gaping mouths of coal caverns on the other. You reached it
by perpendicular steel ladders descending through a web of hissing steam
pipes and machinery; once across greasy deck-plates and through a maze of
dimly lit alleys, you would find Nosey shovelling coal into the furnaces
under the direction of a hairy-chested individual afflicted, men said, by
religious mania, who sucked pieces of coal as an antidote to chronic
thirst, and spat about him indiscriminately.

There were eight-hour intervals in this work, during which Nosey slept or
ate his meals or played a mouth-organ in the lee of one of the
turret-guns on deck, according to the hour of the day. He slept in a
hammock slung in an electric-lit passage far below the water-line; the
passage was ten feet wide, and there were six hammocks slung abreast
along the entire length of it.

He ate his meals in a mess with twenty other men, the mess consisting of
a deal plank covered with oilcloth for a table, and two narrower planks
on either side as seats; there were shelves for crockery against the
ship's side. All this woodwork was scrubbed and scoured till it was
almost as white as ivory. Other messes, identical in every respect,
situated three feet apart, ranged parallel to each other as far as the
steel, enamelled bulkheads. 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, skylar