Sailing The Cruel Sea Again, in a Left-Wing Way

A few months ago I caught the beginning of a BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of ‘the Cruel Sea’, Nicholas Monsarrat’s masterpiece about the battle of the Atlantic. It had a strange agitprop tone to it that I didn’t quite like. Having seen the excellent film version, starring Jack Hawkins and Donald Sinden, more times than I care to remember, and having read the book twice, I searched my shelves for my dog-eared copy, but failed to find it. Last week, searching for something else entirely, I tracked it down.

By that time, alas, the BBC had removed the recording of the serialisation from their website, so I can’t transcribe the oddly leftist voiceover introduction which I recall from March. But I can provide you with this quotation from the Radio 4 website

‘But this isn't just a war story. In a surprisingly subtle way, The Cruel Sea also chronicles the often abrasive process by which classes, previously unknown to each other, were thrown together onboard ship and had to learn to rub along - and how the earned respect, in the long term, led to the future Welfare State and the social equity and cooperation of the 50's and 60's.’

To which I can only reply ‘Oh, yeah?’ And ‘so subtle that it isn’t there’.  This is the second beloved book to which something of the sort has been done – a recent TV adaptation of ‘Goodbye Mr Chips’ turned the rock-ribbed conservative Chips into a sort of Guardian reader before his time. I have one piece of advice to the culprits of such adaptations. Find your own books. Leave ours alone. But of course the Cultural Revolution was bound to start changing the past once it had won.

Monsarrat’s book, at least the first three-quarters of it up to the sinking of HMS Compass Rose, the third major character in the story,  is not as described by the BBC. The last quarter isn’t, either, being a rather messy series of half-developed plotlines including an ambiguous interlude in the USA  and a love affair which I have often thought the publishers urged Monsarrat to insert, and which in the end he ruthlessly kills off, and I mean kills off. The only real love in the book is the entirely non-sexual comradeship between Ericson, the Captain,  and Lockhart, his First Lieutenant, forged in combat and peril.

Monsarrat was a very clever man, but I don’t think he cared much about politics at that stage in his life. Later on, he seemed pretty conservative to me. I doubt if his two novels about Africa could even be published now (I read them, in slightly foxed ancient hardbacks, found in a back bedroom of  a rented house in Deep France many years ago. I’d never seen them in an English bookshop , library or bookshelf, and I haven’t seen them since, either. Put it like this. They are not keen endorsements of post-colonial African rule).

The only overt politics I could ever find in ‘the Cruel Sea’ were a few vague unformed thoughts about how Britain’s politicians hadn’t prepared for a war that was obviously coming; the contrast between the underpaid sailors, fighting at all hours against submarines and filthy weather, and the dockyard workers on much higher wages, stopping work the moment the whistle blew and playing cards when they should have been working; and some sour reflections on American culture, America’s attitude to the war and America’s capacity to take over as the world’s leading power (mingled with some very friendly thoughts on the generosity of individual Americans) .

The core of the book is simply an unsparing account of war in a disciplined service, and its effects on men.  It concentrates on the officers, because Monsarrat was an officer. But it does not by any means ignore the Navy’s equivalent of NCOs (Petty Officers) or other ranks (Able Seamen). There is plenty about Chief Engine Room Artificer Watts, and petty Tallow, not to mention (see below) poor Able Seaman Gregg.  We had in our house, during my childhood,  a ‘Cadet Edition’  of the book (my brother always used to remark meaningfully that he had never heard of any other book that had a ‘cadet edition’, and I think he was right, though it seems quite reasonable to me to have done this, as long as the original stayed on sale), fit for perusal by schoolboys in the late fifties and early sixties.  It wasn’t that different from the film. But my, it is different from the full version.

Several scenes weren’t fit for ‘cadets’. Here are some : the full, squalid extent of the  betrayal of Sub-Lieutenant Morell by his ruthless actress wife (who turns out to be more or less a prostitute, but only with the officer class, as revealed in a shocking scene when Ericson visits her to console her on her husband’s death  in action); the horrible adultery (portrayed here perhaps more savagely and graphically than I have ever seen, and quite lacking in the standard novelist’s sympathy for the poor trapped woman yearning to breathe free)  which causes Able Seaman Gregg to go absent without leave.  The scene in which he finds his wife in the midst of her betrayal, in which no details are omitted, and the later moments when he tries to win her back, are almost too painful and disgusting to read. The description of the desolation caused by the German bombing of Liverpool is realistically bleak. The panic fear and shame of the young officer who develops gonorrhoea is drawn from the life.

But the most harrowing is the torpedoing of HMS Compass Rose, the howling desperation of the men trapped in the fo’c’sle, who know they will die and can do nothing about it, yet must also wait for death to come in a particularly horrible shape,  the ghastly detail of what happens to men who slide down the barnacled side of a foundering ship (their genitals are torn) , and the detailed accounts of several deaths, in at least one case involving a man who has always been good and kind dying in a shameful and terrible fashion, and in another involving a feral selfishness which fails to achieve its aim, seem to me to have been written from true personal accounts. The experience sends the already terrified Sub-Lieutenant Ferraby mad, and, weeks later, reduces even the hardened Lockhart to streams of tears as he attends a Myra Hess concert in the National Gallery.

I expect and hope I shall read it several more times before I die. It conjures into life the world my own father inhabited, which he never wanted to describe to me; and it opens a clear window into a Britain now gone, but which occupied the same streets, fields and skies as the one we now inhabit. And it illustrates with sour clarity that war is unspeakable, and never to be sought or willingly begun. Self-defence remains the only possible justification. But it is not about the Welfare State.