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it is rather splendid that everybody, everybody , should come to the same place to do their first basic training. All get their first encounter with the Navy at the same place and in the same way. But frankly, I think we have just about reached the limits of variety. We must be operating now just about at our limits.’
    That phrase ‘at our limits’ occurred again and again, as The Bodger went round the College. Everybody warmly and sincerely assured him they were now operating at their limits.
    ‘Of course, we’re operating just about at our limits here, sir,’ said the College helicopter flight commander, a very short, very tubby lieutenant commander with a bright red beard who, for some reason, was always called Buster. ‘Everybody has to take a two-day helo winching acquaint course and frankly, we’re pushed to get ‘em all in.’
    The Bodger had been watching a class, dressed in flying overalls and helmets, practising being winched up and down from a hovering helicopter. Each member of the class in turn stood underneath while the helicopter lowered a strop, like a giant padded hangman’s noose, down to him. He put the strop over his shoulders and under his armpits and then stood to attention. The wire tautened and drew him upwards towards the open helicopter doorway. After being hauled up just far enough to be able to swing and smash the bridge of his nose against the lower door sill coaming, each man was then rapidly lowered to earth again. With the roaring of the helicopter engine, the mighty rushing of winds from its rotors, and the mental associations of rescue and disaster when seeing a man dangling upon the strop, it was as exciting as watching the fire brigade at work.
    ‘Just about at our limits, sir,’ said Buster again. ‘But of course, it is much better that they all do helo winching for the first time out here on a nice sunny day at Dartmouth than on the casing of a submarine, say, in the dark, freezing cold, and blowing a gale somewhere north of the Arctic circle.’ Buster’s voice, expressions and gestures vividly pantomimed just how dark, freezing and generally uncomfortable and hazardous that experience was likely to be.
    ‘Must be,’ said The Bodger.
    ’Of course,’ said the College Bosun, who remembered The Bodger from his last time at the College, ‘we’re working right up to our limits here, you know, Bodger. The rate they bash the boats up, we’re pushed to get enough out on the river every day.’
    At the pontoon at Sandquay, boats were arriving and leaving with feverish speed, as though a film of a peaceful day out on the river had been speeded up several times. The tooting of whistles, the figures of the boats’ crews, the washing of the water, once again took The Bodger back to his own days as a cadet. The river was still, as ever, the most evocative part of Dartmouth. Occasionally, after the thudding and rubbing sounds of a boat coming alongside, there was a sharper, louder clunking as one boat met another. Voices were then raised. Hot words were exchanged, and hard words. Phrases such as ‘rule of the road’ and ‘port to port’ and ‘you clumsy bugger’ came floating across the busy waters.
    As The Bodger watched, he noticed a slackening of the tempo of river life. The water seemed to be emptying of boats. The sailing dinghies were being drawn up on the floating pontoon. The motor-cutters were being secured alongside the main jetty, and their crews were taking off their life-jackets. A large yacht secured to a buoy out in the stream was being abandoned by her crew, who were rowing themselves ashore in a rubber dinghy.
    ‘What’s happening, Bo?’
    ‘You might well ask, Bodger. They’re all going to play cricket, would you believe? Somebody somewhere up there,’ the Bosun raised his eyes disgustedly to the sky, ‘has decreed that they’re all going to play cricket this afternoon. We’ve got a hundred bods ready to take their proficiency tests, and they’re