The Cruise of The Breadwinner by H.E. Bates Page B

git two engines. Not one. We oughta gittwo fourteen-horse engines, instead of one eighteen-horse, so’s if one goes, we got a spare.”
    â€œAnd supposin’ both go?”
    â€œIt ain’t likely.”
    â€œNo, it ain’t likely. And it ain’t likely I’ll git the money either. Where’s the money coming from?”
    â€œGit the Government to pay it! They got plenty. They throw it about enough, don’t they? Git them to pay it. We’re on government work, ain’t we?”
    There were times when Gregson pushed his belly tight against the wheel and held it savagely there and did not answer, and he did it most often when Jimmy talked about the Government. Gregson did not care for the Government. The Government was some huge, anonymous, thwarting, stingy, stinking body empowered to frustrate the lives of ordinary men. Gregson felt for it a more positive enmity than he felt for any living person, enemy or friend. “Don’t talk about no bloody government to me.”
    â€œWell, don’t say I ain’t told yer. One o’ these fine days we’ll get out there, forty miles from nowhere, and she’ll go dead on you. And then what?”
    â€œAnd then what?” Gregson roared. “What the bleedin’ hell d’ye think wind and sail is for?”
    Gregson stuck his belly harder than ever against the wheel, holding on with both hands, and was silent, looking at the day. Behind him he could see now the coast of England becoming slowly more coloured in the blue-orange light of morning, with low clean stretches of deserted sand marked as far as he could see with what looked like the rusty stitchery of steel defences, and farther east the sun rising dark red over the terraced and almost all empty white and crimson houses that lay under the line of hills. It was from these hills, becoming still further eastward cliffs thatcame down to the sea like the carved edges of creamy glaciers, that Gregson saw the first patrol of the day.
    â€œSnowy!”
    â€œYeh?”
    â€œPlanes!”
    The boy Snowy came bouncing on deck like a blonde and excited rabbit surprised out of a hole, carrying a tea-cup in one hand and blinking friendly blue eyes against the strong sea-light. He looked no more than seventeen, his white-yellow hair blown forward by the wind in one thick swathe over his face as he turned to gaze at the land.
    â€œBunch o’ Spits, ain’t they, Snowy?” Gregson said.
    â€œHurricanes.”
    Gregson did not speak. The boy knew everything; there was no arguing with the boy. Gregson believed that if an entirely new and undocumented plane had come out of the Arctic the boy would have given it a name. The boy knew everything that flew, and a lot, Gregson thought, that had not yet begun to fly. He named them while they were still gnats on the horizon. He could name them at twenty thousand feet, and sometimes by mere sound, not seeing them at all. Without him Gregson would have been utterly lost;
The Breadwinner
could never have done a single patrol.
    â€œLooks like a nice day, anyway,” Gregson said, as if that at least were something he could understand.
    The boy stood watching the squadron of Hurricanes resolve itself out of the east. It came straight over the cliffs, in two flights line astern, with straight and fine precision, quite slow, wings shining in the sun, as if each aircraft were tied by an invisible string to the other, and then turned westward to follow the line of shore. The noise of engines was never loud enough to drown the noise of
The Breadwinner’s
single auxiliary, but it was loud and beautiful enough to bring the engineer-gunner on deck.
    â€œHurricanes,” Gregson said, before the boy could open his mouth.
    â€œSteady, steady. They might be Spits,” Jimmy said.
    â€œAh, Spits your old woman,” Gregson said. “Use your eyes.
    â€œOne missing,” the boy said. “Man