Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2019 20:38:42 +0000 (UTC) From: Peter Brown Subject: Queen Mary Bell Boys Chapter 135 Queen Mary Bell-boys by badboi666 =============================================================================== If sex with boys isn't your thing, go away. If, as is much more likely, you've come to this site precisely to get your rocks off reading about sex with 14-year-olds then make yourself comfortable - you're in the right place. Don't leave, however, without doing this: Donate to Nifty - these buggers may do it for love but they still have to eat. http://donate.nifty.org/donate.html =============================================================================== Chapter 135 We stayed there holding each other for ages. Gradually the sea eased and by 1300 the mess on the deck stopped sliding about and people started the business of clearing up. People spoke more loudly than they usually did - there was almost a festive air, but it was brittle. No-one said it out loud but we all knew we had come within an inch of death. "Come on," said Charlie, "let's get thus place cleared up. Being busy is what we need right now." We both got up to see the chaos that the galley had become. Others were returning to normality as well. By 1500 we'd got the broken stuff piled in a corner ready to be shovelled into sacks. Most of us were frantically preparing something - anything - we could feed the GIs, because we knew that when they stopped feeling groggy lots of them would suddenly feel famished as most of them hadn't eaten for 24 hours or more. The queue had already built up by then, so we went onto automatic pilot. Most of us cooked and a dozen or so of us doled out food. It wasn't the greatest menu we gave them, but they were even more relieved to be alive than we were, and no-one complained. There was no shift arrangement as there usually was - we just kept on cooking and serving until the queue dried up. I was almost asleep on my feet when the last GI collected his tray and went to join his mates to eat. Ryan came out from the galley. "Well done, you lot," he said, "we've fed over 11,000 in under nine hours." I had no idea of the time - it was 0100. I'd been on duty for 24 hours, and Charlie nearly as long. Ryan sent us all below. "Tomorrow - well, no, the rest of today - will be catch-up, and we'll feed them the best we can. Normal mealtimes from the next day." Charlie and I went to the cabin where we found Sam and Tim in bed, but not asleep. Although I'd been exhausted 15 minutes earlier I was suddenly awake and desperate to hear how they had been when we nearly went over. Tim, lucky sod, had been in the cabin, but had fallen out of bed. No harm had been done, but he confessed to being scared. Sam, up on the Bridge, had seen it happen. A freak wave almost 100 feet high had come from nowhere and caught us broadside. We had rolled 52 degrees according to the instruments. Long afterwards we learned that the experts reckoned that if we'd rolled 55 degrees we'd have gone over, and that would have been that. "What did you see?" "Just this wall of grey water coming right at us. There were big waves coming from all directions, and had been since we hit the storm, but this one was far bigger than the others. None of us had seen anything like it, and I hope to God we never see another one." That night, as luck would have it, all eight of us were off watch. The session in the beer cabin was memorable. We all had to relate our own terrifying experience, although none of us could have said why. It was a need far deeper than 'wow! I had this scary thing today' - it was more a conviction that by saying it out loud we would each put the terror in a box: not hidden, but at least confined. Javid and Prince had been off watch but had decided to sleep in the same bed, much as Charlie, Sam and Tim had done. They had been unlucky in their choice of bed, however, and when the wave hit the ship she rolled them out of bed altogether, flying across the cabin to land on the other bed in a mess of tangled limbs and, in Prince's case, a marvellous black eye where Javid's elbow had landed a direct hit. By the time they had picked themselves up the ship had resumed rolls of merely 30 degrees, so they just got back into the right bed again and tried to go back to sleep. Sleep had not returned and, in its absence, post-shock reaction made itself known. As Javid told us, "it was like being a little boy again. Each of us gradually realized he was frightened, and each of us tried to be a big strong man to comfort the other. It was sweet." Prince smiled his enigmatic smile. "And after a little while we each remembered what big strong men like to do with boys on Queen Mary." Tim and Sam were aghast. "You don't mean ...?" Javid nodded. "And the memory of terror made it the best fuck either of us had in months." Nigel and Graham looked miffed. "With each other, he means," said Prince. Neither Nigel nor Graham had crowned their experience with sex. The wireless room, being small, provided plenty of things for Nigel to hold onto as the ship rolled, and while they weren't flung around in there the four of them were, like Sam on the Bridge, high up in the ship and therefore whipping from side to side much more than anyone down in the lowest decks like Javid and Prince. Graham had been in the engine room, also relatively free from the effect of rolling, and had had the unnerving experience of seeing one of his mates crash across the deck, breaking both legs. "It was horrible," he said, "he was screaming in agony and none of us could get to him to stop him sliding around. It was half a minute before they could reach him to hold him while someone got a stretcher." As we told our stories and drank our beer it slowly dawned on us just how close each of us had been to death, whether by reasonably quick drowning or by long-drawn agonized fear-filled death by starvation or worse. Couples naturally cuddled each other as the beer relaxed us. Tears were shed. Love was declared, together with murmured injunctions that lovers should not leave each other. Ever. ***** When we arrived in Gourock late in 1943 I found a letter waiting for me in the port office. Addressed simply to "Patrick Mulloy, crew member of RMS Queen Mary" it was the first letter I'd had since joining the ship over seven years earlier. As soon as I went off duty I rushed down to the cabin and opened it. "Dear Patrick "I have no idea how long it will take for this to reach you - it's now May 1943. I don't know if you know, but my lovely Alan was killed two years ago today. He was on Hood. I remember how excited we all were when she escorted us home in 1939 - it was that which really persuaded us to volunteer for the RN. Needless to say we were split up, and he went to Hood. I don't know why they sent me to a smaller ship - I'm still serving on her - 'she was first and the rest nowhere'. I miss him every day even though plenty of other friends have gone since TCH fucked us all up. I hope you and Charlie and all the others are safe on our old home. "I am feeling sad - no, ashamed would be better - about something my ship and a load of others were involved in last year. We've been escorting convoys in very cold waters (I can't say more, but you can work it out) for some time. Usually we meet them in a loch near where Charlie comes from - he'll know it - but the time I'm telling you about we were further away. It was an almighty fuck-up. All our ships were ordered to run away and the poor bastards in the merchant ships were told to scatter and do their best. It was horrible. Most of them were sunk because we - the ones with guns who were there to protect them - were ordered away. I tell you, when we heard about it the whole fucking crew were horrified. What's the point of having the bloody RN if we're not allowed to do our job. Alan got killed, but he got killed doing what he signed up for. The poor sods in the merchant ship were sitting ducks and they hadn't signed up for that. There - I needed to get that off my chest. This is a happy ship most of the time. But the shame's still there. I don't think any of us will get over it. I hope when all this is over we can get together again. I want all of us to drink to Alan. "Until then, dear Patrick - I love you all and miss you hugely. Kiss Charlie and the others for me. "Love, Andrew" As soon as I could I showed it to the others. We were all shocked to hear about Alan. We'd known about Hood blowing up - news gets around at sea - and the only comfort was that, as Tim put it, "at least the poor sod died quickly". Small comfort, but nevertheless a real one. Thousands of men must have died slowly and horribly at sea since then. "What does he mean in the second paragraph?" said Graham. Charlie guessed that if there were convoys going from a loch near Durness into cold waters they must have been headed to Russia, as there wasn't anywhere else up there apart from Norway, and that was occupied by TCH. "What is the bit he put in inverted commas? It must be a clue to the name of his ship," said Sam. Rack our brains as we might, it meant nothing to any of us. "It can't be a capital ship - that would be first and the rest nowhere - because he says he's on a smaller ship than Hood," said Tim. More head-scratching got us nowhere. When Prince and Javid came off duty they couldn't shed any light either. Nor could Nigel when he came down from the radio room at midnight. "See if your chums upstairs know anything more about Hood and this fucked-up convoy," I said. "If you tell them one of our shipmates was involved they might tell you things they shouldn't." To my surprise it took Nigel only two days to unlock the secrets. Hood had been sunk by Bismarck and Bismarck herself had been sunk a few days later - that we knew because it had been widely celebrated. We didn't know the details, nor would we until after the end of the War. A freak shell from Bismarck did for Hood in exactly the same way some of our ships had blown up at the Battle of Jutland in 1916. We all shuddered, glad that if Queen Mary was carrying vast amounts of ammunition at least it would be quick, like poor Alan. The convoy thing was much less clear, but the radio men had picked up that we were sending arms and supplies to Russia, and that the merchant ships got together in a convoy guarded by naval ships. Someone had fucked up and the thing had gone badly wrong, as Andrew had described. The radio men had asked Nigel why he was curious and I'd agreed to let them see Andrew's letter: it didn't bother me that they knew the intimacy of Andrew's (and our) relationships. They told Nigel that they understood that the system had changed and that although running convoys to Russia was still dangerous it wasn't suicidal any more. The 'she was first' puzzle was cleared up too. Spike read the letter and immediately said "Eclipse". Pressed to explain he said that Eclipse had been a racehorse of such prodigious speed that the expression was always used. "Never beat, not once," he said. "Your pal must be on a ship called Eclipse. Clever of him to find a way of telling you." Spike, it seemed, was a treasure trove of racing lore, and he confessed to Nigel that betting on horses ("not that there's any bloody racing going on") was that about which he felt most deprived by Nazi Germany. "Have you bet on Eclipse?" asked Nigel. Spike laughed. "Eclipse has been dead for over 150 years. Never been a horse like him though." "What's this TCH?" asked Herbert. "Can't you guess," said Nigel, "who's fucked all our lives up?" "Hitler ... oh, I get it. Clever." Needless to say the knowledge about which ship Andrew was serving on did nothing to reassure us about his well-being. It wasn't until well after the War was over that I learned that Eclipse had been sunk by a mine in the Aegean in October 1943, a mere three days before I got Andrew's letter. Over 100 of the crew had been killed, Andrew among them. On Queen Mary, however, we knew nothing of this, and just went on hoping. George, Vincent, Phil, Gus - how many others we had known and loved were dead? ***** Looking back, that crossing in July 1943 was the most dramatic episode of our war. We carried hundreds of thousands of young men to war, thousands of whom wouldn't come home. When it was over - Germany, that is, we started the long process of bringing them back. At least there were no U-boats, and it was summer, so for those returning to the USA much of the time was spent out on deck. We quickly got into a routine of dividing the GIs into three groups, with one group sleeping out on the open deck if the sea allowed - which that year it generally did. On our fourth or fifth westward voyage, late in August 1945, I saw a face I thought I knew lining up for food. As he got closer, filling his tray with food, I became more convinced that, despite the years that had passed and whatever had befallen him since D-Day, I was right. When he got to me (I was doling out big wedges of apple pie) he looked at me. "Hi, Jakey," I said, "come back and talk when you're done," and the pressure from behind of his fellow GIs anxious for apple pie bore him away before he could reply. It was 15 minutes before he appeared again. The queue was still solid, so I called to him through the line. "Can you stay here for a while?" He nodded, a huge smile on his face, and he went back to wherever he'd been sitting. I wondered what he would tell his friends. The queue showed no sign of thinning, so after another 15 minutes I said to the guy next to me, "I have to go off for a while - I'll get one of the others to take my place." He nodded - this wasn't unusual. Even experienced galley staff have to piss (or worse) occasionally. I put my head round the galley door and asked someone to cover for me. Within a minute apple pie was being distributed as smoothly as before. I'd watched where Jakey had gone, and went over to his table. There were five others, none of them familiar. "Hi Jakey," I said again, "nice to see you again," and I sat down. Jakey introduced me. "This is Patrick - he works on Queen Mary and he and his friends first met us in Kingston way back in '36." I don't remember any of their names: I was just so pleased to see Jakey again, Jakey now nine years older than the slim sexy adventurous 13-year-old I'd fucked in another life. This Jakey was wiry, tanned, war-weary and just as fuckable as he'd been then. But was he as keen? How to find out? I'd have to get him on his own, or at least get him away from his pals. Dull conversation ought to do it. "Well, Jakey, how are Rueben and Sarah? I bet they've been worried about you. And Esau? Is he on the ship?" "I'd forgotten how many questions you ask, Patrick. In order - don't know, don't know, no. I haven't heard from home for over six months, but I sent a wire a week ago saying I was on my way home. Esau's still in Germany, but he's OK." As I'd hoped all this questing for facts proved boring for the five whose names I'd already forgotten, and they got up to go. "See you around, Jakey, don't fall off." "Yeah guys, I need to catch up with ole P here." When they'd gone he relaxed. "It's good to see you, man," he said, "how's it with you?" "I'm on duty 12 hours a day," I said, "but there's seven other guys who'd like to see you. You're not supposed to go below decks to our cabins, but who's to know if you do, provided no-one sees you. Are you free to move about the ship, or do you have to be in the one place?" He said that provided he got off with the right guys at the right time no-one gave a damn about where he was or what he did. "And if they did I'd tell 'em to fuck themselves. The war's over." "OK, " I said, "I get off at 1900 today. Can you be in here, at this table, then?" He nodded. I got up to resume apple pie responsibility. "See you then, Jakey." He stood up and it was natural that we both hugged. We were two young men who'd survived the war, after all. ***** At 1905 I went over to where Jakey was sitting. He got up. "Come on," I said. The two of us went down into parts of the ship strictly off-limits to him and the other hundreds of thousands of GIs we'd carried. On the way down I told him that he was only the second GI to be invited down. "Oh yeah - who was the other?" "A colonel who died in the Pacific, so you're treading pretty special ground, Jakey." I stopped once we'd got into the no-go area. "I need to ask, Jakey. Are you still into the kind of things we used to do? If you're not, that's fine - we'll have a few beers and talk about the war and everything. If you're still a queer boy like the rest of us we'll have a few beers and talk about the war and everything and then one or two of us will fuck your brains out - or you can fuck our brains out - you're our guest, after all. What's it to be?" Jakey smiled. "I like the sound of beer," he said, "as for the rest, why don't we do both?" =============================================================================== The fun continues in Chapter 136 as Jakey renews some old acquaintances. The photographs in Queen Mary 2 are real. I saw them while making a transatlantic crossing in 2017, and the boy I describe as "me" is really cute. I'm sure he had adventures ... The July 1943 episode is factually correct as to the degree of list. It formed the basis, albeit with those extra few degrees, of Paul Gallico's novel "The Poseidon Adventure". It's referenced at https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/wwii/voyages-to-victory-rms-queen-marys-war-service/ I will be reacquainting myself with these pictures in Queen Mary 2 when I make another pair of Atlantic crossings in April. There will be a three-week pause in the wartime adventures of our eight friends - or perhaps their post-war escapades: who knows how quickly the story will develop. Drop me a line at badboi666@btinternet.com - that is after you've dropped nifty a few quid. =============================================================================