The Cruise of The Breadwinner by H.E. Bates

thing in a little ship, had not been hit.
    â€œWe’ve had it,” he said.
    â€œHad what?” Gregson said. “Whadya mean? What’s up?”
    The boy crawled out of the hole, suddenly tired, his knees and hands black with oil which he wiped thoughtlessly over his face and in streaks across his almost white hair.
    â€œWe’ve had the engine,” the boy said. “That’s what. Cannon shell.”
    Gregson lifted his enormous face, swelling the creases of his great neck until they were blown with anger.
    â€œWhy’n’t they bleedin’ well sink us? Why’n’t they bleedin’ well sink us and have done?”
    The boy, hearing the wind rising now with the sound of rain on deck, was sharply aware of a new crisis.
    â€œWhat do we do now?” he said. He was aware that things might, without the engine, be very tough, very desperate. He licked his lips and tasted the sickliness of oil on them. “What do we do now?”
    â€œGitta us a cuppa tea,” Gregson roared. “Gitta us a cuppa tea!”
    He bawled and raged up the companionway into the beating rain.

Chapter 5
    The english pilot opened his eyes with a sharp blink, as if he had been lost in a dream and the boy had startled him out of it into the cramped and gloomy world of the little cabin. Messner still lay with eyes closed, his face turned away. The only light in the cabin was froma single skylight, about a yard square, of opaque glass, over which rain had already thrown a deeper film. In this iron-grey light the pilot looked on the boy as he might have looked on a shape moulded vaguely out of the shadows: as something that moved and had the tangibility of a face, but as otherwise without identity. He regarded the boy also as if there was nothing he could do or wanted to do to change or sharpen his shadowiness. His eyes had dropped deeper into the bruised sockets of his face. As they gazed upwards and followed with reactions that were never quite swift enough the movements of the boy they had on them the same lightless film as the skylight above.
    It was some time before he could see clearly enough through the stupor of weakness to grasp that the boy was busy with an object that looked like a torch. This torch, though the boy held it upwards, towards the skylight, and downwards and sideways, towards himself and Messner, never seemed to light. He expected it to flash into his face, but after the boy had swivelled it round two or three times he found himself dazed by angry irritation against it. It became part of the pain buried centrally, like a deep hammer blow, just above his eyes and extending, in a savage cord, to the base of his spine.
    â€œWhat the hell are you doing?” he said.
    The boy was surprised not by the abruptness of the voice but by its softness. It seemed like a voice from a long way off. It made him feel slightly guilty.
    â€œNot much,” he said.
    â€œPut that torch down,” the pilot said. “Don’t wave it about.”
    â€œNot a torch,” the boy said. “Pair of glasses.”
    â€œGlasses?”
    â€œBinoculars. The German’s. I found them on deck.”
    â€œOh,” the pilot said.
    â€œCan’t make them work,” the boy said. “Everything looks wrong.”
    â€œLet me look at them,” the pilot said. “They ought to be good, German binoculars.”
    He held his hands upward, weakly, without extending his arms, and the boy bent down and gave him the glasses. He let them lie on his chest for some moments and the boy saw it heaving deeply, as if the movement of reaching for the glasses had exhausted him. It seemed quite a long time before he slowly lifted them to his face. Then when he held them there it was without doing anything with them. His hands did not move on the adjustment screws. He rested the eyepieces lightly against the deep sockets of his eyes and simply held them there without a word, in what seemed a