One Pip Instead Of Two Toots

 

I promised another extract from Signal. This is another story about the Royal Navy's need for comms discipline, and the lengths to which they would act to protect it. This time, instead of chummy telegraphists sending each other messages on the back of official signals, we have a solitary one, onboard a vessel or at a shore station so far down the hierarchy of importance that although present every time his network controller carried out a scheduled call up of his correspondents, our poor hero never once had a signal to send. So one day …  

A nondescript nonentity, a limb of the oppressed,

I wear no badges on my arm, no medals on my chest,

But though my past is colourless, my future dim and bleak,

I cherish a distinction which is probably unique.

Of all the mass of traffic through the tortured ether hurled,

By all the busy Tels of all the navies of the world,

No morse of mine impinged upon a fellow sparker's ear;

I never sent a signal in the whole of my career.

 

I used to wonder meekly when control would let me in

To add my little quota to the universal din.

Then realised my destiny, surrendered to my fate,

Eternally to sit and serve by being told to wait.

 

But once - and only once - I found my baser self constrained

To break the wireless silence I so rigidly maintained.

My weary watch was over, my relief was overdue,

I gently, briefly, pressed the key to see what it would do.

 

I often sit and wonder where that blameless dot has gone,

If still through endless time and space it hurries bravely on,

Disowned by its creator, and dismissed its parent ship,

Unauthorised, attenuated, lonely little pip.

 

But though beyond our universe its travels may extend,

It still will bear my fingerprints on reaching journey's end

And beings in some unknown world may trace it back to me,

As surely as the Flagship did in 1943.