Explore "An Awfully Big Adventure" by Bartimeus on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
We had been back at the Grand Fleet Base nearly a fortnight, and leave had slipped into the limbo of the past. The usual after-effects of a spell at a dockyard were beginning to be apparent: the married men were cheering up and the bachelors were showing feverish interest in the mails. We had a racing cutter in training and a gunnery programme under way that Guns vowed was going to bring him in grey hairs and sorrow to the grave. Then one busy morning when I had mapped out a nice little programme for myself, the Boatswain and the Captain of the Side going round the ship in a skiff, the Skipper sent for me in the after-cabin.
"Hornby," he said, "what are your plans for the future? " I stared at him a bit. I'd only been promoted three years, and I wasn't worrying about a Command. I felt I was doing pretty good work where I was, and the ship, though perhaps I say it what shouldn't, didn't figure badly in the Squadron Returns. However, I decided he was contemplating a change of Commanders and was sorry, because he was a White Man.