Their example and teaching were the moulds into which, year by year, the molten metal of the Navy’s officer-personnel was poured, thence to be scattered about the seven seas, tempered by winds and stress, and, in God’s good time, tested to the uttermost.
Ashore, on the playing fields or across the red ploughland at the tails of the beagles, they laboured in close intimate fellowship with these atoms of clay thrust by providence beneath their thumbs. But on board it seemed they faded from ken, being rarely seen save at classes and musters, or when in pairs the Term percolated through the wardroom for dessert, plastered as to the hair, patent leather shod, to sip and cough over a glass of ambrosial port at either elbow of their Lieutenant.
Seeing and unseen, knowing their Terms as only men who spend their lives among men can know and understand the embryo, they were the guiding invisible wisdom behind the Cadet Captains, who outwardly ruled the decks.
The Cadet Captains were chosen from the three senior Terms, set apart from their fellows by the fact that they wore “standup” collars and a triangular gold badge on the left cuff.
Minor Authority in other guises was greeted much the same as it is in all communities of boyhood. The platitudes of notice boards no fellow with his heart in the right place could be expected to remember over well. The acknowledged sway of instructors and masters was largely a matter of knowing to a nicety how far an adventurous spirit could go (in the realms of Science and Freehand Drawing it was a long way) before the badgered pedagogue turned and bit. Terms paid strict allegiance to their own Chief Petty Officers. But, as has already been shown, this was an affair of the heart and the sentiments. He was theirs, and they were his: thus it had been from the beginning.
There was, however, one voice that rarely repeated an order, one court from which appeal, if possible, was undreamed of—that of the Cadet Captain. Their rule was without vexatious tyranny, but it was an iron rule. The selection of these Cadet Captains was done carefully, and mistakes were few. The standard of the whole was no mean one, and for three months the Lieutenant of the First Term had been studying the raw material, working with it, playing with it, talking to it—or rather listening while it talked to him.... Thus Cadet Captains were chosen, and the queer eager loyalty with which the rest paid them allegiance was the first stirring of the quickened Naval Spirit, foreshadowing that strange fellowship to be, brotherhood of discipline and control, of austerity and a half-mocking affectionate tolerance.
To the Cadet Captains perhaps can be attributed the passage, almost untarnished through the years, of the Britannia traditions. They were concerned, these youthful Justices of the Peace, with more than the written law. It they enforced right enough, but with a tolerance one might expect of fifteen summers administering the foibles and rules of fifty. On the other hand, did a “new” unbutton a single button of his monkey jacket, a “Three” deign to swing his keys, a “Sixer” to turn up his trousers or tilt his cap on the back of his head (the prerogative of the “Niner” or Fourth Term), and Nemesis descended upon him ere he slept that night. Nemesis, by virtue of its unblemished character and the favour its triangular badge found in the eyes of the gods, was allowed to turn in half an hour after the remainder. It occupied itself during this time in guzzling cocoa and biscuits smeared with strawberry jam, provided for its delectation by the authorities—though the cost was said to be defrayed by the parents of the common herd relegated to hammocks and the contemplation of this orgy out of one drowsy though envious eye.
Biscuits finished, Nemesis would draw from his pocket a knotted “togie” of hemp, and, having removed traces of jam from his features, proceed to administer summary justice in the gloom where the hammocks swung.
It was of course grossly illegal and stigmatised by the authorities as “a pernicious system of private and unauthorised punishments.” But the alternative was open to any who cared to appeal to Cæsar. Appealing to Cæsar meant spending subsequent golden afternoons on the parade ground, swinging a heavy bar bell to the time of “Sweet Dreamland Faces” blared out on a cornet by a bored bandsman.