S horter Notices THEY could.call her a Californian Bitch and grumble
at the box of tricks that was her machinery, but they got to love her : not least the Navigating Officer, who was secretly delighted when she broke down on the way over and Was ordered to proceed independently of the rest of the flotilla. He got his chance to show " that although he had been only a mud-squatting yachtsman, he could none the less navigate a destroyer in the wastes of the western ocean." The story of the Porchester ' is exciting—she gets her submarine and a raider —but the author also brings out the strain of her'monotonous routine and the desperate longing for leave—leave, not to get away from the sea, but for a glimpse of home, which is more acute in happily married men than in the sailor-Lothario who can find a girl in every port and indulge m what one of them describes in a censored letter as " a fine spot of lovely." Lieutenant John Fernald, R.N.V.R., is to be congratulated on a book which deserves a wide public. He is now a Lt.-Commander engaged in the present invasion of Sicily.
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