Gone to Sea in a Bucket

by David Black

  ‘Welcome aboard, Mr Gilmour!’ said the smirking Skipper, with a leisurely salute, to which Harry made a smart return. The Skipper turned and called down into the submarine’s bowels, ‘Motors half astern together!’ and Harry felt a tug as the submarine gathered way, moving astern, out into the harbour fairway.

  Grins all round as he was ushered by the sailors down into the maw of the for’ard hatch. One of the older ratings murmured, ‘Very seaman-like, sir, if you don’t mind me saying.’ Harry didn’t mind at all. Then he was in the submarine, and there were other things to consider.

  His first impression was that she was not as cramped as he had feared. Even a tall chap like himself could stand upright. But she seemed narrow. The next impression was how bright she was inside; there was a positive glare from the deckhead light fittings. There was the clang of the for’ard hatch closing behind him and he was ushered aft along the tunnel-like interior, following the back of a sailor, watching how to negotiate the several watertight bulkhead doors – no more than shoulder-width holes – copying him crouching and then swinging himself feet first through the gap. There was a blur of bunks, curtains and storage spaces, and everywhere ran pipes and cable runs, junction boxes and inspection panels, all but masking the bright white-painted steel of the hull’s interior. There was even linoleum on the deckplates, he briefly noted; the thought flashing into his head that you could walk about in your socks without too much discomfort. And then they were in the control room, and that was where Harry’s heart sank.

  He stood upright, and to his left, so close he could have whispered in his ear, sat a po-faced rating of indeterminate age, dressed in uniform dark-blue overalls, tucked in behind a console bolted to the bulkhead. The rating clutched a small brass wheel, a miniature of a traditional ship’s wheel. A large pipe dropped down from the deckhead with a flared speaking trumpet affair welded on to its upturned end, half obscuring the rating’s face. Beside the man was another miniature; this time of a ship’s telegraph, the two handles ready to signal and respond to all the traditional commands writ small on its face: ‘Full Ahead’, ‘Slow Ahead’, ‘Astern’. The full list anyone familiar with a bridge of any sort would recognise. There was a scaled-down compass head too. Harry stared at the man, horrified. Not by him personally, or indeed the Lilliputian displays he was controlling, but by the chaos he could perceive in the periphery of his vision.

  As he slowly turned to take it all in, he was aware of a small space no bigger than a car garage. Behind the rating at the wheel sat two more men, facing the hull. Except you could not see the hull, hidden as it was by two huge glass indicator gauges. Lesser versions cluttered around them, filling the spaces up to where the cable and pipe runs began, tracing the length of the compartment. These extended over the deckhead. The ratings sat in front of two more wheels, looking more like bicycle wheels.

  In the middle of the compartment were two huge brass tubes, one behind the other, coming down from the deckhead and disappearing into holes in the deck at his feet. Between them stood Trumble, the Jimmy, holding on to a vertical ladder that disappeared up through another, more commodious hole. Behind him was a rather delicate scaled-down version of a chart table, surmounted and surrounded by docket holes and miniature cupboards. The array covered the after bulkhead, its door open, through which Harry was aware of the work of the rest of the crew carrying on apace.

  The port side of the compartment, however, was where the true horror lay. Rank upon rank of valve wheels, control levers, a huge fuse panel, and a cats’ cradle of pipework of wildly varying dimensions, woven in and out of the faces of indicator dials, all nestled snug to the hull like the boundary of some jungled sunflower plantation made of steel, brass and glass. Another rating, with an oily rag stuffed into his blue overalls, stood over it proprietorially.

  Harry experienced a sure and certain conviction that the mastering of this machine would be forever beyond him. He felt a familiar hopelessness well up to engulf him.

  The Jimmy beamed with that repulsive, relaxed air born of familiarity with one’s surroundings and the confidence it brings: ‘Flummoxed by the mooring lines, eh? We don’t tend to stow ’em aboard if we can help it. We’ve got boxes on deck for ’em, but one good rattle from a depth charge close aboard and the box’d be sprung; they’d be wafting about wrapping themselves round the prop and the planes before you’d know it.’

  The Jimmy paused to dazzle him with another grin, then: ‘Your chums are topside with the Skipper, so it’s a bit crowded. Stay down here and I’ll show you what’s what . . . cuppa to be going on with?’

  Harry moved across the control room gingerly, so as not to touch anything, fearing that even to snag a lever on his jacket might send them all plunging down into the depths. ‘Yes please,’ he replied, as he squeezed past the periscopes to bend himself into the nook made by the chart table beyond.

  The Jimmy yelled through the aft door: ‘Snobell, make that another char please!’

  A muffled ‘Aye, aye’ was cut short by a tremendous explosion. Harry’s heart stopped and he gripped the chart table until it hurt. No air entered his lungs. The explosion was followed by another in rapid succession, which instantly retreated into a full-throated percussive roar. Harry was aware of muffled commands coming down the voice-pipe to the rating on the miniature ship’s wheel. Harry was also aware of a gale coming down the hatch into which the vertical ladder disappeared.

  The Jimmy must have noticed Harry’s alarm. ‘That’s the diesels starting up,’ he said. ‘Noisy buggers, aren’t they? That wind is them sucking in air. You know, to feed the combustion.’

  Harry attempted a smile and nodded, trying to give the air of someone all too familiar with the physics of internal combustion engines – and failing.

  ‘We came out the creek arse-end first, on our electric motors,’ the Jimmy continued. ‘Easier to manoeuvre. Less racket.’ Seeing Harry still looking unconvinced, he added: ‘We’re in the fairway now. So that’s us on main engines, both ahead, and out into the Solent.’ A pause, then he gestured round the compartment: ‘As you probably gathered’ – Harry hadn’t – ‘this is the control room. I know. It’s all a bit strange and alarming at first. A lot to take in. But you’ll get used to it in no time.’

  Then the tea arrived.

  Harry hadn’t ‘gathered’ anything because his mind had been swamped by impressions. He leant against the chart table, steadying himself as H57 began to ride the swell, cupping his tea and reluctant to open his mouth.

  ‘What do you know about submarines then, Mr Gilmour?’ the Jimmy asked.

  ‘Ah. Um.’ Harry decided to stop before he made a prat of himself to this open-faced, friendly chap before him. ‘Nothing, sir,’ he said, thinking, If he’s the Jimmy, he’s probably a Lieutenant, so give him his title.

  ‘Call me Andy,’ the Jimmy said. ‘We’re too small to stand on ceremony down here. Except the Skipper. The Skipper is always “sir”. So, where shall we start?’ He gestured towards the rating at the ship’s wheel. ‘That’s the helmsman. Steers the boat. But then even you’ll know that! Ha-ha! Two chaps behind him are on the for’ard and aft hydroplanes. The hydroplanes are those overgrown table tennis bats you saw bolted on to the outside of the hull. Once we dive they get extended and act like aeroplane wings, sort of horizontal rudders, a few deft twiddles on the wheels by Ahearn and Hannah here’ – the two ratings turned and smiled at Harry, an unheard of gesture aboard that bloody battleship – ‘and we’re nose down, arse up and swooping away like an underwater ballet dancer. Aren’t we?’

  One of the ratings yelled above the noise of the diesel, ‘Swan Lake ain’t in it, Mr Trumble!’

  ‘Petty Officer Ahearn is notorious for his deftness of twiddle,’ Harry’s new friend, Lieutenant Andy Trumble, confided to him. He pointed to the brass tubes. ‘Eyes of the boat. The main periscope, thick as a drainpipe, capable of swivelling all round, and up and down, giving panoramic vistas of sea, shore and sky. We use it for checking who�
��s up there when we’re down here, thinking about going up there. Use for navigation in shore, all that stuff. And that’s the attack periscope, with all the latest sighting and bearing notches to tell you where and how far; and thin as a whippet’s prick, guaranteed never to be spotted by even the most eagle-eyed lookout.

  ‘And over there’, he gestured to the steel sunflowers, and the sailor with the oily rag in his overalls. ‘That’s Petty Officer McKeown. Our “outside ERA”, otherwise known as “the Wrecker”. The engine-room artificer who gets to work in the comfort of the control room, instead of back there among the din and grease, isn’t that right, Mac?’

  ‘All this luxury? I could be getting ideas above my station, sir,’ said McKeown. There was an Irish brogue behind the smile. McKeown was older than Harry, as were all the other sailors he’d so far encountered aboard. As in Redoubtable, they were all obviously regular RN. Except there was something more self-possessed about these men. None of them was anything special to look at, or out of the ordinary. Same set of faces you’d encounter on a bus anywhere. But there was a seriousness of purpose, and an air of competency that he had not noticed among the huddled, dragooned masses of Redoubtable’s mess decks. Harry recognised this difference with a thrill.

  ‘Mac works that pleasing little confection of valves and levers you see there,’ grinned Trumble. ‘They operate the main vents and compressed air blow valves. Those are the devices that take us down, and bring us up. Do you know the principles of how it . . .? No. I can see from your horrified stare.’

  Andy turned and slipped a notepad on to the chart table, flipped it open and quickly drew a profile and a plan view of a submarine’s hull. ‘This sausage-shaped tube is the pressure hull. That’s where we live, sealed up and snug. All the rest of the hull is open to the sea. These bulges along the length of the hull are the main ballast tanks. They are permanently open to the water below, and have a series of control vents along the top. When we want to dive, we open the top vents to let the air out and the water fill up the tanks. We lose buoyancy and sink. Simple.

  ‘Now, all along here, and here,’ Andy said, stabbing at little boxes he had drawn along the keel, ‘are the trim tanks. All those valves there control the water in those tanks, and together with the hydroplanes we can keep the boat on the level when submerged. That’s my job and Mac’s job. Skippers get very irate if we don’t keep trim. It’s very disconcerting for the crew if we suddenly find ourselves plunging to the depths. Equally, it’s very embarrassing if you suddenly start going up, and end up wallowing on the surface like a breeched whale. Especially if there’s a Jerry up there looking for you. Red faces all round. So we have to watch out for the balance of the boat shifting, people moving about fore and aft can do it. Any movement of weight. Firing a torpedo plays hell with the trim. One of those two-ton buggers shooting out the front end means we have to compensate at the arse . . . actually they’re nearer one and a half tons, but what’s eight hundredweights between friends? Anyway, to compensate, you have to bring the water in at the bow into the torpedo-operating tanks to replace the difference in weight between a tube with a torpedo in it, which would be your “trim” when you started, and a tube that is now full of just water, which actually isn’t much, but enough to screw your trim . . . and bloody quick too, Mr Gilmour or else! Especially with a salvo. You could be twenty degrees bow up and on the roof before you could say “I’ve lost the bubble” . . . and Jerry would be having a good pop at you before you could regain. Follow? The rest of the time, for everyday ups and downs, we use those valves to pump water from one tank to another to keep her in balance; in other words, in trim?’

  Harry wasn’t so sure but he grinned anyway: ‘Sounds really easy.’

  ‘Falling off a log, old chap,’ said Trumble with a sardonic squint. There were suppressed grunts from the sailors. ‘And for when we want to go down really fast, brakes off and arse in the air, there’s this.’ He stabbed at a big hole he’d sketched forward. ‘Q tank. Five-hundred gallons of liquid lifesaver. We open the cocks on that, and we’re gone.

  ‘Now, when we want to come up, the Skipper yells Surface! And I inform Mac that the commanding officer wishes to take the air. He makes sure these levers on the control vents are shut, and then twiddles these valves here. That blows compressed air into the main ballast, forces the water out the bottom of the tanks, and up we go like a homesick angel. And that’s the up and the down of it.’

  Harry settled down to soak up the atmosphere of the control room as they chugged down the Solent. After a while he began thinking it might not be quite as intimidating as he’d thought, and had just started to relax when there was a commotion on the ladder. Brown, then Hardesty, clambered down into the control room, filling it to bursting. Andy leant back and yelled through the aft door, ‘Snobell! Be a good fellow and park these gentlemen in the wardroom,’ he said as he applied a palm to their backs and gently shoved the two Sub-Lieutenants aft. Harry made to follow, but Trumble’s hand stopped him. Harry started to speak but was deafened by a klaxon going off in his ear. From above there was a booming voice: ‘Diving Stations!’

  The control room exploded into action. In quick succession, Trumble, with a surprisingly equal boom, repeated the order: ‘Diving Stations!’

  Two other ratings slipped into the control room. Mac was at his valves, arms moving in a flurry of twiddling. Indeed, everyone was twiddling. Then the racket from the engine room stopped abruptly. Two lookouts came tumbling down the ladder and there was a thump from above. The voice of the Skipper could be heard calling, ‘One clip on! . . . two clips on!’ The hatch was being shut. And then the Skipper too was in the control room, handing his binoculars to a rating who had appeared from nowhere.

  Grinning at the Jimmy, he barked, ‘Periscope depth, number one!’

  Harry felt the boat begin to slip away from under his feet. Christ! he thought. This is it. We’re diving! As they went, Ahearn and Hannah turned the hydroplane wheels. Harry watched the needle on the huge depth gauge creep slowly round, and was dimly aware of Andy Trumble giving further orders to Mac, who in turn was working the array of valves. Harry’s mind, however, was out beyond the hull, imagining the sea around the submarine . . . what was it like? . . . marine life, fish, seals? Who knew what was out there? He fantasized what it would be like to see the water around the submarine. What the submarine would look like moving through it. His reverie was disturbed by the call: ‘Thirty-five feet, sir!’

  The Skipper said: ‘Level off, bring her round to one-six-five. Group down, half ahead together.’ Harry guessed one-six-five was the course, and half ahead, the speed. But ‘group down’? Even the language was new.

  The Skipper turned to him and held out his hand. ‘Lieutenant Jeremy Penn, CO of His Majesty’s Submarine H57. Gilmour, our very first wavy navy.’ He pumped Harry’s hand. ‘And the only one who appears to know one end of a rope from another.’ He turned away abruptly and with a gesture commanded, ‘Up periscope!’

  The big brass tube shot up with a hiss, revealing a complex sight and eyepiece. The Skipper popped down two handles and did a delicate little 360-degree pirouette. ‘All clear up top.’

  The Skipper began fixing H57’s position through the scope, which involved him calling out sightings: ‘Nab Tower . . . the bearing is – that!’ A Petty Officer stood behind him, calling the actual bearing off a bezel above Penn’s head on the periscope stand. The process was repeated until the lines drawn on the chart crossed and H57’s position was fixed.

  Penn then stood back from the scope and gestured to Harry: ‘Want a quick look before we test the dockyard’s handiwork?’

  Harry stepped forward, his eyes wide. Penn’s offer had been unexpected. This was straight out of a boyhood dream. It seemed almost too soon. The chance to look through a periscope was something that should have lain far in the future. Like a goal to be achieved, or an evolution to be undertaken after long training. To just step up and casually put his eye to the lens and look up f
rom under the ocean seemed too sacred a ritual to entrust to someone like him, someone so inexperienced. But he didn’t intend to let it pass, or even hesitate. He grabbed the handles and crouched to bring his eye level . . . at first he saw nothing, a plane of darkness, as he settled his eyes into the viewfinder, then the world leapt into his vision. First, the confusion of the slap of a wave against the lens, droplets, and then the ruffled surface of the sea. A low coast in the distance, two fishing boats rising into view, and dipping. The throat-catching excitement!

  ‘That’s the Isle of Wight,’ said the Skipper, leaning in and turning one of the Bakelite knobs on the stand, ‘and that is the sky. See any Jerries?’

  In a flick Harry’s view was rolling skywards and he was staring at high drifting clouds. Not even a gull was in sight, let alone a Jerry. He grinned like an idiot: ‘All clear. No aircraft in sight.’ His vision began to roll back.

  ‘Aaaaand the Isle of Wight again. It’s over a mile off, but if you wanted a better view, say, to look in a young lady’s bathroom window, then all you do is . . .’ Penn flicked another knob, and a beach, and a row of low bungalows leapt into view as if they were mere yards away. Crystal-clear. Harry was entranced, captivated by the clarity of the image and by the mesmerising slap of wavelets against the periscope’s lens. He found himself eagerly wondering if he lowered the scope a few feet, he might actually see fishes swimming by, wishing he was a child again so he could ask to try it. But in the distance he heard someone say, ‘A hundred and ten feet under the keel,’ and his hand was removed from the handles.

  ‘Interesting, isn’t it?’ said the Skipper, taking over the periscope, and sending it down again. He led Harry to the chart table and stabbed at a point that must have been five miles off a dot in the Solent with the name Nab Tower. ‘It’s an old Great War-era steel and concrete fort they built to guard the approaches to Portsmouth. The pongoes have it now . . .’ Penn noticed Harry’s confusion. ‘The army. Coastal defence. We’re heading to a deep water hole right here,’ he said, and he stabbed at the chart again.