Gone to Sea in a Bucket

by David Black

  ‘Here, help lift Mr Padgett,’ he said, his voice quiet and under control. The sailor mutely obeyed, and they gently lifted Padgett’s bloodied, inert body out on to the deck. Harry looped the collar of the older man’s overalls into the head of one of the diesel casing bolts, to stop his stricken body sliding away down the engine-room deck. That was when Harry saw the side of Padgett’s head, where the blood had clotted around a crumpled dent in his skull, the bone impacted and lightly crazed like the first blow to the top of a boiled egg, so that there were little glitters of white bone through the dark goo and grey, matted hairs. Harry felt an involuntary sob release itself from his chest.

  ‘Aw, Ted,’ he breathed, as he felt his eyes fill.

  But he wasn’t allowed the luxury of dwelling on the wounded Engineer. Gault had returned, barrelling through the bulkhead door leading into the for’ard end of the engine room. He was climbing now, rather than running, because the deck was still slipping away in an irresistible gradient. He was bellowing, too: ‘You two, get down here now! Move it! Help me shut this bloody door!’

  Two sailors leapt from their perches on the starboard diesel’s imposing flank, and dropped down in a series of handholds on the engine to where Gault bestrode the bulkhead’s slope and the canted deck. The water, a friendly looking frothy emerald colour, was rising to lap over the doors combing beneath them. That was the moment when the noise returned, as stuff – heavy steel tools stuff, huge cast-steel engine parts and bolt trays – started to break free and hurtle down the engine room, ricocheting in clanging knells off the engine casings, ushering back the fear and the nagging tugs of panic.

  Another figure slipped past Harry, urgency in his movements, oblivious to the falling debris. It was only as he passed in to the spill of light from an emergency lighting unit that Harry recognised Frank Lansley, the cockney ‘Wrecker’.

  Gault, peeking from behind the starboard diesel, yelled at Harry above the lessening din. ‘Mr Gilmour, sir! Can you organise some of those blokes to get a pump going, and can you get the engine exhaust vents shut, before they start flooding us!’

  Harry stared back, almost catatonic, stunned by the disaster unfolding around him. He heard the words, but was frozen to the spot. Lansley, perched in mid-descent, turned and shouted at the two LTs: ‘Oi! Flannagan and Allen! Yer on! Help Mr Gilmour, now!’

  The two Leading Torpedomen turned and pushed their way back into the electric motor room, heading to rig a pump. They both buffeted Harry on the way past, knocking not just the wind but the daze as well.

  Harry, having returned to terrifying reality, demonstrated he was back in the game by nominating two equally dazed and fearful sailors with punches to their shoulders, shouting, ‘You two, crank the vent valves shut now!’

  The sailors snapped back, the chance to do something unfreezing them. They scuttled up on to their respective diesel casings, reaching out for the exhaust valves.

  Movement was the thing: don’t think, do. Harry bent down to the prone body of Ted Padgett at his feet, dropping to his knees, ordering two more sailors to come to Padgett’s aid, and another to bring bandages and burn dressings from the first-aid locker in the motor room. Two of them required shoving to attend to their duty, but all responded to action rather than standing, idle witnesses, mantled by dread.

  Down by the for’ard bulkhead Gault and Lansley were straining to push the watertight door closed against the seawater pouring over the combing. Two more sailors joined them, leaning into the maw of the hatchway, pushing against the door. Harry cradling Padgett, looked back, amazed at how so little water could fight back against their efforts. All the while he was feeling for Padgett’s pulse, but not finding any.

  He felt a flutter in his chest. He wasn’t going to let this happen. Stupid old bastard! He had been talking to this man seconds ago – by right of the commission he held, one of his men. He wasn’t going to allow the silly old bastard to fucking die on him. Not on his first patrol.

  Gault and his crew were still leaning all their weight on the solid-steel door. All of them were straining, you could see the veins bulging on their necks.

  Harry had the two sailors help him lift Padgett through the swing doors into the more spacious motor room, where the other rating was clutching a bundle of medical gauze. He offered it to Harry, who turned around, asking no one in particular: ‘Does anyone here know first aid?’

  The faces stared back, blank.

  There was suddenly another deep shudder, rippling up through the fabric of the hull, as if Pelorus had hit something solid. The deck beneath them wobbled and then settled at a slightly less crazy angle. They must be hanging bow down by well over twenty degrees. The sailors before him had reached out and were gripping to steady themselves. The fear was back in their faces. He had to think of something else to occupy them.

  ‘Go and get as many Davis escape sets and pile them at the aft bulkhead,’ said Harry. Then, to the bandage boy, he said, ‘You stay with me.’

  Now he had to do something about Padgett, but first he had to fight the urge to crawl under one of the diesels, curl up and hide and wallow in the bitter self-pity of life and everything being snatched away. But he couldn’t do that. Because here was Ted and here was this terrified rating, both of them requiring him, needing him to do what that silly wavy gold ring on his sleeve said he should: be an officer.

  This wasn’t going to be pretty. He knew vaguely from his basic training that Padgett was almost certainly in shock and should be moved as little as possible; but leaving him on the deckplates by the door wasn’t on. He was equally sure there were certain procedures for head wounds, but had no idea what they were. He had to get the wounds as clean as possible and protected against further damage. From the pile handed him he slathered on antiseptic jelly, careful not to press on the skull in case he disturbed some fragment of bone. Then over that he began gently laying pad after pad of burn gauze, which he held in place with loosely swathed bandage. When it was in position, he turned to the sailor cradling Padgett’s head in his shaking hands. Harry looked at the boy; his eyes were bulging and he was yawning, again and again. He had read somewhere that yawning was a telltale sign of fear, and he had seen it for himself, in youths his own age queuing to be beaten by the headmaster for misdemeanors too grave to be dealt with by a lesser mortal. Thanking god it wasn’t him.

  But he was a long way from school now.

  ‘Give me your cap, quick,’ barked Harry. The boy obeyed, and Harry slid it under Ted’s head, covering the confection of burn gauze. ‘Right, hold it there while I wrap some more bandage.’

  Again the boy obeyed, calming a little, certainly enough to venture a few words. ‘I think he’s dead, sir,’ he whispered.

  Harry, finishing his bandaging, fixed the boy with his eyes and what the boy saw made him flinch. Harry laid the back of his hand across Padgett’s mouth and held it for a moment.

  ‘He’s still breathing,’ he lied.

  Gault came through the partition doors and crouched down beside them. He gave the lifeless body of his friend Ted Padgett a quick, resigned glance and then turned to Harry, but Harry spoke before he could.

  ‘Where’s Mr Sandeman, Mr McVeigh, the Skipper?’

  Gault didn’t waste time replying. ‘We’ve been rammed by some bloody rust-bucket of a tramp steamer. The Skipper’s sailed us right into the path of a southbound coastal convoy and some scow ploughed into us just for’ard of the control room.’ A pause. ‘What’s the depth here, sir? When you last looked at the chart, what was the depth?’

  From the look on Gault’s face he wasn’t going to brook any back chat, not even from an officer.

  ‘The North Sea’s all shallow around here, no more than a hundred, a hundred and fifty feet. Why?’

  ‘We’ve got a chance, then. That bump we just had was the bows hitting the bottom. Up for’ard, the torpedo room, torpedo storage, the control room, they’re all flooded. But we’re still watertight here. It’s keeping us buoyant –
for now. Our nose might be in the mud, but our arse is in the air . . . well maybe not quite in the air, but we’re two hundred and ninety feet long. Given where the aft escape hatch is, we might be less than thirty feet from the surface. If we can keep these compartments watertight it will keep our arse up and we can get out of here. Christ! We wouldn’t need the Davis gear, we could free-swim it to the surface. And there’re ships up there, they know they’ve hit us.’

  But Harry wasn’t listening. He was back in training in the submarine escape tank in Gosport, entombed in that steel cylinder with the water rising over his head, and only his terror for company, and the instructor telling him it was OK, because the chances of him ever having to do it in real life were so remote. Despair and hopelessness washed over him; he was going to drown, snagged, trapped in that escape hatch, in the dark, in a press of other drowning men, their struggling bodies and their screams sealed in by steel, the final sensations of his short imperfect life. Panic rose in his gorge like the sac of an egg without its shell, slopping, threatening to rupture.

  He couldn’t keep thinking like that! Thinking himself into a panic!

  ‘What about everyone for’ard?’ he asked. ‘The first Lieutenant? Mr McVeigh?’

  Gault looked at him, then realised what was happening and stopped to reply. ‘They were going into the conning tower to get out,’ he said, ‘them and the boys on the planes and the helm. They were going to try and get out from there. The Skipper was on the bridge. Dunno what happened to him or the two lookouts.’

  Then he was back to issuing brusque matter-of-fact orders, telling Lansley to hand out the Davis sets, telling the men to strap them on but not to use them to breathe, to keep their oxygen charge until the surface, and then use them as life jackets.

  Harry took a deep breath and squeezed through the crush of men to reach for the remaining Davis sets. He grabbed two, one for him and one for Ted Padgett. Gault was already shoving everyone: ‘Get aft, through the aft bulkhead door, into the Stokers’ mess where the escape hatch is. Get going, now!’

  He manhandled everyone through the bulkhead, even Harry and Padgett, and then turned and doggedly shut the bulkhead door, sealing off the engine room spaces. The Stokers’ mess was a tight fit, lined by stacked bunks, piping and cable runs. In the middle dropped the escape hatch tube, surrounded by a rubberized canvas necklace – the tube trunking. When dropped, it formed a cylinder that reached halfway into the compartment and was tethered to the deck.

  ‘Drop the trunking,’ ordered Gault, and down it came, while he himself opened a valve and water began jetting into their space. There were sixteen of them crowded in there, barely the length of three men, their bare heads touching the deckhead pipe runs and the metal frames of the bunks jabbing at their sides. There was barely room for Harry to cradle Padgett, jammed in by the bulkhead door. Everyone was breathing hard, their bodies shaking with the chill of the water and fear. When the water reached the bottom of the trunk, Gault would open an air valve and begin letting high-pressure air into the compartment.

  ‘When the water’s up to our chests and the pressure in here is equal to the sea outside, it’ll let us crack open the escape hatch and we’ll be on our way, gentlemen.’ The steady, monotonous tones of Gault briefed everyone. ‘Frank,’ he said to Lansley, ‘you get ready to go first. You get to the surface and keep them together as they come up. The rest of you, feel your way nice and easy out the hatch then kick like mad for the surface. Thirty feet, no more. You’ll be fine, and don’t forget to breathe out a bit on the way, you don’t want your lungs busting, you don’t want an embolism, now do you?’

  Harry recited the physics of how this should work in his head, to keep himself from thinking about how it wouldn’t.

  When the time came, Harry began fitting Ted’s limp body into the Davis set, still reciting what must happen . . . Lansley would go into the trunking, swim up into the bubble of air between the water and the hatch, and he would open the hatch to the sea; the sea which logic said should then pour in, wouldn’t; it would be kept at bay . . . initially . . . by the air bubble’s pressure. But the pressure would leak, a tiny bubble, then the whole bubble would shoot out letting the sea in to fill the void it left behind, leaving a column of water held inside the trunking, trapped by the pressure in the compartment. One by one they’d duck down into the trunking entrance and themselves shoot up, out the hatch, and be kicking for the surface. That was the idea until . . .

  Pelorus wallowed again. The movement seemed to trigger a terrible tearing of metal from the main engine room, followed by a resonating clang, and an explosive roar of jetting water. Everyone spun and peered through the dim glow spilled by the emergency lighting units towards the bulkhead door into the main engine spaces. Gault sloshed his way through and bent to peer through the door’s small glass panel.

  ‘Shite!’ he said, under his breath, and withdrew his head. Everyone looked to him for reassurance. They didn’t get any. What Gault had witnessed was a scene of utter mayhem. A giant geyser of water was bursting from underneath the deckplates, obviously shooting through the engine room for’ard bulkhead below deck level. The steel plates were flying, and walls of spray fanned out in every direction as the water jet cannoned off every solid surface. Gault realised immediately what had happened.

  ‘It’s the bulkhead valve on the battery vents,’ he said. ‘It’s blown out. The engine room’s open to the flooded compartment for’ard. In a minute the engine room will be flooded too, and she’ll start to sink proper. We’ve got to go now, Mr Gilmour!’

  Gault turned to open a valve, letting loose a terrible scream of high-pressure air venting into the compartment.

  ‘We’re all going out fast, right up the trunking and out the hatch one after the other, no dilly-dallying. Got it?’ yelled Gault.

  Everyone nodded. Jerking, pallid faces in the spectral light. The water was already lapping around the trunking base. This is just like the escape tank in Portsmouth, thought Harry. The steel walls pressing and the rising water, except this time there were others in it with him. The staring faces, eyes bulging, short, sharp breaths, the hideous proximity of other men’s fear. The water reached his waist, and he could see the detritus of the Stokers rise up with it on a thin scum of oil from the bilges: a tin mug, ditty boxes, pencils, the billow of blankets trapping air; a cap, floating. His ears and eyes began to hurt as the pressure built in the tiny space, and then another noise rose above the rushing water and screaming air. It was an animal sound, a sort of high keening. Not mechanical at all. Was it human? If it was, then it sounded like the tearing of a soul might.

  Gault, by the trunking, squeezed his sopping bulk back down into the crush of bodies, reaching for a matted wet skull in the crush. The skull was turned away from Harry, but from the improbable ears, it must be Scanlon, and when Gault finally managed to insinuate himself into the press and take the boy into his embrace, the head turned and Harry could see that it was indeed the young AB. The impossible, inhuman noise was issuing from him, coming from some place deep behind the kettledrum tautness that passed for his face. The boy was coming apart, and as the water began slapping against their chests, Harry could see that the other faces in the press around him were quietly catching his disease.

  It was going to end here, in a blind, mewing and clawing panic, with abattoir certainty; in a heaving mass of life expiring without dignity. Harry too, could feel the disease clench him; until he became aware of Gault’s soft voice, barely audible above the other din, talking in Scanlon’s ear, cooing almost, like a broody dove: ‘Here, young Scanlon, what’s all this then, all this faffing? Calm yerself lad, calm yerself and don’t take on so. It’s all right, everything is all right, see. It doesn’t matter, see.’

  Gault shut off the high-pressure air so that the calm, insistent rhythm of his voice washed over them, until they were all listening. Scanlon’s keening stopped.

  ‘What’s the worst that can happen, eh?’ asked Gault, all matter-of-fact now,
in the seeming quiet. ‘You die. And what good would all this takin’ on have done yer then? Eh? Yer still gonna be dead. But if we make it out, and five minutes from now we’re all tucked up in a bunk with a three-badge Stoker feeding us hot toddies and singing us lullabies, yer ain’t half going to be feeling a right Herbert ain’t cha? All this noise and nonsense.’

  Scanlon, eyes still wide, was nodding silently to Gault’s rhythm.

  ‘You wouldn’t be able to call for a pint for yourself in an orderly fashion ever again, would yer? No you wouldn’t.’ The water was high enough now, and Harry saw Lansley duck down, presumably to shut the water valve. A seeming silence, apart from the distant roar of the failed battery vent. Scanlon’s breathing became more measured. ‘There,’ said Gault, in a tone that closed proceedings. ‘Good on yer young Scanlon, you just stick with me, son. Now, Mr Lansley . . . get in the trunking and up’ – a gurgle as the water slopped to a stop – ‘unclip the hatch. The air that’s left will blow you out so keep them elbows in. Then you next,’ to one of the Torpedomen, ‘the Tiffy will be waiting for you upstairs,’ he said, referring to the ERA, Lansley, ‘and we’ll all be right behind you, eh, Mr Gilmour?’

  ‘Aye aye, chief!’ said Harry in a voice that was too loud. And right away there was the noise as Lansley popped the hatch and the trunking’s air bubble exploded out.

  After that, they started, one after the other, ducking down below the scummy surface and were gone, with only the canvas of the trunking shimmying like the throat of a whale disgorging Jonah whole, as each man struggled for the surface.

  Harry gripped Padgett, holding him close like a teddy bear, watching the heads disappear. There were three, or was it four left, when above him, a cable tray sheered and sliced through the trunking just below the escape hatch, freeing the column of water, and Gault yelled, ‘Everybody . . . grab everybody else, hold on!’ And the sea came in.