Gone to Sea in a Bucket

by David Black

  ‘Really,’ Bonalleck had said.

  After that, what did Harry remember? Drizzly days by the Forth. And Lansley inviting him to the Rosyth Petty Officers’ mess, along with Jim Gault. There had been warm bitter and a press of smiling faces, and loud, hollow rhetoric about how Pelorus’s victory had delivered much-needed good news to offset the loss of the carriers Glorious and Courageous and the bad news from the North Atlantic convoys, and the fact that Jerry was massing on the Channel ports and an invasion was expected.

  Harry had asked, ‘What d’you think will happen to that bloody idiot of a Merchant Navy Skipper for ramming his tramp steamer into a Royal Navy submarine? Eh?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Gault had said.

  ‘Don’t they know how to stand a bloody watch?’

  No one replied. Harry was too new to realise that in wartime, the navy was not in the habit of raking over its own goals in public. If you wondered whether retribution might be meted out for the death of so many sailors and a fine boat, you’d just upset yourself. He’d learn soon enough. No one mentioned that Pelorus was now at the bottom of the North Sea after that, or that most of her crew were too. It let the evening continue without anyone else getting upset. Nor did they mention the high chop rate that was remorselessly culling its way through the Submarine Service. And anyway, the air between Harry and Gault and Lansley was too full of stuff for anything other than a stiff parody of victors’ bonhomie to pass.

  Harry had found himself drinking with a grim intent, quickly noticing that he was not far behind the two Petty Officers.

  The squeeze of passengers for Dunoon moving towards the gangway brought Harry back to the present for a moment, and he joined them filing aboard the paddle steamer, making his way to the ranks of wooden Carley rafts that doubled as seats up forward. He sat down and re-composed his blankest expression to conceal the confusion beneath.

  Gault had actually thanked him in so many words for hauling Ted Padgett out of the Pelorus, and asked to shake his hand.

  ‘Thank you, sir, for saving my friend,’ he’d said with a solemn gravity that had left Harry swallowing hard, making him think of Sandeman and McVeigh. Especially McVeigh. The admirable McVeigh. The friend he would now never have. Bluff, self-assured, unruffable, master of that star quality of effortless professionalism. Harry had wanted to be his pupil, to measure himself by the older man, had looked forward to standing beside him and one day donning the mantle. And now he was gone. All that was left was the memory of his final words, and his back disappearing down the engine room companionway to where he would die beside Lieutenant Sandeman, trapped in a sunken submarine.

  Sandeman, too. Gault had said, ‘You remember that attack, Mr Gilmour. Remember and learn from it. Mr Sandeman – that wasn’t just textbook, that was a work of fucking art. From the moment the Jerry cruiser’s mast came over the horizon he never put a foot wrong.’

  ‘Except best not tell the Skipper, eh?’ Harry had said without meaning to.

  Gault had replied without hesitation, ‘Just what I said, sir. Mr Sandeman, he never put a foot wrong.’

  The memory of those words brought Harry back again to just what he didn’t want to think about. The meeting he’d had with the Bonny Boy in his cabin. The bottle of Plymouth gin on the table.

  Harry looked round for distraction, and found it. The paddle steamer was just emerging from its weave through the crush of anchored shipping and ahead, coming through the anti-submarine boom that stretched from Dunoon pier across the Firth to the Cloch lighthouse, was a submarine. A Royal Navy T-class boat, heading into the Holy Loch, no doubt back from patrol, too, with a black Jolly Roger flying, announcing she had met the enemy somewhere and sunk him.

  And that was the other thing he didn’t want to think about . . . whether he was ever going to go back down in a submarine again, or whether he was going to put in a formal request to be returned to general service. He had been very afraid in those final minutes on Pelorus. Very afraid. A primal thing that had gone deep, so that it felt as if he would have to lean way out over a precipice in order to peer down to where the damage was. But the paddle steamer was coming into the pier; he was going home, and that was going to be another whole issue to deal with right here and now.

  He slung his small canvas grip and slipped in with a press of naval ratings heading down the gangway. The wooden Victorian confection which housed the piermaster’s offices and a tea room were part of his life, he had grown up with them, but coming back now they looked smaller than he remembered, and more frayed.

  At the pier end, drawn up by the kerb, were two blue three-tonners, obviously waiting to take most of the sailors round to Sandbank where the depot ship HMS Titania was anchored, playing mother hen to the Third Submarine Flotilla. She was a sight he’d still to see. She hadn’t been there when he left, but there hadn’t been a proper shooting war back then either.

  They dropped him off at the Queen’s Hotel in Kirn. He walked up the hill, past the grey stone villas overlooking the Firth, to where his parents’ house sat on the corner of the road leading up to the golf club, his mind not at all composed.

  He couldn’t say he was glad to be home, or was looking forward to seeing his mother and father. They would not be expecting him – that was certain. Pelorus’s sinking of the Von Zeithen had already hit the papers; only Pelorus’s own losses had been kept quiet. He had written no letter to say he would be home, and although his parents did have a phone, calling up on an open line to say: ‘Hello, Mum, Dad, my boat was sunk and I’m popping back for a few days lie down before they send me back out again’ – it wasn’t what one was supposed to do. You never knew who was listening, as the posters everywhere warned. ‘Walls have ears.’ ‘Be like Dad – keep Mum!’ Dad and Mum, indeed.

  Dad wouldn’t be there when he walked through the door, he’d still be teaching at the grammar school, but his mother would be in, preparing lunch; and Gordon the dog, the black Labrador named after Flash Gordon, he’d be there, pleased to see him anyway, come what may.

  He walked up the drive and there was the two-storey grey stone house as it had always looked throughout his entire life. He wanted to feel like he was coming home, but the knowledge that another world owned him now weighed on him, suddenly heavy.

  The little white wood porch and the imposing panelled door with its stained-glass windows filled him with something like poignancy. He knocked and the feeling wasn’t helped by the familiar shadow of his mother bustling from the kitchen, laughing and saying something over her shoulder, indistinct, to some visitor, likely Auntie Eleanor, his father’s sister.

  Although Harry was too young to know it, he wasn’t experiencing anything new. Returning warriors through the ages have all, at some point or other, been ‘unmanned’ by their first whiff of domesticity after battle.

  And then the door opened and there she was: smart, slim, sparkly, wearing an apron that, on the occasions she did, always looked like it shouldn’t be there. He didn’t get a chance to say anything, she grabbed him so fast, reaching up and dragging his face down into the nape of her neck; holding on like he’d done with Ted when he was dragging him through the escape hatch.

  ‘Who is it, Edith?’ A voice from the kitchen; Aunt Eleanor right enough, and the domesticity at last overwhelmed him.

  The women talked a lot and the dog barked, but only once, because Gordon was the strong, silent type, communicating mainly through tail-wagging and lots of licking and slobbering. There were of course questions. His answers were elliptical to say the least. God knows it wasn’t because he wanted to be stand-offish or rude. He just didn’t have the language to condense everything that had happened to him since he walked out the door almost ten months ago . . . was that all the time it was? But there was local news too to be communicated, which allowed the women to fill the silence; and anyway, a lot of the questions were of the simple domestic housekeeping kind. Like, when do you have to leave? Which his mother always asked him five minutes after he’d walked
through the door. The specific, pin-you-down ones were the ones that left the silences.

  Pans were clashed, lunch cooked and served, and conversation moved on to the draconian impact of the steep escalation in rationing. Bananas, apparently, were becoming ‘creatures of myth and a dim memory!’ But Eleanor had a recipe for boiling parsnips to a sludge, adding banana essence and ‘whipping it all up into a gooey puree that makes a passably edible banana sandwich’, if you liked that sort of thing. Of course, living in the country meant the rationing of some things didn’t mean they were not available through friends and neighbours. And Dunoon was such a seafarers’ town.

  ‘Only last week Willy MacLeod, you remember, a Second Engineer with the Clan Line, he brought back a whole chest of broken orange pekoe from Mombasa,’ said his mother.

  And then time was getting on, and Eleanor left because his father would be home soon, looking for his tea. So there were more hugs and kisses, and then mother and son were left alone.

  They sat at the kitchen table in the big rustic kitchen with its range, stacked wood and neat, crockery-populated dressers; all white distemper and polished wood; bright from the unfashionably large windows that looked on to their woodland garden, and the meadow towards the golf course. More tea, courtesy of Willy MacLeod presumably, and his mother, apron dismissed, looking very chic in a tailored brown and green plaid skirt, crisp white blouse, and her hair in a very fashionable-for-her-age bob, fair, going rapidly grey without a trace of any effort to hide the evidence. Tell it like it is, was definitely Harry’s mother. She reached over the table and gripped both his hands in both of hers, and fixed his soft brown eyes with her soft brown eyes in a way Harry knew presaged something of import.

  ‘Welcome home, Harry, whoever you are now,’ she said. So you’ve noticed, he thought. Well, you were always pretty sharp that way, can’t keep much from Mum, eh? But he only smiled.

  ‘Your father,’ she continued. Harry picking up the sign, seamlessly, like she’d taught him to long ago, thought: Ah. Here it comes. ‘You cannot have failed to remember what he is like. His very fixed ideas on killing people in general, and wars in particular.’ And there they were back with the same elephant in the room, sitting there immovable, just the way he remembered it when he’d left. ‘Try not to goad him,’ she said.

  Just after 4.30 his father had come home. Harry and his mother were still sitting at the kitchen table, Harry still in his uniform, when the kitchen door had flown open, and there stood the man himself in his tweed jacket and flannels, clutching his bulging leather briefcase, papers bursting out of its flap. He was a tall, angular man, with matinee-idol looks and thick, dark hair that swept back from his high forehead with an almost theatrical wave. The hair was greying, but that just made him more distinguished. His face was clean-shaven, with remarkable smooth, almost peachy skin which carried a light tan from many hours spent outside. The only sign that age was stalking him, apart from the silvering hair, was that he was a bit more stooped than Harry remembered. The eyes were a bit madder too, which didn’t bode well.

  His father was momentarily surprised; then gathering himself together, plonked the briefcase down by the dresser and hung his jacket on the back of the door. Only then did he address his son: ‘Make an old man happy. Tell me you’ve deserted and you want us to hide you in the hills.’

  ‘No, Dad. It’s just leave. Two weeks.’

  ‘Two weeks off from killing. We’ve heard all about your killing. How many of “those damn Fritzies” did you take from their families that day? A hundred? Five hundred? More?’

  Harry knew better than to answer; to say anything. His father sat down, and his mother poured him tea.

  ‘That Crumley girl will be glad to see you at any rate,’ said his father, stirring in sugar. ‘She’s been mooning around here for months now, cluttering up the kitchen, and reeking the place out with that gauche scent she dips herself in. I think she’s spraying her territory . . .’

  ‘Don’t be crude, Duncan,’ said his mother.

  ‘. . . Harry this and Harry that.’

  Harry’s mother gave him a ‘we’ll talk later’ look.

  ‘That Crumley girl’ was Janis, the ‘girl he’d left behind’, although it was hard to think of her like that. Hard to think of her at all without a frown forming. She was the daughter of a local businessman, Hector Crumley, who owned the local bakery, except ‘local’ didn’t quite cover it. He was a self-made man, as he was often fond of saying, and what he’d made was a mini-empire, covering most of Argyll from Oban to Campbeltown. He lived in a rather vulgar mansion overlooking Dunoon’s west bay. He was self-made, new money, and Janis was his only child, so not surprisingly she wanted for nothing, and these days one of the things she appeared to want was Harry, which was rather flattering given what a looker she was.

  Not that anything had actually happened between them: a few snogs up in the seclusion of the Bishop’s Glen and some serial hand-holding at the local cinema. At Harry’s first attempt at a straying hand, he’d been told in no uncertain terms she was not that kind of girl, and in such a scary fashion he’d never risked it again. Nonetheless, she’d soon started describing herself as his girlfriend, a development he’d only found out about through other people. However, her letters to him after he’d joined up confirmed it.

  After a year as an undergraduate at Glasgow University, Harry had fancied himself a bit of a man of the world. You couldn’t call him a womaniser, but there had been women in his life: girls met at the Saturday night dances in the city’s St Andrew’s Halls, or at the university union; office girls mostly, some of them just as keen to be seduced as he had been on seduction in the little garret room he rented off one of his father’s academic friends in the smart part of Partick. The old bloke owned a hut at a place called Carbeth, along with a whole community of hut dwellers, out towards Loch Lomond, and had a car! He was never in town at weekends, out living the outdoors life among the midges and the rain, leaving Harry the run of the house for his trysts.

  He’d almost become quite serious over one of the girls: Violet, a shorthand typist who worked at Weir’s Pumps. But she turned out to be more sensible than the careless Harry, and dumped him. He’d been heartbroken for a good several days. Sometimes, when the fleshpots of Glasgow’s west end bored him, he’d go back to Dunoon for a weekend.

  It was a time when being an undergraduate carried some cachet, and even though he was still a bit young and gangly, there was definitely a promise that he had inherited his father’s good looks. And you’d be blind not to see what a naval uniform might do for him. Janis, for one, could certainly see a young man on his way, so she was there with all her complacent assumptions resolutely undisturbed, demanding to be escorted to all the places a girl of her station should be seen.

  ‘So what does Janis do when she comes here?’ Harry asked his mother after a silent dinner and his father’s retreat to his study.

  ‘Oh not much.’ Harry’s mother never liked saying anything bad about folk, even irritating ones like Janis. She was washing the dishes. Harry wasn’t drying: his father believed it was more hygienic to let them drip. And what his father believed ran as writ in their house.

  ‘What?’ asked Harry. ‘She just sits there?’ Actually, Harry could quite easily imagine Janis plonked impervious at the end of the table as if she belonged; making her presence felt, expecting to be entertained. His father hadn’t been that far off the mark.

  ‘Pretty much.’ Mother being so uncommunicative meant she really must have been irritated; Mother liked talking. ‘Well, sometimes she talks about you.’

  ‘About me? What does she say about me?’

  ‘It’s not what she says about you; it’s more about what she’s got planned for you.’ His mother finished the dishes, and sat down, fixing a wry smile on Harry: ‘You’re hardly going to recognise yourself.’

  ‘I don’t know what she sees in me,’ said Harry, genuinely puzzled. For like all only children, Harry had never quite
grasped the effect he had on other people. Because his life was his, he thought it ordinary, like everyone else’s. He did not see that, unlike most of the other young men around him, he was not a procrastinator. While others might say, ‘I’d love to do that,’ Harry tended to follow his mother’s advice, and do it. And when it came to sailing, he was always hanging around toffs like Sir Alexander Scrimgeour.

  His mother didn’t actually tell him that this was one of the things an upwardly mobile girl like Janis might see in him: an opportunity to one day hang around the Sir Alexander Scrimgeours of this world.

  ‘You’re charming,’ she said instead from behind her knowing smile, ‘and are obviously going to be quite the man of the world.’ Which wasn’t actually a lie. But later she said right out of the blue, ‘You know it will be important that you tell someone about all this.’

  Harry knew she was talking about the war then, and not about Janis, but he couldn’t think how to answer.

  So she said: ‘You are only through the door five minutes and I can tell. I don’t know what has happened to you since you . . . sailed away . . . but I know that something has,’ she said.

  Harry managed a ‘Yes.’

  ‘You probably don’t want to tell your mother. That’s all right. I’d probably never sleep again if you did. But you should find someone. You need to tell someone . . . everything that happens . . . so that you’ll know who you’ve become when it ends. It will be the only way to save yourself.’

  Harry didn’t telephone Janis until teatime the next day, mainly because he’d been asleep for most of it. As any survivor will tell you, getting sunk doesn’t half take it out of a chap. If he’d been expecting a hero’s welcome, he was to be disappointed.