Gone to Sea in a Bucket

by David Black

  Dumaresq very quietly asked, without looking up: ‘What did the Bonny Boy say?’

  Harry remembered the chill that had swept over him as the Bonny Boy had slowly reassembled himself in the silence that had followed his harangue, from drunken rambling wreck to the very picture of a senior naval officer, without a wash of his face, trim of whisker or adjustment to uniform. Bonalleck’s smile had been almost avuncular, but it was a smile that only extended as far as his lips. Harry would never forget the way his former Skipper had looked at him from pools of bottomless malevolence.

  ‘He didn’t like it,’ Harry told Dumaresq.

  ‘You don’t say,’ Dumaresq replied.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Harry woke up with a hangover, the sun streaming through his bedroom window, slowly ungluing his gummy eyes, and heating up a sloppy nausea that rode in waves from head to guts. He had to make several attempts to sit upright. The effort to wash and clean his teeth meant he had to go and lie down again. He tried gulping down ice-cool water from the tap, but it merely rushed over the now desiccated tissue of his mouth and throat.

  So he lay down again, eyes closed, and remembered what Peter Dumaresq had said about the Bonny Boy: ‘He’s far too old and far too senior to be given command of another boat. You’ll more than likely never cross his path again. Stick to your story before the court of inquiry, and don’t try to tell them anything they don’t ask for, and then forget about it.’

  As he saw Harry down Wolverhampton’s gangway, he’d said it was important that Harry had told him what had happened; important that certain people be made aware, but that done, it was none of Harry’s business any more.

  Harry managed finally to rise and go downstairs. It was mid-morning and the house was empty. He put the kettle on and sat, head buried in hands, as it boiled. He was on his second cup when he saw the head and shoulders of a figure purposefully stride past the kitchen window. A girl, he was sure.

  Seconds later the door knocker split his skull ear to ear and sent nausea sloshing through him again. He placed his cup on the table and forced himself to stand and move to the back door. He opened it to be confronted by a young woman with an exquisitely pale skin drawn over high cheekbones, a big, wide smile and a pre-Raphaelite explosion of chestnut hair.

  ‘Hallo, Harry Gilmour, still sea sick?’ she said. The voice had none of the local west coast brogue; it was received pronunciation at perfect pitch, but with too much fun in it to be clipped or glass.

  Harry managed a ‘Huh?’

  ‘You look dreadful, Harry, are you OK?’

  Then he placed her. Shirley. Three years below him at school. The daughter of the peninsula’s very own flat-broke aristocratic family. Daft as a brush apparently, not that he’d known that personally, seeing as this was the first time he’d actually spoken to her; actually found himself in conversation.

  ‘It’s what we in the navy call a self-inflicted wound,’ he said, wanting to affect a worldly sangfroid. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘No. Not really. Is Edith in?’

  Harry bridled at her familiarity, and decided he too could be just as impertinent. ‘Might I ask who’s asking?’

  ‘Me.’

  Harry scowled, and the effort made him wobble a little.

  ‘Oh come on, Harry, it’s me, Shirley Lamont. You know who I am, everybody does. I’ve got a load more plant cuttings for Edith – your mother – and I should put them in the shed if she’s not here,’ and with that she slid past Harry clutching a little box full of twigs and dirt, and vanished into the pantry, only to reappear a moment later with the potting shed key. Nobody locked anything in Dunoon normally, but their small petrol generator and the half a dozen battery cells they charged, were out there; and his mother was always worried next door’s children would get in and play havoc with the family’s only access to domestic electricity.

  As Shirley swept past she saw the teapot on the table. ‘Oh tea!’ she said. ‘I’d love a cup. You wouldn’t make me pedal all the way back without one? Please? Pretty, please?’ Then she was gone round the corner and out to the shed with her cuttings.

  Harry popped his head round the door after her and saw her battered bicycle leaning against the wall, shook his head, and went inside to pour her a cup of tea.

  And that was how Harry got to know Shirley Lamont, someone he remembered only as a figure from the grammar school mainly because of her hair, its wild tresses flashing down corridors or across the playground, always in a tearing hurry and trailing bohemian chaos. She was the only daughter and youngest child of the Viscount and Lady Cowal, of Castle Cowal, sibling to two older brothers whom he did know in passing, and certainly not from the grammar school. The old man, their father, was long dead: a car accident on the North West Frontier while with the horsey regiment the family had served as breeding stock, from a time dating back to the Covenanters.

  With her husband dead, Shirley’s mother had soldiered on into accelerated dotage, raising enough money on the way to send her two sons through public school in Edinburgh, and onward without any distinction, into the regiment; and that was where they were now, with the Colours, somewhere on some foreign field. Cameron, the new lord, and Hamish, who was the same age as Harry. Cammy and Hammy. What a pair. Still it wasn’t her fault she was family to Cammy and Hammy, thought Harry, as one cuppa extended to three, and a scone.

  Shirley really was rather a refreshing girl, Harry thought, in her shapeless blue sweater and green, mud-spattered knee-length skirt and plimsolls. And that pre-Raphaelite explosion of chestnut hair. And her hazel eyes.

  ‘So you asked her out?’ said his mother, having arrived home long after a grinning, waving Shirley had bicycled out of the front gate. ‘She is only sixteen, Harry.’

  ‘Seventeen, actually. You didn’t tell me you’ve been forcing a destitute girl into stealing plants for you. And then not even paying her!’

  His mother scowled at him.

  ‘I did not ask her out, as such,’ Harry finally said to break the silence. ‘She wanted to know how I was spending my leave. I said long walks, and then enquired if she might like to join me one day. Just to be polite. And she said yes . . . tomorrow, since you ask.’

  ‘I didn’t ask,’ said his mother.

  It wasn’t that long a walk. They climbed the Camel’s Hump behind the town and sat looking out over the majesty of the Firth with its shipping, and beyond to the velvety smoothness of the Bens and the toy-like barrage balloons above the Greenock shipyards, and then south over the Ayrshire hills down to the steel-blue waters beyond the anti-submarine boom, to Paddy’s Milestone and the Irish Sea. They had brought a flask and sandwiches, or rather Shirley had, stuffed into her gas mask bag instead of the gas mask.

  ‘Who’s going to gas Argyll? The wind would blow it away before it could even make a sparrow sick,’ was her last word on the matter. Then they talked about the war.

  Shirley thought Harry was doing the right thing, and was so proud of him when she’d heard he’d dropped out of university to volunteer. She had set her sights on going to art school, but she wanted to do her bit too and was going to volunteer as an ambulance driver in Glasgow to free up a man for the fighting forces. The Germans had to be stopped. How dare they march into other people’s countries and wreck their homes and tell them what they couldn’t think or say? Harry found little to disagree with.

  ‘They weren’t even a proper country seventy years ago,’ said Shirley, ‘and now look at them . . . and that Hitler . . . preposterous little man.’

  ‘Dangerous, preposterous little man,’ corrected Harry.

  ‘Exactly,’ she said, then let it hang for a while as they munched through the fish-paste sandwiches, drank their tea and gazed out upon the vista. Then she spoke, as if there had been no interval at all. ‘Are you frightened?’

  Harry rolled on to his back and ceremoniously stuck a stem of grass in his mouth. It wasn’t that she had caught him unawares; the exact opposite in fact. His thoughts had be
en running along remarkably similar lines. The war, with him in it; what had happened so far, and the story his mother had said he would have to tell.

  He stared up into the big blue, and reached a decision. Young Harry, just turned twenty. Not a bad chap, or malicious, just the carelessness of youth driving him. He’d not a notion of the way truth can bind you to another; the effect it can have on a young woman, to have a young man open his heart to her. And we’re not talking romantic declarations here – the heartfelt pledges of undying love and other such guff that gets kicked up like debris by every blindly charging cavalier – but the opening of the door to his intimate workings, to the stuff that was in the process of making him, forming him, turning him into the man he would one day become.

  Harry was some way into his wistful soliloquy when Shirley reached across and took his hand, and Harry, god forgive him, had the overweening arrogance to feel smugly mature at such a ‘girlish’ gesture. Nonetheless, he thought it was quite nice.

  She held his hand all the way down the hill, to where she’d left her bicycle at the back of Dunloskin Farm. The dairy cows studied them gravely as Harry held her bike upright by the saddle and they strolled slowly to the metalled road.

  ‘When you push off again, you’ll write?’ she said.

  Harry, surprised at his own conviction, said: ‘Yes. I’d like that. If you didn’t mind.’

  ‘I shan’t think much of you if you don’t.’

  And that was that.

  The next day, in a stuffy grey little cubby, with the familiar racket of workshops and extractor fans drowning out the closer rattle of typewriters, Harry sat once again in the midst of naval activity, aboard the submarine depot ship HMS Titania. He was barely three miles as the seagull flies from his own back door, serenely afloat on the placid waters of the Holy Loch. Having cadged a lift out first thing on the early picket boat he’d even managed a second breakfast from the wardroom galley before settling down to begin his vigil.

  Last night, after waving Shirley goodbye, and after a stiltedly silent tea at home in the presence of his father, he’d sat out in the garden with a glass of whisky and the late-evening sun for company and made up his mind about many things, not least that if he was going back into submarines, the sooner the better. And so here he was aboard Titania, waiting for the Paymaster Commander, or whoever cut rail passes, for a trip back to Portsmouth.

  ‘Is there still no bugger in yet from your lot?’ The voice of the senior rating Writer he’d been fobbed off on echoed from the next compartment. Mutterings, then the booming reply from the Writer: ‘’Cos we’ve got this single-ringer in next door waiting for a chitty back to Dolphin, and at this rate by the time any of your lot get him fixed up, he’ll be a bleeding admiral.’

  This was followed by a bit of a kerfuffle, a few more mutters and a silence, broken by the Writer who could now be heard saying most respectfully: ‘I dunno, sir. I never asked him his name, sir.’

  Harry looked up from his reverie as a sandy head poked round the doorway and eyed him curiously. ‘And you are . . .?’

  The mention of the word ‘sir’ and the age of the face before him advised Harry to stand and come to attention: ‘Sub-Lieutenant Gilmour, sir.’

  The head’s body followed it into the cubby, revealing a watch jacket with three Commander’s rings on the sleeve; the face squinted. ‘Pelorus Gilmour?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Dear boy! Dear boy!’ A hand shot out to be shaken. ‘The very fellow who snatched that rogue Ted Padgett from Davy Jones’ clutches. Allow me to shake your hand. Jack Twentyman. Commander (S), Seventh Flotilla, but no need to kneel. Come this way, my dear boy, and let’s get you sorted. Tea for this young man. And me. In my day cabin.’

  A flotilla Commander no less, thought Harry. Well if he can’t get me squared away, who can?

  ‘So you’re looking for another berth are you?’ asked Twentyman, seated now on a tiny easy chair, with Harry, his bum on its twin. ‘Didn’t give you cold feet then?’

  ‘What, sir?’

  ‘Being sunk on your first war patrol. You’re not exactly long in the trade are you? If you applied to go back and join the “surface skimmers”, you’d probably get it.’

  ‘I volunteered for submarines, sir. I think I should see it through.’

  The story of the sinking of Graf von Zeithen and then the loss of Pelorus herself had obviously zipped through the fleet – the headlines anyway. Even Harry, and the rescue of the notorious Padgett, was out there. But that didn’t appear to be everything on the Commander’s mind. Harry felt Twentyman’s gaze and could almost feel the question mark hanging above his head like some halo of doubt.

  Harry had no real idea how he would react the first time he stepped aboard a submarine again, and had to drop down through the conning tower hatch and back into the exact same type of steel tube which had so nearly become his tomb. But sitting here under the evaluating eye of this senior submariner, the necessity of his earlier decision was rammed home. If he shied away, everyone would know. Everyone was afraid, sure; it was war. But everyone would know that he, Harry Gilmour, couldn’t face his fear; and how would that feel? The knowledge that every other bloke was capable of accepting the same risk when it came to sliding down that ladder, except that on the day, they would do it and he wouldn’t? What would it be like to carry that around for the rest of his life?

  ‘When’s your leave up, Mr Gilmour?’

  ‘Not until the end of next week, sir, but I thought I might as well get back and get going again, sir?’

  ‘Really. That keen are we? Well, if you don’t fancy numbing your bum on a train for two days, I might be able to help you. Depending on how keen, and how nippy you can be?’

  ‘Very keen, sir.’

  ‘I’m losing an N-class boat to another flotilla, and she’ll be passing through Dolphin on her way. But she slips in,’ he squinted at his watch, ‘just over five hours. I’m sure Bobby Whitlock, her Skipper, would be pleased to give you a lift if you can shift quickly enough.’

  There was no one at home when he dashed back in so it was just a matter of throwing his kit together. He scribbled a quick note, explaining, and felt a pang of guilt that he preferred it this way. Harry wasn’t a fan of goodbyes. For a moment he hesitated, before adding ‘Dad’ to the envelope too. Then it was out of the door.

  Despite being barely three miles to the Titania over the back roads from his house, Harry took the long way round so that he could call in at the Royal Northern Yacht Squadron clubhouse, a huge mock-Tudor mansion sitting behind the slips at Hunter’s Quay. Sir Alexander Scrimgeour, the Edinburgh financier and member, wouldn’t be there, not on a day set aside for sitting in his counting house in the city’s St Andrew Square, but Harry was going to leave a note for him, the patronising old fart. Old Lexie. Harry’s mentor; his role model for better days to come; his guide in matters nautical and social.

  As a youth, Harry had crewed for him on his exquisite twelve-metre yacht, Tangle, as in tangle o’ the isles. Hauling on ropes for him, polishing and scrubbing, boiling kettles and filling teapots, and then donning a starched patrol jacket to serve tea, or gin, in the cockpit to Lexie’s other ‘crew’ of guffawing matelots manqués.

  Harry could never recall without a grin old Lexie’s beatific countenance as he would regard his biddable young protégé on those sailing days. Smugness in a sea of complacency. That was how he would describe old Lexie to his giggling mother. Yet regardless of how much of a god that old man regarded himself – in love with his own enlightenment and benevolence – Harry couldn’t help but like him, for he was kind, too, and not just to Harry. Waiters and bellhops were always treated with scrupulous politeness when men of his status rarely did. Harry’s mother and father were always inquired after too. Not out of nosiness, but in a way that told you he was making sure Harry’s parents knew and approved of what Harry was doing, and who he was doing it with.

  As for Harry? Who was only in it for the sea time, wh
o tended to mock the old man and his conceits. What did Harry, the boy who always noticed the little things, really think? Well, for a start he knew the politeness meant that at heart old Lexie really must be a nice person. And he also recognised, that as a benefactor, Sir Alexander Scrimgeour wasn’t just feeding a jumped-up ego; he really was generous and kind. And yes, Harry had to pander to all the puffed-up posturing to earn his crew berth on old Lexie’s yacht; but what a yacht! And what sailing! That was why it never troubled Harry to take time to show his respect and gratitude, and if the odd line or two was all it took, he didn’t mind taking the long way round.

  His note delivered to the concierge, Harry continued round the coast road to the navy pier to wait for a space on a tender heading out to the depot ship.

  When the tender arrived, it was a fight to get to the departing boat’s gangway through the scrum of sailors humping supplies to stuff into her open hatches. They laboured away with preoccupied intensity in the mid-afternoon sunshine dressed only in shorts and singlets, or blue overalls folded down and tied at the waist with the sleeves, showing paint-white torsos untouched by sun for weeks on end. From behind a steady stream of them filing over a single plank to the submarine’s casing, Harry was clutching to his chest the grip containing all the kit he currently owned.

  ‘Sub-Lieutenant Gilmour, permission to come aboard,’ he called out to a Petty Officer who had a clip board and a particularly foul line in entreaties to chivvy the men along.

  There was a din of chains clanking and scrapping and much cursing forward as a gaggle of ratings wrestled an ungainly, dangling torpedo over the forward hatch, trying to fit it down the hole. The clipboard owner ignored Harry, scribbling as each box passed him and went up and over the bridge. Eventually the stream of loaders halted abruptly, and as a gathering queue of sailors waiting to come off was about to move, the Petty Officer held up his hand against the lead rating’s chest, and without looking up, waved Harry on. Harry stepped nimbly over the plank and on to the submarine’s deck, stepping aside just in time to avoid the ‘going ashore’ line charging towards him.