Gone to Sea in a Bucket

by David Black

  And this clutch of equally scruffy matelots, in misshapen grubby white roll-necks and ratings’ caps insolently crammed on their heads in every jaunty angle, having the nerve to be sharing a joke with him as they prepared to moor the submarine against that ancient mossy stone breakwater, all discipline gone to hell. All aboard for the skylark, wasn’t in it. Oliver had no idea who this youth was, or anything about him, except that he was an affront.

  He used the word ‘youth’, but Oliver could see that the young officer was about his own age, except that he somehow managed to look older. There he was, leaning to gauge the distance between the submarine’s casing and the breakwater, as if he was berthing a gin palace at Henley, gesturing with his good arm to his men, waiting to receive the heaving lines about to be thrown from ashore; and wearing his honourable wounds, won in battle in defence of his country – their country – with an infuriating lightness. Oliver couldn’t take his eyes off him, not out of admiration; never admiration. It was because of the rebuke he embodied.

  Like all young men of a certain age, Oliver had had his own notion of how one of His Majesty’s ships should return from engaging the enemy. But where was the marine band in gleaming white pith helmets, bashing out ‘Hearts of Oak’? Where were the ranks of cheering, hankie-waving sweethearts and wives, snotty brats on hips, the doting parents? Or the ‘brass’, with their braid and swords and aides clutching medal cases for the distribution of? And the ship: Jack Tar lined up on her deck beneath glorified washing lines all a-flutter with bunting? Or whatever the salty dogs called those damn flags they loved to sport on high days and holidays. Or the crush of press, and the newsreel cameras? Don’t forget them, for the love of god. How else would you spread the news?

  But no. None of that. Just a drab, forsaken foreshore, plumed and eddied with mist that clung chill and wet to everything, the clutch of RN Bedford three-tonners parked on the hard by the breakwater, and the ambulances, and the score of matelots, off the trucks now and huddled, nursing cigarettes, standing around their kit bags, the collars of their trench coats turned up to their caps in the same useless attempt to fend off the damp.

  They were to be the replacement crew.

  No one had told Oliver this; he’d heard it over the roar of the engines of the same Coastal Command Hudson which had flown them up from Northolt. Something bad had happened, something to do with the Soviets. The submarine wasn’t going to be allowed just to return from patrol with the crew coming ashore, telling stories. The crew was going to be scattered into the fleet, under an oath of silence. The operation had never happened. The submarine was going to disappear somewhere; all very hush-hush. So hush-hush the boss wasn’t even telling him. Oliver was affronted by that, too.

  And what about Oliver’s boss, having to stand in the damp cold, too, just like an ordinary person; his homburg scrunched down to his ears, his yellow muffler between it and the upturned collar of his dark blue overcoat, neither managing to protect the linen flaps his ears made, hanging limp and beaded with moisture, just like the matted strands of grey hair against his skull.

  He was talking small talk with the Admiral and a Captain, while their two flunkies stood aside, regarding the submarine and its scruffy officer with the same concentration as Oliver. What were the flunkies thinking? he wondered. Maybe, unlike Oliver, they knew why they were all here; maybe they even knew where ‘here’ was? Because Oliver sure as hell didn’t.

  Oliver was being a bit disingenuous with himself. He was on Shetland. Where exactly was the mystery, and why.

  He had no idea that the flunkies weren’t flunkies. Two RN Lieutenants, submariners both. Neither, however, knew any more than he did, except that one of them was to be the submarine’s replacement Skipper, and the other would be the conducting officer for sailors coming ashore. As for what they were thinking: they were thinking about the submarine and what a bloody mess she was in.

  She was listing slightly to port, so that when she came alongside you could see the dents on her forward casing deck. The jumping wire that ran from the bow to the periscope stands was gone, and the periscopes bent back as if they’d hit a low bridge at speed. But forward, it was the gun mount which caught your eye. The 4-incher was half lifted from her mount and lying almost athwart the ship, held in place only by a cat’s cradle of chain, wrapped around the barrel by a crew obviously desperate to save it. They’d wasted their time – the barrel didn’t look quite straight anymore. The conning tower, too, was a mass of dents, but it was aft where the real damage was. The entire casing looked as if some madman had taken a giant hammer to it; the casing plates crushed, and the pressure hull beaten against the boat’s ribs, looking more like a series of serving dishes than the smooth lines of a submarine.

  The two Lieutenants knew all about the pressure waves that could be generated by depth-charge blast, but they’d never seen the actual results on a boat. Not like this. Boats normally never survived this. It was trade lore that they built them well in Barrow, but they’d obviously bloody well excelled themselves when they’d sent the old Bucket down the slips. The Lieutenants thought that very same thought, at the very same time.

  ‘I say!’ Oliver had said to Miranda, his favourite ‘gel’ in the boss’s office. ‘What a marvellous day out!’

  He’d never been to Shetland. He’d never been anywhere, really, since he’d come to work for the boss, the senior Foreign Office mandarin to whom he’d been assigned after coming down from Oxford with his first in Classics. Unless you counted Chequers. He’d been there, and met Winston. Twice. Which was pretty damn exciting, actually. He preferred to gloss over the fact that the first time the prime minister had been tight, and the second time, in his dressing gown, which hadn’t been tied. All those fighter pilots and Dunkirk veterans could go on all they liked about the sights they’d seen, but that was one he’d prefer not to have in his head!

  But, all in all, a pretty damn interesting war. You could do a lot worse than be a personal assistant to someone like the boss: a ringside seat to great events; something you could build a career on, carrying the briefing papers, sorting the correspondence, making sure the Mirandas of this world made the tea and didn’t stew it.

  ‘We’re going to Shetland,’ the boss had said. ‘There has been an incident in the Arctic involving the Soviets. Very serious. So we are going up to meet one of our submarines to find out first-hand how serious and how worried we should be.’

  They had boarded the Hudson with a big pudding-faced admiral called Horton, whom everyone called ‘the FOS’, and his entourage; then droned north to some god-forsaken airstrip called Sumburgh, conveniently located at exactly the opposite end of the island chain to here; and then Oliver had completed the remainder of the trip – all three hours of it – in the back of a Morris 15-cwt, bumped and bashed and tumbled through a grey, wet fog the driver called ‘haar’, sitting frozen on the truck’s flat bed with nothing between its cold metal and his bum but folded gunny sack, and nothing between the rest of him and the elements but a flapping canvas awning. There had been no room for him in the Humber staff car.

  And now Oliver was here, and the submarine was alongside the breakwater. Medical staff had gone aboard, while he stood and stamped his feet against the cold like everyone else, and waited. The youth, as he still insisted on thinking of him, was supervising several matelots while they erected some kind of tripod device above a large hatch on the forward deck, which others looked as if they were having to prise up with iron bars. Oliver didn’t know it, but this was the torpedo loading hatch, warped by the depth charging, and up through it would be winched the stretchers.

  As he watched, another scruffy officer from the submarine came striding up the breakwater. The boss disengaged himself from the Admiral and strolled back to stand by Oliver, and together they watched the submarine’s young CO make his report to the FOS, which turned out to stand for Flag Officer, Submarines.

  ‘The Vice Admiral wants to have a word with his man alone,’ the boss had
explained through pinched lips, a sure sign that he had been offended in some way. ‘A very rude, aloof and vain man,’ he’d added, confirming the matter. Then, as if talking to himself, absently almost, the boss continued: ‘I shall talk to the officers when Vice Admiral Horton has completed his interview, then the crew is to be dispersed, and I shall report back to the PM. Word of what has happened here must never get out. It could be very damaging. Matters are very delicate with the Soviets. We cannot be linked to any international incident involving them. Who knows what they might do if forced to save face?’

  Oliver hadn’t a clue what the boss was on about. Usually he would have tried to read between the lines to work out what was going on; maybe a little gentle probing. But Oliver was in a strange mood now. Rather than listen to more, he decided to go and collect his briefcase with all his pens and notepads he’d left in the Morris.

  As he turned to retrieve them he couldn’t help but notice how the submarine’s CO held himself in front of his boss. He appeared to be offering no excuse for his crumpled watch cap jammed on his head, or the stained heap of material that made up a watch jacket that looked as if it had been slept in; nor the fact that his two faded gold rings were barely still attached to his sleeves; in contrast to the bright solid and two single rings on Horton’s immaculate blue overcoat epaulettes. Completely blasé about it. And the Admiral didn’t seem to mind.

  God they were cocky bastards, these submariners, thought Oliver, trying to evoke the same shade of puce that he’d once seen as a child on the face of his mother’s cousin, an Irish guardsman with his own fair share of the baubles of rank, when he’d been confronted with infinitely less military slovenliness.

  Oliver returned with the case as the first of the wounded were being carried ashore. In the background, little batches of sailors were going aboard the boat, while the boat’s crew, in ones and twos, filed off. Handovers were obviously being carried out below. All very business-like apart from the occasional waves of recognition; former shipmates, Oliver assumed, from different commissions. This added to his irritation.

  And there was that youth again, putting a cigarette in the mouth of one of the wounded and lighting it for him as he lay swaddled on a stretcher, waiting to be hoisted into an ambulance. It was such an intimate gesture. Oliver felt his eyes well up. And with it came the thump. My God, he thought. That youth has something you don’t, is in possession of something way beyond anything you or your generations of privilege have ever been able to confer on you. And that was when he knew why he was feeling so . . . irritated. Words from his past. From his country’s past. He even said the words aloud.

  ‘For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, this day shall gentle his condition. And gentlemen in England now abed shall think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.’

  His boss turned to Oliver with a quizzical look, then followed his line of sight.

  ‘His name is Sub-Lieutenant Gilmour,’ said the boss, haughtily. ‘I wouldn’t be too impressed with him. I understand from the Admiral his previous boat was sunk, and, according to the story being told by his then commanding officer, the only reason this Gilmour chap survived is because he deserted his post. The boat’s loss has not been announced, so nothing’s been done. Yet. But there’s a big black mark over his name, and those have a habit of catching up with one, sooner or later.’

  But Oliver wasn’t listening. There was a war going on, and he, Oliver, was carrying somebody else’s pencil-case, while that young man over there was fighting it.

  His mother’s cousin would help him remedy that. He’d get the guardsman’s telephone number when he got back to London.

  Author’s Note

  ‘Port Boris’, the name given to a German naval base on Russian territory by Lieutenant Andy Trumble RN, is not a figment of the author’s imagination. It did exist, albeit under another name.

  Basis Nord was granted to Hitler as part of a diplomatic and economic partnership that developed between Germany and the Soviet Union following the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty of 1939. The secret naval base was located at Zapadnaya Litsa Bay, west of Murmansk, and was to be used to support U-boats and commerce raiding into the Atlantic. German navy supply ships were deployed to the base, but in the event no U-boats or surface units of the Kriegsmarine were ever to use it.

  Germany’s invasion of Norway in April 1940 would provide bases much closer to the Atlantic convoy lanes for U-boats and surface ships such as the battleship Tirpitz, thus rendering Basis Nord redundant.

  The Royal Navy Submarine Service

  At the beginning of the twentieth century, the idea of submarine warfare was considered by senior Royal Navy officers to be ‘underhand, unfair and damned un-English’ – that particular quote being attributed to Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson VC, who went on to call on the Royal Navy to ‘treat all submarines as pirates in wartime . . . and hang all crews’.

  However, those in favour of experimenting with submarine technology eventually won the argument, and the Royal Navy launched its first submarine, Holland 1, in 1901.

  For anyone interested in finding out more about the service in which Harry Gilmour, the hero of this story, would find himself in 1940, there is the Royal Navy Submarine Museum, situated adjacent to the site of HMS Dolphin, the submarine service’s first shore establishment on the Gosport side of Portsmouth Harbour, Hampshire.

  It is Europe’s only dedicated submarine museum and it houses exhibitions covering the history of submarine warfare in general, and the role of the Royal Navy in particular.

  The centrepiece is HMS Alliance, the UK’s only surviving Second World War-era submarine, which has been preserved as an operational boat of the day and is fully accessible to visitors, with frequent walk-through tours conducted by former RN submariners. HMS Alliance is also the Royal Navy’s memorial to the 5,300 British submariners who lost their lives in the service.

  Among the other displays are a series of interactive exhibits including a working periscope, and a collection of thousands of personal items, photos and documents detailing the everyday lives of those in the ‘silent service’. The other submarines in the collection include Holland 1 and X24, the only surviving Second World War midget submarine, similar to the boats that crippled the German battleship Tirpitz.

  About the Author

  David Black is a former Fleet Street journalist and television documentary producer. He spent much of his childhood a short walk from the Royal Navy Submarine Memorial at Lazaretto Point on the Firth of Clyde, and he grew up watching the passage of both US and Royal Navy submarines in and out of the Firth’s bases at Holy Loch and Faslane. As a boy, the lives of those underwater warriors captured his imagination. When he grew up, he discovered the truth was even more epic, and so followed the inspiration for his fictional submariner, Harry Gilmour, and a series of novels about his adventures across World War Two. David Black is also the author of a non-fiction book, Triad Takeover: A Terrifying Account of the Spread of Triad Crime in the West. He lives in Argyll.