by Jay Garnet
Mike was one who thought along these lines. He had had one ship blown from under him. He had every intention of surviving. If that meant enduring a few more weeks of hunger, then he was ready for it. He drank the greasy tea, forced down the boiled barley, chewed the dried fish. He held his breath over the foul-smelling sewage. (Once, his wallet slipped from his back pocket while he was squatting over a hole. He persuaded four of his mates to dangle him upside down over the sewage so that he could retrieve it.)
The real problem was the tedium – broken by unnecessary morning parades and mock guard duty with wooden rifles – and ill health. The nearest hospital was in Murmansk. A few of the men had been there to be treated for frostbite. They’d seen a Russian who’d had a leg amputated after being given just two aspirins. After that, those who became ill refused to admit it.
It took Mike three months to get home. He was eventually told that he would be going by train to Archangel, now clear of ice for the summer. He thus became one of the few of the Edinburgh’s survivors actually to see Murmansk. By now it was high summer, but the place was still a ghost town. The streets were rubble and mud, lined with the burnt-out shells of houses through which poked the remnants of furniture and iron bedsteads. Ruined concrete blocks nudged up from the chaos of wood and brick. About the only clear area was the railway itself, a single ribbon from the south-east that cut through the ruins and branched out along the dockside. The few inhabitants were unsmiling bureaucrats and officers supervising the labourers who transferred the goods from the convoy ships at the railhead.
The sight of that operation added a new dimension to Mike’s experience of Russia. Vaenga had been bad, but at least men ate and lived. On the dockside, men did not eat, and they died. He had never seen people so starved and weak – dead eyes, sunken cheeks black with stubble, scrawny bodies wrapped in rags. They were no longer people, for as convicts condemned to slave labour, to them it no longer mattered whether they lived or died.
As he was waiting on the dockside to board his train, along with a dozen mates, he saw a figure lying stretched out and propped up against some crates. He wandered over with the rest, thinking the man was unconscious. The figure was horribly emaciated and very dead, with a bullet hole through the forehead. At that moment the Russian who was supervising their departure called to them from the wagon to which they had been assigned, then strolled over to see what had caught their attention. It did not seem to occur to him that there was anything odd about the broken figure slumped on the stones. He grinned. ‘No work!’ he said, putting two fingers to his head by way of explanation. ‘Lazy man! Boom, boom!’
The men – all teenagers, but grown men in experience – walked back along the dockside, past the heavy cranes that were used to unload the British and American war materials, to the railhead. The wagon in which they travelled was more like a prison – unsecured benches and no windows, only ventilation holes set high up under the roof. Mike saw nothing of the journey, nor anything of Archangel, where he was embarked on a cruiser, the Somali.
He was only a little luckier with the Somali than he had been with the Edinburgh. She was torpedoed, and broke up in a gale after the crew and passengers were transferred to another vessel. He eventually reached Lock Ewe in north-west Scotland, one of the regular bases for the reception of convoys, on 26 September 1942.
At the Loch Ewe base, Mike was fed, billeted and told to report the following morning to the administration office. There, one of a queue of survivors, one of whom he knew well, he gave the details of his past few weeks, collected back pay, was given dockets allowing him to pick up new kit, told he could take fourteen days’ leave, received orders to report back to Chatham after his leave, and was given travel warrants to get him by rail from Inverness to London and from there to Chatham.
He could have made a telephone call home; but his mother didn’t have a phone. Besides, he liked the idea of surprising her. In Murmansk he hadn’t heard from her, or indeed anyone. He had written home a couple of times, but there was no way to tell her of his final departure. After another day spent eating and sleeping, he joined a small convoy of three naval lorries taking seamen the sixty miles to Inverness.
The last few months had changed him. His body still needed to recover from the Russian food, the hunger, the cold, the lack of sleep. He was gaunt. But he was also tough. He had come through, and was confident, even proud, of it. Mike had a story to tell – everyone wanted to hear about the gold – and was suddenly at one with the men, some of them twice his age, who shared his compartment for the next day and night.
His outward jauntiness reflected an unusual independence of spirit. He was, at heart, a survivor. As a result he found himself confronted with a problem. He had to remain in the Navy; but how could he avoid being sent back on another sodding Arctic convoy? He pondered the question on and off for twenty-four hours, when he wasn’t talking, playing cards or sleeping, but failed to find an answer.
He was back at Liverpool Street station early on 1 October. With clean kit, a full belly, money in his pocket and a good night’s sleep behind him, he felt on top of the world for the first time in months. Hopping tubes and buses across bomb-torn London, he grinned to himself as he imagined the surprise that would greet his unexpected arrival. ‘Gawd!’ she’d say. ‘We thought you was dead!’
He was prepared for devastation, and so found himself pleasantly surprised. On the home front the worst of the war was over by late 1942 – no more night raids, people fed, wages on the up. Repairs to bombed areas, especially the devastated East End, had not yet got underway and there were the same gaps in the streets that he remembered from his visit at Christmas 1941, for his dad’s funeral. But houses had glass in the windows again. Life seemed to be returning to the old place. A few shops were open.
He walked up Willis Road, savouring the moment, and stood in front of his own green front door.
He tried the handle. It was locked. Not surprising – Mum must be down the hospital.
At that moment there came a voice from over the way.
‘Is that young Mike?’ It was old Mrs Reynolds from number thirty-four, still in curlers, with a scarf over her head.
‘’Ello, Mrs Reynolds. How’s things? Know when Mum’ll be back?’
‘Cor, Michael, you ain’t ’alf grown up!’ She gave a tight smile. ‘You’d better come on in and ’ave a cup of tea.’
‘I could do with one. Ta. But . . . do you know when Mum’s goin’ to be ’ome?’
She didn’t answer, but turned and went back into her house, leaving the door open. Mike followed her through, down the passage and into her little kitchen.
‘Sit down, young Mike,’ she said, then pushed a chipped mug towards him and put a pot in the middle of the table. She sat down opposite him. She wasn’t smiling any more.
Mike had seen that look before, from the communications officer on the bridge of the Edinburgh just after he’d finished talking to Peaches.
‘It’s Mum, isn’t it?’ he said.
‘Yes, Mike, it is. But it’s more than that . . .’ Mike stared into his cup. Mrs Reynolds pulled a handkerchief from her apron. ‘After your dad was killed, you know, she seemed to pick up quite nicely. She was working in the ’ospital, wasn’t she, and never wanted to leave London, like a lot of us. Buggered if old ’Itler was going to scare us lot out.’ She smiled through tears. ‘Doing a good job, she was, and ’appy with it. Then you went away. We all knew about them convoys and she began to say you wasn’t never coming back. Then there was Martin.’
‘Martin? I never ’eard nothing about Martin.’
‘Don’t suppose you did, dear. I wrote to you. Suppose the letter went down at sea. ‘Ad you ’eard he was on the Eagle, in Gibraltar?’
Mike nodded. Martin had mentioned he was being transferred. The Eagle was an aircraft carrier, and was used in the Malta convoys. In August 1942, when Malta was near collapse, the Eagle was part of the convoy intended to relieve the island. Code-named Pedestal,
the convoy left Gibraltar on 10 August, and was hit hard almost at once. ‘The Eagle was the first to go,’ Mrs Reynolds went on. ‘They got off, most of them, almost a thousand, they said. But not Martin. That telegram just about finished your mum.’
Mike put a hand over his eyes. Martin always used to say it was so nice down the Med. He’d looked forward to the Eagle, said he wouldn’t mind learning to fly come the end of the war. Gibraltar was where Mike had been hoping to go. Now Martin, who’d seemed to have had it so easy, was gone, while he, who’d had such a rough ride, had come through.
Mrs Reynolds blew her nose loudly. ‘Then there was the news about the Edinburgh. So many times she was in ’ere, crying, over tea, like us lot now, saying there’s nothing left – first it was Dad, then Martin, now Mike. It was just at the time when we was beginning to think it was going to be all right. We’d come through the Blitz. There was rationing, but we wasn’t starving. We was all doing our bit. But yer mum, she didn’t seem to ’ave nothing to live for no more. She just seemed to sort of fade. I went to see ’er down the ’ospital. The doctor said it was TB, spending too many nights down them tube shelters. But I reckon she just died of a broken ’eart.’ She dabbed her eyes. ‘The funeral was only a couple of weeks ago.’
They sat in silence for several minutes. Then Mrs Reynolds reached over and touched Mike’s hand, as it rested beside his mug.
‘I’m sorry to be the one to tell you.’
‘It’s all right, Lil,’ he said. It was the first time he had ever called her by her Christian name.
The mood changed. They sipped their tea in silence for a minute or so.
‘Thanks for what you did. You was always a good friend to ’er.’
‘What you gonna do, Mike?’ she said, looking up.
‘Ain’t nothing left ’ere for me, is there? My family’s the Navy now. I’m meant to ’ave fourteen days’ leave. But I might as well get down there straight away.’
‘No, darlin’. Best stay ’ere for a few days. I’ve got the key to the ’ouse. Everything’s still in there. You’d better clear it out. Council will be wanting it. You can leave anything ’ere you want to.’
He did stay a few days, even though there really wasn’t much to clear. A few pieces of furniture. The old beds. Some clothing. Dad’s clock. A drawer full of old letters which he began to read but then threw away. Some photographs he gave to Lil, for safe keeping. The rest all fitted comfortably into the back of the lorry old Wallace used for the second-hand furniture.
Five pounds he got: three lives gone and five quid to show for it.
6
Within a week he was back in Chatham, for more training. There were general classes in seamanship, navigation, ship’s maintenance and gunnery. For a month, while awaiting posting to another ship, he learnt more than he’d ever learnt before. He grew. He was nearly seventeen, but looked nineteen; he was six foot tall and weighed eleven and a half stone. Studying and the routines of daily life aboard the training ship helped him gradually to come to terms with the loss of his family.
For a time he forgot his worries about the Arctic convoys. Then a chance conversation raised the matter again, and at the same time offered a solution. In a pub one Saturday in late October, while on shore leave, he got into conversation with one of the harbour divers and remembered old Charlie George, the Edinburgh’s chief bosun’s mate. This man, Thomas Ridler, made a similar impact. He was not big, but compact and strong, and there was a way in which he talked and bore himself, a self-confidence, that both awed and attracted Mike.
Mike asked about diving. Ridler described the life: climbing into rubber suits – ‘Clammy death, we call it,’ he said with a laugh – donning what he called a ‘hard hat’ – a copper helmet with an air tube and a lifeline to the surface – the routine work of clearing fouled propellers; finding bits of equipment dropped over the side; checking on damaged hulls. Ridler was also an instructor for the local training school.
‘Once they’ve done their six months,’ he said, ‘they’re attached as diver to any large ship anywhere in the world. Even cruisers have four divers – you ought to know, being on the Edinburgh – and larger ships have anything up to six. Then, of course, there’s harbour work, wreck clearance, mine clearance.’
‘Cor,’ said Mike, reminding himself of Peaches and the gold.
‘It’s good work,’ said Ridler, giving Mike an appraising glance. ‘Important. Exciting. Besides, you get more money. A penny a day over basic as a second-class diver, fourpence a day as a first-class diver. And that’s before you start the diving. An hour’s diving will bring in as much as most seamen earn in a day. When you’re a diver, young Cox, you’re somebody. Don’t you forget it.’
That conversation changed Mike’s life. A new world opened up before his eyes. Status, money, an escape from the routines of a seaman’s life; an adventure in which he could immerse himself, literally and metaphorically. His attention swung back to Ridler, who, his thoughts way ahead, was watching him quizzically.
‘How do I . . . ?’
‘No room at Chatham for the next month,’ said Ridler with a smile. ‘But they’ve got a bigger place down at Devonport. And you mark my words, they’re short of people. There’s a lot of ships gone down in a lot of harbours. The rate the world is losing them, you could be in work for the rest of your life.’
Along with Mike when he arrived at Devonport on 1 November 1942 were twelve other trainees. As he discovered that first evening aboard, they were a varied bunch. Yet what they had in common was a certain inner hardness, a self-confidence, a physical robustness, a direct glance that would one day give them a natural authority. Some were raw recruits. Some had already had some training in the Marines. A couple had experience as commercial divers, and were destined to move on quickly. In only one case was the self-confidence the product of class. Andy Cunningham was straight out of Harrow and already had his sights set high.
‘I wanted to be a diver as soon as I heard of midget submarines. You’ve heard of them? No? Couple of divers and some explosives. The Italians are jolly good with them, you know. My uncle told me we’re going to get our own and really have a go at Jerry.’
Mike, who was the only one of the group who had been on the Arctic convoys, suddenly connected with what Cunningham was saying.
‘’Ere,’ he interjected, putting down his cup of cocoa. ‘I was on the Edinburgh taking stuff for the Russkies to the Arctic. Them German ships kept on coming out of Norway at us. I remember the chief saying they used to snuggle into the fiords like mice into their ’oles. Only way to get them, ’e said, was if you was a bleedin’ fish. That the sort of thing you mean?’
Cunningham looked across at Mike.
‘You’ve hit the nail on the head, old boy. What did you say your name was?’
‘Cox. Mike Cox.’
‘Well, Cox,’ he said, as if his plans were already a certainty. ‘That’s what I’m going to do.’
Then there was slow but steady Sid Carter, who was what the lads at Chatham used to refer to as an ‘ooo-ar’, which meant anybody with a country accent, whether from Kent or Cornwall. As it happened, Sid came from Romney Marsh – the Sussex rather than the Kent side. He had grown up in Rye Harbour, at the south of the River Rother, a couple of miles from the ancient hilltop town of Rye. In those days, before the boom in private yachting, Rye Harbour was a remote little community set on the edge of the Marsh, consisting of a single line of houses, a mile from the sea, guarded by a round flint tower surrounded by a flint wall – a ruined Martello tower, built during the Napoleonic Wars. His father had a small fishing boat. Sid had spent his childhood fishing, swimming, cycling the windswept miles to Rye itself, and playing on the tower.
‘Built to keep Boney out, as my dad says. May not look much, he says, but it worked, didn’t it? Perhaps it will do the same for Hitler,’ said Sid, with a slow smile, when he first told Mike about his family. They had slung their hammocks next door to each other after supper the
first night and were talking in low voices.
‘Why do you want to be a diver, then, Sid?’ Mike asked.
‘Well.’ There was a long pause. Then Sid spoke with a deliberation that suggested, wrongly, stupidity. ‘Dad did a bit of it in the last war. He used to say all this bobbing around on the top of the waves was all very well, but it was like being an outsider. He told me once – I must’ve been thirteen or fourteen, when we were out getting lobsters – it was like being a hunter. Except you never actually get far into the woods. You lurk about on the edge, go in, shoot something and run out again, all in a few minutes. Don’t get very much, don’t see very much. “Down there,” he said, “there’s a whole new world we don’t know nothing about.” Set me thinking, that did.’
Then Mike had told him about his own background. Sid was to become Mike’s first real friend, an equal in a way that Peaches had never been, a steadying influence that counteracted Mike’s more quicksilver charm and intelligence.
The next day lessons started. There were two instructors. The first was a Lieutenant Coleville, a distant figure who kept himself very much to himself. The other was Eddy Wainwright, a forthright Yorkshireman – like the chief in the Edinburgh – in his late thirties, with piercing blue eyes and a bald head. He talked fast, and a lot, tolerating no fools, and soon became the driving force behind Mike’s steadily growing involvement in diving. It was he who made absolutely certain that his charges knew the fundamentals of what they were up against, first in the Tedworth’s classroom, then on the forty-five-foot diving launch, constantly reinforcing his information with a string of anecdotes.