by Michael Foss
For us, what course would the officers of the night pick between hope and despondency? After an age of looking, the naval mind was made up. Orders were barked along the deck, petty-officers and ratings began to muster their crews. Seamen sprang to work on the lifeboats and on the lockers that held the lifebuoys and lifejackets, cutting through lashings, hammering padlocks from the hasps, ripping away canvas, clearing davits, working not frantically but with enough clumsy urgency to suggest some slow but unstoppable calamity. Frustration squeezed the labouring bodies like a vice, as men lunged at tangled and fouled ropes, or were balked by corroded metal and layers of gummed-up paintwork. Lungs short of air blurted out in gasps: ‘Christ almighty, these bloody ropes!’ ‘Kick the bastard, get it moving, damn you!’ ‘Whoa, get a grip there, don’t let it swing!’ Then curses, oaths, dark-faced mutterings, pungent and repetitious, bewailing fate, maligning all the gods for this terrifying mess of life – the usual story.
Ropes stiffened by age and salt water resisted muscle power. Fingers were torn and bleeding. An axe was called for, then a line parted with a deadly twang and a shriek from a rusted pulley. Lifeboats partly cleared jerked in their davits, swinging unevenly, heeled at mad angles. The crowd on the decks stood by, frowning with worry and concentration. Young men volunteered to help but were turned back with brusque unfriendly shakes of the head. The seamen had enough to contend with already. Panic, if it were panic, was beginning to lap at the common expectation of the onlookers, like the damp creeping through the thrown-on slippers of the passengers, who now had to pull back from the rails at which sailors were bumping and cursing.
But no, it wasn’t panic. The danger was not yet so extreme. We were facing adversity, not annihilation, and we were gathering ourselves for another display of fortitude. This was the year of Dunkirk, and the summer’s evacuation from the beaches was strong in the memory. Our people knew what was expected of them. We acted now under the compulsion of our history and psychology. Was it any the less heroic to do so?
So this unspoken mass-history seemed to make even small children stoical. Did we feel it in our bones, my brother and I, a sort of perverse rectitude, a good behaviour far beyond our years and quite alien to frightened children? There we stood quietly, in a quiet crowd, clutching our mother’s hands. I could not see our tall father but no doubt he was in his proper place, for this was an orderly event. In any case I was small and hemmed in by legs. From my low level I had a view of naked ankles, bare feet thrust into slippers, gym-shoes, unlaced army boots, polished brogues, even court shoes with improbably giddy heels. Looking up a little I saw nightdresses with pretty frills peeping below the hem of bright dressing-gowns, striped pyjamas tucked into boot-tops, the jacket of a battle-dress buttoned over an evening shirt with a wing collar, a long scarf in school colours wound around an old woman’s neck. Men were unshaven, with the smudged look of interrupted sleep; women patted unkempt hair, or hugged a winter coat tight above the slinky material of nightclothes. For us children, all this was neither comic nor monstrous. Caught by the sobriety of our surroundings, we thought it an unusual prelude leading to some unknown grown-up ritual. Some enactment, we felt with more interest than alarm, was about to begin.
The big moon radiated a calm light, clarifying even the smallest movement, making it look weighty and deliberate. We watched, holding a collective breath. At a distance, another ship was foundering. Then somewhere below our feet, in the bowel of our ship, there was a crump and a slight shudder. Then an intensified silence. An effervescent flurry of small bubbles popped out of the crack between the hull and the ocean, dancing in moonlight. The jolt shook the doubt from the face of the crowd. Now we knew for sure, the worst expectation was realized, but the knowledge gave a certain courage.
The fate of the ship was now decided, but the percussion below had led to no sudden appalling consequence and the discipline held along the decks. After a while there seemed to be a hardly perceptible tilt to the hull. Only the now furious action of the crew warned of the inevitable denouement.
A rush of feet, shouts of authority, flushed faces under naval caps waving blue sleeves circled with the rings of their rank. A young officer’s voice choking on an embarrassing squeak. Sailors cutting into the crowd on the decks like handlers at a cattle-drive, rounding up nervous groups, heading off the lost or the maverick. Distortions bawled over the loudspeakers of the public address system, barely comprehensible – ‘Calling Muster Station G’, ‘Officers’ wives and dependent children’, ‘Starboard evacuees’, ‘Remember your lifeboat drill’. The whirr of electric motors, wire screaming off the drum, lifeboats plunging downwards and banging brutally into the water. People getting hastily into lifejackets, puffed as turkey-cocks, the bulging canvas of the jackets soiled by water-stains. Rope ladders flung over the rails, uncoiling like strange probosces. Bosun’s chairs swinging out into space.
My father was gone. Sometime in the stir and haste of the moment he, with other adult males, had been led away. Was there some logic applied to quitting a ship that decreed the break-up of families? I could not understand this dividing of our paths. Now more than ever I needed that tall figure, that paterfamilias. I renewed my grip on my mother’s hand. We – ‘wives and dependent children’ – were herded to a bay in the deck-rail where a bosun’s chair hung out from a cantilevered steel beam. How did one connect that skimpy canvas contraption on the end of a rope with the necessity of escape and safety? Anxiety made my brother’s face look strained and white in the moonlight, startlingly white, but he would not cry. My senior by a couple of years, he felt an elder’s responsibility. He had a boil on his bottom. As for me, if only I remained clutching my mother’s hand I was secure.
A lifeboat was bobbing below, too close under the hull to be seen from the deck. Oars splashed awkwardly in inexpert hands. Male voices rose from the lifeboat, unnaturally hearty, ringing with false confidence, contradictory voices used to command but well out of their element now. A woman climbed over the rail and set herself gingerly on a rope ladder, descending very carefully until only her fastidious wrinkled forehead was above the deck. A child was quickly tied into the bosun’s chair and dropped from sight like a stone.
In the mild night the evacuation was going quickly and smoothly but the plates of the ship were groaning and the stern was beginning to hunker down like an exhausted dog.
‘Hurry, for goodness’ sake get a move on,’ came a voice from below, ‘or this damn boat is going to squat on us. Double up the kids in the canvas chair.’
Along the deck a fat little boy, bigger than my brother and just old enough to start to form some cloudy notion of the ultimate danger, had changed from subdued snivels to raucous hiccups of fright. My brother was being settled into the chair when an exasperated sailor, unnerved by these squalls, grabbed the fat kid and thrust him onto the lap of my much smaller brother. Then down they went, my brother’s pinched face peeping from behind the enveloping suet of puppy fat. My mother and I followed, her arms tight about me.
The last passenger came unsteadily down the rope ladder and a voice cried, ‘Leave off there, this boat’s full now.’ Oars were hovering above the surface of the sea and the lifeboat was kicked away from the scales of the rusty hull. Out from the shelter of the ship we sat on the swell, waiting for a signal from above that all was clear to pull away from the drowning ironwork of the stricken ship. On a bench in the lifeboat my brother and I crouched under the lee of my mother’s body, her arms hugging around our shoulders. My brother looked at the plump brat still trying to ride his hiccups and whispered with tears in his own voice, ‘He sat on me and burst my boiler.’
*
A brilliant night, out under the stars. Mythological wonders of gods and heroes were written on the palimpsest of the sky; I looked up with eyes new to this creation and felt instinctively the power of that divine writing that had suggested such a persuasive mystery to Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Chinese, Indians, Greeks, Polynesians, even to those weird bl
ue men tending the ancient boulders of Stonehenge. The cold nip of the night gave a polish to the air, making those lights of heaven sparkle. We were alone now. The ship had gone, a quiet demise, slipping almost unnoticed into the confraternity of the deep. We held position according to the wheeling arms of the Plough and the certainty of the Pole Star. Somewhere not far to the south was Donegal or the coast of Northern Ireland. If we pulled steadily towards the east Glasgow awaited us. The rowers put their backs into the oars. There was nothing else to do.
Men had ranged themselves along the wooden benches, two or three to each oar, depending on their age and strength. The lifeboat was heavy and clumsy with high sides, deliberately overbuilt to stand the punishment of the ocean, and it was not easy to row. The hands on the oars were willing but soft, inexperienced. The oars were long, heavy, with rough wooden handles. They struck the water at an awkward angle, and the knack of getting them in and out smoothly with a steady rhythm was hard to learn. After a while no one spoke. A bearded man vested in the authority of a navy-blue jacket with brass buttons took the tiller. Women and children were scattered on the benches towards the inside of the boat, fitting in wherever there was a space. The rowers had begun briskly but soon grew weary. Shoulders slumped, breath came thickly from open mouths, a dew of sweat dampened foreheads even in the night chill. Sore hands began to blister. The breeze was freshening, dragging frayed strips of cloud over the flying moon. When the moon was hidden, the oar-strokes no longer glittered in a spray of white foam but went in and out amid surly dark swirls.
Our little family group sat facing forward, cramped for space but glad to huddle together for warmth and security. My brother’s back came within the ambit of one of the oarsmen’s swing. Every so often, on a hard pull, the end of the oar jerked into my brother’s body. A creak of the oarlock and then the blow – a painful time-keeping. It was not easy to shift position without disrupting the work of the boat, and my brother did not complain. He was older than I and felt his standing, particularly in the absence of our father. He would not acknowledge his bruises, and this was no time for the indulgence of tears. At first, I sat on my mother’s lap, hugged against the rough stuff of her coat. In front of me I watched the prow circle against the starry sky. The long swell under the rising breeze was causing the lifeboat to yaw and pitch a little, a mild but unsteady motion.
The fusty smell of my mother’s coat was in my nose. I felt constricted. I was gulping, I couldn’t get enough air, a rising warmth pushed against a plug of soft matter in my throat. My eyes were out of kilter, the horizon was upending itself, faces shifted alarmingly. I needed more room. Seeing my condition my mother led me down the boat, stumbling over the ribs, to the clear space in the stern around the helmsman. On each side of him a little bench curved around the contour of the boat just below the gunwale. We sat on one of these benches, close to the helmsman, but I could not prevent the welling up of my young life inside me. Fright, cold, puzzlement, misery, ignorance, the loneliness of a small mite on the vast unfeeling breast of the sea, they all gripped me. I began to gasp. Now I knew where I was, raw and almost unlicked, and for the first time I sensed my human incapacity. My eyes were misted, my stomach churned and heaved.
Suddenly I leant forward and vomited accurately into the lap of the helmsman. He hardly flinched but kept tired eyes straining into the night.
*
Biological life is one thing. We date our being from conception or birth. But except in dreams or drugs what do we know of our infant days, our weaning, our first stumbles onto two legs, our shouts of naked emotion turning by degrees into speech? Full life – full self-awareness – starts with the first memory. I know that moment exactly. I confirmed it at the City of London Library at the Guildhall, searching through the shipping registers of Lloyd’s of London. I read there what I already knew, that when reality caught me and opened my eyes to perception I was hand-in-hand with catastrophe and sudden violence:
Departed from the Clyde, on 19 September 1940, SS City of Simla, with 3000 tons of general cargo, 183 crew and 167 passengers. On 21 September, at 55′59″ North & 8′16″ West, torpedoed at 1.35 a.m. and sunk, with the loss of 1 crew and 2 passengers.
TWO
The Gate Closed
‘LISTEN, CHILDREN,’ SAID the voice, trying to be cheerful, ‘who’s going to be the first to see a ship?’ It was a poor game but we took it up eagerly, glad, in our anxiety, to be diverted. The mind finds a narcotic in its own patterns of activity – in this preoccupation we swerve away from that fear. A clump of darkness, the shadow of a cloud, a moon-bright slick on a wave, one by one such queer shapes gave a fillip to our childish imagination. But no ship came. Then we grew weary and subsided into uneasy dozing, keeled over against adults, starting awake at the pitch of the boat or the ruffle of the wind.
At dawn, a watery sun peered blearily over the far hump of the ocean. For several hours we had been rowing through seas more cheerless than dangerous. The calm weather was holding. The unwieldy oars scratched along the water, ticking off the slow passage of time. In the lifeboat, heads were drooping, on the edge of sleep or nodding vaguely to a dejected rhythm. So no one saw the pale flush of the day’s first meagre light pick out the lines of a freighter far ahead steaming very slowly across our bows. Then the adults saw it and a low noise went around the boat, not jubilant or excited, but as if taking satisfaction in a favourable toss of the coin. How quickly it had been accepted, in this Britain of 1940, that an autumnal night in an open boat on the North Atlantic was merely the ill luck of war, to be expected and endured. For the time being the good citizen had abandoned the habitual cry of self-interest, the demand to be heard first and often. We were learning that there was a kind of peace in unaccustomed humility.
The rowers rested on their oars, craning awkward looks over the shoulder. They saw the freighter alter course and begin to grow bulky in their line of sight, huge and grey. Then they could afford to smile wearily and paddle a little, sagging on the benches, fatigue mixed with relief giving them a fatuous or spaced-out look.
The freighter had been tiptoeing carefully past the U-boats towards Glasgow. The radio had reported the sinkings in our convoy and so the freighter was not surprised to find lifeboats adrift on the night seas. The crew had already picked up other survivors and had weather eyes open for more boats in need of rescue. Now it was our turn. The big ship hove to, and we slopped about in the thick gloom of its hull. High above us, along the deck-rail, were rows of whitish faces, as dim as dinner plates in a dusty old-fashioned dresser. No one waved or shouted. In a minute or so a dark-faced lascar shook out a coil of rope and hurled it into the bow so that we could tie up and bring the lifeboat alongside the sloping gangway suspended against the side of the ship. We began a laborious disembarkation, a painful exit blotting out the memory of how smartly we had jumped for our lives into the boat. We had been wrung out by too much emotion. This was no more than a domestic event, a homecoming of weary travellers that required neither banners nor trumpets.
And in this flat atmosphere somehow it did not startle me that I should find my father waiting for us as we stepped from gangway to deck. What is a homecoming without the father of the house? His lifeboat had been picked up a good hour before us. I do not remember that he hugged us, but I think he gave my brother and myself a manly shake of our little hands.
But we were fretful and demanding, wanting some recognition of the magnitude of our childhood adventure. Grizzling, wiping tired eyes with the back of a sleeve, shivering not so much from cold but in the after-shock of sea and misery, we went moaning and complaining to a gaunt, functional lobby where we could rest under an old coat or blanket, prone on the floor or huddled in crooked shapes on one of the few armchairs.
We slept, ate hard biscuits and drank weak tea, then dozed again while the freighter headed for Glasgow. As we entered the docks at nightfall we kids were still fractious and bickering, making a grievance of our new safety, paying out for lost security with a
litany of whines. Our mother was overwhelmed, as so often, and then exhausted to the point of tears. That she should have to endure this, after all that she had been through. She washed her hands of us, with resentful looks towards her husband, implying the need for a father’s firm hand. The provocation of his family was as much as my father could bear at the best of times. He hoped to be above the sordid fray of family disputes. In India, there had always been an ayah to scoop us up out of the sahib’s wrath, to feed us sweetmeats and a taste of pan in the servants’ cubbyhole behind the kitchen.
‘Now, boys,’ he said reproachfully, ‘you know better than to annoy your mother.’
He hoped that would be enough, but of course it hardly ever was, and he was reduced to the indignity of having to issue threats and smacks at random. It was sad the effort he had to make to knock us about, and I think we felt for him, for we redoubled our noise and not all the laments were for ourselves. We felt the suffering of our parents.
After all, what did our family have left? We stood in an ill-assorted jumble of clothes. Our trunks, our cases, all our household effects, a favourite teddy bear and the other inconsequential toys of childhood were even then settling into the silt of the North Atlantic. We had become refugees in our own land, a place to which we were barely connected, bearing odd garments like the stigma of our dispossession. My father, tall and slim and a bit of a dandy in his dress, had been given a flat-top cap in a cheerful tweed, the chummy sort of cap of beer-stained working-class pubs in the industrial north of England. We trudged out of the ship onto a raw dock surrounded by the spires of cranes. My brother and I were dragging our feet, trying to put our sullenness into words.
‘What an awful hat,’ said my brother gloomily, behind our father’s back.