by Tim Pears
There were shots from on shore as soldiers and Marines repelled boats seeking to land on Hoy, but on the Island of Cava many sailors succeeded in landing. Victor took up a pair of binoculars and reported what he saw. At one cove they could see a boat floating in the shallows, full of German sailors, and people standing guard on the beach. Victor said they were women armed with pitchforks and other menacing implements.
A British trawler came close and an officer raised a megaphone to his mouth and yelled that the German Fleet was sinking.
‘You don’t say,’ Captain Davies shouted back.
The officer called out for the Flying Kestrel to make for the Victorious, a pre-dreadnought battleship that had suffered much damage and was now the dockyard or repair ship for the Royal Navy in Scapa Flow. Captain Davies seemed to know where the Victorious was berthed.
As they came slowly around Cava they could see the bulk of the German Fleet. Vessels listed to port or starboard. Some heeled over and plunged headlong, their sterns lifted high out of the water and pointing skywards. One huge ship sank squarely, rapidly settling down in the ocean, while out of the vents rushed steam and oil and air with a terrible roaring hiss, and vast clouds of white vapour rolled up from the sides. Then it settled, with its masts and funnels still showing, a battlecruiser doing an imitation of a U-boat.
The Flying Kestrel went alongside the Victorious, sheltering close to its hull. After a while a trawler came up bearing captains and officers of the German ships. Marines in the trawler held their rifles pointed at the officers, who climbed aboard, lugging their own bags.
After some while the Kestrel was permitted to return to Stromness. As they left, they saw the first British destroyers, doubtless telegraphed with news of what was happening, speeding back into the Flow, throwing up huge bow-waves as they came.
The last German ship the Flying Kestrel passed was the first they’d seen on the way out, SMS Baden. For some reason her crew did not seem to have begun the scuttling process. They could see no one on board. Perhaps they had abandoned their ship but forgotten to sink her first. Then when Leo looked back at the Baden, he saw a solitary German sailor in a dirty white summer uniform, dancing a hornpipe on a gun turret. He watched him dancing alone, to no tune he could hear. To the east in the distance he could just make out HMS Benbow in the midst of the British ships.
Part Four
MOTHER AND CHILD 1919
1
The tall, rangy young man caught the first train out from Taunton. At Wiveliscombe Station, milk churns and baskets of produce were stacked at the section of the platform where the goods van had come to a halt. The young man climbed down from the carriage onto the platform. A few others alighted likewise. Travellers waited to board. He did not wish to be recognised, and tried to pull his seaman’s cap down over his eyes, though it had no peak. He put up the collars of his blue woollen coat. One porter unloaded post and parcels and newspapers. The other stacked boxes of provisions on his trolley. A carter in a railwayman’s uniform stood beside his horse.
Leo walked under the arch past the ticket office and out from the station, up the hill northward. He strolled along a familiar lane. There was no hurry. Leaves were turning on the trees. The seasons on the ocean bore little relation to those on land. He had all but forgotten the odours of autumn that entered his nostrils. Wet rotting plants decomposing into rich dark soil, distant bonfires, fungi erupting, sweet fruit decaying. They mixed into a scent that he inhaled deeply. He took a path across a field. Mist rose like smoke from the wet grass.
The war was over but Leo had signed up shortly before hostilities commenced. He was now merely on leave. Other hands with nowhere in particular to go spent their leave in riotous debauch, much of it insensible. The less they could remember, the more acclaim they received upon their return to ship. It was the British way, almost a patriotic duty. Leo might have joined them if a friend had invited or persuaded him, but since Victor Harris had left the Navy and returned to Cardiff he had none. He had become a loner on board, a ghost among men.
There were those among the survivors of the ships lost at Jutland who believed they must have died there and were ensconced now in some parodic afterlife, for who could have survived that conflagration? There was humour in this world, after all. Might not God have allowed Himself some share of it? Such a thing would surely amuse Him, to have the dead believe they yet lived, a miraculous elect.
A light rain was falling. The few people Leo saw had lowered their gaze, were unlikely to see the tall lean figure ambling northward. He entered a wood and remembered how he had once got lost here when sent on an errand, had ridden round in circles and feared that he was spellbound and would never get out. The drizzle ceased. Leo disturbed a cock pheasant out of undergrowth beside the track. He watched it rise, panicking, and fly noisily away. He could have brought it down with a catapult. A breeze came up through the wood. The sun shone. Wind shook the rain from the trees.
Leo did not wish to enter the estate by the customary route. Instead he skirted the village in a wide arc to the east then cut back and walked into the scrubland of the old quarries. By the time he reached his destination it was almost noon. The great pool, where he had learned and loved to swim as a boy, was as he remembered it. He sat upon the grey slab of rock where he and Lottie Prideaux had once picnicked, and looked upon the black water and across the pool to the granite cliff on the far side. The sun warmed the autumn morning. Leo unbuttoned his coat and laid it out to dry. He lay back some feet away and closed his eyes and soon slept.
When the young man woke he shielded his eyes from the sun and sat up. He looked out and saw, on a ledge of the cliff across the pool, a few feet above the water, a heron. It stood on spindly legs, wings folded. Leo pondered the bird. He could not tell whether it was gazing back at him, or at the water, or merely lost in contemplation of something other. Had it been watching over him while he slept? Perhaps herons completed a holy trinity of sentinels, along with horses and trees, put on the earth for this purpose. The bird bent its wiry knees and took off from the rock ledge, and with a stately flapping of its wings flew off towards the sun.
The young man rose from the slab. He picked up his coat and tossed it over his left shoulder and walked around the edge of the pool to the track leading away. It became a winding metalled lane through the old quarries. Then he entered the wood known to all as the Bluebell Wood. Of course they only flowered in spring. Now the leaves from oak and ash, hazel, beech, were falling, the compost of the wood, beneath which the bulbs lay dormant. In six months’ time they would release that blue rhapsody of colour and the faint subtle sweet fragrance.
Leo walked past cows grazing on tired pasture and down into the valley. He followed the stream lined with willows that had been pollarded since he last walked here and now resembled the heads of huge medieval weapons – cudgels, bludgeons – whose handles giants had thrust into the soft earth.
He walked up onto the gallops. This was the spot he feared being spotted, on the open terrain where Herb Shattock’s lads exercised the master’s hunters. To his relief there was no one riding there now. Leo walked on, past the hillocks called the Burial Mounds, and through empty pasture, then along a track between the burnt stubble of wheat fields on Home Farm. Soon ploughmen would turn the earth over, furrow by endless patient furrow.
Leo entered the small spinney Lottie had called ‘the jungle’. This was where he had waited for her, with the skeleton of a hawk his brother Sid had given him. He walked stealthily between the trees. Ahead lay the terraced lawns. Beyond them the big house, which came into partial view as he approached.
What he needed was a plan but he had none. Instead he stood well hidden and looked up across the empty lawns at the quiet house. The garden seemed altered to him. There was a pond he could not remember being there before. Over on one side near the walled kitchen garden stood an elegant wooden bench beneath a bower across which some climbing plant had been trained. On the far side of this was a ga
p in the hornbeam hedge that he could not explain. Perhaps these things had always been there and he had not noticed. Why would he? He was interested in other things.
Why was he standing here? He had come because he wished Lottie to know that he had not forgotten her, or his pledge to return. But how? Perhaps he should go to Head Keeper Aaron Budgell’s cottage, to see if Sid still lodged there or at least to find out where he now lived, and to give his brother a message for her. Or else to the stables, to converse with Herb Shattock. Leo understood that none of these people might be working here now or even still living. Yet he preferred to imagine nothing had changed.
His attention was drawn to movement up at the house. A glazed door opened and a young woman emerged. She walked across the terrace in his exact direction. Leo stopped breathing. He eased back behind the nearest tree. It was her. She was taller, a little fuller in the figure, but unmistakably Lottie. She wore a black skirt and white shirt; her brown hair was longer and tumbled about her shoulders.
Had she seen him, perhaps, from a window up in the attic? While he was peering in from the wood, was Lottie peering out from the house? She had seen him and was striding towards him. He could feel his heartbeat hammering in his chest.
Then she turned, gestured and perhaps said something to someone still inside. Out of the door came a small child. A boy. He toddled towards Lottie. She did not wait for him but stepped backwards off the terrace and retreated further across the lawn. The boy kept coming towards her. Even from this distance Leo could tell that the child was laughing. He gazed, rapt, unable to believe what he was seeing.
Halfway across the upper lawn, Lottie stopped and bent and waited for the child to reach her. She opened her arms and scooped him up and, holding him close to her, spun round and round. The boy hung on tight, his arms around her neck, spinning. Eventually she stopped, and somewhat clumsily set him back upon the grass. Lottie staggered a little. The boy reeled drunkenly and sat down, perplexed. Immediately he struggled to his feet again and tried to walk, but tottered and collapsed once more.
Lottie had surely regained her balance but now she too lost her bearings. With theatrical exaggeration the young woman lurched one way, froze, tripped awkwardly back the other. Leo could just hear the child’s high-pitched laughter. He could not help smiling himself, so fine was the performance. Lottie completed it with a flourish, falling gracefully a few feet from the boy. For a moment she lay prostrate, still, as if dead. The boy watched her. He stopped smiling. He seemed to be speaking to her. When she did not respond, he crawled over to her. Just as he reached her Lottie burst awake and grabbed him, and rolled over with him. When they stopped rolling it was hard to tell whether Lottie was tickling the child or wrestling with him, but he was certainly giggling again.
Leo watched her with the boy, as he had once watched her ride, suppling the doomed blue roan, Embarr. He had understood then, observing her, how fine a rider Lottie was, what understanding of horses she possessed. He understood now or believed he did something of what kind of mother she was. He had adored his own mother Ruth but she had never played with him in this manner. She’d had no time.
Mother and child rose from the grass. Holding his hand, Lottie led the boy to the pond on the lower lawn. Now as they came closer Leo could hear her talking to her son. He could not quite make out the words but he listened to the recognisable cadence of her voice. Imperious, familiar, undissembling. He thought she spoke to the boy as she would to anyone, or to a horse. Or to himself.
There was a low brick wall around the pond. The boy stepped up onto it. Lottie grasped his hand as he walked along the wall. She traversed a wider radius, around the outside, like a horse turning a wheel. Perhaps parenthood demanded such sacrifice. A parent had elected to become, to some extent at least, a beast of burden.
Leo could not understand. He’d believed his destiny lay with her but how could that be? Must he simply become her stable lad? Her groom? He watched the boy stepping carelessly along the wall, secure in the knowledge that if he slipped he would not fall but be saved by his mother. He seemed to Leo for a moment to be not a child but a goblin, mocking him. What had he thought? That he would be more to Lottie than a servant? It was absurd. Yet he was too proud to settle for less.
Leo stepped slowly backwards, deeper into the shadows of the wood. Lottie and the boy circled the pond. Then she looked up and Leo stood stock still. How pretty she was. A lovely woman. Another man was luckier than he. Leo was overtaken by an urge to cry out. His heart was breaking. Then the boy lost his footing momentarily. Lottie steadied him, and they resumed walking. Following the wall, they turned away from Leo. He too turned and ran through the wood, away from the house. He ran across the estate the way he had come, away from it forever.
Part Five
SALVAGE 1919–1927
1
In the summer of 1919, Ordinary Seaman Leopold Sercombe was transferred to HMS Ajax. The ship’s role, along with the rest of the Mediterranean Fleet, was to fly the flag on cruises around that sea. Men were issued with white tropical uniforms. Canvas awnings were raised on poles and spread across the aft decks as protection from the sun.
Operational readiness was maintained by exercises, manoeuvres and inspections. There were flotilla regattas and fleet competitions, on board or ashore.
They anchored off cities: Nicosia, Piraeus, Port Said. Civilians were invited aboard for dances, and for general visits. From Barcelona came a party of children, for whom games were set up. For one game, lots were drawn in Leo’s mess and he lost. His face was blackened with shoe polish and red paint applied to his lips. Thus adorned he had to hide behind two canvas screens, set up on deck some yards apart. As Leo dashed across the gap between them, children threw tennis balls at him. ‘Aim for his face,’ his shipmates urged the children.
Leo lived in a broadside mess with fifteen other men. A long wooden table was hinged to the side and hung from the deck above by a swinging bracket. The long benches could be secured in rough weather with deck bolts. At the head of the table was a locker containing cutlery, plates, basins. There were nests of galvanised steel lockers, one for each man, in which Leo kept his uniform clothes. His daily working rig was a white duck suit worn with a silk lanyard. He wore overalls for dirty jobs out of sight, and his cap at all times. There was also storage for small ditty boxes, containing each man’s private possessions. Photographs, letters from home. Leo had none of these. In his ditty box he placed skeletons of small birds and tiny mammals that he found on his rare forays ashore in the Mediterranean.
There was no privacy in a broadside mess. Leo began to read. There was a small library on board, odd readers scattered amongst the ship’s company who identified each other reading in their hammocks, and passed books back and forth.
The commander’s priority was the appearance of his ship, especially when in harbour, on show. The side party was charged with ensuring the ship’s side was always immaculate, without a single blemish. The quarterdeck was made of oak, rather than teak. A twice-weekly holystone scrub with sand gave it a whiteness teak could not match. The turrets and guns and superstructure shone with fresh enamel paint. Wooden hatches and bollard covers were scrubbed smooth. Brass tompions in the turret guns glistened. Leo’s division worked the upper deck, painting and keeping the forecastle clean. On Sunday mornings, when the skipper inspected the deck, Leo was placed up in the bridge wings with a rifle and a pocket full of blanks, to scare away from the paintwork any insolent seagulls.
The men washed their clothes at set times and dried them on wire clotheslines riven through blocks under the foretop and shackled to eye bolts. The clothes were pegged and the lines triced up taut and the laundry dried in the wind. Only these authorised lines could be used. No clothing could be hung up in the superstructure or on the guard rails that might be visible from outboard the ship. Many foreign ships displayed their crews’ clothes drying. Leo’s fellow hands poured scorn on such indiscipline.
Their day began at fi
ve in the morning and ended at nine in the evening, when the commander moved around the ship, preceded by the bugler, the corporal of the gangway and the master-at-arms. At each mess-deck the men stood to attention. When the rounds had passed, hammocks could be unstowed and slung overhead.
When HMS Ajax was in transit, seagulls fell away, and other birds appeared. The Mediterranean Sea acted like a huge barrier between Europe and Africa. Each autumn some large birds went east and made their way to Africa through Turkey and the Levant. Others went west and gathered at the tip of Spain. Thousands of storks and kites waited for thermals to lift them high enough for the wind to help them over to the African continent.
Small birds like chiffchaffs and nightingales flew straight across the Mediterranean. When they grew exhausted, some took the opportunity of a rest on a passing battleship. One early morning on the upper deck, in the middle of the sea, Leo was woken in his hammock by a familiar sound. For a moment he could not make sense of it, and thought that it must have been remembered from his dreams. It seemed to be calling to him from out of his childhood. Then he heard it again, and looked up and saw, sitting on an arm at the top of the mast, a cuckoo.
Across the Royal Navy, the men’s rates of pay were reduced. Those with families had less to send home. Morale fell on the ageing ships. Officers worried they would lose their jobs. At least married officers could bring their wives out to Malta, at their own expense, but crewmen could not. Ratings often ran out of money by the middle of a month and could not afford to go ashore to visit a canteen or cinema. Some scarcely ever left the ship. Leo was one of these. He was resolved to quit the Navy with savings. He bought soap and tobacco cheaply from the paymaster, the cost stopped from his pay. He did not intend to open a pub, like his friend Victor Harris who had sent him a postcard from Cardiff, but he turned other ideas over in his mind. He stayed on board, reading or playing shove-ha’penny in the mess, or else on deck gazing at the land that was always in sight. In Valletta harbour, a fragrance of spice, perfume and oranges wafted out from shore. Occasionally he scented cigar smoke. The buildings on shore were a light sandstone, the cloudless sky pale blue, the Mediterranean Sea a deeper shade. After tea the rig of the day was no longer compulsory. Leo changed into night clothing, an old serge suit worn without collar or lanyard, and watched the lights of the waterfront bars and the bobbing lights of the dghajsas. He listened to the bells of horse-drawn karozzins. His life was temporarily becalmed and there was nothing he could do but wait for the time it would resume.