by Tim Pears
Leo kept up his diving. On a stormy night in Malta, when HMS Ajax lay to buoys in the Grand Harbour, a steamer came adrift and collided with the bow of the ship. Leo inspected the damage and over the following weeks carried out underwater repairs.
In the summer Leo went swimming. Sometimes others went with him. They took a dghajsa over to the harbour breakwater. At its inner end was an area of flat sandstone, which he made his base for a picnic and a doze in the sun. Periodically he rose and dived into the sea and swam to a buoy moored a hundred yards out. There he heaved his dripping body from the shimmering water, and sat on the bobbing float.
The ship’s plumber bent copper pipe for him with which Leo fashioned a snorkel. He acquired a pair of submarine escape goggles. With these Leo floated in the deep blue water, entering another domain, and watched multicoloured fish dart before him. He saw octopi and eels. His skin turned the colour of hazel.
In the summer of 1923, optional swimming periods were introduced. Between 7 and 7.30 in the morning and 5 and 5.30 in the afternoon, men could rise from the clammy atmosphere below decks and dive into the sea. Leo rarely missed an opportunity. He swam well away from the ship.
HMS Ajax was involved in occasional operations to keep the peace in trouble spots around the Med. From Gibraltar they oversaw the Tangier Patrol, ensuring the security of Tangier against incursion by Berber separatists. There was briefly action against Turkish Nationalists in the Sea of Marmara. In 1922 the Sultan of Turkey was deposed, and the Ajax conveyed him to exile in Mecca.
In April 1924 Ajax returned to Devonport, assigned to the Reserve Fleet. The clear waters and bright sun of southern Europe were replaced by grey seas and grey skies around the grey metal ship. June was dull and unsettled. July was wet and thundery, and cool. August the same, with frequent rain.
Leo asked to see the chaplain. He knew Reverend Martin from the library, and now visited him in his cabin. The chaplain sat at his desk and invited Leo to sit in an armchair beside it. He asked the young seaman if he knew of the damage that insects could do on board. Leo said that of course every sailor gets used to crushing a cockroach beneath his heel. And the cooks complained constantly about weevils in their flour.
‘Silverfish,’ the chaplain said. ‘They’re the most damnable little philistines. I’ve discovered they’re eating our books.’
‘That’s awful, sir,’ Leo said.
The chaplain admitted that in truth the small insects were consuming paper very slowly. The library was not in imminent danger. He asked what it was Sercombe needed.
Leo said that he wanted to ask a question.
‘You may ask anything you like,’ Reverend Martin said. He gestured to the closed door behind Leo and told him that whatever was said in this cosy cabin was confidential.
Leo nodded. He frowned, and bit his lip.
The chaplain waited. Then he said that he had heard so many men express one anxiety or another, he did not believe anything could surprise him. ‘Do you smoke, Sercombe?’ he asked, and offered Leo a cigarette from a silver box.
The tobacco, or perhaps the action of lighting the cigarette and inhaling and exhaling, seemed to make it easier to speak, and Leo said, ‘Do you think it be possible, sir, for a man to find himself in a life that is not his own?’
The chaplain smiled and said he was sure that it was. In fact, it was closer to the natural condition of man than any other.
‘Out a place?’ Leo asked. ‘Out a time?’
‘We are all wanderers,’ the Reverend said. ‘We are exiles upon the earth.’ He reached up to a shelf above the desk and brought down a Bible, leafing through its thin pages. Then he found what he was looking for and, with a finger upon the page, read out, ‘“Here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city which is to come.”’
Leo stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray on the chaplain’s desk.
‘Of course, if you have lost God,’ the chaplain said, ‘I suppose this is scant consolation.’
‘I ain’t sure, sir, that God did not lose me.’
The chaplain shook his head. ‘No, Sercombe. No. If there’s one thing I am sure of it is that God loses no one. He will always be there when we truly need Him.’
Leo nodded slowly. ‘I hope so,’ he said.
‘As you doubtless know, it’s the padre’s job on board ship in time of war to censor letters. To explain to the men what could and could not be said. I must say that I’m very happy to be divested of that obligation, but it did teach me something.’ He passed the box to Leo, and took another cigarette for himself and lit it. He blew out the smoke and said, ‘What I learned is that language is a puzzle. Words can be replaced and taken out and moved around to try to say the same thing in a different way, only for one to find they say something new, or the same thing in an improved fashion.’
Leo said he believed the Reverend was surely right about that, and thanked him, and left the cabin.
In June 1926, a few days after his twenty-seventh birthday, Leo Sercombe completed his twelve years’ service in the Royal Navy, with the rank of Able Seaman, and resigned.
2
‘A field.’
‘A field?’
‘Enough for a vegetable garden, some fruit trees. A paddock for a horse.’
Victor Harris had asked Leo what he wanted. They sat in the small saloon bar of the public house Victor had bought in Cardiff while his wife tended the bar. There were only two customers visible at noon, both old men, sitting alone on different benches along the walls.
‘I’d build a cabin in the field.’
‘From the way you’ve spoke about horses they’ll need one, but what about you, Lofty, where are you going to live?’
Leo smiled. ‘You’re right, Vic. First I’ll build a shelter for the horse. Then I’ll build myself a cabin.’
Victor Harris nodded. ‘I can see that, I can,’ he said. ‘It’s a picture. But I can’t see where the money’s coming from. You’ve spent money on the land. What are you going to live on?’
‘I’ll hire myself out,’ Leo said. ‘Me, my muscles, my horses. And I’ll buy and sell them. Break them in, train them.’
Victor shook his head. ‘You never struck me as a man mean enough to break horses. And where do you reckon on buying this field a yours?’
‘I guess I’ll head back home,’ Leo said. ‘To the West Country.’
‘How much more d’you reckon you need?’
Leo took a deep breath through lips pressed close together. ‘About two hundred and fifty.’
The men supped their beer.
‘At least,’ Leo said.
‘Your trouble is, you only saved,’ Victor Harris said. ‘You never speculated.’ He asked Leo whether he had heard about the salvage operation up in the Flow.
‘A rumour,’ Leo said. ‘But I couldn’t rightly believe it. We saw what happened. Most a them ships are deep under the water.’
‘Aye, the Admiralty said they’ll rust where they rest. But then the price a metal started rising on the markets, see, and some Brummie scrap dealer’s got the contract to lift ’em.’
‘So it’s true, is it? I heard about this scrap merchant.’
‘He’s a madman, is what I been told, like. The rest of us saw rustin metal hulks, see, Lofty, sinkin in the silt. This bloke went up there and had a poke around and saw money underwater. He sent divers down, and they’re seeking ways to raise the ships.’
‘What’s he pay?’
‘I heard he’s payin labourers ten shillins a shift, and divers twice that. He works them hard. A bloke from here it was who told me. Went up, come back inside a month, said this feller, Cox is his name, works his men like beasts. The only one he works harder is his self. It’s dirty work and it’s dangerous. He said the money wasn’t worth being flogged to death for.’ Victor shrugged. ‘You might see it different.’
Leo remembered Cyrus Pepperell, a farmer who drove himself insanely hard. He was not sure he wanted to work for such a tyrant again.
‘Taff said this lunatic has raised the destroyers but he ain’t satisfied. Got his eye on the battleships, see? Goldmines. He’ll be needing more divers, Lofty.’
Victor’s children wandered in and out of the bar from the family’s quarters out the back. Leo could not see how Victor Harris could have fathered so many children. Victor said it was simple. Each child represented a different visit home on leave.
‘I’ve not checked the dates too closely, mind you. Whether the day they was born come a little sooner or later than nine months after my leave. If they did, I don’t need to know, do I?’
The men sat in the gloomy corner, watching Victor’s wife Myfanwy at the bar, serving a third man, who had just come in, with a pint of draught ale. She had a grim unsmiling countenance, but in response to what she said, which Leo could not hear, the man was laughing.
‘I couldn’t ask for a better wife, boy,’ Victor Harris said. ‘If you find one half as good, keep a hold of her. Though she might not be over impressed, like, by life in a little cabin.’
Leo smiled. ‘If I find such a woman, I’ll build an extra room for her.’
Victor nodded. ‘Now you’re thinking straight,’ he said.
3
On the train to Scotland, passengers in Leo’s compartment spoke of the General Strike. One man claimed that strikers in Northumberland had derailed the Flying Scotsman. A large woman said that Baldwin was right, we were threatened with a revolution, and she didn’t care how many Communists were arrested, they could have arrested twice as many as far as she was concerned. A second man said that the strike was a sin, as the Catholic Church had pronounced it to be.
Another asked if they did not feel some sympathy for the miners, who struggled on alone, but none did. He asked Leo for his opinion, but Leo said that he regarded himself as too ignorant of the facts to make a sensible contribution, and so kept his own counsel.
The steam train chuntered through the North of England. Past dirty factories, surrounded by piles of rusty iron and stagnant pools of oily water. Through cuttings, the rock on each side blackened by the coal smoke of the trains. Between rows of houses squashed together, with tiny gardens squeezed between their back doors and the metal fences of the railway. The train chugged across open country for a mile or two then back into the industrial grime of foundries and factories and railway yards.
When Leo travelled this way before, was he asleep in the darkness while they came through the North? Or perhaps the Jellicoes had taken a different line, further east. Smoke rose from factory chimneys. They passed collieries, with grey and black slagheaps. Narrow streets wound away up steel hillsides. He stared at a refuse heap on which small figures scavenged.
Beyond York the countryside opened up once more. It was haymaking season. Leo did not know if summer breezes carried scents into the railway carriages stuttering past or memories defrauded his senses, but he knew the raw smell of fresh grass in the morning, the honey scent of clover. The damp earthy odour of the underside of hay as they turned it to expose it to the sun, the sweet dry fragrance of it being loaded in the evening. But there were fewer people in the fields than he remembered as a boy. And there were fewer horses. For on some farms tractors now pulled the mowers, and rakes that turned the hay. Men who had once worked with horses now rode the machines belching smoke over the fields. Perhaps his father was now driving such a vehicle. No. He could not see Albert Sercombe on a tractor. That would never happen. It was not possible. His father was surely a horseman for life.
4
The man seated on the other side of the desk read the piece of paper Leo had given him. Once or twice he looked up, perhaps to correlate the tall, young ex-seaman standing before him with what was written in the reference letter. To equate the person with the words used to describe him.
‘To whom it may concern,’ he said at length. ‘Yes, it does concern me. Who is this Chief Petty Officer fellow, singing your praises? He could be your uncle for all I know.’ He picked up the letter. ‘This could be a forgery.’
Leo shook his head. ‘It isn’t, sir.’
The man narrowed his eyes. ‘It says here you can dive to ten fathoms. Which if it’s true means you’re plumb fit, sonny. You’ll need to be.’
‘It’s true, sir.’
‘Just out of the Navy and you want to jump back in the water, eh?’
‘I heard you pay well, Mister Cox.’
‘I pay good men good money. You’ll have to earn it. If you’re no good, you’ll be on your way.’
‘I don’t mind hard work.’
The man stood up. He was of average height and looked across his desk and up at Leo. ‘You want to know who you’re dealing with, sonny. I’m not some upper-crust, blue-blooded gentleman. I left school at thirteen. No one taught me anything apart from the writers of the books I read. Manuals. Textbooks. I’m an engineer, and I’m a merchant in metal. The people who know about these things said these ships couldn’t be raised. The experts. Well, I raised ’em. I’ve proved ’em wrong with the destroyers, and I’ll prove ’em wrong with the battleships.’
Leo listened to the blowhard. Another of them. Maybe there was something in his own withdrawn nature that brought forth their boastful soliloquies. He hoped that there might be more substance to Ernest Cox’s bragging than the empty bluster of Henery Orchard selling dud horses or Victor Harris on HMS Benbow fleecing his gambling customers.
‘Put a piece of metal in front of me, sonny, any metal. You can blindfold me … all I need is a spanner to tap it with and I’ll tell you what metal it is, just by the sound of it. What do you think of that, eh? How many men do you reckon could do it?’
Leo did not know the answer, but he guessed the one Cox wanted to hear. ‘No other, I reckon.’
‘Yes, that’s right, sonny,’ Cox said, nodding. ‘No other bugger could do it. You’ve done your twelve-year stint, you’ve spent years on board big ships, and I’ll wager you’ve no idea what metals there are on these Hun boats. Well, I’ll tell you. Cast steel was used for the stern, the stern frame, the rudder frame and suchlike. Wrought iron was used for cables, davits and so forth.’ He did not count these items off on his fingers but with each one slapped the back of his right hand into the palm of his left. ‘There’s armoured cable, sonny, steel rope, anchors, turbine blades.’
He might have been describing the fruit of the Tree of Life, the paradise of God become a scrap metal yard.
‘And when we go inside what are we going to find? Non-ferrous metals. Brass, copper, lead. Phosphor bronze, gunmetal, manganese. You see, Leo Sercombe, I don’t give a tinker’s cuss what objects were once used for. Their function means nothing to me. Irrelevant. All I see is the metal and how we can get it. Come along, I’ll show you round our little kingdom.’
Ernest Cox wore a clean white shirt beneath a tweed waistcoat, jacket and plus-fours. His brogues shone. At the door of the office he lifted a trilby from a hook and put it on his head. ‘Mac!’ he yelled, marching along a corridor and into another office. Leo followed.
‘I may have got you your sixth diver, Mac, just in time,’ Cox said to the man studying ship’s plans at a table. Cox made it sound as if he had recruited Leo himself. ‘He’s a Navy man, stationed here in the Flow back in the days of the internment. His name’s Leopold Sercombe. Leo, meet Sinclair McKenzie, chief salvage officer. He’s a diver too, so there’s no pulling the wool over his eyes.’
Another man came into the doorway. Cox and MacKenzie were middle-aged. This one was younger, not much older than Leo.
‘Ah, Ern. We’ve got a fellow ex-Navy man to keep you company. Not on submarines, I’m afraid, this one, but a good diver, he claims. Ernie McKeown’s my chief engineer, Leo. Come along. It’s almost time for lunch.’
The base of Ernest Cox’s operations at Scapa Flow was in the old naval quarters and depot in Lyness on the Island of Hoy. Cox rammed his trilby further down onto his head against the stiff wind and walked out into the sunshine.
‘
We’ve cleared Gutter Sound of its destroyers,’ he said. He took Leo to the old barracks, whose huts now accommodated his workers in a series of dormitories. ‘You’ll be in here with the other divers,’ he explained, opening the door of a hut. There were half a dozen beds. Clothes and equipment lay scattered around, though there were a number of cupboards and lockers. Leo noticed a wireless set on top of a dresser.
There were other huts for mechanics, carpenters, electricians. Perhaps there was a hierarchy as onboard ship that would become clear soon enough. Cox showed Leo all the accommodation – for labourers, linesmen – to impress upon him the scale of operations. They walked back, past a hut that had been converted into a cinema. Another with billiard tables and a bar.
They approached a larger building from which voices could be heard, and the sounds of plates and cutlery clanking. Cox pushed open the door and strode in.
‘All right, Father?’ a man addressed him. Cox did not reply, but picked up a fork from a table, and a glass. He rapped the fork against the glass. Men ceased talking in a widening circle from him.