by Tim Pears
The divers entered the interior of the vessel, to seal holes they could not access from outside. They carried submersible electric lamps, which gave out a dull, foggy glow. They found that lobsters had made their homes in compartments, and defended their territory with large claws. One afternoon Leo went down with Harry Grosset. He was cutting a ply template for a hole when he looked to the side and saw, in the dim yellow light of the lamp, that he was being watched. He could not see the man’s body, only his head. He was sure that Harry was behind him somewhere, this was someone else. A bald man with dark, sad eyes and fine whiskers. The man beheld him. Leo returned his gaze. After some seconds had passed it occurred to Leo that the man was not wearing a helmet. This was not possible. It seemed to him that the man’s face was unusually small, and somehow unnatural, but in what way he was not sure. He could not make it out. He wondered if he was looking at a ghost. The shade of a German sailor. Or a creature, one of those of whom the Scottish divers had warned him, who came up to the Orkney shallows from their home in the deeps of the oceans to grab a human mate.
Then the odd little man turned and swam off. Leo watched him swim away, and realised it was a seal that had been observing him.
Conger eels were everywhere. As Leo pushed an air-pipe through a porthole one bit him on the hand. It did not seem too bad, as he could not feel it and the cut did not bleed much underwater. But when he came up to the surface the blood began to gush out and he had to have the wound hurriedly dressed.
The divers worked their way through the ship blocking holes. For those too large to be plugged yet too awkward to be covered with a plate they poured ciment fondu, a cement that dried chemically rather than by evaporation. It was pumped into an opening through a long pipe like a fireman’s hose.
One morning in late January Leo went down with Bill Peterson. They followed guide ropes that had been left by the last pair working in the ship the day before, and passed down through the decks until they reached the upper deck now at the bottom of the ship. Every door and porthole had to be sealed so that the entire hull was rendered watertight.
When the scuttled ship had turned turtle, everything loose had been tumbled about and settled on the ceilings that were now floors and covered in a slimy carpet of oil, coal dust and decaying matter. Fuel oil and liquid from the bilges had spilled everywhere. When they disturbed the sludge, no light from their lamps could penetrate it; they had either to wait for it to settle or to work in darkness. The light was dingy anyhow and with every step the two of them raised the oily silt, which spread through the filthy water darkening it further so that Leo felt he was walking through ink, unable to see more than the faintest glow from his lamp. He lowered himself through a hatchway into a mess room. Bill Peterson remained outside to make sure his partner’s air and lifeline did not get snagged.
Leo felt around until he found a wooden ladder. He climbed down it towards the ceiling of the room, where he expected to find an open door that they hoped to be able to close tight shut. Suddenly the ladder came loose from the wall. It squirmed free from his oily grip and shot up through the water, propelled by its own liberated buoyancy.
For a moment Leo waited. He believed that he could sense the wooden ladder beside him rising like a vertically propelled torpedo through the black water. Then he felt his lifeline and his airline pulling themselves taut, lifting him up with them. He rose a yard or two and stopped. The ladder was stuck. He tugged the lifeline. It was caught fast, pinned by or entwined around the ladder. If the ladder had also ruptured his airline he was a dead man. He might be anyhow.
Leo hung blindly in the inky darkness, his heavy boots and the lead weights around his torso pulling him down but his trapped lines ensnaring him. He shut the air valve in his diving suit. After some moments he realised to his relief that the suit was filling with compressed air through the airline, and soon he began to rise. He held his arms above his head. When he found the ladder he grasped hold of a rung and tried to pull it down but it was stuck fast.
Leo took one hand off the lowest rung of the ladder and opened the valve to let air out of the suit. He thought that the lead weights added to the weight of his body might help to pull the ladder down. He held onto the rung as his suit lost buoyancy, but the ladder did not budge. All that happened was that he became aware of heat in his arms that he realised was pain from taking the strain of his own weight and the lead. He changed tactics and closed the valve again and after a minute or two felt the tension in his arms relax, and soon he began to rise once more. He rose beside the ladder now, keeping hold of it rung by rung.
Suddenly the ladder bucked out of Leo’s grasp. He thought that the whole ship had shifted, listing on the seabed. He floated in the blackness. He wondered if death would come now violently or if he might curl up and hang blindly in the strange fluids of that womb-like tomb. There seemed to be no further movement or reverberation. He felt around for the ladder and found it again, then had it sprung from his grip once more. It banged against his helmet. This time he did not try to find it but pulled the lines and discovered that one of them, the lifeline, was now free. He rose, following the remaining, pinned, airline. He was aware of turbulence in the water nearby, presumably the ladder being shifted downwards then bobbing back up, but as it did it yanked him after it on the airline. Someone was doing this. Some insane bastard was messing about with the ladder and with his lines.
Leo rose. His hands came into contact with something that moved. It was oily as everything else and so difficult to decipher. He tried to keep hold of it but it was slippery and was moving, then he grasped something that seemed also to grasp him in an oily handshake and he understood that this was Bill Peterson. They came together and though they were unable to see each other they could tap on each other’s helmets. Painstakingly, by taking Bill’s hand and putting it to the ladder, and to his lifeline, Leo hoped that he might make his colleague understand what had happened and the plight that they were in. They wrestled with the ladder and with Leo’s airline, slithering around in the murk, trying to help each other and work together though it was impossible to know if they actually were, blindly groping for what felt like hours and hours. Until suddenly the airline came free.
Leo rose and felt the floor of the room above him and followed the lifeline to a hatch and half-swam, half-clambered through it. Bill ascended beside him. As they rose together Leo understood that their lines were entangled and they had no choice. He wanted to hug Bill Peterson with relief but, as two men in diving suits in deep water, this was impossible. He signalled by tugging on his lifeline to those in the boat above that they were coming up, and they made their way back. They rose side by side. When they had been pulled into the boat and their helmets removed, Magnus Scott said, ‘Have ye two fellows been doing the tango doon there or what?’
Bill Peterson related what had happened in the boat there and then, as he would do many times in the hours and the days following. To the boss, in the dormitory to their fellow divers, in the canteen to the other men. He liked to tell the story with Leo there beside him, for every time he told it he finished by assuring those present that, ‘This laddie’s got one calm head on his shoulders. He has that, I can tell you. He’s one cool customer.’
Then it was Leo’s turn to speak. ‘Bill saved my life,’ he said.
Someone else had once saved his life underwater. Lottie Prideaux. He did not tell Bill, or anyone else, about it, but he began to think of her again, he could not help it. Of his promise, despite her son and any other encumbrances. Of what it meant.
8
When the holes were finally sealed in February, six twelve-inch centrifugal pumps were set up on the floating dock. A further dozen six-inch submersible pumps were placed beneath the surface. Water began to be sucked out of the great warship, and continued, hour after hour. Over the days following thousands of tons of water were pumped out. It was not possible to say exactly when the ship might be salvaged, but after a week Ernest Cox and his team knew ther
e should be some indication. Some movement. There was none. They stood on the floating dock.
‘Turn them off,’ Cox ordered.
Divers were sent back down. Sinc Mackenzie and Nobby Hall descended in the morning. At first they could not find a problem. No holes that had been missed or some other unforeseen problem peculiar to the battleship. Then they saw that water was seeping back into the hull, through tiny leaks in the pudding joints.
Leo Sercombe and Harry Grosset were the next pair to go down, on the afternoon shift. They were told to collect a plate and bring it back for inspection. They chose the one closest to the surface where the light was best, though the sea was choppy and it was not easy to begin unscrewing the first bolt. Leo was attempting to apply the spanner when he felt a tap on his shoulder. He looked up and saw Harry pointing. Leo obeyed the direction and saw small fish nibbling at the outside of the pudding joints. They did not unscrew the plate but went up to the boat and returned with a fishing net.
The fish were identified as saithe, a species of cod, and they had been feeding off the tallow that had been spread on the outside of the joints. Tom McKenzie had a tank set up in one of the sheds, filled with seawater and populated by saithe. Then he experimented with new sealants. After a few days he found that if he mixed a little Portland cement with the tallow the fish did not eat it. With this new mixture the divers painstakingly re-covered all the pudding joints.
Once the new compound was set, Ernest Cox ordered pumping resumed. The stern of SMS Moltke was embedded in the gravel and silt of the ocean floor, her bow up off the ground. On the third day of sucking water from the ship the bow began to rise. This was no good. If there was a quantity of water trapped amidships the ship’s back could break under the strain and she would be lost, her scrap worthless. Leo watched as Ernest Cox, Tom McKenzie and Ernie McKeown tried one thing after another.
To lighten the ship’s weight at the stern, the giant propeller was loosened, worked off the shaft and hoisted out. This did not seem to help. Water was let back in and the bow lowered, and a destroyer scuppered to add its weight to that end. They pumped the water out again until the ship began to rise but it did so in a volatile manner, rolling and see-sawing, and they let her down again.
All this took weeks. Leo was amazed at the time it took. Victor Harris had said that what Cox did was to speculate to accumulate, but this was speculation on a grand scale. Every action Ernest Cox took was a new experiment, for who had ever salvaged battleships this size? An entire sunken navy? Every problem was a new one, and there was no guarantee it had a solution.
Perhaps the stern needed a little help to free it from the suction of the gravel and sand. Cox ordered the divers to attach a series of nine-inch cables to the gun turret and to other strong points aboard the stern section. These were connected to the winches they’d used to raise the destroyers, attached to one of the floating platforms. Again water was pumped out of Moltke. The cables were made taut. This time, when, on the third day, the bow began to rise, labourers turned the winches. There were twelve winches, with four men on each holding one of the handles. Leo stood smoking with Harry Grosset at the back of the platform. Harry told him how when they’d raised the destroyers there would be another platform on the opposite side, with the same number of winches, so that they’d lifted those boats in a wire cradle.
The bow inched out of the water but there was still no movement in the stern. Ernest Cox barked out orders through his megaphone. It was imperative that the labourers all pulled in unison. Cox yelled for each twist and with a great effort, heaving and grunting and sweating, the men slowly turned the handles. The taut wires began to sing or hum with the strain. Suddenly there was a loud crack. Leo flinched for he thought that someone had fired a gun. He looked up and saw a length of severed cable rear up into the air and come down towards the floating dock, writhing and whiplashing like some steel-wire snake. He threw himself to the floor. He heard another gunshot, then another, as one cable after another snapped, and he heard men yelling, and the sound of the cables as they swished through the air, thrashing, and struck the dock and the winches on the dock and other such machinery.
Leo did not raise himself up until the noises had abated and there was only one sound other than the wind, which was that of a man groaning. When he rose he saw that others had done so before him and were tending to the groaning man, one of the labourers. Another lay still on the deck. Two men knelt beside him. Then they rose and turned away. Other men stood watching. One of these took off his jacket and stepped forward and laid it over the head and shoulders and upper chest of his former colleague.
All work stopped. The injured man was recovering in hospital. The funeral of the other took place two days after the incident. The men accompanied the coffin by boat to the harbour on the mainland and thence by foot to the church in Kirkwall.
9
On the morning following, they were told to gather in the canteen. There Ernest Cox addressed them. The divers sat at their usual table.
‘I don’t know what’s gone wrong, boys,’ he said. ‘Either we can’t lift the stern or when we can her weight seems to shift around. Maybe turning turtle’s loosened everything up inside her. There’s air trapped in some places and water sloshing about in others. The only way to find out what’s happening when we try to raise her would be to have men inside, and that’s too dangerous even for these thrill-seekers.’ He gestured to the divers’ table. ‘I wouldn’t ask you to do that,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I would not. What happened to those two lads was a terrible accident. We all know the risks in this work, and I know you’re all brave as lions, especially you Jock lads, but I won’t go beyond a reasonable limit, no, I won’t, not for any one of you.’
Cox looked around. He was dressed as smartly as he always was, whether he was office-bound or about to spend the day aboard the boat or dock in terrible conditions. His brogues shone with brown polish, his white shirt was freshly starched. There was a woman on Hoy who did his laundry, and new clothes arrived in packages that his wife Jenny Jack had regularly sent to the Flow.
‘But I’ll tell you this, boys,’ he said. ‘Don’t let anyone tell you Ernest Cox knows when he’s beaten. He doesn’t. I’m going to explain to you now what it is we’re going to do.’
Cox nodded to someone at the door. A young lad carried in a large chalkboard and rested it across three chairs, leaning it against their backs. Cox took a stub of chalk from his pocket and drew a side-on outline of the hull of a ship. Then he drew three pairs of vertical straight lines from the top to the bottom of the ship. With crude cross-hatching he filled in the narrow space between each pair of lines, so that the ship was graphically divided into three parts.
Ernest Cox turned back to the company. ‘The hull of a warship,’ he said, ‘is built with many different watertight compartments, partitioned by metal walls or bulkheads. Now, boys, we’ve been making her watertight and pumping out the water. It hasn’t worked. So do you know what we’re going to do next? We’re going to do something different. In fact, we’re going to do the opposite.’
Leo glanced across at Tom McKenzie and Ernie McKeown. It was apparent from their bemused expressions that whatever was coming was going to be as big a surprise to them as it was for everybody else.
‘That’s right,’ said Ernest Cox. ‘Instead of pumping out water, we’re going to pump in air. Compressed air. We’re going to make these three bulkheads airtight, so that we’ve three separate sections of the ship and can control the air pressure in each section separately. Then we might be able to lift her in a controlled manner, do you see? Make the bow less buoyant or the midships more buoyant, as the case may be. We are going to do something, boys, that has never been done before, and in the work you do in these next weeks and months you will write yourselves into the history books.’
10
Now that Ernest Cox had decided what he wanted done, he brought in experts to advise him. The head diver Bill Peterson took part in these cons
ultations and relayed their conclusions to Leo Sercombe and their other colleagues.
The three bulkheads ran through the many decks and countless compartments in the ship. It would have taken the divers years to seal them underwater. Enough air had to be pumped into the hull to enable men to work freely within it. In order to maintain this state, and allow men to pass from the open air and enter the ship whose air was in a pressurised state, airlocks had to be made.
Ernie McKeown found disused boilers six feet in diameter and twelve feet in length. Their tops and bottoms were cut away to render them tubes. Eight of these were welded and bolted together in the workshop in Lyness. Steel ladders were fitted the length of these new pipes, inside and out. This long airlock was carried out to the Moltke on a calm day on one of the tugs and taken to the fore end of the upturned hull at low table, when it was not far below the waterline. The spindly airlock was lowered into place by the tug’s outriggers and chains, and bolted onto the ship. It was then secured with dozens of wire stays riveted to the hull like the guy ropes of a tent.
Tom McKenzie climbed into the airlock and down the ladder and cut through the bottom plating of the hull. An upper hatch was fitted at the top of the airlock and another, inner, hatch, twenty feet further down.
Two further airlocks were made and attached to the hull likewise, one for each of the three new sections to be formed.
Leo went out on the tender to the floating dock moored by the Moltke, from which compressed air was being pumped into the upturned battleship. He followed Tom McKenzie on a swaying rope gangway across from the dock to the airlock then climbed the metal ladder up the outside. They opened the upper iron door and climbed down the ladder into the lock. Tom McKenzie swung the door upwards into place, and turned the air valve. Compressed air flew shrieking through the valve with a sound like a hundred whistles.