‘Diana and I were married at Caxton Hall – to Betty’s disgust, in her view a registry office wedding didn’t count – on 28 July, and honeymooned at Biarritz. That old daydream – but legitimate, not the dirty weekend I’d had in mind when I’d first suggested it… The wedding, though – guests included Suzie and Patricia – and Alastair, on leave from his regiment which was then in Ireland – and Betty, oddly enough, I think under pressure from her husband – and a bunch of submarine friends including the entire perisher course and George Random, our chief instructor. Suzie recognized the name, unfortunately, and froze solid for a while; Patricia saw it and got her over it. Patricia was bloody marvellous, one way and another. Always… But Suzie had every published detail of the Trumpeter disaster, including all the survivors’ names, as it were stamped on her brain, and it wasn’t possible not to introduce Random to her. Anyway – we had a reception at the Lansdowne Club, where Diana was a member, and she’d invited Amy Mollison – better known to the public as Amy Johnson. Her husband – Mollison – was a flyer too. In fact – no, never mind that. She was a chum of Diana’s anyway – and Suzie was thrilled, of course. There was a lot of flying talk, because a Yank by the name of Howard Hughes, up till then unknown to any of us, had just flown round the world in some impressively short time. Under four days, I think, and it had taken Amy nineteen days to fly from England to Australia in 1930 – although she’d done London to Cape Town in six days more recently.
‘Biarritz, then. We had a week or ten days, stayed at a very grand hotel, hired a car and drove up into the Pyrenees. I was aware of being only a couple of hundred miles north of where Guy’s grave must have been, but that war was still going on, of course.
‘Back in England, I watched Len Hutton knocking-up 364 runs against Australia at the Oval. And Germany mobilized that month, the French called up their reservists and Chamberlain flew to see Hitler at Berchtesgaden. De-fusing the situation – temporarily – by giving Sudetenland to the bastards. It was the Nazis’ toe in the door, of course, as far as the wretched Czechs were concerned: a few months later they marched into Bohemia and Moravia as well. At about the same time Madrid surrendered to Franco, ending the Spanish war. I know I’ve skipped again – but these are only cardinal points I’m filling in – all right?
‘I’d finished the course, then, and taken command of an H-class submarine at Portland. Diana was working in her air survey job, Suzie was instructing in the Civil Air Guard, and Patricia had got a flat of her own, in Chelsea, not far from Diana’s. Those cousins were kind but dreary people – I’d met them once or twice, just briefly – and in any case you can’t live in someone else’s house for ever. She’d have wanted her independence, too. I saw her now and then.
‘What else – or next… Well, I’d heard that Threat had completed her trials and Ozzie Ozzard was taking her down to Portsmouth. Also that Tracker, formerly Trumpeter, had been launched – back in March, March of ’38 – so she'd be just about on her acceptance trials by this time. I wasn’t sorry that I wouldn’t be on board, second time round.
‘I was promoted, by the way, in March ’39. I’d reverted to lieutenant when I’d left the job in London. But here I was now, a fully-fledged lieutenant-commander with my own command, a beautiful wife – beautiful rich wife – and a war coming at any minute. Chamberlain had bought a little time, that was all. It was at the end of March that we pledged support for Poland – and it was Poland we went to war over, of course, five months later.
‘I got a new command at about this time. Slayer. A big step-up from the old H-class training boat. I had her just in time to take her down to Gib for that spring’s joint Home Fleet/Mediterranean Fleet exercises, so by the time we were back at Portland I’d shaken down pretty well and we were ready for the “off”. In September, when it came, we were sent to Harwich – half a dozen of us, all “S” class, patrolling mostly around the Heligoland Bight and into the Skaggerak and its approaches. We had our successes. The French 10th Flotilla was working with us too, patrolling the Dutch coast while we worked further afield. As we’ve agreed, I’m not going into details of my own experiences, but Slayer’s score during this Harwich period was one U-boat, a minesweeper and two or three merchant ships – and in those months we’d barely heard a depthcharge.
‘To keep all this in context, a few historical and other notes… A U-boat sank the carrier Royal Oak inside Scapa Flow in October, and the first magnetic mines were doing us a lot of damage – until our boffins got the hang of them… And the Russians invaded Finland. Hitler and Stalin had a non-aggression pact, of course. Then in December the Graf Spee scuttled herself off Montevideo after the Battle of the River Plate. I had a weekend leave at that time, and Diana persuaded me to take her to see Gone With the Wind. This was the heyday of such songs as Roll Out the Barrel, and Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line. Remember? And that dance – so-called – the Lambeth Walk?
‘April, the Germans invaded Norway and that campaign began, on shore and at sea. Fairly well bungled, on shore; but we weren’t ready for it, were we, weren’t equipped as we should have been. Ashore, that is, the Army. At sea – well, we – Slayer and the rest of our flotilla – were kept busy for a month or so. By the time the pongoes pulled out we’d lost Thistle, Tarpon and Sterlet in return for the cruiser Karlsruhe sunk, a couple of other warships and about twenty transports. Oh, and Lutzow, pocket-battleship so called, Spearfish blew her screws off and put her out of action for a year.
‘So then – well, Norway was finished, and so was Chamberlain. Churchill took over. Early May, this was. The “blood and toil” speech. “Fight them on the beaches”, etcetera – and the Dunkirk evacuation at the end of that month. Fighting on the beaches – invasion – did seem to be on the cards. Of more immediate importance to me, however, was that by this time Slayer had a defect list as long as your arm. She’d been worked hard for a long time before I got her, and she was clearly overdue for refit. This came to a head just at the time that Tumult’s CO went sick with tuberculosis, and having put Slayer into dockyard hands I was moved over to her. Early summer, then. Billy Davenport was Tumult’s first lieutenant – as I’ve already mentioned – and Chris Van Sommeren was our pilot. Weapons Officer was Don Sutherland, plumber Engineer Lieutenant “Stew” Tulloch. Dare say you’d have known Sutherland. No? I’d have thought you were contemporaries… Is this the right stuff I’m giving you?’
‘It’s fine. But the shoreside scene, in that summer of ’40 – Suzie and Diana both in the ATA – obviously they were, the party you’ve described was only two or three months later, wasn’t it? Was Alastair still in Ireland?’
‘No, he was back, about then.’
‘Patricia?’
‘She was sometimes there – London – sometimes wasn’t. I told you, I think, she was in SIS. I didn’t know quite what that involved, at first. But she’d told me once – she’d been leaving London next morning and insisting on having an early night – told me she had a car coming early in the morning to take her to some place called Tempsford. It’s near Sandy in Bedfordshire – I looked it up on the map, never having heard of it before, and when I mentioned it to Suzie – don’t ask me when, but it was before that party, we knew more about such things by then – she was what’s sometimes described as “visibly shaken”, and told me under an oath of secrecy that something called the Special Duties Squadron operated from there, flying agents in and out of German-occupied France, in Lysanders. Which was – hair-raising. Patricia, of all people – who was so gentle, so entrancingly feminine. And with whom by that time I was in love. May not have known it – or I was suppressing it, I don’t know… It made me feel ill, to think of her in that kind of situation – the hideously imaginable possibility of her falling into those revolting creatures’ hands – feel small, too, knowing it’d take a cooler nerve than I’ve got, to take on that kind of work. But that’s another thought, when one looks back – how everyone we knew, every real friend one had, was in it up to the
neck one way or another… For instance – Alastair, you asked about. Well, I went for a weekend at Glendarragh – from Dundee, between patrols – and he was there, back from Ireland and soon off to North Africa. He took me stalking – something I’d never done before. Sir Innes had got himself a job connected with Army recruiting, by the way, and Lady C-G was running the estate – full-time job too, their factor had joined up. This can’t have been long after I’d brought Tumult up to Dundee, which was shortly after the party I was telling you about. Reminds me – within hours of our arrival at Dundee, Chris had Suzie on the telephone, then rang her parents, and finally came to me with the formal request for permission to get married. I’d spoken to Suzie too, on the blower, and a couple of days later had a letter from her:
Chris tells me that he had to ask your permission! Could you have refused it, and stopped us? Rufus – seriously – I do love him. We’ve decided, since you and I last spoke, that we’ll try to have the wedding next spring or summer, summer probably – and if we can possibly manage it, at Glendarragh. We including you, Rufus – that’s the purpose of this note, your presence will be absolutely essential…
‘Oh, and Chris told me that when he’d introduced himself to her father over the telephone and asked him for his younger daughter’s hand in marriage, Sir Innes’ response – after an explosive coughing-fit – was a wheezy “Good God!” Chris paid a quick visit to Glendarragh not long afterwards, though, and Suzie managed to be there too. She’d just been promoted to First Officer, incidentally.
Accelerated promotion: she’d done less than the time she should have as a Second Officer. Bucked as anything – you can imagine!
‘Winter, then, with north Norway patrols back in vogue – despite rough seas and gale-force winds straight off the ice. Enough successes to make it worthwhile, I suppose. In the summer, of course, we couldn’t operate very far north – around midsummer there was no darkness at all. We needed at least a few hours of darkness every night for charging batteries on the surface, and without the cover of darkness it would have been near enough suicidal. So in the summer months we concentrated on southern Norway, and the Skaggerak, the German Bight, etcetera. Tumult’s Jolly Roger was quite full by this time, in fact we seemed to be acquiring something of a reputation. I think we were the top scorers in the flotilla – which incidentally had by this time been joined by Tracker – and Threat too. Threat wasn’t Ozzie Ozzard’s any more, he’d taken a brand-new boat, Tigress, to the Mediterranean. But Tracker’s CO was an old friend, Johnny Mottram, and I went aboard her several times, lured partly by invitations to partake of gin – which was what we all drank, in those days – but also because – well, I had to, that’s all. Everyone in the flotilla, let alone in Tracker herself, knew of her previous existence as Trumpeter and took it in their stride, so to speak, but on my visits I still got curious looks from chaps who knew I’d been sunk in her, perhaps wondered if I’d break out in a muck-sweat. To be honest, I wouldn’t have been keen to take her on patrol. I still saw it all – Andrew Buchanan, for instance, and Nat Eason. And others. Dymock. Lots of them, when one opened one’s mind to memory and let them in. I could look round – in Tracker’s wardroom, for instance, which although I knew she’d been totally rebuilt was still the same and see them, hear them, expect them to hear me when I spoke. I’d be conscious of the fact I was sitting there, sipping gin-and-water, with their eyes on every gulp… Sounds fanciful, doesn’t it? But in retrospect it had been a fairly gut-twisting experience.
‘Anyway – I took Tumult out of Dundee for patrol on 31 May. Which of course was almost summer, and having made the point that we called a halt to Norwegian patrols at that time of year I have to contradict myself now. I’d been surprised, the day before, at being briefed for yet another trip up that way. Not in fact to the more distant north, only to latitude 61 degrees, not very far north of Bergen but right on the bulge, which made it something of a strategic area. Potential targets would be iron-ore carriers coming south from Narvik and having to emerge from cover – higher up, they used the inshore waters inside those chains of islands. Coming around that bulge they were often met by destroyer and/or air escorts, of course… But possibly the odd blockade-runner too, or even an ocean raider sneaking home to Krautland. And U-boats travelling on the surface between their German and Norwegian bases. In other words a potentially productive patrol area.’
‘What about the daylight problem?’
‘Wouldn’t be all that bothersome, at that latitude and this early in the summer. There’d be no patrols any further north, we were stretching it a bit – but with that, mind you, came a hope that the enemy might think we’d finished for the season, feel safe and consequently get careless. There was a bit of a daylight problem, of course. I knew we’d have nights that would be only a few hours long; I’d surface into twilight, stay up only as long as was absolutely necessary, and while we were up there I’d stay in the bridge myself and the officer of the watch could concentrate on keeping her under constant helm. We’d also have to watch the sky – I’d have an extra lookout up for that alone. Anyway – we sailed from Dundee that last day of May, stopping en route at Lerwick in the Shetlands to top up with fresh water and provisions, and spent about a fortnight on the billet without seeing a bloody thing. Very disappointing. I’d been lucky, I’d had very few blank patrols either in Tumult or in Slayer before her. I suppose I’d had more than my share of luck. It was frustrating, though – so much hard work for nothing. But our recall came – about the 17th or 18th, by which time the nights were getting noticeably shorter – and I wasn’t sorry to be heading south. West-sou’-west actually – via Lerwick again, a couple of hundred miles away, then about 300 miles from there south to Dundee, on the surface all the way. Actually we couldn’t have arranged it better. We were two or three days behind schedule – so Suzie’d be worrying, and Chris who’d been biting his nails was still mildly worrying, for her sake – but not only would we be in good time to get to Glendarragh for the 25th, being a few days late and having a stand-off period of at least fourteen days that we could count on, he could now reckon on getting as long as ten days for his honeymoon. Pretty good – considering there was a war on.’
(Unedited transcript ends at this point)
* * *
Tumult left her patrol area in twilight, and by dawn Chalk reckoned they were far enough off the coast to stay up. Progress on diesels, on the surface, was a lot quicker than running dived on electric motors – even with a westerly Force 7 whipping up enough of a sea to slow her down. She was rolling hard as well as pitching, with green seas crashing over every minute or so: watchkeepers were more in the sea than on it. Not that there was anything very unusual in this, but Chalk had ordered a zigzag too, to foil U-boat attack, so the boat’s speed-made-good was only about eight or nine knots.
They reached Lerwick in the second dawn.
‘Pendant numbers passed, sir!’
The signalman pushed his Aldis lamp back into its bracket: Lerwick’s signal station had demanded identification, and he’d supplied it. Tumult rolling like a drunk and pitching savagely as Van Sommeren conned her towards the little harbour’s entrance – sea pounding white all along the harbour wall, and the little town, mostly grey granite, seemingly crouched with its coat collar turned up, windows like eyes slitted against the spray.
‘Easing a bit, sir, isn’t it?’
Van Sommeren had his glasses up. Tumult flinging herself heavily to starboard… Still going over, her saddle-tanks on that side buried in the rushing boil of sea, and a huge, curling roller rushing in from ahead, the submarine already over on her ear and with her long forepart buried, that racing mound engulfing the gun-mounting, thundering against the front of the bridge then sheeting up, most of it dropping green on to the watchkeepers’ heads, the rest bursting over, brilliant white. And the next one already gathering itself… Van Sommeren, spitting out salt water, answered his own question: ‘No – isn’t really, is it’, and the signalman laughed
. She was rolling back, swinging through the vertical to lunge over the other way while her forepart soared, shedding a torrent of white foam.
‘Probably get worse before it does ease.’ Chalk was mopping the front lenses of his binoculars with a wad of periscope paper. You kept a supply of it in a flapped and buttoned theoretically waterproof pocket. Glasses up again now – he’d have them dry for about two seconds – and jamming himself back against the forward periscope standard, for stability.
‘There’s a submarine in there already. Alongside.’
Lowering the wet glasses, and glancing round at Van Sommeren. ‘Don’t understand it.’
Because no submarine should be heading north now, and there’d been none on patrol up there that might now have been coming south. Tumult’s forepart smashing down again, jolting as hard as if it were splitting rocks, not water.
‘Signalman—’
But he was on to it already, had seen the first wink of the light calling them from the Port War Signal Station. Lifting the Aldis and sending an answering flash, then they were all reading the dots and dashes as they came like bright pinpricks through the grey, salt-tasting dawn:
From Senior Submarine Officer Lerwick, to Tumult: Berth on Tracker, port side to.
Even inside the harbour there was quite a lot of movement, and Chalk decided to berth not alongside Tracker but in the only other suitable space, on the quayside just ahead of her. There were catamarans there to keep her off the granite wall; but still enough of a surge for the ropes and wires to need watching. Alongside Tracker, even with fenders down, the bumping would have endangered their saddle-tanks’ thin plating.
He began to explain his decision to the base’s CO who’d supposedly have originated that signal, but the commander – a distinguished submariner now in this shore job perhaps for some health reason – knew nothing of it and didn’t give a damn. A short, thickset man, brass-hatted, wearing an unbuttoned oilskin. He waved aside Chalk’s explanation – this was on Tumult’s casing, he’d come aboard over the swaying plank as soon as it had been slid over – and told him, ‘Just as well. You’d have had to have moved, anyway, to let Tracker out. Who’s your first lieutenant?’
Not Thinking of Death Page 32