by Dudley Pope
‘Why? Surely they help to keep spray and the wind out.’
‘Yes, in theory anyway they should help, but the chaps can’t be persuaded to carry those little packs around with them everywhere they go. So when the torpedo hits they’re in one place and the packs in the other. Anyway, they’re flimsy things, just what you’d expect from the Ministry of War Transport. Row a lifeboat in bad weather wearing one of those things and first you get soaked with perspiration because the material doesn’t “breathe”; then it chafes across the shoulders and under the arms; then it splits; and one size fits all. They’d be all right if everyone wearing them crouched in the bottom of the boat without having to row… But it’s not like that. Comes of having these Ministry chaps having war-winning ideas…’
Ned thought back to the convoy he had been sailing in only a few weeks earlier. ‘Yes’, he said, ‘I know it’s not going to be easy. But please don’t worry about us. If we weren’t sitting in a lifeboat we’d be doing something else equally uncomfortable.’
‘Your hand,’ Painter said. ‘You need a glove for it. Hasn’t had time to heal properly. Skin’s too soft. What happened?’
‘Destroyer in the Bay of Biscay…air attack. We zigged when we should have zagged.’
‘The Bay’s no place to be these days,’ Painter commented. ‘Still, I have my special charts and my zigzag diagrams, so I’m quite content: Halifax and back with another brigade or two of Canadians.’
He took a pipe from the rack on his desk and began stuffing it with Three Nuns Empire blend. As soon as he had puffed the pipe into life he said conversationally: ‘Great things, those Admiralty routeing charts. The courses they give seem to keep us out of trouble. Do you know how they find out where the U-boats are concentrated?’
Ned shrugged his shoulders, and thought of all the signals being tapped out between the U-boats and B der U at Kernével in the new Triton cipher using the four-rotor Enigma. Signals that BP could not now read. In two or three weeks the effects of the Great Blackout would be felt. Routeing charts from there on would be merely inspired guesses, as much use as giving Red Riding Hood written instructions about how to avoid the Big Bad Wolf. There would be no more enciphered signals sending a ship like the City of Norwich, or even a convoy, on a sudden jink to avoid a concentration of U-boats. Captain Painter, like everyone else, would be playing blind man’s buff. He could be steaming along in broad daylight, with the City of Norwich fitting accurately between the graticules of a U-boat periscope.
Fortunately, Captain Painter had no idea of the danger he and his ship (and his country, for that matter) were now in; nor did he, or could he, know how important it was for all of them that he abandon one of his lifeboats in mid-Atlantic with twenty-three men in it.
‘I’ve no idea,’ Ned said. ‘There’s a whole section in the Admiralty dealing with routeing ships: I expect it’s them.’
‘It’s a great responsibility they have,’ Painter said admiringly, relighting his pipe. ‘After all, they could easily route a ship or whole convoy –’ he paused as there was a knock on his door. ‘Excuse me a moment: time for blackout, and the lad’s come to close the deadlights. Come in!’ he called.
A steward came in and swiftly worked his way round the cabin, swinging the deadlights, solid metal covers hinging over the glass portholes, and screwing them down tight. They had originally been fitted as protection in case enormous seas broke the thick glass of the portholes; now they were used not to stop great seas coming in, but chinks of light getting out. The steward went into the other cabin to screw down the rest of the deadlights and Painter relit his pipe.
‘A drink – whisky, gin or something?’ he asked Ned, who replied that he had some paperwork to finish up, refusing the offer.
Once the steward had left the cabin, Painter said: ‘Is there anything special I can provide for your chaps?’
At that moment Ned contemplated exactly what was meant by the fact that in a few days they would be living on lifeboat rations, and the success or failure of the whole operation might ultimately depend on how long they could last out physically. In the rush of planning, learning cipher data and commando tactics, getting to know the inside of a U-boat and how to lob black bangers and all this being cut short by Captain Watts’ telephone call to say that Triton was now being used, the question of survival in an open boat had somehow been pushed to one side.
The more he thought about it, the more absurd the omission became. There were plenty of excuses – he or Jemmy or the Croupier would have worked on it had the training and planning part of the operation not been speeded up. But even when they were doing extra physical jerks and balancing exercises – running up and down the casing of the prize U-boat and scrambling up the welded steel ladder of the conning tower, everyone obsessed with stopwatch times and noting whether or not a Sten slung over the shoulder caught one of the rungs – they forgot to ask one question: are you sure you can survive, for a couple of weeks if necessary, in a lifeboat in the middle of the Atlantic in the depth of winter? Not just survive, but still function rapidly and efficiently at the end of it.
‘Yes, perhaps,’ Ned said ‘First, your doctor – you do carry a doctor, don’t you? – could provide a crash menu so that we can get as many proteins or carbohydrates, or whatever they are, tucked under our belts to help us through the long winter nights rowing that dam’ boat. Perhaps he can also draw up a list of the special things – which I hope your Chief Steward can provide – which will help keep us in as good condition as possible? It’s not a question of cheating and not wanting to live on just lifeboat rations, but –’
‘I understand,’ Painter interrupted. ‘Whatever it is you’re up to (and I know better than to enquire), obviously your health is the main concern. “Winter North Atlantic” is, as you know, one of the marks on Mr Samuel Plimsoll’s load line, but it’s not the time to go boating!’
‘No, I’d prefer the one at the other end of the scale, “TF” – Tropical Fresh,’ Ned admitted.
‘The tropical sun can scorch you black: I found a boat full of bodies down close to Freetown and even though they’d cut up a sail for an awning, they were so dried up they reminded me of some biltong I saw in South Africa – sun-dried meat.’
‘So we have the choice – sun-dried or refrigerated!’ Ned laughed but, with the City of Norwich’s engines making the whole ship throb, and the chosen lifeboat hanging in the davits outside his cabin door, the diagonal gripes holding it in so that it did not swing sideways out and back with the ship’s roll, the joke was hollow.
Not refrigerated, but more probably so sodden with bitterly cold sea, flung at them as spray hour after hour, day after day, that they might die of exposure; the body unable to stand more wet, cold, exhaustion. The sheer effort of rowing the lifeboat to keep its bow heading into the seas to avoid getting the boat sideways on, so that it broached by rolling down the side of a wave or was capsized by a crest, was the greatest danger they would face: greater than U-boats, starvation or exposure.
‘Very well,’ Painter said. ‘You chaps go on a special diet. And doc will prepare some special lifeboat rations, in addition to the stuff already in the lockers. By the way, those galvanized food lockers under the thwarts – you know them?’
Ned shook his head. ‘I’ve seen them, that’s all. In the RN we have Carley Floats – balsa frames with nets across.’
‘Well, these galvanized lockers are bolted on under the thwarts and you get at the food inside by unscrewing a circular plate on one side, about the size of a tea plate.
‘I once found a lifeboat with ten survivors in it. They were only just surviving. They were starving – with both food lockers full, and the water breakers nearly empty.’
‘What happened?’
‘It was almost tragic. Instead of having the food locker lids unscrewed once a week, greased and put back on every trip, and the water
breakers topped up – they’re made of wood, of course, and in hot weather there’s seepage – the chief officer on this ship had the lockers checked and the breakers topped whenever he thought of it, which was at the beginning of a trip: every three or four months, often longer.‘
‘He must have cursed himself,’ Ned commented.
‘He did. His carelessness killed him. When the ship was hit, twenty-nine got away in this one boat, including the chief officer. But they couldn’t get at the food because the threads on the lids had rusted up. They broke all their knives trying to dent a locker and make a hole. Then they bashed with an oar, but the lockers were too tough. So after a week or so the weaker men began to die. As I said, only ten left when we sighted them, and one of them died after we got him on board. So watch the threads of those lids – anhydrous lanolin’s what you need. I’ll add a tin to the list.’
Dying of starvation while separated from concentrated food by a sheet of galvanized steel – Ned reflected on the thoughts of that chief officer: dying because of his own negligence, and knowing his shipmates were dying too. He was unlucky not to have died at once, in the blast of the torpedo.
Painter looked at his watch. ‘Nearly dusk – we copy the Navy and go to action stations at dusk and dawn. We don’t have many guns but there’s no harm having everyone at action stations – more eyes watching for periscopes. They tell me the German torpedoes don’t leave a track.’
‘No, they’re driven by electric motors, not compressed air,’ Ned said, and there was an apologetic note in his voice.
Painter opened the door and all the lights went out automatically: Ned thought irrelevantly that the small metal hinge forming the on-off switch, and which was pushed back and forth as the door opened and closed, was like a kissing-gate. Lovers’ gate, some called it.
Climbing the steps of the companionway up to the bridge with dusk closing in on the ship like a noose tightening and the sea cold and unfriendly and spattered with white horses, inviting more victims to drown in its grasp, it was almost impossible to imagine that hundreds of lovers’ gates still punctuated hedgerows in Britain; lovers’ gates now rarely used and sitting in a silence broken by the occasional hysterical squawking of a blackbird frightening itself, or the metallic warning of a jay, and perhaps occasionally the methodical tapping of a woodpecker.
‘Evenin’, Mr Harding,’ Painter said as he came on to the port side of the bridge and greeting the Chief Officer. ‘About ready, eh?’
Harding, a burly man of perhaps fifty, deliberate in his movements and slow of speech, who gave the impression of enormous reliability but no imagination, dug below the folds of his duffel coat and brought out what looked to Ned like an enormous hunter. He pressed the knob at the top of the winding stem and the solid front hinged down to reveal the watch face.
‘Four minutes to go, sir,’ he announced, and replaced his watch.
‘We’ve none of your Navy loudspeaker system – what do you call it? Tannoy? – so we use the action station bells but starting with a “G” in Morse. The dash-dash-dot gets their attention and tells them it’s not actually an air, surface or submarine attack, but the regular call to action stations.’
Painter pulled his cap more firmly on to his head as he walked to the forward side of the bridge. The City of Norwich’s speed of sixteen knots, straight into a westerly wind of fifteen or twenty knots, meant that looking over the fore side of the bridge was like standing up in an open sports car doing more than thirty miles an hour – at twilight, a month before Christmas.
‘Glass is going down,’ Harding commented. Yes, it was a Newcastle accent, Ned decided. Usually ships’ engineers were Geordies; deck officers came from anywhere between the Orkneys and Westward Ho.
‘Hmmm…the forecasters before we left said there was a low which’d go up over Iceland.’
‘Must be passing south a bit.’
‘Maybe,’ Painter said, and turned to Ned. ‘We’ll probably run out of it by the time we reach your spot.’
Ned shrugged his shoulders and wished he was wearing his duffel coat. ‘We’ll see. As the poet said, you can break the glass, but it won’t hold up the weather.’
‘Aye, that’s true,’ Painter said, ‘but what if it is blowing a gale when we reach your spot?’
‘If you can heave-to and give us enough of a lee to launch the boat, we’ll go.’
‘But if we can’t,’ Painter persisted.
Ned grinned to soften his words. ‘If this ship was torpedoed, you wouldn’t have any choice.’
‘Touch wood while you’re saying something that that!’ Painter exclaimed. ‘But he’s right, isn’t he, Mr Harding.’
‘Aye, he’s right,’ Harding said. ‘Not that I trust those boats. Nothing approved and required by the Board of Trade – the Ministry of War Transport, rather, though a tatty leopard can’t change its spots – is any good. Ha!’ he snorted, ‘d’you remember that last Ministry fellow we had on board?’
‘Straight off the boards of a music hall, he was,’ Painter told Ned. ‘Anyway, he had to inspect the lifeboats. We got the covers off for him. He climbs into the first one – and he loses his bowler hat, which the wind blows over the side into the Queen’s Dock, Liverpool. Bald as a badger, he was, so we find him a knitted balaclava. Then, getting out of that first boat, he rips the seat of his trousers – the seam split, so he’s strutting round with a balaclava on his top and his bottom hanging out. Then he complained he couldn’t find the bung, didn’t he, Mr Harding?’
‘Aye, he did that and I waited until he’d brushed himself down and someone found some safety pins for his split trousers, and then I led him back into the lifeboat and showed him the bung stowed just where the Ministry of War Transport regulations said.’
Painter returned to his original question. ‘You’ll embark in the boat more or less whatever the conditions, even if it’s going to get worse?’
Ned considered carefully, because it was a good seamanlike question and (although Painter did not know it) really boiled down to how important it was that the lifeboat be launched at the exact latitude and longitude they had decided on back in the Citadel. That was after poring over the ASIU charts and looking at the Trade and Operations plots, seeing where the heaviest sinkings were and where the U-boats seemed to be most heavily concentrated. Or, rather, where they had been until the Blackout started.
Yet Ned remembered how they had grouped round the chart in ASIU, Captain Watts, Jemmy, the Croupier and himself. One of them had jabbed a finger down here, another favoured there… In the end they decided that there was a great square in the Atlantic, probably 800 miles from east to west, and 400 miles from north to south, which was agreed to be ‘most favourable’. They picked on a latitude and longitude exactly in the middle.
The rest of the box stretched away to the west of them, so they had about 400 miles of westing in reserve: the City of Norwich could steam for a day and night after passing their chosen position before she passed the western end of the ‘most favourable’ area. If it was blowing a full gale at the chosen spot – they could wait twenty-four hours, particularly since the ship would probably have reduced speed considerably because of heavy seas heading her. In twenty-four hours the centre of the low should have moved nearly 700 miles or so, since ship and low would be approaching each other at a combined speed approaching thirty knots and the weather would be improving. Damn, it was cold standing out here on the open bridge, but Painter knew better than to discuss this sort of thing in the wheelhouse, where the quartermaster at the wheel, being human, would be listening.
‘It’s very hospitable of you not to want us to go, Captain! The position I’ve given you is the ideal one for our purpose, but if it is blowing too hard, we can move it four or five hundred miles westward. No more, though.’
‘Ah, that should find a clearance in the weather. Or at least save you a cou
ple of very uncomfortable days during which, whatever you’re supposed to be doing, I’m dam’ sure you couldn’t!’
Harding nodded his head vigorously. ‘In those kind of conditions, Commander, I can tell you that you’re rowing for your lives like madmen just to keep the boat heading into the seas. Get beam-on and you broach. Only takes a few seconds, and then it’s all over: you get washed out, the boat is gunwales under or upside-down, and away you drift in your useless Ministry of War Transport lifejackets, and you die of exposure or you drown because you don’t have the strength to keep your head up out of the water.’
‘The Mate should know,’ Painter said. ‘He was in one of our sister ships, the City of Winchester, when she was hit by two torpedoes last year.’
‘Any tips?’ Ned asked Harding.
‘Watch the men rowing. A good man will keep rowing until he collapses exhausted – and then he lets go of the oar. Double-bank if necessary. The inboard man can be resting as he sits on the thwart, and all he has to do is keep a couple of hands on the loom of the oar, so when the outboard chap passes out, the oar isn’t lost.
‘Keep the chaps cheerful, obviously. If there’s a lot of spray there’s no point in bailing out the boat all the time: every quarter or half an hour. Better to sit with the water swilling around your feet a bit than have half a dozen men sloshing away with bailers like kids on the beach. If anyone is wearing boots – rubber Wellingtons, half-boots, mess boots, call ’em what you will – watch the feet: they swell and then it’s damn difficult cutting boots free without drawing blood. Jacket sleeves wet at the cuffs: they chafe the skin and start salt water boils. Roll-neck wool jerseys do the same round the neck, so cut ’em into a V. That’s about all. Watch for the moaner!’
‘The moaner?’