by Dudley Pope
Results. One docket which had been read and digested, a large pile so far only skimmed, and a diagram. Now Jemmy and the Croupier were coming towards him.
‘Lock up all that bumf for the weekend, Ned,’ Jemmy said. ‘It’s six o’clock and my friend here, who’s the ASIU union shop steward, says it’s gin time on a warm Friday evening. I owe him a gin so you can buy him one of the two you owe me.’
Ned was due to telephone Clare at seven to see if she had been able to get a short weekend’s leave, coming up on the ten o’clock Saturday morning train from Ashford after night duty. His mother had produced a rabbit from some butcher’s hat to augment the meat ration and she had made up a bed for Clare in a guest room next to his own. She slept on the ground floor now the bombing was heavy, having been persuaded to turn what used to be a study into a bed-sitting room. Nothing had been said; the guest room had been prepared, and if Ned had teased her about it being next to his she would have looked blankly and said that she had no intention of putting a guest in a third floor room with only tiles and some plaster and laths to protect her from bombs and fragments of anti-aircraft shells. Mother was sophisticated in – well, a kind and practical way. It was up to Clare, whom she had not yet met, and Ned; she had prepared a guest room; it was up to them what they did.
Outside the Citadel it was dark; the dank November night air was still heavy with the smell of charred wood overlaid with the improbable wet straw odour of sandbags which had been treated with some smelly green substance intended to stop them rotting. The sandbags, Jemmy observed, brought out the worst in St James’s Park, whose earth had been used to fill them and below a certain depth still retained its marsh smells which Ned thought inconsequentially might date from Henry VIII’s day.
‘Stirrup pumps will be worn,’ the Croupier announced in a stentorian voice as they passed under Admiralty Arch, startling two hurrying civil servants. ‘Pub or club?’
‘Pub,’ Jemmy said promptly. ‘I’m bored with seeing our gallant brother officers fighting the King’s enemies in the celibate splendour of their clubs. Let us to an alehouse until night-club time, and hope to find some big-breasted Land Girls who’ll lead us to pastures green.’
‘Land Girls in Whitehall pubs?’ the Croupier exclaimed. ‘You’re a couple of hundred years too late. In good King Charles’ golden days, when lechery no harm meant, I’m sure there were dozens, handing out syllabubs to the thirsty and lecherous soldiery; now you’ll be lucky to find a couple of venereal strumpets.’
‘It’s splendid the way the Croupier lapses into this twentieth-century Elizabethan jargon when he’s thirsty,’ Ned commented to Jemmy. ‘Just listening to him takes my mind off the smell of the pigeons; I swear I’d never hear a siren if he was neighing a sonnet.’
They walked into a public house at the top of Whitehall, carefully slipping between the blackout curtain, and Ned ordered the drinks. The barman guessed they were from the Admiralty. ‘Plymouth or Gordons, sir? Can only let you have one round.’
‘Gordons for me,’ Ned said quickly, regarding Plymouth as being an expensive substitute for petrol.
At a few minutes before seven Ned left the other two men after getting ten shillings’ worth of change from the barman, and went out into the blackout just as the air raid sirens began wailing, the disembodied howling echoing along the streets as though coming from the black sky.
Charing Cross Station was one of the easier targets for German bomber pilots to find: like Cannon Street and Victoria, it was at the end of a shiny grid of railway lines and just over the Thames. As Yorke walked to the telephone kiosk he was thankful not to be sitting in one of the trains waiting to huff and puff out into the night in a cloud of steam and sparks and slowly cross the long bridge to the south bank of the Thames.
He was lucky: he had put the money into the box and was pressing Button A after only seven minutes; the phone had rung, Clare told him, at exactly three minutes past seven. And then they had nothing to say to each other.
‘I was so excited waiting for the call I didn’t think…’ Clare admitted.
‘The sirens have just gone; I was afraid there’d be hours of delay.’
‘How is the new job, Ned?’
‘Interesting – challenging, in fact.’
‘You’re not going back to sea?’ she asked in sudden alarm.
‘No – and’…he paused, knowing he must sound like a nervous schoolboy but finding himself almost terrified that the answer might be no…‘are you – er, can you get away this weekend?’
‘From you?’ she teased.
‘From your other boyfriends.’
‘It’s wonderfully peaceful down here. Just a few bombers going over at the moment – heading your way, I imagine. But walking along the lanes, even though the trees are bare…’
‘Did you get the weekend off?’ he asked stiffly.
‘Yes,’ she said innocently. ‘Until night duty on Monday, which means 6 p.m.’
‘Are you coming up to London?’ His heart was thudding; his palms were wet with tension and he felt he ought to be ashamed that a girl on the end of a telephone line could make him jumpier than a diving Ju 88.
‘I could do,’ she said coolly, ‘but no one’s asked me.’
‘What do you mean?’ he flared. ‘Dammit, I–’
‘Asked a bit of crumpet up to Town for a dirty weekend!’
‘Clare!’ he said angrily. ‘I’ve asked you to stay in my house. Meet my mother. Do–’
‘You haven’t, you know! You’ve taken it all for granted. In fact all you said when you left was that you hoped I’d come to London on my next leave.’
‘Well, you knew perfectly well what I meant,’ he said sulkily.
‘I do, darling Ned, but you’ve no idea how nice it is to have someone get angry–’
‘There are the pips: wait, I’ve plenty of change!’
He put in the coins requested by the operator and pressed Button A. ‘Go on, you were saying…’
‘I feel all warm and snug because you are getting angry at the idea you might not see me this weekend. It does me good. I feel all woman.’
‘But you know I love you!’
‘Oh yes, Ned; but it’s wonderful to hear you getting jealous, even if your rival is only a country lane.’
‘I’m jealous of everything and everybody. Ten o’clock train?’
‘Yes, eleven forty-five at Charing Cross.’
‘I’ll meet–’
He dropped the phone and dived out of the kiosk, clear of the glass partitions, as he heard the whistling hiss of a bomb. It burst with an earth-shaking thud beyond the station, among the network of railway lines. He stood up and sheepishly groped for the receiver, hearing Clare’s alarmed voice calling: ‘Ned! Ned!’
‘I’m here. Sorry, a visitor seemed to be coming.’
‘You’re all right?’
‘Yes, in fact it was a long way off.’
‘I love you, Ned.’
‘Takes a bomb to get you to admit it.’
‘Takes a bomb for you to appreciate it.’
They paused for a moment, each considering the other’s remark, then she said: ‘The pips will be going in a few moments. Let’s say goodbye now, before the operator interferes.’
‘Until tomorrow, then. Your room is ready.’
‘A bed in the attic is all I need.’
He thought a moment. ‘You have a large room next to mine.’
‘Your mother’s choice?’
‘Yes. There’s an attic if you prefer it.’
‘No, I’ll trust your mother’s judgement.’
As the first pip sounded she said, ‘Good night, my darling,’ and hung up.
Ned walked out of the station and down the slight slope of the forecourt quite unaware of the crackling
barrage of anti-aircraft fire and the occasional distant whistle of falling bombs. He could hear only her voice, slightly distorted by the telephone line, and his feet hardly touched the ground.
Chapter Six
Both Jemmy and the Croupier were in the Citadel next morning with such bad hangovers that Jemmy yelped every time a twitch jerked his head. Ned, who had walked home down Whitehall and Victoria Street after telephoning Clare, had spent a couple of hours in front of a fire which flickered with all the ferocity of two lumps of coal and one of slate, alternately glancing at the four pages which comprised the evening newspaper and trying to think of U-boats.
Here he sat within half a mile of Parliament and Downing Street in his own home, inconvenienced only by the noise of bombs and anti-aircraft guns outside. But out in the Atlantic on this November night, between 300 and 3000 miles to the west, there were many convoys under way, some heading south towards the sun, some steaming north from the Tropics, but the majority steering east or west, bringing arms and supplies to Britain from the New World, or returning for more. How many of those convoys had sufficient escorts, and how many were being decimated nightly by U-boats attacking without warning from inside the convoy? Decimate was the right word; one in ten was about the proportion. A thirty-ship convoy losing three ships a night was being decimated. In ten such nights it would be destroyed.
A piece of coal cracked and then fizzed as a pocket of gas ignited. It gave little heat but in common with most Britons on a winter’s night, Ned wore warm clothes and regarded a small coal fire as a spiritual rather than a physical comfort.
He had slept fitfully, a night when the sudden drum-rolls of an anti-aircraft barrage interrupted thoughts of Clare which in turn merged into sleep. Camp coffee and scrambled dried eggs on burnt and dry toast (they were hoarding the butter and margarine ration for the weekend) made a depressing breakfast and he thought he would go in to the Admiralty and read another docket, although Uncle had made it clear that no one was expected to work on Saturday mornings: with a decent night’s sleep impossible and his staff recovering from various unusual experiences, he wanted five good days’ work from each man; the weekends, he said, were for charging batteries and picking up the ideas that tended to float in through the French windows or, he said with a lewd wink, emerge from between a lissome tart’s bosoms.
‘That gin,’ Jemmy whispered. ‘It was the first step on the road to Sodom, or Gomorrah. When you deserted us we went along and met Uncle’s Wren at the point of no return – in this case the number nine bus stop at the end of Piccadilly, whence she had travelled from her Wrennery in Earl’s Court, and, in response to an urgent phone message from me, she had brought company for my loyal shipmate the Croupier.’
At that the Croupier groaned. ‘Soaks up booze like a cruiser’s main suction line, makes love with the thrust of a 16-inch gun’s recoil, laughs the whole time, and is called Sandra.’
‘Are you complaining or boasting?’ Ned inquired.
‘I’m not sure,’ the Croupier said shakily. ‘I’ll tell you later. What doesn’t ache is sore; what isn’t sore is trembling.’
‘When do you see her again?’
‘This afternoon. And with a bit of luck we’ll go straight to bed and stay there for the weekend and I’ll be here making the same complaints on Monday morning.’
‘If you keep off the booze you might conceive some ideas by then,’ Ned said unsympathetically, unlocking the safe and taking out his next docket.
‘If it’s only ideas,’ the Croupier said. ‘I think Jemmy has died. A corpse with a twitch. Ought to be preserved in formalin.’
‘Don’t think so loud,’ Jemmy said. ‘I was just watching Ned taking that docket from the safe. The second convoy, eh Ned? And there’s another of Doenitz’s boys in the middle of it like Neptune’s jack-in-the-box, ready to jump up as soon as it’s dark and shout, “Booo”.’
At that moment Captain Watts’ Wren secretary, Joan, walked in with four cups of coffee on a battered tray. ‘No sugar left and yesterday’s milk has gone sour,’ she said, putting the tray down on Jemmy’s desk. ‘Here, this may help.’ She took a cup herself, sat down at one of the nearby desks, and groaned.
Yorke then noticed that she was pale, with dark rings under her eyes, and remembered Jemmy’s comment a few days earlier, ‘She’s mine.’
‘Poor Joan,’ the Croupier murmured sympathetically. ‘Do you want some aspirins?’
‘I’ve had three already. I ache all over and I feel sick.’
‘Never dive with a submariner,’ the Croupier said. ‘I warned you. They’ve six hands and a rampant periscope.’
‘I know all about that,’ Joan said crossly. ‘And he has all the subtlety of a German sausage seller.’
‘Don’t listen to her,’ Jemmy said quickly, knowing there was no stopping her once she began grumbling.
‘This – this desiccated Neptune’s idea of being romantic is to shout “Up periscope” as he begins to make love. It’s funny the first time, if you like a joke in bed, but not every time.’
‘You can always shout “Down periscope” at the appropriate moment and see what happens,’ Ned said.
Jemmy sipped his coffee. ‘I don’t know what she’s grumbling about. Six sightings in one night.’
‘Six?’ Joan was outraged. ‘One and he falls sound asleep. He dreams the rest.’
‘It is not the custom of the service,’ Jemmy said, ‘to discuss one’s sex life with one’s brother officers.’
‘Joan’s a sister officer,’ the Croupier pointed out. ‘The Wrens work under a different set of KRs and AIs.’
‘They bloody well don’t,’ Jemmy said. ‘The King’s Regulations and Admiralty Instructions apply to everyone. Like the Bible. Everyone in naval uniform, I mean.’
‘I imagine that neither officer was in uniform at the time,’ Ned said dryly.
‘Not unless you count socks,’ Joan said. ‘He complained his feet were cold.’
Ned coughed and Joan said: ‘We’ve shocked the lieutenant. It’s an old Yorke family tradition that a gentleman takes off his socks.’
‘It is,’ Yorke acknowledged, ‘but this particular lieutenant finds it hard to study dockets in an atmosphere thick with concupiscence.’
‘Thick with the stale memory of concupiscence,’ Jemmy corrected. ‘But you’re right. To work. Joan, is there more coffee?’
An hour later Yorke had read the details of yet another convoy attack. Thirty-seven ships sailed and eleven were sunk in seven days; two of them each hit with two torpedoes. The convoy had started with an escort of four corvettes but once the attacks started they had been reinforced by two frigates, whose presence made no difference: sinkings went on at the same rate. Thirteen torpedoes. Although no other tracks had been sighted, the U-boat had probably missed with one and begun the attack with a full outfit of fourteen. Then the U-boat had presumably left the convoy, transmitted a brief score-board report in cipher, and headed for home, which most likely would be Lorient. British direction-finders would have picked up the transmission, plotted the position and perhaps broken the ciphered message, but none of that helped; the U-boat’s route home didn’t matter a damn – as far as Ned’s problem was concerned – and the number of ships she had sunk was hardly a secret…
Six hundred and sixty men had died in those eleven merchant ships. The lucky ones were killed by blast from torpedoes. The rest were drowned as their ships sank, died suspended in the water by their lifejackets, or died of exposure in lifeboats. Ten masters had died – and they were the most irreplaceable part of a convoy. More than ninety DEMS gunners, men of the Maritime Regiment of Royal Artillery or seamen from the Royal Navy, all volunteers, had died. And all of them, ships, cargoes and men, recorded only by a few dozen pages in a manilla folder.
He glanced at the cargoes lost and totalled some of the figures: 1595
lorries, 550 tanks, 66 fighters, 24 bombers, 44 thousand tons of mixed cargo… All sunk by one U-boat in a convoy which included British, American, Norwegian, Dutch and French ships belonging to the Allies, and a neutral, a Swedish dry cargo ship. It must be nerve-wracking to be in a neutral ship sailing in an Allied convoy. Still, quite a few did; it was better than taking the risk of sailing alone and being sunk by a U-boat captain who did not believe that navigation and accommodation lights by night or a neutral ensign by day were anything but a trap.
Once again he drew a convoy plan, marking in the positions of the thirty-seven ships and the names of those sunk. Once again none of the victims was in the two outside columns, nor among the leaders or the last in the columns.
A pattern? Not really. On a night when two ships were sunk, they were usually in adjoining columns, but in two cases on the next night the third ship in a particular column had been hit, followed by the fourth, and the U-boat had obviously waited after the first hit and fired at the next ship to pass.
The coffee and Nature’s own resources had restored Jemmy, and Yorke walked over to him with the convoy diagram. ‘Another picture – can you tell me a story to go with it?’
Jemmy examined it for several minutes.
‘The victims are more concentrated than those in the last convoy you showed me.’
‘Which means the U-boat didn’t move around so much.’
‘You’re learning, Ned. You’re not sure what the lesson is, but you know you’re learning something!’
‘Tell me, then.’
‘Handwriting, Ned; everyone writes differently. Driving a car – everyone has some mannerism which might be difficult to spot but is there all right. Taking soup: everyone slurps it up differently. Understand?’