“Putting you through, sir.”
She sounded cool and distant. “Hello, who is that?”
He replied, “David Howard, you remember when I—” He stopped, already lost.
She asked, “Where are you?” She had changed, her voice very low. “Have you been to the house?”
He nodded, as if he expected her to see him. “Yes. I’m at RNB. Just for a day or so.” The words were tumbling out as if he feared they would be cut off. “Your father arranged it. I—I didn’t know what had happened ’til he told me.”
She said quietly, “I know. It was the least we could do. We heard about the convoy, what you went through.” The line clicked but there was no interruption. Maybe you did not break into a call, even one which mentioned naval operations, if the one concerned was a rear-admiral’s daughter. She said quickly, “There’s a pub, this side of Gosport—The Volunteer.” When he said nothing she said, “It’s quiet, not used much by our people or HMS Collingwood.”
He said, “I shall be there within an hour.” He could not believe what was happening. “I’ll find a friendly driver. I just want to tell you …”
A man’s voice interrupted patiently, “You’ve been disconnected, sir.”
“But I was just speaking to …”
“Sorry, sir.” Then what might have been a chuckle. “It’s the war, you know.”
Howard slammed down the telephone and hurried from the box. He almost knocked over a lieutenant who was about to leave the wardroom. They stared at one another and the lieutenant grinned.
“Sinclair, sir.” The grin widened. “I was a CW candidate in your ship, the Winsby—you won’t remember me.”
Howard’s mind was still reeling, but suddenly a young, eager face formed in his memory. One of the many. He said, “You wanted to go into submarines when you were commissioned, right?”
The lieutenant stared. “Right, sir! Matter of fact, I’ve a boat coming to collect me right now to take me back to the base at Dolphin. What about letting me show you off to my friends, sir?”
Howard’s mind was suddenly clear again. “HMS Dolphin—then you probably know a pub called The Volunteer?”
“Yes, I know it, sir. Bit too quiet for me though.” His eyes sharpened as he sensed the urgency of the question. “I can get you there easy enough. I’m duty-boy at Dolphin at the moment, just came over with a message for the commodore here.”
Howard took his arm. “Then lead on. I’ll have that drink later, if I may!”
He turned to collect his cap from the table outside the wardroom and the young lieutenant who was serving in submarines, and who had once been a nervous CW candidate in Howard’s first command, thought he heard him say just one word. Fate.
Howard pushed through the door and parted the heavy blackout curtains, which smelled of tobacco and dust. It was a cosy enough little pub, but after the darkness outside even the dim lighting seemed too bright. There was a fire in the grate where two farm labourers were sipping their pints, a large dog snoozing between them.
There were a few servicemen in the adjoining bar, but thankfully nobody he knew. He had never felt less like talking just for the sake of it. As the lieutenant named Sinclair had described it, The Volunteer was pretty quiet. It was hardly surprising, he thought. Sea-going sailors liked something a bit more lively after the strain of watch-keeping and staying alive, while shore-based ones preferred the plentiful if unimaginative food of the various barracks and establishments.
“Evenin’, sir.” The landlord wiped an imaginary stain off the bar with his cloth while he watched the newcomer, his eyes moving professionally from Howard’s two-and-a-half stripes to his DSC ribbon when he removed his raincoat.
“Horse’s Neck, please.” He smiled to break the tension he felt. “If you can still manage it?”
The man grinned. “Ah, but if you’d asked for Scotch, that’d be different. I’d have called the police or the Home Guard in case you were a Nazi parachutist! Not had any Scotch for a year!”
Howard took his glass to a corner table while the landlord switched on the nine o’clock news.
Howard hardly listened. In any case he had heard the same sort of thing so many times it made little sense any more: “During the night our bombers raided targets over the Ruhr and the U-Boat bases at Lorient. Seven of our aircraft failed to return.” He saw the landlord staring at the little wireless, his face grim. Maybe he had someone who flew the hazardous raids deep into enemy territory. The newsreader’s well-modulated voice shifted its attention to the Russian front. Stalemate. The news was little better from the North African theatre, and he thought momentarily of Ayres and his missing brother.
A breeze fanned the curtain, and she was suddenly here. She glanced quickly around, as he had done, probably for the same reason. She sat down opposite him and removed her tricorn hat to shake out her hair. All the time she watched him, searching his face feature by feature.
“I hope you’ve not been waiting long?”
Howard signalled the landlord, who, like the two men by the fire, had been staring at the girl as if she had just stepped from the moon.
She said, “A gin would be nice.”
Had she been going to ask for a sherry, but remembered the last time it had happened in the Guvnor’s living room?
“Of course.” Howard moved to the bar and then stopped dead. The newsreader was just ending. Just a small item, which in any daily paper would qualify for no more than a couple of lines: “The Secretary of the Admiralty regrets to announce the loss on active service of HMS Redwing. Next of kin have been informed.” He did not remember paying for the drink. Only that he was seated again, the glass gripped in his fingers.
She took it gently, her eyes studying him anxiously. “What is it?”
“Redwing. I saw her go. That last convoy. We managed to lift off some of her people.”
He stared at the wall but saw only the ship settling deeper and deeper alongside. Dazed, bleeding men being dragged roughly to safety. Redwing’s captain on the bridge, his eyes blank with shock. He stared at her hand on his wrist but did not feel it.
“Tell me.”
“I must have been at it too long.” He looked at her hand and wanted to hold it, to let it all flood out. But he knew she would pull away, that he would not be able to stop this time. “But I had this strange feeling—” He looked directly into her eyes. The colour of the sea. “It’s impossible of course—”
He felt the slightest pressure on his wrist. “Try me.”
Howard said, “I think the torpedo was meant for us.”
She smiled and took her hand away as if she had just realised what she had done. “Well, thank God it missed!” She raised her glass. “I can’t stay long.” She recognised his disappointment. “My friend Jane is standing in for me. I simply wanted to see you. To make sure you were all right. It must have been hell for you when you got back.”
“I saw what was left of the place. Mister Mills has done his best.” He smiled with sudden affection. “Bless him.”
“He’s very fond of you, isn’t he?”
Howard glanced round as the curtain swirled aside again and two soldiers thudded across the floor in their heavy boots, each looking quickly at the girl before discovering the dartboard on the far side of the bar.
She added, “I met your brother and his wife.”
“What did you think of Robert?”
He saw her start with surprise that he should ask her. But her reply was in her characteristic, direct fashion. “Well, I can see him as an admiral.” She smiled for the first time. “He’s not in the least like you.”
Howard grimaced. “I suppose not.” It was strange, but he had never really thought about it. She was right. Robert was all one would expect of a regular officer. Very straight; but inclined to a stiffness their father had never needed.
When he looked again her smile had gone. She said, “Will you keep the old house?” She saw him nod and added wistfully, “I came to li
ke it.” Then she seemed impatient, angry that she could not hide her emotion. “Poor Lucy. But for me—”
Howard pulled the handkerchief from his breast pocket and put it in her fingers. “Don’t even think it. They were together.
Each needed the other.”
He knew the landlord and the two men by the fire were watching intently, but did not care. They probably imagined they had met here in secret. Lovers, when neither was free. Would that we were. He said nothing while she dabbed her eyes, then studied herself in her compact mirror.
She said, “I’m a mess!”
He reached between the glasses and took her hand very carefully. As a man will hold a frightened bird, trying to avoid injuring it. “I’d like to see you again.”
She studied him curiously. “I can tell you mean it, and not for the reasons I’m offered from time to time. But it wouldn’t work.” She smiled, as if to ease the hurt. “How would we manage? Have you asked yourself that?”
“Others do.” His voice was sharp. He was thinking of men who had tried to win her favours. The young widow. It happened often enough in wartime.
“Maybe.” She was still watching his face, looking for something, or someone. “I know I couldn’t. Not again.” She glanced at her watch. “I must go. Really.”
He held her hand more tightly. “Don’t you understand? I’ve been thinking about you ever since that day when the Guvnor—” He looked away. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to drag it all up again.”
Then they were both standing, and in the small bar he could hear the clock ticking.
“It’s my fault.” She freed her hand very gently. “Anyway, what should I do? Every time you say goodbye, it breaks your heart—didn’t you know? That’s why I’m soldiering on. I want to do something useful. Like you, and all the other people out there who are trying to win this damnable war!” She looked around at the intent faces with a kind of defiance which only made her appear more vulnerable. “We shall probably bump into one another from time to time. My friend Jane and I are being transferred to Operations.” She hesitated, seeing the dying hope in his eyes. “Western Approaches, in fact.”
He stared at her. “Liverpool!”
She replaced her hat, then turned to face him. “Well, it’s not too big a place, is it?”
He would have followed her but she said, “I’ve got my bike outside. You stay and have your drink. You’ve not touched it.” Then she said, “I shall miss your father, and if you’re interested, I think you’re exactly like him.” With the same touch of defiance she held up her cheek, and for those few unreal seconds Howard tasted her skin and the gentle fragrance of her hair.
He heard the outside door slam, the far-off wail of an air raid warning, and pictured her cycling through the darkness to the air station at Lee-on-Solent. He downed the drink in one swallow and picked up his cap.
The landlord nodded as he put the glass on the bar. They were in short supply too. Most of the pubs had the rule, “no glass no drink,” so that customers would refrain from gathering a little hoard of them at every visit.
“Nice lady, sir.” His eyes were full of questions. “Not married, I see?”
Howard wanted to leave, to think alone. He replied brutally, “She was. He was killed.”
Outside he paused to look at some searchlight beams wavering across the sky and to get his bearings. As he walked along the darkened road he was torn between despair and a lingering hope. Which, like the horizon and the night sky, had no clear division.
Howard returned to Liverpool after four days, during which time he visited the family solicitor, and spent a whole afternoon signing papers. Even in war there was apparently a lot to do when someone died.
He visited the communal grave, a sad little plot as yet without a proper stone to mark the remains of the six people who lay there. There were a few dead flowers and a fresh bunch of chrysanthemums in a stone pot. There was a card, too, with her name on it. She must have gone there without telling him before she left for a few days’ transfer leave. Mister Mills had told him that she had made him promise to keep flowers there until the stone was properly installed; that was something else Howard had signed at the solicitors.
At Liverpool it was raining when he arrived, and by the time he had been aboard Gladiator for an hour it was almost as if he had never been away.
Lieutenant Treherne had told him that the group was expected to sail in three more days, or that was the latest buzz. He also told the story of Bizley, who with his second stripe and promised decoration was becoming unbearable. There was also a new navigating officer, Sub-Lieutenant Brian Rooke, one of those rare junior officers from the lower deck who sought and won promotion by way of a scholarship. Most of the other lower deck officers were much like old Arthur Pym: years and years of service from boy seaman, up and up via the Petty Officers’ mess and eventually to wardroom with just a thin half-stripe to show for the long, hard slog.
Howard saw Rooke in his quarters, a tough, round-faced man of twenty-four, with a blue chin which apparently defied the sharpest razor. He had a brusque, business-like manner, and his personal report left Howard in no doubt that Treherne’s replacement would prove an excellent navigator, if they could hang on to him.
But he had one failing, a chip on his shoulder a mile wide. As Treherne had said with gleeful relish, “He thinks we’re all turning up our noses at a poor ex-matelot!” Treherne had been thinking of Joyce at the time, and all her ideas of posh officers.
It was just November when the group left Liverpool to shadow a large westbound convoy which was to be met by Canadian escorts in the usual way. The convoy was attacked by long-range reconnaissance bombers, then U-Boats for much of the way; but using more aggressive tactics than before, Captain Vickers threw his group into the attack again and again and left the close escort to the corvettes. They lost just two ships, but severely damaged a U-Boat on the surface one night in mid-Atlantic. It was a probable kill. The return run from Halifax with a fast convoy of modern tankers was mauled once again by a U-Boat pack south of Cape Farewell. Once more Vickers impressed it on his escort captains to follow his tactics whenever possible. Drive the U-Boats under, and keep them there so that they could not overhaul the heavy tankers.
It was a record. When they reached the Mersey they had lost only three tankers. Three out of twenty-seven.
Perhaps it had been sheer luck, or maybe the German HQ had misunderstood the convoy’s intentions. They might even have withdrawn some of their powerful force of U-Boats for refitting and repair before winter really hit the Western Ocean.
As Gladiator headed slowly up-river towards Gladstone Dock, Howard stood on the gratings beside his chair and stared at the mass of dockyard personnel and servicemen who thronged the jetties and moored vessels to watch their return, and then to his amazement, to cheer as if they were the victors.
Leading the group, Vickers’s rakish Kinsale was blaring “D’you Ken John Peel?” on all her speakers, adopted by the rugged captain as their own hunting song. Howard left the ship in Treherne’s hands and watched the welcome, very moved by what he saw and heard. It had never happened before.
He heard Rooke say, “Time to turn, sir.”
Treherne nodded. “Very good.”
Howard did not even have to look. There had been times when he had barely been able to snatch a catnap at sea. Afraid that a youthful and barely trained officer on watch would do something stupid, lose the next ship ahead in the dark or ram it up the stern by too many revolutions wrongly applied. Somehow, despite the changes, or because of them, they had become a team, and no matter what happened on the next convoy or the one following that, this delirious welcome was a tonic after what they had seen and done.
As the destroyers made their careful turn, one of the Wrens on the signal station’s verandah called, “They’re coming, ma’am!”
Celia Lanyon removed her hat and took the proffered oilskin from a grizzled yeoman of signals; it came down to her ankles, but that
did not matter. Out on the windswept verandah, the rain plastering her hair to her face, she felt the new excitement in the place, which she had never shared before. The flags soaring up and down, so bright against the grey sky and sombre town; the clatter of signal lamps; and then more cheers as the destroyer with H-38 painted on her rust-streaked bow edged into view.
She found that she was waving and cheering too, without understanding it. They had called her a blue-stocking, standoffish, before Jamie had come into her life. But she had never been like this.
Howard turned to watch the yeoman clattering off yet another acknowledgement, his hard features outwardly unmoved by something he probably thought was empty optimism.
Well, perhaps it was. Howard stiffened. But this time it was different. He raised his glasses and trained them through the diagonal rain towards the signal station.
Even in the bulky oilskin, hatless and with her hair clinging to her face, he saw her immediately. He hesitated, then removed his cap and held it high above his head before waving it slowly from side to side.
Treherne called, “Stand by wire and fenders.” He glanced up at the captain, and gave a slow grin of understanding. Bloody good luck to him.
Ayres gave a nervous cough and Treherne leaned over the voicepipe.
“Stop port! Slow astern port!” Just in bloody time.
Gladiator was back again, and although there would be those who would grieve for the men who had died with the three tankers, others would see this as a small break in the cloud.
Howard watched until the signal station was hidden from view. There was hope after all. Perhaps for them too.
In the same month of November two other events took place—unconnected, but they would prove more important than any of these men and women could appreciate.
There came to Liverpool a new commander-in-chief for Western Approaches, a tireless, dynamic and forceful admiral named Max Horton. He was neither a patient man, nor one who would accept defeat in any form while the convoys braved the Atlantic in all conditions.
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