by John Harris
“Worried about that bag of yours, sir?” Harding asked more shrewdly, and Waltby nodded.
“Shouldn’t think anyone saw us ditch,” Ponsettia observed. “I didn’t see any ships or anything. Pity we didn’t manage to get a message through.”
“Hell, I never got the chance, did I?” Mackay exploded into aggressive resentment again. “The transmitter just fell to pieces in front of my eyes. I’d just time to change to distress frequency and bang out a couple of maydays. I didn’t even have time to clamp the key down.”
“That means nobody got a bearing on us,” Ponsettia said. “At least, not a good one.”
“I did what I was supposed to do,” Mackay snorted.
“I never said you didn’t, bud,” Ponsettia said mildly. “OK, Mac,” Harding interrupted. “Keep your hair on, old boy. Nobody’s fault. Who expected to meet a Jerry here at this time of the war? Anyway, it’s something that Canada got him, too. I never knew you were a dead shot, Canada.”
“Skipper, I could hit a sparrow in a loop with a rifle. Any Canadian from River Falls could. That’s nothing. But machine-guns – brother, they scare me stiff. I always shut my eyes. It was just luck.”
“Anyway, it’s some satisfaction to know that he’s got a wet behind, too.” Harding was watching the waves as he spoke and his eyes were suddenly full of questions.
“Think these things can turn over?” he asked abruptly.
“Judging by the way it’s behaving at the moment,” Ponsettia said, lurching against Waltby as the dinghy topped a wave, “I reckon they couldn’t only turn over – I guess they could turn inside out if they tried real hard. Can we all swim?”
He glanced down at the dinghy. “It makes you think,” he went on slowly, staring at the rubberised canvas they were sitting on. “Just imagine, if one of us guys had anything sharp on him that could cut this canvas – rip, zzip – we’re sitting on about five hundred fathoms of ocean and nothing else.”
They stared at one another for a moment, and Ponsettia’s words seemed to chill their thoughts, slowly freezing into the very bones of them, like the cold that was rising out of the sea.
“That bit of canvas,” the Canadian concluded soberly, “is all there is between us and the bottom of the deep blue sea.”
Five
From a position high above the sea you could peer down into its depths – sometimes on a clear day when the sun pierced the dark fathoms it seemed you could see the very bottom and the sad wreckage of ships. But when the water was broken into moving waves and the light was diffused by the uneven surface, you had to be content with what floated. Then spotting was not always so easy.
Ten miles away to the north of the dinghy a Walrus amphibious seaplane – a birdcage of struts and wires propelled by a noisy 750 horse-power engine – butted low over the sweeping sea into the growing wind, as though it were a storm petrel. Below it, the grey waves, oddly diminished and solidified by height, stretched as far as the pilot could see.
Lieutenant Patrick Boyle, RNVR, at the controls, peered through the Perspex in front of him, then turned to his companion who was crouched by the wireless set, his face rapt and strained as he listened to the high cheep of Morse.
Boyle raised his eyebrows but said nothing. Petty Officer Porter, his navigator, caught the gesture and shook his head. “No joy,” he said. “It’s a launch they’re calling up, not us.”
Boyle nodded and pushed the controls forward so that the blunt float nose of the plane dropped a little, and he opened the throttle wider. The thin roar of the motor rose and he could hear the wind scratching at the fuselage, as though it were a horde of small animals striving to get inside away from the cold.
Listening to it, his eyes never leaving the sea, Boyle began to sing as the speed of the heavy old-fashioned machine increased. His one great love was speed and his one great ambition was to get off Walruses on to something faster. The fact that Walruses were built to fly at low speeds for spotting carried not an atom of weight with him. He wanted to be rid of them for good and all.
The certain knowledge that he was doomed for the rest of the war to fly these same amphibious seaplanes didn’t damp his spirits in the slightest. He lived in hope of being given a Seafire and flying from the deck of an aircraft carrier. There was still a chance, he told himself as regularly as he took off for his daily Channel sweep, that they would give him a conversion course on to fighters in time for the Pacific onslaught against the Japanese which was promised as soon as the German war was over. And though he knew the chances of such a happening were extremely slender, Boyle’s light heart never failed to leap at the thought of it.
“He flies through the air with the greatest of ease,” he sang contentedly. “The daring young man on the flying trapeze.”
Happily, as he finished the song, he changed to “All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor” and then “Wings Over the Navee, Wings Over the Se-ee-ea,” until Petty Officer Porter, a heavy, unsmiling, serious individual, frowned at the torment. It was one of the burdens of Porter’s life that Boyle liked to sing to pass away the monotony of patrolling the empty-seas – everything he could think of – and even, sometimes, to recite. To Porter’s frustrated disgust, Boyle even preferred longer narrative poems Porter didn’t know, Shakespeare which sounded like gibberish to his unattuned ears, and the epics of Robert W Service. The longer the better, Boyle seemed to think, as he wrestled with the rolling phrases, interspacing them with “Da-da-di-da” and “Tum-tum-ti-tum” whenever he forgot the words.
As he finished “Wings over the Navy” he swung without thinking into “Dan MacGrew.”
“A bunch of the boys was whooping it up,” he announced, “in the Malamute Saloon. The kid that handled the music box was hitting a jag-time tune–”
“God’s night-gown,” Porter muttered to himself.
As Boyle recited he caught sight of a small vessel ahead of him, its wake trailing back across the broken sea, a small dark rolling fragment on the ugly surface of the water, and he swung his machine down to get a closer look.
“Silly, silly people,” he pointed out to Porter. “Going to sea in this weather. Ha–” He broke off. “The RAF boys. Bless ’em, they try so hard. It’s a pity they’ll never make sailors,” he ended, with the pitying condescension of the Senior Service for a game but very junior rival.
Below them, the launch’s grey decks with the single white-painted star flashed in the poor light then disappeared again as the boat rolled violently. The wake streamed astern, creamy and foaming, twisting over the waves as the helmsman tried to avoid some of the worst of the weather. The ensign at the masthead whipped over the starboard side of the bridge in the wind that roared down from the north.
“The boat boys are taking a beating today,” Boyle said.
Porter turned briefly and clumsily at Boyle’s words and stared stolidly as the Walrus roared over the swinging masthead of the launch.
He could see, in the brief instant that placed the boat sharp against the silhouette of the landing wheel folded neatly up to the underside of the Walrus’ lower wing, a crowded bridge below the tattered ensign, and the upturned face of a man with red hair. The man merely gazed back at him without waving, then the boat slid away beneath the aeroplane and disappeared astern.
Porter’s heavy eyes followed it as Boyle swung the machine round towards the south. He could see the great numbers on the black blunt stern of the boat, disappearing from time to time in the wake as a wave rolled away from the boats quarter – 7525. 7525 – and the threshing foam that broke against the bow and fled down the side of the hull.
“In a hurry all of a sudden,” he said. “Only just started up.
“Maybe the war’s over.” Boyle grinned, and he swung the Walrus round in a tight circle and swooped low over the launch again. Then a spatter of thin rain across the Perspex caught his attention and he turned forward again.
“Rain,” he said briefly. “Not much. Seems to be shutting down a bit, though.”
<
br /> He glanced down at the launch, away on the starboard bow now, below the wing-tip, hammering through the grey white-flecked sea.
“She’s heading up north like a retriever after a rabbit,” he went on. “Wonder what she’s got?”
As he spoke Porter bent quickly over his wireless set and reached for his Morse key, one hand on the volume control, his body huddled and shapeless in his flying clothes. Boyle heard the squeak of Morse filling the cabin above the high-pitched roar of the motor over their head, attached to the mainplane, ugly and unstreamlined – like a motorcycle engine out of its proper sphere. Boyle glanced up at it and scowled.
“It’s us this time,” Porter said unemotionally after a while as he bent over his decoding machine. “Kite in the drink. That’s what the fuss is about. Just north of here somewhere. It must be urgent, though, because they’re calling Larry Smith down from up north to help search the area. Just when we were expecting the recall, too.”
Boyle’s expression showed no change. There was neither excitement nor anger on his features.
“What’s the course?” he asked.
The Walrus flew north in the grey afternoon light, over the lonely miles of the sea, its noisy engine screaming. To Boyle, although in contact with the shore through his wireless set and with Porter alongside him, the sea seemed to grow wider and more lonely as the clouds shut in. It was something he noticed every time he had to fly through the autumn afternoons. With the gradual disappearance of light, the sea seemed to grow larger and more threatening, and he, in his relationship to it, smaller and more insignificant. The impression was heightened by the total absence of shipping, for Boyle knew well that German coasters hugged the shore and travelled mostly at night, and that most of the Allied vessels were further south in the Narrow Seas, in that strait between England and France where the constant heavy traffic of war was kept up.
“Wouldn’t like to be in the drink in this weather,” he said slowly, staring down at the cold sea, his eyes narrowed all thoughts of singing forgotten suddenly.
“Ever heard of one of those aircraft dinghies capsizing?” Porter asked.
“I should imagine they could if they tried. Give me a Walrus every time, bloody old string-bags that they are. God knows, I’m chokker with Walruses, but to hell with ditching in a kite that won’t float.”
Porter touched his arm heavily and pointed across the sea at a rapidly moving speck approaching them.
“Keep an eye on him for a minute” – Boyle was cheerfully unperturbed – “till we find out what he is. I don’t believe in mixing it with a Messerschmidt in a Walrus.”
“OK, it’s a Thunderbolt! It’s a Yank!”
The other aircraft grew rapidly as its great engine flung it low over the water towards the Walrus, and they heard its snarl as it flashed by underneath them.
“There’s another on this side,” Boyle pointed out excitedly. “I do believe they’re searching! Boy, this must be important if they’ve got the Yank fighters out to give a hand!”
He watched the squat-nosed, thick-bellied Thunderbolts flash past and swing to the north, and his anger surged up in him as the thin note of his own engine sidled into his brain again, reminding him of their speed.
“Hell’s teeth,” he roared in a fury. “Look at those boys go! And we trudge along with this flaming little two-stroke like a man with a wooden leg – and that broken!”
He put the Walrus into a shallow dive, roared down to the surface of the water, and pulled the machine up again.
“Twenty miles an hour, flat out, wind and tide up her behind,” he snorted. “Mother, I’m going to buy myself a paper kite and be a real aviator! A bloody taxi-driver, that’s what I am,” he said bitterly. “Look at the thing! It looks like a London taxi – an old one!”
Porter was peering through the Perspex window in the square side of the plane, almost as though he were deaf. His solid lack of humour was impervious to Boyle’s rages.
“Something in the water down there, Pat,” he said quietly.
“Dinghy?” Boyle quietened immediately.
“Nope. Might be a man on his own. In the water. No dinghy.”
“Damn!” Boyle felt flattened. His light spirits, which only the speed of the Walrus could damp for long, fell and he began to feel depressed.
He turned the machine slightly so that he came round in a large arc while Porter kept his eye on the object he’d seen.
“Got it?”
“Yes, I’ve still got it.”
“Where is it?”
“Over there.” Porter pointed. “Right under the bow there. Port a bit. You’re heading right on it now. Don’t like the look of it.”
“Looks like a man–”
“–floating,” Porter added.
“Let’s go down and have a look.”
The Walrus swept round and down in a shallow glide so that it almost skimmed the wave-tops. Although throttled well back, they shot over the surface of the sea at almost a hundred miles an hour and had barely a second or two in which to identify what they’d seen.
“See it?”
“Once, briefly. Looked like a stiff.”
“It’s half underneath the surface of the water.” Boyle was silent for a while and only the roar of the engine filled the square cabin above the flying-boat hull of the aircraft. “Looks as though those damn dinghies do capsize,” he ended.
“If they ever got into the dinghy.”
“Let’s have one last look and then we’ll get a message through to base. They might like to know. Then we’ll find the launch boys and get ’em to pick it up.”
Six
Leading-aircraftman Tebbitt, wedged into the starboard corner of the tiny bridge of HSL 7525, on look-out with Leading-aircraftman Westover, saw the Walrus coming towards them long before anyone else on board. It was on his side of the bridge and it appeared first as a dot low over the horizon, but in Tebbitt’s brain preoccupied as it was with his worries over his wife, it failed to register immediately.
Huddled inside his duffel coat, he was staring into the wind and covering the sea to his right as the launch corkscrewed her way stubbornly north-east. Ahead of him he could see the bow of the boat, sharp and grey, the anchor locked into position slightly forward of the winch, heaving up and round and down in labouring arcs, then up and round and down again, so that the broken sea and the grey sky went down and round and up in the opposite direction in sickening monotony.
One after another the dark waves came at them, rolling under and beyond the launch from one horizon to the other, their tips touched with feathers of white. They came from where the massing clouds curved down to sea-level, from the width of the North Sea, growing more vicious and broken as they ran into the confined spaces where England pressed close to France, down across the wrecks of hundreds of ships whose mastheads marked their graves on the sandbanks of the Channel, whose only tombstone was a green wreck buoy which warned vessels to give their sunken spars a wide berth, whose only requiem was the paragraph concerning their position in Advice to Pilots.
The spray rose in little spurts as the waves exploded under the chine and whipped in curving darts across the port side of the fore-deck to rattle on the splinter mats and the wheelhouse windows and so over the bridge. As it fell it coated everything with a layer of salt rime, stiffening the halliards and the heaving-lines that swung from the hand-rail, making the grey decks slippery as the wind-blown drops gathered in larger globules which became streams in the tearing breeze and hurried before it across the deck to congregate in jerking, sidling, quivering puddles by the gun-turrets and the bridge step.
Tebbitt’s eyes saw every one of those rolling waves just as they saw the aircraft in the distance, but only about one in ten registered on his brain, for his personal problems pursued him like the hounds of Hell down the dark avenues of his thoughts, never leaving him for a moment.
He was as certain as any man could be that his wife was on the point of leaving him, and had been fo
r longer than he cared to think about.
You great soft oaf, he told himself bitterly, you’d have done better if you’d taken her at her word and let her go the first time she threatened. You’d have done better still if you hadn’t been fool enough to marry her – if you’d stuck to your own Westmorland kind…
Tebbitt let his thoughts run riot round the What-Might-Have-Been which for a moment or two cloaked the What-Really-Was in a cloud of pleasant fantasy, then the unrepentant devil in the What-Really-Was soured the What-Might-Have-Been and Tebbitt was back on the bridge of 7525, and the spray was coming over the port side like stinging needles and the sea was the colour of dirty pewter, and he could hear the Flight Sergeant in the wheelhouse talking to Robb.
His thoughts stumbled on in a silent argument with himself as the aircraft went forgotten – or, to be more exact, unmarked in his mind. It wasn’t even as though there were any passion in his wife to hold him, he remembered bitterly. Hilda always did seem as cold as a frog. To him, anyway, he thought with burning jealousy.
But Tebbitt was what Flight Sergeant Slingsby derisively called “Well-brought-up” and “All cup-of-tea” – Tebbitt could even then hear the harsh sarcasm as it came from the cheerful, vulgar little Flight Sergeant – and in Tebbitt’s well-brought-up circle the men-folk didn’t lose their wives except by death. They didn’t divorce or run away from each other. They lived dull, contented lives and went to chapel with each other and reared children who would do exactly the same thing. And it was this as much as anything which made Tebbitt hang on to the unrepentant Hilda in the vain belief that she would eventually settle down.
He knew what he ought to do. Wallop her, you great soft-hearted fool, you, he told himself. Wallop her. Hurt her – even if it would never solve the problem. At least show her she couldn’t get away with it. Sling her across the room till she ached, and give her what-for until she knew who was the boss.