by John Harris
“Wind’s still blowing from the north,” Ponsettia pointed out. “That sets the Jerry coast over there, in the east.”
He pointed and their eyes followed his outstretched hand.
They waited a long time in weary patience for the rain to slacken off a little. It was as though the squall that dragged their hair in limp strands over their eyes drew a curtain between them and the distance to shut off their view as effectively as if it had been solid.
“It’s slackening,” Ponsettia said after a while and they could see the white crests in the distance appearing again, blurred at first then gradually becoming more distinct. Then, as a wave lifted them, they all strained upwards, their tired eyes peering out of their salt-stiffened faces.
They saw it suddenly, just a long low shadow, blue-grey through the rain across the white-flecked metallic water, lifting upwards with them with slow deliberation above the intervening waves.
“There!” Mackay said sharply, flinging out an arm. “I saw it! There!”
As the rain stopped briefly they could see flat-fronted houses – even the blank windows which suggested they must be unoccupied by civilians – and the taller bulk of the trees behind. There was a long sea wall running along the shore with, here and there, the low humps of what appeared to be pill-boxes and sandbagged gun-positions. They could even see the yellow line of beach below the dunes with posts sticking upright out of it as though they held barbed wire.
“Houses,” Ponsettia breathed. “Real houses! Jesus, don’t they look warm?”
There was something reassuring about the solidness of the land, in spite of its hostile nature, and Waltby found himself marvelling at its stillness. After twenty-four hours of staring at the ever-moving sea the land seemed weighty and strong and, in spite of the thought of captivity, he found it hard to feel anything but thankfulness at the sight of it.
Its nearness now that they had seen it took their breath away.
“Hell, we’re close in,” Mackay said in shocked surprise. Then the rain came sidling along the sea again, like a grey fog, blanking out the view of the coast and even of the other waves, but they were oblivious of it this time, soaked as they already were and aware that they were almost in Occupied Territory.
Ponsettia, his face streaming, was trying to stare through the rain at the vanished coastline. “It must be Belgium south of Walcheren,” he said. “As I thought. With the north wind and the tide setting south, that’s about where we’d end up. That’ll be nice. Right in Jerry’s lap. Wonder if our people have captured the place yet?”
They stared at each other, then Ponsettia shrugged.
“Ah, well,” he said. “I could almost look forward to a nice cosy prison camp.” He was silent for a while then he went on again. “I once heard of a bloke who survived four days in a one-man dinghy and then was washed up in Lincolnshire somewhere. He was killed when he tried to wade ashore. Land mines.”
He was staring at his feet as he finished speaking.
“You know,” Mackay said thoughtfully after a while. “If they spot us, at least the Skipper will soon be in hospital and warm. The war’s almost over. It wouldn’t be for long.”
Waltby studied him, thinking, as he considered the warmth – even the warmth of captivity – with a sickening longing, of what would happen to the brief case full of documents if they were captured, and he forced his wearily protesting brain to try to work out some plan.
“At least,” Mackay went on. “I should dodge a court martial. I’ll bet some officious bloody Service policeman’s got that jerrycan of petrol in the guardroom by now. If I get back I’ll be down to sweeping the road outside the Flight Office.”
“Such a pity,” Ponsettia said dryly. “Flying pay’s so useful.”
“More useful than you think,” Mackay said, and Waltby had a momentary picture of him banking every available penny for after the war to be put into that precious little business of his.
“Perhaps I could put in a word for you,” he offered. “We’ve got to know each other pretty well, considering.”
Mackay nodded, unable to get away from his tongue the thanks he knew he should utter, and they fell into an awkward silence.
As the light grew the baling continued, then Waltby stopped suddenly.
“Listen,” he said. “What’s that noise?”
They cocked their heads. “I can’t hear anything,” Mackay said. “Only waves.”
“Yes, I know. That’s what I mean. But listen – they’re louder now.”
“Christ, you’re right,” Ponsettia agreed, startled and suddenly apprehensive.
The rain cleared again and they saw they were moving steadily along the coast. The houses had disappeared and they were opposite sand dunes. But outside of them the sea was breaking wildly along a wide stretch of water, the waves leaping irregularly as though flung upwards from beneath.
“Sand-bank,” Ponsettia said. “That’s what it is. That’s your noise, Syd. We’re smack inside of it. And it’s a big one. There’s a good mile of it. I’ll bet it dries out at low tide.”
As the rain came down again, blurring the shore and the broken water, he prodded the yellow sides of the dinghy. “This damn sausage skin’s getting soft,” he said. “It’ll be handy if it goes down. Better pump it up a bit.” He turned, looking for the bellows, then he suddenly shouted – so unexpectedly that they jumped – his voice harsh and cracked with excitement.
“A launch!” he yelled, trying to stand up. “A launch! Oh, Christ Jesus Almighty God, a launch! They’ve found us! They’ve found us! They’ve found us!”
“Sit down, for God’s sake,” Waltby yelled, “or you’ll have the dinghy over!” He found his own pulse was racing with excitement at Ponsettia’s words, but his frantic relief stuck in his throat.
“Where? Where is it?” Mackay was demanding eagerly, half kneeling. “Where, man? Where is it?”
“Over there.” Ponsettia was pointing wildly to the west. “Outside the bank. They’re coming. I saw it through the rain just for a second. There. Just there. It bobbed up and disappeared.”
They were all scrambling to their knees now, their eyes wild, desperate, clutching at the fragment of hope, praying it wasn’t imagination.
“You’re seeing things, man!” Mackay shouted. “You’re going crackers.”
All three of them were panting, their mouths hanging open, like exhausted runners.
“I tell you I saw a launch!” Ponsettia was shouting furiously. “Only just, but I saw it. And if it wasn’t an Air-Sea Rescue job, I’m barmy.”
“Well, where is it? Where is it?” They were peering through the rain, their eyes smarting with the wind and the salt water, all the time at the back of their hearts afraid of another disappointment. Ponsettia was almost in tears that they wouldn’t believe him, and yet half laughing with hysterical joy.
“I saw it, I tell you. I did. I saw it. Where’s it gone to?”
“Get the flare ready,” Waltby reminded them soberly. “Just in case. And make sure it goes this time. We’ll need it if Canada’s right.”
“I was right. I saw it, I tell you.”
“Well, where the hell is it, you stupid fool?” Mackay shouted in a black disappointed fury.
While they were arguing and shouting at one another, by a trick of the sea they were lifted to the top of a huge combination of waves at precisely the same time as HSL 7525 was lifted up by another a mile away, and they all saw it before the rain came again, grey and indistinct but undoubtedly a launch.
“There! There!” Ponsettia’s voice was almost a screech. “Oh, Jesus, ain’t she pretty? Ahoy! Launch! Launch! For God’s sake shout, blokes, we’re saved.”
He started to slap Mackay and Waltby with numbing blows on their shoulders. Choking with relief, Waltby fought down the desire to hug the little Canadian as common sense and the training of years told him to take every precaution first.
“They haven’t seen us yet,” he reminded them sharply. “Stop
that yelling and for God’s sake get the flare off, one of you!”
Mackay, who had been struggling with the tape of the flare, began to curse. “Oh, blast the cold,” he was saying. “I can’t hold it again!”
“Blow your whistle, Mac!” Ponsettia lunged forward and freeing Mackay’s whistle from his lapel shoved it between his lips as he started to blow his own.
“Here, Syd,” he said, diving for Harding’s whistle. “You blow the Skipper’s.”
In a moment the three whistles were shrieking frantically, thin and reedy against the wind and the sea, only a thin pipe, like the lamenting of lost souls.
“The flare!” Mackay shouted, so that his whistle fell out of his mouth into the bottom of the dinghy. “I think I’ve got it! I have, I have! I’ve got the bastard!”
Dazed and stupid with the cold and the excitement, he forgot the flare and started to fumble instead for his whistle, and Ponsettia snatched it from his frozen hands and yanked at the tape. Immediately, with a hiss and a roar, they were enveloped in acrid crimson-tinted fumes as he held the flare as high as he could and began to wave it. The wind snatched away the blue-grey stream of smoke and carried it southwards.
Half blinded and choking, they peered again for the launch.
“They must see it,” Waltby breathed. “They’ll never hear the whistles over the sea.”
“Suppose it’s a Jerry?” Mackay said uneasily.
“It’s not a Jerry,” Ponsettia snorted with a confidence that was really only hope. “Hell, I can tell by the cut of the thing’s jib! She’s an Air-Sea Rescue job. What else would she be doing here?”
“She might be an E-boat trying to find her way back.”
Waltby was feverishly opening the brief case with clumsy hands and trying to stuff Harding’s shoes into it to make weight. Then he felt for the blunt-ended, cork-handled knife from the dinghy equipment and stuffed it awkwardly into his belt, ready to cut the rope, which still tied the case to the dinghy.
“Suppose the shore batteries see it?” Mackay said, indicating the flare.
“The ASR boys’ll have us out of here before that.” Ponsettia was buoyed up by excitement to a near-hysterical expectancy.
The thinning rain cleared again for a moment and the three of them cowered in the lurching dinghy, soaked with spray staring over the tumbled water of the sand-bank, their hearts stopped with apprehension.
Then Ponsettia slapped Waltby’s shoulders again. “She’s stopped, Syd!” he shouted gleefully. “She must have seen us.”
They watched again, then Ponsettia shrieked. “She has!” he yelled. “She’s stopped! Oh, boy! I’ll never say God doesn’t listen to your prayers. I was praying last night enough to wake the dead.” Tears were running down his face and mingling with the rain and the seawater there.
They could see the launch more clearly now. Although she was still greyish-blue and indistinct in the distance her outlines were recognisable. They could even see the silhouette of the gun on her stern, and her mast. As they watched, the beam-on outline shortened until she presented a head-on appearance to them, lifting slowly on the sea and disappearing again as both dinghy and boat dropped into troughs of the waves at the same time.
“She’s heading towards us. She is! She’s coming! There! A Verey light! See it? Shout, boys! Shout like merry hell to make sure.”
Ponsettia’s words died in the middle of his joy as he became aware of Mackay silent behind him, staring shorewards, his face taut and grim. Ponsettia’s eyes lifted and over Mackay’s head, as the dinghy breasted a wave, he could see the shore again. They had drifted past the sand-dunes once more and the houses were visible again, in a cluster along the fringe of the beach, and in front of them were those ominous huddles of sandbags which indicated gun-positions.
Mackay’s gaze was cold and bitter as he stared at Ponsettia, his swollen, ugly-looking hand tucked into his battle-dress blouse. “You can stop your blasted celebrations for a bit,” he said. “Until we’ve seen what that lot there have got to say about rescue.”
Three
It was Gus Westover who first saw the flare from the dinghy.
With the first light, Skinner had got his engines in working order again. He emerged from the engine-room hatch, the wind whipping at his trouser bottoms, and with both hands on the rail staggered along the heaving deck towards the bridge where Robb was hanging over the side on lookout, eating a corned-beef sandwich with vast enjoyment in spite of the rolling. His red face had a bovine, contented look as he chewed, and he was obviously free from worry or strain, a fact which infuriated the weary Skinner.
The engineer’s face was grey with fatigue and his eyes were red with the staring he’d done in the poor light of the engine-room. His best jacket, which he had slipped on against the cold on deck, had a great black patch of oil across the front where it had fallen into the bilges and soaked up the dirt for half an hour before he’d noticed it. It was now seeping through to his best shirt
“Where’s the Skipper?” he asked sourly.
“In his cabin,” Robb said, half turning.
“Well, she’s ready. We can start up.”
Robb crammed the rest of his sandwich into his mouth and spoke with his cheeks full.
“Good!” he said. “Engines OK?”
“’Course they’re OK.”
“We can make the inshore search?”
“Hell, I’d forgotten that!”
“Can we?”
“Have we got to? I rather like being alive.”
“Can we?” Robb’s voice rose to an infuriated shout.
“Oh, Christ, yes, if you’re looking for a gong! The engines are all right now. Even the oil-feed.”
“Whacko!”
Skinner missed the eagerness in Robb’s voice as all his own pent-up fury burst out in an explosion that was touched off by Robb’s lightheartedness. “After all the trouble I had to make sure that flaming oil-feed didn’t let us down,” he snarled. “And then the goddam, thrice-stricken water-pump keys had to shear off just because there was a cross-tide!”
Robb turned, half inside the wheelhouse, his bulk filling the door.
“Just goes to prove,” he pointed out cheerfully. “Always make sure you repair your oil-feeds when they’re in danger of packing up – instead of taking WAAFS to pubs – and then your water-pump keys won’t shear.”
Skinner gazed after him as he dived below.
To Milliken, who, exhausted by his long watch on the rolling bridge, had finally fallen asleep on the sick bay floor, the sudden explosion of the engines was the crack of doom; and he sat up, believing in the first moment he was awake that something else dreadful had happened to him. Then, realising with relief that Skinner had completed his repairs, he lay for a while dozing under the duffel coat which, he was surprised to find, had been thrown over him as he slept.
He was glad to see the daylight again. Nothing seemed quite so bad as when it was dark. Even the cold seemed less now that the harsh glare of the deckhead lights had disappeared. Never once during the long night had Milliken been able to draw any warmth or comfort from the light below deck after the wild darkness above. He listened to the pound and beat of the engines, then, as the boat rolled, swinging on to a new course, he began to slide across the deck and he sat up sharply, scratching his head and trying to rub the weariness out of his eyes.
By the time he staggered on deck the boat had been under way some time and she was plunging through cold grey seas that seemed always on the point of snatching her under, down into the dark fathoms below.
To his surprise, the rain was rattling on the port side. He had by this time got sufficient mastery of his directions to know that if they had been headed home the rain ought to have been beating at them from the starboard side, and the difference struck him ominously.
Then he remembered that last wireless message that had come through the previous night and he felt a sudden hollowness in his stomach and a dryness in his throat as he realised
they were already on their way to the inshore search.
“Why aren’t we going home?” he asked Knox, who was standing beside him on the after-deck, hanging on to the sick bay cabin top.
“Going for a look-see.” Knox confirmed his fears with a tautly framed answer that made Milliken realise that everyone on the boat beside himself also knew what that message had contained. “Almost there by this time.”
Milliken glanced towards the bridge where he could see Robb’s red hair, and Treherne and Westover, and he noticed that they all wore Mae Wests. Although they should have worn them constantly at sea, this was the first time they had done so, and the significance of the fact made him swallow quickly.
There was no sign of haste or panic, however. Indeed, he could even smell the fumes of paraffin from the galley where Tebbitt was struggling with the stove again.
“Somebody making tea?” he asked, cheered a little by the thought of warmth.
“No.” Knox’s reply took the brightness out of him. “Hot-water bottles in case of shock.”
“Oh!”
“Keep your eyes open,” Knox warned him. “Might see a mine. We’re inside their minefield now. Should be seeing the shore any time. It’s only over there through the rain.”
Milliken nodded, his eyes flickering about him across the wind-snatched water. The whole surface of the sea seemed to be rising to meet them now, in flying spray and skimmed foam, and the sky hung on the tattered flag, which had torn in the wind during the night into two long streamers. Dark grey broken clouds tumbled by overhead and to Milliken there seemed to be nothing but ridges of water, with the mast of the boat lying regularly parallel to the surface of the sea, so that he looked shudderingly into vast valleys.
It was after the wireless cabin had raised cheers with the news that 7526 had had to abandon the tow of the Walrus and leave her to her fate in the storm in order to reach safety herself, that Westover saw the flare.
His shout made Milliken jump.
“Skipper! Flight! On the starboard quarter! A flare! A red flare!”