‘Kapok’d burn even better if we soaked it in the rest of the fuel. Though we’ve not much left of that either. Or in Calzer oil,’ the skipper replied, his tired, puckered face lighting up as the idea caught hold and spread. There was a plentiful stock of Calzer oil still in the lifeboat’s stores. It was supplied by the Merchant Navy for use in the event of shipwreck in the extremes of cold in the far North Atlantic. Rubbed on to exposed skin, it prevented frostbite, so we had disregarded it in the first instance as not much use to us. Until our feet and lower limbs began to shrivel up and blacken, mouldering in the water which, no matter how we bailed, seeped in continually and swilled about along the bottom of the boat. Mick told Joe and me then to use the Calzer oil on our feet, to massage it in, to try to fend off further, perhaps irreparable, deterioration. He recommended at the same time, without a hint of irony, that we should keep our legs up as much as possible, out of the persistent swash. This struck me, given the paucity of space, as a resoundingly unhelpful, if not entirely fatuous, piece of advice. But the Calzer oil had helped a little, providing a layer of waterproof grease on our extremities, though it could not arrest the decomposition of spongy, putrid skin that had already set in.
‘That engine’s massive,’ Captain Edwards went on. ‘Be a job to shift it. It’ll need unbolting from the underneath. Think we can do it?’
Fraser shrugged. ‘Worth a try. What’ve we got by way of tools? In the kit box?’ he raised his voice towards us.
Tomas leant down behind me and opened up one of the lockers in the stern sheets. He found the tool box and yanked it out. He rummaged around a bit, raking over odds and ends of rusty equipment and finally pulled out a large, adjustable spanner. ‘There’s this!’ he said, brandishing it triumphantly in one hand. ‘Would this do it?’
‘May do,’ said Fraser. ‘Someone’ll have to go and take a recce.’
‘Jesus Christ! I don’t believe this!’ Mick, fuelled with fear, was furious. He could hardly get his words out and he stood, wide-eyed, hands held out in front of him, beseeching the rest of us to see his sense. ‘We can’t throw out the engine. It’s all we’ve got! What happens when we really need it? How’ll we ever get through breakers to get to shore without the fuckin’ engine? You’re tossing away the only thing we’ve got to get us out of trouble.’
‘Wouldn’t you call running out of water trouble?’ Joe asked him. ‘And anyway, we’ve hardly any fuel left. You heard the skipper. Not enough to be of any use even if we do need the engine now.’
But Mac waded in with Mick. ‘It won’t bloody work. What the fuck does he know?’ he jerked his hand towards me. ‘He’s just a kid. Ain’t never heard of anyone tryin’ this before. People’ve been stuck on lifeboats before us and no one’s ever been so fucking stupid as to take apart the engine to try and make a friggin’ kettle.’
‘You haven’t heard of it,’ said Joe equably, his ridiculously unruly hair belying the calmness in his voice, ‘because maybe none of those poor bastards dared to do it. Maybe none of them had the balls to try it and so they did not make it. Well, Mac,’ Joe moved towards him, deliberately seeking out his eyes, ‘we’ve got a chance here to make a difference, to help ourselves. And I, for one, am willing to take it.’ He turned back to the rest of us, ‘We can die here without water. Give it up. Lie back down and hope for land. Hope to be picked up. And while we lie here quietly hoping, one by one, we’re going to die. Or we can bloody well try to save ourselves. We need more water and here,’ he waved a vague hand towards the engine, encompassing me within its sweep, ‘here’s our chance to make it.’
‘I’ll go,’ said Moses. Unaccustomed to his voice, it took me a second or two to recognise the speaker. ‘I’m a good swimmer,’ he added shyly, awkward at his sudden impulse to be heard.
We took him at his word and sent him over to take a look. He returned, breathless and shivering, from underneath the boat. He reckoned we could unbolt the engine with the spanner but it would be hard. The nuts, six of them in all, were crusted, rigid with rust and large, but the spanner could be made to fit. It could be done. He went down again, this time with the spanner tied – at Clarie’s insistence – with a bit of rigging to his wrist. When he finally resurfaced, panting and so enfeebled physically by his body’s lack of sustenance, we had to grab at him and haul him in.
It would be dangerous. Already reduced in size and strength, severely dehydrated and half-starved, we were further debilitated by the resulting, throbbing dizziness that swayed up unexpectedly and closed in, bringing frightening seconds of blotting darkness. We would have to work away at the rust-encrusted fastenings in short, sharp shifts. They needed hacking first to unloose the claws of sea and salt and age. Only then would we be able to work on their unscrewing.
Mick alone remained vociferously opposed to the ditching of the engine but he was disregarded, outnumbered as the rest of us began to concentrate our scant energies on the newfound common aim. Even Mac had quietened and was now offering to swim some shifts, converted maybe by our infectious hope. Either that, or in extremity, he was not quite strong enough to foreswear the crowd.
Work began. The tablespoon of water for our breakfast marked, as usual, the beginning of the day. Some of us tried still to eat a little but mouths without saliva can make only token progress and our fare had steadily become more difficult to swallow. Appetite fell away. The water, that one bewitching tablespoon of water, drawn out between three tortuous intervals, was all that stoked us into bothering to endure the endless blur of hours.
I offered to go in first. The responsibility of it being my idea overrode, before the others, the sickening dread I felt at having to get into the water once again. But the sun was up and blazing and so initially, there was some small relief to slink beneath the cool, encapsulating waves and be separate momentarily from the existence of the boat, those men, this purgatory. I kept one hand on the underside of the boat for reassurance and kicked my way beneath the stern, salt slapping my eyes and stinging my skin, which all over me had been sliced apart into a million tiny cuts by the shards of a slivering sun. I found a bolt but, flagging already, could barely manage two blows with the spanner’s side against its uncompromising edges before black dizziness shuttered down before my eyes and blind with sudden, gripping terror, I had to kick out and up again to find release and air. The upward thrust was long, too long, and I surfaced, gasping, flailing my arms in panicky exhaustion until Joe reached down to heave me out. It was cold. None of us would be able to last long down there.
We took it in turns. The better swimmers among us – Moses, Tomas and Fraser, Jack and I, even Billy – went down more often and tried to force ourselves to stay under longer. But we were weak and wasted, and it was gruelling work. We hacked away, fighting against the obstructive water, over and over, clanging and striking at the rigid nuts until our lungs, bursting with the effort, would force us to abandon, just before that one last strike that surely would have been the one to unloose its clasp. Joe went down, and Big Sam, to try their strength but neither one had now the stamina and both returned, shaky and unsteadied by the claustrophobic limitations of their weakened bodies. Only the skipper and Fred Watson did not swim. The captain was more than ready to take his turn but he had fifteen years on even the oldest ones among us. His shrivelling frame was folding in upon itself, hunching in his shoulders and bowing down his back. He looked small and wizened. Old. So Mick, who could hardly bear to sit by and watch our desperate labours without the benefit of his wisdom and advice, against his better judgement, offered to swim for him. As for Fred, he had not recovered from his bout of sickness as some others had. He had withered into the bottom of the boat, unresponsive and incapable. We forced him to take his ration of water with the rest of us but as he lay there, by the seat where Joe and I had left him, he let it trickle from between his slackened lips.
The unbolting of the engine gave us purpose and despite its difficulty and our fatigue, we could not give it up. The task had occupied our m
inds and given us a smaller, more manageable objective. If we looked at that, at solely that, we did not have to confront more menacing questions which, while so engrossed, we did not have to try to answer. It galvanised us. For a short time again, we were a crew, not separate individuals, self-preserving at all costs and jealously guarding against each other’s primacy.
And slowly but surely, we were rewarded. By the morning after, we had got rid of two of the bolts and loosened up the remaining four. It took the rest of the day, one by one, for us to screw each one laboriously round and off. And that evening, we lugged the massive engine up and off its plate, dismantling what we could to get at the fuel tanks and the copper pipe and salvaging other useful-looking bits and pieces under Fraser’s frugal eye. Then we heaved it overboard. It thunked and disappeared. Not one of us, at that moment, was sorry to see it go. Even Mac clapped me on the back and said, quite cheerfully, ‘Now, let’s see you get to work.’ It was not without effect.
I was appalled. He stumbled off, and eyes fixed upon his scrawny back, I suddenly felt the weight of what I’d done. I stared back down into the water, into the layered depths that had closed behind our engine just minutes before, and felt my confidence ebb away from me, drawn down towards the darkness in the engine’s murky wake. What if I was wrong? What if this plan, this ridiculous, rudimentary scheme did not work? I felt as if I had laid down all my cards, and had bet with the lives of all of us, on one rash stake. In recompense for two whole days of intolerable physical labour in more extreme conditions than any of us had ever imagined we might endure, I had promised them water. And all of them were watching me. Waiting for me to perform some kind of impossible magician’s trick. I could not do it. It would not work. I might as well go in after Moley.
‘Cub, I need your help,’ Fraser called. He was squatting down beside the metal plate where the engine had stood, balancing one of the fuel tanks on one corner beneath his hand, trying to find its best position. The copper pipe that I’d earmarked for our spout stuck out rigidly from it at a right angle. Its length, three feet or more, made it difficult for one person to manage alone, and Fraser was trying to turn the whole thing round so that the pipe fed up the boat towards the prow. I helped him turn it, swinging the pipe around and almost whacking Slim, who happened to be lying in its path, across the head. We took it up and over him and brought it down to rest upon the seat next to him.
‘If we could prop the tank up, say half a foot both sides, above the metal plate, we can start the fire beneath. What’ve we got? Anything in the lockers?’ Thinking out loud, Fraser was absorbed. His instincts as an engineer had latched on eagerly to the idea of constructing the water purifier, allowing him to lose himself in practicalities. It soothed and reassured me that he, a thoughtful and intelligent man, believed in it.
‘There’s these,’ I said, picking out two or three of the larger bits of scrap from the small heap of metal pieces we’d taken off the engine. A couple, shaped like angle irons, were good enough to make a reasonable cradle for the fire and so we set about positioning them so as to balance the fuel tank on their upturned ends.
Thus preoccupied, we had not really been aware of the angry voices rising at the centre of the boat until Jack came sprawling back towards us, just missing falling on, and therefore most probably breaking, our precious pipe by inches.
‘Jack!’ I cried, concerned only in that instant with preserving the equipment that had been so hard-won.
Jack tried to scramble up, but Pat Murack, enraged and threatening, knife in hand, thrust him down again and bent down low with one foot either side of Jack’s curling body to grab his hair. Taking a fistful, he jerked his head back and held the knife up to his throat. ‘Tell them what you’re eating, you little bastard,’ he shouted, his mouth so close to Jack’s flinching face, it almost touched it. I could see Jack’s eyes, flicking and darting, pleading help from any quarter, as his hands sought to clench the cloth of Pat’s shirt, which hung loose about his attacker’s chest. Stung somehow into immobility, we all just stood there.
‘Fucking chocolate! Snivelling little bastard kept it back. Been eating it on the quiet.’ Pat looked up, from one face to the next until he found Joe’s. ‘Joe? So much for fucking sharing, Joe,’ he spat. He turned back to Jack, leaning closer, viciously triumphant. ‘It’s each man for himself, ain’t that so, you little shit?’ Jack half nodded, half whimpered his agreement and Pat, satisfied, shoved his head back roughly and let him go.
I rowed much of the night that night. I was fretful and could not rest. Fraser and I had had to stop our efforts at construction at sundown though we sat on for longer, slitting up the life jackets and cutting out the Kapok by the light of the stars. Joe sat with us, humming intermittently as he worked, and talking to anyone who’d listen, while Slim crouched by his side, slicing silently. Their company distracted me from brooding on the gamble we were taking. Somehow, it was a job to be undertaken under the cover of darkness; the destruction of our emergency aids without the help of which, at the turn of fortune, would mean more certain death.
We made a pile of Kapok and flung the material from the jackets to one side, until Fraser suddenly held up a strip and looked at me. ‘We could use this! It’s useful. Look. If we wrap it round the pipe, along the length of it, we can soak it all the while with cold water. It’ll keep the pipe much cooler longer.’ He was right. I had thought we could just pour cold water straight on to the copper, but the soaked material would make it more efficient.
Joe smiled across at me, ‘You know, Cub, if this works, you will probably have saved us all.’
‘And if it doesn’t?’ my voice wavered. He shrugged and shook his head, as though the actual outcome of the attempt was almost immaterial.
‘Then you were brave enough to try,’ he said. There was a note of new respect in his voice and, in the warmth and light of his admiration, my misgivings momentarily receded.
We took our shift late on. I rowed with Joe and Tomas, Billy, Cunningham and Butler but when the skipper called for the changeover, I rowed on. Fred had long since been incapable of doing anything and Jack, I knew, had only just succumbed to sleep. The spasmodic heaving of his shoulders had only just subsided and I didn’t want to rob him of the relief sleep brought him from his embarrassment at weeping. Besides, responsibility weighed heavily on me and I needed to do something to assuage my nagging doubts.
I need not have worried. At daybreak, Fraser was up and brandishing an empty Horlicks tin in front of me. ‘We’ll collect it in this,’ he said, placing it below the end of the fuel pipe carefully. We filled the tank with sea water and set the fire, dousing the Kapok with the last of our fuel and some Calzer oil and then lighting up. It wasn’t long before steam was dancing hazily from the copper spout but, given that the fuel tank still contained a residue of petrol, we let it boil away. We filled it several times and let the steam evaporate until we thought we’d done enough to rid the tank of all the traces of its fuel. We soaked the cloth from the life jackets then in the sea and wound them tightly all along the copper pipe and started again. Fraser and I sat either side and poured cold water continuously along the spout. Most of the others came to watch, sitting and standing, arms folded in an attitude of silent but very palpable prayer.
I concentrated with all my will on pouring, hardly daring to wrench my eyes away from the piece of pipe in front of me to its end, where all our hopes hung in the balance. I knew their eyes were all upon us, waiting, hoping, not quite ready to believe. The skin along my hairline began to prickle and my wrists went weak and light. It was taking just too long and disconcertingly, out of the corner of my eye, I could see that steam was still busily escaping from the end of our spout.
‘It’s never gonna work. It’s been far too long already.’ Mick, tutting angry vindication, flung his arms down against his sides impatiently, releasing his chest from the tight anxiety of their embrace. He was standing up almost behind me and the shadow of his doubt cast an unwelcome covering
over the back of my neck and shoulders. ‘All that fucking work. For nothing! Jesus. We never should’ve listened to them.’
The words, now actually out, were nothing more than the spoken fears every man present had been struggling to smother. They were thrown out harshly across my head and landed heavily in the centre of the concentrated silence the watchful company had been keeping, opening the floodgates and engendering a murmured and then increasingly more voluble wave of aggressive scepticism.
‘Should’ve thrown them two overboard, never mind the bleedin’ engine,’ I heard Butler say, turning his head to Billy, who shrugged a scarcely perceptible, thin-lipped agreement.
‘Fucking done for, now,’ he muttered back.
‘They shouldn’t be allowed any water from now on in,’ Murack said, slapping his hands down decisively on his knees and getting to his feet. He nodded at those around him, enlisting support before wheeling round to face the captain, ‘We’re so much fucking worse off now. You should never’ve let them do it. Them who thought of it should fucking well have to go without.’
‘That’s right,’ Mac cried. ‘They’ve lost their fucking right to water rations surely. I say the rest of us poor bastards should get their share!’
There were several audible murmurings of affirmation from various quarters around us and as the cold fear of failure and its consequence crept into my stomach and settled, I glanced up uneasily across at Joe, who, perching on the rim of the boat, had been hanging on to one of the mast-ropes and humming cheerfully as he leant out to refill our tins with cold water before passing them in to Fraser. He stood up slowly and balancing on the ledge, put his hands upon his hips.
‘Give it time, give it time. It isn’t over yet. Just have a bit of patience.’
‘Patience! Jesus, Joe!’ yelled Mick. ‘Need the patience of bleedin’ Job for this. Patience doesn’t get you nowhere. We were patient with your clever feller who thought it might be a good idea to throw out the engine. And now look at us. No fucking water. No fucking engine. No bleedin’ life jackets. Jesus. And you’re asking me for patience?’
Making Shore Page 12