Soldier, Sail North (1987)

by Pattinson, James

  Donker nodded vigorously, corroborating the captain’s statement, and managing to convey by the extreme vehemence of his nodding and the expression on his face that he did indeed know only too well.

  “The petty officer,” continued Captain Pownall, gazing all the time at Willis and ignoring the person of whom he was speaking, “knows that a convoy to Russia is just about the most uncomfortable, coldest, and most dangerous voyage we are called upon to make. At this time of the year the weather is likely to be at its vilest. That will be the least of our troubles.”

  He closed the book with a snap and began to pace backward and forward across the carpet, as though he were on the bridge.

  “We shall not be able to travel very far north because of pack-ice; rounding North Cape we shall be within the easiest distance of German aircraft bases in Norway, and we are likely to be heavily attacked. There will be submarines as well, and possibly surface raiders; but I don’t expect you gunners to do a lot about them; they’re jobs for the escort. Aircraft are different; they’re your meat, and I shall expect all your men to be on their toes. Keep a sharp look-out and have the guns ready for instant action. Is that understood?”

  He had come to a halt again in the middle of the cabin, and was staring at the two men from under his shaggy eyebrows. Willis and Donker answered “Yessir” in unison.

  “Very well. That is all I wished to say.”

  As he and the petty officer left the cabin Willis noticed that Captain Pownall was already seated at his desk and scribbling furiously on a writing-pad. Willis closed the door silently.

  “Usual stuff,” said Petty Officer Donker. “He thinks ’is little pow-wow keeps us up to the mark. Well, it pleases ’im, and it don’t do no harm.”

  “Know how he got his D.S.O.?” asked Willis.

  “That?” said Donker. “Why, yes. It was some time back, off the West Indies. His ship got sunk by a U-boat. They was in the lifeboat forty days—nearly died of thirst. The Old Man it was who kept ’em going. He’s better than he looks, you know.”

  “You seem to know all about it.”

  Petty Officer Donker fingered the lump on his neck caressingly. “I ought to,” he said. “I was there.”

  Before going back aft Sergeant Willis took it into his head to climb up to that highest part of the superstructure, known as ‘Monkey Island.’ From this vantage-point he had a view of the entire ship’s armament—a bird’s-eye view. Away forward, almost in the bows, was the twelve-pounder. Willis had a poor opinion of the effectiveness of that weapon—at least against aircraft. Its rate of fire was too low, and there was no tracer by which to observe the path of the shells. It was an old-fashioned gun, like the four-inch on the stern. Yet he supposed Donker loved it; it was strange how these old shellbacks clung to the weapons of their salad days, having for them the same affection they had for ancient ships, long past their prime. In a way it was touching.

  Willis could see the paravanes lying one on either side of number one hatch, looking like elongated eggs with fins attached to their pointed ends. They were for protection against mines, but he had seldom seen them used. Then, on either side of the bridge, were Oerlikon guns, twenty-millimetre automatics. Willis approved of them; next to the Bofors they were, in his opinion, the best anti-aircraft guns carried by merchant ships. It was strange, he mused, that those two peerless light-anti-aircraft weapons should both have been designed in neutral countries—the Bofors in Sweden, the Oerlikon in Switzerland. He supposed the Swedes and Swiss had the time for such intricate work.

  On either side of the boat-deck were racks of explosive rockets—racks known irreverently as pig-troughs. And about as much use, thought Willis. A lot of noise and damn-all to show for it. Well, they were Donker’s worry, and he believed that Donker had put the apprentices in charge of them. Willis hoped those youthful heroes would not blow themselves up. Rockets were inclined to be dangerous things—for their users.

  Aft were two more Oerlikons, then the Bofors and the four-inch. Lashed to the poop-deck near the taffrail were eight smoke-floats.

  “Regular little man-o’-war,” muttered Willis, as he made his way aft.

  The several members of Willis’s detachment prepared for the voyage each in his own manner. Vernon went to Grimsby and bought himself a number of books by Russian authors: Dostoevski’s The Brothers Karamazov, Chekhov’s plays and stories, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. He had for a long time been intending to study Russian literature, and the present seemed a singularly appropriate time to begin. In addition he picked up a copy of Housman’s A Shropshire Lad and an anthology of English verse. Thus equipped, with his unspillable ink-bottle replenished and an exercise-book in which to write, he felt that any spare time there might be on the voyage should not be difficult to pass away.

  Bombardier Padgett’s choice of literature bore little resemblance to that of Gunner Vernon. Padgett had been a keen amateur weight-lifter before the War, and his torso proclaimed the fact. When Padgett was stripped down the muscles could be seen rippling all over his body as he tensed and relaxed them. He was a walking advertisement for physical culture, and physical culture was his supreme interest in life. To Padgett the body was all-important, a living sculpture to be carved out of the basic material given to every normal man. In his view neglect of the body was a crime for which there was no excuse. Muscles, tendons, sinews, chest measurements—these were the themes of Padgett’s conversation; these were the objects of his labour.

  Padgett bought two books to see him through the voyage. One was called Building the Body Beautiful, with 150 full-page photographs and ten tables of exercises; the other was Strength through Diet. With these two volumes he expected to spend many an interesting and instructive hour.

  Gunner Payne bought a pile of Wild West magazines. For him the stage-coach still rolled across the Texan prairies; six-guns barked out their messages of death; and Zane Grey was the greatest writer that ever lived. In some ways Payne had never grown up.

  None of the others bought any books; there was a small library on the ship supplied by the Missions to Seamen, and this they relied on for any reading matter they might desire. Cowdrey had brought a game called Monopoly back with him when he came off leave, and while the ship lay in port he often collected enough gunners to play a round. It made a change from nap.

  Miller never did any reading. He had once tried to read a book by Karl Marx called Das Kapital, because the comrades were all supposed to be familiar with it; but he had not made much headway, and in the end he had given it up. He had sometimes read the Daily Worker; but that had been before he joined the Army. Now he read nothing.

  Willis did not read much either. His life had always been one of action, and he had never had any time for that faint mirror of reality that lay in a printed page. Army manuals, handbooks of gunnery—these were the only books he respected or understood—books that served a purpose—books of fact, not of erotic nonsense or synthetic adventure. Life was real to Sergeant Willis, and he had never felt the need for escape into a fictional world of make-believe.

  Randall read only the newspapers, skimming fearfully through them, and, having failed to find that which he feared, threw them aside and waited for another day to pass.

  So they all waited as the s.s. Golden Ray sank lower under her cargo, until, on the ninth day after their arrival, the ties of Immingham were cast off, and they made once more for the open sea to join a north-bound convoy. So north they went, creeping along the coast past Flamborough Head, past the mouth of the Tyne, past the Firth of Forth; still northward past Peterhead and Fraserburgh, round John o’ Groats and through the Pentland Firth; sometimes in daylight, sometimes in darkness, but moving on, moving on without pause; westward through the Pentland Firth, westward to Cape Wrath; then southward down the Minch, with the jagged coast of Sutherland and Ross and Cromarty to port, until they came to a narrow inlet leading to a stretch of hill-surrounded water, and here they sought shelter. The
anti-submarine boom opened to let them pass; they steamed in past the ships which operated the net and dropped anchor in Loch Ewe. The net closed behind them, and they lay at the foot of the snow-bound hills and waited.

  And other ships nosed their way into the loch, other ships low in the water with cargo; and these too dropped their anchors and waited under the white, silent hills, while the gulls hovered and swooped and quarrelled, filling the air with the sound of their raucous voices.

  And Petty Officer Donker, leaning over the taffrail, noticed with satisfaction that there were three tankers among the ships; for he knew from experience that tankers were favoured targets for U-boats. And Donker reasoned that for every torpedo aimed at a tanker there would be one less for the Golden Ray. Therefore he smiled and rubbed the knob on his neck for pleasure.

  “Tankers,” said Petty Officer Donker, “are what I like to steer clear of. Hell-ships,” said Petty Officer Donker; “hell-ships!”

  But Gunner Payne, who was also leaning over the taffrail, disagreed. In his opinion tankers had their good points, and he had sailed in two, so ought to know.

  “They feed well,” said Payne. “They feed damn well. None of the sort of muck we get on this tub. They have cooks in tankers—real cooks—and good quarters.”

  Petty Officer Donker cleared his throat and spat. His spittle dropped into the placid water of the loch and sent ripples circling away from it, sinking gradually once more to their former level.

  “They can keep their food and their quarters,” he said. “They ain’t safe. You don’t tell me you like sleeping on ten thousand tons of high octane ready to go up like a volcano.”

  “Well,” said Payne, “it’s a bit nerve-racking if you think about it. No smoking on deck and no hobnailed boots. Best thing is not to think about it.”

  “Easier said than done.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. You get used to anything.”

  Donker, still staring at the vessels in the anchorage, drew up more information from the well of his experience.

  “There’s a Blue Funnel boat; they’ve lost a deal of ships, one way and another. Used to be in the Java and Sumatra trade, a lot of ’em. Tea! Boxes and boxes of it. My word! That one on the far side is a Harrison—Harrison, T. and J.; wonder which one she is; might be the Adviser or the Settler —that type. Ha! See that one over there; that’s one of the Strick line; bit off their old run, this; Persian Gulf’s more their home. One of them tankers is a Norwegian. Wonder what she’s carrying to Russia.”

  A motor-launch, heading for the Golden Ray and flying the Blue Ensign, put a stop to Donker’s lecture.

  “More trouble,” he grumbled. “More bastard shore staff.”

  He pushed himself off the rail and went to see that all hands were occupied.

  While the ship was in Loch Ewe Sergeant Willis was not idle, and he did not allow his men to be idle either. It was gun-drill, gun-drill, gun-drill, until each man fitted into the pattern of the team as the portions of a jig-saw puzzle fit into the whole. Willis’s voice, trained on the barrack square, was loud and penetrating. It penetrated to the ears of Captain Pownall; and more than once that taciturn man paused in his affairs to glance aft and watch the gunners leaping to their posts. And at these times the master would nod his head in satisfaction, supposing that his brief lecture had not been in vain.

  The days passed. Snow, scudding across the loch, was followed by clear skies, and they in turn were followed by sleet and boisterous winds, which lashed the surface of the water into miniature waves that ran foaming up to beat futilely against the edges of the land. The s.s. Golden Ray pulled at her anchor, like a dog unwillingly chained to its kennel, as though impatient to be gone. But the gunners, staring up at the bleak hills, hoped for another night at anchor with peaceful sleep and no watches.

  But after four days the boom opened, and one after another the ships filed out of the loch, turned to starboard, and headed north. The dark journey had begun.

  It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and already the light was failing. A strong beam wind brought scuds of rain, and the sea heaved. The s.s. Golden Ray swung like a pendulum, biting her way through the grey sea and casting up founts of spray. Ahead of her went the Blue Funnel steamer; astern lay one of the tankers; and this was the start of the journey.

  Sergeant Willis was on watch with Randall and Andrews. Andrews was feeling sick. He knew that in a few days he would be all right again; he was always sick at the start of a voyage if the sea was at all rough, but the sickness never lasted many days. But the knowledge that his sickness would leave him tomorrow or the next day was little consolation. All he could think about now was that he was sick; his head was heavy; his eyes ached, and hot liquid kept rising in his throat; swallow as he might, it rose again. He longed for the watch to end, so that he could crawl into his bunk and sleep; but the watch had only just begun.

  Randall was staring at the coast of Scotland, a vague outline on the starboard beam. He was glad that they were under way; he felt that he had severed his last link with home and that he would never return. Somewhere in those far northern waters he would find forgetfulness and oblivion. Let the law search for him how it might, it would never find him.

  Sergeant Willis was thinking: Two weeks! Two weeks, and we should be there—either there or meat for fishes. If only we knew what was waiting for us. But perhaps it’s best not to know. Yes, certainly, best not.

  Suddenly the telephone-bell rang. Willis spoke into the mouthpiece. “Bofors gun-position here.”

  A metallic voice sounded in his ear. “Bridge here. Just testing. Just testing. O.K.?”

  “O.K.”

  Willis put the telephone back in its waterproof box and began pacing up and down a ten-foot stretch of gun-platform, leaning against the roll of the ship. Fourteen days, he thought. Where shall we be in fourteen days?

  A Whitley bomber of Coastal Command was flying round the convoy, keeping watch upon the water. Now and then it winked at the ships in a series of flashes, long and short, short and long. And from the bridge of the commodore’s ship a signal rating, steadying himself on wide-parted legs, flashed back an answer. It was all so usual; it was just the way every convoy began its journey; and nobody thought what a miracle of planning and organization it all was. But twenty merchant ships in four columns lay upon the heaving bosom of the sea, keeping the pattern of their movement, like chessmen lying on a board, while round them the steel ring of corvettes and destroyers kept watch and ward.

  At dusk the Whitley left them, and through the night they pushed on, northward, ever north, still keeping their positions on the chessboard, dark shapes showing no light from blacked-out ports, no glimmer from wheel-house or galley or cabin, dark shapes moving upon a dark and restless sea. The watches changed and changed again; and dawn came, and with the dawn a Lockheed Hudson, sweeping up from the land and winking its greeting. And the convoy winked back in answer and moved on, moved on.

  On the third day the carpenter slipped on the deck-ice and sprained his ankle. It was not the first mishap, for Vernon had already made a sad mess of his left thumb. He had been taking cleaning-rags from one of the lockers, an iron locker with a lid weighing a quarter of a hundredweight. Vernon had omitted to fasten the lid back, and a sudden roll of the ship upset its equilibrium. Twenty-eight pounds of iron caught his shoulder a glancing blow and fell upon his thumb.

  After the first fierce shock of pain Vernon felt surprisingly little beyond a dull ache, but, looking down at his thumb, he saw that the end had been flattened and mangled. It seemed unreal, something that did not belong to him; but he felt sick and weak and was glad to sit down on the locker until he should recover.

  Miller and Warby looked at the thumb, as men may inspect a strange specimen. Miller shook his head.

  “Now you’ve done it,” he remarked. “Proper mess you’ve made of that. Does it ’urt?”

  “It does,” said Vernon. “Try it yourself some time.”

  The blood
was dripping from the end of the thumb and making red splashes on the deck. Vernon took a handkerchief from the pocket of his coat and wrapped it round the wound. The handkerchief was black with oil, but soon the red was showing through.

  “Good thing I had my anti-tetanus injection the other week,” he said.

  “You’d better go along to the steward with that,” said Warby. “Are you feeling all right? Want me to come with you?”

  “I’m all right,” said Vernon. “But I think I had better see the steward.”

  His legs felt weak as he climbed over the side of the gun-platform, and it was difficult steadying himself with one hand; but he would not admit his weakness to the two watching him.

  “I’ll be all right,” he said. And he thought: I’ve got to be. This is only the start.

  The steward was ‘doctor’ on board the Golden Ray. Often it had occurred to Vernon during his time at sea in cargo vessels that it would go hard if one were seriously ill or injured far from land with only an amateur to doctor one. Supposing one had acute appendicitis? What then? That, like many other things, was better not thought about.

  The steward of the Golden Ray reminded Vernon of Harold Lloyd; he wore the same type of black-rimmed spectacles, and he had the same gullible, inoffensive look. In the case of the steward, whose name was Carter, looks were misleading.

  Carter looked at Vernon’s thumb and did not like it. “How did you do this?” he asked.

  “Shell-locker. Lid fell on it.”

  “Nasty, very nasty. Hurt much?”

  “Enough.”

  The steward sat Vernon in a chair and went away for a bowl of hot water. The steward’s cabin was comfortable; it compared very favourably with the gunners’ quarters. Vernon noticed that there were sheets on the bed and coloured curtains over the port-hole. There was a desk and one or two wooden lockers and three chairs. In one corner was a small bookcase. One of the books was Shakespeare’s Sonnets. That surprised Vernon; but he had knocked about the world enough to know that people were always surprising. A man’s mind was his own, something secret, impenetrable. Sometimes a tiny corner of it might be revealed, and then it was often the unexpected.