Soldier, Sail North (1987)

by Pattinson, James

  At the moment of peril he had no time to warn the bridge, for the blare of the tanker’s siren and the outline of her towering stem looming out of the fog came simultaneously.

  Willis, Andrews, and Randall were like men observing some inevitable tragedy; they were like the audience at a Greek play—powerless to prevent what must occur. So they stood quite still, watching the bows of the tanker moving steadily closer to the stern of their own ship. They knew that nothing they could do would prevent this calamity. They knew there was no way of suddenly stopping the momentum of thousands of tons of steel and timber; it was a force that could drive a brutal wedge into the Golden Ray and sink her with as much effect as any torpedo.

  “God!” Andrews muttered. “Oh, God!”

  There was a look-out in the bows of the tanker. He was waving his arms and shouting madly. But he too was powerless; and suddenly he was still and silent like the gunners, waiting for the crash that could end all their lives.

  But at the last moment the tanker swung her head to starboard; there was a sullen, grinding noise as she slid past, and a great scar appeared on the surface of her paint, a scar stretching from bows to stern on her port side. Then she was gone—swallowed up in the enveloping fog.

  “By God!” said Andrews, his voice trembling. “That was close!”

  “Too close,” Willis muttered. “Damn this fog! Damn this bloody fog!”

  He rang through to the bridge again. “It was the tanker, sir. She’s gone now.”

  It was the returning gale that drove away the last tattered remnants of the fog. Soon the convoy was once more ploughing through the mountains and valleys of a raging sea, shivering under the lash of a freezing wind, assailed by driving blizzards which turned the ships into pale ghosts, and torn out of its symmetrical pattern of ranks and columns.

  But calm followed the gale, and a Focke-Wulf found them —a Focke-Wulf coming up out of the south with almost the first light of day and playing the old game of encirclement.

  The convoy was battered and weary; the gunners’ eyes were red from lack of sleep; but there was a bitterness in their hearts born of the memory of dead comrades, and when the Heinkels came—summoned by the Focke-Wulf—they found the grey ships ready and waiting. And from those slow grey ships such a curtain of flame and steel flew upward that the Heinkels would not come in low, but dropped their bombs from 5000 feet and raced for home, with the red flame of tracer and the deadly glitter of shell-bursts following them as they went.

  And the convoy steamed on without further scathe—driving westward to the lodestone of Iceland.

  When the Catalina met them the men in the Golden Ray raised a cheer.

  “It’s a Cat! A good old Cat! Oh, what a sight for sore eyes!”

  It was good to see a Catalina again. The Catalina was like a hand reaching out across the water to help them home. For days the only aircraft they had seen had been German; and there was something evil about the very shape of a German plane. Now here was the friendly old Catalina, winking a greeting and keeping an eye open for U-boats; and it did their hearts good to see it.

  When they sighted the coast of Iceland they had been at sea for thirteen days. Here they saw a bleak, rugged land, with bare mountains rising almost directly from the shore and showing the veins of horizontal strata, as though they had been built up gradually, layer upon layer. For a day they stayed within sight of those mountains, feeling a false sense of security with the proximity of land, but on the fifteenth day they were moving steadily southward over a gently heaving sea, and Iceland had disappeared astern.

  They were moving out of the Arctic, and their hearts were glad. The ice began slowly to relinquish its grip, falling from mast and derrick with sudden clatter, dripping away down grating and scupper, powerless to stand against the warm air creeping up from the south.

  From all of them the dark cloud of the north was beginning to lift, and their spirits were soaring with it. They no longer believed that they would not reach home.

  And then Seaman-gunner Higgins went mad.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Bar the Shouting

  SEAMAN-GUNNER Alf Higgins was twenty—a thin, narrow-shouldered boy with pinched features and hair like straw. When he was no more than nineteen he found himself bound for the Far East in a tramp steamer that had run down the slipway into the Tyne thirty years earlier, and was now nothing but a clanking crate of iron held together by rust and faith and blasphemy.

  They had put in at Takoradi and were steaming south with Cape Town as the next port of call when the torpedo struck them. The ship sank in less than five minutes, and only one boat got away. Higgins was in that boat with fifteen others. The rest of the crew were lucky; they died at once.

  Higgins lost count of the days that the boat drifted in the Atlantic. He was wearing only a singlet and underpants; by day he was scorched by the fierce tropical sun; at night he shivered with cold.

  Two of the men were wounded; they were the first to die. The others were strong then, and were able to roll the bodies overboard. They rationed the water and erected a sail, keeping watch upon the horizon for signs of rescue or the thin haze of land. When the water was finished they began to despair.

  Higgins watched them die—one by one. He saw how each man died in a different way, according to his individual character. Some died quietly, as though resigned to the end, slipping out of life as quietly as a child drifting into sleep; others died in fear, dreading a journey into the unknown; some, unable to endure the agony any longer, flung themselves overboard, where the sharks were waiting; and some drank sea-water and were for a while appeased, until the salt flame roared up to burn the tongue and mouth and throat with a searing fire of torment.

  Higgins, a boy of nineteen, watched all this happen as the boat drifted on over the shimmering sea, and the days and nights trailed away on a belt of endless agony. At last he was left with only two companions. When they no longer moved he concluded that they were dead. He had no hope that within a short while he would not be as they. He lay between them in the bottom of the boat, waiting for the end.

  That was how his rescuers found him—lying in an open boat between two dead men. At first they feared that he was dead also, but with the resilience of youth he recovered quickly. He was put ashore in Freetown; two months later he was back in England; a month after that he was at sea again, bound for Russia in the s.s. Golden Ray. The doctors had passed him as fit for sea; and as far as his body was concerned, no doubt he was. They had ignored the scar upon his mind.

  It was strange that Higgins should have gone mad now, when the tension had slackened, when the sea had calmed, and the cold had released its grip. One might have supposed that his hold on sanity would have broken earlier, when the attacks were taking place, when ships were being sunk, when the gale was battering them, and Miller muttering away his life. But the ways of the mind are strange, the balance a razor-edge; and it was now, with Scotland almost in sight, that Higgins chose to tilt the balance.

  He began by emptying a dish of stew over Petty Officer Donker’s spiky head.

  It was fortunate for Donker that the stew was nearly cold; otherwise he might have been badly burnt. As it was, his first reaction was one of bewilderment. The thing had happened so suddenly and with so little warning that for a moment he could not understand why his face should be running with grease or why the dish should be sitting on his head like a helmet.

  The others seated at the mess-room table were surprised, but not unpleasantly so. It was amusing to see old Donker sitting there with the dish on his head and chunks of meat and vegetables rolling down on to his shoulders and lap. They did not at once realize that this was more than a grotesquely far-fetched joke. Then they saw Higgins’s eyes, and they knew that there was nothing funny about the business; that it was indeed deadly serious.

  Higgins began to scream. “I’ll show you who’s captain in this ship. You can’t get the better of me. I’ll show you.”

  He snatc
hed up a table-knife and made a lunge at Donker. The petty officer gave a yell of pain and fell backwards off the form, clutching at his arm. Higgins seemed about to spring on him and deliver another blow, but Agnew moved more quickly. Seizing the boy’s arm, he began twisting it, trying to make him drop the knife. But Higgins’s body had drawn strength from madness, and, wrenching himself free, he flung the knife at the prostrate petty officer. The knife hit Donker flat; it struck him in the chest and fell harmlessly to deck.

  By this time the other gunners had recovered from their amazement, and three of them had seized Higgins. But again he shook off the hands laid upon him, and, leaping over the mess-table, was away before they could stop him.

  “The lad’s crazy!” shouted Willis. “Grab him! There’s no telling what he may do!”

  They could hear Higgins clattering up the ladder to the deck, and they ran after him, hindering one another in the doorway, pouring out of the mess-room, and streaming up the ladder in pursuit. Padgett was the first of them to reach the deck, and he was just in time to see Higgins leap on to the taffrail, as though about to fling himself into the sea.

  “Hi!” yelled Padgett. “Come back! Come back, Higgie!”

  The shout arrested Higgins. He turned and looked back at Padgett and the others crowding out on to the poop, steadying himself with one hand upon a stanchion.

  “Keep back!” he screamed. “Keep back, all of you! You’d mutiny, would you? You’d try and kill your captain! Well, you won’t. You won’t get me.”

  Padgett signalled to the others to keep back; he knew that a single unwary movement might send Higgins to his death. He spoke quietly, trying to humour the mad boy.

  “You’re wrong. We aren’t mutineers. We want to obey orders. We want you to come and give us orders. Come down, now, won’t you?”

  He s moved forward a pace or two, and Higgins screamed, “Stop there! Don’t come any nearer. I know you; you’d like to get your hands on me; you’d like to kill me. But I’ll beat you yet.”

  Padgett said, “Nobody wants to kill you. You know we couldn’t get on without you.” And he moved another pace forward.

  Higgins laughed sneeringly. “Of course you can’t get on without me. You’d run the ship on the rocks.”

  “Well, then,” said Padgett, easing a little nearer, “why don’t you come down? Why don’t you come with me up to the bridge? Come and talk things over.”

  He was within a few feet of Higgins now; another step, and he would be able to grasp him. The others watched, not daring to move; and from the Bofors platform Vernon and Warby looked down in bewilderment, wondering what was going on.

  Then suddenly the ship’s siren tore a hole in the silence, rending the tension to shreds and setting every one’s nerves quivering. It had an immediate effect on Higgins: he shuddered, swung round on the taffrail so that he faced the sea, and released his hold upon the stanchion. At the same moment Padgett leaped forward, grasped him by the belt, and pulled him back to safety.

  It took four men to hold him down on the deck and two more to tie him up, and he screamed and spat at them, mouthing obscenities. Then, quite suddenly, he began to weep, and his body went limp under their hands. He seemed to have come to his right senses, and instead of the wild look in his eyes there was now only fear. He was no longer a dangerous maniac, but a frightened child, caught up in forces he could neither understand nor control, a child scared because of what had happened to him.

  They carried him down to the cabin, and he made no protest. And when the mate brought a strait-jacket from the ship’s store, he allowed them to put it on him without offering any resistance. He even seemed eager to help, as though in propitiation for the trouble he had caused. He avoided looking at Petty Officer Donker, and when they laid him on his bunk he lay there quietly, with his pinched features seeming more thin and pale than ever, and his straw-like hair scattered untidily over his forehead. He knew that he had strayed briefly into some strange, terrible hell, and the fear was on him that he might wander that way again.

  Two hours later the look-out sighted land.

  That evening Andrews sat down to write a letter.

  DARLING JACKIE,

  I have been on a long journey, but it is nearly over. When you get this letter you will know that I’m not far away. You can bet I’ll follow it just as fast as I can, because I want to see you again so much. Jackie darling, it seems years since I kissed you good-bye. Has it seemed like that to you? I hope so. I hope you’ve missed me too. Jackie, I’ve been dreaming about you. Yes, straight up, I have. That’s been the best part. I keep your photo in my pocket always, but I don’t need that to remind me of you. I only have to close my eyes, and I can see you clear as clear….

  He could, too. Jackie! Jacqueline Cooper! Before his last leave he had not even known her; she had been no more than a name on a card pinned to a Balaclava helmet—a knitted ‘comfort’ issued to him in Liverpool. He had unpinned the card, read it, and put it away in his wallet.

  The card read: “Knitted by Miss J. Cooper, High Street, Benford, Essex. Please write.”

  He did not write. He put the card away and forgot about it. He did think that perhaps some day he might send a letter of thanks to Miss Cooper; he even wondered for a moment what she was like. He knew some fellows wrote to women who had knitted comforts for them; sometimes they received letters back; sometimes a regular correspondence sprang up, with photographs exchanged and so on. He had often thought about doing the same himself, for he had had many knitted comforts since he had been at sea. But always he put off the task of writing, and in the end he always forgot.

  Just as he forgot to write to Miss Cooper of High Street, Benford, Essex.

  It was six months before he returned to England. Then he was given fourteen days’ leave. His home was in Cambridgeshire, in a village in the Fen country. Half-way through the first week of leave he was bored. Really, there was nothing to do; the friends he had known before the War were either in the Forces or away all day working; there was no excitement; even the beer was poor. He began to feel that it would be a relief to be back at sea again.

  Then, looking through his wallet, he came upon the card. On an impulse he decided to go to Benford. Even if nothing came of it it would be something to do; it would break the monotony.

  His mother was surprised, but she knew better than to try to keep him from going. After all, it was his leave; he was entitled to spend it as he wished. Still, she did hope he would not be gone long; she and his father saw so little of him these days—and he was their only child.

  Andrews told her he did not expect to be away more than one night; quite possibly he would be back again the same day. It depended on how things worked out.

  He arrived at Benford a little before noon, and found it a small country town—in fact, scarcely more than a large village. High Street was easy to find, for it ran through the centre of the town. There were a few shops, four or five inns, a post-office, and a telephone kiosk. At one point a pond seemed to have thrust the houses back from the street in a rough semi-circle. Seated on the railings surrounding the pond were two small boys, dangling fishing-lines in the water with patience and perseverance deserving of better results. They looked up as Andrews approached, gazing at him with blank, expressionless faces.

  Andrews said, “Can you tell me where Miss Cooper lives—Miss J. Cooper?”

  The older boy answered him. “You mean Cooper’s—the shop?”

  “I’ve only got the address—Miss Cooper, High Street,” Andrews said. “This is High Street, isn’t it?”

  The boy pointed across the street. “What’s that there?”

  Andrews followed the direction of the pointing finger, and saw on the opposite side of the street a small grocery shop. Over the door was a board, on which in faded paint were the words “J. Cooper. General Stores.” He was surprised that he had not noticed it sooner.

  He tossed sixpence to the boys, and walked across the road. Leaving their fishing-
lines dangling in the water, they followed him, exhibiting that open and unabashed curiosity which is one of the characteristics of extreme youth.

  Andrews was beginning to regret having made the journey to Benford. Seeing the faded name above the shop, the thought suddenly came to him that Miss Cooper was an ageing spinster. Until then, almost unconsciously, he had thought of her as young and, he had hoped, attractive. But he saw now that this was unlikely. Things did not work out that way.

  He halted outside the shop, indecision taking hold of him. Should he give up the whole idea and go home again? He was a fool to have come. Scarcely knowing that he was doing so, he began reading the labels on the tins in the window—oxtail soup, baked beans, dried milk, baking-powder, iodized salt, ground pepper. Then he discovered two pairs of wide-open, childish eyes staring up at him inquiringly. He pushed open the door of the shop and walked in.

  The odour of provisions met him like a gentle wave, reminding him of the village store where he used to go shopping for his mother. It was a conglomerate odour of dried fruit, ham, cheese, oranges, tobacco, vinegar, coffee, and tea, with a background of paraffin and methylated spirits. It was sickly-sweet, yet with a trace of bitterness, and was in the very character of the shop.

  The counter was immediately opposite the door, and, but for an open space in the middle, was piled high with groceries. Behind the counter stood a girl wearing a white overall. There was no one else in the shop. Andrews stood with his back to the door, feeling foolish and not knowing what to say.

  The girl asked, “Can I help you?”

  She had brown hair and a rather wide, placid face. Her voice was tranquil.

  Andrews moved forward a pace and said, “I was looking for Miss Cooper—Miss J. Cooper.”

  The girl appeared rather surprised. “I am Miss Cooper.”

  Andrews took the card from his pocket and dropped it on the counter. “It’s about this. I ought to have written; but you know how it is. So, as I was this way, I thought I’d call and thank you.”