Eight twelve.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
. . .
Trench confirmed, “Wielding Christofferson, the boy’s name was. I suppose you know Paul became godfather to his first child?”
I did know. Paul had gone over there quite often, after the war— combining a visit to those people with some salmon fishing. They’d been wonderful, he told me, those Norwegians. They hid him and Lanchberry until most of the fuss was over, then kitted them up and briefed them and sent them up the mountain with a guide to point them in the right direction. They had luck in another aspect too. What remained of Louis Gimber was found somewhere up on the shore where the surge from the explosion had dumped it, and the Germans for some reason assumed he was the only one who’d got out before X-12 blew herself to pieces. So they weren’t looking for any other survivors.
Don Cameron and his crew, and Godfrey Place and his diver, Aitken, were prisoners on board Tirpitz when the side-cargoes from X-6 and X-7 went up. Place’s other two crewmen drowned, and X-5 was lost, probably destroyed by gun-fire outside the nets. The battleship had been warped aside on her cables before the charges went off, but they still lifted her six feet out of water and put her out of action for six months. Then a Fleet Air Arm strike crippled her again, and finally the RAF sank her with new, much bigger bombs.
Cameron and Place were both awarded the Victoria Cross.
Trench pulled a pipe out of his pocket, looked at it, put it away again. We were almost at the house. He said, “Paul was as tough as old boots, and I suppose his ERA must’ve been too. And they had a lot of help from the Lapps they met along the way. It was still a hell of a journey to have survived.”
Paul’s war hadn’t ended there, either. He commanded one of the midget submarines—XE-craft, the improved version—which acted as markers for the Normandy assault waves. As we all know, D-day was postponed by twenty-four hours because of bad weather, so the midgets had to lie in exposed positions off those beaches for an extra day and night in near-impossible conditions, and still played their part to perfection when the time came. After that he came back to ordinary submarining, was selected for COQC—Commanding Officers’ Qualifying Course—and had been given his first full-sized command shortly before the war ended in the Far East.
And was killed, with his wife Lucy, in a crash on the Ml motorway ten years later.
He’d been married less than a year, and they’d had no child, so the title went to Hugh, Nick’s son by Kate. (Who remarried, in Australia, not long after the end of the war.) Hugh took over Mullbergh, the Everard estate in Yorkshire, and farmed the land—as Paul had done—living in the Dower House because Mullbergh itself, that old monstrosity, had been sold long before and turned into a country club. He still lives and farms there. The Dower House had been, of course, Nick’s stepmother Sarah’s home for many years. She died in 1944. She’d been knocked sideways by the news of her son Jack’s death—as prisoner of war on the run in Germany—but she had her first stroke when she heard about Nick. Despite the fact she’d hated him—or had seemed to—since about 1920. In the West Riding of Yorkshire there was less surprise at this than an outsider might have expected. It was no secret in certain houses up there that Sarah’s son Jack had been Nick’s, not his father’s. There had always been scandal around the Everards, and the funny thing was they’d never seemed to appreciate that their neighbours had eyes, ears, tongues and brains.
There was never anyone called “Jane.” There was a girl of another name, widow of a serving officer in another service, whom Louis Gimber had hoped to marry, but that was not her name, and Gimber’s was neither Gimber nor Louis. This last piece of disguise is simply a matter of discretion: “Louis” was killed in X-12, and he was the only child of parents who are now dead too.
When Paul told me about “Jane”—quite soon after the end of the war, and years before he met the girl whom he eventually married—he also told me that after his return to England he only saw her once. It was at her wedding to a then serving officer who has since become internationally famous as well as extremely rich. The engagement had been announced before Paul’s return via Sweden, apparently. Paul said, I remember, “By God, she was fast on her feet, that girl!” He laughed for about a minute, then sobered and added, “Would have been tough on old Louis, though, wouldn’t it.”
Strange as it may seem, that marriage is still in being and the family quite numerous.
At the house, I thanked Eileen Trench for her hospitality, the meal she’d given me, and so on.
“Won’t you stay and have some tea? Or a drink?”
“You’re very kind. But I’ve a long way to go.”
Trench walked out with me to my car. I thanked him, too, for the help he’d given me, filling in the gaps.
“That’s all right.” We shook hands. “I know you’ll do them justice.”
By “them,” of course, he meant the Everards. I’ve tried to—warts and all. And that’s about all there is.
POSTSCRIPT
. . .
I should like to thank a one-time shipmate and former X-craft CO, Commander Matthew Todd, Royal Navy, for his kindness in providing answers to technical questions.
Only six X-craft took part in Operation Source. X-11 and X-12 are fictional. Nor was there any convoy PQ 19 or QP 16; the last in that series were PQ 18 and QP 15, after which the prefix letters for Arctic convoys were changed from PQ/QP to JWIAR.
Adding fiction to fact has not been allowed to alter the facts as they are recorded. For instance, Karl Rasmussen was caught by the Gestapo and tortured, and did kill himself rather than betray his colleagues Torstein Raaby and Harry Pettersen. And Lützow did leave Altenfjord just before the X-craft arrived, just as Scharnhorst was at anchor off Aaroy—moving on the forenoon of the attack into the netcage vacated by Lützow. Donald Cameron saw Scharnhorst in that vulnerable position when he was on his way south to the Brattholm islands in X-6, but his target was Tirpitz and he was not to be deflected. I knew Cameron, and feel sure he would not have objected to my using his “magnificent feat of arms”—Admiral Sir Max Horton’s description of the operation—as a background to this last Everard story.
A. E
Selected Historical Fiction Published by McBooks Press
BY ALEXANDER KENT
The Complete Midshipman Bolitho
Stand Into Danger
In Gallant Company
Sloop of War
To Glory We Steer
Command a King’s Ship
Passage to Mutiny
With All Despatch
Form Line of Battle!
Enemy in Sight!
The Flag Captain
Signal—Close Action!
The Inshore Squadron
A Tradition of Victory
Success to the Brave
Colours Aloft!
Honour This Day
The Only Victor
Beyond the Reef
The Darkening Sea
For My Country’s Freedom
Cross of St George
Sword of Honour
Second to None
Relentless Pursuit
Man of War
Heart of Oak
In the King’s Name
BY PHILIP
MCCUTCHAN
Halfhyde at the Bight of Benin
Halfhyde’s Island
Halfhyde and the Guns of Arrest
Halfhyde to the Narrows
Halfhyde for the Queen
Halfhyde Ordered South
Halfhyde on Zanatu
BY JAN NEEDLE
A Fine Boy for Killing
The Wicked Trade
The Spithead Nymph
BY BROOS CAMPBELL
No Quarter
The War of Knives
Peter Wicked
BY C.N. PARKINSON
The Guernseyman
Devil to Pay
The Fireship
Touch and Go
So Near So Far
BY DUDLEY POPE
Ramage
Ramage & The Drumbeat
Ramage & The Freebooters
Governor Ramage R.N.
Ramage’s Prize
Ramage & The Guillotine
Ramage’s Diamond
Ramage’s Mutiny
Ramage & The Rebels
The Ramage Touch
Ramage’s Signal
Ramage & The Renegades
Ramage’s Devil
Ramage’s Trial
Ramage’s Challenge
Ramage at Trafalgar
Ramage & The Saracens
Ramage & The Dido
BY V.A. STUART
Victors and Lords
The Sepoy Mutiny
Massacre at Cawnpore
The Cannons of Lucknow
The Heroic Garrison
The Valiant Sailors
The Brave Captains
Hazard’s Command
Hazard of Huntress
Hazard in Circassia
Victory at Sebastopol
Guns to the Far East
Escape from Hell
BY JAMES L. NELSON
The Only Life That Mattered
BY SETH HUNTER
The Time of Terror
The Tide of War
The Price of Glory
BY DOUGLAS W. JACOBSON
Night of Flames
The Katyn Order
BY JULIAN STOCKWIN
Kydd
Artemis
Seaflower
Mutiny
Quarterdeck
Tenacious
Command
The Admiral’s Daughter
The Privateer’s Revenge
Invasion
Victory
Conquest
BY DEWEY LAMBDIN
The French Admiral
The Gun Ketch
HMS Cockerel
A King’s Commander
Jester’s Fortune
BY JOHN BIGGINS
A Sailor of Austria
The Emperor’s Coloured Coat
The Two-Headed Eagle
Tomorrow the World
BY ALEXANDER FULLERTON
Storm Force to Narvik
Last Lift from Crete
All the Drowning Seas
A Share of Honour
The Torch Bearers
The Gatecrashers
BY DAVID DONACHIE
The Devil’s Own Luck
The Dying Trade
A Hanging Matter
An Element of Chance
The Scent of Betrayal
A Game of Bones
BY JAMES DUFFY
Sand of the Arena
The Fight for Rome
The Gatecrashers: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 6 Page 38