Westbound, Warbound

by Westbound, Warbound (retail) (epub)

  ‘Secondary puzzle, to me’ – Fisher pondering this in his quiet voice – ‘why they’d leave the evidence floating around for all to see.’

  ‘Reckoning on it sinking by this time. And on sharks maybe. But evidence – the kind I was looking for – must have been deliberately destroyed. Else there’d have been some damn thing!’

  ‘They’d have a biggish problem what else to do. Weight each body so it’d sink? Time’d be a factor, wouldn’t it. After a sinking, no raider’d want to hang around. Especially if the victim had got a distress call out. But just sugar off and leave that lot to mark the spot?’

  ‘Some special circumstance. Look, not the ship that did the sinking – another one, say – if it had found ’em adrift and –’

  ‘Christ.’ A shake of the head. ‘If you’d seen it close up –’

  ‘Glad I didn’t.’ Fisher had the glasses up, scanning the horizon ahead and down the starboard side. Glancing at Andy again, then: ‘Hadn’t you better go down and eat?’

  ‘I suppose I had.’ He checked the time and nodded. ‘Then a one-to-three.’ Meaning a couple of hours with his head down. ‘Lucky bugger, ain’t I?’ Asking as he moved away, ‘What’s on the menu? Still on the Cape Town beef, are we?’

  Fisher would have had his own meal at about half-eleven. As second mate he was the navigator, and having to take over the watch at twelve he’d been in one of the bridgewings in good time to take a meridian altitude of the sun. A matter of routine – and a sweat for young Gorst, the chimp-like cadet who was at the chart table now, wrestling with calculations. He wasn’t good at it, and Fisher was giving him every chance of becoming so by keeping his snout to the grindstone. Navigational expertise of a high order was the norm for all deck officers – it had to be. The skipper took his own sights – morning stars, as often as not – and Fisher having taken his noon altitude would also be taking evening stars at twilight – as would Andy, although it wasn’t actually his job, only normal practice in the Merchant Navy, a matter of keeping one’s hand in. He usually came up for morning stars as well. Routine – up at dawn, then below to shave and breakfast, back up again for the eight to twelve. Life might not be such plain sailing for much longer, he realised. That boat, for one thing – he’d have that in his mind’s eye as long as he lived, he guessed. Except maybe there’d be worse to come, sights and experiences to put that one in the shade. In fact there probably would… The Old Man had expressed it well enough, when they’d been steadying on a course of 270 degrees due west out of Table Bay five days ago; he’d said to Hibbert – PollyAnna’s outsize chief engineer, who’d come up to report on the maintenance job they’d been working on while in Cape Town, and had stayed up there at the skipper’s invitation to smoke a pipe and watch the sun go down in a sky-filling flush of scarlet – ‘Our backdoor entrance to the war, you might call it, Chief. Where it starts for us, this time around.’ Putting it like that because those two had both been in the last war – the Old Man with his master’s ticket even then.

  2

  Cardiff to Port Said had taken sixteen days, PollyAnna arriving there on the forenoon of 22 August. Discharging her coal had occupied another ten days, during which time the approach of war had been swift and sure. Virtually as she secured alongside on the coaling wharf the BBC was reporting Neville Chamberlain’s warning to Hitler that Britain would stand by Poland, and on the day she entered the canal – in ballast, late on 1 September – Germany invaded Poland. Due to congestion in the canal’s lower reaches it was necessary to spend a night at anchor off Ismailia in Lake Timsah, and getting underway again in the early hours of 2 September, the BBC was announcing the call-up of all males aged from nineteen to forty-one. And children were being evacuated from London and other cities, in expectation of bombing and perhaps the use of poison gas. Then on the 3rd – a Sunday, when PollyAnna had left the canal and Port Tewfik astern, and was ploughing south through a dead-flat calm in the Gulf of Suez – Chamberlain’s broadcast to the nation at 1100 GMT had told them that Britain and Germany were at war.

  By way of confirmation, a U-boat sank the Glasgow liner Athenia off the Irish coast that same evening, with the loss of more than a hundred lives, including those of a number of Americans. Shaw, third engineer, commented in the saloon next day, ‘Bring the Yanks in, sure as eggs’; and the Old Man, who had a lot of friends in New York and other US ports had growled, ‘Nothing sure about it. There’s a lot don’t want in at any price.’ Sure enough, before they were out of the Red Sea, President Roosevelt had made a declaration of neutrality.

  The Red Sea, as always, was as hot as hell, but the job of sluicing the coal dust out of the ship’s holds couldn’t be postponed. Gulf of Aden then, out of it between Cape Guardafui and Socotra, and from there a reach of about 1,600 miles to pass around Ceylon into the Bay of Bengal. Another thousand miles, that stretch; they’d met and spoken to a dozen or more other Red Ensign ships, and war news had been coming in continually. At such a distance from it, and getting further away at every turn of the ship’s big single screw, and still in pursuit of her normal trade, one had an uneasy feeling of having turned one’s back on it; and the BBC, one knew, wouldn’t necessarily be mentioning the worst. Ships other than the Athenia would have been sunk by this time and some proportion of their crews would have drowned; you could bet that wouldn’t have been the only U-boat on its war station in the Atlantic before the balloon went up. Which brought to Andy’s mind the one bone of contention that existed between him and his father. From Conway or Worcester, or for that matter Pangbourne, one could have gone to sea with the RN as a junior officer of the Royal Naval Reserve. It was what his father had done in 1914 and what most of his own Conway friends had opted for this time. Whereas Andy had made his mind up to stick to what he’d gone in for in the first place and been trained for, at Conway and then at sea.

  His father had challenged him with, ‘What’s wrong with serving in a fighting ship, for God’s sake?’

  ‘Nothing at all. Happens I’m a Merchant Navy officer, that’s all!’

  ‘When it’s all over you could go back to that if you wanted to. Or switch to a permanent commission maybe – if they’d have you. Meanwhile, the RN needs all the sea-trained men it can get. Chaps like you, Andy!’

  ‘To man escorts protecting Atlantic convoys.’

  ‘Not only Atlantic – all the ocean routes.’

  ‘So who’ll man – officer – the merchant ships?’

  ‘Chaps who’re doing it already, lad!’

  He’d stuck to his guns. ‘I happen to think it’s a job worth doing. Why I wanted to do it in the first place. I like it – enjoy it – and it feels – well, worthwhile. In a lot of ways it’s what I already am – and want to be. Basically, I suppose, a seaman.’

  His mother had come into the room, heard that bit and put her oar in.

  ‘It’s the fighting men who get the respect, Andy.’

  He’d looked at her, thinking, You’d like to be able to say your son’s an officer in a destroyer or a battleship. You’d never want to admit he’s in a tramp steamer. That’s all it is with you, Mama…

  Always had been, he realised. Not that one could blame her for it: it was simply how she was. She’d gone along with his entry to Conway because cadets from there didn’t have to graduate into the Merchant Navy: there was a stage at which you could transfer to the RN college at Dartmouth, if you were up to it and wanted to; there was also an entry scheme to the Royal Air Force. And the old man could hardly have objected, having been a Worcester cadet himself, pre-1914. Although he still might have – with maybe some slight interest in social climbing under his own salt-stained skin, however furiously he’d have denied it. But he hadn’t, and there hadn’t therefore been a damn thing she could have done about it, not without insulting her husband, his background – which she must have accepted wholeheartedly – or blindly – when she’d married him. The old man must have assumed that when it came to war, or as close to war as it had come by tha
t time, Andy would follow in his footsteps, Dad having been a war hero in ’14–’18. He’d flown airships, for God’s sake. Had started off in a minesweeper or some such, seen the navy’s dirigibles hunting U-boats in the Channel, and got himself transferred into the Royal Naval Air Service to fly those contraptions. One DSC had been for sinking a U-boat – which he’d said had been pure luck and as easy as falling off a log – and the bar to it for an operation behind enemy lines, bringing out some female spy, a Belgian girl; he’d described that as ‘the dickens of a lark’.

  It was no small matter, though, this difference between them. Andy was close to his father, always had been; he looked quite like him and, generally speaking, thought like him, but on this issue he wasn’t giving way. No question of it. Couldn’t understand why the old man felt as strongly as he seemed to – unless, as with his wife, it was the social thing, the class thing. Or, to give him the benefit of the doubt, it might have been in respect of her feelings – to keep her happy and family relationships on an even keel. Which in fact Andy himself would have liked to have been able to do, but simply couldn’t. His sister Annabel, three years his junior and now training as a nurse, understood and applauded. But another exchange he and his father had had on the subject had stuck in his mind, and he often thought about it, although he wouldn’t have dreamt of mentioning it to anyone else. It was the last time they’d discussed the matter, in fact. Newly-qualified Third Mate Andy Holt face to face with Commander Charlie Holt DSC RNR, and both as it so happened in uniform – reason for this being that it had been 11 November 1938, not only Armistice Day but the twentieth anniversary of that first war’s end, and there’d been a big turnout and parades on Clydeside as well as everywhere else. And after it, at home in Helensburgh, there they were – one rather grand, the other distinctly less so. (His mother had told him he looked like a bus conductor.) But Charlie Holt’s hands grasping Andy Holt’s shoulders – close, face to face, and a slight up-angle in the contact; Andy did bear a distinct resemblance to his father, but stood a couple of inches over six feet while Charlie was only five-eleven. Charlie demanding quietly in his low, growly voice, ‘Imagine how it’ll be in the Atlantic convoys? How it was last time – when, as I’ve told you, the country damn near starved?’ A shrug of his heavy shoulders: ‘Told you often enough, I dare say. Doesn’t seem so damn long ago either. But this time it’ll be worse – most likely a lot more U-boats, bigger and faster at that, and God knows what in the way of weaponry!’

  ‘But convoy escorts will be more numerous and effective, too – better anti-submarine weaponry as well?’

  ‘Wouldn’t count on it, boy. At least not in the early stages. We haven’t a fraction of what we need. I wouldn’t go around saying this, and don’t quote me, but the plain truth is we’re going to be well and truly up against it, your lot probably worse than any. We’ll get the better of them in the end – bloody have to – that or starve, be starved into surrender, that’ll be their aim…’

  ‘Saying I’ll be more of an Aunt Sally on a freighter’s bridge than I would be on a destroyer’s?’

  The old man let go of him. ‘Saying nothing of the sort.’ He’d turned away. ‘But it’s going to be tough all round – and if you had any damn sense at all –’

  He’d cut himself short. Glancing back briefly, then away again. And to Andy’s mother as she joined them, ‘Old for his years, is this lad’s trouble. Doesn’t look it, but he is. Cat that walks by itself, uh?’ At which she’d snorted and asked them both, ‘And where does he get that from, would you say?’

  That was what he’d been saying, though, and they’d both known it. Effectively he’d been telling his son that he’d have a better chance of survival in a fighting ship than he would in a merchantman. And when you thought about it, it made a kind of sense, merchant ships – or to be precise their cargoes – being the enemy’s prime targets.

  * * *

  PollyAnna had docked in Calcutta on 16 September. There was more awaiting them than the cargo of manganese ore; the ship was to be painted battleship-grey, obliterating her hitherto black hull and white upperworks and the blue bands on her funnel, and she was to have a twelve-pounder gun mounted on her poop, the poop itself needing to be strengthened for this and a steel gun-deck built on it. Similar things were happening to half a dozen other steamers in the port, while an Ellerman passenger-liner was being converted for service as an AMC – armed merchant cruiser. In PollyAnna’s case, painting-ship would be the first job, while she was high in the water: her deep-tanks (ballast) would be pumped out, scaling, chipping and painting would start at the waterline and be done by her own crew simultaneously with the loading of the ore, and by the time it was finished she’d be pretty well at the head of the queue for the engineering job aft – another week’s work, at least.

  Andy’s father, his mother had written, had been appointed second in command of the armed merchant cruiser HMS Andalusia, 14,000 tons…

  Of course he’s overjoyed. She has a four-stripe Royal Navy captain, and a team of gunnery experts, and flies the White Ensign, but most of her officers and crew are the same Merchant Navy men who were serving in her under the red one. They sign on under some special form of agreement. Does Voluntary Emergency Agreement mean anything to you? Anyway, fifty or sixty liners are being converted in this way, he tells me, in about a dozen different ports all over the world, but the Andalusia was one of the first to be taken over and it seems will be off quite soon now. I and Annabel are the only ones who are not cheering. Off where, you ask, and although I shouldn’t put it in a letter, I will, and you can tear it up when you’ve read it – better still, when you’ve answered it. Anyway, they’ll be joining something called the Northern Patrol, patrolling between the Faeroes (spelling?) and Iceland and in the Denmark Strait – wherever that is. You’d know, I’m sure. I made a few notes when he told me about it, so I could tell you when I wrote, although like everything else now it’s hush-hush. So not only tear this up, remember you don’t know anything about it until HE tells you – when you write, I mean, which I hope and pray you will do, some time in the next fifty years?

  Annabel, let me tell you – also in strict confidence – has a new boyfriend. I might add, in the real navy – or something like it. She’s at home at the moment, sends her love…

  During PollyAnna’s three-week stay in the heat and bedlam of Calcutta – temperature often higher than eighty in the shade, and extremely humid – Russia invaded Poland from the east while the Germans were blitzkrieging in from the west, and before the end of the month – September, still – the Germans were in Warsaw (as much as might be left of it) and they and the Soviets had formally agreed to split the country between them. And on the 17th, the aircraft-carrier Courageous was sunk by a U-boat in the Western Approaches – with the loss of more than 500 men, as well as one of the navy’s most valuable ships; and a British Expeditionary Force of something like 160,000 men had been deployed in France.

  Among the things that were not known at that time – not even to the Admiralty – was that the German pocket-battleship Admiral Graf Spee had sailed from Wilhelmshaven on 21 August, slipping away into the Atlantic under cover of darkness. Her support-ship Altmark had preceded her, and the pocket-battleship Deutschland and her support-ship the Westerwald had followed a few days later.

  * * *

  On 20 September the loading of manganese was completed and the Anna was shifted to an inner dockyard berth for the gun-deck to be built on to her poop, and that evening First Mate Halloran invited Andy and Don Fisher to a sundowner in his cabin, then maybe a run ashore – which could apply only to Andy, since Fisher was duty officer that night. A whisky called King’s Legend was the drink; Andy had wondered often enough how Halloran could afford it – and especially the frequency of his shore-going – a mate’s pay not being all that terrific – three or four hundred a year maybe, plus war bonus, if and when that began coming through – and guessed he must have money of his own somewhere, somehow. You
wouldn’t have thought he had – from his style, and so forth – but – well, his business, no one else’s, and he was a strange character in a lot of ways. Anyway, he’d given his reasons for celebrating on this particular evening as (a) completion of loading, and (b) having had a letter that day from his wife, Leila, which had bucked him up no end.

  ‘Don’t hear from her all that often.’ A shift of black eyes towards her portrait. Andy and Fisher looked at it too: it would have seemed churlish not to. Halloran adding, ‘Fuck it, I don’t write her all that frequent. I wasn’t looking for a pen-pal, was I?’ A wink at Andy. ‘Get my drift?’

  He’d let that go; only asked – for something to say – ‘OK, is she?’

  One eyebrow cocked; ‘Doesn’t she look OK to you?’

  ‘Looks – fantastic. Only –’

  ‘Only what, then?’

  ‘I meant her letter – well and happy, or missing you, no doubt –’

  ‘Want to read what she says about missing me – what she misses?’

  ‘Well – no – Christ’s sake –’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe it. Doesn’t hold much back, that kid, calls a spade a bloody spade. What’s more –’

  Fisher cut in – flatly, expressionlessly – ‘What a lucky man you are.’ Making it plain he didn’t want to hear ‘what was more’. Glancing at Andy; getting a hostile stare from Halloran and ignoring it, draining his glass and putting it down close to the lovely Leila’s portrait. A nod: ‘Thanks for that. Enough for me, though. Good Scotch though it is.’ Checking the time: ‘Fact is, I’ll be getting to grips with a wad of chart corrections – which I might have left to young Gorst, but –’