In Danger's Hour

by Douglas Reeman

  'No, actually,' the other man mimicked him and brought grins from the others until Hoggan said quietly, 'Leave it, Sid.'

  The seaman shifted along the bench and touched Boyes's sleeve. 'No 'arm done.' He grinned. 'You're not old enough to draw a tot yet?'

  Boyes shook his head. It was a question he was asked quite a lot.

  'Well, you come round for sippers tomorrow, eh, Gerry?'

  Hoggan watched them, pleased they had accepted the youth. It was not his fault, the way he spoke.

  He said, 'Yeh, meet Sid Jardine, a real old sweat, eh? Must be twenty-one at least! Roll on my bloody twelve!'

  Boyes wondered when it would be prudent to sling his hammock. He was not very good at it yet. Even in a big destroyer there had not been room enough, especially for a C.W. candidate, a potential officer.

  He glanced with interest at his companions. Most of the mess were ashore, on a 'short run' as Hoggan had explained. They might return aboard by ten o'clock either in silence or fighting drunk. After ten they would arrive back with an escort of the naval patrol. Boyes wondered what his mother would make of these men.

  'Tea up!' An elderly seaman with three stripes on his sleeve banged down the ladder with a huge fanny of tea.

  Hoggan put down his darning. 'Teaboat's alongside!'

  What sort of craft was that, Boyes wondered?

  The old seaman glanced down at Boyes and then filled a cup of typical sailors' tea, almost yellow in colour from tinned milk, and so much sugar you could stand a spoon in it.

  ' 'Ere, this one's free, son!'

  The sailor called Jardine exclaimed, 'Free, Stripey? Do my ears deceive me?'

  Another called from the opposite mess, 'Better keep your overalls on in your hammock when that old bugger's about!'

  Boyes had heard much the same banter before. He took the sweet, sickly tea and thanked the three-badged sailor for it.

  He did not care any more. He was accepted. The rest was up to him.

  The chief petty officer Wren from the Welfare Section stood beside the khaki-coloured car, and watched the young sailor called Tinker as he stared at the ruined house which had once been his home. She was a severe-looking girl, with her hair set in a tight bun beneath her tricorn hat. It was not that she did not care, but she had seen too many broken homes and shattered marriages to let it reach her any more.

  She said, 'The bomb hit the front of the house.' She gestured with her cardboard file. 'There was a whole stick of them right across three streets. They were both in bed. They wouldn't have felt anything.' She watched his silent anguish. 'I checked with the A.R.P. people and the Heavy Rescue chaps.' He gave no sign and she said, 'The police too.'

  Tinker stepped amongst the rubble and peered up at one bare wall. The same striped wallpaper, a pale rectangle where one of his pictures had hung. Next to his old toy-cupboard. His eyes smarted again. His own little room.

  The rest of the housefront lay at his feet. He heard the car engine turning over behind him and clenched his fists tightly. Bloody cow, couldn't wait to be off! What did she know?

  Something like panic gripped him. He had nobody, and nowhere to go! It was like a nightmare. All the fear and tension of minesweeping was nothing by comparison.

  He said quietly, 'I had to see it.'

  She nodded. 'Very well. The salvage people have all the recovered property in store in case —' She did not finish it.

  Tinker remembered a time, one month after he had joined Rob Roy, when they had sighted an airman in a dinghy. He had turned out to be a German, shot down in the Channel, and almost overcome by exposure and exhaustion.

  Tinker had been one of the hands to go down a scrambling-net and pull the airman on board, who had fetched him coffee laced with rum. He clenched his fists tighter until the pain steadied him.

  'I wish I'd killed the bastard!' he whispered.

  He heard footsteps on the fallen fragments and the Wren call sharply, 'Not this way, sir!'

  Tinker swung round, hurt and bewildered by the intrusion. He stared and thought his heart had stopped completely.

  Then he was running, his cap fallen in the dust as he threw himself into the arms of a man in heavy working-clothes. 'Dad! It can't be!'

  The chief petty officer Wren gaped at them. 'But I was told you were dead! They said you were both in bed!'

  The man clutched his son's head tightly against his chest and stared fixedly at the remains of his house.

  'She was in bed right enough! But the other bastard wasn't me!'

  He lifted his son's chin. 'Pity I wasn't here in time. Come, we'll go to Uncle Jack's.' He turned the youth away from the house. 'But then it seems I was never here when I was needed.'

  The Wren watched them walk away without a backward glance.

  Her driver said, 'Wasn't your fault, Miss. There's more to this bloody war than bein' blown up.'

  She slid into the car and adjusted her skirt.

  It sounded like an epitaph, she thought.

  No Safe Way

  Lieutenant Commander Ian Ransome sat behind his small desk and tried to relax his mind. The cabin looked bare as it always did prior to leaving harbour. Books secured on their shelves, his gramophone records carefully wedged in a drawer with newspaper between them. It was a trick he had learned after his first collection had been broken when a mine exploded almost alongside. He was dressed in his old seagoing reefer; the wavy stripes on the sleeves were so tarnished they looked brown in the glare of the desk-lamp.

  Outside it was early morning, with a lively chop in the confined waters of the harbour. He felt the deck tremble gently and knew the Chief was already going over everything with his assistant engineer.

  The tannoy again. 'D'you hear there! Special sea dutymen to your stations! Close all watertight doors and scuttles, down all deadlights!'

  Another departure.

  The cabin even felt different. It always seemed as if you were leaving it behind like part of the harbour. Until Rob Roy berthed or anchored again, the minute sea-cabin abaft the wheelhouse would be his refuge. He wore his favourite roll-necked sweater, his trousers tucked in his old leather seaboots. Fresh socks, some of the thick ones his mother had made. It might keep her mind off the other side of the war which had taken her two sons to sea.

  Ransome patted his pockets although he barely noticed his usual precaution. Pipe and tobacco pouch, plenty of matches. He glanced at the cabin door behind which hung his duffle-coat and cap, binoculars, and a newly laundered towel to wrap around his neck.

  His glance fell on the drawing of himself which Hargrave had remarked upon. It all came crowding back as it had yesterday at poor David's funeral. The weather had been bright and fresh at the Hampshire village where the family lived. Ransome had not met any of them before. It was strange, he thought. War was like that. Someone who become a true friend, a bond as close as love; yet when he had been smashed down by cannon-fire it made Ransome realise he knew so very little about him.

  The tannoy squawked, 'D'you hear there! All the port watch, first part forward, second part aft! Stand by for leaving harbour!' A brief pause; Ransome could hear the boatswain's mate's breathing on the tannoy. He sounded cold. 'Starboard watch to defence stations!' More noise this time, thudding feet, the dull bang of another watertight door or hatch. Men hurrying to familiar metal boxes. Not looking at each other just yet. Probably thinking of their last letters home. Like his own which had gone with the naval postman an hour ago.

  He tried not to think about the funeral any more and imagined Hargrave as he coped with his new ship getting under way, or the curious stares from the men who were still remembering David in his place. So many things. But it did not work.

  There had been several women of varying ages, most of them in black. David's father had been there, but had not looked a scrap like him. Another surprise: David's mother had apparently remarried. That explained it. The clergyman had spoken of David's sacrifice; several people had been quietly weeping. There were two ot
hers in uniform, both aircrew from the RAF who had apparently been at school with David. They had looked uncomfortable — embarrassed perhaps? They had most likely been to too many funerals in their trade. The next time . . .

  He unhooked the drawing of himself and held it to the lamp. The rest of the cabin was in darkness, the deadlights screwed shut when he had been roused with a cup of tea by Kellett, the P.O. steward.

  It had been after the funeral, the coffin hidden by freshly dug earth, a man rolling up a borrowed Union flag. Handshakes, David's mother murmuring something to him. 'So glad you were here, Commander.' It had sounded so formal, but he had said nothing. Was she really glad, or would she be thinking of her dead son, wishing he and not David had been the unlucky one this time?

  The girl had been with her family. A slight figure with her long hair in a pigtail which hung down her school blazer.

  Ransome's heart had given a leap. It was impossible, and yet — He studied the drawing again, remembering exactly how the girl had walked into his father's boatyard in Fowey, her sketch-pad under her bare arm, pausing to ruffle the head of Jellicoe the cat, who had been drowsing in the summer sunshine on an upturned dinghy. Like the girl at the funeral, she must have been about thirteen then. He slipped the picture into the oilskin bag and laid it beside his gloves.

  But the schoolgirl had turned to stare at him when David's mother had been speaking. She had not been at all like Eve. He almost heard her name again in his thoughts.

  How could she be? That had been in that other world before the war, when every summer had been full of sunshine and promise. The last time he had seen her had been in the summer of '39. He bit his lip. Four years back. In war it was a bloody lifetime.

  The telephone above his bunk gave a sharp buzz. The one on the desk had gone, in a drawer too probably. Symbolic. The link with the land was cut. Almost.

  He picked it from its cradle. 'Captain. . .?'

  It was Sub-Lieutenant Morgan, his Welsh accent very strong over the wire. He had entered the navy by a roundabout route, and had first been in the merchant service where he had obtained his ticket. He had transferred to the navy and had started all over again. He was a junior sub-lieutenant, and yet was qualified in navigation and watchkeeping, and could in time have a command of his own. He would be hard to replace.

  'Signal, sir. Proceed when ready.'

  Ransome asked, 'What's the forecast?'

  'Freshening wind from the south-east, sir. Not too bad, isn't it?'

  Ransome smiled and put down the handset. He said that about every sort of weather.

  The desk was throbbing more insistently now and he could picture the other minesweeper alongside, the complicated mass of wires and fenders which still held them both netted to the shore.

  Hargrave would be down soon. What did he really think about bis new job?

  He thought of that last meeting with the girl called Eve. She and her parents had come to Cornwall to a cottage over the water in Polruan. They apparently borrowed it every year from a friend. He knew it was ridiculous of course, he still did, but he had always looked forward to the school holidays when people filled the villages and seaports, or hiked across the cliffs and moorland. Always she had brought her sketch-pad with her. Shy at first, they had become close while she had told him of her ambition to become a proper artist. He could see her clearly in her fade4 shorts and shirt, her long dark hair tied back from her ears, her eyes watching him while he had explained about building boats. The yard was owned and run by Ransome's father, who had moved there in the twenties from a smaller Thameside yard. Fowey with the village of Polruan on the opposite side of the little estuary had been exactly what he had wanted for his craft, for his two sons to follow in his footsteps, although Tony had still been at school then himself. Ransome felt the old twinge of jealousy he had known when he had seen his brother walking and chatting with the bare-legged girl. The same age; it had seemed natural and yet. . .

  He stood up, angry with himself for allowing the memory to unsettle him. He was ridiculous. God, he was ten years older than she was.

  He thought of the girl at the funeral; she had been standing as Eve did when she was trying to fix a subject in her mind's eye for her sketching.

  Ransome always remembered that last meeting. He had been driving a potential buyer for one of his father's fishing boats to the station in the yard's pickup van, and had met Eve with her parents waiting with their luggage. The holiday had been cut short. Ransome had not been sure which had surprised him more.

  Her parents had not been unfriendly but had kept their distance. He had been surprised that Eve had not told him her father was a clergyman; or that she was leaving on that day.

  She had been in her school uniform, something he had not seen before, and he knew she was hating him seeing her like that, embarrassed, when they had always shared each other's company like equals.

  Her father had said, 'I expect the next time we meet, whenever that may be, you will be married, eh?'

  Ransome had seen the girl look away, her mouth quivering. The schoolgirl again.

  The train had whistled in the distance and Eve's mother had said, 'So we'll say goodbye, Mr Ransome. Ships in the night.' She had watched her daughter, had been aware of her bitter silence.

  'Say goodbye to Mr Ransome, dear —'

  She had held out her hand solemnly. 'I shall never forget -'

  Her father had peered at the incoming train. 'Ah me, holiday friendships — where would we be without them?' He had been eager to go.

  Ransome had watched the porter putting the luggage in the compartment. He had felt his mouth frozen in an idiotic smile. What did he expect? And yet his heart had been pleading. Please don't turn away. Look at me just once.

  Eve had swung away from the door and had run towards him, then she had reached up and kissed his cheek, her inexperience making her skin flush like fire.

  'Thank you . . .' She had stared at him, searching his face, her eyes already pricking with tears. 'Think of me sometimes . . .' He had never seen her again.

  There was a tap at the door and he snapped, 'Yes!'

  Hargrave stepped over the coaming, his eyes wary.

  Ransome sighed. He'll think I'm rattled already. Halfway round the bend. 'All set, Number One?' He saw Hargrave flinch, as unused to the title as he was to giving it to someone other than David. He also noticed he was wearing a collar and tie.

  'Both parts of the port watch ready for leaving harbour, sir. Starboard watch closed up at defence stations.' He forced a smile. 'I hope I've remembered everything.'

  Ransome unwound, muscle by muscle. It was a whole lot harder for Hargrave, he thought. He would learn. Or else.

  He slipped into the duffle-coat and dragged his cap tightly over his unruly hair.

  'Would you like to take her out?'

  He saw it all on Hargrave's handsome features. Uncertainty, knowing that every eye would be watching him. Knowing too that he could not refuse. It was probably unfair, but they had to start somewhere.

  Hargrave nodded. 'I'd like to, sir.'

  Ransome glanced around the cabin. Would he ever set foot in it again? He thought of David, the earth rattling on the plain coffin. It was over.

  He slammed the door.

  'We'll do it together, Number One.

  Ordinary Seaman Gerald Boyes groped his way aft along the guardrail, his feet catching 011 unfamiliar ringbolts and other unmoving projections.

  He looked at the sky and the fast clouds and shivered despite his thick sweater. He had slept well, wrapped in his hammock with the other gently swinging pods, and had not awakened once, even when the returning liberty men had crashed down the ladder, banging their heads against the hammocks and giving a mouthful of abuse to anyone who objected.

  The other hands in the quarterdeck party to which Boyes was assigned stood around the coils of mooring wire and the huge rope fenders which were ready to supplement those already hung between the two steel hulls.

&
nbsp; It was not like the mess, he thought. Here he recognised no one. He saw the quarterdeck officer, the squat and formidable Mr Bone, hands on hips as he discussed something with his leading seaman. Boyes tried to mingle with the other vague shapes, better still, disappear. He told himself not to be so timid.

  Tomorrow and the day after he would get to know all of them. The ship's company of the destroyer where he had done his sea training had been double that of Rob Roy's.

  A seaman lounging against the steel door beneath the after four-inch gun straightened up. He had a handset to his ear, but stood to attention as he acknowledged the call from the bridge. 'Aye, aye, sir!' He looked for Mr Bone. 'Single up to back spring and sternrope, sir!'

  Boyes was almost knocked off his feet as the figures were galvanised into action.

  Guttridge, the leading seaman of the quarterdeck, a swarthy-faced young man with curling black hair, snapped, 'Cut them lashings off!' He peered at Boyes, 'You're new!' It sounded like an accusation. 'Well, shift yer bloody self.'

  Boyes fumbled with the lashings around the nearest mooring wire, and his cap fell to the deck.

  Mr Bone was old and ungainly but he was across the quarterdeck in a flash.

  'You - what's yer name?'

  Boyes stammered it out.

  Mr Bone growled, 'One of them, are you.' He bustled away.

  Boyes heard yells from forward as the other wires were let go from the ship alongside. He felt lost and humiliated, and sensed some of the others grinning at him.

  A familiar voice said roughly, ' 'Ere, put these gloves on, Gerry.' It was the seaman called Jardine who had mimicked him in the mess. 'There's often loose strands in these moorin' wires. Don't want you to 'ave yer lily-white 'ands damaged, do we?' Then he chuckled. 'Don't mind the Gunner. He don't like nobody!' He pulled out the fearsome-looking knife Boyes had seen him measuring against his new sheath and expertly cut away the spunyarn lashings. 'One day he'll tell you all about 'ow he was a hero at Jutland.' He lowered his voice as Mr Bone bustled past. 'Jutland? It was a bloody picnic compared with what this tub went through last year.' He did not explain.