Empire Day

by James Philip

  Of late the majority of the other women had finally accepted her, sort of, as a kind of ‘little sister’, treating her respectfully at least to her face. Vicky regarded most of the other ‘senior wives’ as sad old harridans but she had got used to keeping thoughts of that kind to herself. It might well be that in a few years’ time, or sooner, that John would be ruling the roost, then all the old women would have to pay court to her!

  In any event, Job Number 309 sat poised on Slip 3 awaiting her first introduction to the cold waters of the iron grey East River. Vicky’s husband, having been introduced to King George and Queen Eleanor – my oh my she looked so elegant! – had slipped away to supervise what he liked to call ‘the mechanics of the launching’ from ground level.

  The dear man invariably returned home from a launching with grime on his best suit, spots of oil on his tie and a shirt smeared with and reeking of slipway grease.

  From Vicky’s vantage point above and behind the launch platform she could see all the way down the port flank of the new ship. It was really still just an empty steel carcass. Although her fire and turbine rooms had been fitted out otherwise she was a shell waiting to be filled. A temporary mast had been raised amidships between where her two raked-back smoke stacks would eventually stand, from whence a giant Royal Standard flew proudly in the breeze.

  John had told her that the ship was the first of a new class. Originally laid down as an eight-gun light cruiser – a scaled down version of the ‘heavies’, the Ajax and Naiad anchored out in the Upper Bay – she was to be completed as a so-called ‘hybrid anti-aircraft platform’. This meant that she would be equipped with four 55 calibre BL 6-inch Mark XXX guns mounted in two twin turrets – identical to those which made up the Lion class battleships’ secondary batteries – forward of the superstructure. The aft third of the ship had been modified to mount twin twenty-feet high launch rails for the new, still experimental XB-293 two-stage long-range Seafire guided missile.

  Everything to do with the Seafire system was highly classified, so secret that once the new ship was fitted out she was scheduled to sail to Scotland where the first prototypes would be loaded and tested. Today the launch ‘rails’ on the cruiser’s stern were plywood, for show. However, now that Vicky had seen the scale of those ‘rails’ it was obvious that the Seafire must be a monster of a rocket!

  Work elsewhere in the Dockyard had ceased at mid-day ahead of the arrival of HMS Cassandra bearing the Royal couple. Normally, at this hour the shadow of the towering King Edward VI Manhattan Bridge – carrying the road from Long Island on its top level, and the two railway tracks across the East River - began to encroach on the western edge of the Wallabout complex but the sun had gone behind gathering clouds.

  With the murmuring of the crowd stilling Vicky heard the clatter of a train rolling high over the river. The great structure – the original, by modern standards, ridiculously over-engineered wrought iron construction was nearly a hundred years old, the roadway having been added only five years ago – had been designed to allow the tallest sailing ship free access to the East River. Even now, the great ELDAR masts and aerials of one of the Lions could easily pass beneath the central span. In the last century there had been plans to span the Hudson River also; it had never happened. The money had run out and people had been complaining ever since about how it would have been much more rational, and certainly a better investment, to bridge the Hudson first.

  The past is indeed a strange country!

  What might have become of a quiet, out of the way little port city like Manhattan if it had been linked to the mainland via a second King Edward VI bridge?

  Instead, the business and financial centre of affairs had moved north to Albany and Buffalo, leaving quaint little ‘New York’, effectively Manhattan-Brooklyn as a cargo depot and shipyard, and Long Island as the place tens of thousands of well to do colonists came to spend their summers and to sail their boats. Not that Vicky was complaining; the unfortunate souls condemned to live in the sprawling urban wildernesses of Albany and Buffalo were welcome to their ‘city life’, at least down here in the south the roads were not constantly gridlocked, and crime was virtually unknown outside the tenements crowding around the Dockyard district. Personally, she had no time for those who constantly wanted to churchify Long Island; the village where she lived, Whitestone, was perfectly all right the way it was and if those blasted Puritans had their way the summer vacation business - the only thing keeping many isolated rural and coastal communities economically viable - would go elsewhere. That apart, she honestly believed that she lived in the best place in the colonies to raise a family.

  The Lord-Lieutenant of King’s County had stepped up to the microphone sited beneath the bow of the new ship.

  The launching ceremony was about to begin.

  There were spits of rain in the air.

  Chapter 13

  East Islip, Suffolk County, Long Island

  From the stench I concluded that I had probably been sick on myself and pissed myself for good measure.

  It was several more seconds before I worked out that I must have been revived by the frigid contents of a bucket of cold water. Initially, my head hurt so much I guessed I might have been hit by the bucket as well as its freezing contents.

  My hands were cuffed behind my back, the chain looped through the back of the chair I was sitting in. Or rather, that I was slumped and generally lolling about in. I desperately tried to focus my eyes on something to make the nausea go away.

  I am definitely getting too old for this shit!

  SLAP!

  I did not see it coming.

  SLAP!

  I felt my nose running.

  Blood?

  Or just the water still draining off my head?

  “I’ve been wanting to do that for months!”

  I blinked dazedly at my wife.

  “That figures,” I muttered.

  I thought Sarah was going to slap me again.

  I knew she wanted to.

  Oh well, at least we were not going to have to go through a protracted trial separation or divorce.

  Every cloud is supposed to have a silver lining but this is going a bit too far…

  I suppose that it is at times like this: that is, later, much later in a day that began with one being dragged out of bed in the small hours of the morning with a gun at one’s head, a day playing mind games with police which had carried on going down-hill, and reached an apparent nadir when I was drugged, had passed out and messed myself, and finally, regained consciousness hand-cuffed to a chair with my ex-wife conducting affairs with the flat of her right hand, that a chap is, quite naturally, liable to feel a tad hard done by.

  I confess, I was a bit down in the dumps.

  Sarah was dressed up in the green uniform of the CSS. She had captain’s crimson tabs on her lapels and I could tell that her calf-length skirt was tailored to flatter her figure.

  I decided that the only thing to do was to imagine her naked.

  Sarah was a lot less scary when she was butt naked.

  Not to mention a sight for sore old eyes.

  I gave her what I hoped looked like a lopsided grin: ‘Was it something I said, sweetheart?’

  She obviously did not see the joke which given the circumstances – I was the one handcuffed to a chair in what looked like a disused changing room – lacked a certain style.

  A changing room…

  I could see where the benches had been along the white-tiled walls, underfoot there were a couple of drain holes covered by rusty grills and I thought I glimpsed the edge of what might have been the communal after match bath beyond Sarah’s shoulder.

  I recollected that there was a derelict football stadium down by the estuary of the Connetquot River. Most of the locals would have translated the old Algonquian name as ‘great river’…

  My mind was wandering.

  “What in God’s name did you comedians put in my tea?” I inquired.

  It
seemed like a reasonable question.

  I was still trying to figure out why Sarah had just taken a step to the left when the next bucket of icy water drenched me.

  “Oh, very funny,” I spluttered. Quite feebly, thinking about it.

  “You’re going to tell me everything,” she replied.

  Okay, it was good to talk.

  That was where most marriages went wrong; the parties stopped talking to each other.

  “Er, about what?”

  “The plot.”

  “What plot?”

  SLAP!

  Well, that only goes to show you: I thought I was married to a south paw and then out of the blue she finds a stinging right cross! Perhaps, we ought to have talked more?

  I shook my head until the ringing in my ears went away.

  “Ouch,” I complained.

  All things considered I did not want to do anything likely to piss her off so badly she called in a man to do her woman’s work. Shapely as Sarah might be she was a lightweight chastising me with the flat of her hand – well, hands – not a middleweight balling his fists.

  “I know it’s a wife’s prerogative to have her husband at a disadvantage from time to time but this is beyond weird…”

  She stepped behind me.

  Whispered in my ear: “You talk in your sleep, husband.”

  I wondered if I ought to tell her she snored in her sleep some nights?

  No, no, perhaps on balance this was not the right time.

  “I’m hardly likely to remember what I say,” I remarked.

  “I know everything.”

  “Wives do,” I agreed.

  I could smell her hair, feel her lips by my ear.

  It was almost erotic…

  If the literature was to be believed – scientific literature, I mean, not the sleazy top shelf magazines fellows of a certain ilk used to be able to buy in the twin-colony before the bloody Puritans took over - there were a lot of men willing to pay good money to be tied up, abused and slapped about like this. I had never seen the point of it myself but viewed from a certain angle, and assuming a certain mindset, I could see how a dirty old man like me might get a rise out of it…

  SLAP!

  For me the slapping rather spoiled it.

  I think my head must have hit the floor when Sarah pushed me and the chair over because the world went black momentarily, or for a long time, I had no idea which.

  Chapter 14

  Brooklyn Admiralty Dockyard, Wallabout Bay, King’s County

  Queen Eleanor patiently awaited her turn. First the Superintendent of the Brooklyn Admiralty Dockyards gave his speech of welcome, extemporising somewhat until he received the signal that the final preparations for the launch had been completed.

  ‘It is always a fine judgement about how many of the restraints and blocks to remove or knock away, and how many of the tackles to loosen off to ensure that when the bottle actually cracks on the bow of the vessel that the ship can actually be safely launched down the slipway by the simultaneous removal of the last critical restraints,’ her husband had once explained to her. ‘It is damnably easy to inadvertently launch the blasted thing early and then one looks like a right dunce waving at the ship floating half-a-mile away in the water!’

  The Brooklyn Yard had mounted the bottle of Virginia Champagne – not a very good vintage, thank goodness – on a mechanical arm which upon her pulling the appropriate lever would prescribe an eighty-five-degree downward arc before exploding on contact with a six-inch sharpened ‘rib’ welded to the hull for this purpose. This was a huge relief to Eleanor because the first time she had attempted to launch a ship the bottle had not broken even though the glass had been half sawed through prior to the event.

  The bow of the cruiser soared some ten feet over her head.

  The ship’s sharp stem was literally beside her, close enough to touch without fully extending her arm.

  The public-address speakers boomed and echoed.

  Some seventy yards to her right the mighty steel sarcophagus of HMS Perseus was rising out of the depths of the giant dry dock, between the Polyphemus and the aircraft carrier the keel of the second ship of her class was already laid, a skeleton of steel rising from the slip. To the left of the looming bow lay the ungainly, slab-sided hulls of two assault ships – odd vessels with huge internal docks which could be flooded down to allow each to discharge their cargo of landing craft – both due to be launched in the coming months.

  ‘The thing is that once they give you the nod, not to hang about, my dear,’ her husband had advised the Queen the first couple of times she had done this. ‘Once they’ve got the ship primed to slide a strong breeze can set the thing off. So, stepping lively is the order of the day!’

  “Pray stand for Her Majesty the Queen!”

  Oh, the colonials were so sweet!

  Everybody knew that she was only Her Royal Highness, Princess Eleanor and not really Her Majesty but the farther one was from London the more sensible people became she had discovered on her travels. Although she always missed England when they were away on one of their ‘Grand Tours’ she invariably came home refreshed and somehow, with her faith in the peoples of the Empire restored.

  “Here! Here!” She heard her husband guffaw enthusiastically. She had been and forever would be his Queen.

  Eleanor stepped to the battery of microphones.

  Her hand rested lightly on the lever which would set things in motion.

  “It is with enormous pleasure that my first act upon setting foot at my husband’s side on the proud soil of New England is that I should be asked to launch one of the Royal Navy’s most modern ships.”

  There was the inevitable temptation to milk the expectant quietness that settled at a moment such as this. She had sent battleships on their way, and bigger cruisers than the one before her now. However, the thrill of setting so many thousands of tons of steel sliding down into the water was the same regardless of the size of the ship.

  She was breathless.

  Composing herself she gripped the launch lever tightly.

  “It is with immense pride and with all my heart that I name His Majesty’s Ship Polyphemus. And in launching her upon her career I wish all who sail in her good luck and cheer!”

  She tugged at the launch lever.

  It stuck.

  In a moment Eleanor’s husband had stepped beside her, waving at the crowds and nonchalantly snapped the ‘sticky’ handle down. To all the world it would have seemed that he had simply moved beside his wife to get the best view and to savour the moment.

  The bottle smashed into a thousand pieces against the flank of the cruiser.

  Nothing happened.

  However, this was not uncommon.

  There was over eight thousand tons of deadweight sitting on the slipway and when the last blocks were hammered away inertia was governed not by the will of mere men but by the physical laws of the Universe.

  Sometimes it took a second or two, on other occasions several. Ships had been known to ‘stall’ for minutes, or in extremis, hours before, with miniscule, imperceptible momentum beginning to move.

  HMS Polyphemus sat in her starting blocks for one, two, three, four, five seconds by which time the launching party was beginning to get nervous.

  “Shall we give her a push, my dear!” King George suggested to his Queen.

  “Yes, why not!”

  Their voices carried over the speakers around the Brooklyn yards and stirred a wave of clapping and cheering.

  Together, the King and Queen put their hands to the cold metal of the cruiser’s bow at the very moment she began to slide.

  Eleanor felt the ship moving away.

  It was all she could do not to give her husband a huge hug in unlikely girlish delight; and from the broad smile on his face and the laughter in his eyes he was similarly moved. Decorum forbade such a ‘scene’ in public, more was the pity!

  Slowly, slowly, then with unstoppable inevitability HMS P
olyphemus slid stern first towards the waters of Wallabout Bay. It was the cue for clouds of confetti and streamers to be launched into the air. On the quarterdeck of HMS Cassandra, the destroyer’s two-inch saluting ‘pop gun’ began firing into the air. The Admiralty Dockyard Band struck up a raucous march.

  ‘The other thing about launching a big ship is that once it starts moving the only thing that is going to stop it is the water and hundreds of tons of chains,’ Eleanor’s husband had pronounced all those years ago when he, and she, had been unexpectedly catapulted into Buckingham Palace.

  The King had put his arm about his wife’s waist, and she his; everybody was watching HMS Polyphemus so protocol and stupid conventions be damned!

  The cruiser was gathering speed.

  Rushing to embrace her natural environment.

  She had slid at least one hundred and fifty feet by then.

  Some witnesses later claimed the explosion had come from within the mid-section of the cruiser; actually, it had occurred on the slipway, beneath the shallow bulge of her starboard flank as her turbine spaces were passing above it.

  There was a small bang at first; momentarily followed by a much bigger detonation which showered the workers and their families lining that side of the slipway with a blizzard of red hot shrapnel and debris.

  Instantly, there was pandemonium.

  The ship kept sliding, faster and faster; nothing could stop her. Not even the wrecked slipway nor the jagged crater edges over which the whole forward hull of the Polyphemus lurched and juddered as she began to topple, inexorably onto her starboard flank as she raced down to the cold waters of the East River.

  The dreadful screech of rending metal, of whole compartments within the hull disintegrating, twisting, collapsing would live with those who witnessed the terrible spectacle of the cruiser slowly falling over onto its right side as she went into the water.

  The most frightening thing was the speed with which the disaster had happened.