Convoy of Fear

by Philip McCutchan

  ‘Not, sir?’ Captain Archer was astonished.

  ‘That is what I said, and kindly don’t interrupt me.’

  ‘Sorry, sir.’ Archer, Kemp saw, had gone very red in the face.

  ‘My brigade,’ OC Troops went on, ‘is under orders for Trincomalee. Not Alexandria. That means, of course, that the Orlando will sail on through the Suez Canal with the remainder of the convoy. What’s left of it, that is,’ he added with a cynical look at Kemp. ‘What our disposal will be after arrival, I don’t know. But I can make assumptions. In my view, the move has to do with the fighting in Burma. It’s possible, I suppose, that we may be transported across the Indian Ocean to land in support of the 14th Army, but I don’t know and I’m not to be quoted. Understood, Archer?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Good.’ OC Troops turned to Kemp. ‘What I wish to discuss, Commodore, is this: the reason for the cloak-and-dagger, as you know of course, is that the War Office doesn’t want the enemy to get wind of the passage of what will in effect still be a troop convoy, down the Red Sea and across the rest of the way to Ceylon. They have to be left to think the whole troop movement has been for Alexandria. Now, I don’t know what you think about that —’

  Kemp interrupted. ‘I think the War Office is fooling itself. The moment we leave Alex on an easterly course, the word’ll go through to Berlin. The whole damn area must be thick with spies.’

  Pumphrey-Hatton nodded and said, ‘I agree with you. But the War Office has spoken so that’s that. None of them is a fighting soldier, of course. Anyway, you’re aware of the rest of the orders.’

  Kemp was, and considered the whole thing as full of traps as a dog of fleas. Orlando was to be made to appear as though she was leaving Alexandria empty. From the moment the approach to the port began, all troops were to be confined below decks and were to remain out of sight through Port Said and the canal. Only after Suez would they be allowed on deck. Their life would be a red-hot hell. Kemp doubted if any of this would fool the enemy intelligence, who would presumably see for themselves that nobody was being disembarked from the ship at Alex. They just might think she had come out from the UK empty but they would be fools if they did.

  Pumphrey-Hatton was going on. ‘I want your assessment, Commodore.’

  ‘It’s all bullshit,’ Kemp said briefly.

  ‘I refer to the actual passage. The likely dangers. The likelihood of attack, and from what direction. After Suez.’

  Kemp blew out his cheeks. ‘Not aircraft. Possibly U-boats, in the later stages. And there’s always the chance of falling in with a surface raider, a commerce raider.’

  ‘One of the pocket-battleships? Admiral Scheer, say?’

  Kemp said, ‘They stay mostly in the Atlantic. More likely something like the Kormoran as was.’ Kormoran had been sunk in the course of one of Kemp’s own convoys, but there were plenty more like her.

  ‘Sizeable guns?’

  ‘Yes, certainly. But I fancy we shall have quite enough gun power aboard the cruisers. Even though Belize has gone.’

  ‘Well, we shall see,’ Pumphrey-Hatton said. He ruminated for a moment. ‘What about those girls that came aboard with you, Commodore?’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Infernal nuisance! Women have no place in war, no place aboard a troop transport most certainly — you know what women are. I don’t want any complaints about my troops, you know. I call the presence of those girls a provocation. That’s another thing I wanted to discuss with you. Dangling their charms —’

  ‘They’re all decent young women, Brigadier. The WRNS have a reputation … such as I understand the other women’s services don’t always have.’

  Pumphrey-Hatton’s face went purple. ‘That’s a damned offensive remark!’

  ‘So was yours,’ Kemp said coolly.

  It was not a propitious meeting. Getting to his feet Pumphrey-Hatton turned to Captain Archer and snapishly suggested he would now have a good deal of work to get on with, preparatorily, having the orders ready for the troops to do their vanishing act when Alexandria hove in sight, and he’d better get on with it. Kemp could see that Archer was about to be chased for his life. As the two officers left the cabin, Pumphrey-Hatton said stiffly, ‘I shall not forget that you seem unwilling to cooperate, Commodore. I call that a poor show, d’you hear?’

  Kemp shrugged and let it pass. He could stand his ground with anybody and costive-minded brigadiers didn’t impress him greatly. Nevertheless, there were dangers for the future, OC Troops was responsible for his army draft, but Captain Bracewell commanded the ship. As for Kemp himself, as a commodore he ranked with Pumphrey-Hatton; but as a member of the Senior Service he was technically over the soldier: equivalent army officers ranked ‘with but after’ the Navy. If it came to action and any question of possible abandonment, there could be fireworks. Pumphrey-Hatton would be the argumentative sort. And it was clear he had taken a dislike to Kemp.

  Dismissing OC Troops from his mind, Kemp went back to the bridge. He had a private word with Yeoman of Signals Lambert.

  ‘You’ll have had no news from home, of course, Lambert.’

  ‘Nossir. No mail at Malta, sir.’

  ‘Quite. Or at Alex, I fancy. It’s always a worry — I know that. But I can tell you something for your private ear, Lambert. I had some despatches while we were in Malta, before we left the Wolf Rock. Vice-Admiral Malta … wireless cypher from the Admiralty.’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘Up to then, and since we left the Clyde, there had been no air raids on Pompey.’

  Lambert gave an audible sigh of relief. Kemp said, ‘You can pass that to Petty Officer Ramm, no-one else. All right?’

  ‘Yessir. Thank you, sir.’ Ramm would be glad to have the word: his home too was in Pompey. Lambert watched the Commodore’s back as Kemp moved away. Kemp was a good bloke; not many would bother, in the middle of heavy responsibilities — wouldn’t even bother to remember where a rating’s home was, let alone pass on the contents of a cypher which he really oughtn’t to have done, though why the lack of air raids should be kept secret in the Med was a mystery beyond Lambert’s ken. But everything seemed to be secret in this war, so much so that it had become a joke … sealed envelopes marked TO BE BURNED BEFORE BEING READ, that sort of thing. Lambert was much relieved to know that up to yesterday at all events Doris was safe from Hitler; but the unfortunate episode of the french letter still haunted him.

  vi

  Petty Officer Perryman — as a courtesy, he considered it to be — took Ramm on a conducted tour of the guns, such as they were. Ramm acknowledged that they were a better protection than what the Wolf Rock had had, but didn’t reckon much beyond that.

  ‘Load of old weary willies. Obsolete back in ’17 they were.’

  Perryman was nettled. ‘So they may be. They can still fire, though.’

  Ramm pulled a face. He was irritated by Perryman’s constant belching. Funny, how a repeated sound got on your nerves, made you want to lash out, or scream, or something. The close confines of a ship, for instance the cabin he now shared with Perryman … it made you wonder what the Black Hole of Calcutta had been like, all those bodies. He straightened from a close examination of the breech-block of one of the 6-inch. There had been a spot of rust, unseen by Perryman. Chatham gunner’s mates … Ramm sucked at his teeth. Bloody slack, but it wasn’t his place to say so. The Navy’s hierarchy stood firm. Any RN gunnery officer seeing that rust would have had old Perryman’s guts for garters.

  Perryman was staring out to starboard, towards Africa, across a sea that had now turned a deep blue. The Levanter had gone, faster than most Levanters that Ramm could remember. There was no land in sight, but Perryman was still staring and a moment later he uttered.

  ‘Bloody North Africa.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Bloody Rommel.’

  ‘Monty says he’s going to knock him for six.’

  ‘Hope he does an’ all.’ Perryman sounded bitter. ‘
All them pongoes, all that sand, miles an’ miles of it, bloody great sand dunes, getting in the tea, up your nose and ears, in the moving parts o’ guns and transport!’

  ‘Know a lot about it. Bin there?’

  ‘Eh? No, not me. My nipper’s there, though. Well, not a nipper now. Sergeant in the RASC. It’s a worry.’

  ‘Course it is. And him worrying about you. Doesn’t know how close you are, eh?’

  ‘Not all that close.’ Perryman turned as a resplendent figure emerged from a door and came onto the after deck. Khaki-drill with knife-edge creases, field service cap on square, Sam Browne gleaming with spit-and-polish as were the brown boots. Moustache and square brown face, piercing eyes. No pips on his shoulders. Petty Officer Ramm recognized a regimental sergeant-major, a warrant officer equivalent to a gunner RN. A man to be respected. The RSM marched along, left-right-left, eyes front, a cane beneath his left arm and held by his left hand with the elbow at an angle that looked as if it had been measured with a set square. The boots banged the deck at the correct infantry pace. Perryman said in Ramm’s ear, ‘RSM, trooping staff. The pongoes call ’im Bull’s Bollocks. Real name’s Bill Pollock, see.’

  ‘And God ’elp Rommel,’ Ramm said.

  The soldier halted in front of the two petty officers. They came to attention. ‘Good morning, Petty Officer Perryman.’

  ‘Good morning, Sar’nt-Major.’

  ‘’Oo’s this?’ The eyes pierced Ramm.

  Perryman said, ‘Petty Officer Ramm, Sar’nt-Major, joined from Malta.’

  ‘Oh, yes. You’re in charge o’ them WRNS lot.’

  ‘Nothing to do with me,’ Ramm said. ‘Got their own PO, female.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘PO Wren Hardisty.’

  ‘Hardisty, Hardisty.’ RSM Pollock was staring Ramm up and down so that he felt like a man who’d left his flies unbuttoned. He was aware that he looked somewhat scruffy: often you didn’t shave at sea, though RSM Pollock obviously had. Pollock, he knew, wanted nothing so much as to bawl him out, but again the service hierarchy prevailed. Ramm was the Navy’s problem, not that of the army. ‘Hardisty. Yes, I saw the name. Where is she?’

  ‘Don’t know, Sar’nt-Major. Could be anywhere, sorting the girls out.’

  ‘Yes. Well. I’ll be having words with her. The Staff Captain’s been onto my orderly room. Ship’s purser’s worried. I’m not. I know my lads. And they know me. There’ll be no hanky-panky unless I’ve gone soft sudden like. Which I ’ave not.’

  RSM Pollock turned smartly about and marched the other way. Then back again. Perryman said it was his daily constitutional. Even when the sea was rough, he clocked up a regular mile.

  vii

  Malta to Alexandria was three days’ steaming at convoy speed, allowing for the zig-zag. Mussolini’s submarines lurked beneath the blue waters of the Mediterranean. Before arrival at Alexandria the convoy would pass below Crete. From Crete the German air armadas could strike again. The Orlando would pass the German convoy route from Crete to Tobruk. The Mediterranean was no peaceful sea, though when the skies were clear Kemp could easily enough imagine himself to be once again on a peacetime bridge, taking a Mediterranean-Australia liner through to Gage Roads off the port of Fremantle in Western Australia, and on round Cape Leeuwin for the Great Australian Bight for passage to Melbourne and Sydney Heads. Days of sunshine and tranquillity mostly, with everything running smoothly under the direction of the Master with no interference from above the sea or below it, no sudden alarms of war. Well-scrubbed decks, luxurious cabins in the first class, all manner of people travelling to and from the southland, enormous menus in the dining saloon to which the passengers had been customarily summoned by bugle, with a dress-for-dinner call sounded half-an-hour earlier. Dinner jackets and evening dresses, beautiful women, important men, the most important of whom were invited to sit at the Captain’s table and, however important, often enough proved to be pompous bores with loud voices. Too much money, too much leisure.

  Kemp was visited by a thought that he knew to be a bad one: were those peacetime days really the best? Of course they were; people were not being bombed, killed, burned, drowned. But he did feel that his purpose now was basically a more worthwhile one than the conveyance, largely, of overindulging wealth to far-off places. He was part of a tremendous effort to free the world from tyranny; part of the whole sea service that wherever a seaman served was directing its efforts to keeping the sea lanes open, keeping Britain supplied with food and armaments, keeping her from starvation and impotence in the face of the worst evil that had struck the world since Attila the Hun. That was surely worthwhile, worth more than carrying bloated, overfed upper crusts — upper in a financial sense at all events — across the world on the backs of stewards living in squalid conditions down in the bowels of the ship, on the backs of firemen and greasers working in a hell of heat in front of the furnaces in the boiler rooms which in the hot weather, especially, were places of sheer torment and often more than that; Kemp could recall much earlier days when the stokehold gang had had to be brought up on deck in the Red Sea, and packed around with ice blocks from the cold store to bring down their temperatures. Some had been beyond the point of recovery. And all for around £12 a month, or less.

  Bolshie thoughts, and better not indulged in the middle of a war.

  THREE

  Dr Alan Crampton, the ship’s surgeon — single-handed now, since there were no passengers and the army had its own medical staff, doctors and nurses and orderlies of the RAMC — rinsed his hands and wondered what he was going to do for the rest of the day. Morning surgery had just finished and it had been sheer routine: burns among the galley staff, cut fingers, a couple of men of the ship’s DEMS gunnery rates suffering from shrapnel wounds sustained in the earlier attacks on the convoy, and the usual assortment of VD cases that were endemic to any ship’s surgeon’s list.

  Crampton was aware of his nursing sister, Mary McCann, watching him. He grinned at her. ‘Dull as ditchwater,’ he said. ‘Worse than peacetime, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, Doctor.’ Mary McCann’s pixie face was a shade wicked. ‘Less perks, too.’

  ‘Perks my bottom, Mary, it was hard work sometimes. All those old ladies.’ Dr Crampton’s mind went back in time. The ship’s surgeons used to do visits just like any ordinary GP. Cabin visits, ten bob a time in the tourist section, a pound in the first class. Cases of seasickness, mostly, though from time to time there had been heart cases among the more elderly. The old ladies had been the worst, again just as in ordinary medical practice. They liked to be fussed over and they produced all manner of imaginary complaints in order to get the attention of a ship’s officer with crimson and gold stripes on his cuffs. They could afford it, of course, and Crampton, when his bills were settled, had pocketed the money with a clear conscience, though at the same time regarding himself as something of a parasite in a medical sense. The sea stagnated a doctor; he lost touch with the medical main stream, became out-of-date unless he bothered to keep up with the literature. There was time for that at sea, and Crampton did do his reading. That didn’t lessen the sense of being in a dead-end job. But at 45 it had been too late to change, and the life was comfortable and well-paid, so he made the best of it. As a bachelor he didn’t have any home life to miss out on by sailing away to Australia every three months with around ten days leave in between voyages.

  Now, taking off his surgery coat and pulling on his white uniform tunic with the badges of rank on the shoulder-straps, he made a suggestion. He made it every day, in fact, at this time.

  ‘My cabin, Mary?’

  ‘Thanks, Doctor.’

  Mary McCann from Galway in Southern Ireland was in her mid-thirties, still attractive in her dark, Irish way, still with plenty of fire in the blue eyes; and she had come to like Alan Crampton in the 18 months she had been in the Orlando. He was somehow different from most ship’s surgeons. They went to Crampton’s cabin, its ports overlooking the after end of C deck; Crampto
n’s steward entered at the press of a bellpush. ‘Morning, Sister. The usual is it, sir?’

  ‘Please,’ Crampton said.

  The usual came: a long gin-and-grapefruit for Sister McCann, a plain fruit juice for the doctor. Crampton, unusually for a ship’s surgeon, didn’t drink. He had a reason for this: he’d seen the results in those doctors who did.

  ‘Down the hatch,’ he said.

  ‘Good health, Doctor.’

  ‘Good health’s not my trade. It’s the sick wot pays me wages.’

  ‘You have to stay healthy is what I meant.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ Crampton frowned. ‘Responsibility …’

  ‘H’m?’

  He didn’t elaborate. He said instead, ‘You don’t get a lot of illness at sea, do you? Not real illness. Nothing to stretch one’s mind.’

  ‘That’s true, sure.’

  Crampton studied his glass, watching the slight sway of the fruit juice as it rolled gently to the ship’s motion. He said, ‘You know, I often think … all those troops, packed in like sardines along the troop decks. Ship vastly over-crowded by peacetime standards, any standards really. Not good for health.’

  ‘They seem to stay pretty fit.’

  ‘Yes, they do. Surprisingly. What I often wonder is what would happen if ever we got an epidemic with troops embarked.’

  ‘No picnic at all,’ Mary said. ‘But an epidemic, a serious one, is pretty unlikely.’

  ‘Let’s hope you’re right. Oh, I wouldn’t expect anything this trip, there’s not far to go anyway. But if ever we had to take troops through the Canal it could be different. Gyppo tummy might be the least of our worries, Mary.’

  Dr Crampton had not been one of those who had been told the precise onward orders for the Orlando.

  ii

  ‘All right for some,’ Petty Officer Ramm remarked to the AB who had succeeded Leading Seaman Nelson, killed aboard the Wolf Rock, as Number Two of the Commodore’s gunnery party. Not an AB any more, in fact; now acting Leading Seaman, Cardew had been temporarily rated up by the Commodore. That rate might be confirmed by his manning port or it might not.