Convoy of Fear

by Philip McCutchan

  The sound-powered telephone from the bridge whined and Stouter answered. ‘Chief here.’

  It was the Staff Captain. ‘Depth-charging’s started, Chief. Stand by for bangs.’

  ‘Thanks for the warning,’ Stouter said. He hung the phone back on its hook. He had only just done so when the first of the explosions came. It wasn’t all that far off, he calculated. The engine-room seemed to ring and shudder, and flakes of cork insulation fell from bulkheads and pipes. Then another, and another.

  Through clenched teeth Stouter said, ‘Nothing to worry about, Mildmay. Usual pattern, that’s all.’

  Mildmay, senior second, nodded, ran his tongue over dry lips. He, scared as hell, wondered how Stouter could keep his cool so well. No nerves at all.

  iii

  Kemp wiped sweat from his face. That earlier full helm movement had indeed been due to Bracewell having to take emergency avoiding action. One of the armaments ships had swung across his bows, veering suddenly to port. Kemp’s assessment was that a lookout aboard the vessel had seen, or thought he’d seen, a torpedo trail. If Bracewell hadn’t been dead fast, the two ships would have hit and immense damage, even sinking, caused thereby. Bracewell was very competent and alert; but Kemp hated the personal inaction. It was not his place to handle the ship except in certain circumstances but not to be able to do so was sheer frustration to anyone who had held command at sea.

  Anyway, there was no torpedo. The destroyers of the escort were doing good work; they had intercepted in good time and the sea was sprouting columns of water as the depth-charges exploded on reaching their settings. Beneath the water, the Italians wouldn’t be happy and they might not linger. In fact, they didn’t. But they left two of their boats behind: the first victory signal came from Captain (D) in the destroyer flotilla leader and Lambert reported to the Commodore.

  ‘One kill, sir.’

  Then the other; in each case debris and oil fuel had come to the surface, a fair indication of broken hulls but not conclusive. Submarines sometimes blew oil fuel to the surface as a subterfuge and then went deep, lying low beyond the asdics. Not this time: the next signal reported two hulls breaking surface and the crews asking to surrender. One of the destroyers took them off; the others carried on the hunt, and the subsequent depth-charging was more distant. The damaged submarines were sunk by gunfire from the cruisers.

  As the order to secure from action stations came down to him, Petty Officer Perryman fell out the guns’ crews. In doing so, he had a word with Ramm.

  ‘Thank God for Musso,’ he said.

  ‘Eh? How’s that, then?’

  Perryman winked, and spat over the side. ‘They say ’Itler wanted the Med himself. But Musso, ’e insisted on ’is own back yard. Maray nostrum, greasy fat prat.’

  ‘So — ?’

  ‘So they’ve buggered off as usual. ’Itler wouldn’t ’ave.’ Perryman spat once more, dismissing the Italian Navy. Ramm went below for a fag, feeling sour. Perryman had been chucking his weight around — giving the order to stand down to Ramm’s own guns’ crews as well as his own. Not right, wasn’t that. The sod should have respected Ramm’s partial autonomy or whatever. But now he was stuck with him; the new orders had resulted in a surge of buzzes from the galley wireless. The orders were something that could never be kept dark aboard a ship, of course, and now Ramm knew he would be going through to Trincomalee aboard the Orlando. With Perryman. He had better be philosophic about a fait accompli but he wasn’t happy. Aboard the Wolf Rock, he’d been king of his own castle, the only gunnery expert aboard.

  iv

  Pumphrey-Hatton lingered on the bridge for a while after the abortive attack was over. Watching the distant destroyers, he had given a kind of running commentary to everybody’s irritation. The action could be seen without verbal assistance, as Lambert had remarked to his number two, Signalman Lacegrove. Pumphrey-Hatton, Lambert said, liked the sound of his own voice and didn’t seem to mind displaying his ignorance of sea warfare.

  Kemp was wondering if OC Troops was meaning to make a complaint about the WRNS quarters, but no such complaint came. Pumphrey-Hatton ignored Kemp and spoke to Captain Bracewell.

  ‘My men,’ he said, ‘ETA Alexandria is — what — 1800 hours tomorrow.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I’ll have them out of sight a couple of hours before that, then.’

  ‘It’s going to be uncomfortable,’ Bracewell said. ‘Hellish hot below. Longish, too. We’ll not leave until the next dawn, and after that it’s Port Said and the canal. We’ll get fast clearance in Port Said for the canal entry, but it’s twelve hours to Suez. And after that we’ll have the Arabian coast in sight for quite a while.’

  ‘Time to get used to it,’ Pumphrey-Hatton said briskly. ‘In the army we’re used to discomfort, you know.’

  ‘Discomfort’s not unknown at sea, Brigadier.’

  ‘Good God, man!’ Pumphrey-Hatton’s tone was scornful. He waved an arm around. ‘Discomfort! I wouldn’t call this bridge or your own quarters uncomfortable. And all the rest of it. Meals served promptly, no shortages, drink available at the touch of a button. Clean linen.’ He paused. ‘I was in France in the last war. In the trenches as a subaltern to begin with. My battalion was almost wiped out as it happened. But it’s the appalling mud I’m thinking about, the cut supply lines, the lack of communication, the general filth of the dugouts.’

  ‘Ships,’ Bracewell said, ‘can sink.’

  ‘Well, yes —’

  ‘And when they do, all this vanishes in a matter of seconds. It’s not comfortable in the water, Brigadier.’

  ‘I didn’t say it was.’ Pumphrey-Hatton irritably changed the subject. ‘To go back to what I was saying. I’d like you to do what you can to relieve the conditions tomorrow. Trim the ventilators, that sort of thing.’

  ‘That will be done, of course. Is there anything else you require?’

  OC Troops seemed unaware of the sarcasm. He said, ‘Well … is there anything you can think of, Captain?’

  ‘I can think of nothing to relieve the sweat and stink of closely-packed troops shut below decks.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Frequent baths or showers. Salt water will be available. But the bathing space is limited, as you know.’

  ‘I don’t call that particularly helpful. We should all pull together, you know.’ Pumphrey-Hatton turned away and went down the ladder to the Master’s deck. Bracewell walked across to where Kemp was standing.

  He asked, ‘Did you hear all that, Commodore?’

  Kemp grinned. ‘I thought he was going to remind you there was a war on!’

  ‘Just as well he didn’t. I might have blown a gasket. I’ll bet you one thing: OC Troops will be swanning around the decks while his soldiers are shut down below.’

  ‘Dressed as a seaman, to fool the enemy?’

  ‘I don’t think he’d lower himself that far.’

  Bracewell turned away again as Purser Rhys-Jones was seen to be hovering at the head of the ladder with a sheaf of papers in his hand. Kemp stared across the water towards his charges pushing through under guard of the escort, the Nelson and Rodney towering like blocks of flats — Queen Anne’s Mansions, the Navy called them. The convoy was badly scarred; and there had been so many casualties. Death wasn’t very comfortable; yet OC Troops had had a point. The Navy did have a more comfortable war than the army. They lived in relative luxury in the wardrooms of the fleet as the ship’s personnel did aboard the ex-liner transports. At sea you carried all your services with you. Stewards were always at hand; there was never, in Kemp’s experience, any shortage of cigarettes, to name just one essential of service life, the sustainer of morale, the first resort in moments of crisis, the thing you looked forward to most when you came off watch from the bridge or the guns or the engine-room or wherever. It was just as important to the land forces, but was often missing.

  But it hadn’t always been like that. Not in the old days of sail that Kemp so well
remembered. That was discomfort of a very high degree; and not so far removed from it today were the conditions aboard the smaller escorts, the destroyers, frigates and corvettes that operated across the North Atlantic in all kinds of weather, mostly in the winter months, with their messdecks awash all the way out from Scapa or the Forth or the Clyde or Londonderry, right through to 40 degrees west longitude and back again. Days and nights when there was no hot food because the galley fires were out, days and nights when clothing and bedding were soaked through and there was nowhere except the engine spaces in which to dry out. As a lieutenant RNR in the last war, Kemp had done his destroyer time and he knew what it was like. Pumphrey-Hatton took no account of that.

  Kemp looked at his watch and called across to his assistant. ‘I’m going below to my cabin, Finnegan.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Call me in accordance with Standing Orders.’ This was a routine phrase; Finnegan knew well enough that Kemp would be on the bridge within half-a-minute of being required. He knew something else as well: Kemp was going below to give First Officer Jean Forrest a lunchtime gin. Kemp himself would stick to orange squash at sea. But for the last few days Kemp and Jean Forrest had been on what Finnegan saw to be good terms, and he wondered just what the score was. At the start of the voyage from the Clyde, the old man had seemed frosty towards the boss WRNS officer, had held her at arm’s length. Even, once, blasted her off the bridge …

  v

  ‘Come in,’ Kemp said, in answer to the knock on his doorpost. The curtain was across the open door and Jean Forrest pushed it aside as she entered.

  ‘Morning, Miss Forrest.’

  ‘Good morning, Commodore.’

  ‘Sit down … what’s it to be?’

  ‘Gin-and-lime, thank you.’ Jean Forrest sat down. Kemp gestured at his steward, who knew all about the orange squash for the Commodore. Kemp could have poured the drinks himself, but would risk no talk around the ship that he was drinking alone with the First Officer WRNS, the steward set aside for an assignation. That would never do; the Commodore at sea had to be whiter than white. He wondered at his own motives: Jean Forrest had seemed in his view rather too forthcoming when they had first met and he’d seen, or fancied he’d seen, a need to put her in her place. She had come with an introduction; she was a niece of the chairman of the Mediterranean-Australia Line, and Sir Edward had asked him to be friendly. At first she had seemed as though she might flaunt the relationship. In any case Kemp disliked being asked personal favours in a war situation. What Jean Forrest didn’t know was that a commander RN employed on intelligence and security duties had boarded the Wolf Rock in Malta and had picked up the WRNS officer’s name. Jean Forrest was on some sort of security list — her last appointment had been on liaison duties attached to a War Office department evacuated from London to Blenheim Palace at Woodstock near Oxford. The commander had told Kemp in confidence that Intelligence had picked up the fact that there had been a pretty hot affair with a brigadier and Jean had been badly hurt when it had ended. As a result, she had asked for a posting as far away as possible.

  The circumstances induced sympathy in Kemp. He was a worldly enough man, and knew the often base behaviour of his own sex; but the knowledge of the affair made him cautious. Jean Forrest, though younger persons might have seen her as a middle-aged spinster — she was 41 — was attractive and she could well be missing sex as such. Kemp had seen from the start that he’d attracted her; so he had stood off. He was a happily married man who had never been unfaithful in almost 25 years of marriage, even though there had been the many temptations in the liners, even though he had spent something like nine months of every year, on average, away from his home comforts. It had been a strain at times, but he had held fast to his principles. He didn’t know even now whether or not those principles were going to come under further strain, and in the middle of a war and a convoy at that. But the fact was that he had come to admire Jean Forrest. She had stood up splendidly to the horrors they had come through in the Wolf Rock, stood up to death and bombs and had been a tower of strength to the young girls of the WRNS draft. Kemp would no longer be stand-offish.

  But he would be formal, he told himself. For now, anyway.

  ‘All well, Miss Forrest?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Finnegan reported that OC Troops had a moan.’

  ‘Of no account, Commodore. He upset my PO Wren. That’s not a hard thing to do.’

  ‘So we forget it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Kemp twiddled the stem of his glass. He was not wholly at ease, seldom was with women. What did you talk to them about? Kemp was short on small talk. He fell back on Sir Edward and they talked about him, but he didn’t last long. Then she asked how he was getting on with Brigadier Pumphrey-Hatton. ‘So-so.’ He wouldn’t say more than that; he wouldn’t criticize. Commodore and OC Troops had to work together in as much harmony as possible. Besides, brigadiers could be touchy subjects. But it had been Miss Forrest who had raised it; Kemp knew he was seeing things that didn’t exist, but that was perhaps part of his caution. You didn’t not mention a brigadier just because of the bedroom antics of another brigadier who was in the past. Suddenly, as Jean Forrest smiled at him and shifted in the chair so that he caught the sharp silhouette of her breast against the sun coming through the opened square port, Kemp found he wanted to know more about that past brigadier. A kind of jealousy? He hoped not. And he certainly wouldn’t ask any leading questions. Nor was she likely to tell him anything, so his curiosity would have to remain unsatisfied. They talked a little more. As usual, Jean Forrest refused a second gin.

  vi

  The following evening as the Mediterranean dark began to come down with its usual swiftness, the Orlando, dead on her ETA, made in towards the port of Alexandria and, standing clear of the rusted remains of bomb blasted shipping, let go an anchor in the outer anchorage. With a last exchange of signals the heavy ships of Force H and the aircraft-carriers Victorious and Indomitable turned away to make back for Gibraltar with the Nelson. The cruisers and destroyers, with Glamorgan wearing the flag of CS 34 — 34th Cruiser Squadron — remained as onward escorts for the convoy through the Suez Canal and across the oceans to Trincomalee. The battleship Valiant, coming up from the Cape, would rendezvous at the other end of the Red Sea. The troops aboard Orlando were out of sight; the decks were empty of all but the ship’s crew. Pumphrey-Hatton was on the bridge, but was not in uniform. He wore sand-coloured slacks and an opened-neck, dark blue shirt, with a red pullover loosely across his shoulders. Camouflage? Kemp wondered.

  As the anchor was let go amid a cloud of rust that drifted upwards across the chief officer standing in the eyes of the ship in charge of anchoring, Orlando’s sister transport made farther in to disembark her troops. The armaments carriers anchored in their positions as signalled by the King’s Harbour Master. Bracewell passed the orders for the anchor to be secured with the third shackle on deck; and when the ship had got her cable and was lying idly on the smooth surface he spoke on the sound-powered telephone to the engine-room.

  ‘Finished with engines, Chief. But I’ll want you to be on standby while we’re in the anchorage.’ Then he spoke to the chief officer who had come to the bridge to report.

  ‘Anchor watches, Mr Bruton. The juniors can take the weight and call me when required.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir. Do you expect attack?’

  ‘Possibly. Alex is within range of Crete.’ Bracewell turned to Kemp and Pumphrey-Hatton. ‘I think we deserve some relaxation, gentlemen. I suggest a drink in my quarters in half-an-hour’s time. Hitler permitting, that is.’

  FIVE

  When Kemp went along to the Captain’s quarters, it turned out to be not just a drink with Bracewell and Pumphrey-Hatton: he found the army there in some force. Not the ship’s military staff: they were from the Alexandria base ashore. There was an infantry lieutenant-colonel in desert rig, a staff major, a Movement Control Officer, a captain of military police
, and two officers of the RAMC. Each had a glass in his hand and the air was thick with cigarette smoke.

  Bracewell made the introductions and then said, ‘Trouble, Commodore. Trouble ahead.’

  ‘Rommel?’ Kemp suspected yet another change of orders.

  ‘Not Rommel. Over to you, Doctor.’

  Kemp found himself confronted with a major of the RAMC. The major was brief. ‘Cholera,’ he said. ‘In Port Said. Come up to epidemic proportions very suddenly. Not nice, to be passing through.’

  Kemp said, ‘But surely there’s always cholera around to some extent?’

  ‘Perhaps, but it’s usually brought under control pretty fast. This time it hasn’t been. I expect you can see the dangers, Commodore.’

  Kemp could. There would be inevitable contact with the shore in Port Said even though no-one from the Orlando would actually set foot on the land. There would be the berthing pilot and the canal pilot; there would be the Egyptian port officials with their myriad forms, a feature of life aboard any ship passing through Port Said, war or no war. There would be contact with the lightermen bringing off the stores as indented for by the chief steward — fresh vegetables, fruit, meat and other items. Some contact was unavoidable.

  Kemp asked what the real risks were. ‘It’s not caught from physical contact, is it, Doctor?’

  ‘Not what I expect you mean by physical contact, no. It’s water-borne, principally.’ But Kemp turned to Bracewell. ‘Will you be taking water in Port Said?’ he asked.

  Bracewell shook his head and gave a short laugh. ‘Not this time! Our condensers will have to cope. But it’ll make for shortages. Washing facilities, for instance.’

  Kemp nodded. ‘You were about to go on, Doctor. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I was going to say, the bacilli flourish in the intestines and are voided with the faeces —’

  ‘But voiding of faeces … that’s not going to occur aboard — not from the shore people!’