Convoy of Fear

by Philip McCutchan

‘It’s not over yet, missus.’

  ‘PO,’ Miss Hardisty said automatically. ‘Not missus.’ The man, a soldier, didn’t pay any attention. A moment later the tannoy came alive and Miss Hardisty heard Commodore Kemp’s voice, which cheered her even more.

  Kemp said, ‘This is the Commodore speaking. As I gather you already know, the Admiral Richter has been hit. She’s been hit for’ard by torpedoes from one of our destroyers. She is down by the head and losing way but is still firing with her main and secondary armaments. In the meantime you’ll have seen that the Valiant is badly crippled and unable to steer. It’s a case of honours even, but I expect more torpedo hits from the destroyers. I have one more item of news. We are being borne down upon by a typhoon from the south-east. This will affect the course of the action. When the storm hits us, I shall want all men off the open decks — you’ll not go below to the troop decks but will muster under your officers and NCOs in the main lounges. You’ll be tightly packed but that can’t be helped. Also, the boats will be hoisted to the davit heads and secured against the weather with griping bands passed. Don’t worry about this. It’s a necessary precaution and in any case we couldn’t get any lifeboats away under typhoon conditions. That is all.’

  The tannoy clicked off.

  Miss Hardisty, not waiting for the wind to arrive, mustered her girls — they were all more or less together in a bunch in accordance with her own orders — and shoo-ed them inside the superstructure. They found a corner of the main A deck lounge and re-arranged some chairs and sofas and sat down to form a close-knit group, but Miss Hardisty knew they would have to pack in much tighter when the troops poured in.

  vi

  ‘The order was mine to give, Commodore.’

  ‘I’m sorry. You weren’t on the bridge.’

  ‘I was below, but not for long. Dammit, you should have waited!’

  ‘Do you disagree with my order, Brigadier?’

  Pumphrey-Hatton’s face twitched. ‘No, no! I consider it sensible enough —’

  ‘Then what’s all the fuss about?’

  ‘Fuss?’

  ‘Yes, fuss. We’re in action, Brigadier, and are about to meet bad weather — very bad weather. There’s no time for ceremonial in a typhoon, as you’re about to find out for yourself. You’ll find life uncomfortable until it’s moved past.’

  Pumphrey-Hatton gave a gasp, looked furious, found the right words wouldn’t come, and turned sharply on his heel. He went across to the port bridge wing, his spindly body jerking with suppressed fury. Kemp sighed inwardly; once again, he’d got on the wrong side of OC Troops. He should have bitten down hard on his tongue, but the fellow’s manner irritated him beyond endurance and he felt he had enough to worry about without adding Pumphrey-Hatton’s maddening military tantrums to his mind. In any case the safety of personnel at sea was his and Bracewell’s responsibility, not that of OC Troops, at any rate not primarily. Sea officers knew what they were about. And some decisions had to be made fast. Like now: Kemp’s weather eye had told him the typhoon would hit in rather less than half-an-hour. When it did, the Orlando would be tossed about like a cork.

  In the event the typhoon was beaten to it by the Admiral Richter. This time there was no preliminary scream, no rush of wind. The 11-inch shell took the Orlando smack amidships, low down at the end of its trajectory, plunging directly against the ship’s plates alongside the engine-room.

  FOURTEEN

  No-one who was actually in the engine-room escaped, though there were survivors, miraculously, from the boiler-rooms. The miracle was not a kindly one, however: few of those erstwhile survivors were going to live. The burns from the blazing fuel oil were horrendous. The black gang had been brought out at great risk to the bosun and his deck hands, brought out through a shattered bulkhead through which the fire hoses were sending their jets of water to damp down the raging fires inside. Dr Crampton went below himself and tended the burns cases with assistance from the RAMC. In the engine-room itself there was total destruction; the place was no more than a mass of twisted steel, the ladders to the air lock all gone, the shafts broken, the dials and gauges a shapeless mass had there been anyone alive to see. Except for the radio room, which had its own source of electricity supplying its own generator, all electric power throughout the ship had gone.

  Chief Engineer Stouter, removed earlier to his cabin, was too sick to realize the full extent of it. With the fires beneath his cabin so far increasing their hold on the ship he was moved again, this time into a camp bed in the military officers’ cabin alleyway on B deck.

  Bracewell, his face grey with anxiety, took the reports on the bridge. Staff Captain Main had been down himself, had left the chief officer in charge. Main was blackened, his hair singed, arms and hands showing burns and blisters.

  ‘It’s a shambles, sir. Touch and go if we get the fires under control … they’re doing wonders down there.’

  ‘Are we making water, Staff Captain?’

  Main said, ‘A little. The carpenter’s sounding round. The after collision bulkhead’s holding, but only just. There are some sprung rivets and some seepage, but that’ll help the fire parties.’

  ‘If the bulkhead goes —’

  ‘We’ll have had it.’

  A simple statement of fact, no less. They would go down for sure. Bracewell conferred with the Commodore. He said, ‘By rights I should abandon. Or stand by to any moment.’

  ‘But not with the weather coming in.’

  ‘Hardly.’

  That was the problem: the fires might be brought under control; that was at the moment unpredictable. What was wholly predictable was that any attempt to abandon would lead to disaster, a suicide move in fact. And inside the next five minutes the storm was going to hit them and then there could be no possible hope of getting boats away, as Kemp had broadcast on the tannoy not long before.

  ‘We just have to sit it out,’ Bracewell said. Already the hurricane had overtaken the engaged battleships, the cruisers and the destroyers. They were invisible from the Orlando’s bridge, as were the other merchant ships, the armaments carriers for the eventual supply of the Fourteenth Army fighting in Burma. Everything was now in a state of chaos, of total flux. As the Staff Captain went below again towards the fires, the day darkened and the storm, moving swiftly across the final gap, struck the Orlando like another battering from the Admiral Richter. Currently, as it happened, the ship was heading into the wind and sea. For a while she remained there; but not for long. The typhoon’s fury came suddenly a little on the port bow. Only a little; but the fury and force of the wind and sea were such that the ship was taken as though in a giant’s fist and laid over, wrenched to starboard, the bow lifting to the thrust of the waves, and twisting, before plunging right under so far and so deep that the sea rose up along the fo’c’sle and smashed at the base of the midship superstructure, rising for a while as far as just below the Master’s deck before it fell away, much of it making its way aft, washing along the embarkation deck and then finding the hole left by the smashed gun-mounting and pouring down into the ship’s innards.

  ii

  The lounges, now unlit, were murderous. The sudden lift and surge had sent men off their feet, flinging them in all directions on top of one another. Furniture, secured to the deck in many cases, broke free and hurtled around, unstoppable. A grand piano took off, the piano round which the brigade’s officers had sung popular tunes to keep their spirits up through the cholera; it shifted bodily as the deck canted so sharply and came down on a group of men struggling on the deck, breaking bones and heads, a bloody scene to add to the other horrors. Miss Hardisty clung to a stanchion, a big pillar that ran from deck to deckhead, clung for her life in the near dark. Some of her girls were hanging onto the same pillar, others were holding onto the PO Wren herself. Some of the girls had disappeared in the melee. Those with Miss Hardisty were crying; she was crying herself and trying not to let it show. Petty officers didn’t cry, she told herself fiercely, they had to s
et an example.

  But now she was desperately afraid. She didn’t believe the ship could possibly come through. First the German shell, then this. The ship must be filling up with water and, sogged from top to bottom, would sink. There was the very atmosphere of death. For one thing the stifling heat had gone and had been replaced with a terrible cold that was worse than the heat, the worse for being, to her at any rate, totally unexpected and so sudden. It didn’t seem right, it didn’t seem human. There was evil in it, Miss Hardisty thought.

  Then salvation of a kind came. The ship steadied. And someone spoke to her, a voice coming over the shriek of the gale that was now inside the lounge, having shattered the big windows on its way in.

  ‘All right, PO. It’s all right. For a while anyway. Ship’s sort of held in irons if you get my meaning.’

  ‘Oh, dear!’ Miss Hardisty felt ex-Colour Sergeant Parkinson’s arms going round her and unfastening her hands from the pillar. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, PO. You can let go now. All of you.’

  Miss Hardisty let go. She teetered a little on her legs, which felt very shaky, and Parkinson steadied her. She asked how the fighting was going, but Parkinson didn’t know. Nobody knew, he said, all the ships were in the same boat, so to speak. None of them could see each other and the battle would have been suspended.

  ‘Force majeure,’ he said. ‘That’s the way of typhoons. Beat navies, they do. You just have to ride ’em out, the buggers … begging your pardon, PO.’

  Miss Hardisty was so upset she hadn’t even registered the word. She asked, ‘How long will it last?’

  ‘Depends on its speed and depth. Maybe not long. I’ve been in ’em before, Indian Ocean, China-side. Want something to do, do you, PO, you and your young ladies?’

  She said, yes they did. They had to keep their minds off their predicament.

  ‘Good. I knew I could rely on you. There’s been a grand piano loose. It’s brought a lot of injuries and the medics have their hands full with burns from the engine-room. That, and the cholera cases. Come with me, eh?’

  Miss Hardisty collected her girls, made a quick count and found six missing, but this wasn’t the time to go and look for them. Parkinson was pushing through the troops and Miss Hardisty had to keep close. They reached the piano, lying smashed on its side. It had been lifted away from the men beneath. There were men with broken arms and legs, crushed hands, crushed ribs and stomachs, and two seemed already dead with their heads covered with table-cloths that showed a good deal of blood seeping through. Miss Hardisty was in a mental whirl but her innate compassion took charge, and she sat on the deck and talked to the men like a caring mother. She and the Wren ratings, casting aside modesty, removed some of their clothing and tore it into strips to use as makeshift bandages to hold broken bones in place for the doctors when they could get around to it. With no medical knowledge really, just her experience as a nanny of tending children who had fallen over and damaged themselves, Miss Hardisty could only hope she wasn’t making matters worse.

  While she was doing her first-aid act the tannoy came on. The system was fed through the radio room’s generator. The calm voice of Commodore Kemp came over loud and clear.

  ‘I want to give you all the facts,’ Kemp was saying. ‘The fires below are being brought under control. You needn’t worry on that score. But the engine-room is out of action and will remain so. Also, we’re making a certain amount of water. I believe the pumps will cope, though without power they’re having to be worked by hand, by relays of men. OC Troops has authorized the use of the military to back up the ship’s company, and orders for rotas will be issued shortly, I understand, from the orderly room. However, I have to warn you that it may become necessary to abandon once the typhoon’s past. As to the action, we have no idea how it’s going — or rather, how it was left, since it certainly won’t be going on now. With luck, the Admiral Richter will be far, far away when the weather moderates.’ Kemp paused. ‘There’s one more thing I have to tell you and I’m very sorry it’s necessary. Very sorry indeed, RSM Pollock has died. That is all … I shall speak to you again as things develop.’

  iii

  A buzz of comment had run through the lounges and other jam-packed spaces. Bull’s Bollocks had been a martinet with a mind that had appeared rigid as rock to those of the troops who had joined as conscripts and others with no experience of pre-war military machines. But he had always been fair, always straightforward: you knew precisely where you stood with him. So, mostly, he was going to be missed, especially in the orderly room which was now a shambles of upturned desks and scattered documents and where the rota for the pumps would have to be worked out. There was comment also about the other contents of the Commodore’s broadcast: mostly around what he hadn’t said. What was going to happen to a troopship without her main engines, whether or not the pumps kept her afloat?

  This question was asked, somewhat rhetorically, by one of the army doctors of Jean Forrest, who was still helping out. He seemed to think that on account of the two-and-a-half blue stripes of rank on her uniform she would know the answers of the sea.

  She said helplessly, ‘I really don’t know.’

  ‘We can’t just float around the Arabian Sea, getting nowhere.’

  ‘No …’

  ‘Damn great target, if there are any submarines around. And the Richter could still be close when we come through. If we come through.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘we’ll come through, don’t worry.’

  The doctor grinned. ‘You sound confident, Miss Forrest. I like confidence. It’s my stock-in-trade too. Or should be. Why are you so confident?’

  She said simply, ‘Because of Commodore Kemp.’

  ‘You really mean that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I do. I think he’s wonderful. Really great.’

  He gave her a sweeping look: she was very attractive. And there had been something in her tone that he recognized. Not infrequently he’d heard that tone himself, from nurses who’d thought he, too, was great. He grinned again and said, ‘Lucky man,’ and noted afterwards that she had blushed scarlet and had changed the subject quickly. He hoped she was right about her Commodore Kemp. Himself, he couldn’t feel quite the same certainty — but then he wasn’t a woman. Maybe this time a woman’s intuition, or whatever, would be proved right. It was always a hope.

  iv

  In the orderly room a note was made on the word of the brigade major that RSM Pollock’s regimental depot at Carlisle was to be informed: The Border Regiment was not part of the embarked brigade — Pollock had been on secondment for troopship staff duties. The brigade major hoped his regiment would look after the widow and children. When they came through, if they did, then he would write personally to Mrs Pollock. One of the things he would not put in that letter was that the regimental sergeant-major had not been accorded military honours at the last. That had not been possible, nor had a proper committal: Pollock, who was going to die anyway, had not in fact died from the cholera. He had been caught, helpless in his Neil Robertson stretcher, by the surge of sea when the first of the typhoon had struck. He had simply been washed overboard, his body bouncing down the companion at the after end of the embarkation deck and thence over the side. A number of men, themselves fighting for their lives against the enormous weight of water, had seen a body go by but had not until later realized that it had been the RSM.

  An undignified way for any RSM to leave this life. But the brigade major thought wryly that Mr Pollock would make up for it when reporting to the gates of heaven, ‘RSM Pollock. Sir! Late The Border Regiment, on detachment from Earth, reporting for duty.’ There might even be the odd scruffy saint, ordered in no uncertain terms to stand still …

  ‘Tumping rotas,’ the brigade major said briskly. ‘It’s up to us to help save the ship.’ He spoke with a confidence that he was far from feeling. Even he, a landsman, guessed that the ship was making too much water for her safety. There was a differe
nt feel, not just the feel of a ship rolling and lurching without power but a nerve-racking deadness, an inertness that gave a strong feeling of unease.

  This had been more professionally remarked on the bridge. The carpenter’s report to the chief officer had been that the ship was making water amidships to the extent that soon she would be riding dangerously low. The situation might alter for the better once the army had pulled itself together and organized the troops to the pumps. Meanwhile the working alleyways below the accommodation decks were beginning to flood, and the lower accommodation decks were themselves at risk. They were now out of bounds to the troops, with the ship’s petty officers, assisted by the army NCOs, standing guard to ensure the order was obeyed, stopping men not on duty at the pumps from going below to salvage personal effects, photographs and so on.

  For some while now, again a miracle Kemp thought, the ship had remained more or less steady — held, as Parkinson had assured Miss Hardisty, in irons, rather like the old-time square-riggers that had been held by the wind and sea to a course from which the strength of the elements would not permit them to alter.

  But a change was coming. They could all see that when the bows began to swing, to veer off to starboard. Bracewell went to the tannoy and issued a warning.

  ‘The ship is about to lie across the wind and sea. Without power on the main engines there is nothing we can do to prevent it. Everyone throughout the ship must hang on to whatever they can find.’ When the cloud had first appeared over the horizon lifelines had been hastily rigged along the open decks, where now only the ship’s crew would be allowed until the storm was past.

  ‘Touch and go now,’ Bracewell said after his broadcast. ‘Touch and go till the weather moderates … all the way through.’

  Kemp nodded. At his side Finnegan asked, ‘What’s next, sir?’

  ‘Next? Don’t ask me, sub! We’re in the hands of God from now on. You’ve never seen a typhoon, have you?’

  ‘Hurricanes in the Caribbean, sir — same thing.’