Convoy of War (A John Mason Kemp Thriller)

by Philip McCutchan

  TEN

  Various domestic matters were to engage the attentions of a number of the men in the convoy once they had entered the blessings, the mixed blessings for some, of the land. One of the less fortunate was to be Mr Portway, for events had stirred up trouble back across the sea in Essex, trouble that arose for no other reason than the fact that there was a war on and Mrs Portway’s laundry had been put out of action by a bomb. Mrs Portway had never done her own washing: it was infra dig for the wife of the second steward of the Ardara. The trouble was that hers had been the only laundry left in business in Thurrock and she had quarrelled with the only one she knew in Grays. But she knew there was one in Tilbury, for that was where the second steward of the Ardara had on occasions negotiated for the laundering of his underlings’ white jackets, so Mrs Portway went personally to Tilbury: she had tried telephoning but the instrument was out of order; Hitler again, no doubt. But it wasn’t far by train.

  The moment she set eyes on the fat girl with the poor skin she had the feeling she’d seen her somewhere before but at first she couldn’t think where. Then she had been asked her name.

  ‘Portway,’ she said. ‘Mrs Portway. Thurrock.’

  The girl’s face had been a picture — a picture of guilt Mrs Portway knew, for suddenly it had come back. The girl outside the Co-op, and the funny look that had passed between the girl and Herbert. A pity she hadn’t tackled him about it there and then. Her face suffused and her jaw came out and she grasped her umbrella like a lance.

  ‘You seem to know the name,’ she said.

  ‘Oh no — no I never — ’

  ‘Never what?’

  ‘Never heard the name,’ Mabel said, almost in tears already.

  ‘I don’t believe you, girl. What’s your name?’

  ‘Miss Tucker.’

  ‘Tucker. I’ll remember that. Now let me tell you something: I saw you once, not long ago, in Grays. You all but bumped into my husband. I sensed something then, I did.’ It was odd, the way things went, the way the human mind and memory, or awareness, worked: all of a sudden other things had all come back to Mrs Portway — the times Herbert, when in Tilbury between voyages in peacetime and when somewhere up north after the war had started, hadn’t been home when he should have been. Always some excuse, harder to find once the Ardara had quit her Tilbury base, but he always found something and here before her, in the laundry, was the cause. It stood to reason and Mrs Portway was convinced she wasn’t imagining anything.

  ‘You little bitch,’ she said. ‘You dirty little whore!’

  Mabel found strength, hidden reserves of pride coming to the surface. ‘Old cow,’ she said as the tears ran. ‘Give it him yourself and he wouldn’t have wanted me. I’m not all that attractive, I know that.’

  ‘No, you’re certainly not,’ Mrs Portway said. ‘In any case, you’ve seen the last of him now.’ With that she marched out of the laundry, head high and followed by astonished and intrigued stares. Going home to Thurrock as fast as she could she wrote a letter to Mr Portway, addressing it HT Ardara, c/o GPO London. This was two days before the Prime Minister in the Prince of Wales left Scapa Flow; and the GPO, efficient as always, delivered the letter via the RN postal service to Rosyth in time for it to join the mail being placed aboard one of the cruisers of the Prime Minister’s escort, joining from the Firth of Forth.

  ***

  Four days after the Prince of Wales had passed through the lines of the OB convoy, the telephone rang in Mason Kemp’s home in Meopham and Mary answered with her heart in her mouth: in wartime the telephone could be an instrument of torture. You never knew what the news might be.

  ‘Mrs Kemp?’

  She recognized the voice of the chairman of the Mediterranean-Australia Steam Navigation Company and she braced herself. She said, ‘Oh — yes, Sir Edward.’

  There was a chuckle: that was one hundred per cent reassuring. ‘Home to roost, Mrs Kemp — not home exactly, but I’m sure you understand. All’s well, anyway.’

  ‘Thank you so much — ’

  ‘Rubbish, least I can do. Is everything all right your end — boys well?’

  ‘Oh yes, Sir Edward, thank you. I — ’

  ‘Anything you want, any time. Just let us know.’ Sir Edward said a brief goodbye and rang off. There were tears in Mary’s eyes, tears of relief and gratitude. The Line was always caring, never more so since war had broken out — even though her husband was at least temporarily away from the Line, they still regarded him as one of their own, and herself as well.

  She went upstairs to tell Granny Marsden the good news. The old girl was looking rather peaky she thought, but she was, as ever, as bright as a button mentally. She said, ‘Well, I never doubted Johnny would get wherever he was going. Where is he, do you know?’

  ‘Of course I don’t, and you should know better than to ask.’

  ‘I’m not likely to tell Hitler,’ Granny Marsden said tartly.

  ‘That’s not the point and you know it. Careless talk — ’

  ‘All that rubbish! In the Great War — ’

  ‘That was a different war.’

  ‘Yes, it was.’ The old lady gave a heavy sigh. ‘And even then I was an old woman. I doubt if I’ll be here much longer, Mary.’

  Mary laughed. ‘You’ll be here for ever. You know that too.’

  ‘I don’t,’ Granny Marsden said, and all at once Mary Kemp realized she meant it. Something was up, but no use asking questions. Granny Marsden kept her own counsel. But she would ask Dr Ford to look in. Mary went downstairs, thinking that the old girl’s age made the end inevitable soon and it was silly to pretend they couldn’t do with the room and an end to constant attention that kept Mary largely tied to the house — help was getting harder and harder to find, with all the women doing war work of one sort or another, munitions, conducting buses and so on, or in the women’s services. But Mary would miss her, she was often good company, and John would be really sad if anything should happen. She wrote to him that night, care of the GPO like Mrs Portway, but she didn’t worry him about his grandmother. The letter was largely news of the boys.

  ***

  After arrival in Placentia Bay and the rendezvous with the USS Augusta carrying President Roosevelt, HMS Prince of Wales passed the news to the shore authorities that Captain Peter Redgrave, master of the SS Stephen Starr, had died aboard and had been committed to the sea. This was passed by the Admiralty to York in the form of a telegram addressed to Redgrave’s father, but it was the sister who opened it and sat staring at it for a long time, in silence. Then she took it to her father’s bedside and read it out.

  He seemed uninterested, far away. He said, ‘Now they’re all gone. Just you and me left.’

  ‘Just you and me,’ she said, her voice without expression. There would be no help with her father now, no one to share the mental strain, not that Peter had come home much. But he’d always been available, could be contacted somewhere, and that had been something to hang on to. No more now. She wanted to cry but couldn’t: she felt dried up inside. Damn this war! Where was it getting anybody? Past scenes moved across her mental vision, long-gone childhood days, excursions out in the moors and dales to the north of York, the whole family going out by train and bus until her father had bought an old car which made things easier. She remembered driving through Wensleydale from Bedale and Leyburn to the little market town of Hawes, where once they’d spent the night and next day gone on to Clapham and Ingleborough, by way of a wild, mountainous road, and had then climbed up through woodland and past a lake, all the way up to the huge pothole of Gaping Ghyll, deep enough, it was said, to take St Paul’s Cathedral into its great stomach. Peter, adventurous even then, had gone close to the brink and they’d all held their breath ... she and Peter had been great companions in those days. Wonderful days that would never come again. She had been about to write to her brother when the telegram had come and now the sudden realization that there was no longer any need came like an awakening blow and
she began to cry. She envied her father, with his mind so far gone that the news would never really penetrate.

  ***

  Without the Stephen Starr which had not so far rejoined, the OB convoy slid to its anchorage off the port of Halifax, Nova Scotia, under a grey, windswept sky with low cloud and an unpleasant, damp atmosphere though it was not currently raining. The Commodore remained on the bridge, watching as the ships’ cables rattled out and the many anchors took the sea bed, watching a pinnace of the Royal Canadian Navy cutting across towards the Ardara from the port.

  ‘Here comes the brass,’ he said to Williams.

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Williams sounded eager and was wearing his best uniform: the starched white collar was elegance itself and he was showing a lot of cuff. Best cap too, but with the gold badge nicely tarnished to prove his sea-time: the young officers, Kemp was aware, frequently left a new cap-badge in a cup of salt water until it looked as though it had been round Cape Horn half a dozen times.

  Kemp grinned. ‘I said, brass. There won’t be any Wrens aboard the pinnace.’

  ‘No, sir. But later on — ’

  ‘If you’re asking permission to go ashore, Williams, you’ll have it the moment all the bumph and bull has been sorted out. Satisfied?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, sir.’ Williams, anxious for the shore’s as yet unknown offerings, also wanted the mail to come aboard. You never knew: there might be something from a girl and hope sprang eternal in his breast. He stood there with Mason Kemp as the chief officer reported that the ship had got her cable. The Captain passed down the orders to secure the slips and stoppers; Kemp rubbed at his eyes and left the bridge after a word with Hampton, making for the latter’s day-cabin put at his disposal for the reception of the naval brass, which consisted of a commander RCN and two lieutenants of the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve. Not, in fact, as brassy as all that; and, as it turned out, there was a Wren as well. She was an attractive girl and Kemp was aware of his assistant making what he believed were called sheep’s eyes at her but without much success. Kemp was glad he was no longer young himself: it was an awful strain on young officers trying to fit the war around their love lives. Kemp knew: he’d been young in the last one.

  ***

  The mail, sent across the water from Newfoundland by the Prime Minister’s escort on its arrival in Placentia Bay, reached Halifax and was distributed by boat around the ships in the anchorage. Kemp read his letters after the navy had gone back inshore with his convoy report for forwarding to the Admiralty. A bill from Gieves, the inevitable accompaniment of life in the navy: uniform was not cheap but Gieves never minded waiting so long as you paid a little on account now and again. In fact they hated it if you paid it all off: that could mean you’d shifted your custom to Miller, Rayner and Haysom. A letter from his brother, who was a solicitor in Worthing, doing good business on wills in an area where the average age was sixty-five plus. Some bumph from the Officers’ Federation and the Master Mariners’ Association and a reminder about increased subscriptions to a golf club.

  Nothing from Mary, which was the one letter he wanted.

  Well, that was the war. She would have written, of course, but the letter could have missed the mail, just missed a sailing. It was largely a matter of putting home out of your mind, but you couldn’t do that entirely and now there was a nagging worry that something could have happened. Bombs could come down even on such unlikely places as Meopham when the Luftwaffe bomb aimers jettisoned their remaining loads on the way home to report the flaring bonfires to Hermann Goering. But if that had happened he believed Sir Edward would find a way of letting him know speedily, faster than anything from the Admiralty.

  In his cabin in the bowels of the Ardara Mr Portway, together with a bottle of beer, read his fate. He read it from two sources, his wife and Mabel Tucker, and he didn’t care for what he read. Mrs Portway appeared to be in a state of shock at the time of writing her letter: she never wanted to see him again and she was going to find out about a divorce. The loss of Mrs Portway would in fact be less disastrous but she wasn’t the only consideration: Mr Portway owned his house, or rather he and his wife owned it jointly; and that fact came in for heavily underscored threat in the letter. So did alimony. Mr Portway felt already bankrupt and turned for comfort to Mabel’s letter. This he found to be a sort of Dear John: Mabel had had to go off work as a result of the attack in the laundry, she was ever so upset about what had been said in public, she was already finding the deception something of a strain, what with the war and all, and now she felt that it had better end.

  Mr Portway, pale-faced, said, ‘Bugger,’ and screwed up both letters and flung them viciously into his waste-paper basket. Then, since his wife’s had uttered those threats of divorce and sequestration, he retrieved that one and smoothed it out. It might be needed.

  That evening Mr Portway went ashore on the binge.

  ***

  Lieutenant Williams also went ashore, his objective a little different. For him there had been none of the hoped-for letters from such girlfriends as his imagination could drum up as likely correspondents: just the usual long letter from his mother, full of nothing in basis. The war was dragging on and on, wasn’t it, and the queues were awful and people were so rude in shops and on the buses. She had bumped into Mrs This and Mrs That and they’d asked so nicely after him and she told them he was assistant commodore of a convoy and that so much depended on him, she was really ever so proud, but it just went to show. Williams didn’t know what it went to show but evidently it showed something to his mother. There was mention of his father: Dad was working ever so hard, what with the City and the ARP, he was dead on his feet most of the time and had become bad-tempered and, it was funny, but he seemed to get worse every time she talked about Paul being an assistant commodore. His mother thought he might be jealous — jealous of his own son, did you ever!

  Shoving the letter into his pocket, Lieutenant Williams reflected that old man Kemp might get equally bad-tempered at mention of the title.

  The mail for Petty Officer Frapp brought mundane tidings of home. Portsmouth hadn’t suffered much just lately from the bombings but things were getting hard and the prices in the shops were enough to give the cat kittens and Mrs Frapp didn’t know how she was going to manage, she didn’t really. Frapp’s allotment note went nowhere, neither did her wages — she’d just changed her job to get a bit extra and had got taken on at the Landport Drapery Bazaar as a cleaner, and that wasn’t doing her arthritis any good at all.

  ‘Moan, moan, bloody moan,’ Frapp said angrily to himself. What a welcome to a sodding place like Halifax after sweating his guts out across the bloody North Atlantic ...

  ***

  The mail brought real anxiety to Leading Signalman Mouncey and with a shake in his hands he sought out Lieutenant Williams, who aboard the Ardara could be considered his Divisional Officer and as such someone to turn to, though in all truth that wet weekend wouldn’t be able to help a snail off a dandelion. But Williams, he found, had already pissed off ashore; and after that it became a case of an ill wind blowing a bit of good his way.

  Leaving Williams’ cabin door, he all but bumped into Mason Kemp.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ he said, backing off.

  ‘All right, Mouncey.’ Kemp looked at him hard. ‘Is something the matter?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Mouncey said. His voice, like his hands, shook. ‘The mail, sir. I was looking for Mr Williams, sir.’

  ‘News from home, is it, Mouncey?’

  ‘The missus, sir. A neighbour wrote, like. She’s poorly ... in hospital, she is, in Devonport, sir.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Mouncey. Come along to my cabin.’ Kemp turned and strode along the alleyway. Mouncey followed, suddenly feeling a great weight easing off a trifle: the Commodore might do something.

  In his cabin Kemp said, ‘Sit down, Mouncey. Let’s have it all.’ He paused. ‘Like a drink?’

  ‘Thank you, sir. Thank you very much, sir.’
Mouncey sat on the edge of a chair, his cap on his knees, his weather-beaten face screwed up like a monkey’s, his eyes showing the gnawing anxiety. He took the glass of whisky, imbibed a large gulp, and coughed and spluttered. ‘Beg pardon, sir — ’

  ‘That’s all right, Mouncey. Now — tell me the facts and we’ll see what we can do.’

  ‘Yessir.’ It all came out, the words tumbling over each other in a torrent, so fast that Kemp could make neither head nor tail of them. But he didn’t interrupt, didn’t hurry the man; when Mouncey paused for breath he asked if he could read the letter for himself.

  ‘Course you can, sir.’ Mouncey passed it over, a crumpled sheet of Woolworth’s lined paper from a pad. Kemp read that Mrs Mouncey had been knocked down by a double-decker bus in Fore Street, Devonport, while it was turning short of the bomb damage. The neighbour didn’t know the full extent of the injuries but she said Mrs Mouncey was still unconscious at the time of writing. An ambulance had come along fast; the neighbour had happened to see Mrs Mouncey being lifted aboard and fancied there were head injuries, a fact that had been confirmed to her by Freedom Fields hospital.

  That was all; Kemp had a feeling the neighbour was softening the blow. So had Mouncey. Mouncey said, ‘I reckon she’s bad, sir.’

  ‘She may not be, Mouncey. Don’t jump to conclusions.’ Kemp tapped the letter. ‘This was written some while ago. If there had been ... well, worse news, then you’d have been informed. A telegram from the Commodore at the Devonport depot.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ That hadn’t occurred to Mouncey; now he looked a shade happier, but he said, ‘She’ll be wanting me, sir.’

  ‘Of course she will. I understand that, Mouncey. But the exigencies of war — you must understand that too. What I’m saying is, it’s impossible to get you home faster than by remaining just where you are.’

  Mouncey nodded. ‘Yes, sir. But we’re going to be in Halifax a fair time — ’