Convoy Homeward

by McCutchan,Philip

  There had been no really convincing answer to this. Lambert had mumbled the words of his shipmate: Just In Case. You Never Knew. This had made things worse. By the time he had left Pompey by train for Greenock and the Tail o’ the Bank Doris was still nagging. Currently, Lambert had no idea how the land lay. But there was one thing he did know, at any rate about Ramm, because Ramm had come out with an anxiety of his own. Ramm’s worry centred around a barmaid in the Golden Fleece in Pompey who had discovered not only that Ramm was married but Ramm’s address as well. Ramm’s anxiety could be summarized in the words of the traditional wardroom toast always drunk after dinner on Saturday nights at sea: ‘Our wives and sweethearts — may they never meet.’

  Ramm, Lambert thought, was a bloody hypocrite, his pot being slightly blacker than Lambert’s kettle.

  *

  Others aboard the Aurelian Star were concerned about the Germans. Several of the crew had lost fathers, sons or brothers in this war, not all at sea — there was the army and the RAF, and there had been the ferocity of the air raids at home in which in many cases wives or mothers or sisters had also died or been horribly wounded.

  The ship’s Chief Officer, Andrew Dartnell, spoke of this to Maconochie. ‘Bad blood, sir,’ he said. ‘There could be trouble.’ At sea, you didn’t come into much physical, personal contact with Germans. They just attacked from a distance. ‘When they’re here in the flesh —’

  ‘I don’t think you need worry, Mr Dartnell. There’ll be a perfectly adequate military escort.’

  ‘They’ll have to be allowed on deck for exercise, sir. The Geneva Convention —’

  ‘Yes, that must be observed, of course. There’ll be a conference with NOIC and the army people on arrival in Kilindini. Just start planning for it, and any difficulties’ll be sorted out then.’

  Dartnell had to be content with that. He had his own conference with the junior deck officers and with the bosun, the ship’s master-at-arms, the chief steward and the carpenter, the latter likely to be required to carry out structural alterations on deck or below. Meanwhile Kemp had his own reservations about the Germans and to a large extent agreed with Dartnell’s ideas. Also, he’d already been informed about Featherstonehaugh and his loss — throughout his seafaring life Kemp had made a particular point of knowing the details so far as he could — the worries, the hopes and ambitions — of all the men under his command. Featherstonehaugh had been very deeply upset about his father’s death in action and when Kemp had spoken to him in private, man to man, he had sounded bitter. Kemp hadn’t been surprised; but he hoped the bitterness would pass. Now, the advent of Germans aboard would be exacerbating. Kemp considered young Featherstonehaugh — he was little more than nineteen years of age — promising material and in due course hoped to forward his recommendation for a commission as sublieutenant RNVR to the Admiralty. Featherstonehaugh was in the position of not being able to put a foot wrong if he wished, as of course he did, for that recommendation to go through. He would need to watch himself when it came to the German POW presence. If Featherstonehaugh had a fault it was a tendency to impetuousness and an over-eagerness. If he became over-eager on his dead father’s behalf, as it were, there would be trouble. Kemp decided to have a word with Petty Officer Ramm.

  In the meantime he had reports to write up: reports on the departure of the convoy from Colombo, on the contact with the U-boat, and on the preparations for the reception of civilians and POWs at Kilindini.

  ‘I’ll be in my cabin,’ he said to the Officer of the Watch, ’chasing bumph. I’ll be up inside thirty seconds when I’m needed.’ He went below, clattering down the starboard ladder to the Captain’s spare cabin beneath the wheelhouse, which had been placed at his disposal. Kemp detested paper-work, tended to put off the task whenever possible. Today he sighed and temporized: first, he would start a letter to Mary his wife, for landing with the mail at Kilindini. At Colombo, just before leaving with the convoy, Kemp had had depressing news in a cable sent by Mary via the good offices of the chairman of Mediterranean-Australia Lines and addressed to him c/o the naval base. The cable had brought the news that his grandmother, who lived with them in Meopham, had died. She had gone peacefully whilst asleep. Kemp, who had so often reflected that he must be the only Master Mariner in his fifties to have a grandmother still alive, would miss her. On the early death of his mother, Granny Marsden had brought him up as her own son, and later when she had become unable to cope on her own, the Kemps had given her a home. At ninety-two she’d had a good innings and was probably better off where she had now gone. On getting the news John Kemp had gone down on his knees in the privacy of his room and had offered a prayer for her to the God in whom he very strongly believed. He had always thought Granny was wonderful. But it had been, of course, Mary who had borne the brunt of a very old lady’s whims and fancies, a very old lady’s constant demands on her time amidst the wartime worries and privations, Mary who had mostly answered the call of the walking-stick constantly banged on the floor of Granny’s bedroom after she had become bedbound, Mary who had patiently listened time and again to often-repeated, rambling stories from the long gone past, stories about how little Johnny had been a naughty boy and so on.

  Sighing again, Kemp unscrewed his fountain pen and began the letter by thanking Mary for all she had done for so long. He made a guess that she might even miss that walking-stick; at least Granny had been company in a house otherwise empty except when either he or one or other of the boys had been home on leave. Now Mary would listen alone to the bombings as Goering’s Luftwaffe loosed off its remaining bomb-loads before streaking home across the Channel for the airfields in Occupied France.

  Chapter Three

  Ashore in a hotel in Mombasa, not far from the port area of Kilindini, the families for UK had assembled to await the arrival of the convoy and the long, dangerous voyage home. They were a fairly typical representation of British Colonials, Britons who had come out over the years before the outbreak of war, in a number of cases shortly after the end of the First World War, to make their fortunes in the ownership of coffee or tea plantations or merely to enjoy a better way of life than had become possible in England where servants were often unreliable or less hardworking than once they had been or were simply less and less easy to find. Income Tax, too, had a lot to do with their seeking a new life. Now they were going back, for a whole variety of reasons. The younger menfolk to join up and fight for the country their parents had left, the older ones either because the war had put an end to profit or because they, like the sons and daughters, felt they should rally round in Britain’s hour of need.

  Old Colonel Holmes and his wife were going because they were old enough to know that death was not far away and they preferred to die in their native land. Colonel Holmes, formerly of the Royal Berkshire Regiment, had had himself seconded years before the war to the King’s East African Rifles where the chances of promotion were better; in the British regiments of the line, it was a case of waiting for dead men’s shoes and if men didn’t die you could remain a captain until into your forties.

  Colonel Holmes reached out a hand as thin as paper and rested it on his wife’s knee. He said gruffly, ‘It’s a wrench, of course, Mildred. I realize that. So many years.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Still, the regiment’s being embarked with us. There’ll be things to talk about.’

  ‘There’s nobody left, Stephen.’

  ‘Nobody that we served with, my dear. But there have been friends.’

  ‘Yes, Stephen.’

  ‘So we shall be in good company.’

  Mildred Holmes nodded but didn’t comment further. It would never come from her lips that the present officers of the regiment looked upon her husband as a fuddy-duddy, a relic of the past, a dug-out who appeared at guest nights in the mess, was politely talked to for as short a time as possible and then disregarded. Stephen had never seen that for himself; he had continued to believe as the years went by that his stories of ga
rrison life before 1914, of the Flanders trenches, and of gay days in the twenties were well received and of interest to a totally different generation. Year after year after their retirement she had tried to dissuade him from accepting the polite invitations but his reply had always been the same: ‘Oh, nonsense, my dear. They’d be disappointed.’ This had invariably been followed by a gentle laugh. ‘I’m a tradition, don’t you know.’

  A traditional bore: even as the thought came to her Mildred was distressed at her own disloyalty. Now there would be no more guest nights, no more dinner-jackets and evening gowns. In England they would be nobodies at last: an ancient colonel and his wife in a private hotel in Cheltenham, which was to be their destination. Destination, she thought, and final resting place. That was, if the Germans didn’t get them first. Mildred half wished they would. They had little money beyond her husband’s minuscule army pension, and the five guineas a week for the two of them in the Cheltenham hotel would absorb virtually all of that. But Stephen was determined to go home so that was that. He had been born in the North Riding of Yorkshire and had gone to public school at Sedbergh. Until Sandhurst, he had never been out of Yorkshire and now he wanted to see it again. They would have found a hotel up there if Mildred hadn’t for once been adamant and made it plain that after Kenya she would be unable to stand the northern climate, the long winters, the snow that regularly blocked the roads for weeks on end.

  Colonel Holmes gave a wheezy cough and fingered his close-clipped white moustache. ‘I had words with Oliphant just after breakfast.’ Captain Oliphant was the Naval Officer in Charge of the port. ‘Very helpful. Told me we’ll be going aboard the Commodore’s ship. I regard that as an honour, don’t you know. Told me the name of the Commodore, too.’

  ‘Really?’ Mildred wasn’t particularly interested.

  ‘Kemp,’ Holmes said, as though she was expected to know the name. There was no response. ‘Don’t you remember?’

  She shook her head. ‘Kemp,’ he said again. ‘The time we went home via Colombo. British India to Colombo. Then the Ardara, Mediterranean-Australia Lines. Surely you remember, Mildred?’

  ‘Well, of course I —’

  Holmes shifted irritably in his basket-work lounge chair. ‘We were at his table in the saloon. Kemp. Staff Captain, he was then. You must remember, my dear.’

  Mildred’s face seemed to vanish in fresh wrinkles. ‘Yes, I think —’

  ‘Very good chap — Kemp. Took to him immensely. First-class feller and a fine seaman, RNR, don’t you know — that accounts for him having a naval appointment.’

  ‘Yes, I see. Do you think he’ll remember us, Stephen?’

  ‘Oh, I should think so. Even —’

  ‘Liner captains must meet a very large number of people,’ she said warningly. Stephen could be in for a snub and she wouldn’t care to see that; besides, the Commodore of a convoy would presumably be a very busy man.

  ‘I had many yarns with him, my dear. Many. He was in the last war. I remember we talked about that.’

  Mildred reached into a motheaten bag beside her chair and brought out some knitting. Something for a baby. The Holmeses had no children of their own, thus no grandchildren, but there was a great-niece of whom Mildred was fond and this great-niece had a baby of six weeks. Mildred was very anxious to see her; the little scrap, a boy, would make a long sea voyage worthwhile.

  *

  Kemp said, ‘I wonder who they’ve got for us, Finnegan.’ He lowered his glasses. The Aurelian Star was making her approach to Kilindini now. She and two more former passenger liners would enter the port to embark the native troops, the rows and the families, while the remainder of the convoy stood off with the naval escort. Kemp added, ‘The civilians, I’m referring to.’

  ‘A bunch of expatriates, sir. Empire builders, I guess.’

  ‘You sound disparaging, Finnegan.’

  ‘Maybe I do, sir, Commodore. The British Empire, it’s kind of a sore point, back in the USA.’

  Kemp grunted. ‘Don’t let it show, then. They may be touchy, and they’re packing up a whole segment of their lives.’ He paused. ‘Not that I don’t know what you mean, or what I think you mean, sub. They can be a difficult bunch, used to chivvying natives around, plenty of servants, that sort of thing. Stiff-necked very largely.’ Kemp’s liner experience had all been on the Australia run, and passengers going to Australia had on the whole been of a different sort from those going to, say, India. They had mostly been going out on business trips, or conversely returning from visits to families who had emigrated and had become absorbed into the Australian way of life and outlook. As for the Australians themselves, they were a very free-and-easy bunch and had no time for the snobbery that they associated with the English. Most voyages had been good fun, with a good social life for the ships’ officers when off duty. The India-bound ships were very different. Kemp had had a number of friends in the P & O and B. I. Lines, and he’d heard enough about the sahibs and mem’-sahibs, the colonels and their ladies, the gentlemen of the India Office and the civil servants going to and from Bombay to make him glad he’d chosen the Australia run on which to build his career. The British Colonial families he was about to embark could have at least a touch of India about them. Also, he was apprehensive about carrying children to sea in wartime. The German U-boat captains, even supposing they knew, would not hold back on account of children. Kemp reflected that on the heels of the outbreak of war back in 1939, the Athenia, carrying predominantly women and children seeking safety in the USA, had been attacked and sunk.

  Captain Maconochie conned his ship in, his engines reducing to slow as the liner neared the berth, where numbers of native dockers stood ready to act as berthing parties and take the ropes and wires from for’ard and aft. Below, Chief Steward Chatfield was engaged with the Purser, John Scott. The full details of the families, the breakdown of sexes and the number of children, had not reached the ship until, half an hour earlier, the nominal lists had been put aboard from the pilot boat. The lists showed a predominance of women: eighteen men, twenty-five women, thirteen children, six male, seven female, ages ranging from four to eleven.

  Chatfield said, ‘The women without husbands, sir, they’ll have to share.’

  ‘Yes. How many without husbands, Mr Chatfield?’

  ‘Nine I make it, sir. The younger gentlemen appear to be mostly single.’ Chatfield tapped a pencil against his teeth. ‘All those excess women travelling single, sir. A bit of a problem. If you see what I mean.’

  Scott looked up, grinning. ‘We’ve all travelled with excess women, Mr Chatfield.’

  ‘Yes, we have. But in peace. Not war. There’s a difference.’

  ‘What difference? Oh, all right, don’t bother to explain. War loosens morals, though there’s never been any noticeable tightness even in peacetime. I imagine it’s not the troops you’re worried about?’

  ‘Not the Kilindini lot, sir, no, being as they’re black.’ Chief Steward Chatfield, bolshie as he might have been where self-important passengers were concerned, knew the status of persons with black faces. ‘The ladies is white, sir. There won’t be any hanky-panky there, stands to reason. After the Cape, it might be different, of course. All them Australians and New Zealanders.’

  ‘Well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, Mr Chatfield. For now, the women without husbands go into two four-berth cabins.’

  ‘Which leaves one, sir.’

  ‘Damn, so it does. Put the lady in a double berth for now, and we’ll take another look after Simonstown.’

  Chief Steward Chatfield went down to his own office. His second steward was there, going through his overtime lists. Chatfield passed him the berthing plan for the Kilindini embarkation. ‘I see trouble,’ he said.

  ‘Women?’

  ‘What else, eh?’

  The second steward gave his own version of what Purser Scott had said: ‘Perennial problem, Chief. No good looking for trouble till it strikes.’

  ‘Well, maybe n
ot, but I dunno … a lot depends on who gets the berth in the double cabin. There’s going to be nine men on their tod, missing it.’ Chatfield went across to his desk and sat down heavily, wiping sweat from his face. ‘I heard a good one from the chef this morning. Want to hear it?’

  ‘Go on?’

  ‘When royalty has a baby, they fire a twenty-one gun salute. When a nun has a baby, only a dirty old canon gets fired.’

  The second steward’s face was deadpan. ‘One of the single women a nun, then, is she?’

  Chatfield made a swiping motion towards his assistant. ‘Trouble with you, Charlie, is you’ve no bloody sense of humour.’

  *

  Brigadier Pumphrey-Hatton was on deck a little later as the troop embarkation began. He looked down critically as the native soldiers of the King’s East African Rifles were marched by companies onto the jetty. They were smart enough, he thought, marching as he had marched with the DCLI to the light infantry and riflemen’s step of 130 to the minute. As ever, the tall ones looked stiffly uncomfortable — it was hard on a tall man, and some of the natives were very tall. The companies were halted and turned into line and reported by the sergeants, who were black, to the Regimental Sergeant-Major, who was white. The RSM reported to the Colonel, who was also white of course. Pumphrey-Hatton feared that one day after the war was over and everything had gone to pot — just look at some of the appallingly common temporary officers that had been foisted onto good regiments already — at some future date officers might be black. Pumphrey-Hatton shuddered at the very thought. Black men in the mess when His Majesty’s health was drunk, black lips around glasses that might next be used by white ones. It would be the end of the world for such as he.