Lieutenant of the Line

by Philip McCutchan

  Cameron said, ‘Yes, sir. My father would have insisted on that.’

  ‘He has one himself?’

  ‘He’s a master mariner, sir.’

  ‘I see.’ Stubbs paused, then said rather sharply, ‘You’re a pretty rotten signalman, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, I just can’t get to grips with it.’

  Stubbs nodded. ‘That’s honest. Why did you join in that rating?’

  ‘The Chief PO at the recruiting office said there was a shortage of signalmen, sir, and I’d be likely to get to sea quicker than as a seaman.’

  Stubbs laughed. ‘Yes, and it’s true, oddly enough. I’m afraid the Navy’s a bit of a shambles in some ways ... seamen can spend months sweeping the parade at RNB while signalmen always go to sea. However, since you’re no signalman, how would you feel about a transfer?’

  ‘I’d like it, sir.’

  ‘Good! If you wish, I’ll put the wheels in motion. And something else: a commission. How about that?’

  ‘A commission, sir?’ Cameron looked startled.

  ‘That’s what I said. I’m sure you’ve envisaged the possibility, haven’t you?’

  ‘Well, sir—’

  ‘Of course you have,’ Stubbs said briskly, and stood up. ‘That’s settled then. In my view, and in the view of the Training Commander, you have the right qualities of leadership and common sense and personality .. . they’re all summed up in the service phrase, Officer-Like Qualities or OLQ for short. I’m prepared to put it to the Captain that you should have a White Paper started.’

  ‘Thank you, sir—’

  ‘Don’t thank me, thank yourself — and Yeoman Possett. Once it’s all put through, you’ll be sent to Ganges at Shotley for seamanship training, along with your White Paper, and after a course there you’ll be drafted to RNB Portsmouth and thence to sea. You’ll need to do a minimum of three months’ actual sea-time and get your Captain’s recommendation for a commission, then you’ll be put before a board at Portsmouth. Pass that, and you go to King Alfred in Sussex as a cadet rating. All right?’

  Leaving the Divisional Office, Cameron knew that hence-forward life would be a little different. Harder; for he had to prove himself even more and repay Stubbs’s confidence that he could make it. He had to show not only seamanship but the vital elements of leadership and initiative. OLQ would loom very important, and his ships and establishments would have eagle eyes on the White Paper, the avenue to a commission that would carry every detail and every report upon his character and abilities. He was now what was known officially as a CW Candidate, CW standing for Commission and Warrant, the hawse-hole in effect through which every member of the lower deck must pass to the warrant officers’ mess or the wardroom. And he would pass through it in the hard and bloody world of war.

  Within the next two weeks Cameron was drafted to Ganges, the former boys’ training establishment opposite Harwich at the mouth of the River Stour. Here he learned to climb the great mast on the parade-ground and sit nonchalantly on its truck; learned to scavenge as at Royal Arthur but this time with brooms and squeegees along the sloping covered way that ran between the seamen’s messes; learned elementary gunnery and torpedo work and how to handle whalers and cutters under oars and sail and how to take charge in his turn as coxwain. After six weeks he was drafted with his class to Portsmouth, with more words of praise on his White Paper. In RNB he loitered, in a seafaring sense, as a seaman of the Commodore’s Guard, belted and gaitered and slamming to the Present Arms with a ceremonial rifle made simply of wood. Time-wasting though this might be, a couple of weeks of it gave him a better insight into the Navy than he had so far acquired, for his guard duties included acting as escort for miscreants at Commodore’s Defaulters, and as gaoler in the Detention Quarters housing men under such punishments as ninety days’ detention for various offences. It also improved his parade-ground efficiency to the satisfaction of the Chief Gunner’s Mate of the Guard.

  ‘Know something, Cameron?’

  ‘What, Chief?’

  ‘It’s always said, though never in my hearing, that the order is, Royal Marines will advance in column of fours, seamen will advance in bloody great heaps. Now laugh, cos it’s true.’

  Cameron laughed.

  ‘But you’re better than that. White Paper, eh?’

  ‘Yes, Chief.’

  The Chief Gunner’s Mate clapped him on the shoulder, ‘Go to it, lad, and the best of luck. I’m putting in a word that you should get to sea pronto, and put your time in.’

  He was as good as his word; within the next week Cameron was on his way from Portsmouth Harbour Station to Thurso in the far north of Scotland, to go from there by the aged ferry St Ninian across the Pentland Firth to Lyness in the Orkneys, to join His Majesty’s destroyer Carmarthen on North Atlantic convoy escort duty. Her task was to shepherd the America and Canada bound merchant ships as far as was possible. taking into account the limited availability of escort vessels, whence the convoys would chance their luck alone; and to bring in the laden vessels homeward bound. He found life in the fo’c’sle messdeck of a lurching, water-shipping destroyer to be different again from Skegness, or the Ganges, or the Pompey barracks. Life here was real and tough and largely filthy, both as regards language and the few amenities: the seamen’s heads, or lavatories, containing only five cubicles for some eighty to ninety men, were continually blocked, had no doors, and opened into a space below the break of the fo’c’sle right alongside the messdeck and the galley. The stench was foul and wrecked the appetite. The messdecks were usually awash at sea, and water swirled about below the slung hammocks and around the lockers upon whose tops those unfortunates who had no slinging billet had to sleep. Cameron was one of these: all the billets, fitted for peacetime requirements and not enough for a full war complement, had been taken long before his arrival. His accent, he found here, was against him: it yelled White Paper. The Carmarthen already had another would-be officer in the seamen’s messdeck.

  A fat able-seaman, a man with three good conduct badges on his left arm, apprised him of this. ‘w c candidate, aren’t you, Lofty?’

  Cameron admitted the fact, accustomed by now to the inversion of cw.

  ‘Join the other little sod,’ the three-badgeman, whose name was Tomkins, said with a belch. ‘Know what? When you ‘ears the pipe, ‘ands to dinner, it includes wot it don’t say, wot is, we candidates to lunch.’ He gave a loud laugh and thrust Cameron into a stanchion with his stomach as he moved past towards his locker. ‘I s’pose somebody ‘as to be officers... .’

  Carmarthen sailed out through the boom to pick up her convoy before Cameron had been aboard four hours. She sailed into vicious weather, to be thrown about like a cork on vast waters that rose sheer like hillsides and then ebbed away as the destroyer lurched into the troughs, leaving her suspended while her men stared down into a great valley. Cameron, despite his experience in trawlers, was as sick as a dog for the whole ten days of the escort, out and home. He stuck to his duties because he had to, but he couldn’t eat anything beyond an occasional biscuit.

  A few hours from Scapa inward bound, during the morning watch, the weather moderated as the ship steamed into the lee of the land, and the waters lay flat. Hunger returned very suddenly. Carmarthen was a canteen messing ship, as opposed to the general messing system in use aboard big ships; this meant that each mess prepared its own food, which was then taken to the galley to be cooked. This morning there was nothing Cameron wanted so much as fried eggs, fried bread and bacon. These he acquired when he came off watch and took them to the galley with his mouth drooling in anticipation. They were beautifully cooked, and he carried the plate to the long scrubbed table in his mess and set it down beneath the bottom-bulge of an occupied hammock overhead. Before he had taken so much as a bite, a stockinged foot emerged from the hammock and plunged straight into the bacon and eggs. There was a shout of anger from above, and Able-Seaman Tomkins glared down. No matter that he had worn the sock for no less
than six weeks, day and night; it was spoiled and would have to be washed.

  ‘You bloody little perisher!’ Tomkins yelled down at Cameron. ‘Jus’ look wot you gorn an’ done to me fuckin’ sock!’

  There was no come-back on that; Able-Seaman Tomkins not only had three badges but some forty-odd years against Cameron’s not quite twenty. Hunger simply had to endure; but there was always a laugh around the corner. One came that morning: a leading-seaman had gone ashore from the battleship Rodney in search of women, of. which Scapa held none. Desperation and long abstinence had driven the leading-seaman to make use, so rumour said, of a sheep, an act of bestiality which had been observed and reported. When the miscreant had been brought under escort to Captain’s Defaulters, his excuse had been that he had got drunk in the shore canteen — where in fact each man from the fleet was allowed two pints only of Brickwood’s beer sent up from Portsmouth — and thought the sheep was a Wren with a duffel-coat on.

  After this interlude, and a run ashore in the Orkneys’ bleak desolation, it was back to sea again. And again after that, in continuously filthy weather. Again and again, until Cameron’s necessary sea-time was almost up. There had been some action, but nothing very spectacular; there had been the rounding-up of stray merchant ships whose engines had failed them, or whose steering was erratic. There had been false alarms from the Asdic, and false sighting reports from the lookouts that had sent the ship’s company to action stations and caused plenty of sour comment and swearing. And now, on this current run out of Scapa, it was apparently as peaceful as ever even though a highly important convoy was due to cross eastward with valuable cargoes from Halifax, Nova Scotia, a convoy that would be escorted home by Carmarthen and the other destroyers of her flotilla — an exceptionally strong escort that had drained other convoys of their protection — once the outward-bound merchantmen had passed beyond the area of attack. Placidly, in their eight columns —five of four ships each, three of five, the longer columns steaming in between the shorter ones at the convoy speed of seven knots — the ships advanced. With five cables between columns and three cables between individual ships in each column, the mass covered some five square miles of the Atlantic.

  No attack until now: not until the busy Asdics had spoken and Cameron had sighted that feather of water made by a periscope. Carmarthen hurtled on under full power, Cameron still on lookout since his action station as per Watch and Quarter Bill happened to be the same as his three-watch cruising station, still sweeping his arc as the Asdic continued with its ghostlike wailing pings.

  A moment later, nightmare burst.

  With her captain, Lieutenant-Commander Hewson, now in charge on the compass platform, Carmarthen was streaking up to overtake one of the merchantmen on her way to engage the sighted U-boat with depth charges, and passing close, when a shout from the captain of Number Two gun on the fo’c’sle, looking like a daylight ghost in his white anti-flash gear, indicated a torpedo coming in from starboard, slap across Carmarthen’s hurtling bow. Just as the shout came, the torpedo struck the great wall-sided merchant ship. There was a huge explosion and a blast of super-heated air swept the destroyer’s bridge, bringing with it more lethal matter: slivers of blasted metal moving at the speed of light. Cries came from the decks, from the compass platform itself. Something bounced off Cameron’s steel helmet, which went spinning out into the Atlantic wastes. Hewson sagged in a corner with the top of his head missing; on the deck the Yeoman of Signals lay with his neck spouting blood, his head nowhere to be seen. Stephenson, Officer of the Watch, was lying across the guard-rail with his entrails spread wide. As Cameron looked in sheer horror, the body slid away into the sea, leaving its bloody trail.

  Cameron looked all around in disbelief, then took in the fact that no officer was now on the compass platform; no petty officer either. Below in the wheelhouse, the quartermaster would be able to see events through the ports, but would be in need of orders. The other bridge lookouts had a dazed, uncomprehending look. Cameron went, shaking in every limb, to the binnacle and the voice-pipe. In action, the Torpedo-Coxwain would be at the wheel, and thank God for it. Cameron spoke down the voice-pipe. ‘Cox’n, it’s Ordinary Seaman Cameron here. Both officers are dead, and I —’

  ‘All right, lad, I’ll keep her clear of the convoy. You just stay where you are and act as a communication number. I’ll send a messenger and get Jimmy on the bridge pronto.’ Jimmy was the time-honoured lower-deck name for the First Lieutenant. And for Cameron’s money he couldn’t get there fast enough. As Cameron looked across towards the stolidly-steaming merchantmen of the convoy, a deafening noise and a blast of flame came from Carmarthen’s fo’c’sle. Jags of metal glowed red where the breakwater had been, and Number One gun leaned drunkenly to starboard.

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