Convoy East (A John Mason Kemp Thriller)

by Philip McCutchan

  ‘Rough,’ Kemp said with sympathy. ‘Very rough.’

  ‘Yes. I know it’s awfully early days, but what I had in mind was remarriage —’

  ‘Very early days!’

  ‘Yes, I agree. But they do remarry — she’s so young. But without a leg!’

  ‘That’s not our worry, Miss Forrest. What we have to do is get her into Gibraltar and the military hospital, that’s all.’ As an automatic action Kemp was continually scanning the seas through his binoculars, only half his mind on the conversation. ‘Now about that other girl, the pregnant one. Is she pregnant?’

  ‘I don’t know. She’s tending to to walk back on that...says she could be out in her dates, but I don’t believe it. I think she just doesn’t want to risk being landed at Gibraltar.’

  ‘She’s not going to be landed at Gibraltar. What about the doctor?’

  Jean Forrest sighed. ‘She refuses to be examined by him. Just simply refused point blank —’

  ‘Refusing an order? What do they do to Wrens for that, Miss Forrest?’ There was a twinkle in Kemp’s eye. Had he been a girl, pregnant or not, he wouldn’t have submitted himself to Dr O’Dwyer’s investigations. ‘Drum ‘em out of the service, or what?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be sure — in this sort of case. I don’t know...we don’t come under the Naval Discipline Act, you know. I think one just tries to talk them out of bloody-mindedness!’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘I tried but failed. As a matter of fact, I did say...’

  ‘That you’d refer the matter to me?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you indeed, Miss Forrest,’ Kemp said crisply. ‘I really don’t see what a pregnancy has to do with me.’

  ‘You’d have come up against them in the liners, surely?’

  ‘Like hell! The Line never took women who were pregnant beyond a certain stage. You’ve probably no idea of the havoc caused to places like Port Said or Colombo when a ship arrives with more souls than it left its previous departure port with! The shore officials seem quite unable to cope with things like that...numbers that don’t tally.’ They talked for a few moments about the Mediterranean-Australia Line and of its chairman and then Jean Forrest excused herself: she was going below again to see Susan Pawle. She would, she said, send Wren Smith to Kemp’s cabin when he gave the word. That made Kemp feel pressured: he had no recollection of having actually agreed to see the girl but had no doubt given his consent simply by his silence on the point. When Jean Forrest had left the bridge Kemp spoke to Sub-Lieutenant Finnegan.

  ‘Pregnant Wrens, Finnegan.’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘More in your line than mine, I dare say. Or am I being slanderous?’

  ‘I guess so, sir. Members of the WRNS are all young ladies, so I’m told.’ Finnegan was straight-faced.

  Kemp glared. ‘Are you being funny, Finnegan?’

  ‘Me, sir? Gee, sir, no —’

  ‘All right, all right. I have a problem, and you’re closer to the girl in age than I am. How do I get it out of her...the fact of whether or not she’s pregnant? She seems in two minds on the point, probably for nefarious reasons. I don’t think I need to explain further, do I? I’m sure the galley wireless has been at full blast.’

  ‘You can say that again, sir —’

  ‘I don’t want to say it again, Finnegan. I’ve said it once and that’s enough.’

  ‘Yes, sir. My apologies for being a Yank, sir.’ Finnegan grinned he and the Commodore, despite the difference in age and rank, had a good understanding of one another, as apparently his own predecessor, Cutler, had had. ‘I guess I’ve heard it all, yes. Right or wrong, though, I wouldn’t know. But if you’re asking my advice, sir, well, I guess I’d — I’d kind of scare it out of her. Threaten her with Gibraltar and a load of brass hats.’ Finnegan hesitated. ‘The fact is, sir, she could be landed at Gibraltar the way things have turned out. With that third officer.’

  Kemp nodded: obviously! Sheer weariness seemed to be slowing him down mentally. Wren Smith would have ticked over that being put ashore was very much on the cards now; she would perhaps have changed her story accordingly, as Jean Forrest had suggested.

  Bracing himself against the Wolf Rock’s pitch and roll, Kemp gave a heartfelt sigh and mentally cursed the carnal proclivities of seamen ashore in Portsmouth.

  IV

  ‘Look out for Christ’s sake!’

  Petty Officer Ramm roared the words out as something shifted and the bomb moved. It moved just a couple of feet, downwards and sideways. Stripey Nelson just missed being crushed by its weight of metal and high explosive, giving a startled yelp as the thing grazed past his backside. There was a searing pain and he felt blood run. Reaching behind himself, his fingers touched bare flesh. Some projection on the bomb’s casing had ripped through his oilskin and the seat of his trousers, and had torn his skin as well.

  Everyone in the compartment had moved away instinctively. Ramm was the first to approach the bomb again as it settled into its new position.

  ‘Settled firmer than bloody ever,’ he said. ‘But I reckon it’s no nearer going up. Would have done on the move if it was going to.’ He looked around, pointed a finger at one of the ordinary seamen of the guns’ crews. ‘You. Report to the bridge, pronto. Move!’ He turned to Stripey Nelson. ‘What’s up with you, eh? Clutching your bum like a —’

  ‘It ‘urts, PO.’ Nelson explained what had happened.

  ‘Right! Nip along to the quack...nothing’s going to happen here and you might get blood poisoning or some such.’ As Nelson moved away still clutching his rump, the PO yelled out, ‘An’ get a ‘hurt certificate, remember, so after the war you can blame it on ‘Is Majesty an’ get a flaming pension for your piles.’

  From the bridge, Captain Champney called the engine-room with the warning that the bomb had shifted a little downwards. Mr Turnberry was as phlegmatic as Petty Officer Ramm: if the bomb had settled down it was probably no more dangerous than before. The trouble, of course, was that no-one knew just how dangerous it had been, and the engine-room staff would be the first to suffer after the men who were trying to free it. Chief Engineer Turnberry had a reasonably vivid imagination and didn’t need telling that if the thing did go up they would all be sealed right into their own coffin. And the ship’s violent motion, the appalling heave and twist, plunge and lift again, wasn’t helping the bomb’s stability even if it was jammed as the Navy seemed to be saying. Something could give again, like it had just done.

  V

  Jock Campbell, chief steward, was no believer in bombs that didn’t go up. True, there had been some during the various blitzes that periodically slaughtered the civvies back home, but mostly they had gone up in the end, just when everyone thought they were safe and had begun a drift back through the police cordons to rescue what they could from the debris of their homes. Or just when the heavy rescue squads were about to lift an injured person to safety from under a collapsed building. That had happened to his own aged parents in Glasgow. Campbell had pieced the story together when his ship had come in a couple of weeks later, talking to the police and firemen and rescue squads. His mother and father had been pinned down, like Third Officer Pawle, and both had been alive and apparently not injured, or not badly, and there had been every hope of getting them out. Jock Campbell’s father had been heard singing, presumably to keep the old lady’s spirits up, one of Harry Lauder’s songs, Keep right on to the end of the road, keep right on round the bend...The end had in fact come while he’d been singing, a UXB having decided to go up after all. Afterwards, nothing had been found, just a load of debris, the old home where Jock had been born and brought up, down in the Gorbals. He’d not been back to Glasgow since. The missus and kids had been evacuated from his own marital home in Liverpool after the first of the blitzes on the port — he’d established them with a farming cousin near Wrexham.

  Now, with that bomb poised aft to blow him to where bloody Hitler had already blow
n his mum and dad, Jock Campbell found his mind straying from the paperwork he’d set himself to do, which was largely concerned with the catering department overtime sheets there was plenty of that, what with women embarked and all, the Captain’s steward for one dancing attendance not only on the Old Man but on the Commodore and the WRNS officers as well. His mind was on Glasgow as he’d known it years ago, both before he’d gone to sea and since. A teeming city, extremes of wealth and poverty, a vibrant city keeping itself afloat on a sea of whiskies and chasers. On Saturday nights the whole place seemed to get drunk, down in the Gorbals and Sauchiehall Street in the centre of the city especially. The police had been bastards, big tough men with leather faces, patrolling in pairs with long truncheons, like in Liverpool. Always in the ports the police were a different breed from those of the rest of the British Isles. They needed to be. Seamen and the inhabitants of the ports were a tough lot, hard to handle when drunk, rampaging through the Saturday night streets, looking for fights. Especially in Glasgow. I belong tae Glasgow, dear old Glasgow toon...Shades of Will Fyffe.

  Nostalgia: Glasgow would never be the same again when this lot was over, Jock Campbell reflected. Too much of it had gone already, under the high explosive and the incendiaries. The bloody Jerries would probably get the Broomielaw, the quay in the heart of the city whence so many times Jock had sailed down the Clyde to Rothesay on the Isle of Bute, Glasgow’s summer playground where the clean wind blew down from Loch Striven and there was all the fun of the fair on high days and holidays. It was on board one of the Clyde paddle-steamers that Jock had met Mary MacGregor who was to become his wife. Already himself a junior ship’s steward on leave, he’d been peering down the skylight at the great beams of the reciprocating engines as they lifted and dropped and turned the paddlewheels, when he’d heard the sound of a gramophone, a portable one that when not in use shut down into a handy box, very easy to carry. Looking round, he’d seen a middle aged couple, the man with a flat cloth cap on his head, like his own dad, and the gramophone playing. Harry Lauder was singing. Roaming in the gloaming, on the bonnie banks o’ Clyde, Roaming in the gloaming wi’ a lassie by my side...

  Mary had been with them and Jock had been immediately drawn to her. He grinned and made some comment about Harry Lauder. ‘My dad’s mad on him,’ he said.

  It had been Mary who’d answered, returning his grin. ‘So’s my dad,’ she said.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I quite like him too,’ she said.

  ‘My dad met him once,’ Jock said. That was enough: Mr MacGregor was interested and they talked about Harry Lauder and the old days, the days of the last war when the young Jock had been a lad. They’d got along fine and that had been the start of it. It had been Harry Lauder who had brought Mary and himself together. After that, after a decent interval of calling on the MacGregors and getting the two families to meet so that it was all respectable there had been plenty of roaming in the gloaming when Jock had leave, plenty of the bonnie banks o’ Clyde even though in the upper reaches by the great shipyards of John Brown and the others the banks hadn’t been all that bonnie really. Long Sundays had been spent on the banks of Lomond-side, or walking by the Gareloch or taking again the paddle-steamer to Rothesay or further down the Firth of Clyde to Ardrossa in Ayrshire, or across to Lamlash on Arran. That had been about the time Job Number 534 had come alive again and the shipyards had once again been busy, Jock’s father going back to work after a long period of unemployment, and Mary’s father too, both working on what was to become the great Cunard-White Star liner Queen Mary. On the day the Queen came herself to launch her namesake, Jock and Mary had become officially engaged and on his next leave from the sea they had married.

  Now, Jock wondered if he would ever see Mary again. If that bomb blew the stern off they would have had it, everyone aboard. There was too much HE below hatches for anything to survive, and the convoy and escort wasn’t going to stop to pick up the odd survivors. Even if the bomb didn’t go up, they had yet to get through to Trinco in far-off Ceylon and there would be plenty of hostile forces around determined that they wouldn’t make it.

  Best not to think about it.

  Jock gave himself a mental shake and concentrated on the overtime sheets. A moment later Botley’s face came round the door and Jock Campbell looked up.

  ‘Nothing to do, eh?’

  ‘D’you mind, Chief. Just dropped in to keep you up to date, like. Course, if you don’t —’

  ‘Let’s have it,’ Campbell said.

  ‘Right. That Wren.’

  ‘Which bleeding Wren?’

  ‘The one with the nipper up the spout —’

  ‘Just hearsay.’

  ‘Well, maybe. But I’ve just seen ‘er with Harrison.’

  ‘Mr Harrison to you, Botley.’ Campbell rolled a blotter over some inked figures. ‘Doing what?’

  Botley smirked. ‘Well — not doing that. Not likely in the cabin alleyway —’

  ‘She up there? Wrens didn’t ought to be, you know that. Only the officers.’

  ‘I know. But it’s not up to me to shout the odds at the chief officer, is it? What they were doing was, Mr Harrison was passing a bottle of gin to the popsie. They didn’t know I’d seen. I just thought I’d warn you, Chief. Make out the gin stock’s low, eh? Mr Harrison ‘e won’t part with it if it’s on ration.’

  Campbell said, ‘Now look. I’d be a right Charlie to leave UK with low gin stocks, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘Sacrifice yourself for the unborn, Chief. Do a good turn.’

  Campbell blew out a long breath. ‘I know what you’re on about, all right. Abortion. A bite late now — after a bottle’s been passed over. Anyway, the only thing I could do is inform the skipper — I can’t institute a ration off my own bat. Inform the skipper, and then what? Mr Harrison puts two and two together and it adds up to Steward Botley — doesn’t it? I suppose you hadn’t thought of that?’

  Botley hadn’t. He said as much, and after some thought, added, ‘Well, I reckon p’raps it’s not our business. Like you said...too late now. Seems a pity, though.’ He left the cabin, his yellow duster dangling down his leg. He was frowning. Abortion...plenty of girls who’d been indiscreet or careless tried to find a way out of their predicament when they had the know-how, true enough. For Botley, however, things were the other way. He and the missus wanted kids, wanted them badly. They’d tried hard enough but always a nil result. Once, there had been a miscarriage, a terrible disappointment. It really hurt Botley that a potential mother could even think of aborting herself.

  VI

  Dr O’Dwyer asked, ‘What seems to be the trouble?’ Leading Seaman Nelson stood before him, face anguished, still clad in his oilskin.

  ‘Me bottom, Doctor.’

  ‘Ah...’ There was a strong smell of whisky and O’Dwyer, slumped in a chair, was wreathed in cigarette smoke. Stripey Nelson noticed a box of peppermints on the chest-of-drawers beside the doctor’s bunk, no doubt for use when the Captain called for him. ‘Can you be more precise?’

  ‘Tore it on the projy.’

  ‘Projy?’

  ‘The bomb, like. Bit o’ jagged metal —’

  ‘I’d better examine you,’ O’Dwyer said.

  ‘Want me to strip orf, Doctor?’

  ‘The affected part, yes.’

  Leading Seaman Nelson took off his oilskin, dropped his trousers and pants, and turned round in a bent attitude. There was a silence while the doctor peered at the affected part. Then he said, ‘You’ll have had your jabs, of course?’

  ‘Yes, Doctor. TABT in Pompey. Couple o’ weeks ago. Booster, like.’

  ‘Yes, I see. Then in that case...nothing to worry about, I assure you...some ointment and a bandage.’ O’Dwyer’s words seemed to slur a little. Stripey Nelson waited in his undignified attitude. Nothing happened, but after a while he heard something like a snore. He looked round: Dr O’Dwyer was fast asleep.

  Stripey stared indignantly. ‘My arse!’ he said. ‘Off
icers!’

  SEVEN

  I

  After the bomb had shifted that little way Harrison lowered the whip of the after derrick again in an attempt to secure it with a heavy rope strop around its middle. Even if the thing couldn’t be lifted clear it could perhaps at least be held in its position and made safe against another downward slide.

  Petty Officer Ramm was taking charge below, feeling sick in the pit of his stomach. Something, he knew, could have happened internally when the bomb shifted. His hands shook; he was going to be clumsy but it couldn’t be helped. Close up to the bomb, waiting for the descent of the whip, he found, like Jock Campbell, home thoughts crowding. Imminent death had a way of concentrating the mind on the essentials, and Ramm knew, had always known deep down, that his own first essential was his wife Greta and his small house in North End, Pompey. Never mind the others, the one-night stands as they’d mostly been, worldwide. You could scarcely name a port anywhere where Ramm had been that he hadn’t had a woman. Gibraltar, Malta, Port Said, even Aden. On to Colombo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Wei-hai-Wei, the latter known to generations of British seamen as Wee-I. Ramm had burned the candle at both ends. He could recall pay parade as a young AB when the ships’ companies had mustered by ship’s book numbers, junior ratings receiving their pittances from the paymaster on the flat tops of their caps held out in front of them, chief and petty officers taking it more privately in their hands; parades when his cap had shaken in his hand so badly that he’d been in danger of losing his cash. You couldn’t bang all night without it having some effect, and often Ramm had been glad enough to clear away to sea for recovery. That was one thing: there was another, currently more serious to his mental state: the women hadn’t all been overseas. He’d had others in Chatham and Devonport — and in Pompey itself. He’d done a long spell at Whale Island, the Navy’s principal gunnery school, when qualifying for gunner’s mate. There had been times when Greta had gone up to Norwich to visit her mother and Ramm had been bereft. Her substitute, a girl who had then worked as a barmaid in a Commercial Road public house, had become more than just another one-night stand. The liaison had lasted. The last time they’d done it had been during his recent leave and afterwards the girl had said something that had shaken Ramm rigid.