Convoy East (A John Mason Kemp Thriller)

by Philip McCutchan

  ‘Good evening, sir,’ Ramm said.

  ‘Good evening. Er...?’

  ‘Just night rounds of the guns,’ Ramm said. He noticed an edginess in Harrison’s manner, as though he didn’t wish to have Ramm around. Ramm, knowing he was an awkward sod at the best of times, didn’t shift. He said, ‘Weather’s getting worse on the new course.’

  ‘It would, wouldn’t it?’ Harrison snapped.

  ‘Well, yes, sir, it would, that’s true enough. Doesn’t make life any easier, though. Know when we’re due through the straits, do you, sir?’

  ‘Three days, near enough.’

  ‘Ah. May get better weather then, with any luck. Should do, any road. Though the Med can be bad at times. Cold and wet too.’

  Harrison, looking decidedly strained, was on the retreat back into his cabin when Ramm’s persistence was rewarded. He heard the sound of the door at the foot of the ladder opening and he heard a foot on the steps.

  He looked down. There was a WRNS rating coming up: the one the buzz was about, the one with the suspected bun in the oven. Ramm said, ‘What’s all this, eh?’ From the corner of his eye he saw Harrison’s firmly closed door. ‘Wrens not allowed up ‘ere, officers’ quarters. All right?’

  ‘I — I —’

  ‘Just turn about and bloody scarper. Or else. Get you bloody court-martialled, would this, if the Commodore got to ‘ear. Get you chucked out. Me, I’ll turn a blind eye this once. Now get.’

  Wren Smith got, fast, without another word. Ramm turned away, gave a Churchillian sign at the Chief Officer’s cabin door, and climbed to the bridge. All knowledge was useful; the time might come when he could benefit by it. And grateful Wrens who’d been shown mercy by a petty officer might, who could tell, be amenable. Ramm reckoned he was still good-looking, with a trim figure and no fat.

  NINE

  I

  Next morning, in his exposed position in rear of the convoy, Captain Horncape aboard the Langstone Harbour had made an urgent signal by lamp to the destroyer Hindu, standing by still as an unencumbered escort to the freighter under tow of the Burgoyne. One of the injured men was in a bad way and Horncape believed he would die unless medical attention came quickly. Initially advice was sought by signal, but the medical facilities aboard the Langstone Harbour were virtually non-existent and to comply with the advice of the surgeon lieutenant in the destroyer was impossible. Horncape reported as much and after some delay a further signal came back from the Hindu: her Captain would attempt to put the doctor aboard by breeches buoy. The risk was great and all hands knew it: the destroyer would have to approach the freighter dangerously close and the chances of collision would be high, calling for expert handling of both ships. In the meantime there was much to do in setting up the taking of the ropes for the passage of the breeches buoy across the gap between the ships.

  Second Officer Phillips, acting Chief Officer, would be in immediate charge. ‘Have you set up a breeches buoy before?’ Horncape asked.

  ‘No, sir —’

  ‘Then you’ll have to learn fast. I doubt if any of the fo’c’sle hands have done it either.’ Horncape’s bosun, one of those injured, his leg-stump being kept clean and bandaged by the chief steward, was in no condition to leave his bunk. Quickly, Horncape ran through the drill. A rocket trailing a half-inch heaving line would be fired from the fo’c’sle of the destroyer across the Langstone Harbour’s decks and this would be laid hold of and secured, then hauled in. This heaving line would have attached to it an endless fall rove through a tailed block which Phillips would make fast to either the foremast or the mainmast, depending on whereabouts in the ship the heaving line was caught. Next a heavy hawser would be bent to the whip and sent across, being made fast some two feet higher than the block. From then on, it would be work for the destroyer: the breeches buoy, an affair of canvas with holes for the occupant’s legs, would be secured to the whip, the doctor would be lifted into it and then be sent across to the Langstone Harbour by pulley-hauley on the part of the destroyer’s seamen.

  ‘The dangers are obvious,’ Horncape said. ‘Parting of the hawser as the ships lift and plunge — that’s just one. If it parts with the doctor embarked, it’ll be a case of finish. He’s a brave man. All right, Mr Phillips? I’ll be watching...but my first concern’s the ship herself. Do your best, lad.’

  II

  With Jean Forrest, Kemp went down to see Susan Pawle. She lay like a zombie, eyes sometimes closed, sometimes open but not seeming to focus on anything, just a blank stare. As O’Dwyer had said, she was weepy: a slow trickle of tears without any sound. Kemp tried to talk to her, gently, tried to be encouraging whilst knowing there was precious little if anything to be encouraging about. Even apart from that, from the essential hollowness of what he tried to say, he was not at his best with young women, no more so with Susan Pawle than he had been with Wren Smith and her very different problem. The father of sons only, he had no daughter-relationship to fall back on. Going back on deck with the WRNS First Officer, he voiced his misgivings.

  ‘She doesn’t want to live. She’s not making any effort.’

  ‘No, I agree, Commodore. It’s not surprising, is it?’

  ‘No, it’s not. But she must be got out of it.’

  Jean Forrest looked at him sideways as they reached the open deck and the gale’s force, a quizzical look. ‘How?’ she asked.

  Kemp shrugged. ‘We must think of something, that’s all I can say.’

  ‘It’s my worry, Commodore, not yours. You have the convoy to think about. I’m a spare hand, a passenger. Leave it to me.’

  ‘All right,’ Kemp said. ‘I’ll do that. But if you want to talk about it, you can — any time within reason. I mean —’

  ‘The convoy — yes, I know.’

  They went in through the door to the midship superstructure and up the ladder at the bottom of which Petty Officer Ramm had intercepted Wren Smith. Outside his cabin door, Kemp paused. He said, ‘You’re tired, Miss Forrest. Just about all in by the look of you. A shot of whisky wouldn’t do you any harm. Come in.’

  She said gratefully, ‘Well...thank you, Commodore,’ and went in through the door which Kemp was holding open. Kemp gestured her to a chair and rang for Botley. ‘I suggested whisky,’ he said. ‘There’s gin if you prefer it, Miss Forrest?’

  ‘Yes, I think I would,’ she answered. Botley came and the drinks were brought. Jean Forrest seemed to relax, some of the lines of strain disappearing. She was really quite good-looking, Kemp thought, and wondered why she had never married. Over the drinks, he found out the answer. They chatted, initially about her uncle and the Mediterranean-Australia Line, and then the talk flowed as it were backwards. She spoke of her days in Blenheim Palace doing War Office liaison duties but she didn’t mention the married brigadier. It did come out, however, that she was one of those women among so many of her age-group that had become engaged to a young officer in the last war and had lost him in action. In Jean Forrest’s case she had been a little over seventeen years of age when she had become engaged, towards the tail end of the war, and her fiancé, an infantry subaltern not long out of Sandhurst, had been killed only a matter of days before the Armistice.

  Kemp was pondering whether or not to offer her another gin when there was a knock at his door: O’Dwyer.

  ‘Yes, Doctor?’

  ‘I have the full report you asked for, Commodore. For the Admiral. On Miss Pawle’s condition, and the desirability of —’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Doctor.’ Kemp took the report and scanned it briefly: the prognosis didn’t look good at all and it ought to convince the surgeon commander aboard the flagship; the Admiral might be a different kettle of fish. Kemp made no offer of a drink to O’Dwyer: the doctor was well capable of supplying his own needs to excess and Kemp wasn’t going to encourage him, even though he must have appeared impolite. Jean Forrest finished the remains of her gin and left the cabin with the doctor. Kemp read the report through again and then started to draft a
signal to the Flag, adding that he still had the body of a Wren officer for disposal. After some thought he made an alteration, indicating that he already had the body of one dead Wren officer, hoping the Admiral would get the reference and take the hint. The signal ready for transmission, he took it to the bridge and passed it to the signalman of the watch. The Aldis clacked out through the overcast and the blown spume and was acknowledged from the Nelson’s flag deck. The reply came within the next ten minutes. Commodore from Flag, your 1036, weather reports indicate deteriorating conditions in the straits and I have reports from Admiralty of strong Italian forces likely to move out from Taranto to intercept. In these circumstances I do not repeat not propose to delay the convoy off Gibraltar.

  ‘So that’s that,’ Kemp said to Finnegan.

  ‘A case of over to you again, sir.’

  Kemp gave a hard laugh. ‘What can I do about it? The plain facts are that one girl’s life can’t stand against the safety of the convoy. I see the Admiral’s point, of course. He’s hoping to get through before the Italians get down past Sicily, but I don’t reckon there’s much hope of that. Those Italian battleships have a damn sight more speed than we have.’

  ‘They still won’t hurry to meet the Nelson,’ Finnegan said. ‘A token show of force, maybe.’ Kemp didn’t respond; the Italian fleet had not so far been noted for any real desire to engage against heavy ships but this time they might muster their courage and make an all-out attempt, backed by the German JU87s and 88s from the Sicilian airfields, to stop the convoy in its tracks. How would the Langstone Harbour make out, limping along with her fragile escort, under tow? Malta stood in desperate need of her cargo; Mussolini would never let her pass into the Grand Harbour of Valletta.

  Kemp sent down to Jean Forrest, asking her to come to the bridge. He informed her of the Admiral’s signal and she seemed shattered at the lack of concern, the fact that Susan Pawle had not even been referred to in the reply. It was, she said, heartless and abominable.

  ‘It doesn’t surprise me,’ Kemp said. ‘The Admiral bears a hell of a responsibility. So many ships, so many men. All those troops.’ He waved a hand away to the port quarter, towards the troop transports coming along through the spray and the immensity of the waves, lifting and plunging, rolling, their masts and funnels vanishing from time to time in the troughs. ‘A fact of this bloody war, if you’ll excuse the language, Miss Forrest.’

  ‘It is a bloody war,’ she said, and turned away. Kemp called her back. He saw the sparkle of tears in her eyes: she was perhaps remembering again that other war, and the news that would have come from the Flanders front. He said, ‘One moment, Miss Forrest. There’s something I have to do now, since there’s to be no contact with Gibraltar.’

  ‘Yes, Commodore?’

  ‘The girl that died.’

  ‘Sea burial?’

  Kemp nodded. ‘We’ll have to. We’ll have to accept the weather. You know what seamen are like.’

  ‘Do I?’

  Kemp coughed. ‘Superstition. More perhaps in the merchant ships than in the RN. The old hands especially, of course, and the Wolf Rock has a number of them.’ He paused. ‘To be frank, they don’t like being shipmates with corpses. I’m sorry, but there it is. We’re moving into a good deal of danger.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I do understand. When’s it to be?’

  ‘I’ll have a word with Captain Champney and I’ll let you know. The sooner the better in my view, Miss Forrest, since it’s got to be done.’

  ‘You’ll take the service?’

  ‘It’s Captain Champney’s prerogative but I doubt if he’ll want to exercise it.’

  ‘I hope we don’t have it twice, Commodore.’

  ‘Miss Pawle? I pray we don’t. But we may have many more, once we’re into the Mediterranean, you know. Mare nostrum’s a turbulent area now.’ Kemp paused. ‘How’s the doctor coping?’

  ‘Reasonably well,’ she said. ‘So far as I can say, anyhow.’

  ‘She’s being kept out of pain?’

  ‘Oh, yes. But I doubt if you can go on for ever, administering morphine or whatever it is. I just hope he doesn’t overdo it. He’s not particularly compos mentis at times.’

  ‘So I’ve noticed. However, we have to trust him — no choice, is there? We’re lucky to have a doctor at all, unlike poor old Jake Horncape back there.’

  III

  There was always someone at Susan Pawle’s bedside, one of the Wren ratings if not Jean Forrest. PO Wren Hardisty, when her duties as the girls’ ramrod permitted, sat and talked even though she knew she was not being listened to. Miss Hardisty had once in the long ago been a children’s nurse, a nanny in an aristocratic household, and to her now the sick Wren officer was another of her charges, like the old days, when often enough she had sat by the bed of a child with measles or chicken-pox or some such, and had talked without being always listened to. Cook, in those days, had called her Rambler Rose, Rose being her Christian name. She rambled now, aboard the horrible discomfort of the Wolf Rock, heaving about like an oversprung pram in the deep ocean. She talked aloud, and knitted as she did so, a long woolly scarf, comfort for the troops to be sent home from Trincomalee if ever she got there alive.

  Petty Officer Ramm, passing the door of the cabin where Susan Pawle lay, heard a monotone coming through the curtain and paused to listen. He recognized Miss Hardisty’s voice, a loud one. He retailed what he’d overheard, later, to Leading Seaman Nelson.

  ‘Funny,’ he said. ‘Proper old rat bag I always thought.’

  ‘PO Wrens are, usually, GI.’ Stripey Nelson risked a joke. ‘Sort of female gunner’s mates...’

  ‘Put a sock in it, Leading Seaman Nelson. What I was going to say...I peeped in like, and there she was, old battle-axe, yacking away to that poor young girl who wasn’t taking a blind bit o’ notice far as I could see in a quick gander. All about some bloke called Tom Perkins, who I gathered was a gardener. Ripped ‘is ‘and on a rose bush...got tetanus and kicked the bucket.’

  ‘Go on?’

  ‘That’s what I heard her say, more or less. Horse shit, used as manure for the flaming roses...has tetanus in it.’

  Stripey stared blankly. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘Don’t know. Maybe the old girl’s round the bend, I dunno. Point is...’ Ramm creased his brows in an attempt to put his thoughts into words. ‘I reckon she was being sort of kind. Motherly, that’s it, motherly. Not what you’d expect of her, marching round the bloody deck chasing them girls.’

  ‘P’raps she’s a snob, sucks up to the officers.’

  ‘Could be.’ Ramm moved to the ship’s side, to leeward, closed one nostril with a thumb and blew hard down the other, clearing the channel without recourse to a handkerchief. Looking over the side as he did so, he forgot all about PO Wren Hardisty and her odd behaviour: being flung about by the waves’ movement was a corpse. Bloated and disintegrating, but definitely a corpse. Left from some earlier convoy under attack, obviously. Equally obviously, beyond all human aid. But, years of service routine making him react automatically, Petty Officer Ramm made a report to the bridge just the same: corpse overboard. When Commodore Kemp got the report, he shuddered, knowing what he had to do later that day. But the dead girl would go to her committal decently, sewn into a canvas shroud, lead-weighted at the feet. She would surely sink and not be left as a grisly, untidy reminder on the face of the ocean. To make sure, if necessary, Kemp would bring up his revolver from the safe in his cabin, and put a few shots into the body before it disappeared.

  Below, Miss Hardisty talked on, reliving her own past. Tom Perkins had indeed been a gardener at the big house, and had been carried off by agency of the germs that lurked in horse manure and became transferred by some weird chemistry to the thorns of rose bushes. Miss Hardisty had wept for many a long month: she and Tom had started walking out together, blessed by the master and mistress — there was nothing clandestine and definitely no hanky-panky of the sort that
had led Wren Smith into trouble and deceit. Miss Hardisty would never have dreamed of doing anything like that, no more would Tom Perkins, who was an upright man. Thereafter Miss Hardisty had left her employment, her growing-up charges no longer in need of a nanny in any case, and, vowing to remain a spinster, had become a shop assistant in haberdashery, advancing to manageress over the years. The war had taken her into the WRNS; her father had been a chief stoker serving under Admiral Beatty in the last war so the WRNS was an obvious choice.

  She said all this, or much of it, to Susan Pawle’s unresponsive ears. And in the end, the result of several such talkative visits earlier, persistence got through. She found that the officer was staring at her and seemed to react.

  Miss Hardisty asked, ‘Feeling better, ma’am?’

  ‘Not really.’

  Miss Hardisty clicked her tongue. ‘Poor mite...ma’am. I dessay you’re glad of company. There’s been one of us here all the time you’ve been sleeping, ma’am.’

  Susan, Miss Hardisty saw, was trembling. She asked, ‘Is it the pain again, ma’am?’

  ‘Yes.’ Susan spoke through clenched teeth.

  ‘I’ll get the doctor.’ Miss Hardisty got to her feet, the knitting dangling.

  ‘No. Don’t go. Not yet. Where are we?’

  ‘The ship, ma’am? Not far off Gibraltar now.’

  ‘Gibraltar...will they put me ashore?’

  ‘I can’t say, ma’am. I just don’t know.’ Miss Hardisty knew, all right, she’d been told the Admiral’s reply to Kemp’s signal. ‘What’s going to happen to me?’

  ‘I don’t know that either, ma’am. I wish I could help, I do really.’

  The ship rose and lifted, rolled, plunged, a sickening motion: at times the curtains over the port seemed to stand almost at right angles to the deck and the bunk where the girl lay. Susan rolled with the motion, held from falling out by the bunkboard. She was crying again now, not sobs, but a drift of tears down the white cheeks. ‘Will I be invalided, do you think, PO?’