Convoy East (A John Mason Kemp Thriller)

by Philip McCutchan

  ‘Staff,’ she had said almost reverently. ‘Isn’t it splendid, Fred?’

  ‘I don’t know so much.’ Williams’ father didn’t know the contents of the flimsies, but he would have been in some sympathy with the commanding officers. He knew his son pretty well.

  ‘But assistant commodore!’

  ‘Is that what he calls himself? I hadn’t heard ... and I wonder what the Commodore’ll call him!’ He filled in the blank for himself: ‘Commodore’s assistant, I reckon.’ When Paul came in, his father heaved himself to his feet. He’d got his stint at Air Raid Precautions; he was on duty as a warden. Working in the City, chief clerk in a firm of insurance brokers, he often didn’t get home till late but he was determined to do his bit to flatten out Adolf Hitler and teach the Nazis a lesson about ordinary Englishmen.

  Three days later Lieutenant Williams left Hounslow and went north by train from Euston, speeded on his way by the air-raid sirens and then the falling bombs, bound for the naval office in Greenock’s Albert Harbour to report to Commodore John Mason Kemp for the OB convoy.

  ***

  Kemp and Hampton met at the convoy conference, duplicates of which were being held in the other assembly ports. Kemp and Hampton, both Mediterranean-Australia Line, were old friends; and two years earlier, when Kemp had been taken out of his command for war service, Captain Arthur Hampton had been appointed master in his place: Hampton had never bothered with the RNR and had thus been left in peace, if such was the word, in the liners, now converted as troopships and on loan to the government as hired transports in the official term. Kemp had been delighted to be told at the Admiralty that he was to hoist his broad pennant in the old Ardara.

  ‘Just like old times, Arthur.’ Hampton, some five years before, had been his staff captain in the Aratapu, which as it happened was another of the troopships in the OB convoy.

  ‘Same but different, sir. No parties.’

  ‘They won’t be missed.’ One of the bugbears of liner life had been the entertaining, the enforced giving of Captains’ cocktail parties — the gin-palace aspect of the job — and the need to appear as often as his duty permitted at the Captain’s table in the first-class dining-room where there were important passengers to be entertained with small talk, something John Mason Kemp was not good at and had had to force himself into. He would have been highly surprised had he known how popular he was with most of his passengers. One thing he did know: right through his career in the liners he had been the target of forward young women and some not so young: the liner atmosphere did funny things to women, especially once the ship had entered the Red Sea. It had been all right until he had met Mary and married her; after that the female attentions had to be fought off, the more so when he got his promotion to staff captain and then Captain in Command. Senior officers could not afford to be put in compromising situations.

  Kemp was about to make a further remark to Hampton about the peacetime liners when the conference was called to order by a lieutenant-commander RNR. The conference, Kemp reflected, was to be a high-powered one: as the conversation died, the Chief of Staff to the Flag Officer in Charge entered the room. The Chief of Staff was a pompous-looking officer, rotund, two pisspots high in Kemp’s seafaring terminology, wearing a gold-rimmed monocle and carrying, of all things, a beautifully turks’-headed telescope. There was a good deal of other brass around: the Rear-Admiral commanding the cruiser squadron, no less than five four-ring captains RN from the cruisers themselves and the solitary battleship of the escort, each of them accompanied by his navigating officer. The remainder were a mix of commanders and lieutenant-commanders plus a number of lieutenants, mostly RNR or RNVR, from the smaller escort vessels — the corvettes — and the masters of the merchant ships.

  The Naval Control Service officer was concise: time was not for wasting. As they all knew, the OB convoy route was normally south through the Irish Sea, the last pick-up being the ships out of Liverpool Bay. This time, they were going north about, taking their departure from the Bloody Foreland. Why? The answer lay in the intelligence reports. Some German cyphers had been broken and it was known that there was to be a concentration of U-boats lying in wait off the exit from St George’s Channel. So the Germans were to be fooled: no convoy would steam into their periscopes this time. Instead, the U-boats would come under heavy depth-charge attack from Western Approaches command. The lieutenant-commander went on to give the precise route to be followed clear of the British Isles and beyond the range of the German bombers. He stressed the importance of the convoy even though the ships were in ballast. Bottoms were valuable even without cargoes, and the cargoes and Canadian troops that would be picked up in Halifax were very badly needed. As for the escort, the corvettes would break off for return to base at 19 degrees west longitude. The remainder, the destroyers, the heavy cruisers and the old battleship, would, exceptionally, remain with the convoy right through to Halifax to form part of the homeward escort which would if necessary be joined nearer home waters by a fleet aircraft-carrier being held in readiness in the Clyde. The destroyers would re-fuel as necessary from one of the tankers, a Royal Fleet Auxiliary tanker which would be carrying sufficient oil fuel for replenishment. The RFA would break off with the other tankers for the Gulf of Mexico, escorted by destroyers of the Royal Canadian Navy, which would leave Halifax for the rendezvous.

  Afterwards Kemp remarked to Hampton that he had the feeling something hadn’t been said. Hampton shrugged. ‘They always keep their cards close to their chests when there’s — ’

  ‘When there’s something else. That’s what I meant. Apart from the sheer size, the convoy’s not all that unusual. Why fall over themselves to provide an escort all the way when they’re always so short of escorts? There’s got to be some other factor.’

  ‘I dare say we’ll be told in due course,’ Hampton said.

  They made their way along the dockside at Albert Harbour, stepping over the usual clutter of any dock — coils of wire and rope, broken packing cases and the like — closely attended by Lieutenant Williams who was efficiently looking out for the drifter detailed to take the officers back to their ships in the stream. Kemp thought his assistant looked like an impatient bird, peering about for its nest. Back in London words had been uttered in the Queen Anne’s Gate office of the Naval Assistant to the Second Sea Lord, known in brief as NA2SL, the officer responsible for appointments. Naturally, the confidential nature of Williams’ flimsies had been respected; but the navy had ways of conveying information by facial gestures, waved hands and a minimum of words. Commodore Kemp had hoisted in that his new assistant walked with God, but was otherwise reliable and efficient enough. Williams needed to be sat on now and again, and Kemp was regarded at the Admiralty as someone who would sit hard when necessary.

  ‘Training exercise?’ he’d asked with a grin.

  ‘You could put it that way, Commodore. Yes. Make something of him — what?’

  Moving through Albert Harbour to the drifter, Kemp reflected on these words of wisdom. So far his contact with Williams had been of the briefest, a hurried introduction just before the convoy conference, but already he’d got the idea that his assistant was summing him up as a kind of blimp, a relic of the last war, and that he, the assistant, was going to find it a bit of a strain keeping the boss up to the mark. Well, time would tell; Kemp wasn’t the man to make pre-judgements. He had asked Williams a question that he knew the answer to already: was this his first experience of the merchant-ship side of convoys? It was; but Williams had served in the escorts, which should be of some help. Kemp had had, in the past, RNVR lieutenants who had never hitherto moved off their backsides in shore jobs, not as officers anyway: they’d done their sea-time as ratings and then promptly shifted out of discomfort and forgotten all they’d learned. Kemp had refrained from saying what Williams would learn for himself soon enough: that his job wasn’t going to be so much that of assistant commodore, which his manner suggested he believed, or flag lieutenant, as of a kind o
f tea boy and general-purpose dogsbody.

  Meanwhile Williams identified the duty drifter, not a hard task since so many officers were making for it, and reported the fact with a flourish and a salute.

  ‘Well done, Williams,’ Kemp said, keeping his face straight. Williams didn’t seem aware of any irony. They embarked and proceeded out of the harbour. As senior officer present, Kemp was accorded the privacy, honour and fug of the wheelhouse where he did his best to interpret the Scots tongue of the skipper, a gnarled fisherman from Caledonia’s wilder northeastern shores. Kemp gathered that the skipper regretted his patriotism in making his drifter and himself and crew available to the English, like so many other skippers, for the duration when he could be making a damn sight more money by sticking to the fishing. Kemp saw that he was homesick: to the skipper, Clydeside was the south.

  ***

  Leading Signalman Mouncey, together with his number two, Signalman MacCord, had already taken up his quarters aboard the Commodore’s ship and was having his customary grumble about this, that and the other whilst waiting for the Commodore to come aboard. Their quarters, for one thing: a bloody great liner with hundreds of single-berth cabins and state-rooms and they’d been shoved in a carved-up former nobs’ suite on A deck together with the naval guns’ crews, the gunnery rates who manned the two six-inch, one for’ard and one aft, that made up the Ardara’s main defence and despite the strengthening would likely split the ship asunder if fired. Signal ratings, Mouncey said, didn’t expect to be berthed with common seamen gunners.

  ‘Handy for the bridge,’ MacCord said. It didn’t sound like that, MacCord being very Scots, and Mouncey had to ask for a repeat.

  Mouncey said, ‘Bollocks. Plenty of other spaces just as handy. Just some sod being awkward. When I was in the ... ’ He went on and on, moaning about better ships and better billets. MacCord listened philosophically, letting the killick drip himself out. Even a tap must eventually empty the reservoir. After a while Mouncey, a small, dark man with a repaired hare lip and the screwed-up eyes that spoke of many a long year gazing through a telescope at flag hoists and Aldis lamps and the big signalling projectors, came back from the past and peered into the future.

  ‘That there RNR. Commodore Kemp.’

  ‘What about him, killick?’

  ‘Looks all right. Spoke to me decent, almost as if I was yuman. I’ve ’eard ’e used to be in this ship — must be funny, coming back like with a bloody great thick stripe on ’is cuff.’ Mouncey sniffed and wiped the back of a horny hand across the end of his nose. ‘That wavy bloke gives me the bloody creeps, though. The lootenant — Williams.’

  ‘Looked all right to me, killick — ’

  Mouncey jeered. ‘Call yourself a bunting tosser! Blind as a bat, you are. Tarted-up little ponce. Stuck up as a pr — ’

  MacCord never heard the rest of it. Mouncey was interrupted by the broadcaster coming on suddenly, almost in his ear. A voice said, ‘Leading Signalman on the bridge. Leading Signalman on the bridge, immediately.’

  That meant the Commodore of the convoy was aboard. Mouncey went up the ladders at the double. On arrival he got a bollocking from the Commodore’s assistant, which didn’t please him: he should have been on the bridge waiting for the Commodore, Williams said, not skulking below. Mouncey didn’t answer back, you didn’t answer officers unless you liked being put in the rattle, but he fizzed and muttered like a bomb. For his part, Lieutenant Williams didn’t like that. He said something hasty, about dumb insolence. Mouncey’s mouth fell open in astonishment. Daft young bleeder ...

  A moment later Kemp called Williams across for a quiet word. ‘Laid yourself open, haven’t you?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Dumb insolence went out of the crime sheet years ago — as you must surely know.’

  ‘Sorry, sir. Heat of the moment — ’

  ‘Well, don’t let us have any more such moments, Williams. You did right to utter a reprimand, but don’t overdo it. I like a happy signal staff. Understood?’

  Williams, red-faced, said, ‘Yes, sir. If I might explain, Mouncey strikes me as a — ’

  ‘All right, Williams, that’s all.’ Kemp turned away, walked with Captain Hampton to the port bridge wing. Signals were passing between the King’s Harbour Master and the battleship, and between KHM and the senior officer of the close escort. The moment of departure had come. Five minutes later the great concourse of shipping was on the move, the battleship and the cruisers going ahead to be followed by the Commodore and the other ships in convoy, with the destroyers and smaller escorts bringing up the rear, proceeding in line ahead; the ships would remain in single column until the waters of the Clyde opened out beyond the Cumbraes, widening into the firth between Holy Island and Ardrossan so that the convoy could begin to move into its ocean formation. On the bridge of the Ardara Kemp stared ahead through binoculars, towards the anti-submarine boom strung across from Cloch Point to Dunoon, a strange stirring agitating his mind. This, he believed for no real reason beyond a hunch that he avoided thinking of as psychic, was going to be no easy convoy.

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