Convoy South

by Philip McCutchan

  Dempsey looked at his steward critically: Porter seemed preoccupied and anxious, not an unusual thing just after mail from home had come aboard. ‘Anything up?’

  ‘N-no, sir —’

  ‘All well at home?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking, sir.’ He didn’t appear to want to say more, perhaps because of Kemp’s presence.

  ‘I’m glad to hear that. All right, Porter.’

  The Captain’s steward went off, came back with the bottle and left again. Dempsey poured two tots. He said, ‘It’s not an easy life for any of us, is it? We deserve a few drinks as much as anyone else. Helps things along.’

  ‘An anaesthetic.’

  ‘And why the hell not?’

  Kemp took his glass in his hand. Why not indeed? The convoy was secure for now and they would be back at sea soon enough. He was about to go back to the subject of Dempsey’s brother and his happy ending when there was a sharp knock at the cabin door and the third officer came in.

  ‘Captain, sir —’

  ‘Yes, what is it, Peel?’

  ‘Sorry to intrude, sir —’

  ‘All right, I’m not a young woman in her boudoir.’

  ‘No, sir. It’s Leading Seaman Sinker, sir.’

  Kemp asked, ‘What about him? Having trouble with my PO?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Petty Officer Rattray fell down a ladder and he may have broken a leg. It seems he’s currently too far gone to make any sense.’

  Kemp said, ‘God damn and blast! Now he’s going to have some unavoidable explaining to do. Captain Dempsey, can you have word sent ashore for a doctor?’

  III

  Stripey Sinker had had a difficult job if not an unaccustomed one: in his years at sea he had gone many times to the assistance of drunken messmates. Petty Officers were different: the drunker they were, if Rattray was anything to go by, the more officious and rank conscious they became. Rattray was very abusive and at the same time insistent that he was far from drunk. Having invited fate to bugger both the Commodore and Sinker, he had gone on to shout that he was effing sober, hadn’t had enough effing cash to get effing drunk and how could a bloke get effing pissed on sodding sixpence, which Stripey Sinker took to be a monumental exaggeration of Rattray’s financial state. Rattray was a mean sod with short arms and long pockets and saved his pay like Shylock. The shemozzle had brought more ratings to the scene, those few of the guns’ crews who were not ashore, but it didn’t help much. Rattray flailed about with his arms and they scattered, which was just as well. It would never do for a PO to strike a junior rating, this being a court martial offence just as much as the other way round.

  ‘Bloody eff off the lot o’ you…’

  ‘Stupid sod,’ Sinker said.

  ‘Wha’ wash that, Leading Sheaman Shinker?’

  ‘Nothing, PO.’ Sinker took a deep breath and put his arms around Rattray’s body, pinning him against his stomach. He lifted like a human derrick, got Rattray’s feet into the air, and lurched along the flying bridge.

  ‘Effing let go! Thash a norder, Leading Sheaman—’

  ‘Put a bleeding sock in it!’ Sinker hissed in his ear. ‘Blimey O’Riley, you’re as pissed as a bleeding newt! Chancing your rate, you are. Smell like a combined brewery and distillery, you do!’

  One of the guns’ crews said, ‘’Is flies are open, Stripey…’

  ‘Do ‘em up, then.’ There was a delay while this was achieved against Rattray’s struggles.

  ‘Peed in the dock,’ Rattray said. ‘Forgot I ‘ad. Leave me alone, dirty buggersh.’ Suddenly, as though given extra strength and some return of co-ordination under a mistaken sense of nasty goings on, Rattray leaned forward, using all his weight and muscle, and heaved Sinker up until he lay like a crab on the PO’s bent back. In danger of being toppled over the flying bridge to the hard metal of the tank tops below, Sinker let go his hold and dropped backwards. Rattray took his chance and lurched for’ard along the flying bridge, making for the midships superstructure. Going after him, Stripey Sinker slipped on a patch of oil and went headlong.

  There was a laugh from Rattray. ‘Serve you effing right’s what I shay. Goin’ to report you to the C-Commodore.’ He put on speed and vanished into the superstructure before Stripey could catch up. And that was when it happened, as Sinker reported soon afterwards, first to Third Officer Peel and then to Commodore Kemp and Captain Dempsey when the two senior officers went to view the damage.

  ‘Lorst ‘is balance like, sir.’ Rattray was now out cold.

  ‘I see. What was his condition, Sinker?’

  ‘Condition, sir?’ Sinker looked virtuously blank.

  ‘You know very well what I mean, Sinker.’

  ‘Oh yes, sir. Yes. Well, sir, I reckon he’d ate something that disagreed like, sir.’

  ‘He was unwell?’

  ‘You might say so, sir, yes.’

  ‘I think I might.’ Kemp, bending over Rattray’s motionless form, sniffed the air.

  Sinker saw the sniff. He said, ‘Smell o’ alcohol, sir. ‘E explained that, sir. One o’ them Australians, sir, upset a pint o’ beer over ‘im.’

  ‘And a bottle of whisky too?’

  ‘Yessir.’

  Kemp hid a smile; he appreciated loyalty and he had no wish to see Rattray run in and be disrated. There could be ways around Rattray’s condition though whatever happened he wouldn’t escape a tongue lashing from the Commodore in private. Kemp said, ‘All right, Sinker. Leave him where he is until a doctor arrives. But see he’s made comfortable and kept warm.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir, just leave ‘im to me, sir.’

  Kemp walked away with Dempsey. Rattray would be very far from the only casualty tonight, or any other night while the convoy remained in Simonstown. The Military Police would be having their hands full, likewise the naval town patrols, marching the streets with belts and sidearms. Drink and women, the twin curses of the sea and the soldiery. That was, in excess. Kemp was glad to reflect that Rattray had probably been too drunk to indulge in women: Sinker’s case was quite enough to be going on with, quite enough to carry across the war-torn seas to America. It had already been confirmed that he wouldn’t be kept ashore. Kemp excused himself to Dempsey and went to his own cabin; there would be much to do tomorrow, though he himself wouldn’t be concerned in the first work item, which would be the shifting of the Coverdale to the oil berth for discharge and then after tank cleaning to the repair berth for her damaged summer tank and hull to be made good for the next part of the passage.

  Kemp turned in after he’d had the doctor’s report: a surgeon lieutenant had come from the base with commendable speed and his verdict wasn’t too bad. Nothing serious, no concussion — the PO was already coming round, noisily. He had expressed the view that all effing quacks were effing useless. The leg was not broken but was badly strained and Rattray should attend the shore sick bay next morning to have it strapped up. An ambulance would be sent for him. Thereafter he would be on light duty for perhaps a fortnight, which left Stripey Sinker as acting PO. The surgeon lieutenant said that Rattray had only just escaped alcoholic poisoning.

  Next morning that was what Rattray felt like: he woke with a violent headache, a terrible pain in his right leg which felt as though it had been wrenched from its socket and miraculously — since it was still there — replaced. Rattray’s mouth felt full of garbage, like the bottom of a bread barge. And he had the usual, overriding anxiety of anyone who’d been dead drunk the night before: what, exactly, had he done? From about 2100 hours on, his memory was blank.

  He was racking that useless memory when Sinker looked in. ‘All right, PO?’

  ‘What d’you mean, all right?’

  ‘After last night’s what I mean.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Rattray winced as pain shot through head and leg simultaneously. ‘Had a drink or two…’

  Stripey Sinker knew the drill: no drunk ever admitted that he couldn’t remember what he’d got up to, he just fished around for information to f
ill in the blanks unasked. Stripey, with a certain amount of relish, obliged.

  ‘Fell down a ladder, PO.’

  ‘Get away with you! Which ladder, eh?’

  Stripey told him and added, ‘Peed in the dock — you said.’

  ‘I never!’

  ‘Just repeating what you said.’

  Rattray closed his eyes and groaned. ‘Met a bloody Aussie pongo, I did…got me, well, a bit tiddley, like, I don’t deny.’ He paused and looked suspiciously at Sinker. ‘Anyone else get to know, did they, eh?’

  ‘Some o’ the guns’ crews. Captain Dempsey. Commodore.’ Rattray said bitterly, ‘God, you bloody fat ullage!’

  ‘No option. Hurt yourself. We thought you’d broken your leg. Quack was sent for…ambulance’ll be alongside 0900 sharp.’ Sinker looked at him closely. ‘What’s up, PO? You look—’

  ‘Get a bleeding po for God’s sake, I’m going to puke.’

  Stripey was just in time, and in the ensuing couple of minutes sent up a prayer of thanks that fate had made him a seaman and not a poultice walloper.

  At 0900 Petty Officer Rattray was carried down the accommodation ladder to the waiting ambulance and departed for the shore sick bay; and half an hour later, in the care of the dockyard tugs, the Coverdale was moved off the berth and taken under tow the short distance to the oil jetty where acting Chief Engineer Evans saw to the pipe connections for a full discharge of the tanks. As the pumps got to work and emptied the ship, she rose slowly to her marks, showing a weed-covered line below her boot-topping: the ship, Dempsey remarked to Kemp on the bridge, had been too long without a bottom-scrape.

  ‘Exigencies of war. We have to keep the seas even when the weed cuts our speed. I’ll see what can be done about it while we’re here.’

  ‘Dockyard labour?’

  Dempsey nodded. ‘It may have to be, even though my crew could do some sort of a job working from bosuns’ chairs. It all depends what the union situation is out here. You know what it’d be like at home.’

  ‘Yes, unfortunately I do.’ Certain jobs were the province of the dockyard workers, who tended to go on strike if their cherished functions were usurped by seamen. In the middle of the world war for survival it didn’t make any kind of sense, but there it was. Kemp had some stronger words for it than just senseless, and one of them was treason.

  Kemp went below to his cabin to write another letter to his wife. By an automatic reflex he checked the safe: in port, the sealed bag had been transferred back from the chart room. Kemp wondered again about Matthew Grout of the Australian High Commission. So far, no orders of any kind in relation to the bag’s contents had come from Naval HQ. In the event, they never did.

  IV

  Two days later the Coverdale’ s tanks were both emptied and steam cleaned — and afterwards flushed through with seawater, plenty of it, before shifting once again, this time to the repair yard. In the meantime a number of dockyard officials had come aboard and had poked and pried into everything they could find; the damage to the hull had been inspected, as had the fractured summer tank once the cleaning process was complete. Dempsey and Evans had been in the thick of it, answering questions from civilians who, had they been in Portsmouth, Devonport or Chatham, would have worn sober suits and bowler hats in indication of their status as management. A captain(E) RN had, as anticipated, come aboard with them and Evans had spent some uncomfortable hours with him, being catechized as to his report and all the circumstances leading up to the death of the chief engineer and Dempsey’s dangerous descent into the gas-filled tank.

  Evans, young and inexperienced, was out of his depth; when the naval officer had at last gone ashore, he felt that his job might well be in danger even though he had not been acting chief at the relevant time. There were always unfairnesses at sea; someone always had to carry the can and, of course, as second engineer at the time he did have some responsibility himself. It was clear enough that there had been some slackness in not clearing the tank of every last bit of sludge. There was going to be a board of enquiry; it was due to sit the next day and the sorting out would not be a fast process, but the convoy’s sailing would not be put back because of it. The final conclusions might not come for months, with Evans sent back from the UK or somewhere to resume his evidence. And whatever happened it was certainly going to be months before they announced their findings, so a long time of worry loomed ahead — unpleasantly to an acting chief with his career at stake.

  Worries had come also to Sub-Lieutenant Cutler. Commodore Kemp was an understanding boss, far from stuffy, with plenty of sympathy for the desires of a young officer to make the most of his time in port. Kemp had had plenty to do in the way of attending conferences, discussing his route diagonally across the South Atlantic with the Naval Control Service officers, being apprised of such as was known of the movements and current positions of German raiders and U-boat packs and so on; but he had felt able to dispense largely with his assistant’s help. As a result Cutler had seen a good deal of the English civilian girl by the time the tank and hull repair had been made good; and, somewhat precipitately, he had fallen in love.

  Her name was Natalie Hope-Wynyard. Not that alone: she was Lady Natalie Hope-Wynyard and her father, an earl, was an admiral. But it wasn’t the difference in the respective ranks that worried Sub-Lieutenant Cutler. It was his own parents. Both his father and his mother disliked the British; in the past they had expressed their views with force. Britain was going to drag the United States into the war — that had been before Pearl Harbor just as had happened back in 1917 when Uncle Sam had had to pull the British chestnuts out of the Kaiser’s fire, a fact that Cutler’s father, who had lost an arm and a leg in the last of the fighting, had never forgotten. Cutler’s father had grudged having his son join the RCNVR in order to get into Britain’s war.

  Worse: the Cutler parents couldn’t stand the British aristocracy. They were effete, gormless, an anchronism, typical of the huge division between an old, worn-out system and the vigour and thrust of a young country of opportunity and vision. Titles in themselves were an abomination. Cutler’s father called them all Lord Tomnoddies and said that only God was entitled to be called Lord. The British were blasphemers.

  Trouble loomed. Cutler had talked of it, more or less vaguely at this stage, to Natalie. He’d started by asking what her British admiral father thought about the Americans. Did he like them?

  ‘Oh yes, awf’ly.’

  Cutler could hear that coming out in front of his father. He said, ‘I’m glad to hear that, I guess.’

  ‘Daddy says we couldn’t do without you. All those destroyers you sold us —’

  ‘I thought we gave them?’

  ‘Oh no, not actually gave, according to Daddy. But he says it was awf’ly sporting. He thinks President Roosevelt is wonderful.’

  Cutler’s father didn’t; but this wasn’t the time to go into that. Natalie went on with her father’s sayings; they were all complimentary to the Americans but he did seem to have said one hell of a lot over the years, about other things as well as Americans: he disliked socialists, beards, what Natalie called chichis, most young men under thirty, and his wife; disliking his wife was a bore, Natalie said, but she did in fact see his point because Mummy was utter poison and when his flagship was in port in peacetime had tried to run the whole show, going over the head of the Flag Captain and causing ructions. Since Daddy had other interests lined up, a divorce was pending but might have to wait until the war was over.

  Worse and worse: the Cutler parents — of whom Cutler was fond — tended to go bonkers at the mention of the word divorce. But maybe they would come round…just maybe they would, no certainties, though Dad had always had a soft spot for a pretty girl, and Natalie was certainly that and very sexy.

  The day before the troop convoy was scheduled to leave Simonstown, Cutler went ashore with Kemp and Dempsey to attend the final sailing conference and take the last-minute orders and situation assessments. When the conference was ove
r Cutler asked if he might remain ashore: fond farewells were looming, though this he did not say. Kemp nodded his permission, and went off with Dempsey in a staff car. Cutler, meeting Natalie in a hotel bar as already arranged on the assumption he would get leave, fancied he had seen the last of the two senior officers until next morning.

  But he had scarcely settled down with the girl in a corner of the bar when Kemp and Dempsey walked in. The bar was not full and they could not help but catch eyes.

  Cutler got to his feet. ‘Evening, sir.’

  ‘Hullo there, Cutler. Sit down — don’t let me interrupt.’

  ‘You’re very welcome, sir. We’d like you to join us.’

  Kemp glanced at Dempsey: neither wanted to play gooseberry but neither wished to appear churlish. They walked across and Kemp said, ‘Just the one drink, Cutler. And it’s on me.’

  ‘Why, thank you, sir.’ Cutler made the introductions, adding that the girl’s father was the Earl of Truro.

  ‘Truro,’ Kemp repeated. ‘The admiral?’

  ‘Yes. That’s Daddy. Do you know him, Commodore Kemp?’

  ‘Only by name, I’m afraid, Lady Natalie.’ They chatted; Natalie dropped a number of naval names, mostly lost on Kemp, though Dempsey was familiar with some of them. There was a good deal of talk about the girl’s father, in fact, quite an earbashing until Natalie delivered her piece de resistance as Kemp thought of it later.

  She said, ‘Daddy thinks you RNR people are absolutely splendid.’

  Kemp, caught a little off-balance, said, ‘Ah. Really?’

  ‘Yes. He’s often said so. He thinks the convoys are tremendously important. Well, of course…they are, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yes, they are,’ Kemp said, at a total loss for words. The girl was very enthusiastic and obviously considered himself and Dempsey as a couple of fuddy-duddies in need of cheering up. It made him feel very old. He noticed that Cutler was looking embarrassed. He drank up quickly, caught Dempsey’s eye again, and got to his feet. ‘We’ll have to be getting along,’ he said. They took their leave and outside the hotel Kemp grinned at Dempsey and said, ‘A penny for ‘em, Dempsey. A pretty child, don’t you think?’