Convoy South

by Philip McCutchan

  Mary Kemp was no more unexpectant than he himself had been; one didn’t join the RNR and expect to be left to carry on one’s peacetime ways in war. Expectant, and accepting of the lot of a seaman’s wife, though with sadness for all the exposure to danger there would be.

  ‘Tripe,’ Kemp said, and grinned. ‘We’re all in it together. If I’d been left in the Ardara, I wouldn’t have been protected by different gold stripes, would I? Look on the bright side, Mary.’

  ‘What bright side?’

  He kissed her. ‘More leave. The RN’s good at that.’ The Merchant Service wasn’t: an Australian voyage, then a week or so at home, and back again to Australia, world without end. Kemp had been married almost twenty years, and if he added all his leaves up he reckoned he’s seen his wife and children for a little less than two years in all. Young Harry, nineteen and likely to volunteer now for the navy, and Rufus, sixteen and currently with a few more days left of his summer holiday from Pangbourne, scarcely knew their father other than as a fleeting and somewhat autocratic stranger who reappeared at intervals. They had taken to calling him the Ancient Mariner, unflatteringly ...

  Mary said, ‘All right then, the bright side.’ She said it determinedly, then added, ‘I don’t know about Granny.’

  ‘Oh yes, Granny. How is she?’

  ‘Better than she thinks she is. You’d better go up and see her, John, otherwise — ’ She broke off. ‘Started already. Go on up, do!’

  A walking stick was being banged on the floor; flakes of ceiling came down. Commodore Kemp left the drawing-room and went up the twisty staircase down which Granny could never again walk, being bed-bound with all manner of disabilities, some of them real. Granny Marsden was in fact Kemp’s grandmother and had been inherited when Kemp’s mother had died. His mother had died young; Kemp had been devoted to her and had accepted the burden she had left. Granny Marsden at ninety-six was something of a miracle, if a tiresome one. Everlastingly expectant of death, she continued to survive, smoked like a dangerous chimney and drank two weakish whiskies every evening to help her sleep. She came of seafaring stock and in her childhood had sailed in the square-rigged ship commanded and owned by her father. She had been round Cape Horn to Chile and Australia not far off as many times as her grandson had taken the Suez Canal route to Sydney. She still had all her faculties and her hearing was as sharp as her voice; her eyesight was more than equal to the task of watching out that the right quantity of whisky went into her tumbler.

  She was propped up in bed by what looked like half a dozen pillows when Kemp entered the bedroom. ‘Well, Johnny,’ she said.

  Kemp bent and kissed her on the marble-like forehead. ‘Well yourself, Granny.’ It always struck Kemp as slightly ridiculous that a middle-aged shipmaster should be in the position of addressing anybody as Granny. ‘You look it, I must say.’

  ‘Look what?’

  ‘Well.’

  She gave a snort. ‘If you did but know. No one ever listens to me! I keep telling Mary — ’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure you do. She does her best.’

  ‘If you call — ’

  ‘Now, now, Granny.’ Kemp began to use his master’s voice, not wishing to hear criticism of his wife. It had its effect: Granny Marsden knew when she was being told to watch it.

  ‘Well,’ she said grudgingly, ‘it’s nice to see you again, Johnny. What are they going to do with you?’

  ‘Do with me? I — ’

  ‘There’s a war on, so they tell me.’ Kemp didn’t realize how many times he was going to be told there was a war on over the coming years. ‘That man Chamberlain, such an idiot. And as for Hitler!’ Words seemed to fail her, for she didn’t go on. ‘They’ll call you up, I suppose.’

  He told her the facts. ‘Second time round,’ he said. He had served right through the last war in the RNR, in Q-ships and later in minelayers, and he’d been torpedoed twice and had to swim for it. ‘War to end wars my foot!’

  ‘Your great-grandfather always said — ’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure he did,’ Kemp broke in quickly, for his great-grandfather had evidently said plenty; his sayings never ran out. He made his excuses and left the bedside; he would be up later to say goodnight if she wasn’t asleep.

  ‘Huh!’ Granny Marsden said scornfully. ‘How anybody’s expected to sleep in this house I don’t know!’ Kemp knew that the reference was to Harry, who possessed a bagpipe chanter and made hideous noises on it, though, out of respect for the wrath that would otherwise descend on his mother’s head, not unduly late at night. Kemp’s view was that within reason there were times when the old had to give way to the young with their lives before them and Harry, curiously perhaps, had talent in a musical direction, or so he insisted. He was currently employed by the BBC ... but when he came home that evening he confirmed what Kemp had foreshadowed earlier: he intended going along to the naval recruiting office within the next few days and joining up as an ordinary seaman. In the middle of this announcement Rufus turned up: it now being officially wartime, he had put on his Pangbourne cadet’s uniform and this brought a lump to Kemp’s throat. So young ... and God alone could tell how long the war was going to last. Rufus expressed the hope that it would last long enough for him to join in.

  One way and another, the home wasn’t going to be the same. Only Granny Marsden went on for ever.

  ***

  Two years on now, from Kemp’s first wartime homecoming: Paul Williams, lieutenant RNVR, looked at himself in the mirror in his bedroom at home in Hounslow. He liked what he saw: the second wavy gold stripe had only recently been sewn on to his uniform by Gieves on the Hard in Portsmouth, turning a sub-lieutenant into a full-blown lieutenant, and it gave him added importance, the equivalent of a captain in the army to whom in fact, being of the Senior Service, he would rank senior. More importance, in his view, was given by his new appointment to the staff of a convoy Commodore — even though he understood it to be normally a sub-lieutenant’s appointment. Never mind: no doubt an important convoy, a very large convoy, needed the extra rank. The personal staff would consist of himself and two signalmen, plus telegraphist ratings. The Commodore was to be an RNR with the Reserve Decoration, an oldie from the liners and probably with a constipated mind, but Lieutenant Williams could cope with that. So far in the war he hadn’t coped too badly, he believed, though his last ‘flimsy’ — the copy given all officers of their captains’ personal and confidential reports — had made use of the expression self-assertive and bouncy. A previous one had indicated cockiness but both went only to show that senior RN officers were also constipated mentally. If he had been all that, he wouldn’t have landed a staff job — which was how Williams thought of it.

  He saluted himself in the mirror, smartly. Then he coloured as he recalled not so long ago overhearing a leading seaman in his last ship referring to him as being all wind and piss like the barber’s cat. He had been mortified but had prudently turned a deaf ear. It wasn’t the sort of comment you made a song and dance about to the extent of putting the man in the rattle and having the phrase repeated loud and clear at Captain’s Defaulters. Anyway, wind and piss or not, it paid to be smartly turned out, since then you got noticed. Having saluted himself, the new lieutenant removed his cap and went downstairs, but not in time to hear the conversation between his father and mother. His mother had been fondly enthusing over her son’s elevation and appointment.

  ‘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 of 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 patrio
tism 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.’