The Lion at Sea

by Max Hennessy

  Kelly shifted in his seat, wondering if Charley’s devotion was not even sometimes too much of a good thing. With the uncertainty of a very young man, he even saw himself trapped by it. He’d never asked for it, indeed, had never worked to produce it. It had developed quite naturally from the normal friendship of two close friends.

  He frowned. Sometimes, he thought, it took his breath away. She had it all cut and dried and what was he supposed to do if he met someone else? Charley had never had any doubts and that in itself served to worry him more. Marriage was something older men considered; young men didn’t even bother to think about it. The world was full of girls, all interesting and as far as Kelly could make out, most of them itching to get close to a young man. Wasn’t it a little unwise to tie himself down to one, to arrange his future before he’d even lived his present?

  Then he remembered that he hadn’t tied himself down. There had already been other girls and he knew that Charley knew there’d been other girls. It said something for her character, in fact, that she’d never shown the slightest sign of jealousy, as though, despite her youth, she’d accepted that he was a sailor and was going to meet other girls, and that she must not concern herself with them.

  He sighed. There was a great deal more to this business of living than met the eye. In a ship, in the company of men, at sea as part of a unit that was based on comradeship and loyalty, life was twice as simple. Ashore it was full of complications.

  He shifted his position again. His limbs were cramped by the crowding in the compartment and the corridor outside was packed with more men. A sailor was singing.

  ‘Oh, I wonder, yes, I wonder,

  Did the jaunty make a blunder

  When he made this draft chit out for me?’

  The voice sounded bored, but then they were all bored. It took twenty-four hours to reach the north of Scotland and the ‘Jellicoes,’ as the trains were called after the commander-in-chief, were crammed, cluttered, cold and interminable. For Kelly, Crewe, Carlisle and Carstairs would always be inextricably entwined with this long journey to war. There had been nothing to differentiate between any of them except at Carlisle where everyone had hung out of the window on the lookout for hot meat pies only to be greeted by an elderly optimist offering home-made ices.

  ‘Got any ’ot ’uns, mate,’ a disgusted matelot had demanded.

  They were now on the last lap of the journey, on the Highland Line north of Perth, and everybody was waking up after an uncomfortable night’s sleep and peering through the steamed-up windows, certain that they’d arrived at the end of nowhere. In the corridor, movement was almost impossible over the obstacle course of men, cases, kitbags, hammocks and rolling beer bottles. The air was dense with smoke and stale alcohol and smelt more like a ship’s bilges than a train. A ribald request, to the stationmaster at Invergordon to ‘get a bloody move on,’ had brought only the dignified reply that ‘the Hielan’ Railway was no’ designed to stand the strain o’ a European war.’

  ‘Oh, a million miles I’ve travelled

  And a thousand sights I’ve seen…’

  The voice in the corridor sounded weary now, and Kelly saw the sailor stop dead and light a cigarette. ‘Shorter cruisers, longer boozes,’ he said gloomily.

  They reached Thurso at midnight and it was as black as the inside of a coal bag. The dawn came with a rough day and enormous waves crashing over the harbour.

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ the sailor who’d been singing said. ‘A calm day over Caithness’s no bloody indication that the Firth’s calm, and a wild day means it’s bloody near impassable. I wish I’d been drafted to the Gosport Ferry.’

  A bored voice took up the refrain. ‘Blackpool Pier would suit me, mate.’

  The Pentland Firth was one of the worst stretches of water in the world and this morning it was tempestuous and, as he peered through the jagged, slanting rain at the iron-clad heights of Dunnet Head, Kelly felt a ghostly pity for the haggard shades of the Spaniards, fleeing westwards through these terrible seas round the north of Scotland with their defeated Armada. The steamer, stinking of coal and oil and old paint, heaved its black sides through the crashing waves. The Firth didn’t contain ordinary waves, but mountains and chasms of green sea, and soldiers and sailors alike wallowed in the scuppers in a swill of water and vomit.

  When they reached Scapa, the storm had died a little and only a hard Orkney wind was jabbing out of the watery sky. The vast landlocked anchorage, fifteen miles long by eight miles wide, looked like a jagged hole punched in the southern half of the islands, and the grim shadows of the fleet could be seen against Hoxa and Switha Sounds and the empty undulating land among the grey farmhouses with their patchwork fields where seagulls were swarming round a plough. The colours ranged from pastel greys and greens and ochres to deep blues and astonishing turquoises.

  As the light lengthened, they were able to pick out of the retreating murk the lean shapes of the ships to which they’d been assigned, which would serve as homes or sepulchres according to the luck of the draw. No one was looking forward to the exile, because exile was only tolerable in pleasant conditions, and in Scapa there was nothing to relieve the monotony.

  HMS Mordant was a three-funnel ship of a thousand tons with a designed speed of around thirty knots, three four-inch guns and four 21-inch torpedo tubes. She had little to recommend her except her battle-worn appearance – grey sides, streaked with dirt and rust and clawed by the talons of the sea – and Kelly decided that much the same comment could be applied to her captain.

  Commander Henry Bellweather Talbot was a small man with a battered, exhausted, perpetually perspiring face, whose whole appearance was so changed when he took off his cap to reveal a totally bald head that in the wardroom he was known as the Wet Boiled Egg. He smoked a pipe so constantly it seemed to be part of his face and he was bored with Scapa Flow and didn’t even seem to think much of his ship.

  ‘She has such a low freeboard,’ he said, introducing her to her new First Lieutenant, ‘that in any sort of seaway it’s impossible for the men to remain on the upper deck, never mind fight the guns or man the torpedo tubes.’ He gave a bored yawn and went on wearily. ‘When she isn’t rolling or pitching, she’s doing both; and the boiler room intakes are so exposed the stokers go on watch in oilskins. Finally, she carries two boats on davits near the break of the forecastle but, since a head sea over the bows can shatter even the navigating bridge, naturally we lose them every time there’s foul weather.’

  ‘How about the German destroyers, sir?’ Kelly asked.

  ‘Much better designed. If we ever meet ’em, we can expect to be blown to bits in a matter of minutes. “M” boats are nothing but toy ships and they’d probably have been better never built but on the other hand, Number One, you’ll find they’re a splendid school for seamen and anyone who can serve in them without going off his head can take anything.’

  Kelly grinned. ‘I think I’ll manage, sir.’

  ‘Glad to hear it.’ Talbot sounded indifferent. ‘Right spirit, after all. But then, it’s difficult to go aboard any ship nowadays without finding the quarter deck plastered all over with “England expects that every man will do his duty.” In spirit, if not in paint. To me it always seems like telling a man to do what he intended to do all along. One other thing: Mordant, despite her appearance, has a reputation as a tiddly ship and it’ll be your job to see she remains one. In the Navy cleaning ship is a fetish. In this ship it’s a disease. Make it so.’

  Fortunately the other officers, Lieutenants Shakespeare and Heap, the watchkeepers, and Naylor, the sub, were easy to get on with – non-regulars who brought a breath of fresh air into the stuffy corridors of the Navy to counter the heavy breathing of the captain. Lieutenant Wellbeloved, the engineer, an ex-ERA steeped in the traditions of the Navy, Mr Hatchard, the gunner, and the surgeon, Chambers, were also pleasant enough men, though all thoroughly
under the thumb of the captain and unlikely to cause problems.

  Mordant was tiny and salt-encrusted with work. So far no one had discovered how to provide guns, torpedoes and speed in so small and slender a vessel and provide comfort at the same time for the crew at sea. For the lower deck, life was a wet, cold boredom, crawling down ladders from duty to a wet cold mess deck to eat wet cold biscuits and lie wet and cold in a wet, cold hammock. For them in bad weather, even speaking was hard work and thinking an effort as they watched the water, foul with vomit, hurl itself across their living quarters, carrying mess-traps and clothing that couldn’t be retrieved. The officers’ quarters were a little better, but not much. You could hear the propellers and the vibrating rattle of the steering gear, while, with the lack of ventilation when the upper deck was awash, the air was invariably blue with tobacco smoke, oil fumes and the all-pervading stink of an inefficient lavatory in the lobby.

  Though the Flow was supposed to be a sheltered anchorage, often the weather was so rough the gulls were tossed about like limp sheets of paper and the big ships took it green over the bows even when motionless. In a gale it was a smother of white foam with the wind howling from the north west with the violence of despair. Rain squalls and banks of fog succeeded each other like waves of attacking infantry and the long Atlantic rollers swept all the way from Newfoundland to hurl themselves in a cataract of foam on the rock-bound coast, so that it became impossible to get the mails on board from among the cargo of vomiting messmen; and liberty boats could not go ashore and they were isolated for days in their own little steel cases. Even when they could reach dry land, there was little to divert them, only a nine-hole golf course for the officers and a single canteen on Flotta for the men, where the beer was so awful the sailors complained it was impossible to get drunk on it. Even then they could go only in small groups for fear of swamping the meagre facilities and, since the Flow accommodated over a hundred ships, the shoregoing delights were not often enjoyed and every junior officer who had been at Scapa for more than six months seemed to have applied to join some other branch of the service. Both Shakespeare and Heap had asked for submarines and Naylor, the sub, was trying to get some influential relative he possessed to pull strings to get him down to Tyrwhitt’s force at Harwich. Swinging round a buoy for months at a time didn’t seem to be an aid to morale.

  Nevertheless the fleet was a fine sight, with the big ships moored in menacing rows. Revenge, Ramillies, Resolution, Royal Oak, Emperor of India, Benbow, Marlborough, Iron Duke, Hercules, Collingwood, Neptune, St Vincent, Colossus, Superb, Bellerophon, and God knew how many more – Kelly knew he’d be able to recite their names on his death bed. Despite the loneliness and emptiness, the scene filled him with pride.

  There was only one entirely unavoidable problem – time. There was just too much of it, and he could only thank God it wasn’t winter when night arrived at three o’clock in the afternoon, but approaching midsummer when they could walk all night on the decks. Leisure was the difficulty and the lower deck grew sick of making mats, embroidery and knitting, even illegal crown and anchor, and, because they were so far from the run of events, there was no interest even in politics, and the opinions of The Daily Mail and John Bull got short shrift.

  A faint murmur of excitement stirred the fleet when the Germans bombarded Lowestoft in April and everyone began again to hope for a confrontation. But to everyone’s disgust, the fleet didn’t move. It ought to have been obvious that the Germans couldn’t hope to meet Jellicoe head-on but the months of waiting had made everyone desperate and hearts rather than heads were behind the hopes.

  The reaction of the rest of the country was exactly the same. Though few lives had been lost at Lowestoft and there was little damage to military objectives, two hundred houses had been wrecked and the spontaneous result was an uproar that made everyone at Scapa squirm with the guilty feeling of achieving nothing.

  ‘What’s the fleet doing?’ It was in all the papers and in every letter from home. It was all right for the government to write heartening notes to the Mayor of Lowestoft assuring him that it would prove highly dangerous for the enemy to try this sort of thing again, but more than pencilled encouragement was needed. The Mayor, like many others, was calling for the extermination of the German High Seas Fleet. To the man in the street, the principle of the fleet in being as a deterrent seemed to be proving more and more a myth and the solitary naval hero was Tyrwhitt at Harwich who seemed to be the only admiral to have come out of the war so far with any real credit.

  Talbot seemed to sink deeper into his gloom. ‘I’ve been up here since 1914,’ he said bitterly. ‘I missed the Heligoland Bight, Falklands and Dogger Bank actions and they didn’t even send me out to try my luck in the Dardanelles. The only battle I’ve taken part in was the Battle of Scapa Flow.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of that one, sir,’ Kelly admitted.

  ‘It didn’t reach the popular press,’ Talbot explained. ‘Falmouth reported firing at a submarine and every damn destroyer in the Flow raised steam at once and moved about the harbour at high speed, filling the sky with volumes of black smoke. Even the Admiral Commanding Orkneys and Shetlands hoisted his flag in one of ’em and joined in the fun and games. The excitement was added to by the discharges of four-inch guns from any battleship which imagined she’d seen a periscope, and by the fact that all the big ships got out their picket boats which cruised about vigorously under the command of midshipmen looking for periscopes. What they’d have done if they’d met one I can’t imagine. Put a bag over it, I expect. Needless to say, there was no submarine and since then we’ve been overworked and overstrained, and it’s only the thought of dying that keeps me alive. But for the hope that one day the Germans might come out, I’d apply for the Chiltern Hundreds and resign my commission to enlist in the army.’

  On the rare occasions when it appeared, the sun looked remarkably like an underdone fried egg and its ability to generate heat lived up to its appearance. The mud was grey. The sky was grey. The islands were grey. The sea was grey. The ships at their moorings were grey. War, Kelly supposed, was a grey business.

  Every morning the battleships, cruisers and destroyers followed each other up the Flow at regular intervals to carry out gun and torpedo practices, and at night the sea was lit by the gunflashes and searchlights of ships carrying out night firing, while at regular intervals a complete battle squadron disappeared to sea to carry out heavy practice in the western entrance of the Pentland Firth. The destroyers, hospital ships, colliers, oilers, ammunition ships and other fleet auxiliaries lived up Gutter Sound at Longhope, their crews idle, bored and mutinous. In the big ships it was a little better and they could even dance, one man clutching another to the ribald comments of his mates, could even manage cinemas or enjoy concert parties. In the destroyers there was no room for anything and not much time either, because they were always slipping out to sea on an exercise, to escort trawlers or minesweepers or bring some ship in.

  Conscious that it was his job to keep the crew happy and well aware that he could expect little help from Talbot, Kelly organised walks on the islands, inspecting the antiquities, observing the bird and animal life, or merely taking exercise. Football was played as if it were the last thing they were to do on earth and there were matches on any flat piece of boggy ground. Boxing competitions, sports and pulling races were held, but all the time he was aware of how much more determination these activities would require when the winter came with its bitter winds and snow.

  ‘This must be the last place God made,’ he wrote to Charley. The influence of the lonely sea and the grey sky was having a sharp nostalgic effect on him that nudged him as it had nudged sailors from time immemorial, so that he felt sentimental, frustrated and randy, and was kicking himself for drawing back. It seemed so long since he’d seen a girl, he felt they’d have to fit him with a collar and chain the next time he went ashore. After all, he thought, as Charley had s
aid, he might be killed. Though he couldn’t imagine it. He couldn’t imagine what it was like to be dead, except that it would be cold and dark and empty, like being trapped in a vast unlit room.

  Charley wrote back regularly, but never about what had happened or might have happened between them. ‘There were twenty-one bombs on Ashford in Kent,’ she announced in matter-of-fact terms, ‘and they dropped forty-one in the fields near the Admiralty gunpowder factory at Faversham.’ It was almost too matter-of-fact for Kelly.

  Perhaps it was harder for Charley, he decided. He found he still couldn’t think of Ayesha without pain but whether it was the pain of love or the pain of guilt he wasn’t sure. At least, however, he’d experienced love. Charley, he knew, never had.

  Rumbelo appeared. A desperate letter had arrived for Kelly: ‘I have to go back to surface ships, sir. They say that bullet over the knee will efect my climbing and that I might jam the ladder in an emergency. How about asking for me, sir? I’ll not let you down.’ It wasn’t hard to persuade Talbot that Leading Seaman Rumbelo was the best helmsman in the Navy and that good helmsmen were useful in a destroyer; and a special request was sent to the drafting depot. The reply came remarkably quickly in the form of a curt reply that Rumbelo was a Portsmouth rating, that it was quite irregular for such a person to be sent to Mordant, which was a Chatham ship, and that he was due to go to Partridge, from his home port, instead.

  ‘It’s nothing but a piece of red tape,’ Kelly snorted and by the following day had persuaded Talbot to go ashore at Kirkwall and get in touch personally with someone he knew in the drafting depot, asking for Rumbelo’s papers to be closed in Partridge and transferred to Mordant.