A Funny Place to Hold a War

by John Harris

  As Ginger appeared, she closed the garage doors and unhitched the lappa, to stand in front of him, naked, slim and boyish, her skin purple-black.

  ‘One day we marry,’ she said.

  ‘Yeh,’ Ginger agreed in a flat voice. ‘One day.’

  Afterwards, she opened the doors again and, as Ginger sat on a horsehair sofa underneath the solitary hurricane lamp she used to illuminate the place after dark, she produced a bottle of beer for him. ‘No beer in camp,’ she said proudly. ‘But Lizzie got beer.’

  Ginger nodded and began to pour the beer into the sawn-off bottle she handed him in lieu of a glass. There seemed to be hardly a single glass in the whole of Sierra Leone and most people drank out of cut-down bottles. Ginger eyed the sparkling liquid cheerfully and took a deep swallow.

  ‘Cold,’ he said. ‘How’re you doin’, kid?’

  Lizzie shrugged. ‘Okay,’ she replied. ‘Except white boss come. I t’ink he Dutch. He get plenty drunk. He humbug me.’ She gestured to the back room where she slept when the bar was closed.

  Ginger took another swig at the beer, then, noticing the unfamiliar label, held up the bottle to ascertain its origin. Most of the beer consumed in the protectorate was Canadian and much of what appeared in native bars was stolen from the docks. To his surprise, this one was French.

  ‘Who got it for you?’ he asked.

  ‘Friend belong me. I got plenty. Soon-soon is bundu ceremony. Afterwards people drink plenty beer.’

  Ginger knew about bundu – the circumcision ceremonies practised in the bush on both males and females, and the acrobatic and magician’s shows that were put on with the drinking that followed.

  ‘I get him stored in shed,’ the black woman said. ‘I get boy to carry it for me.’

  ‘I’ll carry it,’ Ginger said. He was an amiable man and not at all the person to worry about the white man’s dignity or the dignity of the RAF.

  He carried the boxes of bottles into the bar then sat drinking the rest of his beer, still and silent, his forked stick alongside his feet. One of the village mammies walked past, an earthenware pot on her head. Behind her, aping her, was a small girl carrying on her woolly crown a sheet of paper held in place by a stone. The sun was out again and Ginger stared at the broken step of the bar where a small green lizard was basking in the heat. Startled, as the shadows of the woman and child fell across it, it vanished in sudden zigzag flashes like coloured darts of flame. Ginger wondered if Lizzie’s ‘friend’ was also one of her lovers.

  As he made his way back down-river, the tide was running out fast under all the rainwater that came from the hills. Ginger handled the old scow automatically with the skill of someone who had been handling boats for years, his eyes fixed on the empty beer bottle he’d brought away with him. He had set it on the engine hatch just in front of where he stood at the tiller, and he read and re-read the words on the label over and over again. ‘Bière Etoile. Mise en bouteille à Conakry.’

  His attention was finally caught by a Sunderland, towed by a seaplane tender, moving slowly out of Jum creek towards the lines of mooring buoys. Following it were a refueller and a bomb scow. Despite the purple-grey clouds along the mountains which indicated more rain, there was going to be flying, and the view was confirmed when he saw a motor dinghy appear towing a line of masted dumb dinghies for the flarepath.

  As he stepped ashore, he noticed that the elephant grass which up to a week before had been sparse, brown and withered at the end of the dry season, was growing rapidly in the steamy heat. It would eventually reach eight or ten feet high and was already tall enough and wet enough to soak him as he pushed through it. As he trudged towards the hut where he lived he heard an uproar among the long grass then one of his Temne labourers appeared with his eyes rolling. ‘Boss Ginger,’ he said. ‘Snake!’

  Ginger didn’t quicken his steps. Neither did he slow them. Wearing mosquito boots as he was – they were forbidden during daylight hours but that made little difference to Ginger – he was not so vulnerable as the barefooted Africans. The snake was in the centre of the path through the long grass, a six-foot green mamba, its head raised, watching the scared Africans who were staring at it as if hypnotized. Without a word, never taking his eyes off it, Ginger edged round the back of the reptile, and, with a quick jab with his stick, he trapped the snake with the fork behind its head and pressed it down into the damp earth. As the tail lashed wildly one of the black men produced a heavy stone.

  Ginger picked up the dead snake by the tail and handed it to the black man who held it as if it were a time bomb, then progressed placidly towards his billet. Reaching his hut, he pushed the stick under his bed and, placing the empty beer bottle on the orange box that did duty for a locker, sat staring at it, a cigarette dangling from his lips.

  The rain he had expected started soon afterwards, coming at first in a few heavy drops like bombs, and the mosquito-wired doors of the hut crashed open as Kneller and Feverel fell through, their khaki soaked and mud-covered from working on buoys. Taking the simplest solution, they stripped off their muddy clothes and stood naked outside the door until they were clean.

  Entering the hut again, they noticed Ginger. He was sewing by this time. He had acquired a tatty leopard skin from one of his friends in Makinkundi some time before and was engaged in making matching gloves, handbag and hat to take back to England to give to the first woman he came across who looked obliging. The fact that the skin was as stiff as a board and improperly cured and that no woman in her right mind would have been seen dead in what he was making was by the way. Over his head was his selection of Men Only pin-ups. The whole wall was covered with breasts, bottoms, thighs and navels. He had stuck them there in the first flush of enthusiasm on his arrival but had long since lost interest in them and now noticed them no more than he noticed the squeak and rattle of the fan that revolved slowly above his head – ‘Sssss-ah-phttt, Sssss-ahphttt’ – constantly there because of a fault in the hub.

  ‘What’s up, Ginger?’ Feverel asked ‘ flinging down the towel with which he had dried himself. ‘Got the willies? Gone jungle at last?’

  Ginger looked up, unperturbed by the chaffing. He had a strange affection for Feverel and Kneller. It was closely connected with his own ill-spent mismanaged youth and his lack of most of the amenities of civilization. He could write only with an effort and Feverel, who had been a newspaper reporter before the war, had obliged on more than one occasion by writing delicate missives to his girls for him, while Kneller could not only sing but could actually make sense of the little black dots like the trail of a drunken spider across a sheet of music. He lit a cigarette and gestured at the bottle. Kneller stared at it with surprise.

  ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘Makinkundi. It’s French.’

  ‘What’s it matter if it’s beer?’

  As they talked, the rain increased to a steady and sickening descent that hammered on the roof, the brown flood bubbling under the eaves, every blade of grass dripping its weight of water to the sodden earth. With darkness, it slackened off and the sound of an aircraft taking off reached them.

  ‘C-Charlie,’ Feverel pointed out.

  Ginger said nothing, still smoking, his eyes still on the bottle.

  ‘Why don’t you get the photographers to take a picture of it, Ginger?’ Kneller asked. ‘People would buy it.’

  The squadron photographic sections had long since discovered that the unused film from the cameras on the aircraft could be cut off and used to take pictures which could be sold for souvenirs. Naked black girls were especially popular.

  Feverel looked at the damp haze outside the window. ‘The fitter off the White Bird’s gone sick,’ he said to nobody in particular. ‘Malaria again. That means they’ll have to supply someone else when Groupy wants to go visiting.’

  The weather in England was just about the opposite of the weather at Jum. Jum was sodden and swathed in mist. England was bright with summer sunshine and the fields had never
looked more beautiful, so that the ships’ captains assembling for the convoy conference were not over-anxious to get back to sea.

  The conference was held in a schoolroom, the ships’ captains in civilian clothes, in their eyes the faraway look of men used to staring over vast distances. They carried briefcases and as they sat down they began filling in slips of paper giving the number of officers, hands and DEMS gunners in their ships. They had already been informed of the places they would occupy in the convoy – a matter of joy to those on the inside, of great concern to those on the flanks – and been given sealed envelopes containing the stragglers’ route they were to follow if they lost the convoy, which were not to be opened until they were twenty-four hours at sea.

  The escort commander began to speak.

  ‘As usual,’ he said, ‘for reasons of security you’re not being informed of the route you’ll take, but I can say this: for once, you’re not going far enough west across the Atlantic to see the Statue of Liberty.’ There was a faint ironic cheer and he smiled. ‘You’ll have noted your convoy number, WS24, and you all know what WS stands for. WS means Winston’s Special, and it’s usually reserved for fast troopships. This time, though, because of the situation in the Middle East and the need for what you’re carrying, it applies to you.’

  He explained the need to keep their places, do exactly as they were told, and avoid that most heinous of crimes, making smoke. As he spoke, he looked hard at the masters of the coal-burning ships.

  ‘The chaps in the desert need what you’re carrying,’ he said. ‘To stop Rommel coming any further. With what you’ve got in your holds, the chances are that they’ll even do better than that and might actually throw him out of Africa. But the Germans are as aware of this as we are and they’ll do everything in their power to stop us getting through.’

  It was a little like a lecture in a village hall, and the escort commander wondered that the merchant captains trusted the navy as much as they did. One day, he felt sure, something would go wrong and then the bitterness and the resentment would be beyond belief.

  ‘We shall need to be alert,’ he continued. ‘Not just the look-outs. Every man working on deck must keep one eye on the sea, because intelligence has it that the Germans are assembling one of their wolf packs to stop us. Perhaps more than one.’

  He paused and looked at his notes. ‘For your information, however,’ he said. ‘We’ve been thinking ahead a little, too. There’ll be air cover well into the Atlantic and a strong escort south. At Gib we’ll have air escort to Cape Blanc, which is on the southern extremity of Spanish African territory, where we’ll be met by air escorts from Bathurst who’ll pass us on to escorts from Freetown. They’ll be Catalinas or Sunderlands so don’t mistake them for Focke-Wulf Kondors. They’ll escort us into Freetown where we shall be watering and taking on supplies over a period of four days. So have your requirements ready. It’ll be your last chance until you reach the Cape.’

  Twelve hours later the ships put the shore behind them, moving in file along the swept channel. Dropping their pilots, they headed for open water to commence the complicated business of assembling in their proper formation. As squalls of unexpected rain drove from the south, they began to roll and the formations lost their neat shape.

  At roughly the same time, another convoy was putting behind it the skyscrapers of Manhattan, heading west for the rendezvous with the ships from the Clyde. There were over a hundred vessels, cargo ships, bulk carriers, tankers, refrigerated vessels, and they came from ten different countries. Together, their gross weight was in the region of a million tons, and their cargoes included oil, frozen meat, food, explosives, detonators, bombs, shells, lorries, aircraft, tanks and men. They would meet more heading south from Gibraltar.

  In the corvettes the mess-decks were already a shambles. The chief hope of their crews was never for comfort, just that there might be duff for pudding and that, with luck, they’d be held back for a boiler clean next time they reached their home port. The sailors climbing into their hammocks fully clothed didn’t look forward to darkness, but mostly they thought only about sleep, which was the prize they all looked for off watch, and like all sailors they were optimistic enough not to expect trouble.

  In that, however, they were wrong, because the staff of Admiral Karl Dönitz, head of the German U-boat service, known to the U-boat crews as the Stab ohne Bäuche, the staff without pot-bellies, because of their youth and inexperience, were watching and waiting, one eye on the reports from the Beobachtungsdienst, their deciphering service. They knew how important supplies were for the beleaguered British in the Middle East and they already had a B-Dienst message containing the sailing date and the convoys’ routes, times of departures and meeting places, even the stragglers’ route which even the masters of the merchant ships didn’t yet know. They had picked it up in a signal from America. With the Atlantic telegraph cables overloaded, the signal had been sent by radio, so that it had become potentially insecure the moment it was transmitted, and they had already moved the Gruppe Heydt, a pack of U-boats on station slightly to the north of the expected route of the convoy, further south. A second group, just released from a recent battle in the Atlantic and refuelled from milch cow submarines, was also moving south at full speed. Those with enough torpedoes left were to form a line which would be reinforced by new boats from Germany and older boats from France. The two groups would be known in signals as ‘Markgraf’ and ‘Herzog’ and it was expected that it would take several days for them to get into position.

  That same afternoon, a signal arrived at Jum addressed to Group Captain Strudwick, the station commander and to Wing Commanders Mackintosh and Molyneux.

  Mackintosh received his first and appeared in Molyneux’ office a couple of minutes later.

  ‘You were right, sport,’ he said. ‘Things are happening. Those replacements you were talking about are a fact. Here they are. Due off the coast next month, in our sphere of influence for two days, then into Freetown for water and stores before taking off for the Cape and the Middle East. This is it, sport.’

  ‘Pity there aren’t more of us,’ Molyneux said.

  ‘Or that Lungi isn’t yet operational.’

  There was a moment’s silence as they thought of the new airfield being constructed just across the mouth of the Rokel for the new four-engined American aircraft they so desperately needed.

  ‘The buggers sank eleven ships – seventy thousand tons – off this coast in March,’ Mackintosh pointed out. ‘We could do with a few of those long-range jobs Bomber Command’s beginning to lose every night over Germany.’

  ‘Or some of these new radar-directed lights we’ve heard of,’ Molyneux agreed. ‘They say they’re death to a submarine at night.’

  ‘Which is the only time you can catch the bastards on the surface,’ Mackintosh said.

  ‘This is our last chance, sport. If the convoy system can’t deliver the goods, where do we go next?’ He paused and puffed at his pipe. ‘Just to help matters, I hear we’re losing Warrant Officer Hacker. Going home for a commission.’

  Hacker, the engineer warrant officer, was an ex-apprentice, one of that splendid body of men who were the backbone of the RAF workshops, and Molyneux considered the information, hoping that Hacker’s replacement would be as good as Hacker.

  ‘He was due home, anyway,’ he said. ‘Time-expired, like a few more. I hear a ship’s due in.’

  Nobody ever knew where the news of homegoing ships came from, only that there seemed to be remarkably few of them. The lean stooping men who had finished their tour of duty watched for them like hawks, because though hundreds seemed to pass, going south, none ever seemed to come back. Most time-expired men were bitterly convinced that the harbours of the Middle East were packed with idle ships, and when one – they never seemed to come in twos – arrived, the time-expireds immediately began to panic that they’d be forgotten.

  The new arrivals in their unfaded khaki, their skins still pink and white and he
althy, wondered what they were getting so worked up about. They couldn’t understand the anxiety, because they’d not long come from green fields, English beer, and Vera Lynn on the radio, and had not yet realised that in Jum there was nothing but boredom, heat, sickness and flies, and that the very absence of war was what really got you down so that rumours of homegoing ships and clearance chits became the most important things in life. As the old hands had discovered, there was more to being in a war than facing the enemy with your teeth bared.

  And this time, though nobody was yet aware of it, there was even more than that.

  Part Two

  Crisis

  ‘…The critical phase of the U-boat war cannot be long postponed. A bolder and more reckless strategy and concentration against shipping of immediate military importance are the keynotes of present enemy policy…’

  Admiralty report. 1942

  ‘…General Rommel positively asserts that, providing he can be supplied from Italy and providing the British are prevented from reinforcing their army, he will be able to defeat them again outside Cairo. It is confidently felt that the British cannot be expected to hold their present position without the men and the machines they need. Even with reinforcements, they will have difficulty…’

  Intelligence digest of the Kriegsmarine,

  9 July 1942

  One

  Ginger had not been wrong when he had said that X-X-ray’s crash had been witnessed by two other men. So had O-Orange’s.

  They came from a small group of wooden buildings in the hills near Bonai. The sign on the gate announced that it was the base camp of an iron ore prospecting company. A lot of digging went on in the protectorate, most of it near Pepel on the river Rokel, or nearer the coast and the river Bic at Yima where it was possible to scoop the ore out of the hillside with ease. Mining engineers were always moving about the protectorate looking for new sites, because Sierra Leone seemed to be built on iron ore in thick deposits of rich red haematite, and this group of huts at Bonai had been erected ten years before by the Dutch Jan van der Pas Company which worked the mine at Yima. It had come to nothing, however. The area had yielded little and the huts had been left empty and until recently unused.