Submariner (2008)

by Fullerton, Alexander

  As they might anywhere, in fact. Keeping the lads on their toes, was all.

  2150 now. Ursa trimmed down, with her low profile practically invisible at any range at all, diesels grumbling thickly into the dark, enclosing night.

  Supper would be in about an hour, McLeod told him. 2300, roughly.

  ‘So what’s that?’

  Cold pork and baked beans was what it was. McLeod tucking into it while Jarvis who was also at the table rolled poker dice against himself. Mike appreciating, obviously, that McLeod was getting his now because he’d be taking over the watch from Danvers at a quarter past the hour; but cold food, after all, why did the rest of them have to wait an hour?

  ‘Spuds, sir.’ Jarvis looked happy enough about it. ‘Roast spuds. Chef’s tour de force. Number One’s rotten luck, so Barnaby’s warmed his beans up for him instead. Care for a game, sir?’

  Rattling the dice. Mike suggested, ‘Why don’t we wait for Danvers and make it three-handed Liars?’

  Liar dice was the wardroom game. In fact poker dice of any kind: when one had the time for it, for instance, Double Cameroon, for which one needed four players and two sets of dice. In other messes the games they played most were Uckers, a form of Ludo, and cribbage. Current Uckers champions were the stokers, individual cribbage king as it happened the Stoker PO, Franklyn.

  Intriguing sight, the champ at play. Large, invariably smiling face, huge hands, fingers like great sausages fiddling matchsticks into the scoreboard’s little holes …

  ‘Barnaby?’

  McLeod – he’d finished his pork and warmed-up beans – would have time for a mug of coffee, as long as it took Barnaby no longer than two or three minutes to produce it.

  ‘Two an’ a ’alf, sir.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ He asked Mike, ‘If you’re getting this sumptuous repast at eleven, sir, might ditch gash at half-past?’

  ‘All things being equal, go ahead.’

  ‘Gash’ meant muck, galley rubbish, and ditching it meant hauling it up through the tower in buckets on a rope – two men up top, two more below and one on the ladder to guide each bucketful up through the hatch. You wanted to avoid spillage, but also to get the job done quickly; ropes and men in hatches, preventing them from being shut, weren’t tolerable for longer than was necessary. On the other hand it did have to be done; on a long day’s dive the last thing you wanted in the boat was garbage.

  He heard the gash-ditching taking place at eleven-thirty, and White watch taking over from Red at midnight. They’d played Liars while the spuds had been roasting, and he’d then flaked out but not slept; wasn’t tired, what was more had another long, quiet day ahead. Wasn’t likely to sleep at all while traversing QBB 255. As skipper, one had an inclination – instinct – to stay awake. No obvious or logical purpose in it: if you were submerged and hit a mine, you were dead, all of you – unquestionably, instantly, nothing you could do or could have done, might just as well have been fast asleep.

  Only to be around, was the thing. Present, with them – and one might hope, imparting confidence – which in fact one did have, was no bullshit. Steering a course of 300 degrees at 150 feet, as recommended by Shrimp a year or more ago and used time after time since then by all his COs including Wanklyn, Tommo and their brethren – Cayley, Woodward, Norman, Wraith – and a dozen others, faces and boats’ names flickering through the stream of semi-consciousness, in one’s private, unspoken thoughts recalling Stephen Spender’s I think continually of those who were truly great.

  To be emulated, what was more. As far as one was able. Because to excel in this particular function was as it happened the pinnacle one aimed for. Nothing else came near it, or probably ever would. Not easy to explain, simply how it was.

  The minefield business though – Ursa had no MDU, mine detection unit, in her asdic equipment; and some COs who did have it didn’t use it. The pinpointing of mines or of what looked like mines when the set picked them up served little purpose other than giving one the willies. Much better follow Shrimp’s advice – duck under, stay on that course at four knots for fourteen or fifteen hours, then ’plane up into the clean, dark, hopefully empty night. Well – after some further interval. You’d reckon to be clear of the mined area after fourteen hours, but you’d stay under until you had darkness to surface into.

  ‘Four o’clock, sir.’

  ‘Right.’Messenger from the control room, where Red watch was relieving Blue. This was Brooks, Leading Torpedoman, shaking him. ‘Thanks, I’m awake.’ Up on an elbow to prove it, hearing from the control room ‘Relieve lookout, sir?’ and Danvers’ affirmative down the pipe. Brooks, one of Ursa’s three Glaswegians, had meanwhile shaken McLeod:Mike telling him as he more or less surfaced, ‘I’ll take over from Danvers at a quarter-past, Number One, dive shortly afterwards on the watch.’

  Meaning on McLeod’s Red watch, as distinct from going to diving stations and disturbing the whole crew’s well-earned repose.

  ‘Right, sir.’ At the table, getting it together while fumbling the lid off a tin of Senior Service. First thing Jamie McLeod always did on waking – when on the surface – was light up.

  ‘You, sir?’

  ‘Oh. Well.’ It would be the last for quite a while. He’d have switched on the overhead lamp, refrained from doing so in the interests of his night vision when he got up there presently. Jarvis meanwhile snoring like a dog, and some Blue watch men heading for’ard displacing the curtain as they passed. One of them – Llewellyn, who came from Port Talbot, where he could have remained in what he said had been a ‘reserved occupation’, i.e. free from call-up, in a steel works – diminutive, wild-eyed, laughed a lot, sometimes for no obvious reason – giving tongue then over the diesels’ racket, ‘Bleedin’ mines all fuckin’ day now, eh?’

  ‘May be, Taff, then again may not.’ Brooks, the torpedoman who’d just shaken them. ‘Say there is – never bumped one, did we?’

  Llewellyn’s cackle fading as he went on for’ard. Scrape and flare of McLeod’s match. Mike sitting back from it, thinking again about his answer to Ann’s letter. Be less cautious, she’d urged him: OK, so he would. Spell it out the way he felt it, no holds barred – passion, memory, longing – if he could manage that, which he supposed he never yet had, on paper. He stubbed out his cigarette, pushed himself up from the table, fetched binoculars and Ursula jacket – protective clothing designed by the then CO of the U-class Ursula – from their stowage behind the bulkhead door. A glance at the clock, and a nod to McLeod: ‘Half-past, Jamie, I’ll pull the plug.’

  5

  Coming up for fourteen hours under the mines – most of which time he’d managed to stay awake. 1810 now, by the clock on the control room’s for’ard bulkhead, above the helmsman’s – Cottenham’s – narrow, bald-patched head. White watch on the job although McLeod was still presiding – had spent the last few minutes adjusting the boat’s trim; Jarvis would be taking over from him in a few minutes’ time, was currently imbibing a mug of tea in there. Mike meanwhile having drifted in to peruse the chart, check Ursa’s day’s progress as recorded in his officers’ notations along her pencilled track and in the log. The dive at 0430, and 0600 dead-reckoning position and another at 0800 – breakfast-time, when she’d have been at her nearest point to the Sicilian coast, five miles off Cape Granitola – and at 1230, lunch-time, starting across the southern approaches to the Egadi Channel – towards which he’d then have been turning up if it hadn’t been for Shrimp’s warning. And now – well, here, near enough, ten or twelve miles southwest of Marettimo, just about clearing the minefield’s western boundary.

  Give it until the half-hour anyway. Then up to periscope depth for a look-around before altering course to north.

  Ten miles up that way should do it:You’d have periscope fixes on Marettimo island as you crept up in easy sight of the island’s west coast during the last few hours of daylight. Turning his back on the chart, leaning back with his elbows on the table’s edge. Needles in the depth-gauges s
teady on 150 feet again, McLeod behind the ’planesmen with his hand still on the order instrument – switching off at that moment and meeting his CO’s eye. ‘Good enough for the time being, sir.’

  ‘For the time being’ because they’d be going up to twenty-eight feet pretty soon – different kettle of fish altogether then, taking in ballast so she didn’t rise too fast. Meanwhile in trim at this depth, following the changeover of watches. With the air a bit thin and the battery distinctly low: would be lower still by the time they surfaced. Time coming up to a quarter-past, and Jarvis sloping in, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, ready to take over, pink-faced in his greenish-khaki shirt with its torn collar. Nodding to Mike – ‘Sir’ – and then addressing McLeod: ‘On the dot, please note, as always?’

  ‘Bloody hope so. Point of fact, a few minutes early would be better.’

  Telling him then – same course and depth, same revs, well enough in trim, DR as on the chart, captain would be taking her up for a look-round shortly. Jarvis nodding: ‘Got her, then.’ And to the men on watch around them, ‘Evening, all!’ Impersonating someone or other, Mike realised, some actor or comedian. Arthur Askey, of course – Big-Hearted Arthur, as he called himself. But you’d never have guessed, he reflected, looking round at them, that these men had spent the past fourteen hours in or under a minefield. A basic factor being of course that one tended not to think of it in such stark terms – having been through it before more than once and come to no harm, and now simply repeated that exercise – accepting assurances, incidentally, that minefields deteriorated with the passage of time. Touch wood, they did. Italian ones especially. Shrimp had a theory that Italian moored mines ceased to be effective six months after they were laid – which in the case of this QBB 255, which had been laid more than two years ago, was definitely encouraging – even allowing for the probability that out of every thousand mines you might reckon on there being at least a few exceptions to that generality. Two boats had been lost, apparently to mines, in these Sicilian narrows, in the past eighteen months, one ‘U’ and a ‘T’; but there again, since overall losses up to the time the flotilla had taken its recent holiday from Malta had been approaching 50 per cent, it was no reason to see this particular transit as more dangerous than any other.

  ERA Coldwell asked him, ‘About through, sir, are we?’

  ‘Not far off. Give it another mile, in case of strays.’

  Stray mines. If mines did stray. Well, loose from their moorings of course they did. But making as sure of it as possible, was all.

  Coldwell was about five-seven or eight, with a seamed face and irregular features, jaw already darkening with stubble. Mike asked him, ‘Your father still in Heavy Rescue?’

  ‘He is that, sir. Eased off a lot though, compared to what it was. Last I heard, they got him supervising, sort of thing.’

  ‘That’s good news. Big relief, eh?’

  ‘’Cept it won’t keep him out of it – him being him like.’

  Heavy Rescue squads in the London blitzkrieg – part of

  ARP, Air Raid Precautions. Coldwell Senior and most of his buddies were ’14–’18 veterans, too old for service in this war and not necessarily all that fit, but all volunteers. Coldwell had summed it up to Mike, a long time ago, as ‘Just strong. Get in there, take the weight.’

  Just Strong. Two-word family motto, he’d thought, and it had stuck in his memory as not a bad one. At the chart again, plotting tomorrow’s track and distances – Cape San Vito, Cape Gallo, Golfo di Palermo – remembering Coldwell telling him about his father when they’d still been in the yard at Chatham, Ursa barely submarine-shaped even, at that stage. The blitz on London had been at about its worst in the autumn and winter of ’40. Battle of Britain having peaked that summer, but London and other cities and the ports especially still getting it in the neck. Including the weekend of Billy Gorst’s wedding – ‘Taranto Night’ as they’d referred to it on account of the news of that Fleet Air Arm triumph having been released that morning, or ‘Coconut Grove Night’ coming closer to one’s own more private memories. Including the party’s ending for himself and Chloe in a jam-packed Tube station in use as an air-raid shelter in the rumbling and flaring small hours of the morning.

  And the day after – Sunday. Drifts of smoke over London, even the West End redolent of the night before. Lunch at the Nineties, by sheer luck not seeing anyone either of them knew, then the matinée as she called it, in a flat behind Harrods belonging to friends of hers and Charles’s; supper and dancing then at the Wellington, which was geographically as convenient as it could have been, but by no means a late night, partly for fear of finishing up in yet another air-raid shelter – a prospect so dreadful it had actually seemed funny; they’d got back to the flat to all intents and purposes running. Coldwell’s father, though – where this jumble of reminiscence had begun – well, blitzkrieg more or less nightly all through December, Chatham getting a fair share of it. They’d been going for the docks as much as anything, although the City and its environs had had 10,000 incendiaries strewn across it in one single night, seven solid acres on fire at one stage; the bastards had timed it for low water in the Thames to hamper fire-fighting. Coldwell’s father in the middle of all that, Coldwell himself fairly desperate about it, especially around the time of Ursa’s completion – initial dive in the dockyard basin to ensure she was watertight, brief acceptance trial and a week or so at Blockhouse, then westabout to the Clyde and Holy Loch for work-up.

  His ambition, oddly enough – Coldwell’s – was to become an aircraft engineer. So how he’d found himself in submarines or the Navy at all was a mystery. Mike had an idea that he’d explained it at some stage – or McIver had – but when or in what circumstances –

  ‘Close on half-past, sir.’

  Jarvis – cautiously, almost apologetically. Mike grunting acknowledgement, having just switched to the larger-scale chart on which Danvers had marked Palermo’s defensive mine-belts in Indian ink. Plenty of time later for a closer study of their extent: one wasn’t likely to get close enough to the port itself to bother much with them.

  Much better not, in fact. In close proximity to a major port, those wouldn’t have been left to deteriorate.

  He turned from the table and the ticking log with its winking blue light.

  ‘Hundred feet, Sub.’

  ‘Hundred feet, sir.’

  PO Hec Bull acknowledging as the brass wheel slid through his hands, putting some dive on the after ’planes to angle her bow-up by dragging the stern down:reversing the ’planes’ angle then as Sharp span his wheel to put rise on the for’ard ones. Needles in the depth-gauges initially reluctant to comply, but with the bubble in the spirit-level sliding for’ard of the centre-line – there, now – finally responding. Jarvis with his eyes on the gauges and the bubble, a hand rising slowly to the order instrument above his head, ready to tell the stoker on watch in the pump-space aft to flood ballast direct from the sea into ‘O’, the midships trim-tank.

  Ursa nosing upwards. Passing 140 feet. 135. Jarvis now using the telegraph, and whichever of the stokers was spending these two hours cramped in that little machinery space would be cracking the trimline flood-valve, letting in some weight. Steady rise meanwhile, all under control, no excessive angle on her. Mike said, ‘Make it fifty feet.’

  ‘Fifty, sir.’

  A thump from somewhere for’ard. You felt it as well as heard it:by habit and training absorbed, contained, the element of slight shock. Scraping, sawing sounds out there now though: in here, nerve-scraping.

  ‘Stop both.’

  Jarvis echoed Mike’s order as Newcomb, messenger of the watch, jumped to the motor-room telegraphs and jerked them over. Scraping noise continuing from the port side for’ard: but with her forward way diminishing as it would be now –

  Mike checked that Jarvis had that trimline valve shut, and told Newcomb, ‘Slow astern together.’

  ‘Slow astern together, sir.’

  Some kind o
f secondary impact – again, port side for’ard. He had a picture of it in his mind – his own concept of the likely external state of affairs – even before Cottenham for some reason not immediately evident had begun putting on starboard wheel. Well, to counter a swing off-course, an effort to keep her on the ordered course, obviously. Sharp on fore ’planes meanwhile complaining, ‘Can’t shift ’em, sir, they –’

  More of the scraping, grating: Cottenham offering, ‘Gotter be snagged or –’

  ‘Wheel hard a-port, Cottenham.’ And to Newcomb after a moment’s thought, ‘Stop port, half astern starboard.’ He’d considered going full astern on that starboard screw, but was wary of any excessive expenditure of amps, having the present state of the battery in mind. There was a bow-up angle growing on her now: Jarvis glancing at him, on the point of asking whether he should flood the for’ard trimming tank, Mike rejecting this before it had actually been mooted – shake of the head and ‘No, wait –’ – point being that if she was snagged on the wire, pushing an angle into it and her stem sliding up it, for whatever reason – well, comprehensible enough, wire anchored to the seabed 500 feet down from here and fairly rigid, but less so from here on up to wherever the mine might be. Could be only a few feet above the casing, in which case a heavy downward tug –

  Analysis interrupted then by a clang with a shivery deep-water echo to it. Loud, close-sounding, and a tremor that ran all through her. Disconcerting, in its way, but –

  Silence, except for the motor’s hum, vibration …

  Jarvis’s quiet ‘Guess you’ve done the trick, sir.’ Enquiring expression as well as sweat on Hec Bull’s pudgy face as he glanced to his right, at Sharp. Mike having envisaged the wire springing free of the port for’ard hydroplane, but aware this might be wishful thinking. If the construction he’d put on it had been wrong from the start, for instance, and whether it hadn’t been almost too easy …