A FLOCK OF SHIPS

by Brian Callison

  Brannigan’s teeth flashed in the darkness as he came back out on to the wing. ‘Wish I’d had a big softie like you for a boss when I was a cadet, Sir.’

  I hitched my shorts up and glared at him severely. ‘That would have been about six months ago at that, wouldn’t it, Mister Brannigan?’

  The teeth sparkled again. ‘Yeah. But us boys were men in those days.’

  Leaving the irrepressible Fourth grinning after me, I wandered into the wheelhouse and glanced into the binnacle. The floating card swung slightly with the slow roll of the ship. ‘Watch your head!’ I said unnecessarily to McRae, standing stolidly behind the wheel in a bright check shirt and tight jeans—virtually the universal dress of British merchant seamen—plus, of course, the ubiquitous heavy leather belt with its traditional double sheath for marlinespike and knife.

  ‘Aye, aye, Sir,’ he muttered, resigned to the fact that the only justification for having officers of the watch at all was their capacity to issue non-essential cautions to a craftsman like himself.

  I turned away and leant on the mahogany window-ledge, staring at the brightening line of the horizon through the circular Kent clearview screen. McCrae shuffled a bit behind me. ‘I see we’re still headin’ south by east, Sir?’

  ‘I hope so, McRae: I hope so,’ I answered absently without turning.

  There came a few seconds’ silence, then he spoke again. ‘The crowd was thinkin’ we should have been alterin’ towards the coast by now, Mister Kent.’

  I pushed myself upright and swivelled round, trying to look casual. So the sailors had it figured too? They were beginning to wonder why we were churning on into nowhere instead of running for the Cape. A few months ago I would have brought him up with a sharp round turn for inferring that the Captain needed assistance from the foc'sle, but now, with the war beginning to hot up and most of us living on our nerves, ships did a hell of a lot of odd things that required explanations. The trouble here was that I, myself, couldn’t really explain this headlong dash right past our destination. Even if I could explain it—could I justify it?

  Doing the next best thing, I shrugged and tried to make my voice sound bored. ‘Admiralty instructions. Ours not to reason why, McRae.’

  ‘You what, Sir?’ he asked vaguely and I knew he wasn’t convinced, then to my relief Brannigan stuck his head in through the door and said, ‘Zig-zag leg again, Sir.’

  ‘Carry on, Mister Brannigan,’ I muttered, and left him to it. As I stepped aft over the low coaming of the chartroom I heard him issue the new course alteration to McRae and the ship lay over fractionally as we adjusted.

  In the discreet privacy of the chartroom the bearded old sailor frowned down at me with wise brown eyes. I accepted his invitation and lit up, thinking he’d seen a lot of nervous anticipation and a lot of action too—him and the dignified ironclad moored in the bay behind him. I wondered who he'd been, and whether he had ever tried to run away instead of facing the enemy, and how many hoary old bluejackets like him there were aboard Mallard. The blue smoke from my cigarette hung suspended in the glare of the overhead light as I grinned tightly up at the Players' tin. Not many. Not many hard old shellbacks like my friend up there, I suspected. The only ones I’d seen from the lofty Cyclops’s bridge had been young, pink-­faced kids who didn’t seem to fit in with the efficient image of what was still the finest navy in the world. Still, we’d heard rumours about a great naval engagement taking place off Cape Matapan a few weeks before and, if it were true, there must have been a lot of young boys getting suddenly older in that—or never getting any older!

  *

  I realise, now, that I should never have had that bloody sandwich.

  Every time I picked up a sandwich it seemed to activate an explosion—like when the Commandant Joffre was hit. But I never thought about it as I picked distastefully through the box on the tray beside the chart table. Cheese this time and, as usual, dry as a piece of cardboard between two slices of melba toast. My teeth meeting for the first bite was the signal for the detonation.

  In actual fact there were two explosions, almost simultaneously. The first, a whiplash-like CRACK, seemed to come from directly aft somewhere, followed only micro­seconds later by a deeper, reverberating boom rolling across the sea from over on our starboard beam. Oh, dear God - Bill Henderson’s Athenian was out there! My nerves, this time, were so tensed I didn’t even have consciously to drop the fatal sandwich—it was already on its way to the deck as my shoes scraped over the coaming while I hurled myself out on to the starboard wing.

  I had to steel myself to peer through the darkness that enveloped me. Even the bright edge of dawn was lost as my eyes fought for mastery over their previous immersion in the chartroom's red glare. I knew it was Athenian in trouble long before my night blindness finally faded and I could see properly again. It had to be her, over on that side of us. I felt the sick surge of acid in my throat as I gazed fearfully out over the black water, expecting to see the great shape lurching out of control, maybe even now swinging suicidally across our bows to bring us both to a rending, screeching halt.

  But no; there she was, still racing stolidly alongside our protective flank and showing no apparent signs of damage.

  Then slowly, but with relentless persistence, a little flickering light appeared on the after end of her boat deck. Gradually it seemed to expand like some enormous, swelling glow-worm, until the dazed Brannigan and I could see it was composed of individual licks of flame. The fire grew in intensity until the whole after end of Athenian’s centrecastle jetted long tongues of white-hot fire, fanning back over her after-well deck while leaping, crackling sparks flew erratically astern to be lost in the darkness of her wake.

  I swung round on the Fourth Mate, my voice high-pitched and vicious in its anxiety, ‘Torpedo ...? For Christ’s sake, man, was it a torpedo?’

  He shook his head, still not taking his eyes off the burning Athenian. All the bounce had gone from his shoulders and he seemed to droop. I suddenly realised he was as scared as me. ‘My dear God! Oh, my dear God!’ he kept saying, almost to himself, over and over again.

  Then the Old Man arrived on the run, took one look across the water and he said, ‘My God!’ which seemed to indicate that He was much in demand by all of us that morning!

  I took a grip of myself and, trying to forget Chief Officer Henderson five cables away, grabbed Brannigan’s arm tightly. ‘I asked you what happened, Mister Brannigan.’

  He swallowed and took a deep breath. He must have got a whiff of new courage with it because the young face cleared and I got a frown instead of the wild stare he’d afforded Athenian. When he spoke I found out why he’d been so shocked in the first place.

  ‘We fired at her, Sir,’ he said simply.

  It was my turn, and the Captain’s, to stare in shattered disbelief. Evans found his voice just before me. ‘What did you say, Brannigan? Who did you say had ... fired?’

  The Fourth Mate shrugged helplessly. ‘We did, Sir. It ... the shot must’ve come from our poop gun. I heard the bang and even saw the flash from aft.’ He hesitated as though we’d caught him out telling a lie, then ploughed on determinedly, ‘I’d swear it came from us. It wasn’t a torpedo, I’m positive of that.’

  Evans swung round on me, red face working savagely as he realised the implications of what Brannigan was saying. ‘Did you see anything, Mister Kent? Did you?’

  I felt the crimson flush rising above my collar, ‘Er ... no, Sir. I was in the chartroom when I heard the explosion.’

  I hoped he wasn’t going to ask me exactly what I was doing sitting around in the chartroom but, on reflection, realised that he didn’t have any reason to. Chief Officers aren’t exactly unfamiliar with that little retreat, especially during the early hours of the morning watch, otherwise why have a cadet and a fourth mate up there too? It was a bit like having a dog and barking yourself.

  Evans turned to face Athenian again. Even in the few minutes we’d been out there the early dawn
light had blossomed into a canopy of pale yellow and red tinted sky and every detail could be seen of the frenzied activity aboard our sister ship. We were so close we felt we could almost jump aboard and lend a hand. The feeling became so overpowering that I had to grip the smooth teak rail tightly to fight it off.

  The searching eyes of daylight seemed to some extent to reduce the apparent damage. Clouds of thick, oily smoke now replaced what had originally looked like a solid mass of flame from well deck to boat deck, and we could see that the main outbreak was concentrated in the area of the wireless cabin and officers’ smoke-room situated on the after end of the boat deck. They must have had nearly every member of the deck crowd fighting the outbreak and, already, the white threadlines of hoses webbed the deck from all available hydrants. If Bill was still alive—and assuming he’d been on the bridge as I was when the shell hit, he should be—then he’d done a pretty smart job of organising his damage control parties. I resolved to have a word with the Bosun about our own drill as soon as possible.

  The Old Man was still simmering with barely suppressed raged. By the grace of God, Athenian hadn’t suffered any hull damage but, judging by the twisted and smoking wreckage they were jettisoning from the boat deck, anyone in the region of the radio room or after accommodation must have suffered severely. I knew one Sparks must have had the watch, while the other one would have been turned in in the same cabin.

  Evans pivoted to face me and his eyes were very hard. ‘Get aft to the poop, Mister Kent. I want the man responsible for this, and by God I want him badly!’

  ‘Aye, aye, Sir,’ I answered, feeling bloody glad it wasn’t anything to do with me.

  He stopped me again at the top of the ladder. ‘It must have been one of those D.E.M.S. buggers. If it was, I want them too ... Especially them.’

  The army gun crew we carried aboard to serve the venerable 4.7 mounted on our hastily strengthened poop had somehow managed to develop into one of the Old Man’s pet hates. There were only three of them altogether—two gunners and a Bombardier Allen of the newly formed Maritime Artillery. This was their first trip with us and they superseded the elderly naval reservist who had been previously posted to us as a D.E.M.S. rating. He had come from what was laughingly known as the Defensively Equipped Merchant Ship organisation and had actually fulfilled the duties of an instructor to the gun’s crew itself, made up from the Cyclops’s normal complement and headed by Mister Shell, our Second Mate.

  The Old Man had been very proud indeed of His Fighting Lads as he liked to think of them. It was commonly agreed that a place on the gun, which was never seriously expected to have to fire a real shell, was a dead cushy number and the current ‘price’ charged by the ship’s fixers—at least before the arrival of the disgruntled soldiery—was reckoned to be in the region of fifty bob for a place on the outward leg, plus another fifty bob when homeward bound. Evans used to take great delight in gun drill and would call them away from the most unpleasant jobs regularly, just for the pleasure of watching the - on the surface - practised ease with which they traversed and loaded and almost pulled the firing lever. Personally I had grave misgivings about whether the bloody thing would actually fire or just blow up there and then and save the Germans a job.

  Until. at the beginning of this month and just before the ship sailed, the three Brown Jobs had marched disconsolately aboard with orders stating that they were members of the Royal Artillery’s newest off-shoot, the Maritime A.A., and, as such, were to replace the ship’s own gallant Fighting Lads—the latter to be relegated to the status of common ammunition carriers and oddsbodies. Our frustrated potential Nelson of a master immediately blamed the poor bloody gunners personally for what he considered a slight on his ship and had refused to have anything further to do with what had suddenly become ‘that blasted spit tube', other than broadcasting gloomy prophecies of disaster to all and sundry.

  And now it looked as though he'd been right.

  *

  I gathered a nervously returning Conway in my wake as I hurried aft along the boat deck. Mallard was now running close alongside Athenian and I could see the flat white caps on her bridge tilted back as her officers stared anxiously up at the looming cargo ship’s upperworks. I couldn’t remember having heard it, but someone must have pressed the tit on her attack alarm bell because her crew were all stood to at Action Stations. A steel-helmeted figure was moving among the depth-charge racks again, occasionally bending down to make adjustments, and I hoped like hell he knew what he was doing. Braid must have been fit to be tied right then and it was going to be an interesting and colourful conversation between him, Bert Samson - Athenian’s Master - and our own Old Man when they got round to discussing whose fault it had been.

  Larabee was hanging over the rail outside the radio room when I arrived at the after end of the boat deck. He looked red-eyed and tired and I noticed his whites were badly in need of a dhobey. As we approached he turned, and the thin face looked inquisitively over at Athenian. ‘What happened, Mate?’ he said.

  I looked closely at him. It was gratifying to note that even he seemed to be feeling the strain by now. A nervous flicker jumped in the wasted muscles of his cheek as he stared defiantly back. Had it been anyone else I’d have felt concern for them, but the sardonic Sparks was different. He’d asked for a load of extra tension anyway, after the way he’d flown off the handle about my offer of a replacement for old Foley. I glanced briefly over at our sister and was greatly relieved to see that the smoke had almost died away, though they were still playing hoses on to the blackened shell of the W.T. cabin and smoke-room. A macabrely appropriate description, now—smoke-room.

  ‘Dunno, Larabee,’ I grunted, trying to be as unhelpful as possible. ‘Someone put a shell into her, looks like.’

  I didn’t stop but I could feel his eyes on the back of my head as I swung down the well deck ladder. He would never forgive, nor forget, what I’d done to him in the radio room the previous night. Larabee wasn’t the forgiving type. I shrugged inwardly—I should worry. Second wireless operators didn’t bat in the same league as chief officers, and Larabee wasn’t even a regular Company man, he’d only been provided by Marconi as a temporary replacement himself because our original Second had been seriously injured by a Liverpool Corporation tramcar, of all things, while weaving across the road from one pub to another. The chances were I’d never have to see the obnoxious little cynic again after this trip.

  I met the Third Mate at the bottom of the after centrecastle ladder. He glanced almost guiltily at me as I frowned queryingly. He wasn’t due to relieve me from the bridge until 0800 and Curtis normally clung to his bunk right up to the last minute.

  ‘Couldn’t sleep,’ he mumbled, and judging by the white creases of strain flecking the sunburn round his mouth, I half guessed the reason why—his nerves were taking a beating. That made him a candidate to join the John Kent Coward’s Club too. He said he’d just run aft when he heard the bang so I pushed past him and didn’t think any more of it at the time.

  It was a bit odd, though ...

  *

  The long barrel of the 4.7 was still pointing forlornly to starboard as I reached the poop, with the three D.E.M.S. blokes gathered in a huddle behind the oildrum-shaped breech. The bombardier, Allen, came nervously to attention as I approached, and the two other soldiers shuffled uncomfortably. They looked an odd crowd as they stood there watching me with resigned anticipation, what with the two gunners being big and tall while the gun commander was a little, fat, dumpy character. They looked a lot stranger by virtue of the fact that they were all standing in their issue underwear. This made me even more bloody angry because, as I’ve already said, we were pretty careful about how we looked aboard Cyclops and I wasn’t prepared to allow any scruffy pongoes to come on board and act like a lot of casual layabouts.

  I ground to a halt in front of the fat little bombardier. ‘Right, Soldier! Who did it ..? Who bloody did it?’

  His round, chubby face scre
wed up and I could see he was nearly in tears. I didn’t give a damn for their feelings, though. It only needed a glance at Athenian to know that men had died violently over there, and the tell-tale traverse of the gun confirmed what Brannigan had already said— that this was the weapon responsible. The bombardier started to shake and the identity discs round his neck clinked together over the khaki vest. He didn’t seem able to speak with the fear of retribution inside him, but I was in no mood to be sympathetic with a man whose mistake must have cost irreplaceable lives.

  I smashed the flat of my hand down on the barrel of the gun and gritted, ‘Which one of you bastards is responsible for firing this?’

  When the bombardier’s voice came it was only a cracked, almost indistinguishable, whisper. ‘None of us, Sir. There weren’t none of us up here when she fired.’

  It was a day for surprises. I stared at him disbelievingly. ‘It must have been one of you ... Allen, is it? Or are you trying to say the bloody gun just fired itself, with no one up here?’

  He shook his head numbly. ‘No, Sir. No, it couldn’t fire off its own bat. Not without someone to load it for a start.’

  His two mates just stared stolidly ahead with regimented, thousand-yard-stare eyes, offering no help to the floundering bombardier. I glanced at Conway, but he was frowning across at the other ships, watching as Mallard sheared away from Athenian and, with a sudden splurge of white water under her stern, pulled rapidly ahead of the formation. The ratings on her foredeck were trooping back aft and I supposed Braid had called them from Action Stations on the assumption that we had finished shooting at our opposite number for the time being.

  I turned back to Allen in frustration. ‘Now, listen to me, Corporal ...’