See You at the Bar

by David Black

  ‘Um, no,’ said Harding. ‘It’s not Sunday, sir.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Harry, ‘but as I’m the captain, I’ll say it is.’

  ‘That ERA, whatshisname, the one that does all the God bits… McKay. He won’t like it, so neither will the crew.’

  McKay was indeed the ERA who did ‘all the God bits’. A gloomy West Highland caricature of a man, who every week would methodically draw up the order of the service, with two hymns and two gaps for Harry, the captain, to deliver a ‘reading’, and make his ‘any other comments’, which was the bit where Harry filled everybody in on what was going on in the war in general and on the boat in particular. Really, it was only the last bit that anybody was interested in, and the service just an excuse. But that was the way Jack liked it, it made it look less like a crew of grown men needing pep talks. And it kept at bay McKay’s comic tendencies to lapse into old testament doom-saying – or so the word was from the engine room. Especially as everybody knew that that kind of talk on a boat could easily end in bad joss, and nobody found that comic.

  ‘Just get Nick to tell the cox’n, sir,’ said Harding. ‘It’ll be round the boat before you’ve sat down again and save you interrupting everybody’s sleep.’ And with that, Harding leaned back and lifted up his book.

  ‘Hmmn,’ said Harry as he thought about better ways to keep the crew up to speed on what was up. Keeping the crew informed, making them feel part of everything that was going on was important. If you knew where you were going, who was supposed to be doing what and why it was important, it meant you were free to concentrate on the really important things. And everybody knew what they were on a submarine.

  And then he started reflecting on Harding and how little he knew about him. Nothing, if he was just to go on what Harding had told him, apart from he’d been to some minor public school and then to Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth at the age of sixteen. Oh, and that he was almost eighteen months older than Harry.

  Of his origins, however, it had been Farrar who had told him that the young Miles came from a landed family down Wiltshire way – not much land though. And they didn’t farm it, the tenants did that. So not that much money either. There were siblings, but Farrar wasn’t sure as to their gender or how many.

  Professionally speaking, of Harding’s work as navigator, what could Harry say? He made it look easy, and Harry, no mean navigator himself, knew it wasn’t. Apart from that, Harding appeared to be a supremely self-contained young man, fleet of thought with the odd flash of insight that left you wondering how much more was in there that he wasn’t giving away. And, of course, he could be very, very funny.

  Harry was smiling to himself as he remembered Harding leaning breathless on the bridge that night after he’d come scrambling back aboard from kidnapping their Luftwaffe Colonel and his trembling little airman, his face split by the most ecstatic grin.

  Behind him, the evidence of Harding’s and his team’s handiwork had still been unfolding – flames from the villa’s gas tank were leaping over the horizon of the cliff and the bump! bump! bump! from the Jerry 20mm was still going off.

  ‘And you’re last off the beach,’ Harry had said to him, before delivering his bollocking. About how RN navigators weren’t as expendable as pongos and certainly not as replaceable. And Harding answering him back. Actually arguing with him.

  ‘I was simply ensuring the op succeeded, sir,’ he’d said. ‘It’s sort of a Royal Navy tradition, sir.’

  Harry hadn’t been able to believe the cheek. ‘Are you arguing with me, Lieutenant Harding?’ he said, very softly, deciding not to add, ‘…on my own bridge… with the boat engaging the enemy…?’ Because it was self-evident, and he shouldn’t have to.

  ‘Absolutely not, sir!’ A suddenly realising Harding had blurted after he’d managed to control his look of horror. ‘No, sir. Never, sir. Sorry, sir. Don’t know what came over me, sir. Must’ve had a rush of…’

  ‘…shite to the brain?’ Harry had offered. One of Harding’s frequent phrases when describing a miscreant rating’s motivations. ‘Do shut up, Miles,’ he’d then added, smiling.

  Later, he asked Harding, almost as an afterthought, ‘Your little Ulrich, why didn’t you or Pettifer just kill him along with the rest of Jerry “other ranks”? Why’d you bring him off?’

  And Harding, looking like the question hadn’t occurred to him, said, ‘Well, I suppose he’d just sort of already surrendered by the time Pettifer’s lot got round to doing the chopping. And poor Ulrich, he was so terrified and obviously harmless by then, it just wouldn’t have been sporting. I mean, he’s hardly the master race, is he, sir? It would’ve been like drowning puppies. Very… eh… un-British, sir.’

  ‘And here was I thinking that you were a bit of a hooligan, Miles,’ said Harry smiling.

  Harding, not smiling, said, ‘Sir, I wish to register, forcefully, that I strongly resent your use of the words, “…a bit of…”.’

  Looking back, Harry remembered a totally unexpected urge to give his navigator a big, bloke hug, without really knowing why. Later, it turned out, it must have been because of his amazement at Harding’s perspicacity, because of how things turned out, how Ulrich, still alive, had shown his gratitude by proving such a useful reference point for all the lies Oberst Von Puttkamer had tried to put over on the interrogation teams. Funny how things can turn out, Harry thought.

  Just before the change of watch, with Scourge at sixty feet, just edging towards the Straits of Otranto at a mere two knots to conserve batteries, Harry told Farrar to spread the word about where they were going and why, and he also told him, since nobody had anything better to do, he’d start whittling down the defaulters’ list and see how many he could get through before nightfall, and they’d have to surface for their final dash to be off the straits’ entrance by dawn the following day.

  ‘Not all of them merit the captain’s table, sir,’ said Farrar, who struck Harry as becoming more and more punctilious with each passing day.

  ‘I know,’ said Harry, ‘but I’m in the mood to put the fear of God up them.’

  Algiers had been their first run ashore in a port of plenty for some considerable time, and the Scourges had not acquitted themselves well. Just because Algiers had well-stocked bars, unlike the Malta they’d come from, it had been no excuse for all the brawling that had gone on. That was the judgement of their captain. So there he’d sat, cap on, in all his glory at the head of the wardroom table, punishment book before him as Ainsworth marched each one up… ‘Attenshun! Off cap! Stand at ease!’

  Each one the same, usual story of rolling about some drinking den floor knocking lumps out of some other tub’s matelots, or pongos or Yanks. He’d managed to work through four of the cases before he had to quit and go to diving stations and start their dash through the straits.

  They’d stood and taken their bollockings and their stoppages of leave or rum like proper chaps, but it was only the smart ones who, when they got back to their messes, worked out that the punishments they’d received would all have expired by the time they’d got back from patrol. They filled in their messmates on how the land lay: the skipper was pissed off with them, but not that pissed off as long as they’d learned their lesson.

  *

  Scourge went through the Straits of Otranto, right down the middle, at a depth of two hundred and fifty feet, coming out the other end about halfway through the middle watch, with Brindisi lying about thirty-odd miles astern of her and the port of Durrës in Albania about seventy miles off the starboard beam.

  All day and into the night, Biddle had been giving everyone a running commentary on the criss-crossings of Italian anti-submarine patrols above – mostly those destroyer escort types they called torpedo boats, all about a thousand tons and two hundred and fifty feet-plus, with their three or four 3.9 inch gun mounts and their quarter decks all choked with depth-charge racks. All pinging away with their echo-sounders, or passively listening with their hydrophones and then chu
cking off the odd depth charge here or there – their favourite tactical ruse, apparently, to see what they could scare up but which only ever served to let you know where they were and to keep away.

  None of them had shown any signs they’d even suspected Scourge was passing through. So Harry decided they’d come up to use the remaining hours of darkness to air the boat, cram on a few more amps and generally see what was about. Biddle did an all-round Asdic search from sixty feet: nothing. Harry then ordered them up to twenty-seven feet and got Farrar to do the same through the periscope, as his night vision was better: nothing. So up they went, rising on an even keel, barely making a froth on the surface, and Harry had followed up the lookouts into the balmy, almost caressing night air. The first thing Harry saw was the riot of stars, but the first thing he heard was the alert voice of the port lookout, ‘Searchlights! Bearing red one seven zero! Panning the horizon, sir. Really low down.’

  Even Harry could see them now, a long way off – long needles of light swinging out and back in the immaculate darkness and not even remotely looking for them. It was like a dramatic visual display to welcome them, the way Hollywood cinemas always seemed to herald the release of their latest big star attraction. It made Harry smile at the thought of it, even though he knew it was almost certainly just some bored escort sweeping the surface to see if it could catch a periscope.

  It was Farrar’s watch. He joined Harry on the bridge, having already resigned himself to the fact he was going to have to spend another turn upstairs with the skipper watching him. They exchanged pleasantries about the evening, and Harry read his mood. God, sometimes the Jimmy could be a real old woman.

  ‘How many defaulters left to flog at the grating,’ said Harry, just to lighten the mood.

  Farrar, his binoculars stuck to his face, scanning a horizon Harry could not make out, took a second to reply, ‘Two sir,’ he said, then realising that his pause could’ve been construed as the dumb insolence it was, he began to be a little more chatty. ‘One’s more of the same, but the second one’s Leading Seaman Cross, sir. It’s more serious.’

  Harding had more or less implied the same earlier, without giving any details. Cross. He liked Cross, but… and he sighed, ‘What’s he done now?’

  Farrar lowered his bins. Finally submitting to the fact he was going to have to humour the skipper, even though they were running on the surface in enemy waters.

  ‘It appears it all started with him getting into it with a mob of ratings off another boat, in some wine shop off the Corniche,’ Farrar began. ‘The shore patrol arrived, and he ducked out. They couldn’t catch him. He made it back to Ellan Vannin and managed to bluff his way past the regulating POs before heading down to the lower mess deck where he resumed drinking beer. The shore patrol turned up, gave the officer of the watch Cross’s description, and they all set off to apprehend him. When he saw them coming through the door, he scattered all manner of kit in their way, tables, chairs, and he started throwing beer bottles willy-nilly. In the mayhem, he managed to make it onto the upper deck and down onto the trotted-up boats…’

  ‘Full beer bottles, Number One?’ asked Harry.

  ‘Empty ones, sir, as I understand it.’

  ‘Thank God for that!’ said Harry. ‘At least he was still in possession of his faculties.’

  Farrar smiled patiently, then continued, ‘He landed on HMS Tobermory and ran along her casing, chased by one of the shore patrol. There appears to be some dispute here as to exactly what happened next. Did the shore patrol fall into the water, or did Cross throw him? No matter… for Cross then disappeared down Tobermory’s open torpedo loading hatch, leading the remaining SPs and Ellan Vannin’s regulating POs to assume he was part of Tobermory’s crew. A verbal altercation then ensued between them and Tobermory’s officer of the watch over whether they should be permitted to come aboard and search the boat. In the ensuing chaos, Cross somehow managed to make it back aboard Scourge.’

  Harry sighed, ‘And he’s being charged with what?’

  ‘Late on watch, sir,’ said Farrar. ‘He was supposed to have presented himself on board for harbour watch duties twenty minutes before all those events occurred, sir.’ Farrar paused. ‘Neither the depot ship’s regulating POs, nor the SPs have a confirmed identification on Leading Seaman Cross, sir. So I thought it better to restrict the charges to the one immediately at hand until you have decided how you wish to proceed. Although I am led to understand there are suspicions that the man they are after is indeed a Scourge, if you’ll pardon the pun, sir.’

  ‘Ha, ha,’ said Harry, flatly, then he sighed. ‘Honestly, they’re worse than children sometimes. We’ll do Cross and the other one after the start of the afternoon watch. I’m going below now, Number One. Suddenly I feel quite tired.’

  Scourge dived just before first light, still holding her 315 degrees heading. Working with Harding, Harry had plotted a course and speed to bring them to the north coast of the island of Vis, just off the coast of Yugoslavia at two hours before sunset on the following day.

  As the boat crept up the Adriatic at sixty feet, Biddle, then one of his back-up Asdic men, kept up a steady running commentary on all the HE, they were picking up in the water: HE being the Asdic shorthand for the hydrophone effects generated by any passing ship’s screws. There were half a dozen or more prime targets blithely cruising by, not in convoy, entirely un-escorted in this backwater to the war, blissfully unaware of the Royal Navy submarine crossing their tracks with never a whisper of her presence. From time to time, when they’d picked up a particularly juicy-sounding contact, Harry would go and sit in the Asdic cubby and listen on the spare headset as yet another potential target slipped away over the horizon. For Scourge was under strict orders not to engage any enemy shipping until she had delivered her cargo safely into the hands of the Yugoslav partisans. It made sense. The last thing anyone wanted was to have the whole bloody sea alerted, with aircraft and A/S vessels scooting about everywhere when what you really needed was everything to be all peace and quiet so as you could go creeping inshore on the surface to drop your men off and get away again without anyone suspecting what you’d been up to.

  After the watch changed at midday, Harry set up his desk and quickly disposed of the first defaulter – stoppage of all shore leave for ten days. Scourge would likely have as much as another two weeks at sea after his punishment expired. But the rating took it seriously and solemnly swore his future conduct would be exemplary, sir.

  Then came Cross.

  The charge was read out, and Harry asked him how he pled.

  ‘Guilty, sir.’

  Harry gave him a brief lecture on the essentialness of punctuality when it came to presenting himself for duty, fairness to fellow crew, safety of the boat etc. And then he sentenced him to ten days stoppage of spirits and said, ‘Dismissed.’

  The look on Cross’s face was abject. He plainly didn’t understand what had just happened – or not happened, more likely. But it was more than that. Harry let Ainsworth lead him away, then called for the wardroom steward.

  ‘Windass! Be a good chap and bring me two piping hot coffees. And put a gulper of rum in each,’ he said. Then he took his cap off, leant out the wardroom and called, ‘Pass the word for Leading Seaman Cross!’

  Cross, when he arrived back at the wardroom, snapped to attention before the table and was about to salute when he noticed his skipper was bare-headed. His face immediately became a picture of confusion.

  ‘Sit down, Cross,’ said Harry as Windass arrived with two mugs. ‘Two coffees with, sir!’ said Windass, plonking them down and drawing Cross a sideways look. ‘And take your cap off, Cross,’ added Harry, catching the poor sailor halfway to obeying the first order and pitching him into an even further confusion of movement.

  Harry let him compose himself before saying, ‘Well, this is a right bloody mess, Red. What the hell were you thinking of?’ Before the lad could answer, Harry said, ‘Have a drink of that,’ gesturing to one of the tin
mugs.

  Cross raised it to his lips and immediately smelled the rum.

  ‘Sir?’ he said, looking confused again, ‘I’m under stoppage of…’

  ‘Just drink it, Red,’ said Harry. ‘I’m the captain and I said so.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir,’ he said and complied and immediately looked all the better for doing so.

  At length, Harry said, ‘I know about all your antics. And the hue and cry that’s following you. You’re a good submariner, Red. A credit to this boat. So why are you conducting yourself this way? Are you trying to get yourself returned to general service? Do you miss being a skimmer?’

  ‘Oh no, sir!’ It came out more like an anguished howl than a statement. ‘I’m sorry, sir. I don’t know… sometimes… something happens… it’s like I can’t help it. I am going to do better, sir. Honest, sir. I will, sir. Please don’t… This is the first time I’ve ever been good at anything, sir. Being a helmsman, on Scourge, sir. Being a submariner. Please don’t…’

  ‘Oh take another belt of your coffee and shut up, Red,’ said Harry. ‘Nobody is going to throw you to the wolves. You have my word on that. I’m not logging your charge or punishment. I’m dismissing them. This way, if anyone comes asking, it turns out you couldn’t have been that rampaging matelot, because you were already on watch. Mr Harding is going to vouch for it…’

  ‘Is that what he told you, sir?!’ yelped Cross, who then suddenly looked horrified, aware he’d just interrupted the captain.

  Harry feigned to ignore it, ‘No, Cross, but he’s going to. You’re still going to have your stoppage of rum, though. That is still going to stand… well after this one.’ A pause. ‘What about your family? You’re not married, are you?’

  ‘Oh no, sir,’ said Cross, surprised at the idea. ‘Just me mum and two older sisters. They’re married, sir.’

  ‘You keep in touch?’

  ‘My mum and I write all the time, sir. Sisters too, every now and again.’