See You at the Bar

by David Black

  Harry shrugged, ‘I’m afraid I can’t answer that, sir. We never hung around long enough. But I thought Grieve’s idea was worth the shot. I really would have loved to have seen some of those dizzy merchantmen running themselves aground out of fright at the sight of one of his bobbing sticks.’

  Captain Philips let out a bark of laughter, ‘Couldn’t agree more. I see you’ve put down Grieve for a mention in dispatches. I’ll happily approve that.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Harry. The whole boat will be happy about that.’

  ‘And about your last patrol report…’

  Harry felt his stomach lurch. What was coming now?

  ‘…Flag officer, submarines passed through while you were on patrol. He asked me to tell he’d been made aware of your recommendation that your navigator, Lieutenant Harding be awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.’

  Harry breathed again, ‘Yes, sir. It was requested that citation should be verbal, on security grounds.’

  Meaning nobody had wanted it known publicly, the background as to why he was putting Harding up for the gong for his little run ashore on occupied Sicily and the deft way he’d managed to nab that Jerry intelligence officer and the entire Jerry order of battle for southern Italy.

  ‘Yes,’ said Captain Philips, with a certain resignation. ‘Well, the FOS got the details from Mr Wincairns. Interesting chap. The upshot is the award is approved. You can tell Lieutenant Harding the paperwork’s on the way.’ And then it had been, ‘Thank you for a concise report, Mr Gilmour, and it is a pleasure to have you back aboard the Tenth, even if it’s only for the time being.’

  And then Hutch had taken him into the wardroom for a drink – somebody had to, after all, he was a skipper newly returned from patrol. What was the Commander S supposed to do, leave him standing in a corner studying his fingernails while all these wretched COPP team ruffians commandeered all the sofas? The poor chap looked completely disoriented. In his own wardroom, after all. I mean to say! The next thing he knew, Harry had shot to his feet. ‘John!’ he was shouting. When Hutch looked round, there was the wardroom steward emerging from a press of officers; that Maltese chap who’d been here forever, apparently.

  The steward looked stunned that someone was shouting his name, then recognition and a shout of his own, ‘Mr Gilmour!’ and he started waving with one hand and trying to balance his tray with the other. In the next moment, Hutch was treated to the somewhat unseemly spectacle of the two men hugging.

  *

  Letters – from the handwriting, he could tell the senders easily. There were three from his mother, two from the last tailor he’d used in Portsmouth, one from old Lexie Scrimgeour, Sir Alexander himself, the Edinburgh financier on whose twelve-metre yacht he used to crew as a schoolboy. And even one from Shirley. He felt the envelope. It was as if there was no substance to it at all. But, all sealed up, he could have no idea what it contained.

  He was lying on an old second-hand single bed, tucked into a CO’s cabin that had been newly hewn out of the rock at the back of the Lazaretto. The cabin should have been single occupancy, but with the press of bodies now in the wardroom, space was at even more of a premium than when he’d sailed the last time. Hutch had told him he was lucky they weren’t squeezing in three to a cabin these days. His fellow skipper in this one, however, was out on patrol, so he had it to himself for now.

  The tailor’s letters were for unpaid bills for uniforms that now lay shredded somewhere under piles of rubble, probably quite close by. Not that it mattered, he realised; he was still liable for the merchandise. He smiled to himself, considering how alarmed such a missive would have left him if he’d still been a student. Funny how preoccupations change. He certainly didn’t grudge the money; if he’d still had a cheque book, he would have posted one off right away. But he hadn’t a clue in what bomb crater that cheque book’s burnt cinders now resided. They’d just have to haul him off to debtors’ prison, which would be a lot safer than here, he reflected ruefully, and probably a bit more comfortable. He did resolve, however, to write the tailor a letter. He was sure he wasn’t their first young gentleman to find himself constrained by exigencies of war from settling an account.

  He turned to Old Lexie’s letter, in his copperplate hand. Fondly asking after his welfare, congratulating him on his medals, expressing pride, confiding his hope that the sextant he’d presented to Harry departing for sea was still rendering sterling service – it wasn’t, he’d locked it up safe in his personal trunk back at Fort Blockhouse – and finishing off with an entreaty that, once all this was over, would he, Harry, consider making his civilian career in the Scrimgeour finance empire.

  Harry had to pause, with the letter lying on his chest for a moment. The concept of a life after the war was too big for him to get his head round right away. Could such a thing come to pass? Especially one where he would be invited to breathe the rarefied atmosphere of the House of Scrimgeour. The chaps who worked for old Lexie before the war usually ended up being able to afford yachts of their own. He laughed at that. There was a notion to kick about in times of quiet reflection.

  His mother wrote like she spoke. Reading the words was like hearing her voice, right down to the quiet inflections and all the pauses she loved to leave. Close his eyes and he could even see her arch looks and her smiles. The letters told the story of home, except it wasn’t the home he remembered. The house she talked about was now full of the noise of the three evacuee children, his father’s presence on the pages was no longer like some grim cauldron simmering in the background, all that pain of war. The children ran his life now, ruled his moods, or rather had banished them. The bedtime stories, the amateur dramatics, from scripts he’d write for them to the sewing of costumes and building of sets. The banging and the laughter and how his entire existence had returned and been completely taken up with them – especially the little one, Maggie – how everything the children did now appeared to dominate his parents’ lives. From their inventiveness in the face of rationing to the visits of the mother, and what his mother didn’t say about those or about the woman herself. A whole world going on where he didn’t feature, wasn’t part of it. The letters evoked a melancholy feeling of estrangement in him, as he pored slowly over each line. The final act of leaving home, he supposed. The letters made him smile too because of the happiness that shone out of his mother’s stories. He could tell she missed him and worried for him. But she and his father were obviously having a new life now. And good for you, he thought to himself, as he folded the last one and put it away; good things should happen to good people, at least every now and again.

  Shirley’s letter he would leave for later. He didn’t want to read it here. He wanted to read with the sky above him and the sun shining down and the sea twinkling all the way to the horizon so that he could imagine she was sitting beside him, no matter what it was she was about to say. The envelope he held was utterly inscrutable. It made him think of the letters he used to get from Janis, doused in Chanel. And all the winks and lewd guffaws in the wardroom every time one was delivered. Now, that had been funny. That cheered him up. That afternoon, another boat returned from patrol, and Harry ambled down to the wardroom for the bash. Another of the new U-class boats, not long out from Blighty, her skipper a proper up-and-down and squared-away RN lieutenant, just in from his latest Mediterranean war patrol – a lot of brisk gun actions and some vandalism to the rail network south of Naples and he was full of it. In the press of bodies, Harry had been introduced. ‘Sorry? Harry, is it? Pleased to meet you,’ he shouted above the din. ‘Haven’t seen you here before. You’re new. Ah. Well. A word to the wise. Before you go out on patrol, I strongly recommend you get yourself down to the travel section. That last S10 left this collection of inshore pilotage notes for Eyetie yachtsmen… Capitano Massimo’s Guido di Mare to Reefs Best Not To Hit, or whatever the title translates as… because whoever did the translation did a bloody good job. I really recommend you have a good read at them. Invaluable
they are… if you intend going inshore,’ the last words delivered in the tones of one who knew all about ‘going inshore’. Harry just smiled appreciatively.

  He left it until the hour before sunset to go for his walk. He’d go and see Louis the bookseller tomorrow, after all, Scourge was going to be here a couple of weeks while they tweaked her up over at the dry dock, it wasn’t as if there’d be any danger he’d miss him. Out towards his favourite café, over Sliema way, he found a stretch between the road and the beach barbed-wire entanglements, and he sat down overlooking the sea to read Shirley’s letter.

  ‘Dear You,’ it started. Harry smiled at that. No endearments. He hadn’t expected any. It wasn’t as if they were going out together, as she’d spelled out the last time she’d seen him. Shirley, the girl he’d known since they were both at school. Except Harry hadn’t really known her at school, she was just the wayward banshee from two years below whom everyone said was using her upper-class pedigree to get away with murder. Then he had come home on his survival leave after Pelorus had gone down and discovered everyone had been wrong. It had been Shirley, the apprentice woman with the level gaze and pre-Raphaelite explosion of chestnut hair, who all along had simply just been refusing to suffer fools.

  And then it had been Shirley the ambulance driver; and then Shirley, the woman cruelly patronised – by him. And finally, Shirley, his lover; although he wasn’t allowed to call her that because she was buggered if she was going to come out of this war another weeping wraith in widow’s threads because, as he’d told her himself, the chop rate in his line of work was off the scale.

  ‘After the war, if we’re both still here, we’ll see!’ At least that was what she’d told him, back then.

  Her letter opened with brief news of life in wartime Glasgow, driving an ambulance and a line about how the job was a continuing reminder to her of the necessity to keep being a grown-up about everything that happened, in order to cope with it. She thought she was in danger of becoming wise in the ways of the world, which was probably no bad thing.

  And then she wrote, ‘…and then I go and read something like Emily Dickinson and I think of you. Do you know Emily Dickinson’s poetry? Do you know this one? Wild nights – wild nights! Were I with thee, wild nights should be our luxury! Futile – the winds – to a Heart in port – done with the Compass – done with the Chart. Rowing in Eden – ah – the Sea! Might I but moor – tonight – In thee! And I don’t want to be wise any more. I realise I am getting tired of being wise.’

  Harry sat on the rock, hunched over her letter like some unfinished Rodin, pretending to be reading it again but thinking only about the hardness of the stone beneath him until he noticed the little splash on the paper. There was a moment before he realised it was a tear, before he acknowledged that feeling, that ache in his breast, of the sailor yearning for the land. For home. For his love.

  Nine

  Harry watched the chart table chronometer as it ticked towards 2400 hours. The hands aligned, and it was, at last, the 10th of July.

  ‘Periscope depth,’ he ordered, and up crept Scourge, nosing at a steady three knots on 290 degrees. Beneath his feet, he could feel the deck plates begin to rise and fall. There had been a brisk nor’-westerly force seven blowing upstairs when they had dived a few hours after sunset, after fixing their position for the final time, and you could feel the effect of the waves now, even down here at twenty-seven feet. Harry shuddered to think what it was going to be like for all those poor bloody pongos crammed into landing craft on a night like this. All aboard for the vomit comet! wasn’t in it. And now it was time for Scourge to come up and join the bump and grind.

  ‘Asdic. How’s it looking up top?’ he said, stepping forward, ready to order the periscope up.

  Biddle’s voice came from the cuddy, ‘Same, sir. Multiple HE astern. Some way off and passing from port to starboard. Too many targets for individual identification. No HE from green one one zero through the stern to red zero nine five. The sea is clear from both quarters for’ard, sir.’

  ‘Thanks, Biddle, up periscope!’

  Harry wasn’t in a good mood. What they were about to do was at once damned tedious and bloody dangerous. They were the designated picket boat and outer marker for the western landing force. And the darker band of a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t break in the line between dark sea and night sky that he was looking at right now, was the southern coast of Sicily.

  It was a foul night, and once he’d made sure there was nothing but the bloody awful sea state to worry him, Harry called, ‘Surface!’ And the outside wrecker’s hands danced over the dive board to send them up. They had been at red light for an hour now, so the lookouts, when they got up, would have no trouble in spotting anything Harry might have missed through the ’scope. Scourge was already bow on to the oncoming seas, and Harry ordered a birdbath to be rigged once the lookouts had clambered up into the conning tower. Scourge gave one last lurch, and they were up, and the lump of water that now dumped itself into the control room told everybody the lookouts must have opened the upper hatch and were on the bridge. Harry wasn’t going up, it was Farrar’s watch, and anyway, Harry knew he’d be able to see bugger all in the pitch black of a near gale.

  Harry looked at Harding’s plot on the chart for the umpteenth time – the tiny scratch of Scourge’s progress, five miles sou’-sou’-west of Licata. Their orders lay tucked into the rack at the back of the chart table should Harry need to refresh his memory – highly unlikely since there wasn’t much to memorise, and he practically knew them by heart now anyway.

  Farrar’s tinny voice was in the voicepipe, his first words lost in the bangs of Scourge’s diesels exploding to life, ‘…Actually, I think the wind is abating a little, sir. Sea is clear to the south and west, but looking aft, from the top of the wave crests… I can make out the bulk of a mass of shipping… it’s pretty bloody dark up here… a lot of muck about, sir, but I think I can see the cloud starting to clear from dead ahead.’

  Scourge was running roughly parallel to the coast, and the force seven, or what was left of it, was coming right at them from the opposite direction.

  ‘What’s happening onshore, Number One?’

  ‘There are two coastal searchlights doing sweeps to seaward. And away inland, to the north-east, there are flashes along the horizon. Looks like a bombing raid in progress, sir… That’s the lights rigged now, sir, you can illuminate them any time.’

  Harry glanced at the chronometer; it was too early. Another hour at least before they lit up their line of coded navigation lights, now, presumably garlanding Scourge’s bridge. Between them and the radio beacon they would shortly switch on, all the ships in the western landing force would know exactly where the left flank boundary lay for their run into the beaches. For that was to be Scourge’s role tonight, reduced to playing mother hen to the huge clump of ships astern of them that formed the American contribution to Operation Husky – the Allied invasion of Sicily.

  They’d all been watching the build-up on Malta for these landings for a few weeks now.

  Admittedly, right after they’d come in from patrol and the crew had been packed off to the submariners’ rest camp up at Ghjan Tuffieha Bay, that build-up had been no more to them than a dust cloud to the south and lots of noise.

  While their boat had been in dry dock on the other side of Grand Harbour having her elastic bands re-tensioned and her bum wiped.

  But when she’d come out and they’d all been trucked back to the Lazaretto to work on her and make her ready for sea again, trialling all the fixes and repairs, bedding in the updated Asdics and radio gear, it had been like walking into the middle of Piccadilly Circus. You couldn’t step out the main gate at Fort Manoel without taking your life in your hands, not because of Me109s anymore, but all the bloody traffic on the roads. Quite simply, the island was full up. Practically every empty field you used to pass, every spare clump of derelict ground you remembered, there was a tarpaulin-covered dump on it now. Ev
en Valetta’s narrow streets were jammed with an endless, slow-moving crush of military uniforms swamping the poor civilians trying to go about their daily business. Harry even had to wait in queues for a dghaisa to row him across the harbour to Valetta when he went to visit Louis the bookseller.

  On the upside, however, no one was hungry anymore – you hardly saw a child that wasn’t stuffing American chocolate in its face, and the island was practically awash in American PX beer.

  The big boys were all here too. Every day, someone in the wardroom was breathlessly recounting a sighting of Montgomery or Eisenhower or even Mountbatten, to the extent that Harry often found himself wondering if any of these top brass were actually doing any work down in that huge bunker that had been carved out underneath the Lascaris battery. And, of course, everyone knew what it was all for, despite all the endless blather about secrecy, where all this mountain of men and materiel was headed. It was Sicily.

  The only thing folk didn’t know was when. Then one day, the destroyer flotillas and the big US Navy cruisers of the naval gunnery support groups began slipping their moorings and queuing up to leave Grand Harbour, and they had their answer to even that.

  In less than twenty-four hours, the Lazaretto wardroom had all but emptied; all the COPP teams and the submarine crews that would carry them were gone. Harry had been reclining in a huge armchair on the wardroom gallery, luxuriating in the warmth of the afternoon, in the peace and quiet, savouring a cup of truly excellent coffee when Hutch had come up and said, ‘Harry, can you chase up your number one and navigator and report to the Captain S in ten. He wants to see you.’

  And that had been when Scourge was handed her sailing orders.