‘Look, I appreciate that you can’t tell me…’
Clark held up his hand. ‘It’s not that, Number One. The fact is that I can tell you little at the moment beyond saying that Pearson is wrong. On the other hand I would ask you not to press me further. You must be aware that we are not a randomly gathered bunch of officers and ratings and you will easily deduce that we are intended for something unusual. That much I can say to you because in the next hour you and I must apply that criterion to the dispositions of every man in our small ship’s company.’ Clark paused, allowing the importance of his deliberate tautology to sink in. ‘Now, let’s begin…’
Although some work was done in the yard that Christmas, no one disturbed them aboard either Sheba or the Nottingham Forest. By the evening of Boxing Day, Olsen had rigged a steam pipe and power line between the two ships. Gradually the chill was driven out of the air in Sheba’s mess decks, flats and cabins, and below decks she glowed with electric light. At 1800 Clark ordered her company accommodated on board; two watches were given a run ashore, and the third assigned its duties. Clark had requisitioned stores directly from Nottingham Forest so that by that evening, when he turned in, he felt the little warship was coming to life.
Next day he began his battle with the shipyard. It was not that they opposed him but, whether it was a chargehand, a foreman, the ship manager or even the senior yard manager to whom he spoke, each and every one of them seemed like a juggler. And of all the balls each of these men were keeping airborne, that named Sheba was the least significant. Clark grew weary of excuses, of argument and counterargument. But Gifford’s caution prevented him from claiming the whale catcher to be a vessel of any importance, so he became a fusspot, insisting on the urgency implicit in his orders; consequently he was seen as a jumped-up second mate elevated by Admiralty order to a commander who was too big for his boots. It was as unfair as it was inaccurate, but that did not change the perception of those doggedly assigned with tasks almost beyond their resources. Clark’s ship was, he was repeatedly assured, ‘as good as completed…’
Until actual completion took place, Clark was permitted to occupy one of the huts behind which he had first seen Forrest’s Austin saloon. Here, in a shed with Sheba chalked on the door, he asserted his minimal authority. Most of the time, however, he was absent on missions of cajolement and threat, leaving Pearson to handle the complex paperwork of requisitions, mail censoring and even the correction of the ship’s charts, which had already arrived and grew out of date by the day, even as Sheba’s date of going to sea seemed to recede into an ever more uncertain future.
Forrest returned from his leave. Swore ritually at the plundering of his stores by Clark, said he ‘couldn’t care less’, and took his ship to sea. Three days later one of the corvettes slid from the slipway and entered the Tees, to be towed to the fitting-out berth. Another was brought by tugs from the fitting-out berth to join Sheba between the mooring buoys. Immediately the keel plates were laid on the slipway for the next hull. New Year came and went, and with it the news of the surrender of Hong Kong. It was a dispiriting time.
‘The bloody Japanese seem to be getting it all their own way,’ said Pearson, as if the affront was personal.
‘They’ve got rather used to that,’ Clark said.
‘Yah, I was in Nanking in ’37,’ added Storheill.
It seemed that all about them were the alarums of war, from which, for all Gifford’s and Pound’s admonitions, the wretched Sheba was exempt. Privately Clark agonised. What was the state of the Orca? More importantly, where was she? Still in the Baltic, which he doubted, for had not Gifford said she had already been undergoing her working-up? Was she in Norway, then? Perhaps at Alesund, in sight of Olsen’s house! Would he ever get his own ship to sea?
In desperation, Clark tried a new tack, but attempts to draft Sheba’s company into simple tasks like varnishing the chart-room table were rebuffed. ‘Don’t take t’bread out of our mouths, Captain,’ he was told flatly by the shipyard labourers, though Frobisher, in contempt of any Trade-Union-inspired demarcation dispute, had the men clean the ship, sweeping out and scrubbing the alleyways, mess decks and cabins. Growing bolder and having located some rolls of carpet, they laid these in the wardroom, transforming the place. Then Pearson made a major discovery.
‘There’s a store, chaps,’ he announced enthusiastically over a lunch of soup and sausage rolls. ‘Inside the main store there are cages, each with a ship’s name on it, you know, the corvettes and…’
‘Oh, for Chrissakes get on with it, Sub,’ Frobisher snapped.
‘Well there’s loads of kit for the ship, Number One.’
Pearson’s fortuitous discovery marked the turn of the tide in their favour. Why the fact had not been drawn to their attention earlier remained a mystery. The best explanation they could come up with when they debated this over drinks that evening was that every official in the yard who knew of the accumulation of stores assumed that someone else had told the ship’s officers. This seemed to assuage their curiosity and they were content with dismissive jerks of their heads, much tut-tutting and snapping of ‘Typical!’ Besides, they were now too busy for further reflection, while any sense of complacency was regularly interrupted by the almost nightly air-raid alarms. But Olsen’s boilers were flashed-up and their warmth pervaded the ship, supplying steam to the radiators in the wheelhouse, where, to Clark’s delight, varnish appeared on the chart table. On the forecastle the windlass was run, above the wheelhouse their searchlight was tested. Their Sperry gyrocompass hummed into life and the telegraphists made short, proving transmissions. Towards the end of January 1942 two men in mackintoshes arrived and Clark, Frobisher, Carter and his two Asdic operators were closeted for hours as the Asdic was set up.
On the last day of January, HMS Sheba slipped her moorings wearing the red ensign and, as a little flourish insisted upon by the yard, flying the white, blue-crossed flag of the Smith’s Dock Company. For her trials the wheelhouse was crowded. Clark, his officers and the Sheba’s coxswain were outnumbered by a Tees pilot, the ship manager and several representatives from the yard, the Asdic specialists, a wireless mechanic and a sinister-looking civil servant from the Admiralty who, apart from making himself known to Clark, remained aloof from the entire proceedings.
Out in Tees Bay they worked the ship up to her full speed, making 15.3 knots over the measured mile near Redcar. Then they threw the helm hard over, first one way and then the other, timing the period Sheba took to reach a reciprocal course and estimating the tactical diameter of her turning circle. While these grand manoeuvres were under way, circuits were tested, alarms rung, guns traversed and elevated; down below in the engine room, pumps were run, valves thrown, extended spindles and the Sheba’s one watertight door into her short shaft tunnel were tested.
Then the ship was stopped, a light lunch with drinks was served on the bridge and the observers watched while the boats were hoisted out. As the starboard boat was hooked on to the falls prior to her recovery, one careless seaman suffered a squashed finger. This minor disaster proved a triumph for Sub-Lieutenant Pearson, who proved an able first-aider. Next the ship was anchored, first by the port and then the starboard bowers. Cable was veered and hauled in again and the windlass brakes tested against a load. Finally a couple of dummy depth charges were fired from each mortar and the ship turned west for the Tees Fairway buoy. From down below Olsen reported himself satisfied and the Sheba returned up river bravely breasting the ebb with a fine bone in her teeth.
‘Well Commander,’ the sinister-looking Admiralty representative said quietly as Clark rang Finished with Engines, ‘I imagine you’re satisfied.’
‘Yes, I think so, thank you.’
‘Good. I’ll take your report with me then.’
Clark signed for the ship and typed out his report. While he did so the Admiralty man sat silently in his tiny cabin, smoking a pipe, an intimidating presence behind Clark’s back. As Clark handed the buff envelope ove
r, the man rose and, picking up his bowler hat, said, ‘You’ll commission tomorrow then?’ Clark nodded. ‘Good. I’ll tell Gifford you’re ready. You’ve to pick up a load of torpedoes at Rosyth and then I understand you’re off to Scapa.’
‘Yes, that’s correct.’ Clark followed the fellow out on deck.
‘Good luck,’ the official said and left Clark at the head of the short gangway staring after him. He never knew the fellow’s name, having failed to read it properly on the identification papers he had been shown earlier that day. As he watched the figure merge into the dark shadows on the shipyard quay to which they had moored upon their return, he was seized by the most awful apprehension. Suppose the man was a German agent? He had no incontrovertible proof that he was what he claimed to be! Anxiety twisted in Clark’s gut and he tried to recall what he had written in his report, hurriedly returning to his desk to read the duplicate copy. It gave nothing away beyond the fact that HMS Sheba had completed satisfactory trials and would be commissioned at 1000 the following morning.
Leaning back in his chair, Clark lit a cigarette and composed himself. What a bloody fool he had become! He was getting nervously preoccupied, his attention divided between the details of getting the ship ready for sea and the greater purpose towards which these petty endeavours were directed. He would be glad to get away from the constraints of the shipyard, reflecting that this whole, sorry business had been initiated in a shipyard. A knock came at the door.
‘Come in, Number One.’
‘Your blackout needs a bit of attention, sir.’
‘Does it?’
‘Yes. Don’t worry, I’ll see to it in a moment. I take it we commission at ten tomorrow?’
‘Yes, as planned. Everything went all right today, I thought.’
‘Yes, pretty remarkably. Perhaps we misjudged the yard a bit.’
‘Possibly.’
‘What happens after commissioning, sir?’
Clark grinned. ‘A nice little cargo run for you, Number One. We’re off to Rosyth, to load torpedoes for Scapa.’
‘Bloody hell, I hope I don’t run into any of my old muckers in the greyhounds of the ocean.’
‘Why not? Surely you’re proud as punch of your nice little armed whaler.’
‘Ha, bloody ha, sir.’
* * *
The next morning they went through the modest ceremony of commissioning. The crew were paraded on the quay, watched by a small group of managers and typists from the builder’s offices, a handful of chargehands and a few of the men who had built the ship. Clark read his commissioning order, the ensign and commissioning pendant were hoisted and Frobisher dismissed the ship’s company. It began raining again, with a keen wind blowing off the North Sea. The courtesy of their presence over, the shipyard’s personnel dispersed, the shivering girls running off bare-legged in the chilly breeze, the men with a resigned air. For them the esoteric act was of no great significance; there were more ships to build and their task lacked any glamour, even that attaching to a small warship: their world was bounded by the grey of their industrial landscape, not the sharp monochromes of a warship’s paintwork with its bright gleam of red, white and blue fluttering over the stern in the bitter wind.
Marching off, the seamen’s square collars blew up round their heads as they went up the gangway, boarding the ship officially for the first time. There were fewer than thirty of them, officers included.
Next day they were gone, the berth empty, awaiting its next, transitory visitor, the only evidence of their passing the quickening in the wombs of three careless and unknowing young women. In distant Liverpool another, not-so-young woman, was growing anxious.
As she steamed north, none of the ship’s company aboard His Majesty’s Armed Whaler Sheba gave a second thought to the River Tees, nor to those who dwelt upon its banks. Young they might be, but after over two years of war they had become accustomed to departures and inured to the pain of parting. The unthinking shaggers among them would find other willing girls and even the few disposed to fall in love could repeat the process elsewhere. In the meantime they would beat the bishop, in the time-honoured fashion.
The Admiralty, through the agency of some two dozen first lieutenants and captains scattered throughout the fleet, had done its work well in selecting the crew of HMS Sheba; some had viewed the request seriously, most had got rid of their bad-hats. But not one of the young men who slipped easily into the routine of sea duty that raw morning was known for his sentimentality. On the contrary they were taking stock of the future and, to a man, were wondering why they had been assigned to this odd little ship with its odd and preponderant assortment of officers. All they knew with anything like certainty was what Leading Seaman Carter told them, that the Old Man was a whizz-kid on the Asdic.
As for the Old Man, Lieutenant Commander Jack Clark stood on the starboard wing of the bridge, his back to the ugly Hotchkiss gun, staring ahead. His mind was on the far north, full of his responsibilities and the intended encounter with his enemy.
Scapa Flow
February 1942
HMS Sheba proceeded independently as far as the Tyne and then received a signal to join the escort of a coastal convoy northwards to Methil. They had little to do except perform the unflattering role of ‘tail-end Charlie’ which surprised nobody given their unprepared and unworked-up state. Nor had they more than a token stock of depth charges and ammunition aboard, loaded shortly before leaving the Tees, but it was their first encounter with the rest of the Royal Navy and they began to feel a sense of purpose animate them. This was something familiar, something they had become masters of, unlike the endured existence ‘in dockyard hands’ as the naval phrase succinctly had it.
‘The only time the navy surrenders is to a bloody dockyard,’ Frobisher had remarked back in Middlesbrough as he saw Clark scribble the time-honoured phrase in the deck log, explaining away another day of unproductive naval service. ‘How this is winning the war beats me!’
Clark merely grunted at his first lieutenant’s pugnacity.
At sea, on a purposeful passage in support of a convoy, Clark began to observe his crew at work, particularly the competence of the ratings. The signallers performed with gratifying ability during this short and, as it happened, uneventful passage. The clatter of the Aldis lamp had, Clark thought, an especial significance and would linger in his aural memory as long as he lived. It was the real means by which he and his fellows communicated, in the heat of action and the relief of the aftermath. By means of its flashes they made their facetious, schoolboy jests; in its cryptic messages they received the instructions, remonstrations or compliments of their senior officer; with it they scolded the masters of merchant ships as they struggled to keep their unsuitable vessels in a naval formation, or made too much smoke, gleefully pointing out the obvious to men older and wiser than themselves. The dots and dashes of the Aldis lamps, manifested in the rapid clatter of the shutters, were like the out-reaching tip on the coachman’s whip, flickering over the six-in-hand as the convoy crawled slowly towards its destination.
From the convoy anchorage off Methil they detached to steam further into the Firth of Forth, to be briefly absorbed into a greater, grander manifestation of naval puissance. It was the first time Clark had reported to a senior officer as the commander of a commissioned warship and it was clear that no whiff of the Sheba’s ultimate mission troubled Rosyth dockyard. The unimportance of his ship somewhat relieved him, enabling him to conceal her unpreparedness amid all the hustle and bustle of the place. After the rarefied atmosphere of the Admiralty and the intoxication of that interview with Sir Dudley Pound, the short stop at Rosyth grounded him in the immensity of the navy’s task and the smallness of his own. For all Gifford’s emphasis on the vital importance of the Sheba’s mission, it seemed insignificant when set against the greater operations of so huge a force as the Royal Navy.
Then, as he lingered over a cup of tea brought by a plain Wren with straight legs and an impossible bosom
, the staff officer dealing with his arrival said, ‘You’ve heard the news from Singapore?’
Clark shook his head. ‘No…’
‘We’ve lost the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, bombed out of existence by the ruddy Japs!’
‘Good God!’
‘Better news from Tobruk, but the Prince of Wales, for Heaven’s sake…’ Incredulity seemed to prevail at the loss of this brand new battleship. ‘No bloody air cover, d’you see,’ the staff officer went on. ‘The Royal Air Force were bloody useless and the designated carrier is sitting in an American dry dock after grounding in the West Indies…’
The staff officer’s tone of accusation at others’ incompetence was almost venomous, taken personally as an affront. The man ground out his cigarette with the air of one who could have done better himself. Suddenly Sheba’s mission did not seem so minor an affair. Wars were won or lost by an aggregation of triumphs or disasters, large or small: the realisation that an error in navigation in the West Indies had a decisive bearing on events in the South China Sea was a sobering thought. Clark returned to his ship in pensive mood and remained so as they loaded their consignment of torpedoes along with a quantity of shells and cartridges, depth charges, rockets and grenades. Then they made their way north alone.
Clark continued to observe the emergence of the ‘characters’ in his ship’s company. This period, known to the navy as ‘shaking-down’, was as important to him in watching his crew, as it was to them in the refinement of their interrelationships on board their new ship. These, bounded in part by the constraints of discipline, were equally governed by those assertions and concessions men who were cooped up in a small space made with, for or against each other.
Clark knew, of course, of Carter’s virtues and Carter was a bright enough individual to realise his strange posting was pregnant with possibilities.
Dead Man Talking Page 16