Clark registered the concern of the young man. The matter was clearly preoccupying Barrington and had nothing to do with snobbery. ‘So, you don’t mind turning-to and doing a bit of painting then?’ Clark asked with a smile.
‘No, not at all. It’s just that I’ve been a bit worried about… well…’
‘Well, forget it, Barrington. All I am truly interested in is your present role as my senior wireless operator.’
‘Oh, well, that’s fine, sir,’ said Barrington brightening. ‘You, er, you didn’t mind my raising the matter, sir? Only, with the ship a bit disrupted at the moment, it seemed like a good opportunity.’
‘Of course not,’ Clark said, then an idea occurred to him. ‘By the way, have you got any classics texts with you, on board?’
Barrington nodded. ‘I’ve Caesar’s Gallic Wars, the History of Herodotus and the Annals of Tacitus.’
‘Good. Could you work up say four or five short lectures, either about the works, or what they contain – you know, perhaps a talk about Caesar’s campaign against the Belgae, or something. I want to keep the men’s minds occupied during what might turn out to be several weeks’ wait up here? Could you do that?’
‘Well, I, er…’ Barrington considered the matter a moment, and then smiled and nodded. ‘Yes. Yes I could.’
‘And if there are any other glittering alumni on the lower deck, perhaps you’d let me know?’
‘Would you give us a talk on the Arctic, sir?’
‘Why not? Not that I’m a real expert, you understand.’ Clark nodded with satisfaction. ‘Well, I suppose we’d both better get back to work, or the first lieutenant will start shouting at us…’
Frobisher had discovered that it was almost impossible to break up the ship into equal areas and to run an inter-watch competition as Clark had originally suggested. Instead he announced the painting of the ship as ‘job-and-finish’, a task which, once embarked upon, had to be completed. It was not, he emphasised in briefing the ship’s company, being undertaken from a maintenance point of view, but from a cosmetic one, designed to break up their shape, to produce a trick on the eye of any observer. ‘What a German submarine commander is not expecting to see, he won’t see, and for as long as he doesn’t see us, he gives us the advantage. Until we open fire, that is, by which time we should be on top of him, catching him with his lederhosen round his ankles,’ Frobisher concluded.
And so they had begun that morning, wiping the accretions of salt off the ship’s steelwork and slopping on a coat of mixed undercoat and gloss, which covered imperfectly, but well enough for their purposes. On the foredeck, Frobisher, as adjudicator of this inter-watch marathon, mixed the paint, quoting the witches from Macbeth and periodically emitting wild and manic laughter. Then he wandered about the deck topping up the paint kettles of the three gangs as they splattered the mixtures over every vertical surface, exhorting them to greater efforts.
The Sheba lay against a substantial ice floe, two mooring ropes secured to boat anchors driven into the ice so that the Red Watch could paint almost from the waterline upwards on the port side with comparative ease standing on the floe. The Blue Watch had some grounds for grumbling about the difficulties on the starboard side. Here, a smaller floe had been dragged alongside under the bow to provide a platform for the men painting forward. The rest of the side was painted from the starboard boat, lowered into the water for the purpose. Meanwhile, the White Watch grumbled about the comparative awkwardness of the deckhouse and fittings, claiming they had by far the worst of the job.
Aware of the wild fluctuations in the morale of the ship’s company, Frobisher waited until the hands broke off for some sandwiches and then announced that the main brace would be spliced on completion of the job, which encouraged men to move on from their original allotted areas so that, at about one o’clock the following morning, almost the entire crew were at work on the upper deck, a crowd of zombies enjoying the midnight twilight in a mood of mild, good-natured madness. During the labours of the day someone had begun to compose what in due course was christened ‘The Ode of the Shebans’, in which all the varied strains of the Sheba’s disparate cultural origins came together:
’Twas on the good ship Sheba,
By Christ you should have seen her,
Grey as a rug,
In a dockside snug,
With a crew of wild Hyperboreeners.
Sent north to seas polar and icy,
Oh, Jesus Christ all-bloody-mighty,
They were given a gun
To frighten the men
But found only sun that shone nightly.
The skipper said, ‘Chaps, we’ll paint her all white
To lurk in the ice and pretend we can’t fight,
’Til the whites of their eyes
Stand out in surprise,
As we totally turn them to shite.
There were more verses of doubtful scansion and more dubious propriety that accompanied the rum issue and sent the tired officers and ratings to their bunks and hammocks in a state of mild intoxication. Clark had few misgivings, the task was done and the relaxation of naval discipline would do them all good if, as he suspected, they were to have several weeks of crushing boredom. He stayed on the bridge all night himself, the conclusion of the work fitting in well with the Admiralty’s transmission times so that even the wireless operators could have a short break. For five hours Clark was utterly alone. From the bowels of the ship, up through the engine-room skylight, came the occasional clang as the duty fireman tended the banked boilers. Olsen and his men had, like the cook and steward, been exempt from the labours of the day, for food and fire were essential in these high latitudes.
As for a sudden appearance of Orca, Clark considered the matter so unlikely that the risk of exposure didn’t outweigh the advantage of having the ship camouflaged. Moreover, Clark’s secret orders assured him that he would ‘almost certainly receive at least one warning’ of the enemy’s approach. This would be derived, it was implied, from a source within the Seekriegsleitung, the German Supreme Naval Staff. As he considered these matters, his thoughts turned once more to Kurt: Kurt in the lonely peril of his position in Berlin. Clark assumed that he was still there, able to pass on sensitive information to the British. But supposing Kurt had been transferred and sent to sea? Did that explain the dearth of information flowing out to them up here in the Arctic? And how did Kurt process information? Did he have a code as bizarre as the Dissertation of Dr Ruddick? Or was there a shadowy middleman, a nominally neutral Swiss or Swedish diplomat, perhaps? And what of the core of the matter, the enemy’s super submarine, codenamed Orca? Clark wondered whether Kurt had exaggerated the threat posed by her or, if he had not, whether his pipsqueak ship would be adequate enough to counter that threat. He began to agonise over the outcome, aware that the corrosive effect of his anxiety could overwhelm him.
He could only do his best, he consoled himself, but that was not enough, he argued, certainly not enough to withstand any inquiry instituted by Their Lordships! He switched his thoughts off Orca and Kurt, only to find them bounce back to his second obsession, Magda. Her image had, with increasing frequency, floated unsummoned into his mind’s eye: Magda of the beauteous face and wide, red mouth; Madga of the luscious breasts and long, elegant legs; Magda of the smooth arms and eager hips; Magda of the delicate panting sighs and of the ultimate, consummating acceptance. And then the reality of Jenny, of her mild expression of incredulity, her slight gruntings, of her passionate explosions and of his withering withdrawal that came with post-coital sadness and regret.
And none of it was relevant to the small hours of that long, white night when his only duty was to keep his ship safe from surprise, when his nearest, most implacable enemy was the enclosing ice. But the pack was melting as the Arctic midsummer approached. Day by day they moved slowly northwards, pushing up towards Hope Island. Why could he not learn to enjoy the moment, the pure moment of remote privilege? Was he not leader of his crew of, as t
hey put it, ‘wild Hyperboreeners’?
At 0600 he went below and called out the cook, steward and the duty wireless operator.
‘Never been called out by the captain before, sir,’ remarked the three-badged, regular cook.
‘You’ve never been tied up to an ice floe either, Cookie,’ he said. ‘Be a good fellow and call Ordinary Seaman Oliphant when you’ve made some tea and tell him to report to the bridge.
‘Aye, aye, sir.’
Oliphant turned up twenty minutes later, bringing Clark a cup of tea. Clark gave him orders to call out the crew and resume normal watches from 0800.
‘Very good, sir. By the way, sir, Barrington said you were looking for lecturers.’
‘Yes. Got something in mind?’
‘Well, only if anyone might be interested in architecture.’
Clark shrugged. ‘I don’t see why not.’
‘I could always call it something else, sir, “how to build a house”. Might come in useful after the war if Jerry demolishes much more. I was hoping to go into town planning, sir.’
‘Brilliant, Oliphant, quite brilliant…’
And that is how they started their period in limbo, or – as Clark remembered it afterwards – their prelude to hell. Innocently, when they were detached enough from the reality of war to enjoy themselves. The sun did not always shine, for fog plagued them intermittently, once for ten long days at a stretch. At the end of March they endured several days hove-to, the ship’s head hauled round to the south-west, head to wind, dodging the heaviest floes as a gale sent a surge of swell among the pack and the air was filled with ice spicules that blew off the surface of the pack. They gleaned from intercepted radio transmissions that a Russia-bound convoy had been scattered by the heavy weather and that several ships had been sunk. The SOS signals were piteous and there were confused indications of an action between a cruiser and destroyers, but there was nothing they could do and these distant indicators only heightened their sense of being remote.
But the gale, as well as scattering what was actually convoy PQ13, also broke up the cohesion of the pack ice, which, with the slow but inexorable warming of the Arctic air, was drifting slowly south as March gave way to April. Clark began a series of training exercises in this looser – but heavier – pack, focusing on the judicious use of the Asdic and acclimatising Carter, Wilkins and Baker to the background responses of ice and, on three memorable occasions, of whales. As the ice drifted south in the aftermath of the gale, fog wafted about them again, often that low form of ‘sea smoke’ that made the sea appear to be about to boil, where the ship’s deck was engulfed in wraiths of water vapour, above which the mastheads were in clear air.
In such conditions they found the cold, damp air far worse than the dry cold experienced previously, even though it was several degrees warmer, if the thermometer was to be believed. They were almost entirely unaware that, far to the south, convoy PQ14 had been broken up by the ice and most of it had returned to Iceland, joining the homeward-bound QP10.
During May, as Russia-bound convoys PQ15 and 16, with their returning counterparts QP11 and 12, fought their way east and west through the Barents Sea miles to the south of HMS Sheba, the whaler was honing her skills in the gradually dispersing ice to the south-west of Hope Island. Frobisher carried out dummy firings of the torpedo tubes and Pearson was permitted a few practice rounds from his precious four-inch gun. Whatever the private preoccupations of their commander, most of the hands agreed they had got a good number. Opportunists like Harding thought they were on a fool’s errand and Their Lordships had ‘fucked-up’. Not that he was complaining, he explained to his messmates, he was all for a ‘soft billet’ and a ‘cushy war’, because, mark his words, there were ‘plenty of bastards at home having a cushier time getting their legs over other blokes’ wives while seeing if they’d like some nylons’.
The only thing worse than ‘having one’s bint poked by a black-marketeer’, Harding assured his appalled audience, ‘was having her screwed by an RAF officer’. ‘Those bastards,’ Harding stated with unequivocating certitude, ‘were no more heroic than anyone else in the fighting services, and, bugger me, they get home every fucking night! And where d’you think home is, mates? In some poor sod’s bed, that’s where!’ Such assertions were usually concluded by a general instruction to ‘bugger the Brylcreme boys’, a pleasing alliteration that seemed to satisfy Harding’s sensibilities, even if it did unnerve one or two of the older, married men.
‘It ain’t the Brylcreme I worry about,’ Able Seaman Collins admitted quietly one evening, ‘but those bastards peddling nylons and chocolates – well, they take some beating for cheek, an’ no bleeding mistake.’
These unpleasantly disturbing considerations were displaced only in part by the better-intentioned lectures of Oliphant and Barrington. Frobisher spiced things up by giving lessons in unarmed combat, in which he and Able Seaman Saunders demonstrated a disturbing ability, while Clark’s talks on the Arctic were received with a respectful interest.
‘Fucking ship’s like a bleeding uni-fucking-versity,’ remarked Harding with that dismissive tautology so beloved by certain denizens of the seamen’s mess. ‘It’s just fucking propaganda to divert your fucking minds from what’s really fucking happening back home while we’re stuck aboard this fucking heap of crap.’
Sometimes such a diatribe was countered with a rendering of the ‘Ode of the Shebans’, to which additional verses were added as time passed. Pearson was immortalised, along with a mention of a polar bear too obscene for publication. On the other hand, Able Seaman Saunders, with his ability to disarm the lanky first lieutenant armed with a bayonet, was said to have out-hugged a male bear, only to get his comeuppance when required to perform, in its place, the dead animal’s marital duty.
Indeed, they might have supposed that the war in the Arctic had died away. For almost the whole of June they heard nothing, not knowing that the Home Fleet had been called upon to provide much of its strength to Operation HARPOON, a major effort to resupply Malta in the distant Mediterranean. But June was not entirely uneventful, for early in the month Pearson, on watch one morning, spotted huge footprints on a large ice floe and, about half an hour later, spotted a large male polar bear heaving itself out of the water on to an ice floe. Thereafter they saw several of the magnificent white mammals – including a mother with two cubs – but none came near the ship and their closest neighbours were several species of seals, guillemots, auks, kittiwakes, fulmars and the voracious glaucous gulls.
Their latitude had been increasing as they slowly made their way north and east, stemming the polar current as it drove the breaking ice down from the Arctic Ocean. Just as the last vestiges of the warm Gulf Stream, known as the Norwegian Atlantic Stream, washed the west coast of Vest Spitsbergen, so the counter-current of cold water drained out of the Arctic basin, eventually sinking beneath the remnant Gulf Stream somewhere to the north of Bear Island. On midsummer day they came within sight of Hope Island. The flat table land was dark under its mantle of snow, a narrow strip of rock rising out of the sea and surrounded by ice. Clark and Storheill took sights and laid off bearings in an attempt to ascertain its exact position. ‘So that we might achieve something concrete while we are up here,’ Clark remarked as he and the Norwegian officer bent over the chart.
It was at that moment that they heard the engine noise. Both men looked at each other for a split second, then made for the bridge wing. At the same moment the lookout shouted, ‘Aircraft, green one five zero!’
Clark raised the glasses and stared out over the starboard quarter. ‘Low down, sir!’ the lookout said, pointing urgently. Just above that greenish-blue berg…’
‘I see it, sir!’ Storheill exclaimed.
‘Got it!’ responded Clark.
‘Condor!’ said Storheill.
For several tense minutes they watched as it flew east, all thinking the same thing: was it searching for them?
‘What is your opinion, Pilot?�
�� Clark asked as it droned away, out of sight.
‘He’s going along the edge of the heavy pack. He’s not looking for us.’
‘No, I agree.’
‘But why exactly?’
‘Because he wants to know, or somebody in Norway –’ Clark was about to say or Berlin, but he bit the words off in time – ‘wants to know for operational reasons.’
‘Ja, that’s right, Captain. Maybe our time is coming.’
‘Maybe it is, Pilot, maybe it is.’
‘It is good, for Fridtjof is worrying about fuel.’
‘Yes, I know.’
Clark went back to the chart table, his heart thumping. He worked out an estimate of the aircraft’s distance from them and the probable ice limit of the heavy pack ice. It was possible that the Condor was reconnoitring for Orca. The submarine would operate on the surface as much as possible and, just like themselves, the fringes of the pack would provide her with the best cover. But, unlike themselves, she would not need to conceal herself from anyone other than the convoy – or so she would assume – which would have cruiser cover and therefore a measure of air reconnaissance from the cruisers’ Walrus amphibian aeroplanes. But she would not wish to tuck herself so far away that she could not strike at the convoy. Perhaps her commander would have as many anxieties as himself, Clark thought consolingly with a smile. Taking up a soft lead pencil from the rack, he drew a line approximating the limit of the heavy pack. Storheill stood beside him and he explained his reasoning.
‘I think you are correct, Captain,’ Storheill said.
‘So, somewhere along here we may well find our quarry.’
‘Yes, but when?’
‘That is a question I cannot answer. I only wish I could.’
‘Was it von Clausewitz who said, In war the simple becomes quickly complicated?’ Storheill asked.
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