The Bonny Boy

by David Black

  The warden’s face appeared back over the lip. ‘Kin ye reach that dod o’ wood there,’ he said, pointing underneath the opposite wall of the hole. ‘It looks like a bit of banister.’

  So not all of them had legged it; that was nice. She reached over and could just touch it with her fingertips. She sat back. The warden began to speak, but she cut him short. ‘Just leave me be a second,’ she said. The warden did as he was told.

  She tested the weight against her back. It didn’t feel like the bomb’s full weight was actually resting against her. She’d probably be flattened by now if it had been – flattened before being blown up. She took her time thinking it through. It was probably that her weight was just helping to balance it, so all she needed was something to stabilise the damn thing. And that was the banister, which was why the warden had pointed to it. Good. Got it. Right. Here we go.

  She placed the palm of one hand on the bomb and levered herself up off her haunches. Keeping her weight pressed on the bomb, she reached out legs apart, with the other hand, grabbed the banister and pulled it free. Then she paused for a moment to select the sturdiest pile of bricks to prop it against and then wiggled the other end under the bomb and let it take the weight. There was a bit of grinding, then nothing. And then she was out the hole faster than a bunny rabbit with a stoat on its tail.

  One of the other wardens had driven her ambulance back up the Dumbarton Road, and it was parked there beyond the blast radius of the bomb with the two Bedfords, when Shirley and her scrawny warden pal came running out of Langholm Street together.

  Shirley skidded to halt by one of the Bedfords, and bent over, hands on knees, panting. She heard one of the other wardens tell her scrawny pal one of them had gone to the tobacconist to telephone for an Army bomb disposal squad; but she was looking down at wee Duncan’s grinning face. He was lying tucked into a stretcher, perched on two toolboxes close enough to the Bedford for an open umbrella to be stuck into its canvas awning to keep the drizzle off him.

  One of the other wardens noticed her look. He said, ‘Your pregnant lady and her auntie are in the back o’ yer ambulance shoutin’ the odds aboot ye no’ getting’ them tae the maternity. So we didna’ want tae put the wee lad in there—’

  But Shirley interrupted him, ‘Oh, why don’t you just tell them to just fucking shut up!’ Then she plonked herself down on the Bedford’s running board, sighed, and gave Duncan a big grin.

  The two wardens laughed, and one knelt to confide to Duncan, ‘Yon girlfriend o’ yours is a helluva haundful, is she no’ Dunc? I shudder tae think what yer gonnae dae wi’ her when yer merried.’

  Duncan, still grinning, said, ‘She’s always saying bad words, mister. But she says she’s gonnae gie me a kiss, so ah don’t know whether tae tell oan her, or no’.’

  All this while the scrawny warden had gone rummaging in the Bedford’s cab. When he stood up, he had a substantial stainless steel hip flask in his hand. He passed it to Shirley. ‘Take a chug oot a’ that, lass. You look like you could dae wi’ it.’ So she did, then passed it back. He gave her a ‘Cheers. Ah know ah dae’, and took a chug himself.

  All the wardens present, and wee Duncan too, would not have believed you if you’d told them Shirley had an “Honourable” in front of her name and was the daughter of a now deceased, and spectacularly skint viscount; and she was the sister of big brother Hammy, who had inherited the title, and another brother, Cammy, who like her had had to settle for a “Hon”. Not that the honorifics had brought them much; together they all had was a third share of some very nice family silver and a few select paintings their mother refused to part with, and a draughty old 16th century Keep for a home. And their batty mother got to be called the Dowager Lady Lamont. Otherwise, bugger all. But posh was posh, and Shirley, though you wouldn’t have known it from the language she’d picked up over the past two years, was the real thing.

  Later, she sat in the canteen at Ruchill Hospital, where her ambulance depot was, her patients delivered and ambulance parked. She was thinking about Harry again, nursing her cocoa. She hadn’t wanted anything to eat.

  She always thought about Harry when she wanted to talk to someone. She couldn’t help it. Except these days he was an officer on a submarine, in the Mediterranean the last she’d heard of him. He could be dead now, for all she knew; he’d certainly made a big deal about that possibility in the last letter he’d written. So she wouldn’t be talking to him anytime soon – if ever. And now she was thinking about that letter he’d written to her. She didn’t want to, but she couldn’t help that either. It just made her so angry. But then so did little boys trying to get to school, and ending up down a hole with a 500lb bomb.

  ‘Are you all right dear?’

  Shirley looked up, startled. A nurse in full uniform was leaning over her, her hand on her shoulder. ‘What?’ said Shirley.

  ‘Are you crying?’ said the nurse, her face full of sympathy. Shirley put a hand to her cheek, and found it wet with tears; she hadn’t realised. She let out a sob that racked her. Then she rubbed her tears away roughly, with both hands, and said, suddenly all matter-of-fact, ‘Thank you for asking,’ smiling now, ‘but as you can see, I’m an ambulance driver. So of course I’m crying. I do it all the time. In fact, I insist on crying. And if I ever find I’ve stopped crying, I want you to shoot me!’

  Two

  ‘Control room! Control room! Your course is zero eight nine degrees true! Start the attack!’

  ‘Starting the attack!’ said Harry. ‘Up periscope!’

  Harry, already gripping the periscope, waited for the upper lens to be unmasked. To his side, the Asdic operator called, ‘Heavy HE bearing zero five zero!’

  HE – hydrophone effect – the noise a ship makes when its propellers are churning up the sea around it.

  Harry let himself be walked round onto the bearing by another of his four-man control room crew, leaning behind him, ready to read off the target bearings from the bezel above Harry’s head.

  Harry was still trying to guess the voice issuing the orders, when suddenly he was confronted with the image of a ship. ‘Bearing is that!’ he barked, thus announcing he was pointing the periscope directly at a potential target. He hoped his tone was sufficiently commanding that it covered the fact he was trying not to laugh at the same time. Behind him the young officer who had been steering him round immediately called out the reading on the bezel.

  The angle was so easy that Harry, whose bedtime reading as a boy had been Jane’s Fighting Ships, could identify the target instantly, although he also recognised it as a good try to confuse him. No need to guess now who the disembodied voice was calling the orders down the voice pipe by his head.

  ‘The target is an Imperial Japanese Navy aircraft carrier. Either a Shoho class or the Ryuho,’ said Harry. Then more confidentially, he announced to the control room, ‘Looks like we’ve got Mandy on the plot again today chaps.’

  The other four lieutenants in the control room groaned.

  Mandy – Third Officer Amanda Trevanion – was the officer in charge of the clutch of Wrens who ran the upstairs bit of HMS Dolphin’s attack teacher. The five officers downstairs, including Lt Harry Gilmour RNVR, were the latest batch of candidates being put through the Royal Navy submarine service’s infamously brutal rite of passage, officially known as Commanding Officers’ Qualifying Course, but unaffectionately referred to as “The Perisher”.

  Everybody lived in awe of Mandy Trevanion, a flame-haired Cornish banshee; she was a force of nature beyond any placating – capricious, beguiling, hilarious and terrifying all at the same time, with an un-nerving sense for the weakness in every candidate, and a maliciously sure touch when it came to laying it bare. Now, over a week into the course, they knew to expect “pranks and japes”, all unleashed on them by the prior approval of “Teacher”.

  The control room was nothing more than a circular brick cell, with a periscope that neither moved up nor down, dangling into the middle of it. The walls we
re slathered in whitewash and criss-crossed by conduit tubing, channelling cables to a collection of electrical gizmos designed to represent the real technical equipment available to a submarine CO when exercising the deadly art of target acquisition. Above them was a regulation Admiralty deckhead light fitting with a blinding 100 watt lamp in it, and to the side was a cobbled-together flat wooden lectern so that one of the five officers crammed into the small space could keep a plot going on each simulated attack.

  All the young men were bareheaded, but remarkably smart in their blue No 1 “undress” uniforms of white shirt and black tie, and Navy blue double-breasted reefer jackets – four rows of brass buttons – with the double gold rings of their rank on the sleeves. However, only Harry Gilmour sported the wavy rings of the RNVR; the other four had the solid rings of a regular Royal Navy officer.

  It was Jacko Dunham who was on the supposed Asdic set, listening out for the bearings that one of Wrens on Third Officer Trevanion’s team would regularly call down to him. In real life he would have been listening through headphones to a real Asdic set.

  Asdic was the Royal Navy’s device for listening and tracking the noises of the deep in its passive state; when active, it could send a pulse of sound into the water, which could deliver a bearing to whatever object it had hit.

  Then there was George Maude, sat before a real “fruit machine” – the electro-mechanical device fitted to all RN submarines that added and subtracted all the angles you fed in, and then calculated the exact point you should fire your torpedoes at the moving target in your periscope sight, so that your torpedoes and that target would meet at exactly the right spot on the ocean.

  The lieutenant standing behind Harry was Paddy Cullinan, his eyes on the periscope’s bezel, marked in degrees, that would tell him what angle Harry was pointing at off their notional submarine’s bows and so give him the bearing to the target. Then there was Guy Serrell, who was by the lectern, keeping the plot. Each in turn would get their shot at the periscope, and get to play CO; and all the while upstairs with Mandy and her Wrens was “Teacher”, Commander Hugo Lipsey, the officer in charge of the course, there to watch them, and evaluate them and who, at any time throughout their entire five week ordeal had the power to pass the final, irrevocable verdict as to whether they would be fit to command one of His Majesty’s submarines, or not.

  The height of the enemy’s masthead from the waterline gave you the range. And Harry being Harry knew the height of a Shoho class carrier’s masthead without having to guess, and he called it. Their own course and speed was already in the fruit machine.

  Harry remembered to call, ‘Down periscope!’ into the pipe, because the number of seconds a candidate left the sock off the periscope head were meticulously recorded by Teacher, and more was always bad. George Maude dialled in the range.

  To look at, they were a pretty average bunch: same uniforms, same pasty complexions from being in submarines for most of the war, same short back and sides haircuts, same mousy colour, apart from Guy Serrell’s jet black locks whose waves showed through despite the shortness of the cut. Guy was the handsome one out the team. Not that all of them weren’t handsome in the way most young men are; it was just that Guy was matinee idol handsome.

  You could practically smell the concentration in the tiny room.

  Upstairs was far more spacious. Presiding over everything from a cut-down tennis umpire’s chair was Teacher, and before him was a huge white plastic plotting table, marked off in squares representing a thousand yards to the inch. On it were the relative positions of the candidate’s notional submarine, and the target he was after.

  Suspended over the table, and extending all the way to the far wall, then out through a window, was a magnificent Heath-Robinson device constructed of telescopic arms, wires and pulleys. The structure supported a travelling platform that carried a small turntable below which could be attached a scale model of the target ship. The walls were lined with racks containing hundreds of models of every type of liner, tanker, battleship, aircraft carrier and tramp steamer, from every nation in the world.

  Third Officer Trevanion and a petty officer Wren and two leading Wrens were there to tug and turn the target models this way and that around the static periscope, and mark up the plotting table.

  If it was all tension and concentration downstairs, upstairs in the plotting room the atmosphere was simply fun. Cdr Lipsey, for all his air of silent superiority, liked to run a happy ship, and from the shiny faces of his girls, wreathed in conspiratorial grins, he obviously knew how to do it. He would sit there every day, pipe-puffing, perched Buddha-like, immaculate in his No 1 uniform, brows knit with the sole intention of confounding and confusing the five aspirant skippers below, and then watching how well they got out of it. As for the girls, it was their job to do the actual tormenting – manipulating this wonderful machine to trip up, wrong-foot and take the mickey out of a never-ending progression of snotty young, stuck-up, arrogant two-ringers, and get paid for it. They loved their jobs.

  Downstairs, George Maude called, ‘Range seven thousand five hundred! Target course is one five five, speed twelve knots!’

  ‘Place me on the bearing, Paddy,’ said Harry, crouching to put his eyes to the periscope; standing behind him, Paddy Cullinan moved him round until the degrees on the bezel read true, then he slapped Harry’s shoulder.

  ‘Up periscope!’ called Harry, and upstairs one of the Leading Wrens leant over and plucked the sock off the periscope head. The target wasn’t where it should have been; Harry turned the periscope, slowly to his left, and there it was. ‘Speed correction!’ He called into the voicepipe. ‘Make the target’s speed fourteen knots!’

  Upstairs, Cdr Lipsey shared a small smile with Third Officer Trevanion, and made a note on his clipboard.

  ‘Starboard ten!’ said Harry. ‘Bring me on to zero nine five! Down periscope!’

  For the next few minutes Cdr Lipsey watched contentedly as Harry tried to close the range yet keep his notional submarine ahead of the target. Being an experienced submarine commanding officer himself – the little row of medals on his left breast said so – Cdr Lipsey knew exactly what was going on in Harry’s mind: just how long, how far could he safely run on this course, closing the range, before he would have to turn in on the target, and come on to a 90 degree track angle so when he fired there was some chance of scoring a hit?

  Cdr Lipsey allowed Harry another two, ‘Up periscope!’s, noting with satisfaction that each peek was quicker than the last, before he was satisfied he’d lulled him into a sufficient level of complacency; then he leaned forward and issued his instructions to the Wren plotters. There were grins all round as they turned the Japanese carrier on the huge board, and the machine replicated the manoeuvre for the wooden model dangling from its turntable. The plotting room team waited, expectant smiles all round. Then the call came up the pipe.

  ‘Up periscope!’

  A little pluck from the nearest Wren, and they could all hear the gasp from below.

  ‘Port thirty! Bring me on to two four five! Target has altered course …’ Harry called the bearing and range, and Paddy read them off for George to dial into the fruit machine. Guy marked the plot. ‘Down periscope!’ called Harry. And Cdr Lipsey thought to himself, Well done. He heard Harry call for a director angle on the target, and George give it.

  So far they were doing all right. They had got the target’s new course – 360 degrees – correct, and her new range, 3,000 yards. It placed them on a track angle to the target’s course of 120 degrees. The director angle, or DA, was the aim off – the point on the target’s advancing track that, given the target’s speed, when it crossed it, you had to fire if your torpedo and the target were ever to meet. It was a long shot at an acute angle. Harry called another ‘Up periscope!’ for another check on bearing and range. Then, ‘Down periscope!’ again. On the plot, Guy still reckoned 14 knots. Harry concurred. George read out the DA and Harry ordered the sock off one last time.
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br />   ‘Place me on DA green one eight,’ they heard him say to Paddy. The pair turned slowly to the right, and stopped. A moment passed; a Wren upstairs steadily turned a handle and the model of the carrier slowly crept back up the gantry until Harry gave the order for a full salvo, followed by, ‘Down periscope! Starboard thirty, keep one hundred feet!’

  Upstairs, Cdr Lipsey played with his slide rule, did the necessary calculations, and nodded to himself. ‘Well, Mandy, this time I think the lads deserve three … no, make it just two … belts with the hammer,’ he said to the tall red-haired officer.

  ‘Aye, aye, sir!’ said Mandy, and she stepped to the wall where they kept the aforementioned hammer tucked behind a water pipe. She took it out and gave two hefty raps on the iron pipe; the resulting clangs indicated the number of torpedo hits scored. Behind her, she heard Cdr Lipsey yell across the room so he would be heard down the open voicepipe, ‘Well done, Mr Gilmour, you’ve actually hit something today!’

  Three

  Spring, 1942. After two and a half years of war, Portsmouth had a drab, battered look about it that even the spectacular sunsets of the past ten days couldn’t brighten. Old Pompey was no longer the nation’s premier naval base – too close to the enemy’s airfields across the Channel.

  The aircraft carriers, slab-sided battleships and the sleek, fast cruisers and destroyers were all gone – to the Home Fleet base at Scapa Flow, to the Mediterranean, even to the Indian Ocean now that Japan was in the war; and far too many, had gone to the bottom of sea. Even the smaller frigates and corvettes were gone, all out now, patrolling the convoy lanes. Instead, the harbour was jammed with coastal forces – armed trawlers, motor gun boats, a token pair of Great War veteran destroyers. Barrage balloons punctuated the sky line.