The Bonny Boy

by David Black

  Then Harry stopped thinking about what he’d be doing now. He was all right when it was his turn at command; but watching, sooner or later the thoughts returned, playing it back again and again: the depth-charging Nicobar had received running from the carnage she’d inflicted on that Jerry troop convoy; and how, after she had finally escaped the troop convoy’s escorts, his hands had shook and his guts had curdled until he thought he was cracking up – thoughts that wouldn’t go away.

  He’d called what he’d experienced back then, fear, but it wasn’t really. More a physical sensation, like vertigo, like he was teetering on the edge of a void opening up in his guts, feeling like he was endlessly about to topple into it.

  He’d not been able to stop himself picking at the memory of that feeling, all the way back from the Med, aboard Calliope; and all the time at Dolphin, in the attack teacher and in the wardroom, so that he’d wondered what it would be like getting back in a submarine again. If he’d ever be able to do it again. He’d danced that particular dance once before, after Pelorus had gone down with him in her. But in the end good old fashioned Royal Navy ‘’urry up!’ had got him back down a submarine’s hatch when the time came, even before he’d realised. But this time, when it came to going aboard Sepoy, it had been as easy as pulling on an old sea boot. Not even a flutter. Yet the thoughts wouldn’t leave him alone. Coming back to blighty aboard Calliope had helped, especially his long chats with the cruiser’s young gunnery officer. And when he’d finally made it to Sepoy, the smells of diesel, bilges, damp wool and bodies packed in together had made dropping down the hatch easy.

  In fact he’d found the time to be quietly critical to himself of the operational regime he found when he got there. The memory of that made him smile.

  When it had come to Sepoy doing her first dive on that first time out in her, her first lieutenant had given them a warning. ‘Diving stations in five minutes!’ he had called through the boat. Coming right off an operational boat, Harry wasn’t used to warnings. On an operational boat, the first thing you knew you were diving was when the klaxon blared, and you did it fast – in seconds preferably, if you wanted to survive.

  Harry had disapproved. Nicobar could be under in 13 seconds from second klaxon. If you had a crew who could work their boat that fast, then they were doing it on reflex; a discipline that went right to the heart of what the Trade was about: each man knowing his job, and doing it, because if he didn’t, everybody died. And the more you practised the better you got. Submarines, he thought, shouldn’t do leisurely dives.

  If you were playing devil’s advocate, you might say that this was just training, and not only was it a waste of time for a crew to stay so taught, it was nerve-fraying. You kept an edge too sharp – you blunted it. But submarines were dangerous beasts: they wanted to kill you. Just standing in one was dangerous, but if you were trained, tight and fast, you could stay ahead of her and then she might just let you live.

  There were other thoughts disconcerting him of course. A couple of dozen months ago he’d been a feckless student in an over-sized ’varsity scarf; and now His Britannic Majesty’s Royal Navy was training him for command at sea in wartime. How had that happened? Another thought was the slow realisation that not only was he proving to be quite good at this lark, but that he was actually … enjoying it. God help him. Which was another reason for not wanting to fail the damn course.

  Jacko Dunham was ordering, ‘periscope depth’ again. He called for an Asdic report. And as he did, Sepoy’s squat, bustling Chief ERA came squeezing into the control room, his grease-daubed overalls dispensing a more intense reek of diesel above its general ambience. His scrunched, oily watch cap looked more like something feral squatting on his head than an article of clothing, and he tugged it more snugly as if to emphasise the importance of the words he’d come to have with the first lieutenant at his post on the trim board.

  Meanwhile, with this buzz in the background, Jacko called the new bearing and range. From what Harry could hear, it sounded like the little convoy was coming back off its zig-zag and on to its original track. As Jacko sent the periscope down again, Harry heard the CERA announce their port propeller shaft whine was back. It was why this S-boat had been relegated to Perisher duties instead of being out on patrol; despite repeated visits to the submarine dry dock over at Scott’s yard in Greenock, nobody could work out what was causing it. And a boat with a shaft whine would be heard by every Jerry sub-hunter from the Bay of Biscay to the Arctic Circle.

  Harry caught Lipsey’s frown of impatience at this interruption, while Jacko was calling, ‘Plot. What’s my distance off track?’

  Serrell replied, ‘Seven eight zero yards.’

  ‘Port thirty, half ahead together,’ said Jacko. ‘What’s my course for a one hundred track angle?’ As the course was called, Harry was thinking, Jacko, you didn’t do an all round look? Where is everybody upstairs?

  ‘Up periscope,’ said Jacko, ‘I’m going to call the bearing on the lead merchantman. Give me my DA,’ this to the studious little Sub Lieutenant on the fruit machine. Harry watched Jacko as he called the bearing then turn the ’scope a bare few degrees to starboard, and back again, saying, ‘Three merchantmen in sight … and Bedivere on the starboard wing …’

  This wasn’t right. Harry took a half step into the control room, behind Lipsey. He’d barely managed to say the word, ‘Sir?’ before Lipsey had the handles of the main ’scope and was ordering it up. Everybody suddenly turned to look at the commander. He was already performing a swift all-round, starting aft, but he stopped before he’d gone a third of the way.

  In a movement so rapid it appeared almost as a blur, his hand shot out and hit the general alarm, as he yelled, ‘Full ahead together, flood Q, keep one hundred and twenty feet, midships, down all masts! Stand by for collision!’

  From the corner of his eye, Harry saw everyone grab a hold of something solid, apart from the outside wrecker whose hands were already dancing over the valve to flood Sepoy’s Q tank with life-saving water.

  The name Berkhamsted had hardly formed in Harry’s head when there was a tremendous clang, and a tearing noise above his head and Sepoy lurched on her beam ends on the way down. Blades of water came slicing down through the periscope gland packing.

  ‘Not me bloody packin’ again,’ muttered the outside wrecker, off to the side, his quaint tag being the name the Trade gave to the engine room artificer in charge of the boat’s ballast systems – and the periscopes.

  ‘Depth one two zero feet,’ said the cox’n through the noise of the water and the receding ricka-chicky-ricka-chicky of a surface ship’s high speed propellers. Lipsey turned to face Sepoy’s skipper, and said through a laconic smile, ‘I do apologise Mr Barbour, but I rather think one of my chaps has bent your boat.’

  Six

  ‘That’s for you, Mr Gilmour,’ said Cdr Lipsey, pushing a slip of paper over his desk, before leaning down to one of the drawers.

  Harry reached for it. They were sitting in Lipsey’s tiny office, leant to him out of a rare kindness of heart on the part of the training flotilla’s Commander (S), rare because such gestures were seldom seen, given that office space – indeed any space – was so precious on a depot ship the size of Cyclops. The slip was a 14-day pass.

  ‘Oh, we’re getting leave,’ he said, ‘Thank you very much, sir. Just until we get a replacement for Sepoy?’

  ‘We’ve already got a replacement,’ said Lipsey, producing a bottle of Plymouth Gin from the drawer, and then two tumblers and a little flask of bitters. ‘I’ve roped in, or perhaps “lassooed” as Mandy might have said …’ a flash of a grin, ‘… our old neighbour H57 to complete the course. She’s already started an emergency work-up and we’ll begin again the day after tomorrow. You, however, are no longer with us.’ And with that, delivered out of a blank, expressionless face, he proceeded to pour two very large ones.

  H57 was the old 1918-vintage H-class boat that served as “clockwork mouse” for other boats w
orking up before going on patrol – like a sort of pretend U-boat to practise against and ditto for the endless procession of new escorts joining the fleet. Sepoy sometimes tied up alongside her. She was also Harry’s first submarine, the boat he’d first dived on, on the day all those months ago – years now – when her CO Lt Penn and her number one, Andy Trumble, had agreed that young Sub-Lt Harry Gilmour, ‘would do’ for the Trade.

  Acting as Perisher course’s training sub was an exacting task, and any boat undertaking it need to get some practice in herself before being turned over to Teacher and his candidates. Hence the emergency work-up.

  Harry smiled to himself at the unfortunate co-incidence; the boat that had seen him “in” was the one that was seeing him “out”. Because it obviously meant he had failed.

  Jacko Dunham had gone already, as everybody knew he’d have to, first up the gangway right after they’d trotted-up alongside with Cyclops’ crew leaning over her sides grinning and elbowing each other at the sight of Sepoy’s flattened periscope stands and split bridge faring. And now Harry was being failed too. He didn’t know what to think about that. At one time he thought he might have felt almost relieved, especially after all that hand-shaking and blind funk nonsense on Nicobar. But every time he recalled all those little chats with Calliope’s gunnery officer on the way home from Gib, his funk had seemed to matter less and less. And which was why, he felt that he’d “sorted himself out”. Such a pity.

  Calliope’s “Guns” was Lt Freddie Woodruffe, who’d known Peter Dumaresq, Harry’s old mentor from Redoubtable – Peter, his friend who had later commanded the cruiser Pelleas, and died aboard her in that night action off the Libyan coast they now called the Battle of Ras Lanuf. That old friendship was how he and Freddie had come to confide in each other, how Freddie had helped him put it all in perspective so that now he hadn’t even so much as flinched after HMS Berkhamsted had come so close to ramming them good and proper.

  ‘So you’re failing me, sir,’ said Harry as phlegmatically as he could manage while reaching to accept the proffered tumbler of gin with the spirals of bitters still uncoiling in it.

  As he spoke, Harry could still see in his head Freddie smirking at him. He’d been recounting for Freddie how the Italian escorts had hunted Nicobar after she had all but wiped that troop convoy. Harry could hear himself confessing how he’d got the shakes, how the panic rising in him had made him feel like he’d been about to fly apart, how it had shattered his belief in his own fortitude under fire.

  And then he was remembering Freddie’s words in reply: ‘… so there I was up in the director tower, all day under a beautiful Mediterranean sun. The sky had been black with Junkers 88s and Heinkels and those tri-motor Eyetie torpedo bombers. They’d been coming at us since just after dawn with no let up. I’d been sat in that director tower for fourteen hours solid, and when the sun finally went down and we secured from action stations, I couldn’t move. The lads were saying, “Tots’ up, sir! Show a leg!” But I couldn’t. So someone went off to get Chiefie, and by the time he came back I’d shat myself. They lifted me off the seat, cut off my trousers, slung them over the wall and hosed me down … had to do the tower too, and then they carted me off to my bunk, my hampton dangling in the breeze. The surgeon came round and offered me something, but I said no, because I was going to have to get up tomorrow and do it all over again. And so I did. And you’re worried about a touch of the shakes?’ He and Harry had looked at each other until they’d both started laughing.

  So, all in all, a shame really, to have failed.

  ‘Failed you?’ said Lipsey, raising his glass in a toast. ‘Of course not, Mr Gilmour. You don’t think I’d be wasting good gin at this time of the day on a failure. I’ve passed you. We’ll only have two more days after we get H57. It’ll take that time for me to put the other three through their final paces. I’ve seen all I need to of you. Highly irregular of course, but the timetable is God here, so let’s say you’ve done enough to convince me. Congratulations, Captain.’ And he took a hefty belt.

  Harry did too, ‘Thank you, sir.’ He didn’t know what else to say. He felt his throat constrict. Lipsey gazed ruminatively into his tumbler, as if trying to come to a decision about something as yet unsaid; then he spoke, ‘You knew.’

  ‘Sir?’ said Harry.

  ‘You said “Sir” in my ear,’ said Lipsey. ‘You knew.’

  Harry just looked down at his tumbler.

  ‘These old Yank four-stackers have the turning circle of a bloody battleship,’ added Lipsey. ‘When our little convoy executed its turn, Lieutenant Dunham assumed they’d all turned together. But Berkhamsted being as about as handy as a brick was always going to have to go the long way round, and she came up behind us. Mr Dunham wasn’t paying attention. He was too busy thinking about his target. He was, as we say, “lost in the box”. You knew though, didn’t you, Mr Gilmour? That’s why you whispered “Sir” to me, wasn’t it?’

  Harry didn’t answer. He half suspected he wasn’t meant to.

  ‘All that chitter chatter going on in the control room wouldn’t have helped him of course,’ continued Lipsey. ‘But that doesn’t matter. If he’d felt himself getting distracted, Mr Dunham should’ve told them to shut up. But he didn’t. And that was why he failed. As for you … if your sixth sense has managed to equal mine, there’s little else I have to teach you.’

  Lipsey paused, as if considering what to say next. He settled for, ‘Home is near here for you Mr Gilmour, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes sir. Dunoon. Just round the corner.’

  ‘Good. I wouldn’t go far. You’ll be getting word of your first command before the fourteen days are up,’ then Lipsey paused to savour another gulp of gin. ‘Just one more thing … the next time you think some berk is about to break a submarine, don’t whisper it.’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Harry.

  ****

  It is a common delusion among sailors home from the sea that they are returning to a world as they left it. Harry Gilmour was going home that evening for the first time in over a year, and maybe if he wasn’t exactly articulating that thought to himself, it was what he was yearning for. A tender had taken Jacko Dunham away, but Harry had to rely on the few remaining paddle steamers plying the Clyde ports to get him off Bute and back to Dunoon. It could’ve been a convoluted journey, but it wasn’t. The sailing from Rothesay went directly across the Firth to Wemyss Bay, and on the other side of the pier there was the last sailing for Dunoon.

  Dunoon sailings had always sailed from Gourock pier, further up and round the bend at the Tail o’ the Bank; but Gourock pier was now home to a squadron of US Coast Guard Treasury class cutters now pressed into escort duties on the North Atlantic convoys, so the paddle steamers had to sail from Wemyss Bay. So what was a damned, bloody inconvenience to all the workers who lived in Dunoon but worked in the industries that lined the river at Greenock, was a gift to Harry. He lugged his full kit up the gangway onto the little paddler, his feet barely stepping off before the gangway was whisked ashore, and the paddle wheels started churning up the water below him.

  It was a cool evening for the time of year, with the usual blustery sou’wester blowing up the Firth. Harry stood on the crowded deck, all the carley rafts traditionally used for seating being granted to the many women passengers on board. For the folk on this run tended to be ladies, or soft-hatted officer workers – draughtsmen with milk-bottle bottom glasses, and other ranking pen-pushers and bosses in their bowler hats, too old or too knackered to be in uniform. Rationing meant there were no fat people, but that wasn’t the only thing that made everyone look much the same; Harry’s fellow passengers were a dowdy mob in belted trench coats, the women in fashions that were three years out of date, their material shiny with age, for it wasn’t just food that was rationed now, but clothes too. Nearly all the men, and most of the women were smoking.

  But Harry wasn’t paying attention. He was wallowing in the nostalgia of seeing the Cowal hills again: the ra
gged skyline of peaks to the north; the forest green all in shadow now; and the purple of the heather, higher up and still in sunlight; the crisp, sharp clarity of that evening light and how it polished the bellies of the high scattered clouds to a glowing white, about to tinge with pink, but not quite yet; the whole wide spread of this little inland sea, cradled in a landscape that looked old and wise. And the smell; the tang of the sea wrack, and above the beat of the paddles and the rush of the water, the cries of the gulls. Home.

  Since they’d begun the sea-going part of the course up here on the Firth of Clyde, he’d spent nearly every day beneath the surface. And all the action had happened much further down this fabled stretch of water. So this was the first time he’d had the chance to get a proper look at the place where he’d grown up. It had been a long time since he’d been here. It felt longer. He turned back inboard, to give himself a break from the intensity of what he was feeling, and found himself staring into the face of a young woman, sitting barely six feet away and looking straight at him.

  She was wearing a stylish hat, and a coat that although subdued, looked considerably more fashionable than anyone else’s. He would never have picked her out in a crowd, which when he considered it later was, in itself, unbelievable. But she was so close now, he knew her immediately: Janis Crumley.

  ‘Am I such a sight these days you don’t even want to say hello,’ said Janis.

  Janis Crumley. Mid Argyll’s girl-most-likely-to. Only daughter and heiress to Hector Crumley, the county’s soda scone-and-shortbread mogul; his baking empire stretching from Campbeltown to Oban, the rewards from which his daughter had always loved to put on vulgar display. She had also, once upon a time, been Harry’s girlfriend, or at least that was what she used to tell people.

  ‘What? Huh? Um, no. Not at all. Hello, Janis. What are you doing here?’ said Harry, trying to smile to cover his surprise. ‘I mean, on this boat?’