by David Black
‘But he can be lucky,’ says Harry. ‘Group up, full ahead together. Starboard thirty.’
Almost immediately Freer calls, ‘A single depth charge going into the water … but it is way off … dropped far too soon … another … and another. Escort one still closing fast.’
The escort is throwing them out randomly as she races wildly across the patch of sea where she has lost her quarry.
Harry calls, ‘Depth beneath the keel?’
‘Eighty feet beneath the keel now, sir’, comes back at him. ‘Sea bed falling away.’
Deeper water at last.
‘Keep three hundred feet,’ orders Harry.
RICKA-CHICKY-RICKA-CHICKY-RICKA-CHICKY!
They hear the escort go right over them, but it is only once she’s passed that they hear the tell-tale splash – another depth charge coming down. They wait the seconds for the detonation, but the noise they hear instead is a great clang, and a shudder goes through the hull like they’ve been hit by a giant hammer. It comes from right up in the bows.
‘That bloody one just hit us on the nose, Number One,’ says Harry, incredulous, and in the time it takes him to say the words, the depth charge falls a further 56 feet, where the pressure triggers its detonator and a huge concussion explodes below Nonpareil’s starboard bow.
RAH-BUBUBBUBBUMM-DAH-DUMMM-DUMMMN-DUMMMN!
Deck plates jump out of their seatings, and they feel the boat’s entire for’ard end being thrust up, and their deck cant to port.
‘Group down, dead slow ahead together,’ orders Harry, and the boat begins to stabilise beneath them. Freer calls the bearings on both escorts. They appear to be joining up off to starboard. This time, Harry asks for damage reports. He’s listening to them over the sound-powered phone from each compartment when Blake interrupts him.
‘We’re going down by the bow, sir,’ reports Blake. ‘I’m unable to hold trim.’
‘Leak in the for’ard auxiliary machinery space,’ says a disembodied voice from the sound-powered telephone.
‘Number One,’ says Harry immediately – suddenly he has a bad feeling about this one – ‘get for’ard and sort it.’
‘Aye, aye, sir,’ and Blake is off.
‘Frank …?’ says Harry to the wrecker, but CERA Lansley is already grinning back at him, ‘I’ve got the trim board, sir.’
‘Good man, Frank.’
‘Aye, aye, sir.’
Blake swings through two watertight doors on his way to the gangway above the auxiliary machinery space. Long before he gets there, he sees a wall of water coming out of the deck. The LTO, Petty Officer Young, has come aft from his diving station in the forward torpedo room and already has the deck plates above the machinery space lifted. It’s from that hole that the flat jets are spraying, and they are making a noise like tearing steel. Blake, pressing through the crush of men with hammocks and battens, gets to the hole in the deck and looks down into the chaos.
A perfect blade of water is slicing out from the head of Nonpareil’s retractable log tube. It’s clear that the log – an extendable rotator arm that is lowered beneath the hull to record their speed through the water and distance travelled – has been damaged. That last depth charge: it must have ruptured the gland packing! Images are racing through Blake’s mind. He sees the round tube that allows the log to be retracted, and he sees how the ring of packing between the top of the tube and its cap must have been rent by the force of the upward blast, opening it just a fraction to the sea.
The jet of water hitting the inside of the clamped cap and then scything out probably only has a diameter of millimetres, but it is shooting up at a pressure of 130 pounds per square inch and its spraying a screaming liquid shroud that could practically take a man’s leg off if he stepped into the space.
Blake has no idea what to do. But he knows he has to do something fast before the rupture starts opening up and the pressure blows the head off, and the boat is lost. But he immediately realises that at the pressure it’s coming in, the water should have almost filled the space by now. So it must be flooding into the bilges, or other adjacent spaces. For’ard are the boat’s fresh water and fuel tanks; aft the number one battery space. If sea water gets in there, it will contaminate the battery acid. Mix sulphuric acid and salt water and you get chlorine gas. He needs the wrecker here, right now.
As he reaches for the sound-powered phone, Young has dropped a hammock into the space to part shield the blade of water and has gone in after it. He is on his hands and knees. Blake knows he is feeling for the suck of water leaving the space. He hears Harry’s voice through the phone, ‘Control room.’
‘Control room, Number One here. The log shaft … its gland has failed—’ says Blake, as he is interrupted by Young, down in the space, ‘She’s venting for’ard through the ventilation trunking, sir!’
Blake relays the news to Harry, who turns to CERA Lansley, ‘Get up there Frank …’
The leading stoker who has been at Lansley’s side, steps to the trim board. Harry orders the forward bilge pumps started, and warns the leading stoker to prepare to blow number one main ballast tank.
The void is opening in his guts again. Harry knows it must be the same for everyone. And he knows it’s not the fear that counts, but what you do with it. How you handle it when the little boy who lives in the heart of every man starts crying, “I’m so afraid!” So Harry does what he’s learned to do – since Trebuchet. In his head, he puts his hand over the little boy’s eyes and says to him, Stick with me lad. We’ll just carry on, and we’ll be all right.
Freer calls, ‘Targets drawing aft, sir. Slow turns. They’re a-beam of each other … pinging … no … now they’ve stopped again … like they’re doing a sweep. Going back the other way.’
‘Thanks Freer,’ says Harry, then knowing the control room is looking to him, waiting for a sign, needing to know, he turns, leans against the plot and says, ‘Running away, eh. That showed them!’
It’s all an act, of course; everyone knows how bad a hole in their boat can be, at 300 feet, but for a few glorious moments everyone is master of their fear.
Above the auxiliary machinery space, Lansley slides in, trying to avoid the streaked white jet of sea water that reaches out to the space’s walls and then up like a solid plate before disintegrating in circular blades of spray.
Young, splashing out the way, says, ‘We can’t get at the valve to shut the trunking, it’s behind the torpedo re-loads.’
Lansley stands waist deep in swirling water that looks dull and soupy in the ochre gloom of the emergency lighting. He is gesturing up to one of the ratings, ‘Gimme that hammock!’ Then to Young, as he crouches beside him, ‘Durn’t matter. Valve’s probably stripped anyways.’ He’s rolling the hammock tight now, and wetting it. ‘It’s the bloody leak we need to stop … get me an adjustable spanner.’
The spanner is passed down. To Blake’s incredulity, Lansley begins in sequence to loosen the steel knuckles of the clamps securing the log tube’s cast-steel cap. The blade of water begins to distort and thicken, and the scream begins to change note. As the water comes more in a rush than slicing blades, Lansley has the rolled hammock now, and he’s levering it into the widened gap between the head and the top of the tube. Young doesn’t need asking to start levering it in around the other side. As he does, Lansley begins tightening the clamps again, crushing the hammock in like a seal, smothering the water.
The outrushing water drags the other hammock to the open louvre valve and Young moves to fother it tighter over the space. ‘Battens!’ he calls, ‘a hammer!’ And he starts banging the battens between a hull rib and the bulkhead to hold the hammock in place.
Lansley meanwhile has given the last clamp one last heave. The water and the noise have stopped. Just drips now. You can hear the sailors round the hole breathing. Lansley decides at last to join them. ‘Pump,’ wheezes Lansley. ‘Get a pump down here, get rid of this.’
Blake hopes the Eyetie escorts with their probin
g hydrophones are too far away to hear the pump when it starts. It hasn’t occurred to him that if they hadn’t heard the racket the leak had made, then the pump’s putter-putter was hardly going to register. But then his mind has been on other things.
Eight
It was a beautiful autumn Mediterranean day, the sun already high in the sky with light and warmth leeching in through the dull grey army blankets that acted as drapes to old Hubert’s office. A million motes of dust hung or eddied in the stuffy air as the shafts of golden sunlight played through them. The noise of clanging and banging drifted up from a submarine moored to the pontoon outside the base periscope shop and the odd hoot and guffaw drifted down from the Gallery where Nonpareil’s officers were having an impromptu party with their colleagues from HM Submarine P71 to celebrate their boats’ happy return.
Calling it an office struck Harry as stretching irony even for Royal Navy sangfroid. It was a scraped-out cavern in the rock below what was left of the old Lazaretto, the 17th Century quarantine hospital that the Tenth Flotilla had called home since it arrived on Malta some 20 months ago. But then old Hubert – Lt Cdr. H A L Marsham RN, the flotilla’s second in command – always had been dry cove.
Harry had settled into a burst leather armchair between a chipped, Government issue, green metal filing cabinet and Hubert’s salvaged Edwardian leather-topped desk with its carved panels and ornate tooling. Harry couldn’t help but notice how the seat behind – one of those green canvas and metal-tubing jobs that normally live in assembly halls – it failed to match its tarnished opulence. Its canvas back was starting to fray. On the bare, pale stone walls was a map of the central Med, a really rather well-executed watercolour of the small Malta hill town of Rabat and random strings of electric lighting flex that dangled naked lightbulbs here and there. Hubert’s cap hung from an ornate coat stand probably salvaged from the same place as the desk.
Hubert was pouring two large pink gins from a selection of decanters he kept in an old meat safe against the back wall. ‘I understand there’s an old friend of yours still on the island,’ he said, over his shoulder.
Harry, who was still a bit dazed after making his patrol report to the Tenth’s Captain (S) frowned when Hubert turned to hand him his brimming tumbler.
‘Thought you knew,’ said Hubert. ‘But apparently not. I was speaking to George Wincairns while you were on patrol, and he said there’d been no gentlemen callers answering your description. Don’t pretend you’ve forgotten Miss Kadzow. The nightclub singer. She’s staying with him these days.’
Nonpareil had limped in barely an hour ago, in company with the minesweeper escort that had guided her in through the swept channel. Since then Harry had been in detailed and at times uncomfortable conversation with Shrimp about his attack on the Italian convoy, and how close the Italian escorts had come to sinking him.
So it took him a moment to think: George Wincairns? Then he remembered: middle-aged, flamboyant and somewhat portly. Harry remembered him from when he was first based on the island. What he actually did was less apparent. Something to do with the Government Information Service, folk said. All Harry knew was that he lived in some style out beyond Sliema in a villa that was built into the cliffs so that it looked more like a coastal battery than a home. And that some folk looked on him as a figure best observed from afar.
‘Of course I remember Katty Kadzow,’ said Harry, and left it at that. Whatever Katty Kadzow was doing out at Wincairns’ place, her virtue was never going to be at risk. George Wincairns was a “confirmed bachelor”.
‘Shrimp’s looking tired,’ said Harry.
Harry was a captain in his own right now, so such familiarity when referring to his CO was acceptable, even if they were playing by wardroom rules – and they were. This was the Trade after all. Harry sipped his gin, which was so strong it would have blown the head off a piston block.
‘He’s been busy since he came back with all the boats at the end of July,’ said Hubert. ‘We’ve had a lot on, what with Rommel charging all the way across Libya, and over the Egyptian border. When I was reading those daily sitreps back then, I was convinced Jerry was going all the way to the canal this time. He’s still only sixty miles away from it, for God’s sake. I don’t know if you heard back in Blighty, but we even evacuated the Mediterranean Fleet from Alex. The Auk finally stopped him thank God. Cobbled together a last-minute defence line running through some fly-blown railway halt called El Alamein.’
Hubert gazed into space, as if contemplating it all again, then he said, ‘And that’s where Eighth Army is now. Facing Rommel. Dug into our respective sandpits out in the big blue, waiting to see who’s going to make the next lunge. I’ve been seeing signals that say it’s going to be Jerry, and soon too. Which is why I suppose you haven’t even had a chance to unpack your shaving kit since you got here. Or to go and visit Miss Kadzow.’
All true; Harry had barely stepped off the Sunderland that had landed him at the Kalafrana seaplane base on the south of the island, than he’d been bundled aboard Nonpareil because she was about to sail even if her skipper had just been laid low by some foreign lurgi. And when they’d returned from that first washout patrol, Shrimp Simpson had had in his hands an intelligence signal that called for a boat on fast turnaround; there was a convoy to be intercepted and since Nonpareil still had almost a full load of torpedoes aboard, out they’d gone again.
‘I believe it got quite bloody while I was away,’ said Harry.
‘Ye-es,’ said Hubert, who wasn’t actually that old. Nearly 40 Harry had heard. But he looked older. He was certainly polite and precise enough to be. ‘Not that there was much for me to do with all the flotilla’s boats gone. Apart from put my tin hat on and hide under the bath.’
The pressure had been on everyone since June, when the Panzerarmee Afrika had launched a major offensive against the British positions around Gazala in Libya. Since then Rommel’s soldiers had been consuming fuel and firing ammunition as fast as they’d been able to pump it and load it, chasing the Eighth Army in what had amounted to a 350-mile series of routs.
The Auk – C-in-C Middle East, General Claude Auchinleck – might have brought Rommel’s headlong dash to a juddering halt, but with the Panzerarmee Afrika building up for “another pop” the only British units capable of choking off the flow of supplies Jerry so desperately needed were the Royal Navy’s submarines.
Which was why their base, Malta, had been under continuous air attack by the Luftwaffe.
‘Shrimp said you came within five days of the food running out before that last convoy got through,’ said Harry.
‘Five days?’ said Hubert. ‘Was it as long as that?’
Fourteen merchant ships had set out from Gibraltar at the beginning of August. Only five of them had made it to Malta. But the 28,000 tons of supplies they’d carried, including the half sunk tanker Ohio’s cargo of aviation spirit, had saved the island. The Royal Navy had lost an aircraft carrier, two cruisers and a destroyer fighting the convoy through. But the fuel alone meant the RAF could fly in more Spitfires. And overnight, the odds in the sky above the island suddenly hadn’t looked so bad for the home team. It had been in all the papers back home, but even now, two months later, from what Harry had seen of the island since his return, it was still all too apparent what a close-run thing the whole siege had been.
He took another belt of gin.
‘After we left, I didn’t think the place would hold out,’ said Harry.
‘Neither did I to be honest,’ said Hubert. ‘Jerry was all over us like a bad suit, and we were all frightened to come out of our holes. A pongo colonel had to give me a good talking to, to stiffen my resolve I’m ashamed to say. Worked though.’
Harry squinted at him, puzzled.
‘He’d turned up asking if he could billet some of his chaps on the base,’ continued Hubert, obviously still amused by the recollection. ‘Said they’d give us a hand to tidy up. It would give them something to do while they were stood d
own from the beach defences. I hadn’t realised there were any beach defences. Silly me. Of course I didn’t say that. All I said was, of course, make yourself at home in the rubble, but I shouldn’t worry too much about clearing up, because I’m sure we’re all for the off sometime very soon.
‘Well. He bit my head off. “We’re not bloody well going anywhere!” he yells. “And no effing Jerry is going to make us. Because we’re the Royal West Kents, and I’m their CO, and I’ve said so. And if you want to put that up on your notice board, I’ll sign it.” What could I say, apart from bloody marvellous. So we started decorating our dugouts and clearing paths through the rubble, and as a result we now have the des res you see today,’ Hubert paused to sip his gin, then asked, ‘Did Shrimp tell you your future?’
‘No,’ said Harry, ‘He said you’d fill me in. So I am assuming the news isn’t going to be too terrible.’
Shrimp always gave out the bad news in person, insisted on it, in fact.
‘Indeed not, young Gilmour. Indeed not. You’re getting your own boat,’ said Hubert.
Harry said nothing.
‘The mess you returned her in, the poor old Nonpareil is probably going to be in hospital for a bit, and since old Flannel is due to be discharged from his confinement quite soon they’ll be re-united ere long. Which would leave you on the beach. However, we’re expecting Scourge in from her current patrol sometime in the next ten days. Her CO, Bertie Bayliss has just been bumped up to commander and they’re whisking him off to some staff job right away. So Scourge will be in need of a new skipper, and Shrimp has decided you’re to be it.’
Harry had heard of Bayliss. Who hadn’t. He was a DSO and Bar, and he’d sunk over 20,000 tons of Axis shipping since he’d arrived in the Med just six months ago. HMS Scourge was a boat with a reputation.
‘You’ll be wanting another one of those gins, I take it,’ said Hubert.
****
Harry had to write up his formal patrol report, but it was still only mid-afternoon by the time he’d finished and handed it over to the petty officer writer who acted as Shrimp’s secretary. And since Nonpareil wasn’t actually his boat, all responsibility for her and her crew ended there.