The Bonny Boy

by David Black

  But it had been no good, him trying to relax below until needed. Running on the surface at night, if anything was to happen the bridge was where he had to be. And the time it might take him to respond to the call, ‘Captain to the bridge!’ might be all the time it took to lose his boat. Because it was his boat. King’s Regulations and Admiralty Instructions were very specific on that. He’d read every word, very carefully. When it came to responsibility for HMS Scourge and all who sailed in her, it was he who would have to answer – at his peril.

  So, every time they were running on the surface now, he’d be on the bridge. He was even considering whether to get the second cox’n to rig some sort of perch for him to take the weight off his feet, somewhere abaft the periscope stands maybe.

  And McCready never seemed to mind. And that was when it came to him: of course McCready didn’t mind. He was young, inexperienced and just a Wavy-Navy wonderboy like Harry had been. The skipper being on watch with him gave him confidence. Scourge’s other officers were experienced, and RN and therefore it followed that, as far as they were concerned, the skipper on the bridge all the time was just a pain in the arse: it was your boss always looking over your shoulder; he was in the way.

  Harry frowned to himself; he didn’t like the idea of not being on the bridge, of leaving it to his watchkeepers. So what if it pissed them off? He could think of plenty other skippers who wouldn’t have given a stuff. This wasn’t about winning popularity contests. And yet … pissed off officers weren’t concentrating on the job. Jesus! Getting the hang of this bloody command business was just too damned tricky.

  Towards the end of the Middle Watch Harry ordered a course change, angling Scourge back inshore. Looking over the bridge front to the south east, he could make out the persistent flicker all along the black horizon line; a tiny reminder as to why they’d come all this way. It was the battle raging out there in the desert, for the fate of Egypt and the Suez Canal – for the whole Middle East even, and probably the entire war. It was while he was contemplating it that he noticed the fleeting shadows skipping across the moon’s splash on the sea. And now he’d noticed it, he became aware of the low echo of a different kind of engine drone, coming from off their starboard bow.

  ‘Mr McCready,’ he said over his shoulder, pointing, ‘What’s that?’

  Tom McCready was in the act of turning when a growing, growling roar rose out of the ocean from behind Harry, and a giant shadow passed over them from the starboard quarter, heading like them, inshore, but at maybe 500 to 1,000 feet – it was hard to judge in the dark.

  ‘Aircraft, sir!’ said McCready.

  Harry fought the urge to say, ‘Really, Mr McCready, I thought it was desert djinns.’

  McCready was following the shadow through his night glasses. ‘I think they’re Junkers Fifty Twos, sir. Definitely tri-motors … fixed undercarriages … they look like they’re … descending.’ he said, still straining to see. Night glasses or no, Harry hadn’t a hope of seeing anything. But McCready’s aircraft recognition was something for him to note. That’s when he, McCready and the starboard lookout all saw it simultaneously: a tiny necklace of lights flashing on; a row of glittering little pinpricks of light rimming the dark, somewhere inland.

  Before McCready actually said it, Harry knew what he was looking at – an airfield. At last, thought Harry, something else to blow up. But not right now. It wasn’t long to sunrise, and all those official threats about answering for the fate of Scourge at his peril echoed loud in his calculations; he wasn’t going to hang about off an enemy coast in broad daylight for any target, no matter how juicy. There was a time and a place for everything.

  ****

  Harry had all his officers round the little wardroom table, scrunched up so that their two guests could perch on tiny wooden box seats from the engine room parked in the gangway.

  Scourge was hanging at periscope depth in barely 70 feet of water, about 600 yards off the beach on what in daylight was an utterly nondescript stretch of flat, featureless coastline. All morning Harry had had them creeping in and out the shallows, up and down for miles, snatching quick looks through his attack periscope because it was the thinner, smaller of Scourge’s two, trying to take bearings and calculate ranges on any hump or mound or clump of sand grass not liable to suddenly transform itself into a camel or truck and start to move. Now he was convening a council of war to tell them what he intended to do, and what he expected of them.

  Harry sat with his back to a partition, with a mug of coffee in front of him on the green baize table. Behind him, next door in the control room, Scourge’s Vasco, or navigator to the uninitiated, Sub Lt Miles Harding RN, was on watch. Here in the wardroom, to Harry’s left, was Farrar sitting bolt upright and formal, looking quite trim in his white shirt with his two RN rings on each epaulette. Not even a week away from his last shave, his black beard was coming along nicely, leaving everybody else way behind with their varying degrees of wisp and grizzle – apart from young McCready, who at 19, wasn’t even trying. Because nobody shaved on patrol on a submarine – it was the easiest way to waste fresh water.

  Between Farrar and McCready was Sub Lt Jeremy Powell RN, Scourge’s gunnery and torpedo officer, a fair-skinned, bony young man with a permanent and pensive scowl. Unlike Farrar, Powell at least had the common decency to look younger than Harry. Like Farrar, however, Powell’s posture was rigid. But the way his eyes kept flicking to the wardroom’s two guests gave the game away: it was because there were two “other ranks” on officers’ hallowed ground. It might just be a tiny upholstered alcove off the main gangway, but someone had marked it out, and by inviting the “guests” here, Harry was becoming aware that he’d managed to offend against yet another peculiar discipline regime that had become custom on this boat, because this wasn’t the first. Yes, the wardroom was officer country, but cheek-by-jowl on a submarine meant there was always give-and-take. It was how you did it in the Trade, which was why Harry had started wondering just what kind of skipper Bertie Bayliss had been.

  Leading Seaman George Hooper, Scourge’s gunlayer, perched with his cap on his lap, was looking equally discomfited, obviously not used to being in such proximity, even on a submarine, to officers. He was a young man, and now seeing him close up, Harry could see by the poverty-sheen to his skin as well as the spaces and stains in his teeth, everything he needed to know about the streets Hooper had come from. And not that long ago either. As the war went on, the old salts were becoming fewer and fewer and the “hostilities-only” boys were turning up everywhere. Next to Hooper was Chief Petty Officer Eric Ainsworth, Scourge’s coxswain; and there was absolutely nothing discomfited about him: a career sailor, not that old, but his face all hard planes, utterly inscrutable, and eyes that could see for a thousand miles. Both senior and junior rates were in the Trade’s ubiquitous, shapeless white pullovers, but you didn’t need rank insignia to tell who was who.

  ‘I’ve asked the cox’n and Hooper here because I need them to understand completely what we we’re going to get up to inshore after the sun goes down,’ said Harry to the table. ‘And for Hooper to help us work out the best way to range our gun against onshore targets. Gentlemen, Mr Ainsworth and Leading Seaman Hooper, our wardroom guests.’

  Harry looked round as Farrar muttered some words of welcome to the sailors, but he knew it was really on him that all the attention was focused. He was about to come under close scrutiny from all those aboard, everybody keen to know what new ways the new boy had devised to get them all killed. For this was going to be Harry’s first cosy chat with the crew.

  The previous night, after he had recovered from the shock of that giant, roaring shadow zooming over his head, they had followed the aircraft’s passage inshore towards the lights. Even though they were on the surface, Harry had ordered the main search periscope raised and had Farrar paint him a verbal picture from the control room, enough to make Harry want to drop down and take a look for himself. What he saw was all picked out in dimmed headli
ght beams from a score or more of trucks and other vehicles. It was a hastily improvised airfield, with a roller-flattened sand runway, a supply park with stacked boxes and jerry-cans, and a lorry park, with a lengthy queue of trucks assembling to take the fuel and ammunition forward. There was a windsock, and around it were eight Ju52 transports, all shadows and angles and crawling with tiny figures – ground crews in the process of executing fast turn-arounds.

  Now it was the day after and Harry was leaning over the chart table trying to construct a better picture. From the chart itself, when you looked at the blankness that represented the land, it was now obvious real life had replicated it. The airfield was just a wide sward of hard gravel and sand peculiar to the western desert. And this expanse lay conveniently located between the sea and the main coast road. The spot was almost 40 miles of east of Sidi Birani, and so probably not much more than 15 miles behind the fighting, although from what Harry had gleaned from radio traffic, the battlefront was moving west at a hell of rate. That little short-arse Montgomery, about whom everybody’s first word had been, ‘Who?’ was apparently winning. And, having ordered Scourge all this way from Malta, it was obviously Shrimp’s intention that Harry should do all he could to give him a hand.

  That morning Scourge had dived at sun-up, just after the last Ju52 had departed. His last look at the supply strip through the periscope let him watch it vanish under cam-nets until it was all gone. Why, quickly became apparent: the sky became busy with Desert Air Force aircraft – Bostons, Beaufighters, P40 Kittyhawks and Hurri-bombers ranging far and wide along the axis of the coast road hunting targets. As the day wore on, every time Harry took a look through the periscope, he just had to crank the head up to see the extent of the RAF’s air superiority. It was a vaguely exhilarating experience to see all those aircraft in the sky, and them not be Jerries for a change.

  And even though he knew Scourge at this depth, this close inshore, must be visible from the air, he also knew the Brylcreem Boys wouldn’t be looking for submarines, and even if one of them did cast an eye seaward, Scourge was lying in a tangle of shoals that cast their own long, subaqueous shadows, so he felt perfectly obscured and safe.

  The air activity must also be why the forward strip only came alive at night, a fact that made his task both easier and harder. But he reckoned he had a solution. He had spent the day charting the shoals, and with this being the Med and no tides to speak of, he had navigated a course to get them through and out again. His plan was to close the shore, but only to surface once a good tempo of incoming flights had built up. He wanted a lot of aircraft on the ground, and a queueof ammo crates and Jerry-cans, piled high and waiting for loading onto the trucks before he would order ‘Commence firing!’

  But, because they would be at sea level, and the strip slightly elevated, Harry knew it would make Hooper’s job as gunlayer, sighting and ranging from the deck, almost impossible. That was why he planned to extend the main search periscope to its maximum height, and put Powell, their “guns”, on the end of it, giving him an additional 18 feet of elevation for his spotting; so much easier for him to range in their three-inch deck gun, and observe the fall of shot.

  So now, sat round the table, he and Powell worked it out with Hooper, how they would call it. Harding would be on the bridge with him, crouching over his chart with only a stool to prop it on. Because knowing exactly where they were was going to be crucial, and taking the bearings and marking the fixes was going to be Harding’s job – Harry would fill him in later.

  Farrar, in the control room, would see to it everything ran smoothly: the daisy-chain passing up the ammo for the gun; the engine room telegraph; the dive board and the conning of the boat. On the helm would be Ainsworth. The cox’n’s usual diving station was on the for’ard dive planes, but as he was also the best helmsman aboard, Harry needed him on the wheel this time.

  Harry had had business with CPO Ainsworth since coming aboard, and he trusted him completely. Enough for both men to know they both saw eye to eye on the important things.

  Ainsworth at 32, was by far the oldest man on the boat, average in height, build and nothing else. He’d joined as a boy sailor and never once in his entire life in a blue suit had he mentioned where he’d come from. His accent had a trace of northern in it, and probably more west than east, but that was as near as you could narrow it. There was nothing about him that said you’d get anywhere by asking.

  Of course he had heard of Lt Harry Gilmour RNVR long before he’d watched his sea-boots slide down Scourge’s conning tower ladder, but was too old a hand at the Trade to have jumped to any conclusions about the young Turk, let alone confide them to anyone. Right then if you were to have sought deep for his reaction to Harry’s appointment, the best you’d probably have detected was a mild curiosity as to how his new skipper would react to inheriting Bertie Bayliss’ legacy.

  Not that he’d had much chance to think anything else; Lt Gilmour’s joining had been little more than a “pierhead jump” – Jack slang for a posting so short-notice you practically had to take a running leap off the end of the pier as your new berth passed by, already proceeding to sea. But he’d started to get the measure of the new CO pretty quick.

  Especially after he’d issued his first order.

  ‘The signal locker, Mr Ainsworth,’ Harry had said to him. ‘Get it out the conning tower please. I don’t care where it goes, but it doesn’t stay there.’

  Bert Ainsworth’s first thought had been, Oh no. Not another nutter. His first order on assuming command is to rearrange the furniture. But Bert changed his mind after Lt Gilmour explained why. Ainsworth could quite see how a column of water coming down the conning tower hatch could smash the locker and then how all the signal bunts floating free could choke the space’s drain valves; and nobody wanted to dive a boat with a conning tower full of water and no way to get rid of it. So the new CO wasn’t so daft after all.

  Mr Gilmour’s next question had, tellingly, been about his new crew’s welfare.

  ‘You leave the rum ration ashore?’ The lad had tried to hide the incredulity in his voice when Ainsworth had told him. ‘Don’t you … doesn’t it … suffer from … pilferage?’

  Since time began, Jack’s inalienable right had been to his tot. No arbitrary order, even from the highest admiral, could deny him. It was the law, written into the KR & AI – the King’s Regulations and Admiralty Instructions – that only Jove, or the king, under certain circumstances, could set aside. Captains, however, could decide when and where the tot was dispensed.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ had been Ainsworth’ response. When the new CO had wanted further explanation, he’d added, ‘Captain Bayliss’ standing orders, sir: no rum on board. The crew was to collect it on return from patrol, sir.’

  ‘Minus pilferage,’ Mr Gilmour had added.

  ‘Yessir,’ said Ainsworth.

  ‘But the wardroom has a stocked bar,’ said Mr Gilmour.

  ‘Yessir.’

  ‘That standing order ceases with immediate effect,’ Mr Gilmour had said without a moment’s hesitation. ‘I’m sure you have long experience in dispensing tots, Mr Ainsworth, so I am ordering you to see to it from now on, as long as it is in a fashion that will not interfere with the smooth running of boat. There’s probably not enough time to load our ration before we slip, but next patrol, make it so.’

  ‘Oh I’m sure we’ll find the time, sir,’ Ainsworth had replied, without a hint of the smile he was thinking about. ‘The crew will appreciate that.’

  Other changes were to follow.

  They were already well on passage to their patrol billet before the new CO had a chance to even think of having a look round his new command, and it had been down to Bert Ainsworth to give him the tour. Mr Farrar, Scourge’s Jimmy, having to remain in the control room, in command.

  Ainsworth and his new skipper had been moving through the forward ends. It was about an hour into the afternoon watch and Scourge was at watch diving, keeping 60 feet and creeping a
long at a steady four knots on motors. Mr Gilmour had come up standing at the bulkhead door between Scourge’s accommodation space and the forward torpedo room. It was dogged shut. Doors were only dogged in an emergency, say, if they suddenly discovered the boat had a hole in it.

  ‘Another of Captain Bayliss’ standing orders, Mr Ainsworth?’ Mr Gilmour had asked, his eyes surveying the big steel door.

  ‘Yessir,’ Ainsworth had replied.

  ‘Why on earth …?’

  No other door on the boat had been ordered dogged when watch diving. Normally no doors would be, mainly because it would be a major inconvenience to anyone moving through, and lots of people needed to: test teams on their way to check for faults in the battery spaces, or trim tank piping, or the torpedo tubes; running maintenance teams on their way to fix them; the Jimmy doing rounds; mess seniors carrying mess kids full of grub from the galley to a hungry crew; the captain, doing whatever he liked.

  Ainsworth had explained it had all been Captain Bayliss’ response to the growing threat of mines. If Scourge hit one, with the forward watertight compartment already sealed off, Captain Bayliss insisted it would be more likely they’d be able to save the boat.

  ‘What about the men off watch, sleeping? Or any duty teams working in the compartment?’ Mr Gilmour had asked. He was talking about any crew left on the other side of the door if Scourge did hit a mine. Anyone not actually killed by any explosion would be trapped and must surely drown. Bert Ainsworth didn’t have an answer, so he didn’t offer one. He remembered just nodding. He had felt too full to speak.

  Jack, as a species, had a rare talent, honed across three centuries, for complaining – especially if he was feeling hard done by. But nobody had complained about Captain Bayliss’ order to always dog the forward bulkhead door when underway, even though everyone knew what it meant. You only dogged all the watertight doors if water was coming in and then you trusted to your luck, and to the skipper knowing what he was doing. But sealing off everyone in one compartment as a matter of routine when you were at sea? The message from the skipper had been just too loud and clear to bear discussing; because it meant that anyone in the forward spaces, whatever his business, was expendable as far as the skipper was concerned. No-one could get their head around that, and certainly not enough to articulate the breach of trust it involved. Nobody had had the words.