Turn Left for Gibraltar

by David Black

  The dance floor was quickly jammed, and more people seemed to flood in from vestibules and side doors until the whole club room was heaving. It stayed that way for all of Miss Kadzow’s set. Dancers shuffled and glided in a slowly moving eddy around the dance floor, a sea of uniforms from all three services, with the odd colour flash of a woman’s dress. On the face of it, it could have been a nightclub in Mayfair – not that Harry had ever been to a nightclub in Mayfair. But it was the noise, and the gleaming excitement in all the faces, sheened with the sweat you work up, dancing two-steps and quicksteps, and from the alcohol. Katty sang, the band played and Harry got up to dance – one thing he’d inherited from his father, how to cut the rug. And he did: with a Wren and a WAAF, and two girls in bright floral dresses who said they were VADs – Voluntary Aid Detachment – nurses. He never quite caught their names, such was the noise, but then they wanted to dance, not talk. And dance, dance, dance they did. Squeezing every last droplet out of it. When he looked, when he wasn’t concentrating on dancing, it was as though he were looking into a mirror of the island. There was no frenzy or desperation, but it was as if everything were happening on a precipice. The danger made it feel like fun.

  ‘She’s a Pole,’ Hume said, when Harry shouted in his ear, asking about the singer. ‘Came here in ’39 apparently, just as the Hun stopped sabre-rattling over Poland and invaded. After war started here, and they were offering passage to any civvy who wanted to go, she said she wanted to stay. Been the centre of attention ever since.’

  Between dance numbers, and in one of those random silences you get in the middle of every racket, the sound of an air-raid siren wafted in – and to Harry’s astonishment, there were shrieks of delight, and people started rushing to the stairs. But not to get out, to go up.

  ‘Oh, good-oh!’ shouted Hume. ‘Fireworks!’ and he grabbed Harry and Wykham. ‘No. Don’t head for those stairs . . . Where’s it coming from?’ He listened for the siren for a moment. ‘From over Sliema. This way’, and he pushed them through a set of alcoves to deep, curtained windows. As they went, Harry couldn’t help but notice everybody seemed to be heading for the roof. Hume wrenched the drapes back, and before them, spread out, lay the darkened humps of Manoel Island and the west end of Sliema town. Above them, the sky was being stabbed by half a dozen blades of light, pointing vertically into the darkness, and with the windows pulled inwards, and the noise behind all but gone, they could hear the beat of aero engines.

  ‘Hear that?’ said Hume. ‘Alpha Romeos. You get to tell the difference after a while. Totally different from our Merlins.’ Then he noticed Harry and Wykham looking at him in amazement. ‘Ah. Your first air raid here. Well, it’s nothing like it was when it was Jerry over there in Sicily. The Eyeties, they only come now once a day at the most . . . usually at night . . . and usually only by the handful. We’ve started looking forward to the show. That’s why everybody’s rushed to the roof. But you never know what lumps of shite are going to fall out of the sky on your noggin. We’re safer in here under the balcony. Watch.’

  And as he spoke, two of the searchlights began to move, probing the sky. Then a third. They all gazed up, mesmerised, the noise of the aero engines growing louder. Then, suddenly the beam of one of the searchlights flitted across something, a brief glitter of reflection. Harry had the impression of three shapes, before the beam settled on one and held it: a little flattened silver cross, pinned to the blackness at about fifteen thousand feet or more, Harry reckoned, over the suburb of Msida. Two other beams swung rapidly to join the arc, moving with mechanical efficiency until the aircraft was pinned, and at that moment all the other searchlights, their beams still static, vertical poles in the night, snapped out.

  ‘They’ve got these tactics,’ said Hume in a running commentary. ‘It’s only sixty miles to Sicily so the RAF boys see them coming with the little radar sets they’ve got buried up north. They tell the Army searchlight boys where to point, and when they catch one . . . watch.’

  Out of nowhere came a string of fairy lights, moving towards the Italian bomber, across the sky from behind.

  ‘Beaufighter,’ said Hume. ‘They send them up as soon as the radar spots any raid building. Gives ’em time to gain height.’

  Another string of lights lazily tracked across the darkness. Tracer, said Harry to himself, realising, just as the Italian bomber seemed to give a little lurch and fall several hundred feet. The beams, however, never wavered from it. There was no sound of gunfire, just the steady engine drone. The next shock took only seconds to unfold. There was a series of distant whistling sounds, and then just beyond the Msida skyline, a line of gouts of earth and debris, and then in the seconds it took for the sound to travel, they heard the rumbling crash of explosions.

  ‘That’s the other Eyeties jettisoning their bombs and getting the hell out of it,’ said Hume smugly, playing master of ceremonies at the show. When their eyes turned back to the bomber caught in the arc of the searchlights, another surprise awaited, with another set of ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ from the mob on the roof above. Three pearl-like blossoms were falling away from the bomber. Parachutes.

  ‘Some more guests at the Takali mess for breakfast tomorrow,’ observed Hume, and at that another burst of tracer hit the bomber, and she toppled from level flight into a flaming Catherine wheel and began falling out of the sky. There were cheers now from the roof above.

  ‘Only three ’chutes,’ said Hume. ‘Oh well. That’s one poor bastard didn’t make it. More drinks, chaps?’

  Looking at the stricken aircraft, Harry was suddenly thinking about Fabrizio: how it could have been him. And he was hit by one of those little waves of silent gratitude that sometimes wash over you, knowing at least that his pal was safe now. A prisoner, yes. He certainly wouldn’t be enjoying himself, but Harry, laughing to himself, didn’t care about that. If he’d ever done one right thing in his life, it had been to see to it that his friend would at least be going home again, when all this nonsense was over.

  Back inside, Katty picked up her set where the air raid had rudely interrupted her, and when she finished, went to join a table on the other side of the dance floor, and a uniformed figure stepped up to escort her to her seat. Although as to what service, or indeed nation’s uniform it was, Harry was clueless. Hume noticed him watching, and laughed.

  ‘Ha ha! That’s our Chally you’re squinting at. Scruff, prima donna, madman and darling of the command. The uniform’s RAF, by the way, or it’s supposed to be,’ said Hume.

  From what Harry could see, this Chally fellow was wearing a pair of fawn Oxford bags that did not now, nor ever had formed part of any uniform he’d ever seen. Over them, he had on a lightweight khaki battledress, definitely not regulation RAF. In fact, the only RAF thing about him was a set of pilot’s wings on his breast, and the rings on his battledress epaulettes. He also had on the most disreputable pair of suede desert boots. One other thing Harry noticed: beneath the wings were a line of medal ribbons that even from this distance, he could see included the diagonal white and purple stripes of a Distinguished Flying Cross – the gong the RAF gave out when they’d exhausted their monthly quota of VCs.

  ‘Flight Lieutenant Toby Challoner, aka Chally,’ added Hume. ‘Malta’s ace reconnaissance pilot. If we want to know if the Eyeties are on the move, Chally flies in their back window and counts the number of socks they’re packing.’

  Chally had one hand on Katty’s bare back, and the other gripping her forearm, proprietorial, guiding her to the table: directing or controlling her might have been better descriptions. His eyes only for her. And Katty – you could tell she was submitting, but her eyes were elsewhere, as though she were on lookout. Making sure the horizon was clear? wondered Harry. Or checking to see what might be coming over it? Whatever she was doing, watching her, Harry felt as though he were looking through a telescope at someone enjoying a party on the terrace of a palace on a hill.

  Harry slept in the next day, and when he ambled into the w
ardroom gallery, Grainger was sitting on an easy chair, reading a ten-day-old copy of The Times with a pot of coffee in front of him. There were some base officers further down who Harry didn’t recognise. Grainger waved Harry to join him.

  ‘Seen anything of our . . . Skipper?’ he asked, pouring Harry a cup. Harry shook his head. ‘Hmmn. Neither have I. He had a very long chat with the S10 apparently, and hasn’t been seen since. You have a chat with the S10?’

  ‘I don’t think he even knows my name,’ said Harry warily, recalling his conversation with the Shrimp.

  ‘I did,’ said Grainger. ‘He wanted to know all about our patrol. All about it.’

  ‘What did you tell him?’ asked Harry.

  ‘Oh, I confined myself to the bare facts,’ said Grainger. ‘Thought it only fair to all concerned. He didn’t. I got a lecture from the headmaster. Ended with him uttering some puerile rubbish about the Trade being everything to do with teamwork if it were to do with anything, and forgetting that was the quickest way to get you, and everyone else, killed. Most extraordinary.’

  Harry said nothing. He especially didn’t say he didn’t find it extraordinary at all. The Shrimp must have put two and two together about what was going on aboard Umbrage. For a start, he would certainly have been pissed off at a torpedo being wasted on a schooner, and pissed off at the Jimmy who’d let his CO even think about it, without an argument.

  Then there was the implicit deal, the one that applied only to submarines, between the CO and the crew – the deal you didn’t find anywhere else in the Navy. Only one man can look through a periscope: the man in charge. The CO. And that means the level of trust a crew must have in that man is a remarkable thing. It’s a question of his judgement, how he calculates risk, how he takes his crew into his confidence, so that they can be confident in him. For a CO is never going to be able to exercise effective command if he doesn’t have that trust. And to help him, he needs a First Lieutenant who is going to deliver to him a crew, fully trained, competent and ready to do its duty – not one who hides behind smug superiority, and who leaves his crew silent, surly and suspicious.

  Sailors raised in the Trade understood that, but Grainger had come from outside, from destroyers. And Harry knew from old, that Grainger had volunteered for submarines, not to learn the Trade, but to get a command faster than was usual in the surface fleet. He’d been like that when he first joined Trebuchet, and obviously matters hadn’t changed: the Number One, it appeared, was still out for number one. Harry found himself wondering if the words Shrimp must have spoken to Rais would have any more positive an effect than the ones he had just wasted on Grainger.

  When Wykham arrived, Harry told him they were going for a swim, and dragged him out via the Leading Writers’ office to get directions to the nearest beach that wasn’t rolled in barbed wire and planted with mines. They were pointed to a little rocky cove with a patch of sand up the coast near St Julian’s Bay. They’d have to walk, they were informed, there and back. And were they mad? The water would be freezing this time of year.

  Coming from Argyll, Harry found the water merely bracing. Anyway, it had served its purpose to get him out of Grainger’s way. Wykham, on the other hand, shivered so much Harry thought he would lose his teeth.

  Wykham. Harry didn’t know what to make of him, if he thought about the poor lad at all. The first thing he’d have to say, was that if you’d asked him right there and then to shut his eyes and give a description of Wykham, he’d have been hard-pressed. Tall, gangly? Um, yes, I think so. Hair, nondescript. Expression, vacant. Still nineteen. Anything else? Ummm.

  He was only two years younger than Harry, but if you looked at them together, there was a lifetime between them. Yet the lad was coming up the same way Harry had: RNVR, King Alfred, then his first sea duty, except for Wykham it had been a six-month sideshow on a minesweeper out of Avonmouth, and not the ordeal suffered by Harry on a battleship based on Scapa. Still, there should have been something.

  Umbrage was Wykham’s first boat, and Harry kept trying not to think about whether he had arrived in the Trade with the same pitiful lack of naval gumption as this bland, utterly inoffensive young officer. As yet, Harry hadn’t plucked up the nerve to ask how Wykham had ended up on submarines, dreading to hear some tragic tale of misunderstanding and innocence betrayed. He wondered what Jack made of him – of all of the RNVR hopefuls being churned out into the fleet, children in their first pair of long trousers, being rushed on to ships. But they were needed. Desperately. The Navy needed every one of them. Everybody knew that. The Battle of Britain might’ve been won, but Britain was still fighting for her life in the North Atlantic, and here in the Med, where her oil supplies were just one more successful offensive away from being overrun by Rommel and his Afrika Korps. And once Jerry had finished with the Russians . . .

  When they got back from their swim, Harry ditched Wykham and went off to work on his translations. When he surfaced again, to get a drink and something to eat, there was a full-blown party going on in the wardroom. While Harry had been holed up in his tiny allocated cabin, carved into the limestone behind the Lazaretto and away from all the noise, two boats had returned from patrol. And there were successes to be toasted. The gallery especially, was heaving. Even the CO, the Navigator and the Fourth off the boat over in the dry dock, who’d been recovering up in the rest camp, had come down. Their Jimmy wasn’t there though; he was still in hospital. Grainger was there, however, and when Harry went to say hello, he told him one of the boats just in was Upholder. ‘And that tall, beardy bloke over there,’ said Grainger, ‘the one who looks like a more hirsute version of Robert Donat about to go on as Mr Chips. That’s her Skipper. The Tenth’s very own legend, in the flesh. Lieutenant Commander David Wanklyn.’

  Grainger rattled off Upholder’s patrol score; and the score for the other boat just in, but Harry was only half-listening. More tonnage to go on the wardroom’s noticeboard. The official figures were pinned up there: the Tenth had sunk over one hundred enemy ships since the beginning of June, equivalent to well over a quarter of a million tons. But at the same time, five Royal Navy submarines and all their crews had been lost. Common sense and the wardroom by-laws dictated you didn’t dwell on the cost in human pain behind those figures. Yours, the enemy’s, the folks back home. Even so, Harry, right then, wondered what it would be like if he did – thinking, Shouldn’t someone? Except, looking at that obviously affable bloke over there, David Wanklyn, a man responsible for more than his fair share of that total, with his self-deprecating stoop and his eagerness to laugh at other people’s jokes, and the newspaper pictures he remembered, of his wife and young son back home, from all the morale-boosting stories, all of it . . .

  Harry turned away and let common sense and the wardroom by-laws drag him back from that particular abyss.

  When he turned, Shrimp’s executive officer was there; some amiable old duffer Harry remembered had been called Hubert; first name, Hubert. Remember the days, Harry? When you, in your short trousers and school blazer, would have laughed yourself silly at such a daft English name. Not as silly as Wanklyn though. He certainly remembered the first time he’d heard that name mentioned here in this wardroom, because with it had come with one of those life lessons you were always better to learn before you put your foot in it, while the joke you were going to make that was going to be so funny, is still forming in your head – until you see the flat, boilerplate stares of everyone around you, daring you to say what you’re about to say; and you guessing, hopefully, in the nick of time, as sure as instinct, that your entire future in this company now hangs on you not being idiot enough to say it. Anyway, he hadn’t said it, hadn’t said anything, and so he’d been safe, and now Hubert was smiling benignly at him and offering him a large tumbler of gin.

  ‘It’s not a party, Mr Gilmour, unless you have at least one drink,’ said old Hubert. ‘Now knock it back and come with me. S10 wants a word.’

  Shrimp was sitting behind his desk in his d
ay cabin: another limestone monk’s cell hewn out of the rock. A desk and chair, a minimal filing cabinet for the minimal paperwork he was reputed for, and a light bulb in a cracked cardboard shade hanging from exposed flex. He had a signal flimsy in one hand and his own gin in the other. He looked very glum.

  ‘Sir,’ said Harry, ‘you wanted to see me.’

  Shrimp looked up as if trying to focus.

  It was all quite informal. Neither were wearing caps, so no saluting or any of that stuff. So Harry said, ‘Bad news, Sir?’ to break the silence.

  ‘A Jerry U-boat’s just sunk Ark Royal,’ said Shrimp. The Royal Navy’s last big fleet carrier in the Med. They both looked into space, contemplating the gravity of this development. Then Shrimp said, ‘Tragic and serious though that is, it’s not why I wanted to see you. How’s your translating coming along?’