Turn Left for Gibraltar

by David Black

  ‘One-five-zero feet under the keel, Sir,’ reported the ASDIC cubby.

  Carey used the bridge mic to raise Mr Napier, who was in with Nicobar’s Leading Telegraphist in the radio cubby. ‘Start sending to Flag Officer, Force F now, Mr Napier.’

  Harry, leaning against the chart table down in the control room, heard the order, and immediately behind him the wireless operator began to tap out the Morse. But he wasn’t really listening to that – he was listening for the ASDIC man to start singing out.

  Nicobar’s favourite ASDIC man was on the set. A young Eastender called Butler, slight of build and concave of chest, he looked like a specky schoolboy rather than a Leading Seaman – complete with acne, teeth protruding from his mouth at all angles and a brow prematurely furrowed above his thick tortoiseshell-framed spectacles, which he was always losing, and the crew were always helping him to find. He was painfully shy, except when calling out HE, and he always wore a set of overalls with pencils and tiny screwdrivers sticking out of its top pockets.

  ‘Ah! There they go,’ said Butler. ‘The two E-boats are on the move, Sir. HE gone to high-speed revolutions, turning towards.’

  Carey was on the voice-pipe. ‘Harry, get on the trim board. We’ll be going down pronto any minute now. Tell John, gun crews close up now. Load with star.’

  Harry passed on the order, and Napier led his crew up through the conning tower hatch, lugging their illumination rounds.

  ‘Estimated bearing to convoy target, and range, Harry?’ called Carey through the pipe. Harry repeated them. Butler began calling out the E-boats’ bearings, as they closed from off their starboard quarter. In the radio cubby, they were still waiting for an RT acknowledgement from Force F. And while Harry was trying to do the mental arithmetic on how long it would take the Jerries to be on them, there was a BANG! And then another BANG! In quick succession. Nicobar had fired her first two star shells, sending them up and over in the direction of the convoy: the prearranged signal, if the radios weren’t working and somebody had spotted the enemy and wanted everyone else to know where. Then two more. Each round packed with magnesium and a tiny non-flammable parachute, blasting out candlepower by the bucketful as it twirled to the sea, hopefully in a box over the position of the Jerry convoy, and high enough for the British cruisers and destroyers to spot. Then all they’d have to do is turn on their newfangled radar sets and all the merchant ships would suddenly appear as little dancing spikes on their cathode ray oscilloscopes, and then it would just be a matter of flashing ‘Enemy In Sight’ around the squadron, and they’d all be off in a clamour of Action Stations! gongs and training gun turrets – thundering down their radar beams into the night and right at the enemy’s throats!

  ‘Water under the keel?’ yelled Carey.

  ‘One six five feet, Sir,’ Butler called back after the briefest of pauses.

  ‘Good enough,’ Harry heard Carey say through the open pipe, then, ‘Wooh! Guy Fawkes!’ and a shout, ‘Right, John, clear the casing . . . Jesus! Enemy searchlights closing astern!’ Then the buum-buum-buum-buum! of quick-firing enemy cannon. Instantly, two loud blares on the klaxon and the first of John Napier’s gunners came shooting down the conning tower ladder like firemen on twin poles.

  Harry was at the trim board with their Wrecker, ERA Bob Mundell. Orders were being shouted and confirmed. ‘All main vents indicating open!’, and the hands flashing across the diving board, opening valves so that Harry could already hear the air venting out of Nicobar’s saddle tanks as the last lookout hit the control room deckplates, and then Carey’s voice came echoing down the conning tower trunk: ‘One clip on, two clips on . . . One pin in, two pins in!’ And he was down too, securing the lower hatch now, and the boat was falling away from them, beneath their feet.

  ‘Depth 120 feet. Group up, full ahead, together,’ said Carey in a rush, as he leaned into Nicobar’s dive.

  ‘High-speed HE closing fast, astern,’ called Butler, and as he finished they could all hear the high-speed HE: the evil whining of the enemy screws rising in intensity.

  ‘Rig for depth charging!’ called Carey.

  ‘Inboard one’s about to go over the top,’ called Butler, not that he had to now. The scream of the Jerry screws was loud and sickening – that tearing linen sound again. Harry looked at the depth gauge; they’d barely passed one hundred feet. And then the thing went over them . . . and nothing. No splash of depth charges. And no click as the detonator fired.

  The noise of the E-boat moved away as fast as it had arrived, until the sound of it was there, but only just there, in the water, with only Butler’s calls to say which way each E-boat was turning. Then the pinging of an enemy echo sounder started up. But it was quite a bit off to starboard. Nicobar was now in water 270 feet deep. Carey slowly took them down to two hundred feet, and rigged for Silent. All non-essential pumps and motors were shut down, and she lay hove to, hanging in the deep while the E-boats seemed to perform an elaborate and noisy search some distance to the east of them.

  The control room crew would every now and then fire a quick glance at Carey, leaning beside Harry at the chart table. If he caught their eye, he would smile and shrug, or make a shush sign with his finger on his lips. Jerry didn’t look like finding them any time soon, and Carey seemed quite prepared to wait them out. And all the while everyone was thinking, why no depth charges? These E-boats carried them, and who better to drop some on, but a British submarine?

  Some time had passed, while Jerry burbled above, and Nicobar hung still and silent, when Butler held his arm out of the ASDIC cubby, indicating he wanted to whisper to Carey. The CO bent his head around the thin partition between the two spaces.

  ‘I’ve got a couple of big explosions in the water,’ whispered Butler. ‘They’re a long way off, to the north-east. There’s another . . . and another.’

  ‘Like what, Butler?’ Carey whispered back. ‘Six-inch salvoes going in?’

  Butler shook his head, emphatic. ‘No, Sir. No pattern. Random . . . and another. That’s five, or is it six . . . pretty big detonations. Almost like torpedo hits, but bigger.’

  And then there was nothing. The E-boats performed a flamboyant figure-of-eight high-speed run, the end of one of them going over Nicobar’s starboard bow, never in any danger of making contact, and then they sped off to the east.

  Nicobar surfaced later, and almost immediately the radio room began reporting a lot of traffic between Force F and VAM, the Vice Admiral, Malta – an awful lot. There were no signals for them, however. So Carey moved back inshore in case another convoy might be making the run before sunrise. It sounded like their little fireworks display had worked, and had guided Force F right on to Jerry, and that the bangs Butler had heard had been the skimmers sending Rommel’s much-needed fuel and ammunition, frankfurters and Lili Marlene records, to the bottom. Nobody wanted to pay any attention to Butler’s doubts about what the bangs had been. Between that and them having successfully dived for cover right under the noses of two E-boats, who never even got a shot in at them, there was a good mood in Nicobar as she went back on billet.

  And then it was Christmas.

  Nicobar was now up in the Gulf of Taranto again, having been sent back by a curt signal from Shrimp; after all, she still had her ten torpedoes left. Now she had eight. On the very day she’d arrived back off Italy, a 1,200-ton steamer with two MAS-boat escorts had come puffing and wheezing over the horizon, with a circling Cant shagbat overhead just to complicate matters. Carey had got them into a favourable attacking position, but at the point where he guessed the target was going to zag, it zigged, and both his torpedoes had missed. The steamer and her escorts had then scuttled off back towards the horizon, and the Cant had come after them, making two ineffectual passes, dropping two depth charges that landed nowhere near. But it kept them down long enough for the steamer to escape.

  So here they were, just after 10.30 hours, on 25th December 1941, heading true north at 120 feet, the motors grouped down, puttering al
ong at a stately two knots, fifteen miles off Capo Colonna. Harry had the watch while the rest of the crew were about to have Christmas dinner. And a particularly festive occasion it was going to be too; Carey had seen to that. For although the Nicobars didn’t normally partake of their daily tots while on patrol, the CO had announced he was going to be making an exception for Chrimbo, and ‘up spirits’ was definitely going to be piped. Yet even this gesture had not won Carey the star of the show – that had gone to Johnny Napier, their Glaswegian Torps and Guns. He said he would cook.

  Nicobar, like all Royal Navy submarines, didn’t carry a cook: the job went to whichever poor sod couldn’t talk himself out of it. Nicobar’s poor sod was Able Seaman Empney who, so far as Harry could gather, had never shown any culinary talent since he’d been lumbered with the job way back at the start of Nicobar’s commission. Nicobar lore had it that he could burn water, but in truth, he wasn’t that bad. Frying he could just about cope with, and amazingly he sometimes could conjure up a passable baby’s head – Jack’s name for a seagoing version of steak and kidney pudding. Anything else, and you took your chances. ‘I don’t know what you did to this cauliflower, Empney, but it’s going to be a vegetable for the rest of its life!’ had been Johnny Napier’s verdict on one of the hapless rating’s dishes.

  However, Sub-Lieutenant Napier was in a position to criticise. He had been an assistant hotel manager in civvy street, and the scran he could turn out was fit to grace the table of royalty. Harry, in the control room, could smell Mr Napier’s dinner wafting aft from beyond the wardroom, and was transported back to Radegonde, the Free French sub he’d served on as a liaison officer, and which had possessed a chef renowned throughout the Marine Nationale. The aromas of roasting meat and rich gravy even managed to eclipse the usual submarine reek of diesel, bilge water and young men’s sweaty bits.

  It had been a bit of a dance to get here, to get Napier laying on the spread. Initially he’d decided to play hard to get – as he always did, before he’d rustle up a treat. He loved all the pleading and begging, and the offers and bribes before he’d reluctantly relent, from gulpers in the PO’s mess to once, a beautiful and delicate model of Nicobar, machined from a purloined wardroom spoon, filed to a silver brightness and presented by the Stokers’ mess.

  This time out though, the piglet had been a dead giveaway, so all the begging and pleading was more piss-take than entreaty.

  Knowing full well he was going to give in over the matter of Christmas dinner, Napier had gone down to the Tenth’s own little menagerie before they’d sailed, and brushing aside all Pop Giddings’s assurances that Nicobar’s share of the Christmas banquet would be waiting when they returned from patrol, insisted on Nicobar’s share now. He’d procured an entire suckling pig, which was promptly dispatched, butchered and secured aboard. You can’t hide a suckling pig aboard a boat the size of Nicobar for long. He’d also sought across the island for a sack of potatoes from somewhere, and failed. Rumour got out about that too. And then there were the fresh onions that had come aboard, all duly noted by the crew, together with all the ingredients for a huge figgy duff, which of course would be served with custard, because there was always custard. So when the CO let it be known there was the prospect of ‘up spirits’ on the 25th, it was confirmation. Most of the boat couldn’t wait to get on patrol.

  The only persuasion Mr Napier had received to cook, however, had come by way of a threat. At the end of the last big exercise before war broke out, with the Fleet back in Valletta, there had been the usual annual competition among the lower decks to applaud the grottiest Jack in the Mediterranean. Grot McGilveray had won it so convincingly that it had been decided to abandon all future ‘Most Grottiest’ competitions on the grounds that Grot had plumbed a depth so profound that nothing so grotty could ever be conceived of again. If Mr Napier wasn’t going to cook Christmas dinner, they were going to get Grot to tell him his winning entry.

  ‘You’ll be rendered clinically doolally. You’ll have to be tranquillised for the rest of your life, Sir.’ . . . ‘You’ll never get another good night’s sleep again, Sir.’ . . . ‘It’s so grotty, Sir, it’s grotty-esque!’

  ‘Aren’t you intrigued, Johnny?’ Harry had asked during the height of the campaign.

  ‘I wrote the book,’ Napier had said with a supercilious smirk. ‘Nothing Grot McGilveray could come up with scares me. Although he does know a few more dirty songs than me, so I doff my cap to him on that score. I’ve told them I’ll do it, but only if Grot promises to teach me his repertoire.’

  Mr Napier, like Grot McGilveray, was a notorious singer, to himself, of dirty ditties, usually while on watch, or lying on his bunk. Mostly, it was quite funny. Leading Seaman McGilveray, on the other hand, sang everywhere he went. He even had a signature tune which you’d hear long before his roly-poly, waddling figure would come flying through a watertight door or up through a hatch. ‘Don’t be shy, show’s yer pie, gie’s a gobble!’ delivered in an almost impenetrable Geordie accent. Then the doughy face would crack into an almost toothless grin that spoke of a boundless joy of life, and an immaculate imbecility, especially beneath his Henry V haircut, styled by putting a pudding bowl over his head and cutting around the edges. Oh, and he always wore his cap perched on the back of his head, even on parade, to the fury of many a Jaunty. For Grot McGilveray was one of those beings who were obviously bred for the Royal Navy, one of nature’s naturally occurring Jacks.

  The dinner, when it was served, even looked good, never mind smelled good – no mean feat with twenty-seven men, three officers and a CO to feed from a tiny four-ring electric cooker in a cupboard, with an oven no bigger than a bicycle basket. The pork was thickly sliced and smothered in a rich creamy gravy, and with it went an aromatic pile of fried onions and tinned runner beans, all oily and liberally sprinkled with herbs, and ice cream scoops of dried potatoes, rehydrated and fluffed up into what looked like yellow cumulonimbus, with butter and milk.

  A daisy chain of Stokers went past Harry carrying stacked plates of it back to the engine room crew off watch, each one grinning fit to crack his face. The CO and their public schoolboy Navigator, Sub-Lieutenant Giles Yeo RN, had already gone forward, having been invited to eat in the PO’s mess.

  ‘Subject to the vagaries of war,’ the CO had said to Harry helpfully, as he slipped a bottle of whisky into his jacket before heading for’ard, ‘don’t feel you have to go up for any all-round looks, at least until we’ve cleared the dishes, I think.’

  So it was just Harry, and the Wrecker’s latest protégé on the trim board, two other ratings standing in for the usual POs on the dive planes, and a Leading Seaman on the helm in the control room now; next door, out of sight, was another rating on watch in the ASDIC cubby, headsets on, listening to the sea outside. And as they sat there, bathed in red light, wafting all around them were the luxurious smells of what they could expect to be served when the watch changed.

  While they were all lost in expectation of what was to come, Napier appeared in the control room gripping mugs of Ky. ‘This’ll keep you going, lads,’ he said, while craftily nodding Harry towards the wardroom on the other side of the partition wall. Harry stepped out of the control room and into the wardroom after him, all the while listening to Napier hum away to himself the tune for When the red, red robin comes a bob, bob, bobbin’ along, along . . . Napier turned, and as he started to pour from a half-full bottle of Marsala, began to sing, except Harry couldn’t help but notice the words were different. ‘. . . A-when the red, red biddy comes a-squirtin’ from her diddy, I’ll be there, I’ll be there . . .’

  ‘One of Grot’s?’ said Harry.

  ‘His down payment,’ said a grinning Napier. ‘Now this might be “enemy” sauce, but I needed it for my sauce, and I had to pay for it too, so we don’t want what’s left going off now, do we, Number One?’ And he held a glass out for Harry. ‘To all our future Christmases, and may we spend them anywhere else but on a bloody submarine.’

&
nbsp; Chapter Eighteen

  The weather was terrible. It was dark and cold, with a driving rain and a chop in the water even here inside Marsamxett harbour, so that the three U-class submarines already in, and Nicobar now just arrived, were all bobbing and bouncing on it, tied up alongside the corkscrewing and gyrating pontoons.

  Harry came into the wardroom, peeling off his soaking watch jacket and shaking his cap. He and the Warrant Engineer, Mr Ridley, had just finished handing Nicobar over to the maintenance crew, not that there was much wrong with her, apart from her six unfired torpedoes to be removed for a turnaround overhaul.

  The only light inside the inner wardroom – it was too cold and the air too full of driving rain for the gallery – came from a couple of candelabras and some battle lanterns. But there was enough to see everyone was a bit brittle in their jollity. Harry scooped himself a whisky and soda off John, the steward, nodded hello to him, and asked about the lights.

  ‘Jerry’s back,’ said John, with a resigned shake of the head. ‘The power’s been off down here for a couple of days now. They’ve been giving priority to getting it back on at the airfields, and over in the dockyard. We’ve had a lot of raids since you sailed. The town is in a bit of a mess, the whole island’s in a bit of a mess, but you won’t have seen it, coming in, in the dark. But we should be all right tonight. Not even Jerry is going to try flying in this.’

  Harry had been a bit glum about coming back in. Standing on the bridge being battered by rain seemed to fit his mood. It had been a washout of a patrol. Four torpedoes fired, no hits. Not even a Gun Action. And as for the inshore work, and their failure to ‘ambush’ the convoy, the least said. But somebody had got lucky that night, if all the bangs in the water they’d heard had been anything to go by. So he’d been hoping that would go a long way to distracting the other crews from taking the mickey out of Nicobar’s duck.