The Skipper's Dog's Called Stalin

by David Black

  ‘Of course,’ repeated Le Breuil. In English. Sonorously. And this time Faujanet couldn’t help himself and burst out laughing; big belly whoops and in between them repeating, ‘Of course . . . of course!’

  The Captain and Bassano grinned indulgently. And so the pattern was set. It would become their little joke, Harry could tell.

  Wonderful.

  Le Breuil cranked up the gramophone and placed a record on the turntable. Artie Shaw and his Orchestra doing ‘Begin the Beguine’ started crackling out of the speaker.

  Radegonde settled down to patrol routine, and Harry sat with the two Royal Navy ratings he had on board to assist him. He hadn’t had a chance to talk to them properly before they’d sailed. Too many things had got in the way, and, although he’d twice bumped into the younger one – once as they passed at the gangway going in different directions, and again when he’d had to confirm both were aboard for the final muster – the other one had been conspicuous by his absence.

  Well, they were both here now. Leading Signalman George Lucie and Leading Telegraphist Lionel Cantor. Lucie was the older; early forties, with thinning, mousy hair, and a vacant, indifferent look about him. Cantor, on the other hand, was a youth; bright, eager, intelligent with corn-coloured hair – strict short back and sides – and sticky-out ears. Both were in French Navy striped singlets and blue overalls, but were still loyally sporting their RN ratings’ caps.

  Their conversation dealt swiftly with Harry’s main concern; he really would have very little to do on board. But there were, he was informed, two distinctly positive aspects to the posting: the first good news was Radegonde’s chef was without doubt the best in the Fleet; and the second was that whatever items the boat might run short of while on patrol, red wine was never one of them.

  ‘But ya never see them drunk,’ explained Lucie, with admiration. ‘Not at sea anyroads. Tipplin’ all day and never a wobble, Sir!’ His words drew a quick sideways glance from his younger sidekick, one that Harry couldn’t quite read. All three were sitting in the wardroom – the British ratings were allowed to sit there by the Captain, to keep them out of the way when the crew was busy and they were not asleep or attending to their own rare duties.

  ‘They’re a grand bunch,’ said Cantor, composing himself with a cheery smile on his improbably youthful face. ‘And she’s a happy boat, Sir.’ But Harry was looking at Lucie and thought he could detect a light sheen on his forehead, and a watery look to his eyes. It set him wondering . . . ‘And a tight one too,’ continued Cantor. ‘They might look a rum bunch, Sir, but when things get goin’, well, they’re all right, whatever Mr Roper might’ve said to you.’

  ‘Mr Roper?’ said Harry.

  ‘The previous LO, Sir,’ said Cantor. ‘He didn’t quite hit it off with Captain Syvret or the rest of the officers. Or the men, come to that. Or even little Stalin, Sir. An’ he’ll chat to anyone!’

  Roper. So that had been his predecessor’s name. Never having actually deigned to meet Harry, Mr Roper had said nothing to him. But Harry didn’t say that. What he did say was, ‘Stalin? The dog? Chat?’

  ‘Oh, aye, Sir,’ said Cantor, his smile even broader. ‘He’s a chatty one, is Stalin.’

  ‘I can’t say I’ve heard much chat from the dog, Cantor. Not even a bark.’

  ‘Oh, he wouldn’t bark, Sir. Not on a submarine. Jerry might hear. But he does this, gurr-urr-rurr-ing thing when he’s sittin’ in with you. It’s really funny. Captain Syvret says that’s him bein’ philosophical.’

  Dear God, thought Harry.

  Radegonde had dived now and was proceeding at three knots, on an east-north-east heading, having cleared the British coastal minefields through a gap just north of Peterhead. Harry decided now was as good a time as any to explore the boat and learn a bit about her idiosyncrasies. He stepped out of the wardroom space and before he could go either way, he was intercepted by the boat’s Maître principal – in Royal Navy ranks, her senior Petty Officer – and a very tough-looking individual he was; out of the same mould as RN senior rates, Harry thought. He later learned the man’s name was Robert de Maligou; but what he saw first was a man with a boxer’s face, upholstered in wind-dried hide and with eye-slits narrow enough to peer into a hurricane. Harry immediately assumed he was going to be spun around and sent back whence he came. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

  ‘You want to learn about my boat.’ It was a statement from the Frenchman, in French.

  ‘Yes,’ said Harry, in French. And in French, they continued.

  ‘Good. Very professional, Sir, if you don’t mind me saying so. We’ll start aft.’

  Chapter Four

  Radegonde was at Action Stations.

  ‘Mr Gilmour!’ shouted Captain Syvret in French. ‘I am looking through my periscope at Norway. How would you like to look at Norway?’

  Syvret was upstairs in a compartment inside Radegonde’s preposterously large conning tower arrangement, which de Maligou had already shown Harry around. It contained a small attack periscope that could only be used from the compartment itself; it also accommodated the chef’s galley, and the control board for Radegonde’s minelaying device. All very unusual for Harry to find so much vital equipment in a compartment not actually inside the boat’s pressure hull. But then there was a lot different about French boats, he thought, compared to proper ones.

  Meanwhile, he was down in the control room, sitting at Radegonde’s very own, spanking new device for sinking ships. Harry had always known it as a ‘fruit machine’, but Radegonde’s crew had come to refer to it as the ‘boffin box’, or sometimes it was the ‘jukebox’. Everyone had been talking about it: the latest technical failure waiting to happen – the most recent of many to be foisted on the Free French’s finest.

  ‘I’ve seen Norway,’ Harry shouted back.

  ‘I’ll do you a cut-price rate! Ten of your English bob a second!’

  They were at Action Stations because they were preparing to lay mines, not because there was an enemy in sight. Because minelaying, as Syvret was never done telling Harry, was a tricky operation. Not so tricky, however, that it would deter Syvret from his endless mickey-taking.

  ‘No need, Sir. It just looks like Scotland, except with lots of Jerries.’

  Radegonde was about three miles off the Hellisøy lighthouse on Fedje Island, at one of the main entrances to Bergen harbour. To the south of Fedje was the islet of Nordøyna and a confused jumble of smaller outcrops and islets that made inshore navigation in these waters tricky. Somewhere around here, Radegonde would lay her first mines. It was just after three p.m. and getting dark. Harry listened to the conversation between Syvret and Poulenc, who was on the trim board.

  In most ways, Radegonde was familiar. There was little in the control room layout Harry didn’t recognise; the big navigation periscope extended down to this deck, and the trim board was here too, where all the pipes and valves that controlled the boat’s ballast converged against the hull – a spaghetti tangle that allowed the officer and senior rate manning the board to dive and submerge the boat.

  Diving and submerging was the same too. Each of Radegonde’s main ballast tanks was open to the sea along its bottom. To dive, the men on the trim board opened the main vent valves at the top of her ballast tanks, allowing the air out, and the sea to flood in, sending her down.

  Underwater, to keep her on an even keel, the men had a set of valves that allowed them to pump water in and out of the internal trim tanks; making her bow-heavy to dive faster, or to compensate for the sudden loss of weight forward after they’d fired a 1,360kg torpedo. Two big wheels against the other side of the hull controlled the hydroplanes – one set forward, one set aft – that acted like an aircraft’s flaps, working with the boat’s two electric motors to help dive or raise the boat as she moved through the water. To surface, they simply ensured the main vent valves were shut and then vented compressed air from a series of compressed air bottles into the tanks, forcing the water out and making Radegon
de buoyant again, so up she would go.

  One big difference, Harry noticed, was that Radegonde was beamier than his other boats, and roomier too. It meant she looked less cluttered in her control spaces; the pipes and cable runs and controls seemed more designed instead of the flung-in-together appearance of a British boat. But then she carried a smaller crew, so perhaps that helped.

  The only other difference he’d noticed was that unlike British boats, Radegonde had a wooden-planked deck, instead of a plain steel casing. And then, of course, there was her vin rouge tank. The French didn’t clutter their boats with bottles of booze; they stored it in a huge steel vat with a tap and a slop bucket that seldom ever filled.

  Harry looked at his watch; it would soon be time to surface. They would wait until full night, then come up to lay the mines. Twelve mines here then two more paquets of ten; the first across the narrow channel between Lyngoksen and Fedje. Then they would dive during the day and go further south to Korsfjorden to lay the last ten the following night between Storekalsøy and Toftarøyna across the other entrance to Bergen.

  Their deliberations around the finer points of the plan were cut short by a shout from the rating in the Asdic cubby. HE – hydrophone effects – sounds of another ship. Was that what was being yelled?

  Harry listened hard to the staccato conversations all around him, the French Navy’s very own jargon. He only caught the odd word, the rest was gobbledegook to him; not good if you were required to understand and obey orders instantly, as you most certainly were aboard a submarine.

  Harry fretted about this for some time, trying to decide whether to alert Captain Syvret to his singular lack of colloquial French, and the threat it might pose to the boat’s operation; but equally not wanting to burden the Captain with his own uselessness. Until it eventually dawned on him that since he was not on watch, nor did he have an Action Station, then none of the orders would actually apply to him. So there was no point in trying to understand every operational command and response.

  Well, what do you know, Harry? he said to himself. You’re getting quite good at knowing when to keep your mouth shut.

  A bored Petty Officer was sitting next to him, with a hangdog look and over-long, flat brown hair that dangled in straggly little rats’ tails from beneath a cap that was too big. An unfamiliar look of animation came over his face – it must be a ship.

  Harry caught a ‘trois-deux-zero!’ being called from the Asdic cubby – 320 degrees – it meant the ship must be approaching from nor’-nor’-east; in other words, it was hugging the coast.

  He waited for the klaxon to sound Action Stations. It didn’t come. A few more orders were exchanged; course alterations. Then, after a while, Syvret dropped down into the control room and issued instructions for Radegonde to go deeper.

  The crew was sent to dinner, and Syvret stood by the watertight door leading aft to the wardroom, and elegantly bowed to Harry to pass through. They weren’t going to do anything about the contact. Harry couldn’t believe it; but again, to be on the safe side, he kept his mouth shut.

  That night’s discussion round the table – for as Harry had now learned, there was always a debate at mealtimes – started with Voltaire, and whether he was really any good as an enlightenment thinker? It quickly moved on to his relationship with Frederick the Great of Prussia, given that it took place during a previous era of war between France and Prussia, was it treason? Or did the concept of enlightenment transcend mere national interests in the eighteenth century? And could art do the same, now?

  Everyone talked at once, loudly. No one talked about the ship that had just passed or why they hadn’t attacked it. Harry’s first Skipper had done that; failed to attack a potential target. Not as a result of a philosophical debate, admittedly, but because he was drunk. Harry remembered it well, and how it wasn’t the drunkenness, but the lack of aggression that had subdued and unsettled the crew; the dread unease aboard at their Skipper’s lack of fighting spirit. Except there had been another word on everyone’s mind then. Cowardice. Not here, though; no one appeared uneasy aboard Radegonde.

  Syvret noticed Harry and interrupted the flow of talk. ‘Mr Gilmour is not happy.’

  Oh, what the hell, thought Harry, just say it.

  ‘The ship,’ he said. ‘What was she? Why didn’t we attack?’

  The other officers did everything but ‘tut!’ and Captain Syvret rolled his eyes to the deckhead. ‘We are a minelayer, Mr Gilmour,’ said Syvret eventually. ‘We carry thirty-two British Mark Seventeen mines, designed in the 1920s . . . and they are shit. Each contains 350 pounds of explosives and they are detonated by the enemy ship hitting, and snapping off, one of the metal horns that adorn them. There are numerous fail-safes designed to prevent the mine going off before it is deployed. But they are shit too. So I have made the tactical decision not to waltz around the North Sea loosing off torpedoes while I am still carrying these pieces of shit, on their shit racks. I will lay them; then we shall attend to our vandalisme.

  ‘As for the ship? I have no idea what ship she was. I saw a masthead and made another tactical decision not to hang about. Because I have no intention of attracting German anti-submarine patrols, or German minesweepers, before I have laid my mines. And right now, after what I’m sure you’ll agree has been a positive frenzy of tactical decision-making, I need a dinner to revive me.’

  Harry could feel his face burning. He shut up, like he should have done earlier; he wasn’t so good at keeping his mouth shut after all. There had been things he’d wanted to say about Voltaire and his work compared to David Hume, but now he’d gone and spoiled everything. And it had been warming up to be a bloody good debate too; he had experienced nothing like it since dropping out of his romance languages MA at Glasgow University, on the eve of his third year, to volunteer for this bloody shambles. He took another glug of his red wine and studied the table top.

  Syvret, watching him, smiled to himself. Definitely not as bad as the last one, he decided.

  Two hours later, they were on the surface, and Harry was back at the ‘fruit machine’ with the bored Petty Officer with his long spaniel face. Harry was supposed to be tutoring him on how to work the device. There was an instruction manual, but it was in English, and the fact that Syvret had assigned a senior rate and not an officer to operate it told Harry how much Syvret was going to rely on it.

  Syvret, meanwhile, was on the bridge and they were about to commence their lay. Up inside the conning tower, Le Breuil, the torpedo and gunnery officer, and obviously now the minelaying officer too, was sitting over the chart Harry had provided from his little stash, showing where the mines should be laid.

  They were running on diesels, so Harry couldn’t really hear the barked orders between Syvret and Le Breuil, but he could hear the mines departing like trains on a miniature goods sidings going full pelt; the mechanical trundle of the mines on their ballast boxes as they rolled down the rack, and then a loud ting, like a bus conductor’s ticket machine, to announce the mine had dropped off the end and was now plummeting to the sea bed, where the whole affair would sit for several hours while the securing pin corroded in the salt water. When that happened the mine would be released, trailing a tether just long enough to hold it floating at a set depth beneath the low-tide surface. The mine would then be ‘live’; and there it would lurk, hopefully in the path of an unsuspecting enemy ship. It was all very simple really. Bit of a cheek to call it war.

  The following night, Radegonde had finished her lay early, and now, with all mines gone and many long hours of darkness still ahead, she had headed down the coast where she was now hove-to, riding on the surface between Utsira Island and Haugesund.

  The Skipper had become bored with having Harry hanging about his control room trying to instruct him on the intricacies of operating the latest magic box they had inflicted on him, so he had allowed him to go and sit in his own cabin out of the way.

  Harry was in there reading when he heard, and felt, Radegonde’s die
sels burble to life. The boat, with a full charge on her batteries, had had her diesels shut down and had been lolling, stopped in the long swell of a windless night, completely silent in the pitch darkness. Harry guessed what Syvret had been up to; he had been listening for other ships’ engine noises carrying over the water. He must have heard something. Then the Action Stations klaxon went off, and the boat reverberated to the stamp of feet.

  Harry fought the urge to leap off Syvret’s bed and get to his fighting position. But he didn’t have a fighting position on this boat. His only duty was to keep out of the way. The same went for Cantor and Lucie.

  Harry felt Radegonde surge away beneath him. God, but he was dying to know what was going on up there. He lay back on the narrow bunk and held his book over his face, trying not to think about anything. P.G. Wodehouse. He couldn’t even concentrate on that.

  There was a sharp rapping on the cabin wall. Harry reached over and switched back the curtain. A matelot was standing there.

  ‘The Captain would like to see you on the bridge, Sir.’

  Harry didn’t need asking twice.

  ‘Diesel thump,’ said Syvret, his night glasses pressed to his face. ‘Off the starboard bow. Big, but not that big. You can’t hear it now with our diesels going.’

  Harry, who’d been reading below, was totally blind. It would take a few minutes for anything approaching night vision to return, and Harry’s night vision had never been good anyway. As he peered uselessly into the blackness, he was aware that Bassano was also on the bridge as well as four lookouts. All were scanning the darkness. It was very cold, and Harry was glad he’d stopped long enough on his headlong rush, to bundle himself into a duffel coat and mitts like everyone else.