The Skipper's Dog's Called Stalin

by David Black

  ‘Comrade Stalin doesn’t square anything with anyone, my dear Bassano,’ said Syvret after another sip of wine, ‘because he’s not a comrade. He is a Tsar . . . without a bloodline.’

  ‘How can you talk like that about another communist?’ asked Poulenc, the First Lieutenant.

  It was not a question Harry would have expected from this very serious young man. Poulenc, with the looks of a fin-de-siècle poet and the manners of a diplomat, always spoke up for his opinions at these debates, but never to provoke. Precise, spare in his language, he pointedly never questioned his Captain, unlike others aboard. He stroked his moustache while he awaited a reply.

  ‘Especially after you called your dog after him,’ Harry heard himself butt in, immediately wondering whether he should have said anything at all. But everybody laughed, even Syvret. And Le Breuil said, ‘Of course!’ and they all laughed even more.

  In the mirth Harry began to be aware he had just steered the talk away from some unseen precipice. Even the dog, who looked like he’d been following the debate, seemed to be smiling at him. Syvret ruffled his neck, saying, ‘I call him Stalin to remind me.’

  ‘Remind you of what?’ asked Harry.

  Syvret turned his smile on the dog. ‘He is very clever. Just like Stalin. But he’s still a dog.’

  Chapter Six

  It is a wet afternoon in early March, and once again Harry is standing on the pier at Gourock, watching the sheets of rain slant and dance across the spume-scuffed waters of the Tail o’ the Bank in an endless procession of shades of grey. Unusually, the anchorage is almost devoid of shipping and the raft of escorts that are normally lashed together alongside at the far end of the pier are gone; they are at sea somewhere in the North Atlantic, some convoy’s last bastion between a safe passage and the U-boats.

  In peacetime Gourock Pier, served by the railway line direct from Glasgow, was a bustling port for all the steamer lines that plied their trade the length and breadth of the Firth of Clyde. In the summer it would be decked in bunting and packed with holidaymakers heading to the coast’s resorts; now it’s all just peeling paint and random mounds of essential freight under glistening tarpaulins, awaiting transport to all the little piers and jetties from Innellan to Troon and Rothesay; Ardrossan, Broddick and Campbeltown.

  The gulls swoop and cry, the rain patters on his oilskin coat and the wind shakes the cast-iron lamp standards that mark where the sodden wooden planking of the pier meets the puddled flagstones of the covered railway platforms. Everything is wet and rimmed with gummy moss. Life in wartime, thinks Harry. Everything and everybody weighed under by the boredom of waiting for events to happen elsewhere; waiting for the day when normal life can go on.

  Harry is heading home on leave, awaiting the little wheezing paddle steamer that is now approaching to carry him back across the firth to the small resort town of Dunoon, where his father is a teacher at the local grammar school, and his mother, a housewife.

  Three weeks, he’s been told; three weeks to patch the holes in Radegonde’s conning tower and re-reeve the jumping wire and do all the other myriad tasks to make the submarine operational for her next war patrol. Harry, as LO, has no role in this ritual. He might serve aboard Radegonde, but he is not ship’s company. So he might as well be out of the way. The Captain (S) cut him a rail warrant and a leave pass and here he is. Off to be reunited with a mother who loves him; a pacifist father consumed with rage at his son’s role in this war; and Janis, a girl he’s known from school, who is beautiful, fashionable and completely cocooned in the security of her father’s self-made wealth, and who says she is his girlfriend. And Shirley. The Honourable Shirley Lamont, a scruff with a mane of chestnut hair and a casual indifference to convention; wayward in a way only the aristocracy can carry off and who, according to her last letter, is now a volunteer ambulance driver in Glasgow, and so likely won’t even be there. Harry doesn’t know whether to be thankful for that, or sad. In fact, if he’s honest with himself, Harry would rather be back aboard Radegonde.

  Harry queued with the press of sailors filing up the gangway in raincoats and dark blue caps with bands that read ‘HM Submarines’; they were heading back to the submarine depot ship HMS Forth, Dunoon’s new neighbour; anchored round the corner on the Holy Loch, and home to the Third Submarine Flotilla, from where Harry had sailed on his last patrol as Fifth Officer aboard HMS Trebuchet. The Bucket to her crew, now familiar throughout the fleet because of what had happened up there off the Arctic coast of the Soviet Union; the neutral Soviet Union.

  Harry was sitting out on the little paddler’s deck on a carley raft that doubled as a seat, trying to work out in his head how long it had been since they had sailed into the Russian fjord and kicked over a hornet’s nest, when suddenly he was right there again. It might have been broad daylight around him, but he was back in that Arctic night; right back there with it all happening, in full gory, noisy technicolour. A flashback; right down to the exploding depth charges, the rabummm-babumm-bumms! that had punched his diaphragm, and made his eyes lose focus and his eardrums sing and his gorge rise and jaw lock from fear. He doubled forward, his fists grabbing his knees, and his eyes scrunched shut. As he did so, he could even feel the paint flakes pitter on his neck just as they had in The Bucket’s control room where he’d stood at his post, crammed together with Malcolm Carey, the Jimmy; Kit Grainger, the navigator; and the Skipper, Andy Trumble, always so cool, pulling his bottom lip, calmly pondering some imponderable as the world ripped apart around his ears. All of them so close, nose to ear with the ratings and Petty Officers, their backs to you, as they faced the trim board and the plane controls and the helm; sitting so you could rest your elbow on their heads and see the dandruff flakes and the roots of their hair; until the next concussion ripped and smoked the fetid air around you.

  He forced himself to sit up, hands still on his knees, rigid, and stared hard at the mountains along Loch Long. He focused on their greens and purples, until his breathing started to calm again and he caught the sideways glance of a grizzled, three-badge Stoker; looking at him with an expression of complete understanding. They exchanged the briefest of smiles and Harry was OK again. He desperately wanted a cigarette, except even now he still hadn’t got into the habit of buying them. The Stoker, a submariner by his cap band, stepped over.

  ‘You needin’ a smoke, Sir?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, please,’ said Harry, and the next thing he was breathing the acrid blast deep into his lungs.

  ‘Rejoinin’ yer boat, Sir?’ The Stoker knew where he’d been, needless to say. He’d probably been there himself a few times.

  ‘No. I’m heading home on leave. I actually live here.’

  ‘Really? Nice, Sir. Very nice. What a lovely place to come home to, Sir.’

  And then Harry was off the boat and in the back of a navy three-tonner taking the sailors to the crew tender pier at Sandbank. He was dropped off in Kirn, and then walked up the hill, through his front gate and up to his front door; a boy again, still thinking of his parents’ house, their front door, as his own. Looking at it before he turned the handle, because the door was always open – people didn’t lock their doors in mid-Argyll, there was never a need to. And there it was, another flashback, a little more benevolent this time, to the student he used to be when he would sit on the steamer, on the weekends he would return for his filial visits, and use the time to adjust his frame of mind from bohemian undergraduate to compliant only child.

  Life at Glasgow University had seemed a world away from here back then. But, my God, what kind of world was he coming back from now? How did you adjust your frame of mind after that?

  And how did you adjust your frame of mind to walking into the house you’d grown up in, to find your father, and mother, and the girl who said she was your girlfriend, all sitting round the kitchen table, frozen in a scene that should have been intimate, but one you knew immediately wasn’t? He’d caught them talking, and it hadn’t taken a genius to work out it had pr
obably been him they’d been talking about. And that they hadn’t been fondly reminiscing. But whatever questions he might have had were immediately lost in all the hugging from his mother, and from Gordon, the family Labrador, who kept jumping up to slobber on him. The hellos from his father and Janis were more subdued. Catching up, chucking Gordon under the chin and small talk took care of the rest of his arrival.

  Later, when the rain had stopped, and patches of blue sky appeared, Janis and Harry sat out in the back garden. Harry had suggested a walk with Gordon, but Janis was in her heels, couldn’t he even see that?

  ‘Of course,’ said Janis, ‘that’s the trouble with you. You’re just so . . . completely . . . selfish.’

  Of course. Where had Harry heard that before? Was he starting to get little Aspirant Faujanet’s joke, at last? But he said nothing. Although Harry was still a young man, he had learned to understand when a woman doesn’t want to listen.

  ‘I wrote and wrote and wrote. Your mother wrote. No reply from you. Then you just . . . turn up . . . and expect to be waited on and fawned over. You think just because you put on a uniform and go swanning off in your little boat, you can forget to behave like a gentleman; you can forget about those who care about you. Self! Self! Self!’

  She had him there. All those weeks in Raigmore Hospital, he never wrote. He couldn’t. It wasn’t that his wounds were so bad: a gashed forearm; puncture wounds in his back, none of them deep; a slash on his neck caused by glass from a depth-charge-shattered gauge. And then the blast damage from that 20mm cannon shell on the bridge of the Soviet tug – your brain’s been rattled around like a pea in a can, the doctor had said. He’d laughed at that. So had Hank the Yank.

  It was that he hadn’t known what to write. His head had been full of the story he had just lived through. The story he’d been ordered on pain of Court Martial never to tell; an epic story of a secret German base in a neutral Soviet port; of a threat to Britain’s convoy lifeline; and a foray into those neutral Soviet waters by two Royal Navy submarines, against the rules of war, to sink German ships and thwart a German plan; and of the aftermath, being hunted by German destroyers, the loss of one submarine and the all-but-wrecking of his own. He had no idea what had happened to The Bucket after they had limped back into a remote Shetland harbour, her crew to be lorried away and the entire, epic battle swept under a carpet because His Majesty’s Government couldn’t admit it had violated the Soviet Union’s neutrality; and because the Soviet Union probably hadn’t wanted them to anyway. Because the Soviet Union had violated its own claims to neutrality by offering base facilities to an enemy belligerent. Nothing in this war was straightforward.

  Even when he’d got to Dundee, he still hadn’t written. He’d tried to; had the pen in his hand.

  ‘I was so worried I couldn’t think of anything else,’ Janis was saying, while he sat, wretched. ‘Every . . . waking . . . hour. All I did was worry. That’s why I’m here today. To tell your mother. To explain,’ she continued. ‘To tell her I just can’t go on like this. I can’t be treated like this. And then you turn up. Like nothing has happened. Well, I’m telling you now . . .’

  There was a pause, and Harry looked up from his pose of bowed contrition. Janis was staring hard at him, as if daring him to . . . to what? He couldn’t read it.

  ‘I have found someone else,’ she said, unblinking.

  Aha! He thought. She was daring him to . . . beg? Plead?

  ‘Edward has been comforting me.’

  Who’s Edward? he thought.

  ‘He’s a doctor.’ She said it as if this explained things. ‘I wish you well, Harris.’

  Harris. His full name. She was being formal.

  ‘But I don’t want to see you anymore.’

  Another pause. Harry bowed his head again.

  ‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’

  ‘I can’t think what to say, Janis.’

  ‘Of course not. You’re too busy thinking about yourself.’

  And with that she was gone; a swish of nylon stocking as she uncrossed her impossible legs, and she was out of the garden chair. He wondered momentarily how she managed to get nylon stockings when rationing meant no other woman could. Her back disappeared around the corner of the house and she was heading for the gate. She hadn’t gone via the kitchen, where his mother and father still sat, to say goodbye to them, the people who’d shared her terrible worry all those weeks, along with Edward; Dr Edward, rather, whoever he was.

  The only sound now was of the three evacuee children who had come from Glasgow to live in his parents’ house, away from the bombs: two little girls and a boy; poor, with a mother working in a munitions’ factory, and a father in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, dead in France Three children who Harry had forgotten about.

  They were playing beyond the bushes at the bottom of the garden. He couldn’t see them, but he could hear the shrieks of laughter and giggling, and the splashing coming from where the burn ran. What did he feel right now? Nothing. He felt nothing. So he went indoors again, to his mother’s love and his father’s anger.

  That evening when his father had retired to his study, Harry steeled himself and went to see him. He’d wanted to, and he hadn’t wanted to. The dread of again having to sit under the leaden burden of his father’s disapproval vying with his need to try and reach out to the old man; to offer his father some solace for the hurt he seemed to bear.

  He didn’t knock when he went into the study; he was carrying two whisky and sodas, so he just butted the door open with his bum, put a tumbler down on the fireside table by his father’s leather armchair, and sat down on the matching one opposite. The room was dark, lined floor-to-ceiling with bookshelves and never a painting. The only light was a standard lamp behind his father, spilling light over the paper he was reading. A huge Afghan carpet covered most of the polished marquetry flooring, and in the bay window was a huge desk, locked now, and sealed from the world. Only a large, framed portrait photograph of Harry’s mother graced its top.

  ‘I thought I’d come and talk to you,’ said Harry.

  His father, Duncan, gripped his paper more tightly by way of reply.

  ‘You do want to talk to me, don’t you?’ Harry persisted.

  ‘Depends what about,’ said his father.

  ‘How about how I am?’ said Harry.

  ‘How are you?’ said his father, his voice as flat as if meeting a tedious acquaintance.

  ‘Oh, you know. The usual. Committing atrocities. Carrying babies around on the end of my bayonet.’

  ‘As long as you’re enjoying yourself.’

  To the uninvolved, this exchange might have sounded quite amusing; an ironic, sarcastic baiting between sparring partners, old in their drollery. But it wasn’t. And even a sensitive witness could not begin to sense the fathomless hurt behind the words from both father and son. But Harry could. So he stopped.

  ‘I know how you feel about the war, Father,’ he said. ‘But King Canute stood an odds-on better chance of stopping the tide than you do of ignoring this war, and what it is about. You’re far too intelligent a man not to know what is at stake . . . this new dark age that threatens us . . .’

  ‘Threatens!’ bellowed his father. ‘It’s not threatening us! It’s here already! We’re in it, you stupid, self-deluding little lemming! Nnngggrrrraagghhh!’ And in his impotent fury, the newspaper Harry’s father had been scrunching in his fists fell from his hands, and he started thumping the big leather armrests of his chair, eyes squeezed tight as tight, like a child in full tantrum. And then, as shockingly as he had begun, he stopped. Harry sat frozen, appalled by this brief glimpse of the full embrace of his father’s torment. His father looked very old right then, and was very quiet. Then, as if after an age, he began to speak very softly.

  ‘You cannot imagine the joy and love in which you were conceived,’ he said, not looking at his son, but at something very far away. ‘Or the joy and love you brought with you when you entered the world. Ye
s, you are right. I am an intelligent man. Which is why I have never deluded myself that such feelings have been mine alone to experience.’

  Harry’s father had stopped speaking, but his words still seemed to hang in the room. Then he looked up, straight into Harry’s face, his eyes so deep and hard Harry couldn’t read them.

  ‘And then I look at you,’ he said finally. ‘In your uniform. The fruit of my loins. And I think of every other father who has had a son. And of every other father whose sons you have taken from them.’

  And then, at length, he looked away again; but he wasn’t finished. ‘And for what? Some historical imperative. They come and go, believe me. So do not presume to tell me I do not understand what is at stake in this war.’

  The two men sat in silence, until eventually Harry’s father bent to try and rebuild his newspaper from its crumpled sheets. ‘Shouldn’t you be getting back to the killing?’ he said, shaking out the centre section.

  Harry left the room and sought refuge in the mayhem in the kitchen. Young Arthur Clunie, the lad from down the road who sailed with the Port Line, was recently back, and Arthur’s mother had brought round some sugar from the cache he’d smuggled ashore in his dunnage, so Harry’s mother and the evacuee children were making scones. Harry joined in, and the shrieks and laughter and the mess helped him bury what he’d just been through. Gordon looked on from his basket in the corner, his baleful eyes surveying this gross disruption to his peace.

  Chapter Seven

  Harry was looking down from Radegonde’s bridge at Leading Signalman Lucie – who was lolling in a wheelbarrow, while Leading Telegraphist Cantor pushed him along the Dundee quayside – wondering why he’d been so eager to get back aboard. A telegram boy had delivered the news to the Gilmour household. Harry was to report to HMS Ambrose within three days. Harry knew what it meant: Radegonde was about to sail on her next war patrol. He could have squeezed another forty-eight hours out of his pass, but he left immediately. Couldn’t get away fast enough, after what had happened. Not between him and Janis; he couldn’t have cared less about her. No, after what had happened between him and Shirley.