by David Black
All the heart-stopping, slow-motion fumbles, working between the shadows and the sickly light cast by the torch, all diffused by the dark water. There were dim memories of heaving the second mine back on to the rack, but nothing about how he’d prised its A-ring apart to get it out of the way, or how he had the presence of mind not to leave the ring behind, but to jam it with the other one in his belt; or how he’d levered and pushed the mines apart to create enough space to get the derailed one back in line.
When he came out of the hole at the end of the chamber, several hands grabbed him and pulled him from the water, out on to the casing and into the freezing air. He couldn’t talk; could only, with great effort, unclench his jaw to let the Davis Set’s mouthpiece fall free. He couldn’t even make a proper thumbs-up gesture, but the deck crew were all still grinning. All that shivering and wheezing for breath; at least he was alive.
The sequence of events that happened next, however, those would stay etched in his mind forever. The noise first, and the scattering of figures, but mostly that single, vivid snap; that face, so clear and sharp that he knew he would recognise it out of a street full of people were he ever to see it again; and of course the sure and certain knowledge that he never would. Ever. Because the face he had looked at was about to become the face of a dead man.
He was in a crush of matelots, all bundled up in their pea jackets, mufflers and bobble caps on tight. They had gathered round Harry where he lay on the wooden deck slats and torn off all the equipment he had slung around him: the Davis Set, webbing bag and tools, the lengths of bent steel and the torch. Harry was gazing, dazed, at the sea and at the electric green of the islet through the drizzle, as if he never believed he’d see such a sight again; looking up and observing how the cloud base had lifted a bit too . . . an aircraft appeared out of the dense white fluff. Right there, before his eyes. One minute cloud; the next, an Arado 196 floatplane.
It was just off the end of the islet and so low, too. The sound of its engine was barely audible above the noise of Radegonde’s own diesels, charging batteries. Needless to say even a barely conscious Harry recognised the aircraft immediately: its big, round, radial engine cowling; the dull green paint and the big black crosses on its side and wings; and the cockpit perched above those wings, long, like some extended garden greenhouse. In the back, a gunner, looking the other way; but in front, the pilot, his canopy pulled back, looking right down at Harry; right into his face. It was the Jerry’s astonished expression – the immaculate incredulity – that Harry would always remember. He had no time to register aggression or fear; and he was young, a boy just like him. Frozen, then gone in a blur of wing as the aircraft went over Radegonde’s periscope stands with no more than thirty feet between her and the Arado’s two huge floats, suspended on their cat’s cradle of struts. Harry thought the eggshell blue of its underside looked almost fairgroundy.
Out of the corner of his eye he could see the port side Hotchkiss gunner wrestle with his gun. But the Arado had appeared too close for him to get in a shot. The starboard gunner, meanwhile, who’d been facing the wrong way, looking aft, had dragged his gun all the way around, and as he swung it, there was the distinctive Hotchkiss rattle. Harry watched as the Jerry powered away over Radegonde’s starboard bow; transfixed, as its trajectory converged with a running red stitch of tracer rounds rising from Radegonde’s conning tower, from the starboard Hotchkiss.
A section of its cowling exploded away; an inspection panel; lumps of wing root and skin, and a gout of black smoke, immediately snatched by slipstream. And then the Arado’s nose shot up, almost vertical, and it was as if the whole aircraft had been suddenly snatched away by some giant, unseen puppeteer from above; disappearing up into the cloud, as if the entire piece of theatre had never happened at all.
Captain Syvret was at the aft end of the conning tower, gesticulating, ordering everyone below. Harry, half carried, half shoved, was being dangled over the aft hatch, when he looked up again. Way away, off the starboard bow, the Arado suddenly reappeared out of the cloud base, but like some entirely different aircraft, trailing smoke and diving vertically, straight into the sea in a gout of white water. Harry was down the hatch and Radegonde was already diving before the last of the water finally subsided.
When Harry woke up he was lying flat on a pile of thin mattresses dragged from matelots’ bunks and piled on the deckplates. He could see he was in the engine room, between Radegonde’s two silent diesels. The silence meant they were submerged, and running on electric motors.
Harry felt his head being raised, and one of the many matelots kneeling around him pulled a thick, knitted woollen hat over his ears. A commotion developed at his feet. When he focused, he saw de Maligou, still in his pea jacket, attacking the seals of the frogman suit with a bolt cutter. Behind him was another matelot with a huge knife, slicing the suit open as if he were flensing him. And suddenly Harry was naked, being dabbed with towels. He wanted to shout: Your good Italian frogman’s suit! But his jaws were going like a pneumatic drill. He couldn’t speak. And then there was the pain; he felt as if his whole body were on fire.
The next thing, the matelots’ many hands were pulling a sleeping bag round him, and Faujanet’s face was leaning over his. Faujanet, naked apart from his skivvies, crouching down and grinning sheepishly.
‘We all love you, Harry. I love you, Harry,’ he was saying, then suddenly frowning, as he seemed to be about to try and get in the sleeping bag with him. ‘But like a brother. OK? No kissing, Harry. No kissing and I promise never to say “of course” again.’
Harry’s eyes went wide with alarm; but he couldn’t talk to tell Faujanet about the pain in every limb and extremity, and how he couldn’t bear to have the Frenchman kick and elbow his way into the sleeping bag beside him. But Faujanet didn’t see; he was too busy planting a big kiss on him, landing somewhere between his eye and the bridge of his nose.
Harry wanted to shout Stop! but couldn’t. Somebody else did, however. Captain Syvret had stepped into the engine room through the bulkhead door behind Harry’s head. Harry eyes rolled with relief.
‘What are you doing, Faujanet?’
‘I’m getting in to keep him warm,’ Faujanet replied, huffy that his sacrifice wasn’t being appreciated.
‘He won’t thank you for it, Philippe,’ said Syvret. ‘He’ll be hurting, and it won’t do any good right now.’ Then, to the others, ‘Blankets. Get lots of blankets round him.’
Syvret knelt down, brandishing a flask. ‘Hot chocolate. You can have some as soon as you are able to tell me you can swallow it without choking.’
He ran his eyes over Harry’s shuddering, slimy white body as the sailors mummified him in coarse wool. ‘You look like something from a St Malo fishmonger’s slab,’ he said. ‘Well, almost.’
Harry, his eyes starting to roll again, looked up at Syvret. ‘A-a-alm-m-ost?’
Syvret blew out his cheeks in his usual, reassuring fashion and smiled. ‘You’re not dead,’ he said. ‘Thankfully.’
Chapter Ten
‘Somebody should write to the Luftwaffe warning them about you,’ said Captain Syvret. ‘Every time you see one of them, someone shoots them down.’
He and Harry were in the wardroom, the little glass light fitting on the deckhead above casting a dim, cosy light over them. Both men were hunched over mugs of something steaming, leaning on the table. Harry was bulked up in several sweaters and had a blanket round his shoulders. He still looked slimy white, but was at last beginning to believe he might one day feel warm again. He forced a mirthless smile.
Syvret was talking about the Junkers 88 over Dundee, and now the Arado. But Harry wasn’t in a reminiscing mood. He was thinking about other things. What he’d done and why he’d done it. It wasn’t as if he’d had to do it. It wasn’t as if he was one of them, a Radegonde, ship’s company and all that. No, he was a supernumerary. It wasn’t his navy, he told himself, and it hadn’t been his job. He’d nearly died; which seemed to be a
pretty good reason for asking himself: What in God’s name were you thinking, Harry? Did he really have the right to be so careless of his life now, just because he was no longer saving it for Shirley Lamont? Was that what all this was about? Trying to get himself killed just because he was ashamed of how he’d treated a stupid girl. Except she wasn’t stupid; he was . . .
And that was what was going around and around in his head, like a scratch on a record.
The boat was quiet. Three days had passed since Harry had freed the mine. Not that Harry could have told you; most of that time he had spent in a kind of pain-addled, semi delirium. Nor did he have much memory of his actual deeds down in the mine chamber. But he must have done something right. Because when he’d finished, all the mines had been back on the rack and the mechanism was working again. And now they were motoring away from a successful night-time surface minelay on their alternate target. All the mines had been deployed and were out there now, bobbing about, ready to blow the arse out of any unsuspecting passing Jerry.
The Captain was happy; even the crew seemed happy. No one had actually said thank you, but there had been all those toothless grins when the Radegondes had popped in to see him in ones and twos as he lay mummified in blankets on the Captain’s bunk, his arms so bundled up he was unable to fight them off when they insisted on ruffling his hair.
He was aware of the Captain considering him. He took another warming gulp from his mug; coffee and brandy. He felt it warm its way into his belly.
‘Everybody is still going to hate you . . . of course,’ said the Captain, that last bit with a wry smile. ‘Nothing will change that. It’s nothing personal. You’re English. Everybody hates you.’
Harry made no comment. Actually, he found the idea of being hated, even if it was for the wrong reason, quite comforting.
‘You hate me?’ he asked.
‘Of course!’ said Syvret. When he realised what he had said, he heaved with suppressed laughter for a moment. ‘Oh, dear, I’m becoming tedious.’
‘Certainly not,’ Harry said drily, ‘you’re very amusing.’
Syvret considered him for a moment, then said with that glint in his eye, ‘I hate you, because you’re English; because your climate is insipid, your food inedible, your manners ludicrous’, like he was ticking off a shopping list of ingredients for a nice dinner, ‘and your women are icicles. Because of your wretched class system, and your affected superiority. Because you do not know how to enjoy pleasure; you’re not allowed to dip your toast in your coffee, or in your boiled eggs – you deny yourself! Eating chicken legs or lamb chops with your fingers – you deny yourself! You do not know how to make coffee. Instead, you make sludge. That is all I’ve ever tasted in England. And what do you drink instead? Tea.’ He paused to smile at Harry; his warm, twinkly, devilment smile. ‘And don’t even mention your women’s fashions. I cannot look at their hats and still believe in civilisation.’
Harry, too, was smiling now. ‘Is there anything you do like?’
‘I like some of your traditions; like the way, down through history, you name your warships for the attributes of your women . . . Illustrious . . . Formidable . . . Indefatigable . . .’
‘You know I’m not actually English,’ said Harry.
‘Yes. And that’s another thing I hate. I constantly insult you, and you don’t even have the common courtesy to be annoyed.’ He paused again, musing. ‘Implacable . . . Colossus . . . Thunderer!’
‘Aspirant Faujanet said everybody loves me now,’ said Harry.
‘He was humouring you.’ He emptied another slug of brandy into Harry’s mug. ‘You know, Harry, now that you are a Radegonde, you’re going to have to learn how to take a joke.’
Radegonde lingered on the Norwegian coast for a few more days for the sake of some vandalisme, but no suitable target for their torpedoes presented itself. Harry was sitting with Lucie at the radio inside the conning tower. Both Lucie and Cantor had barely been able to contain their pride in Harry after his deed of epic derring-do. ‘Saved the boat, you did, Sir,’ Lucie had confided in him at one point, his chest puffed out like a mating pigeon. And later, when Harry had caught the two of them giggling like girls together, and asked rather coolly what was so funny, Cantor had leaned in to tell him. ‘The boys up in the for’ard mess, Sir. They’re trying to get one of the Torpedomen to fix you up with his sister, Sir.’
Harry managed to look both scandalised and intrigued.
‘She’s a dancer in that Folly Berger, Sir. They’ve got a pin-up of her on the bulkhead. She’s really nice,’ grinned Cantor. ‘They really like you, Sir.’
Harry had decided to be haughty. ‘The Folies Bergère is in Paris, Cantor, and the last time I looked it was full of Jerries.’ But all he was thinking was how he might plausibly get a glimpse of this pin-up.
‘For after the war, like, Sir,’ said Lucie. ‘Not right now.’
But Harry was thinking right now would be better.
When their recall came over he ripped off the full message from Lucie’s signal pad and went down to the wardroom to decode it. Captain Syvret was at the wardroom table when Harry slid in.
‘Our recall, Sir,’ he said, ferreting about for the secret books in the cubby he used for his feet when sleeping. Syvret had a chart on the table and was drinking coffee and eating toast while he peered at it. He looked up, then stuck his head into the passageway and called the steward for coffee and biscuits for Harry.
Harry finished the decoding and pushed the message over to Syvret. While Syvret read, Harry sat back to dip a digestive biscuit in his coffee. He ate it, then slurped some coffee to wash it down. That was when Stalin padded up, skipped on to the banquette beside Harry, and began a conversation.
‘Grrnngungnnm,’ said Stalin, reflectively, while looking from Harry to the plate of digestives.
The intimate little tableau struck a thoroughly contented Harry as the epitome of domestic bliss. To complete it, Harry lifted one of the biscuits and offered it to the dog. Stalin peered closer, then recoiled.
‘Rrrrnngrumnngr,’ it said.
Harry offered again, and Stalin looked positively accusatory.
‘I’ve just offered Stalin a biscuit, Sir, and he’s refusing it,’ a stunned Harry said to Syvret.
Without looking up, Syvret asked, ‘Did you put any butter on it?’
‘No.’
Syvret sighed, rolled his eyes, then went back to reading the signal. Curious now, Harry, biscuit still in hand, slipped out of the banquette, took two steps down to a little second galley, then brought the biscuit back, buttered. He sat down again, his every movement being followed by Stalin. He offered the biscuit again and without a moment’s hesitation Stalin took it and in two chomps and a lick of his lips it was gone.
‘Well, bugger me,’ said Harry.
Syvret was still reading the signal, not even looking his way.
‘There is no law,’ he said, distractedly, ‘that says communists can’t be sybarites too, you know.’
Stalin meanwhile had nuzzled up against Harry, his eyes devouring him adoringly. And right there and then, Harry had one of those epiphany moments where the possibility of an entirely different world, of another life, suddenly becomes plausible. Looking down at that bloody dog, he had never felt so distant from the Royal Navy; so far away from all the discipline and the duty, and the expectations and traditions of his service. From the war, even. Instead, he found himself in the company of madmen. And he quite liked it. In fact, for the first time in a long time Harry felt . . . happy. He chucked Stalin under his chops, and Stalin nuzzled him back.
‘You haven’t seen a little girl wandering around here?’ he asked the dog in English. ‘Answers to the name of Alice?’
Syvret squinted up from his chart, gave Harry a sideways look, shook his head despairingly, and went back to work.
According to the signal decoded by Harry, they were to rendezvous with a Royal Navy armed trawler just after dawn, outside the coastal minefield p
rotecting the Firth of Tay. The exact position was pricked on the chart, and over the ensuing hours, while Bassano navigated them to X-marks-the-spot, Captain Syvret composed his patrol report. It was a more time-consuming task for him than for a Royal Navy Skipper, as he had to compose two – one for the FOS and another for Carlton Gardens – and they were not always exactly the same report. All Harry had to do was decide what he was going to do with his leave. In the previous world, there would have been no debate. In this one, the thought of going home held no charms for him at all.
Radegonde, like all submarines coming in off patrol, was abuzz. Her crew went about their duties with a certain briskness. Nothing was too much trouble, smiles were everywhere you looked and bonhomie and good will were all-pervasive. Stuff to go ashore was trussed up and made ready; inventories were completed; anything was attended to that might impede their dash down the gangway once they were alongside.
As always, Harry kept out of the way when Radegonde was performing critical evolutions, such as diving, or surfacing, but once the boat was up, diesels engaged and her course shaped for Dundee, Captain Syvret invited him on to the bridge. And there was the trawler, off the starboard bow, ready to escort them, not because of any threat from the Germans but – as Harry knew all too well – because of the threat from the RAF. There had been many a Jack who had come to grief because he believed pilots could tell one submarine from another. This was not so. As far as the Brylcreem boys were concerned, all submarines were U-boats. This was a truth every submariner had to learn.