The Skipper's Dog's Called Stalin

by David Black

  It was a bland, grey day, with high white cloud and a stiff breeze buffeting in from the north-east. Radegonde and her escort corkscrewed in rhythmic echelon across a long, rolling swell. Harry scrunched himself down into his duffel coat, behind his muffler and waved gratefully to his protectors; members of the trawler’s aft gun crew, lounging round their 20mm Bofors mount, goofing at Radegonde, returned the wave. The Angus coast was still just a smudge. Harry had plenty of time to decide what he would do when they docked.

  The Honourable Shirley Lamont, youngest daughter of the late Viscount Cowal and the eccentric – or demented, depending on your point of view – Lady Cowal. Shirley, sister to Hamish, the new Lord, and Cameron, the younger son; her brothers Hammy and Cammy, whom Harry had known vaguely since childhood. The local, impoverished aristocrats. Both the sons were cavalry officers now, in the same regiment the family had bred officers for since the days of the Covenanters. Maybe that said all there was to say about them.

  It didn’t begin to cover Shirley. The girl with the pre-Raphaelite explosion of chestnut hair; the girl whose face he couldn’t get out of his head – the face that had been with him when the German depth charges were raining down and he thought he was going to die. Knew he was going to die.

  Harry leans over the bridge rail and stares into the water, seeing himself on top of the Camel’s Hump that day, blubbering; and then seeing Shirley suddenly appear.

  In his mind, he hovers over the scene; he doesn’t want to get too close, to hear the words again. He couldn’t bear that; hearing his words again. He has enough trouble continuing to look, knowing what he is about to see. The Harry on high contents himself with just looking down on the Harry below. He watches as he stifles his own sobs; pulls himself together; watches Shirley as she steps forward to comfort him; watches as they sit and he begins to talk. He knows he is talking about himself, about his war, while she says nothing about hers. And he watches while she throws her arms around him, not saying a word, and clings to him like she’s saving him from drowning. Except, standing where he is now, knowing what he knows now, he’s not sure whether maybe she was trying to save herself.

  They seem to remain like that for an age, before she starts to fumble with his coat, and then his trousers; and then her own layers of clothes. And Harry, watching from above, starts to feel sick all over again; sick and excited.

  Harry, poor Harry; he isn’t a completely inexperienced young man. He has been with women before; but here we have no Nijinsky of coitus, or a Donne in the art of seduction. Because this is back then, in a time before sex; where nice girls didn’t, and what a boy could get, he had to cajole and negotiate for, hard. And even then, where was there to do it?

  Not that any of that matters, because this is not Harry’s show. Yes, he has always wanted Shirley; ached for her sometimes, but not like this. Romantic Harry has had his own imaginings as to how it should be, one day.

  But this is Shirley’s show. And she’s taking what she needs because it is the only life-affirming thing she can think of after what she has seen; after what she has lived through on the bomb-shattered, burnt-out streets of Clydebank. This poor, shattered young woman needs her life reaffirming, right now; here, with her Harry. The only boy she’s ever trusted. She doesn’t know how to ask for it; who would? How would you ask? What words would you use? How can she ask him to prove to her that her body is still whole, and that life still courses within it, unlike almost every other body she’s seen in the town she’s just come from?

  Like any smash and grab, it’s messy and over quickly; and no one knows quite what to say afterwards. All Harry guiltily notices is that from the little splatters on his shirt tails, he is her first.

  Harry, still replaying it all in his mind, follows as they both eventually descend from the Hump. He sees Shirley walk to her bicycle and cycle away. He knows there are tears in her eyes, but he dare not go so close as to see them again. It is not easy to relive the scene, even when all he has to do this time is watch it, from afar.

  He knows what has happened; and he doesn’t know. Which is why he runs. When he’d got back to Dundee, all the letters that had been chasing him around the Royal Navy postal system had finally caught up with him.

  From the pouty, stylish, Gorgeous-with-a-capital-G Janis, who said she had ‘written and written and written’, there had only been one letter. He didn’t read it, just dropped it in a wastepaper basket, unopened. But from Shirley; there was a parcel of them.

  He started with the oldest one. In it she had at last turned eighteen and she was joining up, like she’d said she would, to be a volunteer ambulance driver in Glasgow. It is the thread that runs through all of her letters. A thread that starts with the excitement of it all, bubbling up through the other news and chat about politics, music, the war, books, them; and then the other news becomes less, and pretty soon it is all thread. Her war, under the bombs. Picking up what’s left.

  The letters end with a deceptively short little note, written a few days before Harry had returned on his first leave after joining Radegonde. The letter set out everything she wanted to say about two nights she had spent in Clydebank, and their aftermath. She didn’t write much. The letter wasn’t graphic; there was no self-pity; she’s not that kind of girl.

  March 13 and 14; the Clydebank Blitz. Two nights of sustained Jerry attack. It was all over the newspapers while Harry was at sea. Everybody knew the papers didn’t tell everything; everybody knew it had been bad. And everybody probably knew Shirley had been there. But nobody had told Harry.

  In a previous Gilmour household, before the world went mad, the talk would have been of little else. But in this world, the Gilmour household is no longer a place where people talk in the same old-fashioned way. His father sits behind his newspaper; he cannot talk to Harry, he is defiant and impotent against a world at war. His mother, the talker and the peacemaker, cannot talk because the house is full of other people’s children; in the daytime, loud and excited and full of fun in a new world away from the bombs; but at night, sleepless, tearful, frightened, they are the orphans of a father dead at St Valery and a mother still in the city doing war work.

  And into it all had walked Harry, home from the sea, too busy thinking about his war to listen to stories about anyone else’s; giving nobody a chance to tell him anything. Selfish.

  Gazing blankly into the foaming white of Radegonde’s wake, Harry sees it clearly now, all right. Everybody is in this war, not just him. But he hadn’t seen it when Shirley had needed someone to talk to, more than talk to; all Harry had done was talk about himself. Who was the arse who said it is always better to face up to things as they really are? A mere few hours ago, Harry had felt happy. Now he’s faced up to things, all he feels is shame.

  He had been staring so intently into the water, he hadn’t noticed Bassano leaning companionably on the rail beside him. By the look on the Frenchman’s face Harry could tell he knew Harry had been brooding.

  ‘So, what’re you going to do on your first night ashore, Harry?’ said Bassano, looking towards what was firming up to be Carnoustie Bay.

  ‘I thought I was going out to get blind drunk with you, Henri,’ said Harry, turning to look at him.

  Bassano pursed his lips and rocked his head from side to side in that reflective way only a Frenchman can.

  ‘D’accord,’ he replied.

  Chapter Eleven

  Harry was on Radegonde’s bridge – not on watch, but adding his own set of binoculars to the constant scanning of the horizon – when the radio traffic started up. It was a beautiful spring day, with only a few scattered, high cirrus clouds against a vivid blue sky and a steady south-westerly breeze scudding the tops off the long rolling swell.

  Radegonde was at forty-five degrees forty-nine minutes north, forty-four degrees thirty-eight minutes west, deep into the mid-Atlantic, cruising at a steady twelve knots, with just over 600 miles to run to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she was scheduled to refuel before heading south f
or Martinique. Leading Telegraphist Cantor was on radio watch down in the conning tower’s radio kiosk when the first signals started to come in. Leading Signalman Lucie was off watch, but was up there with him with nothing better to do than sit about reflecting on the excesses of their last leave. Cantor got him to go and call up through the conning tower hatch for Harry.

  Harry, meanwhile, in between scanning the horizon, had been reflecting on his own excesses of the last leave. Exact convoy routings weren’t broadcast for obvious reasons, so seeing as Radegonde was in the middle of convoy waters it was a good idea to keep an eye out. Being run down by a phalanx of up to a 100-odd merchant ships could, as the Yanks would say, ruin your whole day. Yes, visibility right now might be gin-clear, but the sooner you spotted a convoy, the more time you had to get out of its way. You might be on their side, but you were still a submarine, and having to engage in long explanations with a jittery escort was a problem you could do without. Especially on such a nice day.

  So in between horizon-scanning, snapshots from his run ashore played out in Harry’s head: out on the town in Dundee, arms linked, stepping out like Tiller Girls down the High Street with two other Free French officers from the other French sub in the flotilla, Minerve, belting out ‘The Marseillaise’ with a lung-bursting gusto; being thrown out of the dance at the North British Hotel for starting an impromptu conga line; then navigating deftly away, untouched, from the fight that had erupted in their wake on Castle Street between a bunch of Royal Navy lads and some Brylcreem boys coming it all superior. And then the waxing philosophical bits too, when it was just Harry and Bassano, just as the evening was getting going, before they’d topped off their alcohol tanks; leaning against the bar in Mennie’s up on Perth Road, Bassano saying, ‘So who was the woman you were thinking about? Or is it women?’ And Harry, smiling to himself, replying, ‘Isn’t one enough?’ and suddenly feeling all grown up, just like Humphrey Bogart.

  ‘So what was the problem, Harry?’

  ‘Beyond fixing, Henri,’ Harry had replied. Definitely like Bogart, especially when he then got to say, ‘And you? A woman?’ And Bassano had nodded, in that way that only Frenchmen can. And that was when Bassano went all lyrical, in a way Harry had never dreamed him capable, easing open a door to a cultured and educated Bassano that Harry doubted any of the Radegondes ever imagined existed.

  ‘Are you a reader, Harry?’ he’d asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ford Madox Ford. One of yours. Do you ever read him? Parade’s End?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In Parade’s End there’s a description of the hero’s wife . . . “the more she has made an occupation out of torturing him, the less right she thinks she has to lose him . . . she will tear the house down and the world will echo with her wrongs . . .” That was mine. What do you do about that?’

  ‘Drink heavily.’

  ‘D’accord.’

  It hadn’t been the only philosophical excursion that leave. Unable to even think about going home, he had decided to take up an invitation extended months ago to go and see Sir Alexander Scrimgeour at his club in Edinburgh. Old Lexie, financier through the week, yacht-master at the weekend; owner of that magnificent twelve-metre sailing greyhound Tangle, and indulgent mentor to a young Harry for whom no task had been too menial to bag a berth aboard her as crew.

  Lexie was a member of the Aristotelian, of course he was! That discreet bastion of intellect, philosophy, money and claret-swilling that had sprung up on the corner of Hanover Street and Queen Street in the aftermath of Great Britain’s great defining victory in the Seven Years’ War to provide a retreat for men the likes of old Lexie, where leisure could be taken after the exertions of building an Empire. Past alumni included David Hume, Adam Smith, Walter Scott and Alexander Fleming.

  It had been a weekday when Harry had caught an early train from Dundee and rattled across the Forth Bridge to Waverley, to present himself in front of the Aristotelian’s deliberately innocuous front door. Inside had been infinitely more grand. How very Edinburgh, Harry had thought: all genteel modesty on the outside. He was led through a high-ceilinged portico whose paintings he didn’t have time to study, to a Chesterfield-populated library, book-lined floor to ceiling with one wall segmented by long deep windows, each pane starred with strips of masking tape against bomb-blast. Old Lexie was standing with a group of men of similar age, all in morning suits, cradling whisky snifters and toasting their backsides before a huge fireplace. The wall mirror above it was angled just right to reflect the varied array of balding pates below.

  Harry was presented with his own snifter and then gently quizzed on the progress of the war, which he found amusing, seeing as every one of these men of business probably had a much better idea of how Britain was faring than he had. Then Lexie and Harry peeled off to dine alone.

  Sir Alexander Scrimgeour was a man who looked taller than he really was; not because of any erect bearing, but his slight stoop. He was a spare man, more skin than flesh these days, flappy more than jowly; a face made up of sheets of legal parchment, and a strong chin that jutted out as if stretching to touch the plunging tip of his magnificently hooked nose. His neck dived into his starched collar without touching the sides. Not the best canvas to write his character on, but his smile, when it broke, which was often, worked wonders, aided and abetted by the devilment in his twinkly eyes. You knew right away then, this was a man who loved life and certainly knew how to make the most of it.

  The old fart nodded his appreciation when Harry thanked him again for the sextant he’d presented him with when he’d signed up for the RNVR, but it was the French he really wanted to hear about.

  ‘It’s verr-y important work you are about, laddie,’ he said. ‘Keeping them in the war. They’re a great, great nation who’ve gone a wee bit astray these days. Not to mention the sore strait they’ve plunged us gentleman into. To have our access to claret so suddenly denied. I’ll tell you, this war better be over before the club’s cellar gets any emptier.’

  Harry assured him, if the Radegondes were anything to go by, they wanted to fight.

  ‘Aye, aye. All well and good,’ said Lexie. ‘And long may it continue.’

  Then he paused, ruminating, before starting up again. ‘They might have prevailed in the last war,’ he said, carefully bisecting his rabbit, ‘but it cost them dear. Cost both of us dear. And we’ve both lived in dread of another, which is why we were so unprepared for this one. But such a magnificent country; a place of culture and prosperity and peace. Not all that unlike us in these islands. The only thing about the French, though, is they are prone to two very different types of violent disaster.’

  ‘What would those be?’ asked Harry, wondering whether the old man was beginning to ramble. He should’ve known better.

  ‘Avalanches in the Haute-Savoie,’ said Lexie, ‘and their national politics.’ And he washed a forkful of rabbit down with a glass of the aforementioned claret. Harry followed him. The braised rabbit really was rather good – and so was the claret.

  ‘They do like to get into their respective trenches, when it comes to their politics,’ said Lexie. ‘And, of course, communism was a big threat to them, especially after the crash. I can’t remember how many governments they had before war broke out. And, of course, all the time their Right was listening to Mr Hitler and only hearing what he was going to do to the communists. And there’s still too many Frenchmen think he’s a good thing. Even now.

  ‘Marshal Pétain and his Vichy cronies believe they’re still dealing with the Germany of 1871. They think once the Hun’s beaten us, they’re only going to hang around in France long enough to impose some punishing but bearable treaty, exact reparations and then bugger off. As they did back then. They don’t realise who this man Hitler is. That this is a different war, and they’re in Hitler’s empire now. That’s why it is so important that we back this bumptious big scrapper de Gaulle; and so should the French people.’

  Tangle had been towed up th
e River Leven, and hauled ashore for the duration, Harry then learned. Sir Alexander hadn’t even bothered to check whether there were new regulations regarding pleasure boats, he was damned if he was going to risk his precious lady among all that naval traffic, or venture out anywhere on waters choked with assembling convoys. The conversation drifted on until it was almost five, and Harry had to think about getting a train back to Dundee.

  ‘One more wee balloon of this most elegant Armagnac,’ he had said, and who was Harry to argue? He had just spent one of the most agreeable lunchtimes of his life. And not really because of the setting he’d been treated to, or the matters he had discussed with the man, although his view on how matters stood politically with the French had been interesting; it was because of the way he had talked to Harry. Like a grown up. Harry had stopped being the boy who ‘did’ aboard this man’s yacht. Harry, in his uniform of a Sub-Lieutenant, RNVR, had been addressed as just that. And more; there had been an undisguised pride in Sir Alexander when presenting his protégé – his dashing, young submarine officer protégé – to his cronies. Harry had liked that. So much so that he’d stopped thinking of him as old Lexie, and started thinking of him as Sir Alexander instead. He chose not to think about how he had left matters with his father.

  Harry, back on Radegonde’s bridge, rolling on the Atlantic swell, was still smiling at the memory when Lucie’s shouting interrupted his reverie and he had to trot to the conning tower hatch.

  ‘What?’ he said, irritated, glowering down to where Lucie stood at the bottom of the ladder peering up.

  ‘Scuse me, Sir. But there’s a lot of stuff goin’ back an’ forth on the radio, Sir. We think you should take a listen to.’

  ‘If it isn’t Glenn Miller playing “Tuxedo Junction”, I’ll be extremely upset,’ said Harry, backing to clamber down the ladder. The rest of the bridge team, from the Captain to the lowly lookouts, cast little smirks at each other on seeing Harry annoyed.