‘Or time to do it, either,’ Jory said. ‘The old girl was a goner, you knew that, and that meant another problem, because if you were still aboard or close by when she went, she’d suck you down with her. The only thing you could do was jump, swim as far away as you could and hope someone would be around to pick you up before the sharks did.
‘We were mortally terrified of sharks,’ he said. It was pitch dark, too, which didn’t help. Jumping into darkness with no idea what might be waiting for you … A right scary business but they had no choice. It was simple: they jumped or they drowned.
‘You stopped thinking, that’s what you did. You shut your eyes and mouth, shut your bloody mind, and jumped. Even with the ship going over as she was, it seemed a hell of a way down, but when you hit the water the first thing you thought was what have I done. Down you went like you were never going to stop but you did, of course. And when you came up you took an almighty breath and what did you smell? Oil. From the engines, see? It was everywhere. You were in the midst of it and your first thought now was: what do you do if that lot catches fire? Fry, that’s what you’d do. Fry like a potato chip. God a’mighty! So you swam like you never swam before. To get away from it. And all the time there were other blokes around you, men who’d been your mates. Some crying out, some like you fighting to hang on to life, swimming as fast as you could go and keeping your eyes and mouth shut ever so tight, because that oil muck burns, see. Get in your eyes or stomach and you’re a goner. And the bloody stuff was everywhere.
‘With the poor old Scimitar creaking and groaning behind you, right over on her side now and threatening to go under any minute, I tell you, Marina, that wasn’t a place you’d ever want to be in your life.’
Except she could see from his expression that was where he was at that minute. One of a succession of nightmares that haunted him and maybe would go on doing so forever.
It was two days later before he continued with his story. In those days he disappeared, with Marina waking in the morning to find him gone. No explanation, no note, simply the empty space where a man should have been and was not.
She didn’t go looking for him. She reckoned he’d be back when he was ready; in the meantime, she’d let him get on with whatever he was doing. Might he kill himself? She didn’t know that, either, although as far as she knew he still had the gun. She wouldn’t let herself think about it because that would be the worst thing that could happen to her in all the world, but she knew if he was determined to do it there was nothing she could do to stop him.
‘Where is he?’ Marrek said.
She shook her head, not trusting her voice.
‘He used to do this when he was a kid,’ Marrek said. ‘When he’d something he had to work out. Be gone for days, sometimes. Me and the missus, we never asked what he’d been doing or where he’d been; never seemed our business, somehow. I doubt he’d have told us, anyway. But he always came home.’
Which was comfort, of a sort.
He came back the evening of the second day, said he’d been walking on the button-grass plains of the interior. That was all he said; she would never know where or why or what he’d seen, hoped only that he might have taken at least the first steps towards finding himself, though with what success she could not tell.
None of that worried her; what mattered was that he was safe and, for the moment, seemed in his right mind. He stripped naked and went down to the sea. The breakers were not too heavy so he waded out and let them smash over him a few times, standing strong against the force of the sea, then came back and rubbed himself dry with a rough towel. It was the first time since his return that she’d seen his naked body and she saw the wasted limbs, the ribs protruding like rails under the pallid skin, with marks that could have been cigarette burn and scars that might have been caused by whips. Other scars, too, that she could not identify, all of them combining to fill her with fury as well as anguish that faceless men should have done these things to her man. She said nothing but turned away so that he could not see the tears in her eyes and that night, with the wind up and the surf once again crashing in tumult on the rocks, Jory told her what had happened after the Scimitar finally sank in an explosion of swirling water.
* * *
He felt the suction of the sinking cruiser on his legs and knew that if he’d been any closer she might indeed have dragged him down with her. As it was, he found himself in a lonely place, alone in the darkness amid the salty slap of the oil-tainted waves, with no one and nothing in sight. Until, out of nowhere—or so it seemed—a searchlight speared the night and moments later he made out the shape of what had to be a Japanese submarine, lying motionless on the surface, maybe fifty yards away.
They’d all heard stories of Japanese ships machine-gunning the survivors of sinkings. ‘I thought that was me done for,’ he told Marina. But it was not so; on the contrary, the sub seemed to be on a rescue mission, taking men aboard. Presumably this was the vessel that had done for the Scimitar and it seemed crazy that it should now be picking up survivors, but there was no doubt about it: that was what it was doing. With a sudden upsurge of hope he waved his arms frantically, trying to attract the crew’s attention. It worked; within minutes the sub had eased its way through the water towards him and not long afterwards he was hauled aboard.
‘I was that relieved,’ Jory said. ‘But that was when my troubles really started.’
It didn’t take him long to find that out. The first thing that happened, while he was still sprawled on the submarine’s hull, fighting to get his breath, was a kick by a booted foot into his side, delivered with such force that for a moment he thought it must have stove in his ribs. He cried out in shock and pain and was at once dragged to his feet and punched ferociously two or three times in the face before being shoved to an open hatchway and flung headfirst down into the submarine’s interior.
‘I reckon I passed out at that point,’ Jory said. ‘When I came to, I found myself chained to what I later discovered was one of the forward torpedo tubes. Chained by the neck, Marina. Chained by the bloody neck.’
He wasn’t the only one, either. Four of his mates were also there, similarly chained, but when they tried to talk to each other one of the sailors smashed them into silence with a wooden club.
They didn’t know why they’d been picked up; they didn’t know where the submarine was taking them or whether they would ever get there. As far as Jory could make out, they were travelling underwater most of the time, surfacing only at night to recharge their batteries. A stealthy, skulking business, but Jory wasn’t complaining; to be blown to bits by their own side would really have been too much to bear. It almost happened; three days after Jory had been captured, the sub’s motors fell silent, the crew tiptoeing barefoot about the cramped interior. Nobody spoke but the eyes of both crew and prisoners looked up apprehensively as Jory thought he heard the faint menace of propellers. At that moment the tin-can hull, crammed with gauges and dials and a thousand items of gear he did not understand, was like a clenched fist holding them all so tightly that even breathing became a challenge. For what must have been at least a minute he didn’t breathe at all as he waited for the crash of exploding depth charges that would signal the death of the sub and everyone in it, but eventually the sound of the other vessel faded and after a long wait the submarine continued cautiously on its way.
Afterwards he could not have said how long the voyage took but eventually, with the submarine running now on the surface, the hatchway of its conning tower open and fresh air flowing through its stagnant depths, they arrived at their destination. Where that was he had no more idea than before. Nor did he care; thankful they’d all survived the journey and could now put their days aboard the claustrophobic vessel behind them. Things, he told himself, were looking up.
How wrong could you get? It was then, he told Marina, that the true nightmare began.
* * *
All Marina’s senses cried out that she could not listen to any more of it
: not only because of its effect on her but because she could see that talking about it was dragging him back into the darkness of the nightmare that had consumed his life during those last desperate months.
Yet she had no choice. Clutching his hand, sharing every movement of his shaking body, she understood that only by revisiting those terrible days could he come to terms with memories that would otherwise destroy him. So she endured, as he had endured, and told herself that her pain was nothing in comparison with his.
He discovered that he had not been rescued out of kindness but because Japan needed slave labour. He had been assigned to work in the Mitsui coalmine, on the outskirts of a town called Omuta, in Japan’s far south.
In that place all the workers endured arbitrary beatings on a daily basis. There were beheadings for the most trivial offences, and often for no offences at all. Other things he would remember all his life: the starvation and lack of medical facilities, the sadistic cruelty of the guards.
The nature of the work meant that their clothes quickly fell to pieces; they were not replaced and within months all the prisoners were nearly or in many cases absolutely naked.
‘Every week, the owner of the mine, Baron Mitsui, would drive up in his open touring car to check on what was going on.’
‘He did nothing?’
‘He couldn’t have cared less.’
Many prisoners died—of sickness, exhaustion, hunger, despair. The blackness of the mine, the blackness of their lives, meant that many lost the will to go on. When that happened, he told her, they died very quickly.
‘Thank God you didn’t.’
‘I thought about it but I wouldn’t let them beat me. They were bastards, Marina, no other way to say it, but I wouldn’t let them beat me.’
A Coverack man, she thought. A hundred years since, but with the blood still strong.
She had to go back to work. Neither of them wanted it but she had no choice about that, either. As always, she took Charlotte with her. For the first two weeks Jory came too, in part because it was what he wanted, in part because she was scared to leave him.
He was an object of curiosity in Boulders, a rarity who had been captured by the Japanese and come through. Folk wanted to hear what it had been like, hoping that by sharing his experiences they would become part of the war themselves, but he wouldn’t oblige, the expression on his worn face warning them not to push it. Then they took offence; quickly sympathy turned to resentment. He got a name for being a strange one, not the boy they remembered from the days before the war.
That, too, was something Marina and Jory had to endure.
He ate ravenously, quickly putting on weight, but to begin with it was fat rather than muscle. Muscle took longer, but he worked at it and gradually, very gradually, he came right in his body.
His mind was a different matter and there were still nights when she woke to find him shaking and crying out beside her. Times, too, when she endured nightmares herself, engulfed by the horrific images that his experiences had created in her imagination.
The bound and blindfolded prisoner kneeling, the executioner with sword raised before the strike. The hunger tearing endlessly at her entrails. The daily humiliation of being helpless and despised by guards whose barbaric behaviour, she was convinced, ranked them below the vilest creatures on earth.
She lay awake, eyes staring in the darkness, body wet with sweat, as she experienced something of the suffering endured by this man she loved.
Day by day, the months passed. Day by day. Things got better; Jory’s night-time terrors, and her own, occurred less frequently. There were days when they were able to forget the past and believe that the future offered at least the possibility of joy.
Then, between one day and the next, the world changed.
1947
CHAPTER 41
Beyond the walls of the old house, the tempest continued to roar.
After a prolonged spell of unusually calm weather, a westerly gale, accompanied by torrential rain, had arrived three days before. As though determined to make up for the peaceful days that had preceded it, the storm still showed no sign of abating. The howling of the wind and hammer blows of the rain, the creaking timbers of the besieged house, combined to create a wall separating the present from the tranquility of a week before. It was impossible to think of leaving the house in such conditions, yet Marina knew that Jory was growing more restless by the minute. She could see from his hunted expression that the prolonged incarceration was reawakening the traumas of his wartime experiences, the torments inflicted on mind and body by his Japanese captors.
She would have liked to get out, too, but knew by the sound of the wind that it would blow her off her feet if she tried. Marrek, too, hated being confined, and with two other adults and a fretful child in the house, all of them desperate to get out, the walls seemed to close tighter and tighter around them until even breathing became a problem.
There came a crackle of lightning, a simultaneous roar of thunder, and all the lights went out.
Marrek’s voice out of the abrupt darkness: ‘Musta struck the damn generator.’
It was nine o’clock at night, no light through the shuttered windows, and Marina could see nothing. She heard Jory say something, an incoherent protest of fear and fury, and sensed movement. She made an effort to grab him but there was only air where he had been standing. Seconds later and the outside door was flung open. Marrek and Marina were shouting.
‘What the bloody hell …?’
‘Jory!’
The wind brought chaos into the house. Plates crashed, cloths and papers flew. Marrek reached the door and forced it shut against the gale. Marina was still shouting.
‘Jory!’
Nothing. Jory was gone.
‘I must find him.’
She hauled on her coat. She stumbled over a fallen chair, made the door at last and opened it. The strength of the wind flung her backwards but she hung on to the door handle and forced herself out into the air. Engulfed at once by wind and driving rain, she was unable to open her eyes against the storm.
Marrek shouted from inside the house. ‘Don’ be mad, girl! You dunno where he’s to.’
She took no notice but hauled the door closed behind her. Now she was alone. Alone amid the storm.
Marrek had been right. She had no idea which way he’d gone. Knew that in these conditions it would be impossible to find him. Knew only that she must.
She was frightened as never before in her life. Frightened that Jory might be gone from her. Frightened that as soon as she moved away from the house the storm might destroy her.
She thought: Charlotte needs me; Jory needs me. I shall find him and bring him safely home. So that we can be a family once more. She thought: if I have to crawl, crawl I shall.
She tried to reason out which was the more likely way for Jory to have gone but there was no way to know. Not the slightest hint of footprints on rock continuously deluged by water. She turned left, or south, which had the sea on her right. Away from the house, the storm wrapped its invisible strength about her. Within yards it had flung her to the ground.
It was impossible to stand against the force of the wind. Very well. I said I would crawl, if I must, so crawl I will. Half-stunned, she forced herself to her hands and knees. Groping, she crawled on, knowing that in these conditions her chances of success were close to zero but doing it all the same. Within twenty yards, she had found him.
He was lying on his face and, as far as she could tell in the dark, was unconscious but still breathing. She thought he must have struck his head on a rock when the wind sent him flying.
He had no coat and was soaked to the skin. His body felt cold. She had to get him back into the warm house or he might die. But how? It had been hard enough dragging herself along in these conditions; how was she going to get him home? Carrying him would be impossible; dragging him over the sharp-edged stones would rip his body to shreds.
Even to think was difficult a
mid the booming of the wind but after a minute or two she had an idea.
It took her an age to reach the shed where the tarpaulins were stored but she managed it eventually. Opening the shed door was also a nightmare but that too she managed. She grabbed a folded tarpaulin. It was twenty-six feet by thirteen in size, the smallest they had, but still big enough to cause her problems on the way back. Yet get there she did, fighting the wind and rain. She loaded Jory’s inert body onto the tarp and, inch by slow inch, dragged it back to the house.
Marrek had had a skinful of his home brew while she’d been fighting the elements but still, puffing and complaining, face as red as a furnace, he helped her take Jory’s clothes off and get him into bed.
Jory was showing signs of coming around, which took a weight off Marina’s mind, but he was still deathly cold. She hadn’t dare get him into a bath of hot water for fear she’d never get him out again, so she did the only thing she could to warm him up, something she’d read somewhere.
She undressed, got into bed with him and held him close. It was like cuddling an iceberg. She’d also read that having sex was the best way to raise the body temperature but Jory was still not really with it, so she didn’t see how she could make that happen. Instead she held him tight, this man who meant the world to her, and slowly he grew warm.
She’d read a dozen stories where people were said to fall asleep in each other’s arms but had never found that worked; the position was too awkward for sleep—but that night it happened almost immediately, she falling asleep while she held him tight.
Twice since his return she had come so close to losing him; she was determined not to let it happen again. In time—surely?—he would get over the traumas of his wartime experiences; she would help him every step of the way; the land and roaring seas on the west coast of their island home would heal him; they would be happy and fulfilled, united until their lives’ end.
Stars Over the Southern Ocean Page 25
