‘Well,’ she said stoically, ‘there’s a war on and there’s a lot of it about. Death, I mean. He’s an old man and…well, there it is.’ He remained silent as she recovered herself. ‘The problem is he has always had a great desire to get to the bottom of things. It is what made him a newspaperman in the first place.’
He nodded and smiled. ‘Of course. And there is the hundred thousand. I suppose that I’d feel the same. Tell me, did he try and find out from Gardner?’
‘Yes. They were in touch. I’m not certain how Daddy located him but he refused to say anything. His excuse was that you were the senior man and he would do nothing either without your approval, or in your stead.’
He smiled. ‘Nathaniel would say that, God rest his soul. But what happened to Alan Tomkins?’
‘Who?’
‘The Alert’s Chief Officer.’
She frowned. ‘Oh, I don’t know, he was untraceable.’
‘That’s a shame. He was a splendid fellow in his very distinct and undervalued way. So I am your last hope, or at least your father’s?’
She nodded. ‘Please humour him.’
‘So what do you want me to do, come down to London on my next long leave and spill the beans?’
‘No. Neither of you may live that long… I’m sorry to be so frank…’
He patted her hand again and offered her the lop-sided grin. ‘No, you’re right, in my case most certainly. Well what then?’
‘You have a five-day boiler-clean…’
‘Four after tonight…’
‘Will you stop bloody interrupting me, Commander! I buy you dinner here, each night and you – as you put it – spill the beans. Will you do it?’
He blew out his cheeks and looked at her for some moments. ‘Yes,’ he said at last, patting her hand again. ‘Yes, of course I will. War changes everything.’
‘Thank you so much…’
‘By the way, what is your name?’
‘Call me Liz, or Lizzie. Until tomorrow then. Here at six.’ She slipped from the bar stool, kissed him lightly on the cheek and was gone.
He stared after her in the mirror for a moment, then pushed aside the half-finished pink gin, picked up his book and left for his bed-room on an upper floor of the labyrinthine building that had become part naval ward-room, part knocking-shop.
THE FIRST EVENING - DADDY’S YACHT
I have to confess I found your father’s expedition vessel unimpressive when I first saw her. She lay in a corner of the Surrey Commercial Dock on the Thames, sharing that filthy expanse of water with a handful of the usual undistinguished middle-trade vessels and a brace of coasters. One of these was leaving as I arrived in my taxi with my kit, a long quarter-decker belonging to Munro Brothers of Glasgow and I watched her for a moment after I had paid-off the cab and before I looked at the Alert properly. By contrast the coaster was vibrant with life, for there is nothing deader than a ship before her crew joins her and she remains in the hands of others, a ship-keeper, a gang of riggers. Besides, this was a wet and windy afternoon in late March, much the same time of year as this, which only added to the extreme bleakness of the moment. I wondered what I had let myself in for.
Despite her three masts, she seemed to be little more than an extension of the slime and slurry of the dock-side, much of which had been tramped up her gangway onto her wooden decks. I guessed, rightly as it transposed, that she was rigged as an auxiliary barque, a low-powered steamer with a simple sailing rig, though those yards that were then across her main and foremasts were a-cockbill and bereft of sails. Two, the main and fore topgallants, still lay across the deck, among an apparent tangle of extra-flexible steel wire rope and the ends of gantlines dangling from the fore and main-masts where the riggers had left them for the night when they knocked off.
Underneath her light dusting of London’s finest soot there shot the odd gleam of recently applied paint, which told me she had but recently emerged from a graving dock and a glance at her topsides and waterline where her red boot-topping fought for attention with the unspeakable detritus that had accumulated between her hull and the dock-side. I noticed all this during the process of dragging my kit aboard: one trunk, a suitcase and a sextant box.
Altogether, she looked like an ex-sealer, being too small for a former whaler; a miniature version of Scott’s Discovery, Bruce’s Scotia or Shackleton’s Nimrod, and she gave off the smell of a vessel employed in some such predatory trade. I thought with a wry smile of my father’s enthusiasm for getting this appointment, so I had better explain how it all came about, because on the face of it, it was incongruous. Unlike many mercantile marine cadets and apprentices of my generation, I did not serve my indentures in sail; I was a steam man and proud of it, having been bound apprentice to Alfred Holt & Co. of Liverpool, owners of the Clytemnestra, the Antigone and about a hundred other fine vessels of similar Homeric nomenclature that made up the Blue Funnel Line.
They called us midshipmen too, just to inject us with the necessary sense of elitism to carry us through four years of rust chipping, painting, wire splicing and learning seamanship and navigation before casting us out into the wilderness. You couldn’t hold officer’s rank in the Blue Funnel Line without a master mariner’s certificate. To obtain this required several years of sea-time and the acquisition of both a second mate’s and a first mate’s certificate of competency on the way, and you couldn’t get this sea-time without going to sea in anything that floated. The objective was to get the sea-time in as soon as possible, so one’s best option was to get one’s second mate’s ticket, then find a berth on a tramp ship. One could be away for a two-year voyage, by which time you could sit for first mate’s, then do a second and qualify to sit for master. Things have changed a bit since then, thanks to Adolf and his gang of hooligans, but in those days the slump in world trade after the first war didn’t help and I found myself kicking my heels at home with my parents in Surrey in the autumn of twenty-five, aged twenty-two and with less than fifty quid in the bank, money needed to sustain me during my next ticket leave, the big one, master’s, with which I could rejoin Holt’s.
My parents had never been keen on my going to sea; I was expected to qualify as a doctor, and follow my esteemed pater into a rather successful general practice, but I had neither the brains nor the application and had been too early seduced by a lot of romantic literature about the sea. I should like to have gone into sail, like most lads did, but my father procured me a place aboard the training-ship-cum-minor public school, HMS Conway, on the Mersey, where two strong influences came to work upon my future. Where I had failed at school, I found myself quite good aboard the Conway. I won a couple of prizes and came under the purview of Holt’s, who put money into the old wooden wreck and regarded their droits de seigneur was to take the pick of the cadets as middies into their Blue Funnel liners. We also emerged as midshipmen in the Royal Naval Reserve, which is, I suppose, the kicking-off point by which I am, today, in command of that tin box of a corvette whose name you are quite illegally in possession of.
Anyway, there I was in the leafy hills of Surrey, chewing my intestines with anxiety, irritating my oh-so-successful father – ‘diseases are not dependent upon world trade, my boy. They are a constant, like death and taxes, blah, blah,’ a note of delicate protest from my mother at the other end of the breakfast table – and then he suddenly sat bolt upright.
‘Good God!’ He peered round the pages of the newspaper, The Courier, you’ll be pleased to note and commanded us to listen before reading out loud: ‘Navigating officers required for expedition to the Arctic, apply Box 24, The Courier, Fleet Street…’ Then he collapsed the paper in his lap and stared pointedly at me. ‘Well?’
I took the hint; a letter of application was in the late morning post and, two days later I was ushered into a waiting-room in The Courier’s Fleet Street head-quarters, which you know well. To be truthful it was not what I had expected, thinking only that The Courier was the vehicle by which the advertisement
had been promulgated but it was obvious from the presence of eight other men, mostly young like myself, but some older and desperate, family men whose economic circumstances were increasingly dire as the world headed for the Wall Street Crash, that there was more going on than met the eye. Shortly after I sat down the tall figure of Nat Gardner entered the room. I noticed he had a rolled copy of The Courier under his arm. I could see its red-top thingamajig, you know the winged figure and then I realised that several other candidates also carried the bloody paper, and I chid myself for my stupidity in not purchasing a copy but, as a seaman, reading a daily newspaper was a luxury I had never acquired and I felt a wave of resentment that my father had not thought of it. Anyway, it was too late now. It was good to see Gardner. He was another Blue Flue middie and we knew each other, not well, but well enough to express genuine greetings and an exchange of commiseration at our collective circumstances.
‘I won’t have a snowball’s hope in Hell,’ he said in his booming voice, looking round the collection of mercantile marine hopefuls. ‘What’ve you got, a first mate’s?’ I nodded, somewhat embarrassed at Nat’s failure to understand the occasional necessity for sotto voce communications. ‘I’ve only got second mate’s…’
‘And there are master mariners here,’ a voice interjected with some asperity from a thin man sitting in the corner with a blue gabardine raincoat crushed in his lap. A moment later I was relieved from this tense atmosphere when a trim young lady, Doris, as I learned later, your father’s private secretary, called out my name. ‘Mr Adams? Please follow me.’
I left the room with Nat’s hissed ‘Good luck’ in my ears and followed the lovely Doris into a lift which whisked us up to your father’s private office where I was offered a chair set in front of his desk.
Besides your father, one other man sat at the end of the desk. He was round faced, rather flushed about the gills with those unpleasant whiskers some men affect on their cheek-bones despite their being called ‘bugger’s grips’. Your father introduced himself and forbore from mentioning any previous contact.
‘This is Commander Hanslip,’ he added, and the red faced chap rose and extended his hand. So I first met Herbert Henry Hanslip, or “H.H.H” as he liked to be thought of in his more Shackeltonian moments. Unfortunately he was to prove no Shackleton, not even a pale shadow of the great man. The two of them quizzed me about my experience, Hanslip being obviously put-off by my lack of familiarity with sailing-ships and I left after about twenty minutes firmly convinced that I had no chance of the job. I did not pass through the waiting-room again, so had no chance to say anything to Nat Gardner and, as neither of us had the other’s address, I presumed contact was lost, or at least dropped for the time being, a familiar occurrence to officers of the mercantile marine.
‘How d’you get on?’ my father asked over dinner that evening and I explained, with some heat, that if he hadn’t sent me to Conway and I had served my time in sail I might have a job. He didn’t understand, and I don’t think he wanted to understand, the nuances that affect the career of merchant Jack. Anyway gloom descended upon the Adams’ household and the following morning I began to write a letter to Their Lordships at the Admiralty in an attempt to find a posting in the Royal Naval Reserve to which I had a tentative entrée thanks to my having been a midshipmite at Conway.
My heart wasn’t really in it. Somehow that voyage to the Arctic had wormed its way under my skin and I was decidedly irritated to consider myself unqualified. Like all young men I was full of hope and optimism and took no thought about Hanslip, whose function I had not even considered, but I was stirred by the notion of going north, all my previous experience as a midshipman in the Blue Funnel Line being confined to the flying-fish trades of the Far East – give or take the odd typhoon – or the dull drudgery of tramping with coal or railway lines to India and carrying jute gunnies somewhere else between the two Tropics.
I was chewing the end of my fountain pen when I heard the door-bell ring and the maid’s voice and then my mother’s. The next thing I knew my mother called me and handed me a brown envelope with the remark that I had received a telegram.
It read: ‘POSITION OF SECOND OFFICER OFFERED STOP IF INTERESTED REPORT THE COURIER TEN TOMORROW STOP SOUTHMOORE’.
I handed it to my mother and she smiled. ‘That’s wonderful,’ she responded smiling. Adding typically, ‘your father will be so pleased.’
When I was shown into The Courier’s waiting room a second time that week there were just three of us, the chief, second and third officers, appointed to the expedition. To my delight my junior was to be Nat Gardner while the man selected to be our chief mate was a complete stranger; I had not even noticed him at the interview but he rose and introduced himself as Alan Tomkins.
‘I’ve a master’s certificate in sail,’ he said quietly. I recall having the impression there was a good deal more to Mr Tomkins that that enviable qualification, but perhaps I have misremembered. What I do recall with perfect clarity was that he was a powerfully built man of about forty, with deeply lined and weather-beaten features, severely scraped by the daily application of a razor, a thin mouth and incredibly blue eyes. A dusting of yellow hair was cut short and his hand-shake was painful. I could tell that even the tall and ever ebullient Nat was impressed as he blurted out ‘we’re both steam-ship men,’ adding, ‘from the Blue Funnel Line,’ as if to compensate for our obvious short-comings.
‘First-rate company,’ Tomkins said. ‘Nothing to be ashamed of. I gather we’ll be handling a barque. You’ll soon get the hang of it.’
I was less sure of this but further conversation was terminated by the lovely Doris who arrived to summon us to the presence. We travelled up in the lift to your father’s office where, once again, he and Hanslip were waiting for us. Three chairs were arranged in a half-circle before your dad’s desk and he wasted no time in briefing us.
‘Well gentlemen,’ he began, ‘congratulations on your appointments. I won’t expatiate on your individual virtues, but Commander Hanslip and I have our reasons for selecting you. The Commander will fill you in later this morning on the detail, but I’ll brief you now’ I remember he looked at his watch and I thought: ‘this chap’s got a newspaper to get out…’
Anyway, he explained what all this was about in fairly flattering terms regarding our success in being appointed to a vessel that he had especially bought for a voyage to the Arctic. ‘You’ll all have heard about the Andrée expedition,’ he began and I have to confess I had no idea what he was talking about. ‘And you’ll know it disappeared somewhere north of Spitsbergen sometime in 1897. Its mysterious disappearance caused a lot of heart-ache in Sweden, somewhat akin to the loss of Scot and his companions in Antarctica did here in 1912.
‘About three months ago,’ he went on to say, ‘I was approached by Madame Blavatskoya, the well-known White Russian medium whose remarkable talents have allowed many of us to communicate with those lost on the Somme and elsewhere. She told me she knew of the location of Salomon Andrée and his fellows; that it would be an act of great human compassion to recover the bodies and ease the national ignorance of the Swedes, and that such an act would redound to the credit of Great Britain. Being a newspaperman,’ he added with a smile that I suppose was intended to find an understanding in our comprehension, ‘only added to my desire to do it and to make a scoop.
‘To this end I arranged for Commander Hanslip here to purchase a suitable vessel and have it dry-docked and fully refitted to his own specification. Some advice on the matter was forthcoming from my good friend Richard Holt,’ here he looked at Nat and me, ‘and as a result the ship now lies in the Surrey Commercial Dock and I am relying upon you gentlemen to get her up into the Arctic Ocean by the time the ice thaws and you can reach the location revealed to me by Madam Blavatskoya. As you will understand, this information is, at the present moment, under embargo, and I want it to be clearly understood that you are working for me personally and that you owe me a certain loyalty not
to disclose any of this to anyone, not even your nearest and dearest. To this end I have avoided drawing attention to the vessel which is not, alas, renamed ‘Courier,’ as I should have liked, but retains her old name: Alert. However, once you are on your way, The Courier will bear a notice of your departure and I shall manage the flow of news personally to create the desired effect. To get the copy back here I have a man from the Marconi Company joining and one of my staff reporters and a photographer will also be joining you, so a couple of stops will furnish me with some photographs to whet the public’s appetite.
‘Owing to the necessity of preparing the vessel properly you three have to know all this before-hand, but no-one outside this room has any idea what we are about. As far as the dock-yard company were concerned the vessel is a scientific expedition going to examine certain magnetic anomalies in the waters of the Davis Strait. I have, however, asked the President and Council of the Royal Geographical and the Royal Zoological Societies if they would like to send anyone north this summer with a view to carrying out general observations and they suggested observations of the Northern Right Whale among other low-key matters which would provide experience for a party of three scientists who will, I am given to understand, be drawn from one or other or our universities.
‘As far as all other plans are concerned, Commander Hanslip has the matter in hand and you will take all directions from him as he will be in full charge of the expedition. Any questions may be directed to him shortly. All I now require from you,’ and here your father picked up a typed document from his desk, pressed the intercom buzzer to bring the lovely Doris into his office, and concluded, ‘is your signatures as to the confidentiality of your service.’
Without any further debate we all obediently rose, scanned the brief document the wording of which swore us to secrecy, signed our names and stood and watched as Doris witnessed them all. I noticed that she gave Nat more than one glance and guessed that he had made a mental note of her address. It turned out that I was not wrong!
Cold Truth Page 2
