by David Black
Redoubtable had spent the previous seven years cruising the Med, acting as bar and ballroom to an endless calendar of diplomatic engagements. But now war had come, and she had sailed home to once again defend Britannia against the Hun. Her wardroom, no longer a focus for fripperies, was a place where serious men sat down to address their noble calling, sanctified by 300 years of unbroken tradition: to keep the sea lanes open, defend the Empire and its trade, clear the oceans of the enemy, and as they were indeed doing now, to carry the army to the enemy’s backyard and keep it there, supplied and supported, until victory was won. The talk would be of tactics, gunnery drills; serious stuff. At least that was what Harry had envisaged. He saw his posting, not as an entry to some floating club, but as a pass to the front row of the coming war at sea. He would sit down with these men, share their deliberations.
The reality had been somewhat different. For a start, everybody was half drunk most of the time, singing songs round a piano like extras in some vaudeville revue. Except here the parody was real. Even the backdrop seemed a mockery. The ship might be sailing to war, but the wardroom hadn’t lost its flotilla of plump floral-patterned sofas or its ornate tables for games of bridge. No concession had been made to more functional, warlike furnishings. And beneath the jollity there was the pecking order, the jostling for position and the undercurrent of bullying. That Harry could read this etiquette easily was no particular testimony to his intuition. It was simply because he was not remotely part of it. There was a French word which summed up the manner in which he was treated better than any English phrase: froideur. Not even his teenage ingenuousness could cocoon him from the front of cold air every time he walked in to this bloody sixth-form common room.
It was being on the outside that allowed all other insight to follow, let him read their thoughts. Nothing personal, old chap, but you just don’t belong. Fine on the bridge of a minesweeper tootling about some remote estuary, or on a motor gunboat in the Channel, or in charge of a gun crew aboard some newly refitted armed merchant cruiser, but not here in a capital ship’s wardroom. So it had been a pretty lonely life for Harry, these past few months, aboard Redoubtable.
There was a movement out of the corner of his eye. He glanced up and saw the Petty Officer opposite rising with that expression of naval blankness that always presaged doom, and heard his hiss, not even a whisper: ‘Christ! It’s the Bloke and the Jaunty!’
Harry jerked his head round, and there, in the distance, striding up the length of the deck from behind the A-turret barbette was indeed the Commander and the Master-at-Arms. Oh dear. Behind Harry, in a flurry of seamless movement, cigarettes were being extinguished and palmed for a later date, as the damage-control party shot to their feet and attempted a semblance of naval readiness.
The ‘Bloke’ was Commander Maitland, a tall, stooped, imperious figure, who breathed from a rarified atmosphere. He was the executive officer, second only to the Captain, and his job was to be the Captain’s representative on Earth; to know the Captain’s will, and make it so. Beside him, the ‘Jaunty’, Master-at-Arms Beddoe, seemed equally tall, but with a scrawny, more menacing mien. He was the most senior non-commissioned officer aboard. Technically, Harry was his superior. The Jaunty’s rank carried with it responsibility only for the crew’s discipline, but it would be a truly foolhardy junior officer who would cross him. This one had a reputation for being a right hard-horse, even by naval standards. From Commander Maitland’s gimlet glare, and the Master-at-Arms’ openly smug fury, Harry knew he was in trouble. His throat went dry and to his surprise he began to feel a cold bead of sweat developing along his hairline.
BUDUD-DDUMMM!
Another salvo, as if to announce their arrival. The same physical shock wave blow hit Harry, but the Bloke’s and the Jaunty’s strides never faltered. And then they were on them.
Unprompted, Harry’s Petty Officer called the damage-control party to attention. Salutes were snapped . . . then followed a contemptuous delay before either Commander or Master-at-Arms responded. Not a word was spoken. Mainly, even Harry realised, because there were formalities to be observed. Harry was the officer in charge, and so could not be bawled out in front of his men. Equally his men could not be bawled out in front of him. Commander Maitland, in his gold-braided cap, immaculate watch coat with its three intimidatingly gleaming solid-gold rings, wrapped in his white muffler, surveyed them all for a long moment, before turning on his heel and walking off a few paces.
‘Mr Gilmour. A moment if you please.’ It wasn’t a question.
Harry leapt after him. The Commander stopped, so that Harry had to get around him to make his salute.
‘Sir!’ said Harry in his best naval clip.
Another silence, then: ‘This is one of His Majesty’s ships,’ said the Commander, each word snapped off in steel, ‘at Action Stations. Engaging the enemy.’
Harry could tell he wanted to go on. But he didn’t. This close Harry could see for all the impervious formality of the man, he was really not that old, but he was very very angry and struggling to control his anger. Harry managed a quiet ‘sir’, while remaining rigidly at attention.
Eventually the Commander said: ‘Stand easy.’
A pause.
‘We will speak later. Meanwhile you might consider your dispositions, Mr Gilmour.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
The Commander had not finished: ‘Should this part of the ship be hit, Mr Gilmour, your men of the damage-control party must inevitably go up with it. And therefore be in no position to control any damage that might ensue. Might I suggest that you remove the men into the cover of the A-turret barbette.’
The A-turret barbette was the armour-plated cylinder linking Redoubtable’s forward 15-inch gun turret with its magazines below decks, and therefore excellent cover in the event of an enemy hit on the fo’c’sle.
‘Aye aye, sir!’
And again Harry leapt to comply. As he marched up to his men, the Petty Officer was turning away from his conversation with Master-at-Arms Beddoe, and not looking at all as discomfited as Harry had been expecting. The Jaunty was looking, well, quite jaunty. The sailors as ever, were po-faced. Something important had passed between these men of the lower decks, and more than ever Harry felt judged and humiliated by this new world to which he had been condemned.
Chapter Two
HMS Redoubtable turned her bow down the fjord, and with her gaggle of escorting destroyers fanned out ahead, she began piling on the knots, making for the open sea. Her vast grey eminence swept through the faded light that passed for night at these latitudes, as her crew secured from Action Stations. In five hours she would rejoin the powerful covering force that had been dispatched from the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow to cover Anglo-French landings farther south around the port of Trondheim, scheduled for two days time.
Following her to sea was another battleship, HMS Warspite, and her destroyer escorts. Between them they had chased and cornered a substantial German naval force of destroyers and torpedo boats in the labyrinth of fjords around Narvik, and reduced them to half-submerged piles of mangled metal. In a series of gun duels the German threat to the landings had been removed, and the German troops their warships had carried to Narvik had been stranded ashore, cut off without ammunition or supplies. It had been a successful operation, and the atmosphere aboard Redoubtable was distinctly upbeat.
After almost twenty-four continuous hours at Action Stations, hunger and the dire need for a drink were enough to numb Harry’s mortification over events in the fo’c’sle. So after seeing his party stood down and all the equipment stowed, he made straight for the wardroom.
It was already heaving when he got there, with every other officer aboard bent on a similar task. Harry squeezed in, excusing himself to a succession of disapproving grimaces as he sought to navigate through the throng nearer to where the stewards darted in and out of the galley area with their trays of beers and gins and steaming bacon and sausage sandwiches. Harry wanted beer and b
acon rolls and after all these weeks aboard Redoubtable, he wanted just for once not to be at the back of the bloody queue. It was a forlorn hope, but he was taking it anyway, even though he and all the other junior officers, the ‘Subs’ and the Midshipmen, did not figure. In fact, they were lucky to be in here at all. Aboard a capital ship, the place for ‘Subs’ like Harry, and ‘Snotties’ – as the Midshipmen were universally known – was the gunroom. But it had been cleared months before Harry had joined Redoubtable and was now a makeshift infirmary in preparation for casualties, when they eventually came. A generous relaxing of the rules had been approved, ‘it being wartime, and all that’, so the ‘Subs’ and the ‘Snotties’ got to mess with the gentlemen.
It wasn’t the only mess rule being relaxed that night: dress code had gone by the board, and he was in a sea of crumpled watch jackets and even the odd duffel coat. For once he was unlikely to be picked up on some obscure breach of etiquette by a bored mess senior. The sense of relief, coupled with hot wafts of fried food, was beginning to intoxicate him to the point where he was forgetting the speed at which news could move through the ship.
Harry hadn’t known the Bloke and the Jaunty routinely toured the ship at Action Stations to make sure the ship was closed up and ready to fight; but he should have known that talk of his disgrace would have preceded him. Despite the mere matter of weeks he’d been aboard Redoubtable, he should have been prepared. He wasn’t. Instead he was listening with a certain amused detachment to Lieutenant Turl-d’Urfe, that imbecile Swordfish pilot, as he recounted his bird’s-eye view and critical role in the past action. The pilot was at the far end of the throng, leaning against the piano, snifter in hand, in full flow, describing the tight little side fjord where the Jerry torpedo boats had been holed up.
‘A proper troll’s quarry, the place was; the way in was through a pinch of channel, then into a dogleg before you hit any open water,’ the pilot drawled with affected schoolboy sangfroid. ‘Far too risky for Hester and Hecate to try and force.’ HMS Hester and HMS Hecate were the two destroyers sent to act as ‘stoppers’ in the bottle-shaped fjord where the Germans lay trapped. ‘They’d have been coming at Jerry from the bowler’s end, and of course, cunning little Hun that he is, he’d thrown out quite a nifty little fielding plan. There was one of his tubs at Square Leg, another two at Gully and the rest at Third Man. Jerry wasn’t going to make it easy for us, buggers didn’t have the common decency to lash themselves all together alongside the bunkering jetty . . . so that a couple of good straddles would have blown the whole lot to buggeration.’
But Redoubtable had sent her shells over anyway, and the Swordfish’s observer, perched in his bit of the cockpit, behind his preposterous pilot, had observed the fall of shot, each shell forming little clusters of white blossom bursting from the dull black waters. And with each blossom, he’d radioed back his corrections to Redoubtable’s Gunnery Officer, instructing him to march each salvo across the anchored enemy, until each ship was left split and burning.
The Swordfish had circled too high for the German’s piffling anti-aircraft guns to threaten her, and Narvik had been too far away from the German forward fighter strips for the ships below to summon fighter cover. It had been a very one-sided action but the wardroom didn’t want to know that, they wanted more glory. One of the pilot’s audience – a Gunnery Officer – said, ‘Stooging around up there, you’re lucky one of our 15-inchers didn’t tickle your fanny on the way past.’
‘No chance, old chap,’ said the pilot, with an elegant sweep of his gin glass, ‘could see ’em coming. Ups-a-daisy, like a ruddy great dustbin, and plain as day, hung about a bit right at the top, just like they was getting their bearings, and then downs-a-daisy. Ka-boom!’
One torpedo boat had apparently tried to dodge the leisurely, systematic smashing of the big shells. ‘Whipped up her anchor and went off like a scalded cat,’ said the pilot, ‘but Binky did his observer stuff’ – he gestured at his fellow airman, a curtailed saturnine youth – ‘called in a tight little salvo right on Slips, and the bugger steamed right into it, stately swan to ruptured duck in one easy wiggle!’
Everyone laughed, and as the pilot surveyed this further triumph, Harry was foolish enough to let their eyes meet. The pilot smiled, and then in a stage whisper said: ‘Well lookee here, it’s “wavy”! Jerry didn’t trouble you much from what we’ve heard. A little smoko and a snooze, was it? In the face of the enemy? They shoot you for that, you know. Says so in the Articles of War, as enshrined in the Naval Discipline Act 1866. Obviously not done it yet.’ His grin broadened. ‘Still, plenty of time, eh?’
Harry let his eyes drop. He couldn’t help it. It was instinctive; but anyone thinking he would turn away as usual like the silly little boy they took him for was about to be disabused.
When Harry had walked into that Glasgow recruiting office a couple of days after Chamberlain’s speech, he had wanted to serve, to do his bit. His motives were pure, patriotic and moral. He might not have been long out of school trousers, but he was well-read, sharp, bright, and able to see for himself that Mr Churchill’s warnings of a new Dark Age threatening to engulf Europe were far from empty rhetoric; and he was determined to step up, to be one of those to stand against that evil tide. Yes, it would be a lie to say his resolve was not without all the attendant dreams of youthful derring-do, the flights of fancy, the movies running in his head of himself aboard white-hulled warships against a tropical ocean, hunting down some German commerce raider; of himself against the background of a bridge, sextant pressed to a keen eye, ‘shooting’ noon; bent over a chart table, pricking the chart; the Captain asking, ‘What’s our position, Mr Gilmour?’ And him pointing to that tiny nick in a sea of featureless blue, replying, ‘Right here, sir.’
But Harry Gilmour was not just a romantic fool, nor was he some inadequate, unformed youth, unequal – and never likely to be equal – to the challenges the war and the navy might throw at him. The real Harry Gilmour Redoubtable’s officers chose not see was at heart a serious, self-possessed young man, prepared to learn, eager to learn the duties expected of him. And right now, in Harry’s eyes, if anyone was failing in their duties and responsibilities it was this wardroom full of hide-bound clowns, who should be training and preparing him to lead his men and fight this ship, instead of behaving as if they were still in the common room of some English public school, still lolling in their little rituals of bullying and oppression. Harry had had enough.
Indeed, if any of them had been paying attention to their unwelcome interloper, the officers of Redoubtable’s wardroom might have spotted a certain stiffening in his stance. Harry’s new resolve had been spotted, however, but not by a wardroom member. Not all the officers were in their Action Stations’ kit; one, behind the piano, a Lieutenant, was in his dress jacket, on the shoulder of which he sported a little braided cord confection called an aguillette.
Peter Dumaresq was a Flag Lieutenant; aide-de-camp to a Rear Admiral who flew his flag of command from Redoubtable’s foremast. Harry had never actually set eyes on such a mythical creature as a Rear Admiral, who lived on the flag bridge, because flag officers were not part of any ship’s company where they flew their flag, nor were their staffs. They had no authority over the day-to-day running of a ship. Their job was the tactical command of a squadron, in this case, made up of Redoubtable, her escort of destroyers, and any other naval unit that might come into its area of operations. Which was why Lieutenant Dumaresq might be in the wardroom, but he was not part of it.
He’d been only half listening to the pilot, whom he found tedious, but his head was up now, alerted by a sudden subsiding of the general hubbub; and he couldn’t help but observe that some kind of confrontation was taking place between the damned flyboy and some junior officer by the galley door. He leant to see that the butt of the intrepid aviator’s joke was that RNVR ‘Sub’, foisted on Redoubtable several weeks ago for reasons known only to god and the Admiralty.
Since they’d sailed
from Scapa the Lieutenant had been watching the young man with a mixture of curiosity and compassion. The lad had been making heavy weather of fitting in, and it had been apparent for all to see that only a little of the heavy weather had been of his making. You couldn’t help but notice how his mere presence had divided the wardroom; the officers who hadn’t ignored him, had baited him. Not surprising really; the lad had arrived with a sort of insouciant, self-deprecating manner that was too contrived, trying to hide his obvious assumption that he had a right to be here. He was here, that was true, and he was quite charming if you took the time; but it was his assumption that he expected to be accepted. Well, none of it washed on the Redoubtable; this particular band of brothers had earned their places in this berth the hard way through the rites of passage as administered by Britannia Naval College, Dartmouth. They were career officers, one and all, bound in a Masonic-like hierarchy, with all its attendant codes and obligations, and as far as they were concerned, this whippersnapper, this arriviste, hadn’t earned the right to breathe the same air.
Indeed, the Lieutenant, from the same school, could see their point, but there was a bigger issue at stake over this RNVR youth’s presence; before this war was over, there would be a lot more like him in the ranks of the navy, and how the navy was going to fit them in was likely to be crucial as to whether they were going to win this war or not.
On hearing the pilot’s outburst, all the officers in the piano corner, had followed the line of his sneery gaze, and his sneery words, and were now looking at the young man, their own faces starting to sport contemptuous smirks too. The Lieutenant had heard some muttering that the lad had yet again fluffed his duties somewhere on the ship during Action Stations. Alas, this ‘fluffing’ was nothing new: the bits of the ship that the lad’s ‘clean ship’ parties had cleaned were, on inspection, never quite clean enough; when he did paperwork for the Paymaster Lieutenant Commander, it was never quite right; he kept asking why this and not that? And suggesting, ‘Wouldn’t this way be better?’ And when he was sent on errands, he always seemed to get lost. The contempt his shipmates dished out in punishment was nothing new either. Until now, this lad had taken all their brickbats with a sort of resigned stoicism. That was how it had appeared to Dumaresq. This time, however, something was different. Instead of turning away, after a hesitant flutter, the lad held the pilot’s stare, and with a composed expression that looked all the more dangerous for its suggestion of polite inquiry. And now he was shouldering his way through the crush of officers, and his shouldering was anything but polite. My god! The thought flashed into the Lieutenant’s mind: surely he isn’t going to hit him!
