by David Black
Dumaresq sat back as if to regard the impact of his words, while Harry contemplated the image of ‘Jack’ throwing generations of corned beef tins overboard until the ship itself was resting on the pile.
Dumaresq took a folded sheet of paper from his pocket. ‘So what are you doing in this museum then, Gilmour?’ he asked. ‘When there’s a bloody war to be won?’
Harry spluttered, ‘You’ve got a damn cheek!’
Dumaresq laughed and offered Harry the sheet.
‘One of the advantages of being in a staff job is that you get to see all the signal traffic first. That there,’ he gestured to the paper, ‘came through while we were under sailing orders at Scapa. I brought it with me in the hope I might find someone for whom it might be of some use.’
Harry ran his eye over the paper. It was to be posted on ships’ notice boards, a request for any junior officers interested in an accelerated training programme to make them proficient in celestial navigation. Harry suddenly felt his heart pounding. This wasn’t a class on basic coast-hugging, the stuff he’d picked up crewing on rich men’s yachts. This was real, this was deep-sea stuff, the stuff that would take you round the world. He would at last be able to use that sextant for what it was meant, instead of just shooting church steeples and lighthouses. The one Sir Alexander Scrimgeour had given him when he signed up to become a sailor. Harry looked up at Dumaresq, who had a little conspiratorial smile playing about his eyes.
‘As you rightly surmised, young Gilmour, you are in deep trouble with the Commander. Very serious trouble. So my advice to you, as a former “Snotty” myself, who came up the hard way, is that you head him off. Now I want you to listen to me very carefully.’
Chapter Three
Harry stood on the Portsmouth Harbour station jetty and watched the Gosport ferry chug through the April drizzle towards him. It was getting late – 20:00 hours – and the wet gloom was giving way to proper darkness. Two old First World War vintage V & W-class destroyers wallowed, lashed together out in the fairway off Burrow Island, and a motor gunboat puttered in the distance, angling in towards the base proper, obscured behind North Corner. On the skyline, the masts of HMS Victory and their tangle of rigging stood out against the lowering sky. To seaward, a low clag of sullen cloud hung over Fort Blockhouse and The Point, retreating to merge with the narrow band of sea that was visible from where Harry stood. At his feet was the oily wash of the harbour, sluggish, moving the harbour crap with a slothful languor that Harry found almost mesmerising. There was little of interest within Britain’s premier naval base on this night, but looking at what there was took his mind off the events of the past two weeks.
The ferry nudged up to the jetty in a welter of churned water and the gangway was shoved aboard to allow less than a dozen sailors, buttoned up in macs and toting kitbags, to disembark. When they’d filed off, Harry quickly adjusting his collar against the rain, hefted his own kit and joined the small gaggle of dockyard workers going aboard. Until now, it had only been by concentrating on the small and the mundane that Harry found he could cope with life, but as the little ferry nosed away from the Portsmouth pier, he started picking over the events that had propelled him here.
Harry had indeed listened to what Peter Dumaresq had told him in the wardroom of HMS Redoubtable, in that other lifetime. He had gone back to his cabin and completed his transfer request, careful to employ all the phrases dictated by the Flag Lieutenant. He had personally handed it to the Leading Writer in the Commander’s office, before going on watch again.
Events had moved swiftly after that. Harry had expected a summons to see Commander Maitland over his handling of the damage-control party once Redoubtable had cleared the Norwegian coast and rejoined the covering force. And he expected it to be rough. He was not alone. One of the other Subs who shared his cabin, and who was not as resolutely hostile as some, had grimly commiserated: ‘At school we used to tell chaps up before the Head to stuff a Collected Shakespeare down the arse of their flannels. But I fear the Bloke might be going to hit you with something a bit more substantial than a cane, old chap.’
When the first Lieutenant came for him to deliver the expected summons, he was curt, precise and scrupulously polite. Not a trace of his customary flowery abuse. It boded ill. All the pre-prepared constructions Harry carried in his head on how to play this were shouldered aside by the nausea-inducing vision of how his parents would react to his court martial. His remote, austere, academic teacher father – his wholly, resolutely pacifist father – would find Harry’s disgrace comic. Harry could almost hear his low, sardonic laughter. And his mother? Her solace and endless understanding would be much worse.
His mind was so a-swim he didn’t even notice that the first Lieutenant, after delivering the summons, had immediately swerved away, heading for the wardroom bar, showing no intention of accompanying him to the Commander’s lair, as would have been the case if some formal ambush awaited him. In fact, so circumspect had the first Lieutenant been, that instead of Harry’s departure from the wardroom being followed by gallows-stares from the assembled officers, no one noticed him slip out to go and face his destiny.
The triviality of his offence, in the real world, compared to its gravity seen through the prism of military discipline, had brought a stasis to his thought processes. He entered the Commander’s ante-room and told the Leading Writer who he was. The sailor had risen at once to rap and then push open the door, announcing, ‘Sub-Lieutenant Gilmour here to see you, sir’. He remembered hearing ‘Send him in’, and then himself squeezing past, still not yet ready to face the Commander; thinking to himself, almost panicky, what do I do now? A voice in his head answered, Come smartly to attention and snap off a salute. He was already at attention, his right arm on the point of rising, before he saw that the Commander was not wearing a cap. Naval custom dictated that he could not salute, must not salute, as the Commander, not wearing a cap, could not return it. Harry stilled his arm.
The shock of such a close shave with yet another naval indiscretion stopped Harry from noticing at first that there weren’t any other officers in the Commander’s tight little cubby. He saw a tidy, compact space filled with a desk, and behind it, the angular, doom-laden scowl of the Commander, who looked a little too big for the cabin. On the blotter in front of him was Harry’s transfer request.
Later, Harry remembered being told to sit down and take his cap off. After that there had been no preamble. The Commander just launched right into him.
‘Our nation is in a war for its very survival,’ he said. ‘HMS Redoubtable and her crew, the only thing allowing them to function as a fighting unit, in wartime, at any time, is discipline. There is a lot of rot talked about discipline. Rot. The truth, the essence, the only thing anyone has to understand is the rigid responsibility of officers, and their insistence on all duties being carried out in a military fashion, by all the crew, at all times. Nothing else matters. Failure to understand that and comply can lead to only one consequence: defeat.’
And then a pause. Harry remembered the pause, dropped in as if to underline the fact that the ideal had just been nailed to the mast. It was a pause in which the Commander’s baleful gaze announced his disappointment.
He then began to tick off the long list of Harry’s failings; exactly how he’d failed to measure up to ‘the requirements of the service’. Chief among them was Harry’s almost stubborn inability to comprehend the concept of ‘in a naval fashion’.
But after that the lash went out of his voice, and this gave Harry hope. Everything seemed to point to clemency: the softening of the tone; the fact that the Commander was bare-headed, behind his desk, and no one else was present. Could the Commander’s rant be ‘more in sorrow than in anger’? A good wigging, then his request for transfer to the navigation class to be approved? There was a moment of relief before the other possibility occurred to Harry: that this wasn’t a ‘let’s clear the air and start again’ moment; this was in fact Pontius Pilate speaking. The Com
mander was washing his hands of Harry. The realisation came as a thump.
He’d felt as if a void had opened up beneath him; that the Commander was not only about to tear up his transfer request . . . he had decided Harry’s conduct had been far more grievous than he was prepared to, or indeed competent enough to, adjudicate on himself, and that Harry was about to be passed up the chain of retribution, to be dealt with by a higher authority. A flash of the woodcut of Admiral Byng being executed aboard his flagship after his failure to defend Menorca from the French in 1756 passed before Harry’s gaze. If they could shoot Byng pour encourager les autres, what might they not do to a sloppy Sub-Lieutenant? The Commander fingered Harry’s transfer request, seemingly lost in thought.
In fact, the Commander appreciated the Royal Navy’s urgent, nay, chronic need for junior officers. He understood that it could only be met by cramming civilians through a sausage machine, and he was resigned to the fact that, one day, in an indeterminate future, many of those hostilities-only officers would end up aboard the service’s major fighting ships. That one day they might even command. But what the Commander did not understand was any need to accelerate that process. He had no doubt this war was going to last as long as the last one. Plenty of time for those wavy-navy chaps to learn the ropes in smaller ships. Yet they had foisted this hapless young man on to his ship, practically from his mother’s tit. The lower deck had ragged him, the junior officers had ostracised him, and the Jimmy, the first Lieutenant, hadn’t a clue what to do with him. The young man was utterly devoid of any kind of naval gumption. And then there was that bloody shambles with the fo’c’sle damage-control party.
Their lordships had sent this young man to the Redoubtable as an experiment and he’d ended up being made a fool of by that martinet Master-at-Arms and his coterie of favourites. They’d set the lad up for a fall. What a jolly jape! Except the Commander couldn’t just leave it at that. Because it wasn’t just that silly little bugger Gilmour who’d been the butt of their insubordination. It was Sub-Lieutenant Gilmour. Because it wasn’t the man you saluted, it was the rank. When they stuck two fingers up to Harry, they did it to every officer in the Redoubtable. And that was conduct prejudicial to naval discipline, and in the face of the enemy to boot. It could not be allowed to pass.
Except that their lordships would be looking for progress reports on Sub-Lieutenant Gilmour, not to read his name in details of a court martial. They would be looking to read of the success of their experiment, to see how best to integrate this new caste of officer into the fighting strength of the fleet. Alas, the report that the Commander had been faced with writing was that Sub-Lieutenant Gilmour was in serious disciplinary doo-doo . . . right up until this little piece of paper had landed in his in-tray. No longer. A way out had presented itself.
From the moment he’d picked up Gilmour’s request, the Commander had wondered who had written it for him. It certainly wasn’t his own work. There had been a seasoned hand behind it. And for that, the Commander was truly grateful. With this request he could now salvage the reputation of HMS Redoubtable, her wardroom and his own career. Sub-Lieutenant Gilmour was seeking advancement, and to achieve it meant he must leave this ship. The Commander was not about to stand in his way. He could then deal with the Jaunty in his own good time.
Harry, of course, suspected none of this. After his royal dressing-down, he had emerged from the Commander’s office having suffered nothing further than a homily on how he must apply himself more diligently to the cultivation of officer qualities, and an assurance that his transfer had been approved. His necessary orders would be cut and awaiting him here in this office, the minute Redoubtable had picked up the buoy in Scapa.
Meanwhile, the war went on. On the run south, stories of their ‘battle’ were told again and again. Harry remembered the unreality of listening to the talk; a battle that he had undoubtedly been in, but personally knew nothing of. No one mentioned the German sailors on the end of those ‘ruddy great dustbins’. Wonder as he might, Harry couldn’t even begin to conjure what it must have been like for them. Their experience of this engagement must have been completely different from his. The whole war was like that. According to the BBC news, the army and RAF bods ashore in Norway were fighting toe-to-toe with Jerry. Yet, in what must inevitably be, sooner or later, the main theatre, in France, armies faced each other across defensive lines the likes of which the world had never seen, doing nothing, their air forces bombarding each other with leaflets. And here was Harry, one of the victors of probably the most significant naval engagement of the war so far, and what story did he have to tell? He hadn’t even seen a Jerry yet, let alone prevailed against one. That fact, however, hadn’t stopped him becoming the centre of attention when he’d finally pitched up at HMS King Alfred again two days ago.
Harry had gone ashore on the first crew launch after Redoubtable had entered Scapa. Safe in the inside pocket of his Number 1C jacket were his orders and a clutch of travel warrants authorising his progress all the way from Thurso railway station to the south coast – the length of Britain. A daunting journey at the best of times, but in wartime, a Homeric epic. It had taken over fifty hours, umpteen different trains, and endless battles with over-worked, unhelpful RTO officers, who were camped out in every station for the sole purpose of ensuring that every man-jack in uniform was in possession of every necessary military authorisation for his, or her journey, in triplicate, and with every proper stamp that regulations required; with woe guaranteed to betide if you didn’t, and sometimes even if you did.
And then finally he was there, exhausted. The broad, squat brick and concrete block on the seafront that had once been a local council leisure centre was now a ship, ‘sailing’ under RN colours as HMS King Alfred. It still dominated the promenade, towered over only by the tall Victorian terraces of St Aubyns Gardens, but the whole area was now much more militarised. The terrace’s windows were zigzagged with white sticky tape to stop them shattering in bomb blasts; barbed wire roiled the beach. Sandbags sat in entrance doors. The two naval tailors were still there, though, right across the road from King Alfred’s entrance, likely doing brisk business among the growing number of ‘officers under training’ beginning to come through.
It had been only a matter of months since Harry had ‘graduated’, but the commandeered pavilion had become a different place when he walked back through its doors; a much busier, more organised place. He’d arrived as the cadets were finishing afternoon classes, the entire building filled with a surge of blue serge and, very young, pink, scrubbed and beaming faces.
And then at last he’d found himself standing in Captain Pelly’s staff office, where everyone was far too busy to bother with the minutiae of his paperwork, and where a sprightly 60-something Lieutenant Commander told him to pack himself off to the Peverill Guest House where a hot bath and a bed was waiting, and to report back here at 08.30. As Harry had turned to leave, the older man, obviously First World War vintage and here for training purposes only, had called after him.
‘You’re just posted from Redoubtable?’ He was squinting at Harry’s orders, held three inches from his nose. ‘You were at Narvik.’ It was more a statement than a question.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Harry.
‘Bloody marvellous!’ barked the old man, and lunged forward to pump his hand.
It was to be the first of many such encounters in Harry’s short stay back at HMS King Alfred. He could take no pride in his brief celebrity, however. He was tired, but also being back had brought on an uneasy sense of dislocation and loneliness. Seeing the cadets – their camaraderie and bands of new-found friends – had rammed home how lonely the past few months had been; that, and his sense of loss, sharp and un-dealt with, over Clive Sells, his friend of three months and now no more.
Clive had been one of his band: there were seven of them back then in October 1939, all having joined up at the same time, arriving at King Alfred together: Clive, Jim, Gilbert, Howard, Zack, Ron and himself. A
ll in the same division – eating, studying, square-bashing together – separate from the ‘S’ men, the yachties who had signed on to the navy’s version of the TA years before. (They were all older, and kept to themselves; easy since they did only ten days refresher training before being bundled out to the fleet with their new commissions.)
Harry and his chums, all university boys and as confused as they were keen, with three months training ahead of them, had gravitated together. Gilbert, taller than the rest, whom for weeks had been forced to turn out on parade still wearing the pinstripe trousers from his days as a stock-jobber in the City before someone could find him a uniform; Zack, the Manchester Jew, with his exotic olive skin and matinee-idol looks, who wasn’t safe from womenkind on their infrequent runs ashore; Jim and Ron, the engineering students from the Midlands, whose life-maintenance skills left a lot to be desired; Clive, like Harry the son of a teacher, an amiable, easy-going lad whose rugby prowess had already attracted the attention of team selectors; and Howard, the son of a gentleman farmer from Hampshire, whose artistry with an iron made all their shirts presentable. A tight bond of friendship had formed among them as each in turn had their first encounters with naval discipline, the rigours of training, and the unforgiving eye of Chief Petty Officer Vass, HMS King Alfred’s senior training NCO.
