Gone to Sea in a Bucket

by David Black

  H57 began its run. Harry, lost in the mesmeric efficiency of the people and machine, had no idea how much time elapsed, and then there was a bark in his ear.

  ‘Down periscope! Right, everyone! Beginning test run. Make your depth one hundred feet, steer one-nine-zero, group up, full ahead together.’ He turned to Harry. ‘We’re going to carry out some bouncy underwater manoeuvres to make sure the port-forward hydroplane repairs have worked. Stay and watch if you want, but make sure you’re hanging on to something!’ He gave Harry a big grin, and then turned back with a sudden look of innocent excitement, like a child playing with his favourite toy. The incongruity, compared to Penn’s hitherto stern mien, made Harry want to laugh out loud. This man was about to start having some serious fun.

  For the next hour, H57 plunged and rose and yawed, coming up to periscope depth, checking its position every few minutes on a bearing to Nab Tower, then diving away again. The hull strained and the engines surged. She lurched and she rolled. Orders were barked and responses noted. Her gyrations and course changes were scrupulously recorded, and another junior officer, staggering and bumping Harry with every leap and bound of the submarine, tried heroically to trace her convoluted course on the chart. Harry clung like grim death to anything that looked substantial enough to hold his weight. The babble of orders passed way over his head, and he quickly lost all notion of what was going on.

  Not so the crew of H57, who fell to with a preternatural concentration, performing duties and tasks, without orders, their roles and responsibilities already understood. It felt good to be in their company as they worked with a sure and steady dedication to make H57 perform to her Commander’s will. And then suddenly it was all over.

  The Skipper ordered, ‘Midships! Group down! Half ahead. Make your depth thirty-five feet. Pilot, lay us a course to the trawler rendezvous. Mr Trumble, how long have we got?’

  ‘Rendezvous is seventy-three minutes from now,’ replied the Jimmy, checking his watch against one of the chronometers above the chart table. He glanced down. ‘We’ve only got about two miles to run. Plenty of time to stooge around.’

  ‘Jolly good,’ said Penn, again turning to Harry. ‘Enjoy that, Mr Gilmour? You were certainly grinning enough. Thought you were going to let out war whoops. Which would have been acceptable.’ He laughed and slapped Harry on the arm.

  ‘Yessir!’

  ‘You probably want a little sit-down after that. Go back to the wardroom and get Snobell to sort you out with something. And send Flanagan and Allen up here,’ he added, referring somewhat acerbically to the other two aspiring submarine officers, Brown and Hardesty. Harry had completely forgotten about them. ‘I have to give them a shot on the toys too,’ added Penn, with barely concealed resignation.

  Brown and Hardesty sat ashen-faced in the little cubby-hole that passed for H57’s wardroom. Brown still gripped the table with white knuckles, Hardesty leaning on it as if breathless after some great exertion. Their eyes darted about, barely acknowledging Harry as he slid in beside them with a mug of steaming tea and a sardine sandwich. Brown got a whiff of it and looked as if he might wretch.

  ‘Skipper’s asking for you chaps,’ said Harry, poised to take a bite. ‘He wants to show you the control room.’

  ‘He’s a bloody madman!’ hissed Brown. ‘What in bloody hell was he doing? You were there, did he go berserk? A king’s ship isn’t a bloody toy to be flung about! Was that performance some kind of punishment for us? Because we wouldn’t tie his stupid little knots for him? What does the bloody navy enlist ratings for, eh? Answer me that? The man’s an overgrown child. Not fit to hold a commission!’

  Harry, in mid-bite, was halted by the sight of Brown’s face twisted in scorn. He looked at Hardesty who had the common decency to at least appear embarrassed by Brown’s tirade. Even so, he made no effort to distance himself from Brown’s remarks. In one of those little epiphanies that prove with hindsight to be turning points in our lives, Harry saw everything with a super clarity: Brown and Hardesty had been frightened. And as that fact dawned, Harry realised with a jolt that despite all his earlier trepidation, he had not.

  Exhilarated, yes. The atmosphere in the control room had been electric. He had felt himself in the presence of men whom together were doing something extraordinary. Something he felt proud to witness and wanted to be part of. He tried to imagine what it must have been like for Brown and Hardesty sitting back here, being thrown about as the submarine had been wrenched through its paces by Penn, as he tested the limits of his newly repaired hydroplane. Sat here with nothing to listen to but an entire orchestra of cooking utensils rattling out their protest from the galley across the passage, they would have known nothing of the reasons for the manoeuvres. But Harry surprised himself by feeling no pity. Instead, all he saw in the two young men before him was a mirror of the wardroom of HMS Redoubtable, and in that instant the possibility of a future in the Royal Navy where he might belong, became real. All the risks of joining the Submarine Service were still there, yet for the first time he wasn’t the butt of someone else’s joke. Here was a world he could inhabit where things would be expected of him, where he would have a role to play. What had Dumaresq said? ‘Lots of small ships and nasty little battles.’ God. He’d be in for it now all right.

  ‘Sub-Lieutenants Brown and Hardesty!’ It was the Skipper’s voice booming through from the control room. ‘When you’ve got a minute!’

  H57 surfaced shortly before 3 p.m., a mere hundred yards or so away from the small armed trawler that had been sent out to meet her. Protection, not from the Luftwaffe, but from the RAF, said Penn, who went on to explain that there was now a firm and unshiftable conviction abroad that any submarine, unless secured alongside or in company with, a Royal Navy warship, was German.

  The two vessels made their sedate way back into the Solent at a comfortable eight knots, past a busy pattern of shipping movements. Merchantmen and minor warships, all part of the sea link to the British Expeditionary Force, were now arrayed, shield-like, across northern France. Just as in the last lot – except that at the moment, nothing was happening.

  Brown and Hardesty were back in the wardroom being humoured by H57’s midshipman, a bad-tempered-looking youth, worldly beyond his years, who was plying them with some of the boat’s stash of genever, purloined off a neutral Dutch tramp that H57 had stopped in the Kattegat a few weeks before under suspicion of running contraband to the enemy.

  Harry was on the bridge with Penn and Trumble and the lookouts. The sun was up, dappling the slight chop, making the air warm despite the whisper of a breeze. The trawler led off the starboard bow, her long sleek hull carving little in the way of a wake to trouble H57’s smooth progress. Lounged across the out-of-place industrial construction of housing and funnel that passed for the trawler’s superstructure, her crew were goofing around H57 in singlets. Gulls soared, and the intermittent strains of a dance band on the radio wafted back to them above the diesel thump from both vessels. All seemed well with the world.

  Penn completed a perfunctory sweep of the horizon with his binoculars, then turned to drape himself casually against the thin steel cowl that formed the bridge wing and regarded Harry frankly.

  ‘Met the Hun yet?’ he said.

  Harry, wanting to respond with equal frankness, did not know how to respond. His inglorious role aboard HMS Redoubtable hardly seemed to count. He certainly didn’t want to waffle some convoluted explanation peppered with yeses and nos and on-the-other-hands. Then inspiration struck him: ‘My last ship . . . my first ship . . . was Redoubtable.’

  ‘Narvik,’ stated Penn.

  ‘So I’m told. I didn’t exactly see much of it.’

  ‘You don’t tend to “see” much of it in this mob, either. Unless you’re me.’ Penn mimicked snapping down the periscope handles. ‘For everyone else, it tends to be “noises, off”. Preferably a long way off. Lots of thuds and bangs. Not much waiting to see the whites of their eyes, I’m afraid. It’s a funny old game,
this modern warfare.’

  Then with his eyes still fixed on Harry, Penn fired a question to Trumble who was draped with equal sloth over the opposite bridge wing: ‘So, what do you think of him, number one?’

  Trumble, smiling broadly at Harry, said with report formality: ‘Not afraid to muck in. Distinct blood lust in the eyes when you were taking the old girl over her fences . . .’

  Without a hint of rudeness, Penn butted in: ‘I’m reminded of Admiral Wilson’s words . . .’

  Trumble butted back, as if on a point of information for Harry’s benefit: ‘Controller of the navy, 1902, didn’t like these new-fangled submarines.’

  ‘Underwater weapons, they call ’em,’ said Penn, with a heavy larding of mock solemnity, obviously mimicking the sonorous Admiral Wilson. ‘I call ’em underhand, unfair and damned un-English!’ A pause and then back into his easy drawl: ‘That’s what old Wilson actually said. True.’ He turned to Andy: ‘I can’t answer for underhand, Andy, but his hair is definitely not “fair”, and he’s definitely not English. Two “uns” out of three isn’t bad. What do you think?’

  ‘Oh, I think he’ll do.’

  ‘What say you, young Gilmour?’

  Harry was laughing at their sport with him. He composed himself: ‘Aye aye, sir.’

  Penn, at the age of 24, was one of the youngest submarine captains in the ‘trade’, which was how the Royal Navy had come to describe its submarine service. He was already blooded, having sunk a couple of smallish German transports trying to get up to Norway, and a small Type-UB inshore U-boat, off Texel. His main achievement so far, however, had been to survive. For there had been a lot of losses in the Submarine Service; an alarming number, given the war was still only months old. His boat had almost been one of them.

  H57’s dicky forward hydroplane wasn’t some minor maintenance problem. Travelling underwater in an attempt to get into the German coastal shipping lanes, they had heard the tell-tale, sick-making scrape that could be made only by the anchor cable of a mine dragging along the outside of the hull. Penn had ordered all stop, intending to slowly turn away from the obstruction. But the massive tidal ebb running at the time was far greater than he’d calculated, and it not only took the forward way off them, but had sucked them back, sending the cable scraping back along the length of hull to jam behind the hydroplane mounting. They were barely a few miles off Heligoland, and the waters above were teeming with enemy patrol craft.

  Surfacing and fending off the mine while the crew cut the cable was not an option. It had taken four hours of patient manoeuvring underwater to work H57 free. But they were patched up now, and ready to go back out on the patrol line, hunting for U-boats trying to slip down into the Channel to wreak havoc in the supply lanes to the army in France.

  Nursemaiding new recruits for the service was not Penn’s main job, but it was a duty he didn’t mind. Indeed, approved of. The Submarine Service had always been a tight, close-knit family since its inception in 1901, with a tremendous esprit d’corps. It took a certain type of man to prosper in its company. Also, it was by no means a favoured specialist branch for a career officer seeking to distinguish himself. Rear Admiral Arthur Wilson’s words were not so far removed from official thought, which in many ways still considered the submarine to be ‘the weapon of the weaker nation’.

  But Penn had never any doubt where his career was going, right from the moment, at the age of 14, when he had walked through the gates of the Royal Navy’s most renowned officer-training establishment, HMS Britannia, the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth. And that was to command a submarine. He couldn’t imagine taking possession of a greater toy. Now, in time of war once again, the navy was coming round to his way of thinking; having to put aside its sniffy reserve and building up its submarine force.

  The only thing was, you had to get the right type of chap. In peacetime the service was manned by volunteers. In war, that might prove a luxury, which was why the net had been cast wide so that the right types could be hauled in while there was still time. A right and proper submariner was a special breed, and you couldn’t let any old Tom, Dick or, indeed, Harry, in. And being regular RN was no guarantee that you’d fit. Penn knew a few RNVR officers had already made the grade. This Gilmour fellow, however, was the first one he had encountered personally, and he seemed to be all right. You could tell. At least, Penn could tell. He and Andy Trumble had been watching him all through the exercise. You couldn’t pin it down. He just had it. Fitted in.

  The other two were a waste of space. Brown was too far up his own arse, and Hardesty was too frightened of offending anyone and everything. And, in the end, as a serving Skipper, it was Penn’s call. For, every now and again, the Admiralty still had it in itself to make the right decision. In this case, it was the final decision about who got in, and who didn’t. And that, the Admiralty had decided, would be left to the submariners themselves.

  Candidates for submarine officer training could be put forward by anyone, including the candidate themselves. And indeed, such was the scramble to push as many through as was sanely possible, many got through every selection criteria on the nod. Until the last one. They were told they were going to sea in a submarine to decide whether they’d be comfortable going beneath the waves in an iron coffin as part of their job. But really it was for an experienced Skipper to judge whether a submarine crew would want them in the first place.

  Penn wrote up his report that night. The next day Harry got his place on the next six-week course. Brown and Hardesty he never heard of again.

  Chapter Five

  There was two weeks to go until the next submarine officer course commenced at HMS Dolphin, so the office of the shore establishment’s CO co-opted Harry to command, of all things, the damage-control parties for the base. It was not an onerous task, however, as the various fire-and-rescue teams on stand-by in the event of air raid or sabotage were ably run by a taut cadre of Petty Officers. For the first few days Harry rarely issued an order more complex than, ‘Carry on, chief’, and did not have his sleep disturbed once. The interlude was a godsend, allowing him to attend to the build-up of personal tasks, neglected for some time for a variety of reasons, not least his own youthful sloth.

  Most pressing on the agenda was the matter of his uniform. He had been competently fitted-out by Hector Powe’s on the front opposite HMS King Alfred during training. The rig did him well enough right through his posting to Redoubtable. Two regulation monkey jackets, eight gold buttons, set four aside down the front, two pairs of regulation trousers of similar colour and cloth, and a serviceable collection of grey flannels. There were enough white shirts with changeable collars to get him through from one laundry run to the next. A very smart cap and a slightly more functional watch cap. Two jet-black pairs of Oxford shoes and a pair of sea boots for boat work. The idea was to wear one’s less presentable monkey jacket and flannels on duty, choice of footwear optional depending on duties for the day. Ditto the cap. But Harry had barely stepped aboard H57 before his number two monkey jacket was smeared with several types of oil, and snagged by any number of brackets. Thus the reason for the entire crew’s non-existent dress code quickly became all too apparent. ‘No one wears a good uniform on board a submarine,’ he’d been told by Andy Trumble. ‘We don’t do “at-homes” or drinks parties in the trade. So there’s no call.’

  So Harry took himself up to Southampton and an old Merchant Navy chandlery, and bought himself a reefer jacket with at least a passing semblance to the cut of the navy’s monkey job. Except this one looked like it had been round the Horn a few times. He did a deal with the old salt behind the counter and got the jacket and a dozen second-hand RN buttons – extra in case of losses – and braid for his single stripe, and the old man to sew them all on, for just a few bob. He also invested in a comprehensive set of oilskins, leather gauntlets and a pair of ex-RAF flying boots, as his first impression of a bridge on a submarine was that it looked like it could get very cold, very easily. And he treated himse
lf to a new switch-knife. A knife was the first thing he’d been told to buy when he started hanging round yachts.

  ‘What will I need it for?’ he’d asked.

  ‘You’ll hardly ever need it,’ came the enigmatic reply, ‘. . . until you do. Then you’ll really need it.’

  That done, there was his personal correspondence to catch up on. No mean task. He began by writing to his parents. Then to his chums from his HMS King Alfred days, to his old headmaster, two of his tutors and Sir Alexander Scrimgeour, whose yacht, Tangle, he’d crewed on since he was fifteen, and a few school friends he promised to stay in touch with. Then there was Janis. The girlfriend, apparently; at least that’s what she told him.

  Janis Crumley was from back home, a precocious, gaudily glamorous young woman a year or two younger than Harry, who seemed to have designs on him for reasons he could not fathom. But there would be plenty of time to worry about that later. More immediately, after much deliberation, he wrote to Peter Dumaresq, to tell him his counsel had not been in vain, and to thank him.

  Trumble also gave him a stack of his briefing notes from his time on the submarine course and Harry spent every available moment with his nose in their complexities. In the evenings, however, there was the ritual gathering around the wardroom’s wireless to listen to the BBC’s Nine O’Clock News. The collapse of the Norwegian campaign dominated.

  On 10 May the news changed, but it wasn’t the BBC who told Harry first. While having his morning tea in the wardroom, another officer burst in yelling, ‘Jerry’s on the move!’

  All through that lovely, fresh spring morning, with the sun warm and slanting through the office windows on a diligent Harry attending to paperwork, the Germans had been sweeping through Holland and Luxembourg towards the Belgian frontier. Suddenly the war was no longer a distant inconvenience. The tempo changed, and the speed of events overtook even rumour. Before the day was over, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had resigned. Then they learned of his replacement: it was that man so detested by Harry’s father. ‘He’d have us in a police state!’ was Mr Gilmour’s mantra every time the vile name came from the enormous walnut and maple radiogram that presided over the living room. But that man had become Harry’s civilian boss: First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. And now he was prime minister.