Gone to Sea in a Bucket

by David Black

  The older officers looked grimly satisfied. ‘Now you’ll see,’ was the sage muttering. But exactly what they were about to see was not made clear. As for Harry, in the eye of all this, it was as if a void were opening up under his youthful confidence. It was like watching the scenery change at the theatre. The narrative was breaking up. The Germans were moving fast. Events were not meant to unfold like this, and he was still young enough to fret about why the grown-ups weren’t doing something.

  Thankfully, opportunities to fret were limited as Harry spent the following days drilling intensively with his damage-control teams, and after 14 May, when the Luftwaffe razed Rotterdam to the ground, he was up most nights watching the skies.

  The news was relentlessly grim. German armour had traversed the ‘impenetrable’ Ardennes forest and crossed the Meuse. The French army was beginning to collapse, and barely a week after Rotterdam, the British Expeditionary Force was in retreat to the Channel ports. The sailors crowded around the Mess radios every night to listen to the BBC newsreader itemise each incident of defeat and rout. By the third week in May, the port of Dunkirk was being mentioned with increasing frequency. Then one evening, the officers and Petty Officers were summoned to a meeting in the gym.

  ‘Does anyone have small-boat experience, especially in running and maintaining small-boat engines?’ a ruddy-faced and very harassed captain wanted to know. He didn’t say why, and the grim-faced sailors knew better than to ask.

  A number of Engine Room Artificers and some younger officers stepped forward. Harry had worked on yacht engines, he reckoned he knew enough. He started to shuffle out of the mob to go and stand with the growing number of volunteers, when a broad arm blocked his way. Harry had seen him about the base. It was another of those ubiquitous middle-aged Lieutenant Commanders wheeled out of retirement as trainers.

  ‘There’ll be plenty of time for volunteering, young man, before this lot is over,’ he said paternally. ‘You are about to begin a very important training course which will result in your contribution to this war being far, far greater than anything you could achieve stooging around small-boat engines.’

  Harry had no option but to comply. ‘Aye aye, sir,’ he said and stepped back.

  Over the next few days rumours started filtering through of an epic action off Dunkirk. The newspapers were silent, but the word was that the entire British Expeditionary Force had been plucked off the beaches round the port by a Royal Navy scratch force of destroyers and requisitioned pleasure craft, all of it carried out under the most sustained and heavy air attack.

  Belgium surrendered on 27 May, a Monday. Harry’s course began the same day.

  It was relentless. All the principles of submarine propulsion, submarine electrical systems, batteries, pumps, motors, optics, supply, torpedo maintenance and firing procedures. And squeezed into all this was his celestial navigation class, as well as in-shore boat handling, basic first aid, and signals and ciphers.

  Harry neither excelled nor flopped. The cribs Andy Trumble had provided helped him – just – to bluff through much of the technical part of the course, and he did show a certain flair in handling a submarine, navigation and even first aid. He worked and he slept; and nothing else. That is not to say the course was without its amusing moments.

  The class, in little huddles of three and four, was regularly shipped out on to the training sub, to apply their classroom learning to the real world . . . and to be publicly humiliated by its unimpressed crew. The sub was another antiquated and flimsy H-class, and it was on one of these early trips that Harry was ‘blooded’ in the use of a submarine’s ‘heads’.

  He had asked where one went to ‘spend a penny’. There was a pause.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ he was told by a rather short Petty Officer in a misshapen white roll-neck pullover. ‘H-class normally have the jawbox jammed in the open between the diesels. But we’ve been modified, sir, to ’ave all the comforts of a liner, sir.’

  Harry waited to be told where to go but the Petty Officer just stared back at him. Reluctant to ask, Harry eventually said, ‘If you wouldn’t mind pointing me in the right direction, Petty Officer?’

  A slow shake of the Petty Officer’s head was the response.

  Harry, being in increasing need, drew himself up. He had quickly learned that a certain amount of joshing was part and parcel of the navy at every level, and junior officers, especially those under training, were prime targets. And being a particularly sharp young man in many ways, he was equally quick to realise that how you reacted was very important in terms of the reputation and the respect – or lack of it – you earned among the lower deck. As the old adage went, if you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have joined. But there were times when even his genial patience could be tried. On the one hand there was the wisdom in knowing when to acquiesce in being the butt of a little sport, and on the other, there was impending disaster in the trouser department.

  Before Harry could raise his voice in righteous remonstration, the Petty Officer began to explain with a solemn gravity: ‘You can’t just wander about doing your business on a submarine whenever you feel like it, sir. There’s procedures, sir. You ’ave to ask the Capting for permission, sir. Or the officer of the watch, if the Capting is being by some ways indisposed.’

  This was too much. Harry leant in to hiss in the little man’s ear: ‘Now this has gone far enough . . .’

  The Petty Officer recoiled with a look of pained affront on his face. ‘Sir,’ he said firmly, ‘the ’eads on a submarine is a very complex and sensitive piece of equipment, seeing as it is a device not just for your personal convenience, but for blowin’ the stuff overboard, through the pressure hull, as and when, at whateffer depth . . . the crew’s doings being an unnecessary impediment to the smooth running of the boat and not being wanted. That’s why, like you and me, sir, a submarine cannot be goin’ about discharging over the side whenever it feels like it. There could be people watchin’. Or listenin’. Which is why, since he is the bloke what knows what the submarine is about at any particular moment, we must ask the Capting when we want to go,’ – a pause for emphasis – ‘sir.’

  Harry retreated. Immediately behind him in the tight space of the control room he was aware of an instructor going through the steps of an attack with one of his fellow students. He could see the Skipper’s folded arms protruding from the corner of the chart table. Harry turned away from the Petty Officer and made to squeeze his way into the control room, preparing to choose a moment that promised least embarrassment. It was like being back in school.

  The Skipper was leaning back against the chart table watching, amused, as the instructor shuffled behind the student officer, who in turn was crouched and draped over the periscope as if his eyes were glued to it, and was jerking back and forth as if trying to follow some target whose manoeuvres defied the laws of physics.

  ‘Now the surface contact is up there, Mr Pettifer,’ the instructor was intoning patiently, ‘so just work back along the line of her track until you re-acquire.’

  Harry, unable to shove his way in to the tight little compartment any further without disrupting proceedings, tensed himself for a wait. He needn’t have bothered.

  ‘’Scuse me, sir!’ came a voice from behind. It was the Petty Officer, in the strident tone he might use in a force 8 gale.

  Over his shoulder the Skipper said, ‘Petty Officer Sillitoe?’

  ‘The young gentleman, sir. He wants to use the ’eads, sir.’

  The Skipper turned to see Harry’s face, inches from his own, now tinged crimson as to remove all doubt as to which young gentleman Petty Officer Sillitoe must be referring.

  ‘You should have gone before you stepped on board,’ was his terse response. Then to Sillitoe, ‘Get one of the ratings to show him how to work it, Petty Officer. And try to keep him clean, please. He’s on next.’

  Harry was too distracted to puzzle over what the Skipper meant by, ‘try to keep him clean’. He shuffled aft, foll
owing an Able Seaman who looked twice his age, and was certainly twice his size, through bulkheads which the AB in the ubiquitous white jumper moved with far greater ease than Harry, and finally into the engine spaces where the AB turned, and with a flourish, revealed a small cupboard with an extremely flimsy partition door that did not quite reach the deck.

  ‘The seat of repose, sir,’ he said, in a south London accent. ‘Now before you go in, sir, there are fings ’ere you must bear in mind.’

  And he opened the door. The space was two feet by two feet and not an inch more, and contained a tiny steel pan, an intimidating set of valves, gauges and an air bottle above it. By the side was what looked like a car handbrake, secured by a clip. The only object of familiarity was the Bakelite toilet lid – which Harry took to be quaintly superfluous, not yet being steeped enough in submarine lore to realise that nothing aboard a submarine is superfluous.

  ‘Right, sir, ’ere’s what we do . . . do your business as normal . . .’

  ‘That’s reassuring,’ observed Harry, becoming increasingly impatient for all the obvious reasons.

  The AB stopped to let him have his joke, then with great portent, said: ‘The next bit, it is as well to pay close attention, sir . . . when you is finished, shut the lid. Open these here two valves. That opens the device to the sea. But don’t worry cos the pan’s still sealed at the bottom, and there is a non-return valve as well, what prevents the sea comin’ in. Have you got it so far, sir?’

  Harry was torn between desperation to be getting on with it, and a sudden and increasing unease that if he didn’t overcome his distraction and listen, this device might do him serious injury. He nodded.

  ‘Right, sir. Open that valve there to charge the bottle wif high pressure air. We’re about thirty-five feet, and you’ll need a coupla pounds per square inch above the outside water pressure . . . so what are we sayin’? About free atmospheres on that gauge is what you want. Now release the lever to position one to open the bottom of the pan. You will then be connected to the waste tank. Lever to position two now, sir. That lets in seawater which comes in and flushes your business back into the waste tank. Position free shuts the bottom of the pan sealing it from the waste tank. Position four vents the air from the bottle frough the waste tank and flushes the whole lot into the sea. It is vital, sir, for your shipmates, that you leave the lever in position four until all the air is vented. If not, if the next poor bleeder comin’ in for ’is mornin’ george tries to shift that lever to position one, he will experience what we in the trade call, “a return to sender” – in other words, the residual high pressure air what you have left in the tank, blows the stuff back at you. Which is also why, when you go to move the lever back to position one, you put the lid down and have your foot firmly on it, sir, just in case you haven’t vented all the air, and you get a return to sender instead. Ready now, sir?’

  Harry was transfixed. The only thing he could think to say was, ‘I’m going in.’

  The AB grinned suddenly: ‘There’s always a first time, sir. Best of luck.’

  The AB waited outside, but Harry was too far gone to be shy. Once finished, he began the procedure. The AB monitored his progress, listening to all the clicks and hisses, so he understood what had happened even before Harry shouted, ‘Jesus H fucking Christ!’ And long before the smell. However, from the muffled nature of the blast, the AB was able to call reassuringly to Harry. ‘At least you remembered to put your foot on the lid, sir.’

  Harry’s first true encounter with terror came one morning in the escape-training tank.

  The course was almost over. At the end of one of the written finals, Harry was one of half a dozen officers under training to be called out and ordered to report to ‘The Tank’ for their DSEA orientation.

  ‘DSEA stands for the Davis Submarine Escape Apparatus,’ said a bare-headed, wiry Chief Petty Officer wearing nothing but blue denim overalls and black plimsolls. He was a very poised, precise man of indeterminate age; neat, clean-shaven with a warm smile and receding mouse-brown hair, he seemed to Harry rather like a concerned older brother. He held aloft a brownish rubber sack, the size of a shopping bag, with a corrugated tube coming from it; then he embarked on a complicated technical description of how it worked.

  They were in a windowless warehouse with steel rafters. It was a bright day outside, but only a murky light came through huge frosted ball-shaped lamps suspended from a row of conduit tubes. Although summer was almost here, the space felt chill and draughty, which was why the officers under training – each wearing nothing but swimming trunks and a set of goggles on their heads – stood around the chief shivering, and looking like so many pale skittles.

  Behind the chief loomed a forty-foot steel cylinder with a door bolted on to the side; and way up there, in the dim ceiling of the brick tower that surrounded it, was a platform bolted around the top, upon which perched three distant figures. Even at that height you could tell they were burly sailors, rank unknown, as they too were in trunks and goggles. They peered down and Harry could imagine the amused grins of men who knew what was about to happen and were looking forward to much laughter at the expense of others. This was ‘The Tank’ and, as lore had it, the sailors on top were there to clear it of bodies once the training was over.

  As so often in the past, the technical briefing went in one of Harry’s ears and out the other. He looked attentive enough, staring fixedly at the kit, but really he was in trance, trying to force himself to imagine having to actually use the DSEA device to save his own life. The reverie ended when the CPO called his name. Harry was to be first into the tank.

  The rubber felt obscenely clammy against his chest as the chief hefted the set over his head. And it was surprisingly heavy, weighed by an oxygen bottle attached to the bottom. The chief guided him as he tightened the webbing straps and then handed him a set of nose clips. Then the dreaded door of the device was opened before him. With the set disgustingly clingy on his chest, he had to squeeze through the gap. The door clanged shut and he could hear it being secured – almost at the same time as he could hear, and feel, the water start to pump in.

  Harry had never before experienced the fear of drowning. He had been out on the sea all his formative years, he was aware of the mariner’s appreciation of his element: that if you did absolutely everything, exactly right, the sea might let you live. But trapped, sealed, and facing a watery tomb, was something he’d never contemplated. Death. Drowning. In a sealed metal container. It was at this moment he first discovered the taste of fear. It was metallic. He would taste it again and again before this war was over, though with never the same intensity as he did then in that bloody chamber.

  Water. Water rising to engulf him and water into which his insides were turning. Panic was overwhelming Harry, apart from a tiny glimmer at the edge of his consciousness he recognised as shame. The water rose and covered his head. The goggles started to mist. He became aware he was still holding his breath, so he breathed. But nothing happened. The panic made his throat constrict; his whole body began to jerk involuntarily, and the walls and pipework in the tank lifted the skin off his elbows and knees. From somewhere outside the silent screaming in his head came the memory of a valve, and a bottle attached to the set. He fumbled, found it, and began to twitch it open. He heard the oxygen go in to his rubber bag, and his body suddenly lurched up against the hatch wheel above him. Just in time he remembered to turn off the bottle. The inflated bag pushed against him with an intimacy that momentarily replaced the panic with revulsion, and in that brief lucid flash he remembered to breathe again. He took a gulp, and oxygen flooded his lungs.

  It was as if the inrush had freed his brain. He remembered to unclip the hatch above him. When the last clip came off, Harry, still stupefied by his panic, shot out like a bullet, slamming into every protruding edge of the tank with his cramped body on the way, and knocking off his goggles. Right at this juncture, he entered a peculiar frame of mind in which he abandoned all care; the panic de
parted and a superior kind of phlegmatic consideration ruled him. That was when he remembered that he was not supposed to be going up so fast. There had been something about pressure that had been mentioned in the lecture. Pressure and your ears, and something called embolisms to worry about. From somewhere, Harry remembered the set was fitted with a sort of folded apron, designed to be pulled out and used as a crude brake. The details of the lecture bubbled up: all the stuff about nitrogen dissolving in your blood under pressure, and how you had to come up slow from depths, otherwise, as the pressure came off, the nitrogen would begin to ‘un-dissolve’ and turn to bubbles in your bloodstream, and that the bubbles would then shoot straight to the places you didn’t want them to, like your heart or your brain, and earn your next of kin the telegram.

  He pulled the apron and immediately performed an immaculate underwater somersault before hitting the surface in a wallowing thrash.

  Afterwards, the Petty Officer told Harry that he’d ‘done all right’ for the purposes of the exercise, despite the hilarity from the tank team. And, the PO added, it was unlikely he would ever have to do it in real life anyway – in submarines, either the boat returned from patrol, with you in it, or it didn’t, and neither did you.

  And then it was all over, and he was through the course. There had been beers in the wardroom after the last test had been handed in, but everyone was too knackered for revelry.