Gone to Sea in a Bucket

by David Black

  It was the last thing Harry heard before the air he was breathing, the air that filled the Stokers’ mess between the chest-high water and the deckhead, was gone. Vanished in a chest-sucking whumpf that he felt more than heard, and then everything was churning sea.

  Harry had already fastened his and Padgett’s nose-clips before the water, in a surge, had enveloped him in a maelstrom of bubbles and debris sucked up from beneath the deckplates, the great swirling commotion in the water almost making him fill his lungs with the stuff in fright. He felt he was inside a washing machine, being battered against steel machinery. Yet he did not let go, and other hands were grabbing him.

  A subterranean greenish gloom, courtesy of the one remaining emergency light, began to coalesce and then it was as if hours passed. The ripped trunking had let all the air out and the water in. No orderly escape was possible now, and the lost buoyancy of that remaining air, vented through the escape hatch, made the submarine lurch deeper.

  Gripping Padgett for all he was worth, chased by panic, he began chanting a little mantra to himself: that if he could just get Padgett out of that hatch, to the surface, then maybe he too would be worthy of surviving. If he could just get him out of this bloody iron coffin and up in the fresh air.

  There was a scrambling of bodies in front of him. One seemed lifeless, battered against the hatch by the force of the exiting air. Harry adjusted Padgett’s set, bled a little oxygen into it for him to breathe, making sure the mouthpiece was snug as he shuffled himself to the shredded ends of the trunking. He was kicked by someone in front, Scanlon or Gault, he didn’t know, and again, so that what was left in his lungs was fighting to burst out, and then he was at the hatch.

  No one was in the way. He didn’t push Padgett up, he dragged him up, then pressed him so as to squeeze them both through together, and then they were in the hatch, and Harry knew beyond all question that he could not hold on any longer, that the fight not to take one huge breath was lost; except that it wouldn’t be air he would draw deep into his lungs. He was done. So close. Poor Ted, I tried, he said inside his head, as he banged it on something smooth and bevelled and steel, and his foot was on the hatch rim and he felt himself in open water, and above him like a liquid borealis was a light playing behind the ripples of the surface, and his legs were pumping and pumping and pumping.

  Chapter Eleven

  Harry, standing on the railway pier at Gourock. A bright summer’s morning, the light scrubbed and the mountains across the Firth of Clyde picked out in lush velvety greens and dappled shadow from a random scatter of high, white fluffy clouds. And the waters of the Firth in-between, thick with dull grey shipping lying in steel clots on the deep-blue anchorage. Scores of them: cargo ships, a tanker or two, and warships; a new fleet carrier, cruisers, destroyers and smaller escorts. Here at the Tail o’ the Bank, where the river meets the Firth, one of Britain’s main convoy assembly areas, a terminus for the trans-Atlantic sea lanes, down which pass the country’s lifeline to America and the Empire. It is an impressive tableau. Harry, the boy, would have been thrilled beyond words. Harry today, however, is altogether more sober.

  He is going home for the first time since he caught the train for HMS King Alfred in September 1939. Survivors’ leave. Two weeks of peace and quiet, your reward for staying afloat when your ship didn’t. There hadn’t been many others from Pelorus left afloat to collect that prize. McVeigh and Sandeman were gone, and that irritating little Torpedo Officer, whose name Harry couldn’t quite recall now. Swann. That was it. And all the other sailors from the control room and torpedo rooms. All gone. Just Harry, and CPO Gault, and the outside ERA Frank Lansley and Scanlon, and the handful of Stokers and Leading Torpedomen who’d all got out of the escape hatch and had been picked up.

  Oh, and then there were the two miracles. Ted Padgett was still alive. Even Harry couldn’t quite believe it. And the Skipper, the Bonny Boy, thrown from the bridge on impact and the first to be picked up. He couldn’t account for the two young ABs on watch with him. They were never seen again. Nobody pressed too hard on that one. Poor Commander Bonalleck, to have lost his boat and most of his crew, and to have survived. How must he feel?

  Harry knew. Harry had had an interview with him, one of many seemingly endless interviews after he walked down the gangway of the armed trawler which had rescued him. It would be a long time before Harry would forget that interview. As usual, Bonalleck had been drunk.

  Standing on the railway pier at Gourock, Harry watched a little paddle steamer churning and foaming as she came alongside the one remaining civilian berth on the pier. Her long, slim hull was yacht-like apart from the barn-sized box arrangement midships, beneath which her paddles beat to and fro, and out of which stabbed the natural-draught smokestack.

  She was angling close to allow a grizzled old deckhand to throw his heaving line. A crush of passengers lined her side, nearly all men and women in uniform, their expressions glum, despite the sun, just like the little ship herself – no longer decked out in the elegant colours of the Caledonian Steam Packet Company that he remembered; instead, in the same drab grey as every other craft, great or small, on the Firth this morning. Like everything else that used to be familiar, that he’d seen between here and Rosyth, the little steamer too had been touched by the war. Still here, but different. Grimmer, like him.

  The guilt at surviving was still gnawing Harry, and he wasn’t helping himself by leaving it alone. He kept going back to the scab and picking it. He remembered every little thing that had happened, vividly. And his feelings. He kept going back to it all, telling himself he was resetting his soul, like you’d reset a bone; except this felt much more painful. But he was, after all, still not much more than an adolescent, and what he was dealing with was man’s work.

  Ted, lying tucked up in that pristine white hospital bed, still unconscious, intubated, drips attached, and looking so small and frail, his white hair now turned to cotton wool beneath the swathe of bandage. Harry had sat with him, holding his hand for god knows how long, still unable to let him go, just like on Pelorus. In his jumble of emotions was something like pride. Back in that compartment, when Pelorus was sinking, Sub-Lieutenant Gilmour had been the officer in charge, except it was Gault and Lansley who had got them out. Not him. But they would have left Ted. He didn’t.

  The old fellah had accepted him into ship’s company with his twinkly grin and cheeky jibes, and then . . . in the blink of an eye . . . he’d been about to die. Did Harry actually make the decision that he wasn’t going to let it happen? That he wasn’t going to allow Ted Padgett, his new shipmate, to die? Or was it one of those melodramatic, lucky talisman things: that if he could just get this one man, this Ted fellow, whom he hardly knew out of the damn boat and to the surface, that only then would Harry deserve to live?

  He remembered sailing into Rosyth, standing alone on his rescuers’ deck; how when the sun came up he’d gone on deck and refused to go below again despite the drizzle, unable to tear his eyes from the passing shore, and the magnificent, preposterous loom of the Forth bridge; feeling the waft of the breeze on his wet cheeks, hearing the sound of the gulls above the engine thump in his ears; gripped by the sheer, tear-pricking joy of still being alive; brushing aside the offer of a stretcher, insisting on walking up the gangway off the trawler and on to the firm concrete of the dock just to feel the solid land beneath his feet.

  There had been medicals, but there wasn’t much wrong with him that lashings of sweet tea, a hot bath and fifteen hours sleep hadn’t sorted. The sailors at Rosyth could not have been kinder. He wanted for nothing – a clean uniform, shirts, socks, new split dress oxfords, boots, even a hand-knitted muffler from someone’s sister; and endless rounds of large ones at the wardroom bar. He’d sunk the Graf von Zeithen after all, and that was ‘a bloody good show’ in everyone’s book. But he was also a shipwrecked mariner, and that made him different. The generosity and the solicitousness created a distance as well as a bond and Harry was sensitive enough
to register the subtle diffidence with which even relatively senior officers treated him. He’d been sunk; he carried the mark that no one wanted. And he was coming to learn some of the ways of sailors, that they were, in general, an open-hearted lot, bound by the sea and all that meant. But Harry had been where they all dreaded, and returned as a living reminder that they were there but for the grace of God . . .

  Then had come the official questions. McVeigh’s words echoed. He told it straight, apart from the Bonny Boy’s drinking. They’d kept him apart from other members of the crew until the interviews were over, and the evidence pending the inevitable Naval Court of Inquiry was gathered. Then on the afternoon of the third day, the Bonny Boy had invited him for a drink.

  Harry shut his eyes briefly, so he could see the Bonny Boy again resplendent in a borrowed Commander’s jacket, his luxuriant grey hair Brylcreemed, the flaccid jowls shaved waxy beneath the Martian canals of burst capillaries criss-crossing his cheeks, the wet eyes dancing with gin-fuelled light. He was posed Pharaoh-like in a rubbed relic of an easy chair, one of two that filled the sitting room part of the shore cabin he’d been assigned by the sympathetic base Flag Officer. On a card table by the Bonny Boy’s elbow was a gin bottle, already damaged before Harry’s arrival. Harry was invited to help himself, had been going to decline, but thought better of it. His Skipper had an edginess about him that Harry didn’t like.

  Listening to Bonalleck that afternoon had been like being forced against one’s will to look into some Lewis Carroll landscape where the talker dwelled, and from which he returned only occasionally for appearance’s sake. Bonalleck had maintained a reverent silence throughout the ritual pouring of Harry’s gin, then from nowhere he’d begun with what seemed an irrelevance: ‘I put six torpedoes into the flagship and the umpire said her effectiveness had been reduced by twenty per cent. Six torpedoes.’

  Harry had no idea what he was talking about. Then, as if by way of belated explanation Bonalleck continued, his voice sounding almost as if he was reminiscing to a favoured nephew, his eyes staring as if watching a movie.

  ‘A hundred miles south-west of the Fastnet Rock. Fleet exercises, 1926. You shouldn’t ask submarines to take part in fleet exercises . . . not unless they’re there to show how pathetic the A/S is . . . because you just sink everything . . . what’s the point of being there otherwise?’

  A sudden look up, directly into Harry’s eyes. He was completely lucid, and then he looked away. ‘I went off on my own and I set about “sinking” . . . that is what submarines are supposed to do . . . sink . . . so I did . . . everybody . . . they didn’t think the Bonny Boy was so “bonny” that day . . . Mr Gilbert.’

  Harry had realised he was hearing some tale from Bonalleck’s past, but its relevance was beyond him. They should be talking about the sinking of Pelorus. Of Von Zeithen.

  Another volume of gin disappeared down Bonalleck’s throat. Harry watched its progress, mesmerised.

  ‘I’m going to tell you something about your betters, Mr Gilbert,’ Bonalleck continued, getting his name wrong again, leaning in, conspiratorial, so Harry could hear the alcohol wheeze in his breath. ‘. . . professional jealousy. Ever heard that expression, sir? Eh? Worming and twisting in their bellies . . . for years, decades. All the braid they put on only feeding it . . .’

  And then he had sat upright, jolting Harry back in his seat, and it was as if his captain had retreated from him like a view suddenly going out of focus. It took a second to realise that Bonalleck had become quite mad, and that he had begun to address an audience Harry couldn’t see . . . like the worst ham actor imaginable. Harry didn’t think this an appropriate moment to correct him on his name.

  ‘Oh, aren’t you just the dashing chap, Bonny Boy?’ Bonalleck declaimed, having suddenly become a third party in the room. ‘More laurels for the Bonny Boy! Ribbons and gongs! And strike up the band! Knew the Tsar, you know! And the King! It’s another war now, but what the hell! The Bonny Boy’s not shy! He’d sail a Serpentine punt against the Jerry! Another plum for the Bonny Boy, here! Let him show us he’s still Britannia’s favoured son. We’ll lay it on a plate for you . . . you just have to turn up and there’s glory just for the picking!’

  Bonalleck paused again, returning to himself, looking thoughtful. ‘. . . people like that don’t appreciate you, especially when you’re right. Professional jealousy. So they set you up to shoot you down.’

  He swallowed another gulp and suddenly became surly and sarky-sounding. ‘. . . just change a few minutes on the co-ordinates . . . sloppy Morse . . . a decoding error . . . oh, they’re quite capable . . .’

  And then he reared up again, glaring at Harry. ‘Of course they would know I’d have to tell you . . . got to tell the crew where we’re going . . . what we’re after. So that when I missed, you’d all be sharing in the joke, eh!? Bonny Boy missed her! . . . But I am wise to them, Mr Gilbert. Oh yes. I had my own plan. Oh yes. I wasn’t going to go wandering over some “diversionary” patrol area, loosing torpedos at useless targets . . . they like to punish. Punish other people for being better than them . . . oh so we’ve got one of those VCs who loves glory more than the service, have we? Knows better than us, does he? Well it’s time he was reminded of . . .’

  He tailed off into another long long silence, then became quite lucid again: ‘Our orders were specific. Go off on your scheduled patrol . . . don’t attract attention . . . then when we signal you, head for the Skagerrak and wait for Jerry. She’ll be a big one. Definitely worth the name of the Bonny Boy. Just tiptoe up there and he’ll come right into our trap. How do they know these things, Mr Gilbert? Did they expect me to believe they’ve got some shifty chap in a trench coat hanging round Wilhelmshaven dockyard dropping a penny in the phone box and chatting to Whitehall every time Jerry slips to sea? I knew what they really wanted. They wanted to humiliate me. They wanted to send me to the scene of my past glory . . . my glory! Not theirs . . . so they could say behind my back: not so clever now, Bonny Boy . . .’

  He was staring fixedly at Harry now. A cold, hard stare, almost unblinking. Harry felt forced to speak.

  ‘What was your plan, sir?’

  Bonalleck’s eyes narrowed. ‘What was my plan? . . . my plan? . . . hah! Wouldn’t you like to know! . . . You were in it with them, weren’t you? With Sandeman and McVeigh? . . . they were part of it . . .’

  ‘We did sink her, sir,’ Harry ventured, but was cut off by an explosion from Bonalleck.

  ‘We? We?’ Another belt of gin. ‘We . . .?’

  And then the third person, the ham actor, was suddenly back on stage. ‘All very well taking snaps of our battleships through your periscope, Charles, way back then . . . but it’s war now and it would appear when it comes to the real thing, you’re not really up to it. Are you? . . . ruined your career of course, Charles, back then. All that messing about in stupid submarines. Young man’s game, don’t you think? Silly young man’s game. Tsar thought you were a splendid chap, of course, but where’s the tsar now, eh? Eh?’

  And then his voice dropped again, to the growl.

  ‘Shits. All of them. Utter, utter shits. I did all those things. I gave this service its name. I made this service what it is today! My deeds! My victories! It was my hand the tsar shook for blasting Jerry out the Eastern Baltic. While they shined the seats of their pants and buffed their braid. It was me that was earning the glory. I . . . made . . . them! And they can’t stand that . . . got to bring me down . . . can’t have any more laurels for the Bonny Boy . . . got to see he comes a cropper . . . so don’t give me “we”!’

  Then he had appeared to rally, and smiled at Harry.

  ‘That was the Great War. The last lot. Stupid, stupid men, their lordships, back then. Of course they never liked submarines, the Admiralty. Said we should all be hanged as pirates,’ a big smile from the man then, warm and confiding . . . and reasonable. ‘Horton started flying the Jolly Roger when he heard. You know Horton. He’s our flag officer, submarines now, i
s our Max. He was just another two-ringer Skipper in those days, like me. But their lordships. “We have spoken. Make it so.” All our blokes who’d died. Sunk by Jerry submarines. Jerries who knew what they were doing. Our lot? They didn’t learn a thing. Still haven’t.’

  Another pause, while Bonalleck gazed into the abyss.

  ‘You were there . . . you saw . . .’ his tone had totally changed again, become confiding: ‘We could achieve great things in this coming war . . .’

  But Harry ‘saw’ nothing: had no idea what this mad man was raving about. He fell back on his prepared speech.

  ‘Sir, I have told the inquiry officers all I know,’ Harry said. ‘You’d been unwell during the patrol and were in your cabin when we encountered the Von Zeithen, and the first Lieutenant had been on watch and begun the attack in case she got away. Obviously any evidence I give to the inquiry will be guided by the good of the service.’

  But it had been Bonalleck’s ravaged face, suffused with drink and self-justification, which had done it. That had made Harry go on. That had stoked his young man’s sense of injustice. He had bridled at the thought that the Bonny Boy was trying to suck him into some kind of conspiracy over the truth of what had happened. It stuck in his gullet that Bonalleck had steered them in the dark into the middle of a coastal convoy, who could not account for the two members of his crew on watch with him, who was likely going to escape unaccused. And even after all that, the fact that Bonalleck was more interested in pouring himself another gin. It pushed Harry over the edge.

  ‘Sir,’ said Harry. Bonalleck had looked up, as if surprised to see Harry still there. ‘You are a shameless drunk, sir.’

  Bonalleck squinted as if he was thinking, I can’t be hearing this.

  ‘You have lost your boat and you have killed half your crew. You are a disgrace to the uniform you wear. You’re going to get away with this, I know that. But I want you to know, no matter whatever else happens, there is someone who knows the truth.’