Gone to Sea in a Bucket

by David Black

  Harry didn’t have a tin hat; they hadn’t issued him with one at Rosyth, so it was only an inherited watch cap and his gas mask bag that he grabbed before he headed for the steamer. This time the sailing was from Kirn Pier, a hundred yards down the hill from his front door, from where the little paddle steamer would go all the way up the Clyde to the Broomielaw in Glasgow’s city centre. It was a greyish day, with thin, high cloud blocking the sun and making the air close.

  The pier was jammed with sailors, some burdened down with giant white slugs of kitbags, others just heading for the city on passes, to the pubs and the dance halls. Despite the early hour the lads were raucous, full of it. Many of them sported ‘HM Submarines’ cap bands, begging the question: was Harry still one of them? He shut his eyes and conjured up Pelorus’s bridge, the gaping ‘O’ of the hatchway that led down through the conning tower to the control room, and every time he closed his eyes he would see its black hole; tried to imagine going through another just like it on another submarine, and his stomach would churn. A settled and terrible conviction seemed to be forming in him, that somehow if he were ever to shut that steel hatch on the good, fresh air, he would never see the sky again. The little paddler chuffed and beat its way through the flock of anchored ships cluttering the Firth, and he leant on the rail and let the conviction fill him with despair.

  As the Clyde’s banks narrowed towards the city the paddle steamer began passing docks, and then shipyards bristling with cranes disgorging cargo, or lifting plates and giant hull frames; serried ranks of freighters, the slab sides of a King George V-class battleship in the fitting-out basin at the John Brown yard, an aircraft carrier taking shape on the slips; other lesser warships, dwarfed by the giant structures, all seething with workers. And still audible above the belly rumbling of the paddler’s reciprocating steam engine was the all-pervasive background din drifting out across the river of caulkers’ hammers forming hulls; and the sparkly guttering flashes of welding torches, and every now and then the unmistakable smell of burning steel wafting on air that looked and smelled greyer than air should, too thick to carry away the stink and fug of heavy industry going full-pelt. The sky became high and narrow as the ranks of hulls began to bunch, each ship perched on a slipway, angled into the curve of the river, towering over the turbid water, all self-contained and huge and swarming with blackened gangs of men. Another King George V-class sat like a vast, propped-up, bath-time toy on the slips at Fairfield’s yard, and then tucked behind in the next door Stephens’ yard, just where the letter had told him, was HMS Wolverhampton: dazzle camouflage paint almost complete, ship’s stores going aboard, almost ready for sea. Harry couldn’t help a little thrill at how poised and capable she looked amid all the clanging, banging chaos around her.

  He took a tram from the Broomielaw along the streets of Govan that backed on to the yards and the river; streets of grimy tenements, one collapsed like a rotten tooth: German bombs falling short of the shipyard, a failed one-off attempt to keep Wolverhampton in port. It was a shocking sight, mainly because the destruction was specific and local, a little atrocity in the middle of the mundane and the everyday. If Poland and the Low Countries were anything to go by, apparently the Germans were capable of much, much worse; but so far, this country had not been Rotterdam-ed. No one, however, appeared in any doubt the Luftwaffe were only staying their hand in order to stockpile and prepare. Maybe Crumley was right. Maybe with the coming of the Hun, humanity really was going to reprise some blackly medieval past.

  Harry was at the gangway before he snapped out of his gloomy reverie. He was going to see the flamboyant Peter Dumaresq, the man who’d saved him from Redoubtable’s wardroom; to toast Peter’s new half ring and swap war stories.

  ‘Sub-Lieutenant Gilmour, for Lieutenant Commander Dumaresq,’ said Harry to the officer of the deck, as he snapped off a salute to the quarter deck.

  ‘Mr Gilmour. The yeoman will take you to the wardroom,’ said a fellow Sub with a friendly smile. Not like Redoubtable at all, even though he was RN. A ‘welcome aboard’ followed. Down through the labyrinth of passages to the officers’ flat.

  ‘We’ve been ordered to look out our tropic kit, so we’re probably headed for the Arctic,’ said Dumaresq, after shaking his hand, after Harry asked where they were bound. ‘The Captain’s ashore in deep pow-wow as we speak, so I suppose the rest of us will find out as we steam past Arran.’

  Then into lunch: a gaggle of officers, draped in various shirt-sleeved poses, sat around the main wardroom table in a half gloom from the limited light the open scuttles allowed in. The crisp white tablecloth was covered in remove after remove until only the detritus from their dessert was left and clean ashtrays were being slid along the table. They were mostly young men, a dozen or so spared last-minute pre-sailing duties, all in their late twenties and early thirties.

  All the department heads were there: ‘Guns’, the navigator, the Chief Engineer, career officers letting their hair down just a little, all having drunk their share of claret, and zeroing in on the port; drunk, but only a little. After all they’d be sailing on the dawn tide, heading back to sea, and the war.

  This wasn’t Redoubtable. Not at all. Not a whiff of the upper-sixth common room here. These were hard, serious, professional men, many with experience won in battle, and right now they were getting ready to listen to Harry’s tale. The steward had been summoned, told to bring more port and clear the table – but leave the condiment dishes, mind you! They didn’t just want to hear how Harry had sunk the Von Zeithen, they wanted to see it as well.

  Their eagerness, and what it meant, was not lost on Harry, despite his feeling a bit droopy from the wine and the magnificent and eminently tasty concoction the wardroom chef had miracled out of mounds of corned beef, instant potatoes and carrots. He looked at the faces around the table, feeling a long way from the wretchedness of being on Redoubtable. The faces here didn’t make him feel like an outsider anymore, a butt for bored bullies; wavy stripes and all, he was being treated as one of them now. A fighting sailor, part of a crew who’d met Jerry on the high seas in a straight fight, and sunk him; credentials didn’t come much more credible than that. He’d dreamed of this; this was exactly how he’d dressed it up as he scrawled his signature that Tuesday afternoon after war had been declared in the recruiting office in this very city. But it had taken a lot of growing up to get here.

  Harry, before all this the easy-going, charming, diffident owner of a poseur’s pipe he actually couldn’t bear to smoke, was much given to leaning raffishly against a students’ bar on Byre’s Road, waiting to be admired. That Harry would never have recognised the bloke who’d called out the readings from a ‘fruit machine’, sitting in a steel tube with fifty-odd other tensed-up, sweating matelots, forty feet under the North Sea, stalking an enemy cruiser, with the murderous intention of shooting several tons of high explosives into her guts.

  There was a toast: ‘To the next port! Wherever it may be!’

  ‘Is it true we’re all going to Canada?’ Harry asked, made bold by the booze.

  ‘Canada?’ said ‘Guns’, a chubby, cheery two-ringer with tow hair and a distant, half surprised look at him.

  ‘It’s the rumour,’ added an older officer, the oldest at the table, another Lieutenant Commander with a centre parting and the vaguest hint of posh Scots in his accent and with red piping between his stripes – the ship’s surgeon. ‘When the invasion comes we’re all supposed to bugger off across the Atlantic with the Crown Jewels, “to carry on the fight”, at least, that’s the talk of the steamie,’ he said.

  ‘What are you talking about, Doc? What do you mean “all”?’ said Dumaresq.

  ‘All,’ said the Doc. ‘The lot of us. The entire home fleet and all who sail in her.’

  ‘Bollocks!’ said Dumaresq. ‘Who’s saying that?’ He paused to put more menace into his scowl. ‘It’s propaganda to lull the bastard Jerries into a false sense of security.’ Another pause, then: ‘If Jerry is stupid enou
gh to attempt a landing he’ll find Nelson, Rodney and every other battleship in the bloody navy steaming down the Channel line abreast, firing their 16-inchers over open sights right into their bloody hammocks. And bugger the Luftwaffe!’ Dumaresq paused again as if to reflect, then carried on: ‘If he tries it’ll be a bloodbath, probably for both of us, but that doesn’t matter. All that matters is it means Jerry can’t win. He might sink the whole bloody fleet in the process, but as the last destroyer goes down, there’ll be “Jack”, balancing on her main truck with a Lewis gun stuck to his hip, still firing till his hat floats. Even if a few Jerries do get ashore, they’ll have paid too dearly for the entrance fee to have anything left to pay for the rides.’

  While he was talking, Dumaresq had absently drawn a pad of bar chitties towards him and was scribbling on it. ‘That is what we are here for, not as a lifeboat for the Crown Jewels. We’ve seen off the Armada, the Dutch and the French. And Jerry will be no different. I refer you to Old Jarvie, a man not known for prevarication – you know who Old Jarvie was, Mr Gilmour? Don’t you?’

  Harry didn’t get a chance to answer.

  ‘Sir John Jervis, Earl St Vincent, First Sea Lord,’ said ‘Guns’, butting in, ‘Took his title from the drubbing he gave the French off Cape St Vincent in 1797.’

  ‘I think you’ll find it was the Dons that time, but you’re on the right track,’ said Dumaresq with a smug grin. ‘In 1801, when Parliament was in a funk over Bonaparte threatening to invade, he told them . . .’

  Another Lieutenant farther down the table decided he too was going to butt in. Grinning, he interrupted with a sombre archness: ‘“I do not say, my lords, that the French cannot come . . .”’

  Dumaresq butted back, ‘. . . “I say only that they cannot come by sea.” Quite right, Mr Chapman. So I don’t want to hear any more of this talk. For the pure and simple reason – and I guarantee you this, gentlemen – the Germans are not going to invade these islands. Because the Royal Navy isn’t going to let them.’

  All said in a tone that brooked no contradiction, at least not from one of his junior officers. But the Doc wasn’t junior.

  ‘So you don’t subscribe to the old “fleet-in-being” concept, Peter?’ he said, smirking away in the corner. ‘Remain intact, maintain the threat. Very popular in the Italian navy one hears.’

  ‘We don’t have a concept of “fleet-in-being” in the Royal Navy, Doc,’ said Dumaresq, calmer now as he slid the bar chitty tablet he’d been scribbling on down the table towards Wolverhampton’s Surgeon Commander. As it passed Harry, he could see his friend had been sketching a series of signal flags.

  ‘We have that instead, and I’m assuming you know what it is?’ asked Dumaresq, leaning back.

  The Doc peered at it. ‘A signal hoist . . . ,’ he said, recognising it immediately and beaming as befits a gentleman who acknowledges he’s been bested.

  ‘. . . and you know what it says?’

  ‘“Engage The Enemy More Closely”,’ said the Doc, much to the amusement of the assembled young men, all now sporting expressions of naked aggression.

  Into the middle of this leant ‘Guns’, slamming down the salt with a thump on the table: ‘Right, Gilmour, let’s get down to it now we’ve got Henry the Fifth Part Two out the way. There’s Pelorus, in the Skagerrak, sun’s up; what’s your exact position, course and speed . . .?’

  Later, after the action had been played out across the cloth, Harry was sat in Peter Dumaresq’s linen-cupboard-sized cabin, a palatial space by naval standards. Harry was sat on the desk’s chair, with the desk’s top folded up behind him, and flush with a shelf crammed with the cabin’s only fripperies – photographs of an eighteenth-century vine-encrusted English farmhouse and a stout tweedy man, one of a young woman of stunning elegance, in a light print dress, smoking a cigarette and cupping a wine glass, sitting against a bright, Mediterranean backdrop, with bougainvillea everywhere. A girlfriend? Fiancée?

  Dumaresq was leaning across to tip a few drops of angostura into Harry’s tumbler of gin.

  ‘I didn’t do anything,’ said Harry suddenly, staring at the bulkhead, waiting to be censured. ‘In the engine room, after we were rammed. I didn’t take command. I didn’t lead. I was the only officer in the compartment and I didn’t do anything.’

  He’d decided to come clean right away. Confess to the doubt and shame that had been eating him since.

  Dumaresq, perched on the edge of his bunk, was paying more attention to doctoring his own gin, slowly swirling the spirals of bitters until the clear gin assumed the proper hue, then he raised the tumbler for a toast, looking at Harry, who responded with his glass, and Dumaresq said simply: ‘To Ted Padgett. Who will live to tell it all to his grandchildren, thanks to you.’ He took a hefty belt, then considered his glass: ‘Everybody wonders how they will stand up the first time. Now you know.’

  ‘Indeed I do,’ said Harry, dripping wretchedness.

  ‘You kept your head,’ said the older man, as if discussing something entirely different. ‘You let the chiefs get on with their jobs, and you saved the life of one of your wounded crew . . .’ a pause . . . ‘I hope you’re not going to start getting all soppy now, like a girl.’

  And with that, he looked up with the broadest, friendliest smile. Harry didn’t know even what expression to wear. But he got the point, and stepped back from the precipice of self-indulgence just in time. A voice in his head even said, Oh, do shut up! And then as he remembered his mother’s entreaty to ‘tell someone’, he started to laugh. Whoever that someone might one day be, it certainly wasn’t going to be Peter Dumaresq; or indeed any of them from among the wardroom of HMS Wolverhampton. These men hadn’t wanted to know how he’d ‘felt’, or what he was ‘going through’, they had only wanted to know what he’d done. And the relief that washed over him right then ‘felt’ pretty good. He’d just been judged by his deeds, and so far had not been found wanting. Everything else was flummery. The message was simple – get on with it!

  From that moment on he knew that if he was to turn in his papers as a submarine officer he would never again feel he had the right to sit in the company of men like Peter Dumaresq, or indeed any of the other officers of Wolverhampton’s wardroom. But more than that, he knew he would never be able to face himself. The dilemma had been resolved. He could not back out now. That it meant he was going to be very afraid again, very soon, was no longer the issue. He had got his wish, he had become like the men he had just dined with. And with that little matter of housekeeping out of the way, he proffered his glass to Dumaresq to be charged with more gin. The conversation, naval fashion, immediately cut to the real reason Dumaresq had called Harry back into his cabin: what had really happened aboard Pelorus?

  The story of the patrol up to and including the sinking of the Graf Von Zeithen had been easy to tell, what Harry knew of it. Then there was the loss of Pelorus; but what did Dumaresq want to know about the scramble for life in an oily sunken steel tube, just another mortal vignette from their particular house in the human zoo; there were endless others being played out on stricken ships from Halifax to Cape Town. Men dying in warships wasn’t news these days. But what had happened in the interview with the Bonny Boy back in Rosyth was different. Dumaresq wanted to take Harry back to that place; the place Harry hadn’t gone back to since.

  It wasn’t out of prurient interest either. Dumaresq was such an affable chap it was easy to forget how connected, just how ‘old navy’ he was. What did Harry remember that made sense, which he could succinctly communicate, naval-fashion, to Dumaresq? Pared back to the language of an Admiralty dispatch, bald precision would not address the deep unease he’d felt.

  ‘He described the patrol, from his point of view,’ began Harry, ‘although there wasn’t much of his version I recognised.’

  ‘Go on.’

  Harry looked at Dumaresq, at loss as to how he could communicate what had gone on in Bonalleck’s tatty naval quarters. How do you explain the abyss to someone no
rmal, who has never had an occasion to look into it? How do you explain it to yourself, when for the first time in your life you are confronted with madness? When it only comes at you in flashes? Against everything else that seems so normal?

  Harry couldn’t think how to excuse himself, or indeed if an excuse was necessary. All he could think of was the black hole he’d seen opening up beneath him if he tried to make an issue of Bonalleck’s conduct; the hole he was going to fall into if he announced he was actually going to tell what had happened to a court of inquiry.

  ‘I just told him that as far as I was concerned, he’d been unwell during the patrol and was in his cabin when we encountered the Von Zeithen, and the First Lieutenant had been on watch and begun the attack in case she got away. And then I added that any evidence I gave to the inquiry would be guided by what’s best for the good of the service.’

  Dumaresq smiled a very knowing smile. ‘Did you now? What a very clever young man you are. That was the correct answer . . .’

  ‘I didn’t leave it there, though,’ Harry added.

  ‘Ah.’

  Harry spoke with his eyes closed: ‘I told him he was a shameless drunk who had killed half his crew.’

  Dumaresq sat back, steepled his fingers on his chest and studied them closely.

  Harry continued, ‘There had been two lookouts on the bridge with him, I don’t know who they were. A couple of young ABs. He survived. They didn’t. But he never even bothered to mention them. His crew. Two of his crew. And he just turned his back. Didn’t care. Probably like he did that night. I just couldn’t let him get away with it. So I opened my big gob. I told him I knew who he was, what he had done.’