Gone to Sea in a Bucket

by David Black

  She was a much smaller boat than Pelorus, about 200 feet long, and she didn’t look much over 600 or 700 tons, newly painted a drab grey, with a small 3-inch pop gun mounted forward of the conning tower, flush on the casing instead of in its own raised mounting as on Pelorus. He could read her name plate fixed to the side of the conning tower, N’galawa. Bloody funny name for a warship, thought Harry. HMS N’galawa sounded like something Johnny Weissmuller would shout at the natives in one of those awful Tarzan films.

  ‘Oi! ’arry!’ yelled the clipboard man, right by Harry’s ear.

  Harry spun with an ingratiating smile, surprised at being recognized, but he hadn’t been. The Petty Officer didn’t even raise his eyes from his clipboard; not even when the Harry he was after stuck his bare, oil-smeared head above the bridge, obviously irritated at being dragged from some below-deck task, and bellowed back in a thick accent, ‘Wot?’

  ‘This here’s our passenger, Mr Gilmour,’ said Harry’s welcomer, finally looking up with a narrow eye. ‘Stow him in the wardroom and make sure he stays out the way.’

  He turned to Harry with a suddenly sunny grin, disfigured by at least two gaping holes in a row of teeth the colour of stewed tea. ‘We wouldn’t want you getting belted by a packing case of tinned peaches, sir, now would we?’

  And Harry was guided by the man’s hand – actually, more like shoved – into the ‘going aboard’ line, and found himself being shuffled forward at a tripping rate up the ladder on to the bridge, pushed and buffeted, grunts, a curse, a big big hurry behind him. Through the rush and his own irritation, he realised that his feet had just hit the deckplates of N’galawa’s control room and he’d gone straight through the dread threshold he’d conjured and worried and fretted about; through and beyond the fear he’d had of that moment, of having to stand in the conning tower hatch and lower himself into its black gaping maw. Right through, without even noticing, propelled along by a good old-fashioned Royal Navy ‘’urry up!’

  Out of the corner of his turning eye he was aware of the mechanical spaghetti of the control room, and then the other ’arry was roughly spinning his shoulders and peremptorily announcing ‘Aft, sir’ and he was in the tunnel of the passageway, stumbling on an unfamiliar deck of flat packs of tinned food laid out to make use of every conceivable storage space.

  ‘Hard a’port, sir,’ and he was through the curtains and into the wardroom, and the other ’arry had his grip off him and was cramming him into a tiny shoebox-size shelf above what looked like folded up bunks. ‘Can’t do ya no char or nuffin’, sir – galley’s closed.’ The man, wearing only shorts, singlet and a lot of body hair, displayed no insignia of rank, leaving Harry at a loss as to how to address him. He was also too big for the space, and was bent too close to just turn and bugger off back to his duties, which he obviously wanted to do.

  The two Harrys looked at each other for a moment.

  And then it came to him at last, out of the all too familiar reek of oil, and sweat and bilge water, and the hemming-in steel-ness and the sense of the crush of human bodies – all too real, with the fast-paced daisy chain of ratings charging past eighteen inches away with their loads for stowing further aft. It was the first flutter of panic. Like something encroaching on where he lived, ‘noises off’ and threatening. Suddenly shaky, trying to drown it out, Harry said: ‘N’galawa? That’s a bloody funny name.’ Knowing immediately after speaking that to mock the name of another sailor’s ship was beyond bad manners.

  The other ’arry stopped the supply train passing outside by sticking his backside into it, and as he went to swish shut the wardroom curtains, fixed Harry with a cold, indifferent eye again. ‘It’s Swahili . . . for “I want my mum”. Sir.’

  Harry flopped bum first on to the banquette that lined the tiny space, and laughed a quiet, sardonic laugh. ‘How did he know?’ he said to the portrait of the King, hanging less than six inches from his ear on the wood-panelled bulkhead. The noise of the sailors going about the replenishment of their boat was now doing all the drowning out that Harry needed. A blue funk wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle, was it? After all, he’d handled funk before, hadn’t he? He smiled at the King. He was back.

  Harry was also left alone. He passed the time browsing N’galawa’s meagre library – a couple of Somerset Maughams, a translation of Jules Verne’s Michael Strogoff, some Margery Allinghams – all of them he’d read – and two obscure travel books. Eventually he heard and felt the boat slip her moorings, and the diesels power up; still no one came. Then a rating’s face, and the offer: ‘Skipper says do you fancy a last look at home, sir?’

  They were rounding past Hunter’s Quay when Harry scrambled up between the lookouts to stand beside N’galawa’s Captain, Lieutenant Robert Whitlock RN. He wore a disreputable watch jacket and the usual white pullover, his thick black curls bared to the light breeze wafting like prairie grass. He had a good five or six years on Harry. A lot, when you’re that age, even if you have already been through almost a year of war. The bridge was a tight squeeze and made introductory handshakes a bit of a fumble.

  ‘I hear you think we have a funny name,’ said Whitlock.

  ‘Unforgivable, sir,’ said Harry. ‘Nerves. Trotted out the very thing I didn’t mean to say.’

  ‘First time back in a boat,’ said Whitlock, ‘since you got sunk?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you’re back. No screaming hab-dabs?’

  ‘Not that I’ve noticed, sir.’

  ‘Good man.’ Whitlock looked away and swept his arm the length of the shore, a mere few hundred yards off their starboard beam, ‘Nice here, isn’t it? Very pretty.’

  And that was it. All said and done. The vital question settled. Harry was back in the trade. What was all the fuss about?

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he replied. ‘Very pretty.’

  And so it was. He studied his little town, nestled in a bowl of the Cowal hills, the clouds dappled in the evening sun, with the forlorn statue of Highland Mary on the little plug of rock above the pier, the church and castle behind it, the town’s slate-grey facades redolent with all the beneficence that over 200 years of tranquillity can bestow. And now he was sailing away to defend it. An inchoate pressure of his mission and pride and grim resolve thumped away in his chest and in those passing minutes a serene certainty descended on him, a sense that all that was fine and decent in a world being ripped apart was vested here; and that he would give his life to defend it.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It is 01:47 hours, 16 August, 1940; there is a position marked on the chart in degrees and minutes north and degrees and minutes west, that places His Majesty’s Submarine Trebuchet some thirty miles west-south-west of Les Sables-d’Olonne on the Bay of Biscay.

  Sub-Lieutenant Harry Gilmour RNVR, on her bridge, is pretty confident of the figures, having just drawn down Jupiter to the horizon for the second time – just to check – using the sextant with the modified, more powerful lens that makes it easier to see the line between the dark of the sea and the dark of the sky; the one that old Lexie had presented to him like a school prize to a school boy, so long ago, when Harry had announced he was going into the navy.

  It is a crystal-clear, moonless night with the long, slow swell of the Atlantic barely discernible beneath Harry’s feet. Not a rumour of the tempest that normally rules this notorious pan of ocean. Only starlight illuminates the dimpled surface as Trebuchet noses at a steady six knots towards the dancing line of fairy lights that is the French fishing fleet, out for a night’s work from the tiny ports that line La Roche-sur-Yon coastline between St Nazaire and La Rochelle. The German-occupied coastline.

  On the bridge with Harry is Trebuchet’s Captain, Lieutenant Andy Trumble RN. He is the same tousled blond youth who had stuck his head over the bridge of that old H-boat all those months ago to welcome Harry aboard on his first dive in a submarine, although his hair is a lot shorter these days. Trumble had been the Jimmy back then. Now he is the Skipper and Trebuchet i
s his first command.

  Also with them are two ratings: lookouts keeping an all-round eye while the Skipper studies the bobbing light show. A fifth man on the bridge, Leading Seaman Billy Wardell, mans a somewhat gimcrack twin Lewis gun mount, the wisdom of which the Skipper has often doubted, but for tonight’s enterprise he has allowed it to be assembled.

  They are here to make a rendezvous with a fishing boat, to meet a man called Gabriel, and to collect a package from him, then transport it back to Portsmouth. However, the fishing boat they are to rendezvous with is supposed to be alone, and the presence of these other boats bobbing between them and the shore is a most unwelcome development.

  This is Harry’s third war patrol aboard HMS Trebuchet, and given the mission it is the most likely to generate any excitement. Especially with the presence of this surprise Armada. Harry has already called down his estimated position to the control room. He packs his sextant back in its wooden box and passes it down the conning tower hatch to a rating for stowing behind the chart table. He resumes his scanning of the dark horizon to seaward, while Trumble and the other lookouts peer into the mob of fishing boats hoping to find their fishing boat among them.

  Harry’s job is to look out for any Jerry sneaking up behind them, for Jerry is here already, busily putting France’s Atlantic ports to good use. Brest, Lorient, St Nazaire, Roscoff and La Rochelle, over the eastern horizon, are all being fortified to accommodate U-boats; preparing to get them farther out into the Atlantic in order to disrupt Britain’s convoy arteries to the New World just as they are starting to pump. There’s not much of a Jerry naval presence in the Bay yet, just a few light craft; E-boats, and the slower but no less armed Räumbooten. Most of the Jerry light forces are in the Channel with the landing barges, waiting for the Luftwaffe to finish the job they started less than a week ago, pounding the RAF airfields across southern England, clearing the way for their invasion forces; but there is still a chance there are one or two out there tonight, eager to pounce on any Royal Navy submarine looking the wrong way.

  Harry watches the Bay, his concentration complete, his daydreaming days knocked out of him by the early raids on Portsmouth. The dislocating, sobering, profound shock of seeing rows of mutilated terraced houses standing in landscapes of broken glass and smashed masonry, the intimacy of their patterned wallpaper, and naked bath-tubs on view to the world; the buses down holes deeper than their top decks; burning factories and workshops, the bodies in the streets; women’s legs poking out from under muck-caked blankets, or worse, the children.

  Jerry raids on Channel shipping and the big naval base began over a month ago; relentless, or so they had all thought, until the intensity of the current phase of the air battle. At this very hour, away to the north-east, on airfields in the hinterland behind the giant sweeping arc between the Baie de Seine and the Pas-de-Calais, hundreds and hundreds of German fighters and bombers are being armed and fuelled for yet another day in the skies over England. But Harry doesn’t think about any of that; right now his own little bit of the war has his undivided attention.

  Harry is dimly aware of Andy Trumble muttering away to himself about ‘bloody’ this and ‘bloody’ that, seriously disgruntled by the presence of these other fishing boats, and the nigh-on impossibility of him sighting his fishing boat and its convoluted light signal against a backdrop of a score of other lights. This, and his fretting over the fact that Johnnie Frenchman isn’t all that well disposed towards the Royal Navy these days, not after Force H sunk half the French fleet at anchor in Mers-el-Kébir last month. God knows how many French sailors they’d killed – a thousand at least – all to keep the ships from falling into Jerry’s hands. Which is why, if those fishing boats were to spot Trebuchet, the game would be as good as up. So the muttering continues apace, barely audible above the dull diesel thump of Trebuchet’s two engines – one pushing her through the limpid bay, and the other cramming her batteries full of amps for the coming day, submerged.

  The first white light leapt into Harry’s peripheral vision as he held his binoculars, the seals slightly away from his eye sockets, but he was focused on it in a second. ‘Light on the port quarter!’

  As he said it, he knew it was too close. A mile? Or three? It was too dark for a useful guess at range, but it hadn’t just come over the horizon; so much closer than that. The light had sprung out of nowhere, out of the dark sea background, too dark to separate even the dimmest silhouette.

  A second white light appeared as all binoculars on the bridge trained in unison, in plenty of time to see a green light rise up and then dip. But it was a stuttering, hurried hoist. Behind him Harry heard the Skipper hiss a series of orders down the open hatch to the control room, and immediately the boat’s big diesels went silent. As they did so, Trumble’s hiss became audible, insistent, ‘. . . group down, slow ahead, bring her on to two-nine-five.’ They had gone on to electric motors.

  Trumble’s shadow was up and beside Harry. ‘Our recognition signal, but back to front,’ he said in his ear. ‘What exactly did you see, Harry?’

  ‘Nothing at all, sir. Then the white light just flashed on, and then . . .’

  He was still speaking when the sound of shouts came over the silent water. Not close, but distinct. And then suddenly a fishing boat was all lit up. Not by her own blaze of lights, but a pool at the end of a stab of light, like a white pencil in the dark, and at its end a French drift-netter all picked out. Then the fishing boat’s own lights came on in her wheel house, and a few deck lights, and in their wash could be seen, lolling off her beam, a dim shape that Harry recognised immediately from all the recognition silhouettes pasted up in Dolphin’s wardroom. It was a Räumboote, and she was probing the French boat with her bridge-wing searchlight.

  ‘Bugger,’ said Trumble, and everyone on the bridge was instantly on tiptoe ready to leap into action, but the Skipper did not shout, ‘Diving Stations!’ He said nothing. Then, after a long moment, he said, ‘Bugger’ again before sotto voce issuing a series of further commands down the bridge voice-pipes. He was conning the submarine out in a wide circle, taking them to seaward of the fishing boat and her Räumboote companion, moving silently on her motors to put them between Trebuchet and the gaggle of other French boats.

  Harry kept his binoculars trained on the two light-spattered silhouettes. Here were his first live Germans, tiny mannequins jigging and bobbing on the Räumboote’s bridge. Others were moving, boarding the fishing boat, it all playing out barely a mile away across the black lead of the water. The angry shouting had died down, yet there were still exchanges taking place; even above the burbling of the German’s idling diesels he could still make out the distinct sound of emphatic nons!

  ‘That Jerry’s obviously the sheep dog,’ said the Skipper to Trebuchet’s First Lieutenant, who had just climbed up from the control room, ‘padding about out there to seaward, making sure none of his flock tries to slip away to friendlier shores. He’ll be giving our chaps in the drifter a right bollocking, so while he’s occupied, I’m going round behind him. We’ll not dive as long as he doesn’t spot us, it’ll waste too much time going down only to have to come up again.’

  ‘Too right,’ Harry heard the First Lieutenant whisper out of the darkness.

  ‘Get Mike to get his pop gun party ready in the well,’ Trumble whispered from behind his binoculars. ‘I don’t want them up yet in case we have to go down fast, but I want them ready for a gun action pronto if the need arises.’

  The First Lieutenant’s shadow slipped down the conning tower hatch and was gone.

  Without taking his eyes off the two boats in the darkness, Harry had been hanging on every word. This was it: he was watching the movements of real enemy sailors, operating against an Allied vessel, and he was listening to his Skipper laying plans to engage it. His mouth was dry, his palms moist, and he could not imagine a life more extraordinary than the minutes he was living through now, out in the Bay of Biscay, stalking a German warship through the dead of nigh
t.

  Two war patrols aboard Trebuchet had introduced Harry to the submariner’s life proper, had at last allowed him to grow into being part of a crew. The ‘voyage of the damned’ that had been his patrol aboard Pelorus counted only inasmuch as it let him come to Trebuchet with a ‘name’, a certain cachet that allowed him to start not quite at the beginning, that offered quite considerable benefit of the doubt, especially as far as ‘Jack’ was concerned. He had done something they respected. It was nothing to do with his role in sending to the bottom a major German warship. It was everything to do with him saving Ted Padgett. And it wasn’t just Trebuchet’s crew; he heard it everywhere he went in the trade. The fact that he had personally wrestled Davy Jones for the life of one of their most prodigious sinners – and won; that was something. No one was interested in the glory; and the more Harry thought about it, that was all right by him. Now here he was, part of an experienced submarine crew with more than 6,000 tons of enemy shipping sunk, under their belt.

  He’d learned one other thing about HMS Trebuchet since joining. She wasn’t ever called HMS Trebuchet – at least not by her crew. They had another name for her, and they’d started allowing Harry to call their boat by its ‘real’ name. HMS Trebuchet, pronounced treb-oo-shay, was named after a medieval French catapult – indeed that’s what the boat’s crest should have shown. But, as the Skipper had to explain to Harry, ‘Jack’ had never taken warmly to ‘talking foreign’. If proof were needed, he need only go back to HMS Bellerophon, the 74-gun that fought with Nelson at the Nile, and on whose deck Napoleon would later surrender. ‘Jack’ could never get his gob around that one, so then and forever after every ship of that name became the Billy Ruffian; which was why HMS Trebuchet’s ‘Jack’s called their boat The Bucket. A concept reflected in her crest hanging in the wardroom. It might technically be a medieval catapult, but the perspective showed only a tiny array of struts protruding deep into the crest’s plane, while what you saw was the bucket that held all the rocks.