Gone to Sea in a Bucket

by David Black

  The Räumboote was also carrying depth charges. Trumble couldn’t count them all, but he could see three down either side, astern, and on the flat deck aft there could be a rank of four, ready to roll off the stern. Certainly no more, and they weren’t very big ones. But even Harry could work out that wasn’t where the real threat lay. The Räumboote had a radio shack and its operator would be screaming blue murder, and god knows who would be responding. It wasn’t long until dawn. And now that the balloon had gone up, if they didn’t collect their package tonight they would be returning empty-handed, mission very definitely unaccomplished.

  Carey swung back through the forward hatch into the control room. He was gripping a small pair of pliers as if they were exhibit A in a court case. ‘The shells weren’t fused,’ he said.

  Trumble withdrew his eyes. ‘Down scope. What?’

  Carey said: ‘In a gun action, the crew go up, loader first, layer second. The loader already has the first shell out the ready-use magazine,’ he twisted the pliers in mid air, ‘and up the spout as the layer is traversing the gun for action. But the seal’s gone on our ready-use magazine. Not good to try firing shells that’ve been underwater all day. So the shells were getting passed direct from the main magazine forward. A daisy chain, from the magazine, along the passage, and up the ladder to the loader, who grabbed them, one at a time, and as per procedure, twisted the fuse on the nose, one half turn to the right, to arm it, ready to fire. Except when he was twisting the fuse, one half turn to the right, he was disarming the fuse, because some stupid bastard in the magazine was arming them as he pulled them off the racks. A new addition to the crew . . . thought he was helping . . . helping by passing a live shell the length of the bloody boat, that if it had been dropped or banged would have gone off and blown a bloody great hole in us!’

  Harry was watching the Skipper in profile, so that when he turned away from Carey it was obvious he was suppressing the beginnings of a smile. His face was composed when he turned back. ‘Why have you got pliers?’ the Skipper asked.

  ‘To stop Milner ramming them up the rating’s arse,’ said Carey.

  ‘Well, now that’s sorted, I think we should have another go, what d’you say?’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Harry and Carey were alone in the wardroom. It was late afternoon on the day after their second attempt at a gun action with the Räumboote. HMS Trebuchet, safe in the embrace of routine, was heading out of the Bay of Biscay, her electric motors easing her north at a steady three knots, some forty feet beneath a flat calm sea, the surface ruffled only by light airs and dappled with sunlight.

  Milner was on periscope watch, and the Skipper was aft with Mr Partridge, the boat’s Warrant Officer Engineer and the man in charge of The Bucket’s hitherto trouble-free engines; the Skipper more than likely having to listen to Mr Partridge’s endless complaining over potential threats to their continued smooth running.

  Gabriel, the man they had come all this way to relieve of a ‘package’, was asleep a bare few inches above Harry and Carey in a slung-down bunk that hung over the tiny wardroom cubby like an extra deck. His package was now safe next door under the bunk in the Skipper’s tiny six-foot cabin.

  Harry and Carey were sitting, or rather perched, on the little banquettes that ran round two sides of their cubby and doubled for their sleeping accommodation, drinking French coffee from another package Gabriel had brought aboard. Carey was looking glum, and Harry, being the sensitive chap he was, knew why; although up until now wild horses wouldn’t have prompted him say so. Gabriel, a rumpled hump beneath his blankets, would now and then emit a delicate snore as if to remind the two young officers of the continuing silence between them.

  ‘What I don’t get, Harry,’ said Carey eventually, without looking up, ‘is what he found so funny.’

  Harry stifled a grin of his own. He took a gulp of coffee, which, even with condensed milk, tasted damn good. ‘Relief of tension I suppose.’

  Carey shook his head: ‘He was laughing at me. I know he was.’

  The Skipper’s reaction on learning they’d been firing dud shells at the Räumboote had indeed been a series of sniggers. The crew just thought this was one more manifestation of their Skipper’s general madcap derangement, a talent he’d been known for in the trade for some time. But the Skipper’s eyes had been fixed on Carey, and Harry had guessed why.

  Jerry had a good name for it: schadenfreude. Mr Smart-alec-clever-clogs Carey had got his comeuppance. But what do you say to your first Lieutenant when you realize the joke is on him, and he doesn’t? In the real navy, the answer would have been simple: nothing. Keep your mouth shut and obey the last order. Even in Harry’s short time in a blue suit he was becoming all too aware of what the navy demanded of you. But then there was also what the trade demanded of you, which, he was coming to learn, wasn’t always the same thing.

  Life in a submarine was a unique experience. On a big ship, hierarchy prevailed. On a submarine, it was different. You had to rub along, mainly because it wasn’t safe to do otherwise. Resentments couldn’t be allowed to fester; you let that happen and it stopped people from covering each other’s backs. You had to know that the other bloke knew his job and was doing it, and not going off in a huff. That was how valves got left open and the sea poured in, or new ratings in the magazine decided to help out by arming the bloody shells in the racks instead of leaving it to the gun crew. Or Skippers stopped listening to their number ones, because the number ones kept trying to tell them how to do their jobs. So that was why Harry decided, since Carey had raised the subject, that he would say something.

  ‘It’s because you told the Skipper he shouldn’t attack,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  Harry repeated himself.

  ‘Given the complete bloody shambles that resulted, he should be hanging his head in shame for not listening to me,’ said Carey through gritted teeth.

  ‘He’s the Skipper. Even when he’s wrong, he’s right. According to the Articles of War, disagreeing with him is mutiny.’ Harry, back on Pelorus . . . he decided to moderate his case a little . . . things weren’t that bad, yet. ‘Well, insubordination at least.’ He paused, then decided to make his point. ‘When you, Mr Know-it-all, falls on his arse, the Skipper’s first reaction is to laugh.’

  ‘Don’t you swear at me, Mr Gilmour. Remember who you are – and who I am,’ said Carey. His face began working overtime – a totally unprecedented sight for The Bucket’s scion of sangfroid. Then he calmed himself, before saying: ‘What do you mean, fall on my arse?’

  ‘His job as Skipper is to command and to fight the boat. Your job as “Jimmy” is to deliver to him a fully worked up and efficient boat with which to fight. Allowing new ratings to dick around with pliers, leaving the gun crew to play pass the parcel with live shells up and down the companionway, in his eyes counts as failing in that duty, sir. With all due respect.’

  The atmosphere in the wardroom on the passage back to Portsmouth improved remarkably after that exchange. Carey was aware enough to know when to curb his innate superiority, and how to do it with a certain amount of subtlety; and Andy Trumble was not so lumpen as to miss the new attention to duty on the part of his number one, and the grace with which it was offered up. There were no recriminations, because they were not necessary. Everyone just held their noses and let that one pass downstream. Apart from the new rating, who got a right royal bollocking from the gunner’s mate.

  Much as it stuck in Andy Trumble’s gullet to return from any patrol with torpedoes left, let alone a full complement of them, The Bucket had been ordered back to Portsmouth on completion of her mission. No swanning around looking for targets – straight back to her berth and deliver her package. So the boat was proceeding under regular watch routine: one watch on duty, one asleep and the other attending to the little rituals of submarine life – darning socks, writing letters, polishing and cleaning, and on this occasion, making sure the boat’s battle honours were up to date.
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  It was the Torpedo Gunner’s Mate who took charge of sewing up The Bucket’s Jolly Roger for her arrival back at Fort Blockhouse. A patch representing crossed guns designated the gun action, two stars beneath for the Räumboote and the French fishing boat, sunk. And since it was the collective opinion of all aboard that plucking Gabriel off the fishing boat qualified as ‘cloak-and-dagger’ work by anyone’s standards – and the crew were never ones for false modesty, especially since the action had been a bit of a Boys’ Own epic – there was a dagger patch for Gabriel.

  The action had indeed been brisk. The Skipper hadn’t hung about to digest the ramifications of Carey’s news that the dud shells were not dud after all. He had immediately summoned Milner back to the control room and briefed him for round two.

  ‘Get your mob under the hatch now. We’re going up again in thirty seconds, and I’ll be pointing her straight at Jerry. So Mr Milner, quick as you like. Start firing as soon as you hit the deckplates,’ he said, all delivered with the usual piratical glint. Then to Carey, ‘Get us up in a hurry when I shout “surface”. I’ll have us going in the right direction, you let me know the minute the conning tower’s clear. Harry, you stick with the plot. Sing out if any new HE or wireless blabber comes up.’

  Which is why Harry never got to see them sink the Räumboote. But he did get to take part in the toe-to-toe argument with the fishing boat Skipper, and see the bits of of dead German sailors floating on the surface among the little patches of burning oil, as they departed the scene of their victory.

  Trumble had taken The Bucket into another tight turn on slow ahead, and then in the next breath after ordering ‘midships’ came the awaited command ‘surface’, and, Carey on the board, blew everything with such alacrity that the sub actually lurched as it started up. The hiss of compressed air could still be heard venting into her buoyancy tanks when Carey, a little more loudly, called, ‘Clear!’ And Milner was ripping off the hatch clips, and the noise of trapped water on the gun platform could be heard sluicing into the boat. Trumble was still shooting up through the bridge hatch when the report of the first round going off above him, the clang of the ejected casing and the waft of cordite, all reached Harry in quick succession at his position by the chart table.

  Harry’s ears had been straining for umpteen things at once – a shout from the Asdic compartment, indicating the rating operator had picked up new HE, announcing the presence of new, unknown propeller noises; or that the radio operator had detected new chat on Jerry’s radio net, from reinforcements come to bomb or shell The Bucket out of the contest. And through all of his anticipation had been the sound of the action: the bangs and clangs of Milner’s little gang hard at work.

  They’d got another round off even before the Skipper managed to start calling down info for Harry’s plot: ‘. . . target moving starboard to port on a ninety-degree track . . . high speed . . . range about . . . bloody hell! A hit! . . . and another!’

  And then there was a bloody great kaboooom!!!! The flash was so bright, Harry caught the reflection of it coming down the hatch into the red light of the control room. Milner’s third shell . . . or had it been his fourth? . . . had hit one of the Räumboote’s depth charges and blew the whole bloody show to matchwood.

  There had still been bits tumbling out of the sky – surprisingly close, too – off the port beam, when Harry had come scrambling on to the bridge, abruptly summoned by the Skipper to ‘handle the French’.

  He could see the random splashes out of the corner of his eye as they closed on the fishing boat, now hove to, bobbing, looking suspended in the flood of her deck lights against the dark of the night. Trumble had brought his boat burbling up alongside the French drifter and Harry and Leading Seaman Wardell from the twin Lewis mount were quickly on the Frenchman’s deck, asking for Gabriel, only to be confronted by an extremely angry French Skipper. His torrent of colloquial Breton had all but defeated Harry’s undergraduate French, with him catching only snatches about the atrocity the Royal Navy had committed at Mers-el-Kébir, the cowardice of the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk, and the piracy he was now committing against innocent French fishermen.

  In the middle of this tirade Gabriel had appeared, but the long-limbed foppish youth seemed more intent on joining in than pacifying the wildly gesticulating French Skipper.

  ‘What are you Een-glish playing at? Why didn’t you just send a letter to the Germans, denouncing us? Save all this trouble! The Germans will know it is a rendezvous. We are all marked men now, and our families!’

  At least Harry understood Gabriel’s French. By that time, however, Andy Trumble, who could hear the row from Trebuchet’s bridge but understood no French, had become somewhat impatient. He barked across to Harry to wind it up quick, grab whatever they were supposed to grab and beat it back here right now!

  Trying to pacify an increasingly agitated Trumble with one hand, and force some sense of urgency into his requests that the Frenchmen calm down and co-operate, Harry hadn’t seen his Skipper stride smartly aft along The Bucket’s bridge to Leading Seaman Wardell’s twin Lewis guns.

  Afterwards they all remarked what a tribute it had been to the robustness of the weapon’s First World War design that even after a soaking a hundred feet down in the Bay of Biscay, the damn things had fired right off without the hint of a stutter or a jam. The Lewis guns’ four-second burst achieved a number of things right off: it parted the forestay sail and jackstay, splintered the forward gunnel, punched several holes into the bow strakes, and silenced the outraged Frenchmen.

  In the pause that followed, Andy Trumble had bellowed, ‘Tell that silly arse to get his bloody package here, right now!’

  But they’d all stood frozen, and would have remained so if flames hadn’t started licking up the heap of collapsed sail on the fo’c’sle. One in six of the rounds Trumble had slammed into the wooden French seine netter had been tracer: white-hot illuminated rounds that generated pretty little arcs of light when fired, and put in a sterling performance as a fire accelerant when placed in contact with tarred rope and canvas.

  Gabriel disappeared as the crew rushed to extinguish what had quickly become quite a blaze. The French Skipper and two of his crew were at work with buckets, but the remaining four had equally quickly realised it was too late, and were scrambling to haul alongside the small skiff they’d been towing.

  Suddenly Gabriel reappeared out of a hatchway, clutching a battered, bulging academic’s leather briefcase, and with a graceful ease stepped off the fishing boat and on to the curve of The Bucket’s ballast tanks. For one stomach-dropping moment it looked like he was going to slide off in-between the submarine’s hull and the fishing boat, but he’d slapped the briefcase on to the deck with one hand and grabbed one of the vents with the other, pulling himself on to the slippery deck. The fire had already got a hold on the fishing boat’s rope locker, and a tin of paint had gone off with a bang by the time Wardell and Harry stepped back aboard five seconds later.

  The Bucket pulled away as Gabriel clambered up the ladder to the bridge. He stood beside Trumble as Harry and Wardell followed him, and together they watched as the fishing boat’s crew, and eventually their Skipper, gave up the struggle and pulled away in the skiff from the now blazing hulk.

  ‘Well, I don’t think Jerry will be getting too suspicious about your chums or your families, seeing as I’ve just sunk their boat and killed one of their crew,’ said Trumble.

  Gabriel, who obviously had some English, looked shocked, ‘Un mort?’ he said.

  ‘You, of course,’ said Trumble with an innocent arch of his eyebrows. ‘Now how would a dead man fancy a large tot?’

  And so they headed home, running submerged during the day, and sweeping along at a handy twelve knots on the surface through the darkness, back into the bigger war. Gabriel stepped on to the jetty at Fort Blockhouse with his briefcase, leaving the coffee and the cheese and the brandy it contained, with his new friends. No one asked about the papers that were
also inside, and they never found out who Gabriel really was, or ever saw or heard about him again.

  The summer passed. Above them, the air war raged. Churchill gave it a name – the Battle of Britain – and told the nation it would be their finest hour. But if truth be told, it barely broke the horizon for the crew of The Bucket, who went on patrol, and came back again, to a Portsmouth that was being steadily wrecked while they were elsewhere.

  That they continued to come back increasingly became something of an achievement in itself. Submarine losses were rising at an alarming rate, and each happy return now was being marred by the news that some old chum from another commission, aboard a boat once served on, had been marked up, ‘overdue, presumed lost’.

  But Harry didn’t think too much about that, mainly because nobody else did, and when you lived hugger-mugger with forty-nine other blokes – forty-eight if you didn’t count the Skipper because he had a cabin to himself, albeit one smaller than the cupboard under the stairs in his parents’ house – you didn’t get much time for reflection, morbid or otherwise.

  Carey, Milner and Harry shared the wardroom where they ate, slept, coded and de-coded signals, read their books, darned socks and played uckers – which as any submariner would tell you, was a highly complex and cunningly tactical version of Ludo.

  Of the cubby’s two banquettes, the longer was Milner’s sleeping berth. Above it was a fold-down bunk, the one that Gabriel had used, but was normally the preserve of the navigating officer when they had one. At the other end of the cubby was a deck-to-deckhead cabinet in highly polished walnut with little floral curtains masking some of the shelves. This contained all the officer luxuries The Bucket could accommodate.