Gone to Sea in a Bucket

by David Black

  Harry and Carey had two bunks off the companionway forward, Harry on top. The Skipper’s little cabin was aft, and on the other side of the companionway, less than a shoulder’s width across the way, was the galley for the entire crew. Forward of it was the radio cubby and the Asdic cubby. This was what passed for officers’ country on a submarine.

  On a big ship, officer country was sacred, but here, all there was between the officers and the crew was four sets of more floral print curtains, one drawn to mask the wardroom from the main companionway fore and aft, and the others for the two bunks and the Skipper’s cabin. Doors were deemed to take up too much space. For the seaman ratings there were no bunks, just spaces to sling a hammock for a lucky few, and for the rest, wherever they could stretch out on the forward torpedo room deckplates. The Petty Officers had a couple of cubbies, with bunks and hammock space, forward for the seamen POs, and aft, behind the engine spaces, for the Engine Room Artificers. The Torpedomen electricians and Mechanics’ Mates bedded down in-between the machinery.

  Space on a submarine was so narrow and so tight that the single long companionway ruled that where you worked was where you lived. A crew quickly became two tribes, with the back afties in the machinery spaces rarely setting eyes on their shipmates forward from one patrol’s start to its finish. And one ‘heads’ for all forty-odd men aboard.

  In that space you quickly, easily got to know everything about everyone else, from the peculiar regularity of one man’s bowel movements, to how to tell the heavy smokers from the intensity and frequency of their expectorations. And then there was the ever-present, all permeating bouquet of submarine life made up mostly of diesel and cooking and damp, and that special, personal smell of armpit and socks and crotches, all unwashed because fresh water was for drinking.

  There was something else aboard a submarine that permeated everything. Except this time you couldn’t really smell it, or see it, oil it or polish it. And you never, ever talked about it; it had no specific word to describe it. But if challenged, everyone would agree: it stemmed from the pretty bloody self-evident truth, that for all the boredom, sooner or later there would be times when every man aboard would be scared shitless. No one who had ever experienced a sustained depth-charge attack would ever gainsay that.

  The patrols carried out by HMS Trebuchet through the late summer of 1940 were a sort of apprenticeship for Harry in his new trade. The fact that they still did not carry a navigator meant Andy Trumble divvied it up between himself and his most junior officer, and as a result Harry actually started to become something of a wizard at the job. Going from being not very good at sums at school to a dab hand on the slide rule came as something of a surprise to Harry.

  At the start the Skipper would regularly oversee his work, relentlessly taking the mickey in the process, something he could never resist. He’d watch Harry shoot the sun at noon, when it was visible, with one of the more numerate ratings calling out the precise time on the chronometers on the chart table below, then doggedly follow him down the ladder to the control room to where the almanacs and tide tables were, and hang over him, grinning in a most distracting manner, occasionally tutting and pouting like a fussy schoolmarm, as Harry fiddled with his slide rule in an attempt to complete his calculations.

  ‘Where are we, Harry?’ he’d shout, for a smirking control room to hear. ‘Ummm. Let’s have a look at these sums . . . Oxford Street!’ Or sometimes the guesses would be far more colourful, depending on the mood. ‘I say chaps, we’re fifteen-thousand feet above sea level on the outskirts of La Paz!’ Or it would be Tashkent, or ‘Three miles south of Diamond Head, at the entrance to Pearl Harbour . . . beers and a bonfire on Waikiki Beach tonight, chaps! Well done, navs!’

  Harry would just smile and say, ‘I think if you go back over the figures again, sir, you’ll find we’re a hundred and twenty-seven miles sou’south-west of Valentia,’ accurately placing them slap in the middle of the western approaches off Ireland. Or ‘Fifteen miles south-east of Hayling Island, on track to enter the swept channel for Portsmouth Harbour. It’ll have to be warm bitter in The Red Lion, I’m afraid, as long as Jerry hasn’t got the cellar, sir.’

  Andy Trumble did it because everyone knew Harry could take a joke, and everyone understood just how important that was, and everything that followed from it.

  Around the wardroom table, an unusual friendship began to grow between Harry and Carey. Unusual, but not that surprising, really, since the Skipper, for all his antics, always remained the Skipper, and he spent a lot of his time in his cabin, doing paperwork or sleeping. You could never call him stand-offish; he was always barging in, demanding a quorum for uckers, thrashing all-comers with boring regularity and then goading them with the even more tedious glee with which he celebrated his victories.

  It was a habit that never failed to reduce young Milner to impotent, shaking, frustrated rage – the callow youth being just as much a slave to the same rampant competitiveness that afflicted his Skipper. Unfortunate, that, Harry thought, with a mixture of mild compassion and a lot more amusement. There was very little else to say about Milner, except perhaps that for all the world he reminded Harry of Tigger, that creation of boundless energy, random enthusiasms, and an unfettered ability to irritate and amuse in equal measure, that he remembered from the Winnie-the-Pooh books of his childhood. Harry even introduced their tiny wardroom to this notion, and from then on, the Tigger Mr Milner became. Which just left Harry and Malcolm Carey.

  To Harry, Carey was beyond exotic. He was from a country so completely different from Harry’s own, a place resonant with tumbling images of light and space, not to mention kangaroos and koala bears, but that was only part of it. The bigger part, the unimaginable part, was that he was married. Harry had seen the black-and-white snapshot Carey carried of his wife, Fenella, a gamine creature, the curve of her flanks and legs highlighted by the wind-blown smoothness of a light summer dress, her naturally blonde hair that had never been tamed to the styles so common back in Europe or the USA, laughing directly into the camera, unattainably alluring. Harry couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be married to a creature like that. The very idea of it caused an unnameable ache in him. Not that he would ever be so impertinent as to actually ask Carey.

  ‘What’s life like in Australia?’ was the closest he’d get, and then he’d be entertained with tales of an altogether different existence full of potential and freedom in comparison to the humdrum, predictable and well-travelled rails of domestic existence in the west of Scotland. It never occurred to Harry that Carey, not that much older than himself, might be inventing an idealised land because he was homesick. And if he had, Harry wouldn’t have cared; he listened only for the stories involving that wife back in Melbourne. Fenella. He would speak her name, and the very mention evoked mesmerising possibilities no home-grown Scots lass could ever hope to inspire. Harry hung on every word.

  Their chats, however, had to be sandwiched between his other junior officer chores. Despite his relative newness to the trade, Harry was expected to stand watches alone. The Skipper wouldn’t sleep, mind you, when Harry had the watch, but the sooner he learned to ride this particular bike without stabilizers the better. They were two officers short, and besides, the responsibility was good for Harry’s standing among the crew, and good for his own self-respect. The best way to learn something was to do it. That was the navy way.

  Then there were Harry’s course-plotting duties, or he’d be coding and decoding routine radio traffic; or censoring the crew’s mail home, the endless letters, nearly always interminably dull and unimaginative; and then of course writing – and receiving – his own letters: from his mother, the odd one from Sir Alex Scrimgeour, sometimes with a PS or two from other yacht club worthies, from his mates from King Alfred, and the odd one from Janis and the many from Shirley. When Carey’s reminiscences eased into natural silence, Harry would talk about his letters from Janis and Shirley. There were photographs too to be passed around.


  ‘This is Shirley,’ he said the first time. ‘She’s a friend of the family, just a girl really.’ He held out a Box Brownie snap he’d taken on her camera, of her walking towards him on the prom near the Argyll Hotel, carefully clutching two ice-cream cones and laughing; her hair in the breeze, and wearing slacks, which was still somewhat ‘avant’ for a girl in Dunoon, even in 1940.

  They all knew when Janis wrote, however, because the letters – all two of them over the late summer – smelled as if they’d been dipped in perfume. The whiff of them almost overcame the boat’s natural bouquet of diesel. Harry showed Janis’s photograph without any qualifications. Carey had raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Quite a girl, Mr Gilmour. You are a lucky fellow.’

  His eyes had lingered over a studio-posed Janis, sitting pert on a high stool so as to show off her shapely silk-encased calves as they disappeared up into a pencil skirt; her buttressed bosom in profile, straining against an elegant blouse. She was looking into the camera over her shoulder and from behind Veronica Lake tresses, her make-up immaculate and her lips pursed ever so slightly, as if posing a question.

  ‘What does she say?’ asked Carey, when the letters arrived, and Harry replied, ‘Oh the usual. You know. Girls’ stuff.’

  But the truth was not even that. Janis’s letters were short, with a scatter of endearments to top and tail complaints: how difficult it was to get any make-up, how impossible to get nylons, how ghastly it was to live under rationing, and how only Daddy’s ‘friends’ in business helped eke out their starvation menus. And when was Harry coming home again? And how he should get a staff job, ashore, with some important admiral, or in some hush-hush backroom, which everybody said should be easy-peasy with his languages. A girl couldn’t be expected to wait forever, and anyway, Sir Alex Scrimgeour would fix it. All Harry had to do was tell him what was required and why. The only reason she thought so much of Harry was because he wasn’t like all the other young men, always thinking of themselves, but now she was starting to wonder. She hated people who always thought of themselves.

  Harry didn’t know how to reply, so he made excuses. Sorry, but he couldn’t answer her questions because of the censor who would never let such answers through. Got to be like Dad, he told her, and keep Mum . . . couldn’t discuss anything like appointments or movements or possible postings. Not at all. Sorry. He didn’t mention that he himself censored all of The Bucket’s mail.

  Shirley’s letters were different. She wrote often and at length, and replying to her soon became one of his little treats to himself. She wrote about home a bit; about how Hammy and Cammy were faring well ‘with the Colours’, although she was never so gauche as to mention a regiment or posting. Mostly it was about politics; what did he think of communism? Had that Stalin really turned something hopeful into another tyranny? And shouldn’t we be trying to get him on our side? Because we could use Stalin as a useful counter to Hitler. She wrote about books; how she had discovered an American writer called Pearl S. Buck, and she was devouring her. Wasn’t China fascinating? She thought she would quite like French Romantic period writers too; Harry would know the good ones having done French at university, could he recommend any? And Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller and swing. Uhh! Heaven! And so sophisticated. Banned in Germany of course. That little rodent Goebbels really was another preposterous little man!

  Harry read them as the gushings of a young girl, with a knowing smile on his face; it made him feel mature and so very grown-up to compose his considered replies, to be mentoring this lively and really rather intelligent young mind. Which meant he never quite managed to admit that what he was really feeling was pure delight every time one of her letters was waiting for him, which they were – sometimes more than one – on his return from every patrol. He’d read them ashore, with a scotch or a gin in his hand and Tommy Dorsey on the wardroom gramophone, and her photograph propped on the armchair.

  Shirley, however, was not the only ‘lively’ young thing whose welfare he was entrusted with – there were the ratings in his ‘division’, the slice of crew for which he was personally responsible. Most were callow youths just like himself but there were a few older Petty Officers, career men with varying years of experience between them. Harry’s prior deeds aboard Pelorus had earned him a certain benefit of the doubt, but when it came to the everyday stuff of life in a blue suit, mere boyish charm and the odd self-deprecating aside wasn’t enough to get by this time. He was in a man’s world now, and his efforts were frequently met with po-faces.

  Harry hadn’t been on Pelorus long enough to grasp the gap between officers and the lower deck that still existed even in the trade. On Redoubtable it had been a yawning chasm you couldn’t miss. Under the waves, however, it was an altogether more subtle shift. Harry first encountered it over that most pressing of submariners’ concerns: grub.

  For grub was very important. It stood to reason; after all there wasn’t much else to discuss, in-between the hard work and the boredom of life under water – especially if you didn’t want to keep dwelling on the many types of horrific death that lay in wait. This was magnified by the fact that submarines did not carry a designated cook – the job fell to whoever wanted it, or could be coerced into it. It left a lot of scope for trial and error, and much debate over an incumbent’s performance. Especially since said incumbent had so much scope to rise to the occasion or bring a crew to the brink of mutiny.

  They always got the best of grub in the trade. It was as if, given the risks they ran, the navy treated them like fighting cocks. Stuff like steaks and legs of mutton were impossible to buy on ration coupons ashore, fresh eggs, fresh fruits or jam non-existent, but they were all on the menu aboard HM Submarines. A good cook could create the sublime, and a bad one, an atrocity.

  On The Bucket, the cook’s job had fallen to one of her Torpedomen. He was Able Seaman Vaizey, known universally as ‘Lascar’, and the occasion of Harry’s first brush with him was at a dinner in the wardroom.

  It was shortly after 3 a.m. and The Bucket was surfaced, en passage to her patrol area off Ushant – mealtimes on submarines on patrol were always day-for-night to allow all cooking to be done on the surface. Milner was on watch, so it was Carey, Harry and the Skipper around the table when Vaizey turned up with a tray of Cheese Oosh, coloured a beautiful golden-brown and looking a lot like a cross between a soufflé and a Yorkshire pudding. He began slicing the deep, piping-hot oosh and dolloping it on to the three officers’ plates with absolutely no ceremony whatsoever. But Harry wasn’t paying attention to Vaizey’s casual, bordering on insubordinate, serving technique. Harry was distracted by the smell. It was wonderful. He couldn’t resist a taste, blowing on his fork as he tried to pop the steaming gobbet into his mouth.

  ‘My god, Vaizey! This is . . . delicious!’ said Harry. Vaizey’s eyes narrowed slightly at the exclamation; anyone watching would have been hard-pressed to tell whether it was irritation or just wind. Anyone apart from Carey and the Skipper, who exchanged knowing smirks.

  ‘Able Seaman Vaizey is well-tutored on the cuisines of the Orient,’ said the Skipper, attending to his own plate. ‘Aren’t you, Lascar?’

  ‘Aye aye, sir,’ replied Vaizey in his East London drawl.

  ‘And as such, he is an asset to whichever one of His Majesty’s submarines he serves aboard,’ added Carey, joining in. ‘Isn’t that right, Lascar?’

  ‘Aye aye, sir.’

  ‘Is that why they call you Lascar, Able Seaman Vaizey?’ asked Harry. ‘Because of the spices?’

  Lascar was the term universally applied aboard every tramp steamer and on every dock across the Empire for sailors from the sub-continent, and had been so since the dawn of recorded history.

  ‘Yessir,’ he replied, bored.

  ‘So what are the spices you use? What’s in this?’ pressed Harry. ‘Apart from the eggs, cheese and tomatoes? And where do you get them, the spices?’

  Carey butted in. ‘Harry, Harry. So many questions. You’re asking the man
to divulge his most secret of secrets. Knowledge coveted by hash slingers from Tsingtao to Tilbury.’

  Vaizey’s face, which until now had worn a look of immovable indifference, actually twitched. The movement was slight, but enough to alarm Carey and the Skipper – a development Harry missed.

  ‘Sir. Ma bruvver gets it dahn the West India docks, ’n’ sends it ta us, dunnee, sir.’ The words were wrung from him.

  Harry pressing on, oblivious, asked, ‘And what do you get? It’s curry, is it?’

  But now, very obviously tiring of the exchange, Vaizey’s countenance re-composed itself. ‘’s two kinds, sir. Brahn ’n’ powdery, ’n’ dried ’n’ leafy . . . sir.’

  ‘Yes, but what are they Lascar? What are the spices called?’ entreated Harry. Beyond his vision Carey and the Skipper were rocking with subdued mirth.

  ‘Haven’t the foggiest, sir. ’S all foreign names, innit, sir?’

  And that was when the Skipper intervened. ‘That’s all Lascar . . . another kitchen triumph, now back to the galley and get the tea on.’

  Lascar departed and Carey and the Skipper made their merriment obvious.

  Harry, annoyed at being practiced upon, was curt: ‘What was that all about, sir?’

  The Skipper went all serious: ‘You’ve upset Lascar.’

  ‘Me, sir? What did I do?’

  Carey continued sniggering.

  ‘He’ll be looking for a transfer,’ said the Skipper gravely.

  ‘Oh god!’ exclaimed Carey. ‘Don’t say that!’

  Harry grinned, not rising to it anymore, and assiduously attacked his oosh, but Carey wasn’t letting him off.

  ‘There’s only one thing worse than not having Lascar on your boat,’ he added, ‘and that’s having Able Seaman Reginald M. Fagg on your boat.’