by David Black
‘I told him to wait here,’ said the Skipper, in that level tone his men had learned to fear.
‘He was a non-commissioned officer . . . in an officer’s quarters,’ ‘Tyrone’ repeated, as if that were explanation enough.
Oh dear, thought Harry.
The Skipper, in the doorway with ‘Tyrone’ showing no sign of relinquishing his seat, turned to his officers: ‘Gentlemen, this is Lieutenant Grainger, he’s our new navigator.’
‘Terrific!’ piped the Tigger. ‘We’ve been one chap short for months, and all busier than a one-armed cabbie with crabs!’
Harry had already noticed the Tigger’s recent habit of picking up on ‘Jack’s’ more colourful sayings, and winced at the total inappropriateness of the moment.
The Skipper ignored him, however, and presented each of them in descending order of seniority to ‘Tyrone’, before turning back to his officers again.
‘Fetch Mr Partridge please,’ he told Tigger. ‘Mr Carey, Mr Gilmour’ – the formality boded ill for someone – ‘would you mind waiting a moment in the passage?’
They shut the door as they went out. They couldn’t actually hear the exact words Andy Trumble said to Lieutenant Grainger, but there was definitely a ‘fucking’ and an ‘ever again’ among them, and not even the solid steel of the partition wall was enough to disguise the steel in Trumble’s voice.
Well, well, thought Harry, you could always rely on the Skipper to start off as he meant to continue.
They were heading north, a long way north, Trumble told them after they’d all filed back in. The billet would be in the Barents Sea, but for security reasons he was not at liberty to say exactly where, or divulge the nature of their orders yet. What he could tell them was that they would be sailing in company with another T-boat: Trumpeter.
‘Everybody with duties upstairs is to get fitted with an Ursula suit,’ said Trumble.
Harry’s first thought was Marvellous! I get to wear one now without getting the piss ripped out me!
Harry was presented with a list of stores he should start requisitioning. Extra rations, especially tinned stuff; and although it was strictly the Tigger’s department, the Skipper handed Harry a list of small arms and ammunition he was to secure. And ammunition for the deck gun too. Lots of it. Loading to start forthwith, apart from the engine room requisition list.
The Skipper, Carey and Mr Partridge had just come back from overseeing the start of certain modifications. One of The Bucket’s ballast tanks was being plumbed to carry extra fuel instead of ballast water. They were working on Trumpeter, too. All stowing in the engine room spaces would be on hold until the welding work was complete. There would be issues affecting The Bucket’s trim as a result.
‘Harry, give number one a hand on that,’ said the Skipper.
Passed over for yet another responsibility; Lieutenant Grainger’s already disapproving jaw tightened another knot.
‘What charts do you want me to pull?’ Grainger asked.
‘Don’t bother, I’ll pull them,’ said the Skipper, not even looking at Grainger.
They all filed out and went to work.
A grey dawn and a thin drizzle. Slabs of tinned goods and sacks of potatoes, onions and carrots, and boxes of ammunition started moving down the gangways jutting from Forth’s precipitous sides, item by item on the backs of shuttling sailors, down into the submarines. Mid-afternoon, the humping all but done, Harry was summoned to the Skipper’s presence in a machine-shop office aboard the depot ship.
‘Hand over what you’re doing to the chief,’ said the Skipper. ‘You can have another two hours ashore. Dismiss.’
Harry sought out a chit to use Forth’s shore telephone. Mrs Gilchrist, the Dunoon operator, answered after two rings. He gave the number he wanted, off by heart. Everyone knew Mrs Gilchrist, and she knew everyone; and everything about them too.
‘Harris,’ she said. ‘Now, Janis Crumley has been looking for you all day. She knows you’re back and she’s been telephoning your house. Shall I put you through there instead?’
‘No, Mrs Gilchrist. Cowal 235 please. It’s Castle Cowal I want.’
Harry prayed it wouldn’t be the old bat of a dowager Lady Lamont who would answer. But it was Shirley.
‘I’ve got two hours,’ he told her.
She was waiting on the jetty at Sandbank when the duty tender carrying him ashore docked in the fading light.
He was back on The Bucket barely half an hour before they sailed. The weather forecast was bad. A series of severe south-westerly gales marching in over the past few days had hit the Outer Hebrides and raised the sea state, but hadn’t hit this far south. However, the wind was due to swing round to the north-east, rising storm force.
As they cleared the boom, The Bucket and Trumpeter were already rising and sliding down the swell from the sou’westers. Harry, doubling as usual as The Bucket’s pusser, which as he’d learned was ‘Jack’-speak for supply officer, was below, sat at the wardroom table, filling in the ship’s books for the stuff they had taken aboard in all its ball-breaking detail; trying to ignore Grainger sitting opposite, fulminating behind his scowl.
‘Happy in your work, Gilmour?’ said Grainger, idly gazing at the deckhead.
Harry ignored him.
Grainger didn’t notice. He continued, ‘Ah, but of course, you’ve got work.’
Not looking up, Harry said: ‘Skipper’s giving you time to get to know the crew, sir . . . that’s work, I’d’ve thought.’ Harry had said ‘crew’ on purpose and not, ‘the buckets’ – Grainger was a long way from being included in that honour.
‘As long as they know I’m the navigator, and number three on the boat. And they do as they’re told. That’s all I need to know about the crew, and them about me.’
Harry set down his pencil. ‘Mr Grainger, sir . . . what brings you to the trade?’
Mr Grainger rose smartly and disappeared through the wardroom curtains.
Recreational sailing can be rough from time to time; you get caught out by a wind that suddenly blows up from a brisk force 5 on the Beaufort scale to a blustery force 7, or you’ll occasionally miscalculate and find yourself running for port when a full force 8 gale hits you: things can get frisky aboard in one of those. All this Harry had experienced crewing for Sir Alexander Scrimgeour in his determined wanderings all across the Firth of Clyde, and in and out of the Inner Hebrides. Aboard The Bucket he’d sailed through a few blows in the Channel and the Bay; everybody knew how bad it could get there. But in all the weeks of patrolling out of Portsmouth, the western approaches had never really bared its teeth, and so none of it had prepared him for the force 10 storm that hit The Bucket, Trumpeter and their waddling motor yacht escort late on the second day.
The wind veered round as they battered up the Minch into the teeth of rising seas, with Skye on the starboard beam, beneath grey racing clouds on a grey sea, so that at times the horizon all but disappeared and never any sign of sun or star to shoot. It came out the nor’nor’east, but they were expecting it. In the galley, ‘Lascar’ Vaizey had stored all utensils and crockery and double lashed the pantry doors with cord. Even the wardroom table fiddles were stored; in a force 10 the nifty little wooden fittings would be useless even if anyone was stupid enough to place a plate on the bucking table and expect to eat off of it. In the engine room, the tools and spares lockers were similarly battened. Fore and aft, men stowed all moveable gear; personal and the ship’s. And the Skipper, who’d seen all this before, had a canvas sheet rigged in the control room, like a bird bath, right underneath the ladder to the bridge to catch the deluge from waves breaking over it. Running on the surface, regardless of the weather, the hatch leading up through the conning tower had to remain open, because that was where the diesels sucked their air from.
Harry was wedged in on one of the wardroom banquettes, favouring a steaming mug of galley coffee and a wedge of hot toast slathered with mashed-up sardines, while The Bucket bucked. They had passed Cape Wra
th in the dark and it was coming time for him to stand another watch. He hadn’t tried to sleep, had just sat wedged there against the violence of the boat’s pitching and rolling as the seas hit her fine on the starboard bow. Big waves, he thought, until the rhythm changed and The Bucket seemed to drop ten feet, then climb it back again . . . and again, and again. After a major wrestle to get into his Ursula suit and sea boots, and wrap his neck with towels and a scarf, he had clawed his way to the control room, stopping by the chart table to check course and position before getting himself to the bridge to relieve the Tigger.
That was when he saw why the rhythms had changed. In the partial lee of Scotland, the storm had only managed to whip up a short nasty sea, but there on the chart it showed when they’d cleared the Cape; and when the full majesty of open ocean rollers had hit them, with wave heights to fall down, from trough to crest, not of ten feet, but of twenty feet and more.
Upstairs was an inferno of wind and water, and pitch black. Amid the shuffles and grunts of the two ratings handing over, Harry and Tigger communicated through yells in each other’s ears. The Bucket was being conned from the control room below, so there was no course to communicate, just their sailing station. Their little convoy was proceeding line astern; the motor yacht leading, Trumpeter, and then The Bucket. All Harry had to do was keep Trumpeter’s tiny red steaming light in sight, fine on the bow. The Tigger had yelled to him, then, ‘Every twenty minutes, Trumpeter makes her number by Aldis lamp and we reply,’ and that was all Harry needed to know.
The sea got everywhere; waves, unseen in the blackness, broke over the bridge swirling up and in his seaboots, filling them. Sometimes Harry was waist-deep in the black, freezing water. And it soaked his scarf and towels, and poured down his neck, and up behind his gauntlets and into his sleeves. The salt spray stung his face and eyes, and the muscles of arms and legs ached as he held on, leaning back, feet braced as The Bucket toppled downhill into a darker blackness, and then leaning forward as she laboured up again, so that Trumpeter’s little red riding light would reappear, if she too was on the facing crest before they each fell away again. And if he turned away for a moment, and looked back, even in the darkness, streaks of foam would glow on the flanks of the waves as they powered by, not below him on the bridge, but above.
Then the little blinking red light would come, and it was important he gauge the distance since he didn’t want to be responsible for running Trumpeter up the arse; important and all but impossible. And he’d reach for The Bucket’s little hand lamp, and making sure both boats were in line of sight, and not vanished into another racing valley of water, Harry would key out The Bucket’s number in response; just so that they knew they were both still there, and neither had got lost or foundered. Two hours on, four hours off, as Orkney slipped past to starboard. It was Grainger who came to relieve him.
Carey was in the control room when Harry, preceded by the two ratings, climbed down into its red glow, his numb hands hardly able to grasp the rails.
‘Watch where you’re bloody going!’ Carey snapped at him.
Harry had kicked a hose, one end disappearing into a portable pump and the other in the Skipper’s canvas ‘bird bath’; he looked down and could see it was fighting a losing battle, pumping out all the seawater pouring down from above. He was too cold to apologise, and anyway, he could feel his gorge rise as the smell of vomit hit him. Nearly half the crew were being sick. The two ratings who’d just come off watch were already heading forward by the time Harry had hit the deckplates, which was unusual, but Harry was too cold to notice; he turned aft, where they all should have been heading.
‘Where d’you think you’re going?’ barked Carey, without taking his eyes off the gyro compass by the helmsman.
The deep tremble that the cold had locked on Harry’s jaw made talking difficult: ‘Engine room. Get out of this. Wet.’
‘Mr Partridge isn’t playing anymore,’ said Carey. ‘No more hanging our smalls out on his nice hot pipework.’
‘What?’ said Harry. This was a catastrophe. All ‘buckets’ coming off watch with wet gear got to hang it up in Mr Partridge’s nice hot engine room, otherwise it would never dry before you went back on watch and you’d have to put them on again wet. It was one of those traditions that held ‘the buckets’ together; the back-afters and the deck scrubbers.
‘He says it is because we are ruining the shine on his brasswork,’ said Carey, looking venomously up through the hatch, ‘but there are other opinions.’
So Harry went to get out of his sopping gear in the wardroom.
Grainger, he said to himself.
The engine room was Mr Partridge’s domain. Letting the crew use it as a drying space was his gift to the general harmony. However, if he continued to let the crew use his engine room, then he’d have to let Grainger too; and everyone aboard now knew what Mr Partridge thought of Grainger. Harry could see Partridge’s point, but this wasn’t good on many levels.
They pounded on through a world of water and wild movement, cold and wet and buffeted while trying to sleep; and frozen, stung and blinded on watch, peering into a wall of moving air that was more water than air, and a sky that only changed in colour from black void to translucent porridge; and with two random flecks for company, Trumpeter and the motor yacht. It seemed to take forever, but finally they made it in to the relative calm of Lerwick harbour.
The only pounding now was the racket of heavy maintenance, and the only thing vibrating through the hull was the sporadic judder from machine tools. Harry could feel the gentle bobbing of The Bucket through his now dry bum, comfortably resting in its usual spot around the wardroom table. The little overhead lamp with its floral pattern shade and its very own oily smear cast its light over a spread of charts. At last, Lascar, with maximum disruption, placed a stack of corned beef sandwiches, with pickle, and mugs of tea for everyone, on the table – the Skipper, Carey, Grainger, Harry and Tigger; and Lieutenant, the Honourable Bertie Allen-Freer RN, Trumpeter’s Skipper, plus his number one, his navigator and his torps – all nine of them in a tight huddle, with notebooks out, interrupted in mid-discussion by the arrival of the grub.
Although their little convoy was at last snug, none of them had made it unscathed. One of The Bucket’s engine exhaust mufflers had been stoved in and cracked, and water had been pouring in to the port engine; and her number two torpedo tube bow cap had sprung and kept filling with water: together these injuries had threatened to flood her. Carey had been up for a straight thirty-eight hours pumping water to stop The Bucket from either plunging to the sea bed or rearing up and broaching against the terrible head seas.
The ‘trumpeters’ had similar tales to tell. Andy Trumble, the senior officer present, had them all detailed in his notebook so as to assess his command’s readiness for sea. Both submarines were due to sail again on tomorrow’s late-morning tide, so all repairs, watering and refuelling had to be done by then.
There was a pause in discussions as they all chomped into their over-sized bread wedges. As a group of young men they were all much of a muchness; the oldest, Bertie’s navigator, an RNR officer at 27, and the Tigger the youngest at 18. The same mops of hair, some fair, some dark, except the Honorourable Bertie, who was going prematurely bald; all in their scruffy watch jackets and misshapen, stained and off-white pullovers, and all of them needing a shave; except the Bertie’s navigator, who sported a full set. And all of them as whiffy as they should be with no fresh water to wash in.
Trumble broke the sound of chomping: ‘Right, what’s this all about.’ It wasn’t a question.
The wedges were set down and the mugs of steaming tea were raised as they composed themselves to listen. This was it: the purpose behind all the hush-hush and faffing about.
‘We’re going to Russia. And when we get there, we are going to violate their neutral territorial waters to take a look into a small port nearer to the Norwegian border than it is to Murmansk. It’s called Bolshaya Zapadnaya, and it’s at the
head of the Litsa River . . . there,’ and he jabbed at the chart, ‘but since Bolshaya Zapadnaya’s probably too much of a mouthful for our Anglo-Saxon gnashers to get round on a daily basis, from now on we’ll refer to it as “Port Boris”.’
Everybody leant over to peer at the spot, but it was young Harry who first asked the question on all their minds: ‘Why? What’s there?’
‘Why?’ said Trumble. ‘To look for Jerries.’
Jerries? Of course. It was autumn 1940, over a year now since Joe and Adolf had become pals. ‘Now there’s unlikely bedfellows’ Shirley had written to him. Unlikely indeed. Any Pathé newsreel would have told you: Nazis hated Communists. But last summer the world had turned upside down: Germany and the USSR had signed a treaty. A treaty that meant when Germany invaded Poland, and Great Britain and France declared war, the Soviet Union would remain neutral. A treaty that had let the Soviet Union grab half of Poland in return and stand aside from the war currently ravaging the rest of Europe.
‘It’s the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact,’ Trumble said. ‘It’s the deal Jerry and Stalin did last August. One of the clauses was a promise from Stalin to hand over a base for Adolf’s boys way up north, so that his U-boats could get replenished, and get in and out of the Atlantic way up past Norway, beyond our blockade apparently. But then Adolf’s boys took Norway, so it didn’t matter; but Adolf’s boys still have the base. And we are going in to look because naval intelligence thinks Jerry is putting together a landing force for a descent on Iceland,’ said Andy. ‘I know, I know. Why don’t they just sail from Norway, or are Jerry brass just as perverse as our brass?’ A good-natured chuckle round most of the table, and a pause for more tea. Trumble continued.
‘The story I have been told is this: Jerry is doing a build-up in Norway; RAF recce is going to catch it. But RAF recce can’t overfly the Soviet Union, because the Soviet Union is neutral. So Jerry won’t do a build-up in Norway, but he might do it here’ – he jabbed at ‘Port Boris’ – ‘Intelligence thinks Jerry is doing it here. So we have to . . . confirm.’
