Gone to Sea in a Bucket

by David Black

  Now they were moving there was a part of Harry still looking on, observing that the fear wasn’t quite so bad now; sort of running it through his fingers, testing its quality: the fear for his own hide, yes, but also the fear of letting his men down, of funking it; catching a dose of screaming hab-dabs. But he was OK now, bumping along on the chop, the serious, physical pain of the freezing spray searing into his bare cheeks as they sped towards the shadowed row of lighters: eight of them, trotted up two by two, or maybe there were three together back there, or more; a dozen at most, with a small tug moored to the first two. The tug was not your proper harbour job, all broad beam and engine; she was long and thin, barely fifty feet if she was an inch, with a sweeping gunwhale running high towards the bow, and low almost to the water aft. Her superstructure was a low steel box with a wooden hut stuck on top for a bridge.

  ‘Remember the brief. You’re to get aboard the lighters and cut them out,’ the Skipper had told them. ‘For Christ’s sake don’t sink them. There’s a three-knot current running when that tide is on the ebb. You need to get on to the bloody tug, start her, and tow them out into the fjord after me, casting them loose as you go. I want the whole bloody fjord filled with dark floating objects while we’re running for the sea. Got it?’

  Harry and the rest of his party had all solemnly nodded.

  ‘I want to see Jerry chasing about all over the bloody shop, after those damn things,’ said the Skipper, ‘not after us.’

  Coming out of the darkness, Harry and his party could see four men lining the gunwhale of the tug, obviously newly rushed on deck, gawping at the explosions and tracer peppering the jetty area; coats hurriedly flung around vests, and long johns disappearing into hastily donned seaboots. They didn’t even see the dinghy until it was already under their noses and a mob of duffel-coated matelots were pouring over the low rail and in among them.

  Half of Harry’s party were up and on the tug roughly handling the stupefied crew before Harry had finished securing the dinghy alongside. There was a lot of low effing and blinding but when the scream finally came Harry knew things were getting away from him. It was turning into a rammy.

  ‘Stop! All stop!’

  He had their attention.

  The party had been handpicked for what needed to be done. Harry had an ERA and a Stoker – McTiernan and Clunie – for any engines needing started, and a Leading Seaman helmsman for any steering, and three kids, ABs, for pulling on ropes. The scream had come from one of them, Harry couldn’t make out which in his balaclava, the front and side of which was quickly matting shiny black – blood, obviously. And anyway, Clunie was in the way, tackling the huge tugboat man who’d done the hitting. The AB had taken a serious belt that looked as if it had flattened his nose across his face. But the tugboat man was on his arse now.

  ‘Clunie!’ said Harry. ‘I said, stop!’

  ‘Yon bastart Jerry jist banjoed . . .’ Then Clunie remembered who he was and desisted. ‘Sorry, surr.’

  But from the gabble coming from their prisoners, three standing, one sprawled, Harry realised right away they weren’t Jerries: they were Russian. French and Italian he could do; Russian he couldn’t. He could think of only three words in Russian: da, niet and tovarisch, so he started using them furiously until he had the tugboat crew’s attention, shoving his way in front of them, punching his own chest and shouting, ‘Tovarisch! Da! Nazi, niet!’ It seemed to calm the situation.

  But we must get on, his little inner voice was telling him, in a distinctly shrill tone. He sent McTiernan and Clunie sprinting to the engine room, and told the Leading Seaman to drag the wounded and distinctly dazed AB to the bridge with orders to bring the tug to instant readiness.

  He turned to one of the remaining ratings: ‘You, take this lot into the nearest cabin, shut the door and don’t let them out . . . and for Christ’s sake don’t hit them again . . . wave your rifle about if you have to.’ Then he turned to the remaining lad, eyes staring dumbly out of his blackened face: ‘And you, come with me.’

  The Skipper knew what was wrong even before he leant over the bridge to glare down on to the gun platform.

  The air was still getting ripped by steady bursts from the Lewis mount behind him, but the Tigger’s gun had stopped firing.

  ‘Slammed the breech before the shell was properly seated,’ yelled the Tigger. They’d been working too fast and now the gun was jammed: the shell’s base plate not quite home before they’d slammed the breech shut, pinching the thin casing and leaving it not quite in, not quite out and well and truly stuck. And they hadn’t even begun pumping shells into the second target.

  ‘Well, get it un-jammed, Mr Milner,’ said the Skipper. He looked over the sum of their handiwork so far: all but one of the transports were wrecks. So what if they had missed one? It wasn’t enough to lift an invasion force anywhere with just one. So let’s get a move on before Jerry pulls himself together and starts shooting back, he thought. If rounds started coming the other way . . . one of those 20-mm anti-aircraft gun rounds through his pressure hull, and they wouldn’t be able to submerge. And that was a 20-mm gun on the little headland overlooking the jetties, and another behind it, covering the wharf and tents’ encampment; and then there was that other twin 20-mm on the flatbed railway carriage, part of that empty troop train; any of those could put a hole in them. And if they couldn’t dive, they were dead.

  One good burst, and they were dead. Dead, dead, bloody dead, just like he used to tell young Gilmour around the wardroom table; to annoy him as much as teach him. Not that he’d ever succeeded in annoying him. And where was young Gilmour anyway? He peered back towards the wharf into a dark just beyond the fall of the floodlight glare: too dark to see. Get a bloody move on, he thought, we have to get going, now!

  Harry, breathless, came scuttling on to the bridge of the tug.

  ‘The Bucket’s stopped shooting, sir,’ said the Leading Seaman.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Her gun, sir. I think it’s jammed.’

  Any reply Harry might have contemplated was lost as another burst of light machine-gun fire hit the tug. He wasn’t sure where the rounds landed, he just heard the ricochet and saw the flashes of bright-green tracer sailing off wildly into the night.

  As Harry and the AB had danced around loosing the lighters’ moorings, casting them off from the shore, small gaggles of huddled-up German soldiers had started appearing on the wharf, popping off at them with rifles and that light machine gun. They’d been forced to duck and crawl behind hatch combings while they went about switching hawsers around, creating a raft of six hulls ready to be towed out into the fjord. It had all taken time – a lot of time – so that the remaining six lighters, triple-trotted at the end of the row, they’d just cast adrift to let them float off free. They had to get going now.

  The Skipper saw the tracer searching for Harry. The Tigger and his gun crew were still trying to prise the bent shell out of the damn gun – a manoeuvre which called for a blend of brute strength and delicacy. On the one hand it might be a lump of steel that needed shifting, but it still had an explosive warhead, primed and ready to go off at the slightest excuse; and the Skipper certainly wasn’t diving the boat with that still up the spout. But then neither was he going to leave without Harry and his landing party.

  While he was weighing his options, the twin 20-mm on the train opened up. Where was Harry? That had been another mistake, another failure of judgment. If he’d sent Harry and the boys off earlier, before all the shooting started, let them sneak off in the quiet and the dark; nobody would have been looking for them, they could have been aboard the lighters, cutting them out, before the balloon went up. But he had waited; told them not to go until Jerry was looking at all the fireworks. Now, all this cutting out lark, which had seemed such a good idea, was taking time; and they didn’t have time any more. What a balls up.

  He waited for long lines of electric-green tracer to find The Bucket as if paralysed by the realisation of his own fai
lure, but they didn’t. So much for fire control in the famously disciplined German army, he thought; until he realised that Jerry couldn’t actually see The Bucket from way back there beyond the wharf. So all the hosing around the Jerry gunner was doing was to find some steel for the tracer to bounce off, so he could then start pouring on the fire. The realisation jolted the Skipper back into the game.

  ‘Dead slow, ahead,’ he said to the rating on the engine room telegraphs; then he leant down the conning tower hatch: ‘Mr Carey. Trim us down to decks awash.’

  It was all getting a bit too damn noisy for Harry, and a bit too like the Blackpool illuminations, with all the bloody 20-mm rounds and the tracer flying about; especially as he was standing at the wheel now as they began towing the raft of lighters, straining to move their deadweight. They might be empty steel tubs, but together their drag was very nearly too much for the tug’s wheezing engine; and the empty steel tubs were making a hell of a racket as they clanked together. But not racket enough to drown out the bellowing and banging from the cabin below as their four Russian captives registered their displeasure at being kidnapped by strangers.

  Harry could feel through every straining rivet of this old rust bucket that the ebb had started now, and it was helping. So imagine his dismay as he saw the shadow of The Bucket, just visible to him in the wash of the jetties’ floodlights, start to submerge.

  ‘Up!’ he screamed at the Leading Seaman, crouched behind the brass stand of the binnacle, as if it might have the power to stop a 20-mm cannon shell. ‘Go and get everybody! Everybody! And start casting off the lighters . . . and before you go, what are you going to do?’

  The young sailor stared at him with dumb horror. What was he talking about?

  ‘You start at the back! Right? Start at the back! And work forward together! I don’t want you casting off willy-nilly, and left like doolies floating about on a lighter each, wondering what time’s the next bus back to The Bucket. Got it? Start at the back!’

  And the rating, nodding, repeating ‘start at the back’, was off.

  As he went out the port wing door, two 20-mm shells came in through the back of the wheelhouse, blasting a couple of wooden splinters into Harry’s back. One of the shells ricocheted off the binnacle, lifting the compass off its top and blowing the wheelhouse roof off; the other shattered the wheel, its splinters opening Harry’s right forearm, before it exited the front of the bridge, hit the raised steel gunwhale that enclosed the bow and exploded, blowing in the wheelhouse windows and blowing Harry off his feet.

  The Skipper watched the tracer find a solid target in the darkness, saw the green rounds skittering away, the small explosions from the shells that had gone home, and he knew Jerry had found the lighters.

  ‘Any time you like, Mr Gilmour,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘We’re waiting.’

  The Leading Seaman had turned back immediately after the two shells hit. Amid the splintered wood he saw a mound of duffel on the deck, blood seeping around it. More rounds went into the tug’s superstructure below him, so he just lunged for his dazed Able Seaman chum in the corner and dragged him out and down the companionway. There were holes in the cabin where they’d locked the Russians, and screams now coming from inside. The rating ordered to guard them had dropped his rifle and was cowering behind the engine room hatch combing. McTiernan and Clunie were coming up from below. The Leading Seaman yelled Harry’s orders.

  ‘Is he still at the wheel?’ asked McTiernan.

  ‘He’s dead,’ said the Leading Seaman; the words like a starting gun, sending them all sprinting aft to release the lighters and get the hell out of there. That was when the first star shell went up, and the entire tableau of burning ships, drifting lighters and skulking submarines sprang to life.

  The Skipper, looking aft, could see the figures of Harry’s party scuttling about the decks of the lighters now. Everything was in a chemical silhouette, lit by the flares pirouetting delicately down towards the silvered water on their dainty little parachutes in long, languid spirals. The green of the German tracer shells didn’t seem so bright and frolicsome now that he could see them, smashing into the lighters and the small tug, now free of its daisy chain and moving erratically towards him. Jerry still hadn’t spotted The Bucket, hull down with just her conning tower showing.

  There was a clank, and then a splash from the gun platform; the Skipper leant over in time to see the Tigger grinning up at him.

  ‘Gun’s cleared, sir,’ said the Tigger, ‘shell’s over the side.’

  ‘Secure it, Mr Milner.’

  ‘Dinghy returning!’ called the aft lookout.

  McTiernan hadn’t followed Harry’s last orders: he’d unhitched the towline to the lighters and got everybody into the dinghy right away. They’d powered to the back pair of lighters, and two of the sailors had jumped aboard them, dodging the 20-mm rounds blowing steel splinters round their heads, hurriedly unhitching one lighter from the other. It had taken barely two minutes and now they were heading back.

  The Skipper caught a new vein of tracer out of the corner of his eye, arcing out to the edge of the parachute flares’ spill; the German 20-mms on the headland were reaching out to Trumpeter. He ordered the rating on the engine room telegraph to grab the Aldis lamp and make the Trumpeter ‘return to rendezvous’; that would get her out of the way and moving seawards. By the time he looked back, the dinghy was coming alongside.

  But there was something wrong; he was counting the huddled shapes bundled into her when he saw Grainger below him, splashing out along the all but submerged casing to where the Tigger and two of his men were waiting to haul the dinghy aboard. He turned and yelled back down the conning tower hatch to Carey: ‘Trim her up a foot, number one! Motors, all stop!’

  Harry swayed on to his knees, the two wooden splinters flapping from his back like a matador’s swords, looking like a stricken bull in a now empty and shadowy ring. When he moved his right arm, as if to dislodge the splinters, he shuddered with the pain. Around him, the wheelhouse had been scythed away by another burst from the twin 20-mm, leaving just the stumps of steel corner posts, opening out the whole tableau to his swimming gaze.

  Harry didn’t remember there being a full moon . . . no, there was more than one moon . . . that wasn’t right. Then there was that terrible mess out there: at least two of those ships, their backs were broken and they were on fire; and so were those other ones. He had never seen ships close up, so utterly wrecked. It was amazing, mesmerizing. A fantastical sight. But why wasn’t someone doing something about it? Where was Mr Fireman?

  He didn’t notice the splinters finally getting knocked from his back as he slithered down the four steps from the wheelhouse; the big watchkeeper’s duffel had stopped them from going deep, leaving just puncture wounds. His bloody head and arm didn’t half hurt, though. When he reached the deck he heard moaning, and when he looked into the workshop where he’d told the AB to lock up those Russkies, he remembered what he was doing here.

  The walls of the workshop were tattooed with dinner-plate size blast holes and the work benches had been reduced to tangled steel. Everything was covered in dark splatter and scorches. Two of the men were dead, he could tell that right away, because although parts of them were still identifiable as men, where the human-shaped bits ended there was just a mess. In the middle, muttering to himself and trying to get up, was another man; but he was just going round in circles because his right arm and leg were gone. All Harry could see of the fourth man was the dull white smudge of his face in the corner. What damage had happened to his body was masked by wreckage, but his wailing told you the prognosis was grim.

  Harry stared, then turned away and slumped against what was left of the workshop wall, looking outboard, towards all the pretty patterns the flares were making on the water. He didn’t know how long he’d been sat there when Grainger appeared, clambering around the corner of the cabin.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  ‘HE effects. High-speed screws
approaching from west-north-west.’ It was Devaney’s voice. Harry could hear it sharp and clear echoing down the passage from the control room; a blessed relief from the soft, rattling breathing coming from the Tigger, lying on the opposite bunk across the wardroom.

  ‘How many?’ he heard the Skipper ask.

  ‘Multiple,’ said Devaney, dead flat. ‘On a spread; bearing from two-seventy to three-ten degrees . . . four, five, maybe more. Coming line abreast.’

  Harry had been lying there for the past six or seven hours since he’d been hauled back aboard, and lowered down the conning tower hatch none too gently as The Bucket had headed fast down the fjord. He’d been jagged with morphine, and his duffel coat had been cut off him so that they could stitch his fore arm and slap wound dressings on his back; there had been lots of hot sweet tea for shock.

  Like most submarines The Bucket didn’t carry a surgeon, or even a sick bay attendant. The Tigger’s gunlayer, Leading Seaman Titmuss, was the boat’s nominated first-aider; delegated to patch up the usual sprains and bruises and fractures and burns until the boat got back to port. But he was lying dead now, wrapped in a blanket in the forward torpedo room. So it had been Grainger, who, it transpired, was a dab hand with a needle and suture, who had sewn Harry up; and Grainger and Tubby Tevis who had pressed and padded the wound dressings to the Tigger’s chest until the bleeding had stopped.

  Harry wasn’t sure what had happened on the tug. He had memories of being lifted and bundled and thrown about, and of a lot of gunfire. Then there was Grainger chucking him into the dinghy. Being hauled out the dinghy and then being half dropped, half lowered into The Bucket’s control room and the Skipper asking: ‘How is he? . . . Oh that’s nasty. Anything else up with him?’ And someone – was it McTiernan? – saying, ‘Aye. Blast. He doesn’t know whether it’s New Year or New York.’