H.M.S Saracen (1965)

by Reeman, Douglas

  Erskine was a calm, capable officer, and despite his lack of outward emotion looked forward to a command of his own. He knew his work in this worn-out old ship would serve him well when that time came. So too his contact with the new Navy, the reservists and the seamen who daily poured out from distant training barracks, would make him more confident when his chance came.

  The previous captain had been too old, too long in retirement, for the breathtaking savagery of the Mediterranean war. But what he had lacked in foresight and preparedness he had made up in Erskine’s estimation in his dignity and complete courage. He still remembered the look on the old man’s face after the court martial. It was the expression of a dead man. In wartime anything could happen. Men died as easily from caution as from eagerness and as quickly from over-confidence as from cowardice.

  The fact remained that the ship had disgraced herself, and not only the Captain would take the blame. Once it might have been different, but now with every ship and man stretched to the limit there were no acceptable excuses. Responsibility and personal liability grew as resources shrank, and in the cold, dispassionate arena of the courtmartial room who could see beyond the bare facts?

  There was a gentle tap at the door, and Erskine looked up to see Lieutenant McGowan, the Gunnery Officer, watching him with his sad, deepset eyes.

  ‘Good morning, sir.’ McGowan’s voice was formal, but he gave a quick smile as Erskine waved him to a chair. He peered round at the piles of paper. ‘What a war!’

  Erskine tapped his pencil against his teeth and waited. McGowan was the only other regular officer aboard, apart from a midshipman and a couple of grizzled warrant officers, but apart from that fact he was also a close friend.

  McGowan said slowly: ‘Bad raid last night. A destroyer over in Sliema copped it, I believe. And the ruddy tanker they escorted all the way from Alex!’

  Erskine watched the sun’s rays strengthening against the sombre grey paint. ‘We might get it again before we sail.’ He frowned. ‘When we’ve mustered the hands get the cable party to rig a slip wire to the buoy. If pushed we can break the cable and get away in a hurry.’

  McGowan showed his teeth in a mock grin. ‘Hurry? What, this ship?’

  ‘Now look, James, let’s not get started on your pet moan. This is our ship. We must do our best.’ He cocked his head to listen to the sluice of water and brooms across the upper deck. ‘It’ll be Colours in ten minutes, so get cracking!’ He forced a smile. ‘You are O.O.D., I presume?’

  McGowan stood up and reached for his cap. ‘I wouldn’t have stayed aboard otherwise, my friend! A nice booze-up followed by the exotic charm of a dusky filly, is more the way my mind is going these nights!’ He suddenly became serious. ‘I just wanted you to know I think it’s a bloody shame about your getting saddled with this ship. First the bombardment going wrong, and then the old fool running her on the putty, that was all bad enough. I don’t see why you should have to stagnate here when you’re a natural for command of a destroyer!’

  Erskine dropped his eyes. ‘That will do, James.’ His voice was flat.

  McGowan snorted: ‘I suppose the new skipper’ll be even worse! One bloody deadbeat after another. Even a good ship couldn’t be expected to survive this!’

  Erskine looked up his eyes flashing. ‘That will do! You know damn’ well you shouldn’t talk like this, and I won’t have it!’ He watched the surprise on his friend’s face and added quietly: ‘I depend on your support. Any sort of talk like that and there’s no saying what might spread through the ship.’

  McGowan adjusted his cap and said stubbornly, ‘I still think it’s a shame, even if I’m not allowed to say it!’

  Erskine looked back at the signals as a bugle blared overhead. ‘Go to hell!’

  McGowan grinned wearily. ‘Aye, aye, sir!’

  Erskine threw down his pencil and stood up. As he leaned against the rough metal and idly watched the clear water below the scuttle he listened to the bugle as it sounded for morning Colours. Opposite the monitor’s buoy he could see three destroyers and an anti-aircraft cruiser moored together. As he watched he saw their ensigns slowly mounting the staffs, as the Saracen’s was doing at that moment above the quarterdeck.

  He looked past the other ships towards the unmoving pall of brown smoke which hovered across Valletta. Over there people had died in the twinkling of an eye. Women, children, it made no odds to death’s impartiality. But so long as the White Ensign was hoisted every morning there was still a chance, a glimmer of hope. He smiled in spite of his complete weariness. I sound like a bloody politician, he thought.

  He turned as a messenger tapped at the door. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Signal, sir.’ He handed over a sealed envelope with the flimsy sheet of paper. ‘And sailing orders, sir.’

  Erskine darted a quick look at the man’s wooden expression. On the lower deck sailing orders were a constant topic of conjecture. But today this rating had placed the signal in priority. It was unnatural. ‘What does the signal say, Bunts?’

  The man grimaced. ‘New captain is comin’ aboard in ten minutes, sir!’

  Erskine stared at him, his normal reserve momentarily forgotten. ‘What?’

  ‘In fact, sir, there’s a launch waitin’ at the jetty now.’ He spoke with the satisfaction of a man who has seen a superior caught off guard.

  Erskine snatched his cap and jammed it on his head. One damned thing after another, he thought bitterly. McGowan was probably right. Troubles had a habit of breeding very rapidly.

  ‘My compliments to the O.O.D. Tell him I require his presence on the quarterdeck immediately!’ He took a last glance at the disordered office, his mouth curving with sudden resentment. ‘And pass the word for the Chief Bosun’s Mate.’

  The man hurried away, and Erskine followed him more slowly. Of course, it would have to be like this. Night liberty-men not yet returned, the ship a shambles from the night’s air raid and the Duty Watch only just recovering from a hurried breakfast.

  On the broad quarterdeck he felt the first promise of the day’s warmth, and unconsciously he ran his finger round the inside of his collar.

  Chief Petty Officer Craig, a massive, wintry-eyed pensioner, saluted and tucked his list of working-parties beneath his arm. ‘You want me, sir?’

  ‘Yes, Chief Bosun’s Mate. The new captain’ll be aboard in a few moments.’ He saw with faint satisfaction that the tanned face of the Chief Petty officer was unmoved by his terse announcement. ‘Fall in the side party and stand by the gangway.’ Erskine ran his eye quickly along the hose-littered deck. ‘And for God’s sake get this potmess cleared up!’

  Craig saluted and marched purposefully away, his mouth snapping open and shut like a trap as he called out a string of names.

  Gayler, one of the monitor’s two midshipmen, saluted and cleared his throat. ‘Boat shoving off from the jetty, sir!’ He was fresh from Dartmouth and very conscious of himself. ‘It looks like a fine day, sir.’

  You don’t know the half of it, thought Erskine. Aloud he snapped: ‘Man the side! Stand by to receive the Captain!’

  * * * * *

  The pinnace squeaked gently against the jetty’s rubber fenders, and as he looked down the flight of stone steps Chesnaye saw that his personal gear had already been stowed in the boat’s cockpit. A seaman stood at the bow and stern, and the coxswain waited loosely beside the brass wheel.

  As the boat pitched, a shaft of sunlight glanced off Chesnaye’s metal trunk, and just for a brief instant he felt the old emotion touch his eyes. The years seemed to fall away. It could have been Portsmouth harbour with Pickles, a boy like himself, waiting impatiently to take him to the ship. So much had happened, yet so little. It was the same ship. As if she had waited all these years. Unfamiliar in her dazzle paint, but unmistakable. She had lost her tall topmast, and her maindeck sprouted several Oerlikons and other automatic weapons instead of the old twelve-pounders. Yet she was the same. The ship which had stayed with his thoughts over time
itself. Once or twice he had seen her since those terrible days at Gallipoli. At Portsmouth he had once watched her waddling out to sea past the misty outline of the Isle of Wight, and again in Rosyth, paid-off and neglected. She had steamed her way back to the Mediterranean, and on to China. From Hong Kong to Spain to evacuate refugees from the Civil War, and then across the endless water to Ceylon as a training ship for cadets. Back into Reserve again, and then called once more to serve, like himself.

  Chesnaye shifted his weight to the other leg and cursed the pain in his thigh. Like his memory of the Saracen, the old wound had been his constant companion. He turned his head to look at the other warships moored nearby. Commanded by officers younger and junior to himself, they reminded him again that he had only held one command in his life. That had been a small sloop just after the Great War. A short, uneventful commission to break the endless monotony of shore appointments, junior posts in large ships and the final misery of his discharge from the Service.

  Many others had been ‘axed’ from the reduced Navy, but each case was individual. Some had been grateful, after being entered into the Navy by their parents at the age of twelve, to a service they had always hated. Others had been defiant, unwilling to accept the injustice, and had wasted precious time and money in a flare of effort to prove their worth in other fields. Chicken farms, the Civil Service, even the Church, had received and rejected them. Men like Chesnaye had been too dazed, too shocked, to act foolishly. They readapted themselves more slowly, licked their wounds and tried again.

  For nearly ten years he had wandered alone from one country to the next, working without complaint at whatever job took his eye. He had no ties. Both his parents were dead. His father during the final months of that first, far-off war, and his long-suffering mother in the influenza epidemic which followed it. Chesnaye first tried to return to the sea. He joined the Norwegian Antarctic whaling fleet, and for several years worked as a deck officer in the filth and noise of the factory-ship. His old wound reacted sharply, and he moved on to New Zealand, where with his carefully saved capital he bought a half-share in a farm-appliance firm. Business improved, but as world affairs deteriorated, and the clouds gathered above Munich, Chesnaye quietly said his goodbyes to his astonished partner and started back for home.

  He was constantly dogged by the picture of his father as he had remembered him before the first war. He was determined that he would never lose his pride and suffer the final misery of complete rejection by the Service he had always loved. Chesnaye had never forgotten the Navy. He did not have to buy a bungalow in Southsea, to walk the promenade and watch the distant grey shapes slipping down-channel, and to stand moist-eyed at the sound of a barracks’ bugle. The Service was part of him. It never left him, no matter what he attempted. And to symbolise that trust and understanding the memory of the ugly monitor had acted as a prop. He knew, too, that unlike his father, he would accept the position of Officer of the Watch on Southend pier if necessary; but he had accepted the post of Training Commander in one of the new intake establishments with equal calmness. It was a start.

  But the waiting had been harder than he had anticipated. The first excitement of training and guiding the endless procession of civilian sailors—office boys, labourers, milkmen and others—wore off as he again felt the yearning and the want.

  He had almost laughed when he had seen the expression on the face of his captain when that gentleman had told him of his new appointment. The old man had been apologetic and then angry. ‘An old ship like that indeed! By God, Richard, you’re more use to me here!’ He had waved his veined hand across the expanse of the establishment, glittering with painted white stones, flagmast and immaculate sentries. Months before, it had been a holiday camp, but through the old captain’s eyes it had shone like a battleship.

  Now he was here. The waiting and the suspense forgotten. Like an unwanted burden the years seemed to slide from his shoulders.

  A voice interrupted his thoughts. ‘I say, any chance of a lift out to the Saracen?’

  Chesnaye swung round, irritated at being caught dreaming as well as with the casual form of address. He saw a dishevelled officer, whose wide pale eyes were peering at him as if their owner were more used to hiding behind powerful spectacles. On his crumpled sleeve he wore two wavy stripes, between which ran a line of bright scarlet.

  Chesnaye nodded. ‘Yes, I am going in her direction.’

  The officer beamed, his youthful face creasing with pleasure. ‘Oh, jolly good!’ He held out his hand. ‘I’m Wickersley, the Saracen’s doctor, actually.’ He chuckled disarmingly. ‘I suppose I’ve got a cheek really. A tiny voice of caution warns me that you are rather senior!’

  Chesnaye felt his taut muscles relaxing. ‘Captain Chesnaye.’

  ‘Oh, splendid.’ Wickersley looked down at the waiting boat. ‘I’m not really genned up on the ranks yet. I’ve only been in the Andrew a month. I was at St. Matthew’s, y’know!’ He gestured towards the smoke-covered houses behind him. ‘Been over there all night keeping the jolly old hand in!’

  They went down the steps, and Chesnaye automatically stepped aside to allow the junior officer to enter the boat first, as was customary.

  But the Doctor shook his head cheerfully. ‘Oh no, sir! After you!’

  The coxswain dropped his salute and eyed the interloper balefully. He had expected the grave-eyed captain to blast the Doctor skywards as he bloody well deserved. Instead . . . ah well—he shook his head sadly. It was a different Navy now. ‘Shove off, forrard!’ he yelled. The little boat swung into the stream and turned towards the mass of shipping.

  * * * * *

  Spray danced across the pinnace’s canopy as it lifted gaily on the sparkling water. Chesnaye staggered and put out his hand to steady himself against the motion. On the long voyage from England he had noticed how unprepared he had become for all the mannerisms and tests of seaboard life. The restless sea, the daily routine, all seemed vaguely strange and unnerving. The convoy had slipped through Gibraltar Straits and had been attacked soon afterwards. Appalled, Chesnaye had watched ship after ship blasted to fragments by the enemy bombers which appeared to fill the sky. The destroyer escort in which he had been a passenger was commanded by an Australian who had done little to hide his irritation at Chesnaye’s constant presence on his bridge. Once he had snapped: ‘Jesus, Captain, you’ll get enough of this later on! Why don’t you get your head down?’ But Chesnaye had found the Australian accent somehow reassuring, as it reminded him of the life in New Zealand. He wondered how that captain had fared in the night’s air raid.

  He instantly dismissed the convoy and everything else from his thoughts as he watched the sharpening shape of the monitor. Eagerly, hungrily, his eyes darted up and down her length, as if afraid to miss some scar or mark, as a mother will look at a grown-up son. She was older, but the same. There were streaks of rust around her hawse-pipe and more than one dent along her bulging hull, but nothing that he could not put right.

  The Doctor spoke from the cockpit. ‘I’d like to ask you aboard for a noggin, but it’s a bit early.’

  The boat drew nearer, and Chesnaye saw the familiar scurry and frantic preparations which culminated in a rigid knot of figures at the head of the long varnished gangway.

  His eyes misted, and over the years he heard Lieutenant Hogarth’s high-pitched voice screaming down threats to the flustered Pickles. And later when Pickles had warned him of the Captain. ‘He hates everybody, especially midshipmen!’

  Is that how they are thinking of me? he wondered.

  The boat lost way and idled towards the gangway, the polished boathook poised and ready.

  Wickersley called, ‘Jolly decent of you to drop me here!’

  Chesnaye looked down at him, knowing that he was glad he had had company for those last few agonising yards. ‘Actually, I’m coming aboard myself!’

  The Doctor’s eyes widened. ‘Oh?’ Then, as the realisation flooded his mind, ‘Oh!’

  Chesn
aye straightened his back and stepped on to the gangway. He tried not to count the wide, well-worn steps, his mind blank to all else but the whirl of events which had at last overtaken him. His head lifted above the deck, and his brain only half registered the line of tanned faces, the raised hands, and then the shrill twitter of pipes which washed across him like floodwater. A few mumbled words, more salutes, a guard presenting arms and the flash of a sword.

  One face seemed to swim out of the mist. A calm, youthful voice said the words he had waited so long to hear.

  ‘Welcome aboard, sir!’ He was back.

  2

  Out of the Sun

  Lieutenant Malcolm Norris, R.N.V.R., walked nervously to the front of the bridge and stared for several seconds into the darkness. The four hours of the Middle Watch had all but dragged to their close, and now that it was almost time to be relieved the same old feeling of nervous anticipation was making his heart thump against his ribs.

  It was still very dark, with the stars high and bright against a cloudless sky and reflected in the black oily water which slopped and gurgled against, the ship’s labouring hull as the monitor plodded slowly towards the invisible horizon. A steady south-west breeze made the ship rock uncomfortably, so that every piece of metal in the bridge structure groaned in regular protest, yet its clammy breath brought no life to the men on watch, but made them move continuously as they peered into the darkness.