by Jay Garnet
For Mike that convoy was a grim induction into the most awful of the Navy’s wartime tasks. After the rendezvous in Iceland the route led north-east past two bare, rocky outposts, Jan Mayen and Bear Island, then on towards the pack ice. Mike felt the wind screaming off the polar ice sheets; saw mountainous seas smashing over the bows; and was sliced on the cheeks by spray that froze to splinters of ice in the air before it hit the deck. Now he understood why men sometimes refused to wear lifebelts – to be in those frozen wastes of water was to die of exposure in three minutes; better that death came swiftly.
On this occasion the ice was further south than usual. Sixteen of the merchant ships and two of the protecting minesweepers were so battered by it that they turned back. Four days later the eight remaining vessels were bombed by enemy aircraft, which veered off back towards Norway without scoring a hit. A U-boat torpedo blew up the commodore’s ship, the Empire Howard. Finally, a gale struck.
Below decks the conditions outside created their own peculiar miseries. All portholes were closed and air vents pumped in hot air, but internal condensation produced a slow rain of drips from the overhead pipes and electrical cables, and the inside of the hull was covered with an inch of ice.
In addition it was never possible to get enough sleep. With no one wanting to sleep in hammocks, every mess deck was crammed with fully dressed sailors trying to find a space to lie down – on the deck, tables, chairs, tops of lockers. Only the fact that at any one time thirty per cent of the crew were on duty ensured that there was enough space for everyone to sleep. In these conditions the repeated calls to action were something of a relief to Mike. He had an unreasoning, youthful confidence that the weight of metal around him would protect him from catastrophe, and the activity deep in the bowels of the ship gave him a feeling of being part of a living entity.
This time she survived unscathed. The Edinburgh, shepherding the remnants of her convoy and preceded by the four British minesweepers permanently based in the Kola Inlet, had dropped anchor on 19 April, after eleven days at sea.
3
‘Where’s that electrician, then?’ shouted Charlie George, the chief, suddenly pulling back from the railings. ‘Electrician! Let’s have you in position on that derrick!’
The chief looked out again down the inlet, then turned towards the huddle of boys and seamen in the hangar.
‘All right! Out here! Stand by for barge coming alongside!’
Mike and the others stepped out into the chill wind. To either side of him, up and down the ship, snow flurries dusted the superstructure with white. On the warm deck below, however, it turned to slush almost immediately.
Now he could see what had caught the chief’s attention. A launch – no, a tug – pulling a small barge. Even two hundred yards away he could make out Russian guards standing, their rifles slung over their shoulders. Behind them lines of wooden boxes. There was no well to speak of. The boxes needed no securing.
The tug pulled up beside an iron ladder that led up to the flight deck. The Russian officer came up first, unshaven and haggard. From a doorway between the two hangars stepped the senior executive officer and a communications officer who doubled as interpreter. Both men spoke briefly to the Russian officer. The exec nodded and went across to the chief.
‘OK, Sparks,’ said the chief. ‘Get that derrick moving.’
The crane hiccuped sideways and its hook dropped to the deck by the top of the stairway.
‘You!’ said the chief, pointing at Mike. ‘Yes, you! See that cargo net? Bring it here!
Mike went across to the side of the hangar and pulled out the wire-mesh ‘spud net’ and hauled it over to the chief.
‘Finish the job, lad! Put it on the hook!’
Mike, fumbling in his gloves, did as he was told.
The net swung up and over the railings and down to the Russian soldiers waiting below near the lines of boxes.
‘Right. All of you out here. When those crates come aboard I want them stacked over there.’ The chief pointed to the corner of the hangar from which Mike and his group had just emerged.
Two minutes later the sling reappeared over the side, containing five of the boxes. Slowly they were lowered to the deck.
‘OK, lads,’ said the chief. ‘Two per box. Go careful now.’
Mike and the lanky youth, whose name he discovered was Reg Warner, took the first. He noticed the rough wood, the metal bindings, the stencilling – ‘CCCP’, the Cyrillic equivalent of ‘USSR’ – and the rope handles at each end. The box was about two feet long, a foot wide and seven inches deep. If it’s food, thought Mike, as he went to grab one of the rope handles, there ain’t bleedin’ much of it. And why two of us?
Then he found out. He and Reg, using one gloved hand each, failed to raise the box.
‘Bloody ‘ell!’ said Mike. ‘What’s this lot, chief? Bleedin’ lead?’
‘Ask no questions, son. Just shift the box.’
Mike and Reg applied two hands, lifted and walked.
As they returned past the others hefting their loads across to the hangar, a thought struck Mike.
‘’Ere,’ he said to Reg, ‘they wouldn’t want nothing with lead. Sure as buggery it ain’t baked beans. You know what that is? That’s gold!’
‘Gold!’ said Reg, ‘What they want effin’ gold for?’
‘Don’t be daft! We’ve been bringing the Russkies all the stuff to keep them going, ain’t we? You think we’re doing that for free? Nah! Course we ain’t! Stalin, ’e’s got to pay, ain’t ’e? And no one wants ’is roubles, do they? Gold. Got to be.’
By the time the second sling load landed on the deck the whole work party knew of Mike’s guess.
‘’Ere, chief,’ Mike said to Charlie George, who was standing silently to one side now that the operation was going to his satisfaction. ‘That lot’s gold, ain’t it? Old Joe’s gold?’
‘Ask no questions, son, and I’ll tell you no lies.’
But as Mike walked away to rejoin Reg, he overheard the exec mutter to the chief: ‘You making sure that stuff’s coming up carefully, chief?’ The exec gave a humourless laugh. ‘If you drop any over the side, you know who’ll have to get it.’
Mike cast a glance backwards and caught the chief’s eye. No question about it: this cargo was valuable, all right.
Unloading the ninety-three boxes took an hour and a half. The work was hard, and talk died away. Only at the end, as the last batch of boxes was being cleared, did Mike overhear any further remarks. One of the cases was lying upside down on the damp deck. It had lain just long enough for its coating of frost to melt. As Mike and Reg pulled it the right way up, they saw that the large red CCCP lettering had begun to run. Drops of red fell on the deck.
The chief had been silent for some time now, but at this Mike heard him say with deliberate melodrama to the exec: ‘Looks bad, sir. Russian gold dripping with blood.’
The exec gave him a look and raised his eyebrows.
‘Bad omen, sir,’ the chief explained.
The exec smiled wanly. ‘Let’s hope not, chief. Let’s hope not.’
The chief’s image was an unusually poetic one, and it stayed with Mike. He recalled the stories he had heard about the Russians. Bolshies. Revolution. Famine. Death camps. Secret police.
‘Bleedin’ gold!’ he muttered.
‘Eh?’ said Reg.
‘Bleedin’ gold,’ he repeated with a grin, realizing his own pun. ‘Looks like blood on the top of the box. Didn’t you hear what the chief said?’
They dumped the last box in line, completing a rough wall about two feet high and twenty feet long outside the hangar. As he turned, Mike saw the Russian officer holding out a piece of paper to the chief, who waved to call over the exec. A boy seaman was summoned and dispatched. Everyone waited. The exec made drinking motions with one arm. The Russian nodded and called down to his men, who came on board and crowded into the hangar. Cocoa arrived. One of the paymasters appeared, along with the interpreter. The
paymaster looked at the paper still held by the Russian. He went across to the boxes, spent several minutes counting and recounting the boxes, then removed a glove, tucked it under an arm, signed the paper clumsily, resting it against his other hand, and handed it back. The Russian gave a quick smile and spoke briefly to his men, who filed off down the ladder.
‘Dasvidanye,’ he said, and then in heavily acented English, ‘Goodby-ee.’
He turned and, after giving a final wave, disappeared down to the barge. Mike heard the tug’s engine start and, with a swirl of water from the propellers, the little work party headed back towards Murmansk.
‘Well, it’s ours now,’ said the chief, as he walked across to the boys. ‘But you lads haven’t finished yet.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s five-thirty now. Get below to your galleys, have some tea and sandwiches, and be back here in twenty minutes sharp.’
On their return the chief was standing by to welcome them.
‘Right, you ’orrible lot. You on the end, let’s have that bomb-room hatch opened.’
He indicated a hatch that stood between the two hangars in the centre of the flight deck. It was built originally to give direct access straight down through several decks to the four-inch magazine and the bomb-room, where the bombs formerly carried by the ship’s planes were stored.
‘What – we going to put that lot down there, chief?’ said one of the lads.
‘That’s right. Good boy. And we’re going to take it very carefully.’
The hatch lay open now, revealing a ladder that went down sixty steps to the depths below. Above the hatch was a small derrick with a pulley and a rope through it that lay coiled to one side.
‘They want some help down there. Anyone here work in the four-inch magazine?’
Mike half raised his arm as if he was still in school.
‘That’s my action station, chief,’ he said.
‘Down you go, then. You know your way. You’ll find the master-at-arms down there with a few other lads, and they want a little more help. No need to look at me like that, lad. I know you’re not allowed in the bomb-room. But it’s empty now. All you’ll need is a pair of strong shoulders.’
Mike stepped over the lid of the hatch on to the stairs and climbed down past the Royal Marines’ mess deck, past the four-inch magazine, past a tiny telegraph room and down into the bomb-room itself.
He reached the bottom and turned. There, waiting in silence along the bomb-room bulkheads, was Master-at-arms Perry and five other boy seamen. Among them was the drop-shouldered, acne-riddled Peaches, whose face lit up at the sight of Mike.
‘’Ello, Cocky!’ he said. ‘What you doing down ’ere?’
‘Same as you, son,’ the master-at-arms interjected. ‘You’ll see soon enough.’ Then to Mike, ‘They ready up there?’
‘They nearly was, yes,’ Mike replied.
Perry put his face around the door and yelled up the hatchway: ‘OK, chief. Lower away when you’re ready!’
‘Mind your heads then!’ came a shout from above. ‘Here comes number one.’ And within a few seconds, held in a double loop of rope, the first box appeared.
It was a slow business, unloading each box in the confined hatchway, but loading up above was even slower and, despite having to manoeuvre the boxes over a mass of pipes that ran across the bomb-room floor, the boys were having to wait between deliveries.
After twenty minutes the master-at-arms muttered: ‘We’re going to be here all bloody day.’ Then he called up the hatchway: ‘Hey, chief, can’t you put two on at once? It’s slow work down here!’
There was a shout of assent from above. The next load contained two boxes and the weight – nearly 250lb – took the crew up on the flight deck by surprise. Urgent shouts rang out from above, over the rattle of the pulley wheel.
Perry again stuck his head forward to look up the hatchway. He just had time to shout ‘Christ!’ and leap backwards, when a box crashed at his feet. He continued his retreat before an ankle-high cascade of splinters, leaving Mike the closest person to the point of impact.
The box smashed open and its contents spewed across the deck. Out fell not only a slew of protective sawdust but also three bars of glorious, dark, lustrous gold.
Mike had never seen gold before. Unaware that the others were frozen in amazement, he bent down to pick up one of the bars. He could now see directly into the half-empty box. Inside were another two bars, making five altogether. Later, he was to work out how many bars there were in the whole consignment: four hundred and sixty-five.
At that moment, however, his attention was concentrated on just one. Like the others, it was rectangular, nine inches long and with bevelled edges, so that the top, a mere two and three-quarter inches across, was half an inch smaller than the bottom. The whole episode had for Mike a dream-like, slow-motion quality. The intensity of the experience seemed to give him all the time in the world, time enough even to get an impression of the markings on this particular bar: an oval crest of some kind containing Russian lettering and a hammer-and-sickle stamp; more Russian letters, followed by ‘9999’; a long number; and then a short number, that of the bar itself: KP 1926. He remembered that in particular, for it was the year of his birth.
The rest he would only understand years later – the Cyrillic letters for the USSR and NKTsM, standing for ‘People’s Commissariat for Non-Ferrous Metallurgy’; the ‘9999’, which indicated a purity of one part in 10,000; the long number, which was the weight in grammes. The bar was what is known in the gold trade as a ‘400 ounce good delivery bar’ – 25lb of gold worth some £3500 in 1942.
The most extraordinary thing of all was the bar’s weight. More precisely, what staggered him was that the weight could be contained in such a small space. It looked and felt like a fortune.
The moment that to him seemed to have taken an eternity was over in a matter of seconds. Master-at-arms Perry recovered himself first. He had tripped back against a pipe, but not fallen, coming instead directly against a bulkhead.
He now took three strides forward over the pipes, reached over Mike, said, ‘Oi! Hands off that, son!’ and grabbed at it with one hand. He, too, was surprised by the weight, and had to lean on Mike’s shoulder to stand up straight with it. Then he shouted up the hatch: ‘Chief! You buggered one of the boxes! I’ll have to order up a shipwright. Let’s have that second one down – slowly!’
He turned his attention back to Mike. ‘All right, son, get this lot to one side. Stand by, the rest of you, for the next box.’
As the box touched the deck he gave Mike a tap on the shoulder and told him to get a message to one of the ship’s carpenters to make his way to the bomb-room.
The loading then went on as slowly as before. It took another two and a half hours to lower the rest of the boxes one by one and stack them round the bulkheads of the bomb-room. In the meantime a carpenter appeared, went away again, returned with some planking and mocked up a new end for the split box. While the last few boxes were set in position, he packed the bars back inside the broken one and put little metal brackets along the edges. It was not a great job, but adequate.
When all was finished it was mid-morning and time for a meal break. The master-at-arms slammed the bomb-room’s six-foot iron door, pulled the half-dozen levers that made it watertight, locked the solid metal padlock and returned the key to the master key-ring, which was under the charge of a Royal Marine guard.
4
Later that day, down below in their mess decks, Mike and Peaches lay in neighbouring hammocks, a mere sixteen inches apart – the regulation distance defined by the pins in the bar to which the hammock ropes were tied. In one way the lull provided welcome relaxation. There would be no action stations unless there was a German bombing raid and of that there would be fair warning. It was worthwhile slinging the hammocks just to get some proper kip.
But in another way it was not so good. Imagination worked overtime.
‘Cor,’ Peaches said for the tenth time. ‘
Gold! You ’eld it, Cocky! What was it like?’
‘I told you, Peaches.’
‘Tell me again, Cocky. I like to ’ear it.’
Mike sighed. ‘’Eavy. Dull – not as glittery as gold should be. Know what I mean? Sort of soft.’
‘Cor . . .’
It was a conversation that was beginning to try Mike’s patience, but it had an endless fascination for most members of the mess deck.
A dour Scots stoker tried to put it into perspective. ‘For Christ’s sake!’ he said. ‘It’s no more than it would cost to build a ship like this one!’
But it did no good. Everyone was fascinated by the gold. There was scarcely a man or boy who didn’t come up with some insane suggestion of how His Majesty’s Royal Navy could be relieved of just one of those bars.
‘Of course, it’s all accounted for. But what if we get hit? What chance of getting a bar out with us, or a box?’
‘None at all, you daft bastard.’
‘That door weighs a ton.’
‘Hey, Cocky, what did it feel like? Heavy, eh . . . ?’
‘Carry one of those, you’d sink as fast as the ship . . . Besides, how d’you get in the bomb-room? Bring the Royal Marine guard, the master-at-arms, the commissioned gunner in on it?’
‘Nah – get a soap impression of the key, then sneak down when the dynamos are being turned over and the ship’s all dark.’
Most of the talk was harmless fantasy, but beneath it ran a substratum of tension and unease.
The stoker himself put his finger on it.
‘Gold, laddie! They say those boxes looked like they were bleeding. I dinna like it. Carrying gold – it’s no what a fighting ship’s for.’
‘Get away, Jock, yer superstitious git. If you don’t want your share, I’ll ’elp you out.’
Mike took none of this seriously. But Peaches was different. He became both morbid and obsessive. When he talked, it was either about disaster or about the gold. Mike once caught his eye as he was fingering the identity disc round his neck. ‘Know something, Cocky?’ Peaches said. ‘If we go down, this’ll be like writing on my grave.’
