To ‘Moloch’, repeated F0 Dover and Captain (D) Six, from ‘Mackerel’: Have sunk one German destroyer by torpedo and rammed another. My position so-and-so. Two regrettably surviving Huns last seen proceeding westward twenty knots. Got that?’
‘Aye aye, sir!’
‘Where are you going, Number One?’
‘Below, sir, to inspect the damage for’ard.’
‘Damage? What damage?’ He’d been preoccupied with his ‘fun'. Now he was gazing down at the bow itself, ignoring the few surviving Germans on it. They were being permitted to surrender, apparently. Nick didn’t wait. The starboard side of the bridge was smoking, smouldering hot, and the ladder had been shot away; he crossed to the other side and went down the port ladder. There was a jagged-edged rip in the starboard side of the chartroom; inside, everything was smashed. He was looking in through smaller perforations in this near side. It was a miracle that Grant had survived. The wireless office seemed to be intact. Pym grasped Nick’s arm: he was staring at what had been a chart-table, charts, instruments: ‘How – how can I work out a position?’
‘Tell them “vicinity No. 8 buoy”. That’s near enough. Moloch will have seen the shooting anyway.’
Pym nodded, as relieved-looking as if Nick had saved his life. Nick thought, Bloody fool! He turned aft, found that the ladder down to the iron deck was distorted but useable. The whaler’s planks were still burning in the davits: on the other side the 20-foot motorboat was matchwood piled round a charred engine. He was wrenching at the buckled screen door, wanting to get in past the galley and down to the for’ard messdecks; a sailor stopped to help.
McKechnie. Last night they’d been in a different kind of fight together. It might have been a year ago… McKechnie added his weight to Nick’s and they forced the door back; he asked Nick, ‘Did ye know the sub-lieutenant’s killed, sir?’
It sank in.
Cockcroft, dead. McKechnie added, ‘There’s a dozen or more, sir, and a lot wounded too. Back aft it’s terrible.’ Nick told him, ‘Find the doctor, tell him the cox’n’s on the bridge with a bad head-wound. Then go up there yourself and tell the captain I’ve sent you as relief helmsman.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
Memory was to come in fragments: like snapshots, impressions printed on the brain that would probably never leave it. Images, bursts of recorded sound that you heard again after-wards and thought about, glimpses of detail in a broad area of confusion. Important things and utterly unimportant ones – like Chief Petty Officer Swan, when Nick stared at him for a moment hardly knowing who he was, telling him ‘I shaved off, sir.’
‘I think we’ve some flooding for’ard. Come on down.’ Then a hideous grinding sound, and the nightmarish impression that it was the bow breaking away from the rest of her; but it was the German destroyer rolling over, turning turtle, scraping against Mackerel’s stern as she slid away and sank, the sea hissing, smacking its lips as it engulfed her and drowned her fires. Nick and Swan and the men on the bridge and foc’sl saw her go, a boil of foam and steam grey through the darkness, and light from that distant oil-slick flickering across the water. Then – suddenly – Mackerel lurched: as if she’d been relying on her beaten enemy’s support… As Nick flung himself up the twisted ladder to the foc’sl he heard Wyatt bellow over the bridge rail, ‘Collision mat, there! Get a mat over, jump to it now!’
The bow had changed shape: the foc’sl deck from just for’ard of the gun had folded downwards, so that it wasn’t a deck anyone could have walked on now, only a sag of steel that groaned and creaked as the ship moved to the sea. Nick told Swan, ‘Take charge here. I’m going below.’ He saw Grant, and called to him, ‘Mid, you come with me.’ The snotty said, ‘Two of the gun’s crew are dead, and the GM’s wounded in the stomach.’ Nick thought, Cockcroft’s dead, too… Someone had told him so – an hour ago? Cockcroft, with his small eccentricities and his amusing, pleasant manner… Grant asked him, pointing, ‘What about them?’ The German survivors: they stood in a close group, some of them frightened-looking and some hostile: two sailors with fixed bayonets faced them. Nick told one, a leading stoker, ‘Take ’em below, and keep a guard on them.’ He thought as he hurried down the ladder that with any luck the bulkheads down there might hold for a while, so long as Wyatt didn’t try to use the engines. He thought, They’ve got to, that’s all! We’ve a lot of wounded, and no boats.
Chapter 6
The collision bulkhead was bulging with the pressure of water on the other side of it. This seamen’s messdeck with its ranks of scrubbed tables was at the best of times a cramped, gloomy cavern; now, sparsely lit by emergency lamps and with the deckhead crushed downwards and water seeping, it was a trap, coffin-like, echoing to the noise the sea made hurling itself against the thin steel plating, and the frightening racket from the damaged bow. You could imagine the compartment being crushed: the bulkhead splitting, a rush of sea… He said, ‘Paint locker’s flooded. Presumably all for’ard of this point is.’ Watson, the commissioned engineer, nodded. ‘Dunno about down below. Cable locker, an’—’
‘We’ll have a look, in a minute. Meanwhile—’ Nick looked back at the cluster of tense faces behind him and the engineer – ‘we’ll get this shored. Allbright?’
‘Sir?’
Leading Seaman Allbright squeezed forward, between two seamen. He was thin, young-looking for his leading hand’s rate; now he could demonstrate his right to it. Nick told him, ‘Get the bulkhead shored. Tables, mess-stools. Send to the Chief Buffer if you want spars or planks. He’s on the foc’sl. Right?’
Allbright nodded, running his eye over the job and the men at his disposal. The ship’s motion seemed more pronounced down here, and the noise – particularly the clatter and scrape of the ripped stem – added to the sense of danger. Imagination was half the trouble: better if one were bone-headed, solid. White-enamelled bulkheads glistened, ran with condensation; there were leaks from the perimeters of scuttles, dribbles from loose rivets. In bad weather, the for’ard messdecks were never dry. Dirty water, vomit, swept rubbish and gear to and fro across the corticene-covered deck: a shoe, a battered cap, empty cigarette packets, a half-written letter. Stench: and men lived in this hole! Watson, his round face almost as white and as shiny as the bulkheads, pushed his cap back with a black-nailed thumb and ran the other oily palm across a dome of forehead. ‘See what’s what below, then?’
‘Yes.’ Nick, pushing aft through the crowd of men and with the engineer behind him, heard Allbright starting briskly, cheerfully: ‘Right then – clear all this muck aft! Then let’s ’ave them two tables flat ag’in the bulk’ead: mess-stools to ’old ’em… Jarvie, fetch us ’alf a dozen ’ammicks out o’ the nettin’… Slap it abaht now, lads!’
Eyes wandering to that for’ard bulkhead. Shoring might strengthen it enough to make it hold. But if it didn’t—
If it didn’t, the compartment would have to be surrendered to the sea; the next bulkhead that could be shored, after that, would be this one through which they were passing now, leaving the big messdeck and going aft into the leading hands’ space. From here a hatchway and steel ladder led down to the stokers’ and ERAs’ messes.
‘Mid.’ Nick stopped on the ladder. ‘Tell the captain there’s flooding for’ard, I’m still checking and I’ll report soon as I can. Tell him I’m shoring the collision bulkhead and for the time being will he for God’s sake not use the engines. Then come back ’
‘Aye aye, sir.’ Grant shot away. Nick, followed by the hard-breathing engineer, went on down. At the bottom, he turned for’ard, through the bulkhead door.
This stokers’ messdeck was smaller than the seamen’s mess above it; at its for’ard end, ten feet short of the collision bulkhead which now one could hear them working at overhead, was an engineer’s store. Watson opened its steel door. Dark, wet-smelling, echoing like the inside of a drum; Prior, the stoker PO, peered in over Watson’s shoulder. Nick passed him a lamp; they all went inside, and Watson held it up aga
inst the suspect bulkhead. He whistled, shook his head, glanced at Nick.
‘We’re in trouble, all right. An’ all the way down, I’d say, would you.’
It was worse here than on the higher deck. The bulge was so pronounced that it looked as if the steel had actually stretched.
It wouldn’t do that, though; when the strain reached a certain limit, it would split.
Watson banged his heel on the rectangular hatch that led down to a lower store. ‘Try it, shall us?’
Nick hesitated. He suggested, ‘Leave one clip on, and just crack it.’
‘Aye aye.’ The engineer knelt down. Mackerel was rolling harder than she had been, and erratically; Nick realised she must be beam-on to the south-wester, which in any case was obviously blowing up still. He hoped Wyatt wouldn’t be tempted to use the engines to keep her head into it. Watson had freed one of the two butterfly clips; now, squatting, he was using his heel to start the other one.
‘God almighty!’ Fighting to screw it down again, with water spurting in a thin, hard sheet… ‘Purchase-bar!’ Watson looked round for help. ‘Prior—’ A savage lurch of the ship flung him back: Stoker O’Leary pushed in past Prior, jammed a section of steel tubing on one arm of the butterfly clip, wrenched it round; Prior stood on the hatch, and Watson, cursing fluently, joined him. Eventually they had it tight again and the spray of icy, dirty water stopped. Watson was dripping wet; he told Prior, ‘Shore this bulkhead and the deck too while you’re at it. Some bloody ’ow… But solid, make it rock ’ard top to bottom, can do?’
‘Do me best, sir.’ O’Leary, whom Nick remembered seeing in that pub brawl last night, muttered as he got off his knees, ‘An’ a very very happy Christmas to us all.’ He got a laugh, for that. Nick went back into the messdeck and asked Grant, ‘Did you tell the captain?’
‘Yes, sir. He said will you be as quick as you can, please.’
No – I’m trying to give her time to sink… ‘Chief—’ he pointed downwards, as Watson came through and joined him – ‘No. 1 oil-fuel’s down there, right?’ The engineer nodded. ‘Well, if there’s any leakage to it from the store that’s flooded—’
‘Wouldn’t say it’s likely.’
‘If there is, there’ll be an upward pressure here, this deck we’re standing on. Isn’t that so?’
‘Could be, but—’
‘We’ll shore it, then.’ He staggered, half fell across a mess table as Mackerel flung over. Watson, as if he was talking to a horse, ‘Whoa-up!’ He was holding himself upright on the open door. ‘Fine time to blow up a force eight, ain’t it though … ’Ere. Spo—’ Prior, he was talking to – ‘when you got that done, shore this deck down, right?’ He looked around: ‘Only joking, lads, it’s no force eight.’ Nick said, ‘Let’s check the magazine now.’
Aft through the bulkhead door, and down through the four-inch ammunition hatch to the lobby with shell-room to port and cordite room to starboard. All dry: and there was no indication of any straining of the bulkhead. On the way up again he said, ‘We’ll get her back all right, Chief… Now what’s this?’
They were bringing the Germans down. Lister, one of the crew of the foc’sl four-inch, asked him, ‘Where’ll we keep ’em, sir?’ Nick looked at Watson, who suggested, ‘Fore peak?’ Men laughed: the fore peak was flooded. Nick said, ‘ERAs’ mess.’ Watching them troop aft, Watson answered Nick’s remark about getting back: ‘Aye. Be all right if he keeps her slow an’ steady, and the weather ’olds.’
‘lt is blowing up a bit.’
‘Oh aye?’ Rubbing his bald head. He’d got it well blackened, all it needed was a polish. ‘How far ’re we from ’ome, then?’
‘About – sixty miles.’
‘That much?’
Watson looked unhappy. ‘Three, four knots is all that bulkhead’s goin’ to stand. Shored or not shored.’ He pushed his cap on again. ‘Fifteen, twenty hours – an’ blowin’ up, you say?’
* * *
Wyatt, feet wide apart for stability and an arm crooked round the binnacle, was using binoculars one-handed, whenever the ship was on a more or less even keel, to sweep the black sea-scape that surrounded them. Beside him McKechnie, feet similarly straddled, clutched the wheel although she was only drifting without steerage way. It was her beam-on angle to wind and sea that was making her this lively; so far it was only quite a moderate blow.
Enough to make that smashed-in stem sound like a busy smithy’s shop, though.
‘How long?’
‘Perhaps another ten minutes, sir.’
He’d left Grant down there, with instructions to keep him and the captain informed, in particular to report when Allbright and Prior were satisfied with their areas of shoring, so that Mackerel could go ahead – or try to. Coming up from below a few minutes ago Nick had been disappointed not to find other destroyers standing by; he’d expected that Moloch and Musician would have found them by this time.
Dark all round: only white foam and wave-crests, close-to, broke up the blackness. The oil-patch must have burnt itself out.
‘No signals, sir?’
‘Wolstenholme’s uncertain of the receiver. Transmitter’s all right – so he says.’
Not so marvellous, Nick realized. He’d been quite confident they’d have had help close by. What if the transmitter was not working – if that signal hadn’t in fact gone out, and nobody knew anything of what had happened?
‘Do you know if he’s checked the aerial, sir?’
‘Yes.’ Wyatt muttered furiously, under his breath, ‘Come on, come on…’ He twisted round: ‘Reeves?’
‘Sir!’
Reeves was the next senior signals rating after Porter. Porter was dead. So were a dozen other men, according to McAllister’s preliminary count, and there were more than twenty wounded. Wyatt asked Reeves, ‘Have you got a lamp there, and do you know the challenge and reply?’
‘Yes, sir, I do.’
‘H’m…’ Studying the compass card, glancing up to check the wind’s direction and the ship’s head. ‘Coming up stiffer, Number One.’
‘I’m afraid so.’
He’d left out the ‘sir’. He didn’t give a damn for Wyatt, he realised, or for Wyatt’s opinion of him. The only thing that mattered was to get this ship back to Dover; for the sake of the men in her, particularly the wounded, and because it was a natural instinct to fight to keep one’s ship afloat. Not to please Wyatt, though; nothing to please Wyatt.
‘Can’t they get a damn move on, down there?’
‘They are trying to.’ He added, ‘Sir.’ Wyatt was staring at him across the black, swaying, rackety bridge. ‘You said the paint store’s flooded?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Then the cable locker—’
‘The bulge seems worse at that lower level.’
The collision mat was in place, over the outside of the crumpled bow. Swan had secured it there with steel-wire rope, and it would help, so long as it stayed in place; but with the motion of the sea increasing steadily, and when Mackerel went ahead –
The wireless office voicepipe: Nick answered it. Pym reported, ‘Signal received from Moloch, saying Use your searchlight to guide me to you. Leading tel says it was a very faint transmission.’
Nick told Wyatt. It was a relief to know they could receive at all; and that the other signal had gone out. He added, ‘Have to be the after searchlight.’ This one over the back end of the bridge was part of a tangle of junk which must still have parts of men in it. Daylight would be welcome, if Mackerel was still afloat to see it; but it would have its horrors to offer too.
‘Have the light switched on, Number One. Point it upwards.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’ Nick got Gladwish on the voicepipe, and told him what was wanted; the gunner (T) answered flatly, ‘Not a chance. Cables are shot away, and we can’t rig jury connections until we’ve some light to work by.’
Nick wondered if he was trying to be funny. The situation seemed to be singularly unamusing. Except for the
fact that Moloch and others knew Mackerel was in trouble and were looking for her… Wyatt was calling down to Pym, who seemed to have established himself in the wireless office, ‘Pilot, take this down and send it off to Moloch repeated Captain (D) and FO Dover: Have no searchlight working. Am hove-to while shoring collision bulkhead. Intend proceeding south-westward at slow speed shortly. Got that?’
‘Yes, sir… Captain, sir?’
‘Well?’
‘Barometer’s falling fast, sir.’
Wyatt snorted angrily as he straightened up. As if it had annoyed him to be given information of that kind. His manner, Nick thought, suggested that he regarded the shoring of the bulkhead as a mere formality, a ritual drill he had to allow before he shrugged it off and shaped a course for Dover. As if he didn’t realise that without the support of shores – and well-placed, evenly distributed ones at that – the bulkhead could rip open like a sheet of cardboard: might do so even when it was shored… But Wyatt perhaps felt superior to this kind of detail: his prayers had been answered, he’d met the raiders and sunk two of them – on his own, with no senior officer present to claim a share of the glory. He’d be expecting a D50 and a brass hat; he’d have liked now to be steaming proudly into Dover – not drifting, crippled, in a rising sea.
Sixty Minutes for St George Page 10
