‘Everard.’
‘Sir?’
‘Go down and see what’s happening. Tell ’em I’m giving ’em five more minutes and not a second longer!’
Nick hesitated.
‘Do you mean that, sir?’
A bull-roar: ‘What?’
‘If the shoring’s not done, would you risk carrying away the bulkhead?’
Wyatt was a black mass hunched, head forward over massive shoulders, eyes gleaming in the binnacle’s small light. McKechnie’s head was turned towards him too. The questioning of orders was not an everyday occurrence. Nick added, ‘We’ve only the Carley floats, and two dozen wounded men. If the bulkhead goes—’
‘Everard!’
‘Sir.’
‘Do what I told you. Go down and tell’ em to get a damn wriggle on.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
Climb-down. Nick thought, He won’t love me for it. But what difference, for God’s sake, did that make… ‘Everard.’
‘Yes, sir?’ He stopped at the top of the ladder, clung to the rail as Mackerel rolled and shipped green water that swamped across her gun’l and exploded against the bridge’s battered side, swirled, came pouring out of the holed chartroom and over the side again as she hung for a moment and then flung herself the other way. You didn’t need a barometer to tell you what was happening with the weather. Wyatt said, ‘By daylight we may have a full gale on our hands. In the state we’re in, we couldn’t stand it. So we have no option but to make port at our best speed and as soon as possible. Understand?’
Best speed?
How much warning would one get of the bulkhead bursting? Time enough to evacuate the messdeck and the lower – stokers’ – deck? He didn’t think so. If it went there’d be a split and a sudden rush of sea… Might the answer be to finish this shoring operation and then clear everyone out from between the two bulkheads, shore up the second one as well?
He thought about it on his way below, weighing pros and cons. Grant met him in the leading hands’ mess. ‘Just about done, sir, except for the deck down there.’ The midshipman was pale, ill-looking. Nick thought, Poor little bastard… He put a hand on his shoulder: ‘Let’s take a look.’
* * *
Wyatt staggered, caught off-balance as he moved to answer the wireless office voicepipe; he fetched-up in the corner of the bridge like a drunk colliding with a fence. ‘Bridge!’
Pym reported, ‘There’s been a signal from the West Barrage patrol, sir. They met two enemy destroyers and damaged one by gunfire, both last seen retiring north-eastward at high speed.’
‘What ships are on West Barrage?’
‘Swift and Marksman, sir – but Attentive, Murray, Nugent and Crusader are close by in the Downs.’
It was surprising that the Germans had pressed through that far, after losing half their force up here. The Hun raids were aimed at quick and easy killings with no losses to themselves, the ‘fox in the hen-run’ technique. This time, the foxes had got bloody noses.
Nick hauled himself off the ladder into the bridge. His seaboots were heavy, full of water; he’d timed his sortie from the screen door up on to the foc’sl badly, and a sea had caught him in the open, on that lower ladder.
He saw Wyatt at the voicepipe. Pym’s voice was a faint gabble in the tube; Wyatt yelled, ‘What’s that?’ The navigator told him, ‘Signal just coming through from Moloch, sir, addressed to us.’ Wyatt, holding himself at the voicepipe with an arm hooked round its top, the other hand grasping the bridge rail, shuffled his bulk around and stared towards Nick: ‘Number One?’
‘Yes, sir. The shoring’s complete, as good as we can make it. Mr Watson’s view is the bulkhead should stand up to a speed of three or even four knots, sir.’
He’d thought that to quote the engineer would be the best way to make the point about low speed. Wyatt wouldn’t want his opinion.
‘That’s his view, is it… Yes, pilot?’
‘From Moloch, sir: I will continue to search for you. Are you under way yet. That’s the signal, sir.’
‘Make to him: Proceeding now course west-sou’-west.’ Wyatt straightened. ‘How’s her head, McKechnie?’
‘North sixty west, sir!’
‘Starboard ten, then.’
‘Starboard ten, sir.’ How she’d steer, with her bow askew as it was, remained to be seen. Wyatt, back at the binnacle now, called down to the engine-room, ‘Mr Watson?’
‘Sir?’
‘I’m about to go ahead, Chief. I’ll start at one hundred revolutions and work up to two-fifty.’
Ten knots?
‘Sir—’ hearing the engineer’s instant reaction, Nick could imagine the alarm on his pallid, oil-smeared face – ‘sir, that collision bulkhead—’
‘Chief, I’m sick to death of being told about that bloody bulkhead! Slow ahead, one hundred revolutions!’
‘One hundred revs, sir, aye aye!’
Wyatt might reconsider that intention, Nick thought, when he saw the sea’s force on the damaged area for’ard. The man wasn’t mad, he couldn’t want to sink her… The turbine’s low drone was a welcome sound, a stirring of life and purpose; the last hour’s helpless wallowing had been far from pleasant.
‘One hundred and twenty revs!’
‘One-two-oh revolutions, sir!’ Watson’s acknowledgement came as a wail, a cry of despair from the ship’s steel guts. Nick told himself Imagination… He raised his glasses, watched the movement of her stem against the background of white breaking sea; she seemed to be answering her helm quite normally, swinging steadily round to port. But the turning motion involved pushing that damaged bow against the resistance of the sea, adding the ship’s own movement to the weather’s force. He watched closely; he could feel the impact, the thudding jars crashing against split plating – and worse, forcing in, into the already flooded ‘watertight’ spaces and the cable-locker and paint store: already the pressure on the shored bulkhead would have increased considerably.
Wyatt too was angling his binoculars downward, watching the ship’s stem. Nick heard him ask McKechnie, ‘How’s her head?’
‘Just passing west, sir.’
‘Ease to five.’
‘Ease to five, sir… Five of starboard wheel on, sir.’
‘Still swinging?’
McKechnie checked the lubber’s line’s movement round the card. ‘Aye, a little, sir.’
‘Bring the wheel amidships when you’ve ten degrees to go. And steady on south-sou‘-west.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
The point being that she was turning so readily to port, and she might need compensating helm for the distortion for’ard, starboard rudder to keep her on a straight course. She was rolling less and pitching more as she came round closer to wind and sea. It wasn’t good at all, that pitching. Wind, Nick estimated, about force four, rising five. Rising… If you had a huge net – say a single section of mine-net as the drifters handled it, which would be a hundred yards long and thirty feet deep – and filled it with scrap-iron and then swung it from a crane against a solid wall time and time again, that would be something like the noise the sea was making against Mackerel’s bow. So what would it be doing to the bow, he wondered, and what must it be sounding like to the men who were watching the shores down there?
‘Captain sir.’
‘Well?’ Wyatt kept his glasses at his eyes. Nick said, ‘l’d like to go down and see how the shoring’s holding up.’
‘Go on, then.’ Wyatt bent to the voicepipe. ‘One hundred and fifty revolutions!’
* * *
They’d brought some of the tables aft, out of the for’ard messdeck, to use them as bases for the shores on this second line of defence. They were working on it now, here in the leading seamen’s mess and, at the foot of the steel ladder one deck down, the leading stokers’. CPO Swan had taken charge; the faces of the bulkheads were lined with upended mess tables, and hammocks placed to cushion the butt-ends of benches and spars which, with their other ends ja
mmed against angle-bars and centre-line stanchions, held the tables firmly against the flat steel surface. Not too hard, because there was no pressure yet – hopefully never would be – on the other side of it… Planks had been criss-crossed where space didn’t allow for tables. Swan shouted, over the fantastic volume of sound, ‘That’s all me timber, sir. The lot.’ In the confined, below-deck spaces, the Chief Buffer looked bigger than ever; and without his beard, quite a different character.
Nick went into the stokers’ messdeck. It looked something like a shaft of a coal-mine, only with more pit-props than any mine would have; Prior had hammered wedges in at deckhead level to jam spars down on to upturned tables that covered practically every square foot of deck. Now he was squatting on the sill of the door to the engineer’s store at the compartment’s for’ard end. He stood up, as Nick joined him.
‘How are things here?’
He meant the shoring inside the store. Prior ushered him in to see for himself.
‘Needs watchin’ all the time, sir. You’d think nothing ’d shift it, wouldn’t you, but – well, it’s this pitchin’ does it, the ends of the shores seem to keep slidin’, sort o’ – look, see there?’ He used his mallet to knock it back. ‘Wouldn’t ’ve thought it, would you, sir. See it slide, did you?’
‘Could you brace the feet from below?’
‘If we ’ad more spars, I could,’ Prior shook his close-cropped greying head. He had a reddish face, black-stubbled now, and very calm, steady eyes. The noise here in the store was appalling, to most people it would have been almost unendurable, but it didn’t seem to bother him. He shouted, ‘Chief Buffer’s brought out all ’e’s got, ’e says.’ One eye winked. ‘Not my part o’ ship, sir, I can’t tell.’ He turned away, watching the shores again, mallet ready, as Mackerel plunged and shook. ‘Be all right, sir, long as I’m ’ere wi’ this.’ He meant the mallet. And he was alone here, with the shored-up messdeck a dark and uninhabited cavern behind him; if the bulkhead gave way, the odds were he’d never reach the one aft, the one they were shoring now.
Nick said, pitching his voice up high, ‘I’ll ask for someone to relieve you presently. Every half-hour, say, watch and watch?’
Prior smiled. ‘I’m quite ’appy, sir. We done a right good job on ’er, sir, don’t you worry.’
Nick doubted whether it was a job to make anyone ‘happy’, hammering in shores as the ship’s jolting shifted them, watching that bulkhead that had a whole sea’s force only needing a bit of elbow-room on the other side of it – and the noise, the deafening metallic crashing, crashing… He was on his way aft and up to the other messdeck, and he found it much the same except that it was only the for’ard bulkhead, not the deck, that was shored; in spite of being stove-in at its for’ard end where the deckhead caved downward it seemed less gloomy, less of the trap-feeling about it. Grant had come into the messdeck behind him; he shouted, thin-voiced, ‘Seems to be holding up, sir.’
Grant seemed to be holding up, too. Perhaps he’d just been sick; one always felt better, for a while. He was up close to the bulkhead now and he could see where a spar or two had shifted; by this time Prior would have knocked them back into position, but Allbright didn’t seem to have noticed the change. Nick asked him, shouting above the din. ‘Those need tightening, don’t they?’
‘What’s that, sir?’
Allbright looked dead tired. Dark rings under hollow, dull eyes, and face thinner, paler than ever. Nick shouted in his ear, ‘Time you had a rest, Allbright.’
‘Rest, sir?’
The killick smiled. He seemed drugged, stunned – by the noise, perhaps – and puzzled at the suggestion that he might take a breather from this job of keeping sentry-go against the sea. Grant made an offer: ‘I’ll take over, for a spell.’
He took the mallet out of the leading seaman’s hands, and began to knock the shores back into their original positions. Nick yelled, ‘I’ll send someone along, in a minute.’ Allbright objected, ‘Look, sir, I can—’ Grant shouted, with his eyes fixed on the shore he was about to belt, ‘Leave me to it, I’m perfectly all right.’
Nick took Allbright aft. He told Swan, ‘Midshipman Grant wants a turn at the bulkhead. Give him half an hour, then have someone relieve him.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’ Swan peered for’ard through the shadowed messdeck. He glanced at Nick. ‘Not the most salubrious of spots, sir.’
‘You looked better with your beard, Buffer.’ Mackerel was rising, rising: it was time she stopped and came down the other side. Here in the half-light, enclosed, ears ringing with the noise and mindful of what could happen at any moment and what could or could not be done to counter it, surrounded by men whose eyes were either alarmed or carefully controlled into showing no alarm as they watched the bulkheads and the props they’d placed – props which, in comparison with the weight and power of the sea out there, were really matchsticks – you could visualise the ship suspended on a wave-crest, hanging, tilting ready for the great rushing plunge: and then the feel of her moving, the downward slide, accelerating, falling almost as if through air not sea, and as suddenly brought-up hard, her bow deep in the next oncoming wave, sea rolling white and green, high, right over her, drowning the foc’sl gun and exploding in a mountain of foam against the foreside of the bridge superstructure: you heard it, felt it, knew that it had been the first big one of the night and that before long they’d be coming bigger.
Swan asked him, ‘Don’t really say so, do you, sir?’
Nick yelled back, 'l’d grow it again, if I were you.’
* * *
The flurry of sea ahead as Mackerel ploughed into it was all the wilder because of her misshapen bow; instead of a stem slicing knife-like into the waves it was a partly flattened, unwieldy mess of steel that smashed instead of cut, bludgeoned instead of lanced. From the bridge one looked down on a mass of white, a huge lathering that surrounded, smothered and moved with the ship, rose up around her as she wallowed into the troughs and fell away again as she climbed the slopes. Through the froth solid seas, piles of black water, rolled like battering rams, racing aft and bursting against the gun and superstructure, cannoning by and cascading aft on to the iron deck, boiling around the torpedo-tubes, ventilators and the bases of the funnels. Down below, one had been conscious mostly of the pitching, because that was the greatest danger to the shoring, with water hurling itself to and fro inside the flooded area; up here one realised that the weather was on the bow and she’d got into her familiar corkscrew action: bow up, roll port, bow down, roll starboard… You could look down on that seesawing, foam-covered foc’sl and mentally see right into it, see the timber reinforcements to the bulkheads, the messdecks like narrow, ringing tunnels, and the men waiting, trying not to eye the bulging steel too often… Wyatt moved, as if he’d suddenly become aware of his first lieutenant’s presence.
‘Satisfied with your shores, Number One?’
‘Holding all right at the moment, sir.’ He added, ‘But the motion’s tending to dislodge them, we’re having to keep a close eye on it.’
‘Naturally. But so long as it is holding—’
He was leaning towards the voicepipe, the tube to the engine-room. Nick, seeing the movement blurred by darkness, said quickly, ‘With respect, sir, it might be premature to—’
‘You’re like an old woman, Number One!’ Wyatt shouted, ‘Engine-room!’
‘Engine-room!’
‘Two hundred revs, Chief!’
Wyatt straightened. He told Nick, ‘That’s revs for six or seven knots, Number One.’ Pointing at the sea. ‘We’ll be making good – what, three?’ He nodded. ‘We’ll do better, by and by. I’m going to berth this ship in Dover on Christmas Day – we’ll have our evening meal alongside, d’you hear?’
What one heard was the rise in the turbines’ note as they came up to the ordered speed. From one-fifty to two hundred revolutions per minute meant a third more thrust, a third more pressure on the bulkhead. Christmas Day? It was Christmas Day, it h
ad been for the past hour. What did that have to do with seamanship and common sense? Wyatt shouted, ‘Your fears, Number One – or Mr Watson’s – are unjustified. I’ve been at sea in destroyers a great deal longer than you have. You might remember that, eh?’
‘Yes, sir.’ He wondered, as he watched the sea battering her stem, whether it would be practicable and helpful to lighten her for’ard, so the bow would float higher and take less punishment. But there was really only the ammunition that one could shift. One might empty the for’ard shellroom and magazine, move the stuff aft or ditch it? The only other movable heavy weight was the cable, and that was inaccessible. Wyatt bellowed, ‘Watch your steering, helmsman!’
‘Aye aye, sir, but she’s—’
‘Pilot!’
He’d lurched over to the wireless-office voicepipe. Pym answered, and he told him, ‘Make this signal to Moloch: Happy Christmas. Am steering sou’-sou’-west at revs for seven knots. Owing to weather conditions regret may be late for turkey and plum pudding. Got it?’
‘Yes, sir!’
‘Send it, then. Repeated Captain (D) and FO Dover.’
‘Aye aye, sir. And a happy Christmas to you, sir!’
Wyatt groped back, chuckling, to the binnacle. Good humour faded abruptly as he checked the compass card.
‘McKechnie, d’you want to lose your rate? I said watch your steering!’
‘Aye aye, sir. Sorry, sir. Only she’s been gettin’ a wee bit cranky. There’s a change, sir, she’s—’
Sixty Minutes for St George Page 11
