by Dudley Pope
The only contact between the engineers and ‘you silly buggers up there’ was in port, when those engineers not on leave usually had their wives on board and all had their meals in the saloon.
Painter’s thoughts were interrupted by the realization that Ned, at whom he had been staring for some seconds, was waving his arms. He went into the wheelhouse and spoke into the fo’c’sle telephone once again.
On the poop an angry Croupier was protesting: ‘Yes, Ned, I see that the bloody drum hasn’t sunk –’
‘Or apparently been hit once.’
‘–or apparently been hit once, but the bet’s off if we have to shoot at a drum almost alongside. Christ, we’re likely to shoot our toes off!’
Ned nodded and held up a hand, both to silence the Croupier and pick up the telephone to the bridge. He pressed the waterproofed call button.
‘Bridge here,’ Painter said.
‘Captain Yorke here. We’ve a problem. The drum is too close alongside so we can’t get any realistic target practice.’
‘Thought not,’ Painter said. ‘I was expecting a call for the quack to come up and bandage some feet! What shall I do, drop a drum and circle it?’
Ned knew enough not to ask for such a favour, but Painter was a helpful man who could be relied on to do his best without risking his ship.
‘That would be perfect. If your chaps could drop a drum every five hundred yards, then, as we turn, we’ll have plenty of targets.’
‘I don’t think I’ll reduce speed, but what sort of range?’
That, Ned thought, is just the trouble. The Sten is a fine close-range weapon, but don’t expect it to pepper oil drums at two hundred yards… He visualized the angle for his party lining the City of Norwich’s deck.
‘Can you keep the drums say forty yards from the hull? That’s difficult, I know, but I’d like ’em just clear of our bow wave abreast the foremast.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Painter said. ‘Luckily your ’phone buzzed just as I was going to tell the fo’c’sle party to drop another drum. Shall I announce the change of plan?’
‘If you would. Tell them to open fire when within range.’
Ned put the telephone down. ‘Is the bet on or off now?’ he asked the Croupier sarcastically.
‘On, I suppose.’
‘You’d better change your magazine, then.’
‘Blast you – sir.’
Jemmy coughed. ‘As stakeholder, I must know if insubordination cancels the wager.’
‘It does, but only from now on.’
‘But sir,’ the Croupier protested, ‘this is like shooting down at rats in a sewer.’
‘You didn’t hit the drum,’ Ned pointed out. ‘What do you want, the drums circling the ship like unemployed albatrosses? Look, we’re beginning to turn.’
They could see the men on the fo’c’sle heaving over an oil drum from time to time and soon they appeared in the City of Norwich’s curving wake, gradually forming up in a half moon, bobbing like playful porpoises as the liner continued a long and wide turn which, Ned could see, would soon bring her round to meet the first of the drums.
As she was half-way round the turn the swell waves caught the City of Norwich abeam and made her roll, and for a moment a metallic rattling startled Ned until he realized it was the spent Sten cartridges which had been ejected and now rolled the steel deck.
Jemmy looked down at them and grinned. ‘Like a giant pinball machine.’
‘Yes,’ Ned agreed, ‘only it’s registered “Missed”, not “Tilt”.’
They could feel the vibration of the ship’s engines slow down slightly, and the thrusting movement against the seas lessened, as though a restive and jostling crowd was quietening down.
‘He’s making it easier for us,’ Ned said. ‘We’ve dropped a couple of knots. Hope no U-boat is watching!’
‘If the target suddenly changes speed,’ Jemmy said professionally, ‘it’s much harder to hit her. If she decreased speed – which isn’t what a submarine commander would expect – torpedoes will pass well ahead.’
‘As long as they don’t bounce off one of the oil-drums and explode!’
‘They’ve probably got magnetic pistols which explode the torpedo as soon as she gets within the powerful magnetic field caused by ferrous metals – a ship’s hull, for instance,’ Jemmy said with the reproving seriousness of an expert whose subject had been broached in too lighthearted a manner. ‘An oil drum’s magnetic field is much too weak.’
‘You don’t say!’ the Croupier said sarcastically. ‘And polarized all wrong too because it’s twisting about and doesn’t know its north end from the bung.’
‘The first drum is coming up,’ Ned warned. ‘Stand by to fire broadsides and then board in the smoke.’
Captain Painter and the quartermaster brought the great bulk of the City of Norwich up to the first in the semi-lune of bobbing drums and then steered in a curve conforming to them as they had spread out under the influence of wind and the waves.
The Stens forward began barking, sounding faint like excited poodles playing in the park; then Harding and the Marine joined in from the wing of the bridge, followed by the men stationed at intervals along the boatdeck. Finally the three men on the poop could see the drum floating high in the water, slowly turning as wind waves butted it. The three Sten guns thudded in short bursts – just as the instructor ordered, Ned thought – and finally stopped as the drum passed astern out of range.
‘My dad’s got shares in Shell, and these are Shell drums.’ Jemmy said conversationally. ‘He’ll be so pleased to hear we aren’t damaging Company property!’
‘I don’t understand it,’ the Croupier grumbled. ‘We must have fired three or four hundred rounds at it. They can’t all have missed.’
Ned turned round and called ‘Corporal.’ From behind the gun, where he had been standing with the DEMS gunners, a pair of binoculars hanging on their strap round his neck, came Corporal Davis.
‘Well, how are we doing?’ Ned asked.
‘Shooting in a pattern about four times the size of the drum, and most going over it, sir. I saw about ten holes in the drum. No more.’
‘All the holes being at the top means the drum won’t sink for a few hours, until it turns enough times to let water in. Well, here’s the next drum. You two shoot,’ Ned said. ‘I’m going to have a word with Captain Painter.’
He turned away, picked up the bridge telephone and a few moments later was saying to Painter: ‘Can you tell ’em that everyone is shooting too high: the shots are landing in the sea beyond the drums.’
Ned had hardly replaced the receiver before Painter’s voice boomed out. The moment he stopped speaking the forward Stens began firing.
‘Stay close with those binoculars, Corporal, and sing out what you see,’ Ned said as he picked up his Sten and swiftly fitted a new magazine.
The bridge guns fired and then, the noise creeping aft as though men were walking towards the poop firing as they came, the boat deck group.
‘Bridge pair still too high,’ said the Corporal. ‘Ah, that’s better – boat deck group (most Marines, sir) getting hits. Twenty, perhaps thirty. Oh, very nice!’ he shouted above the hammering of Jemmy’s Sten, and then sharp bursts from the guns of Ned and the Croupier drowned his voice.
As the drum drew astern, Ned took the Corporal’s binoculars. The black-painted drum was pocked with rusty marks and as it turned slowly the light reflecting from its wet surface showed how the impact of the bullets had flattened the curve slightly.
As he returned the binoculars he said to the Croupier: ‘You’d better get some ice from the Chief Steward. We’ll share out the champagne among our prize crew.’
‘I wonder if he has champagne buckets,’ Jemmy said.
‘Galvanized iron ones
will do the job. Most of the chaps will be drinking out of mugs, so let’s not be too fussy.’
He turned to Corporal Davis. ‘When we’ve finished shooting, I want you to make sure these guns are properly cleaned and all the magazines filled. Next time we fire ’em, it won’t be at oil drums.’
Chapter Ten
In the darkness the City of Norwich slowly came to a stop. The steady rumbling of her engines quietened until by comparison they were purring: the vibration through the hull, caused by the long shafts spinning on their bearings and finally going out through the hull to turn the propellers, came to a stop. What had been a gentle pitching while the ship drove on westward now became more violent, with the ship losing way and finally lying inert, like a log in the water.
On the bridge Ned shook hands with Harding as Captain Painter talked to the Chief Engineer on the telephone. He put it down and, walking carefully into the wheelhouse, lit by a single blue bulb which distorted the colours and made the men look like animated corpses, said: ‘The Chief says the screws are stopped, so now’s the time, I suppose… The barograph seems fairly steady…’
Ned shook Painter’s hand. Neither man knew quite what to say. Painter still did not know what strange quirk of warfare dictated that men like Yorke had to be abandoned in a lifeboat in the middle of a North Atlantic winter; Ned knew the chances were that the City of Norwich would be torpedoed within a month or two because of the Great Blackout. The routeing charts given to Painter for later voyages would be as much use as directions given to a deaf aunt by a whispering nephew who did not know the way. Painter would follow them optimistically because in the past the routes given had kept him out of trouble.
On the boat deck the motley collection of men waited by the lifeboat with Jemmy, the Croupier and Yon. The City of Norwich’s second officer stood by with a handful of seamen ready to man the falls and lower the boat.
‘All ready here, sir,’ Jemmy reported out of the darkness.
‘Everything stowed in the boat?’
‘The Croupier’s just checked over the list, sir.’
‘Very well. You and three men in the boat when she’s lowered: you’ve chosen the men?’
Jemmy said something to the group and three joined him to climb into the lifeboat as it hung in its davits, the only one in the row of six boats whose davits had been swung outboard so that when she was lowered she would not hit the ship’s side.
Ned looked across at the second officer. ‘Right, lower away!’
Ned reckoned this was the most dangerous part of the whole operation. At the bow and at the stern of the lifeboat was a large metal eye. From each davit hung the falls – which peacetime passengers called by the more familiar word ‘pulleys’ – each having a hook which fitted into the eyes on the boat.
The City of Norwich’s seamen had to be very careful that they paid out the rope of each fall at the same speed, so that the boat remained level (preferably, in fact, with the bow slightly higher than the stern) until it reached the water. In the excitement and darkness, all too frequently one fall was lowered faster than the other: if the seamen had not taken enough turns of the rope round a cleat, so that the friction slowed it down, they found it racing through their hands. Many a lifeboat ended up hanging vertically by one fall: then the crest of a wave gave it a nudge which unhooked the remaining fall and the lifeboat fell into the water, usually upside-down, and pitched the three or four men into the water, to drift away to leeward and a lonely death.
Ned saw that at the roller of the rope one seaman was crouched down making sure that as it turned the rope came off without kinks; the second officer at the ship’s side was watching the lifeboat as it was lowered.
He turned forward and bellowed: ‘You forward – are you ready with the painter?’ As soon as he had a reassuring answer he turned aft. ‘You, aft there: are you ready with the sternfast?’
There was enough surge of the sea, the crests and troughs rising and falling a good ten feet, for Ned to see that, as soon as the lifeboat was properly in the water, both falls must be unhooked quickly and cast off, otherwise, if the boat had landed on a crest, as she tried to drop into the trough the falls would hold her up. Once the falls were unhooked then the painter leading forward would hold in her bow and the sternfast would keep her close to the ship’s side.
‘Falls clear!’ the second officer called, and the men began hauling the ropes in to lift the heavy blocks and hooks clear of the lifeboat and back up to the davits.
‘Over with the ladder!’ the second officer ordered, and as the rope ladder was pushed over the side, unrolling from where it was secured at the top, he said to Ned: ‘Your men can board now.’
The men dressed in a variety of clothes, but unencumbered by Sten guns or bags of black bangers, which had long since been stowed, scrambled down the ladder. Ned counted them, and finally only the Croupier was left, the two gold rings on his arm conspicuous because now instead of the ‘executive curl’ worn by the Navy, his jacket had the diamond shape of the Merchant Navy, indicating that he was a second officer, known colloquially as a ‘second mate’. The Merchant Navy, Ned thought irrelevantly are just like the Royal Navy in their quirkish ranks. The Merchant Navy’s equivalent of the Royal Navy’s ‘number one’ was the chief officer, who was rarely called the ‘first mate’, although in effect he was. The chief officer in fact had passed his examination for master mariner and was usually as well qualified as the captain (who might have taken his ‘extra master’s’ certificate). But the chief officer had to have more sea time as a chief officer before getting a command. The next down the line was the second officer, who held a first officer’s certificate, and in most ships was responsible for navigation. The junior was the third officer, who had passed his second mate’s examination and held the certificate. Below him were the cadets – called midshipmen in some companies, apprentices in others – busy (or supposed to be) studying to take their second mate’s examination. In the Merchant Navy, an officer usually served in one grade below the one for which he was qualified.
And now the Croupier was climbing down the rope ladder and the City of Norwich’s second officer was waiting at the head of it.
‘Good luck, sir,’ he muttered. ‘Dunno what you’re all doing, but I hope you succeed!’
Ned shook him by the hand and started off down the rope ladder. At each step down, the ladder swung in against the ship’s side. Going down was always more difficult than climbing up, and the rough paint of the ship’s side scraped his knuckles as the ladder kept banging against the hull.
Suddenly hands were grasping him and he was in the boat sitting on a thwart. It did not seem so dark down here, and he realized that the water sluicing between the lifeboat and the ship was slightly phosphorescent.
He scrambled aft and found that Jemmy had already shipped the rudder. ‘Is the bung in?’ he demanded.
‘Put it in myself,’ Jemmy said.
Ned shouted preliminary orders and men grasped oars, holding them vertically on the port side, ready to use them to shove the boat clear of the ship.
‘Right, cast off the sternfast… Fend us off there…’ Then, as the gap opened up between the lifeboat and the ship, enough for the oars to get to work, ‘Cast off the painter…’
Five minutes later, the men rowing briskly yet appearing to make no progress in the darkness, among waves much larger than Ned had expected and passing under the boat with a hiss as though a giant was exhaling, the dark blob of the City of Norwich finally disappeared ahead, and for a few moments a whiff of her funnel smoke caught the back of his throat and made him cough.
He saw that the men were settling into the rhythm of rowing, thanks to the practice they had had back in England, but they were not used to the high waves: every now and then a man who had not dipped the blade deep enough cursed as the loom jerked back and hit him across the chest.
&nbs
p; But Ned could not throw off the air of unreality that was wrapped round him, as though he was an inert chrysalis in a cocoon. A chrysalis, he thought, making a wry joke, waiting to turn into something.
It would be hard to tell someone on land that having just been left in a lifeboat in the middle of the night in the middle of winter in the middle of the Atlantic one felt cocooned, as though the wind and seas, the grey lifeboat, the cursing men, the oars more like twitching frogs’ legs than the Boat Race, were disconnected memories. Yet this was the beginning of their weird gamble. It was quite impossible to connect this pitching and rolling boat and the men at the oars with the bespectacled boffins at Bletchley Park, to whom a cipher was simply a mathematical problem – one that might take months to solve. Nor was there any apparent link between this boat (water was already swilling around his feet) and the plump and pink yet bulldog face in Number Ten Downing Street, who had told him to collect men of diabolical cunning. Well, full of diabolical cunning they might be inside, but at the moment they were just dark lumps of misery, already sodden with spray and rapidly chilling with the wind which, as it evaporated the water from the clothes, acted as an efficient refrigerator.
Then the absurdity of it all hit him simultaneously as the wind sliced off a breaking crest and flung it in his face, the cold water soaking down round the neck of his duffel coat, cold tentacles gradually becoming clammy as they went lower. ‘Keep your stomach warm and you’ll survive…’ How many times had he heard that in lectures on survival at sea: how many times had he told his own men the same thing? But like the lecturers and instructors, he had skated lightly over the ‘how’. Keep your stomach warm and the rest of your body won’t worry about the cold. But how to stop the stomach gradually chilling as all one’s clothing became sodden and cold, the doeskin material of a uniform jacket turning into fine sandpaper to chafe skin, where every move exposed to another cold compress a tender part of the body that still retained a tiny, previously unrecognized area of warmth?
