by John Harris
The boat heeled again as the wireless operator began to flash at the Walrus, then she slowly lifted and began to corkscrew across the surface of the waves once more on her original course.
“We shouldn’t be far off now, Skipper,” Slingsby said.
“But we’ve only a little daylight left. How about pushing up the revs a bit?”
“OK” Treherne took the hint and put his head into the wheelhouse. “Push ’em up, Robby.”
The twists of the boat were noticeably more vicious as the engines’ deep-throated roar grew, and the lurches as she hit the waves were more sickening and more tiring.
Knox, who had had his head near to the wireless cabin hatch, talking to his mate, looked up. “7526’s nearer, Flight,” he said slyly as he went below again, as though he rejoiced in rubbing Slingsby’s wound raw. “Botty says he’s slightly east of us now. She’s got the legs of us – as usual.”
Down in the engine-room of the launch Corporal Skinner was studying the revolution counters. He cast a quick glance at the oil-pressure gauges as the revolution counter needles moved further to the right with the increased speed, then his eyes flickered anxiously to the glass tube on the oil tank on the bulkhead. Dray was singing soundlessly on his toolbox above the deafening roar, his mouth opening and shutting like an actor in a silent film as he beat time with a spanner on the box between his knees. But Corporal Skinner, plugs in his ears, noticed that his eyes were never far from the dials in front of him.
Down there in the stifling heat there was little suggestion of the heave of the sea because the drag of the propellers in the water held the stern steady, so that most of the motion came from the bows. But the howling engines played the same sort of devil down there with the nerves that the jarring deck forward did to the deck crew. The very air seemed to vibrate and, in vibrating, to add to the clamour.
Skinner casually moved aft, screwing down the greasers on the water-pumps and adjusting the sea-cocks to the new speed of the boat. He knew already that the chances of getting back to base in time to dance with and make love to his girl were growing slimmer, though he still hoped to reach the station before it was too late to take her home. It was useless carrying on a search after dark, he knew, and they were invariably recalled when it was hopeless to hang on any longer.
There’d be just time, he decided, to see her back to her billet and crawl into his own bed before that damned Tannoy would be shouting in his ear again across the barrack-room where they slept: “Crew of HSL 7525 report to base immediately. Crew of HSL 7525 report to base immediately.”
Skinner scowled and hoped hard they’d make a pick-up quickly – or that 7526 would; he didn’t care much which, so long as they could turn west and head for home.
He felt the change of course as the boat swung back to the north-east, though he had no idea of their direction. It was only that he felt the slight tug of the boat’s turn – far less noticeable down there than on deck – and he could feel the different motion through the water. Then he saw the revolution counters jump forward a little more and he glanced anxiously round him again and down at the spinning propeller shafts.
He was beginning to wish now he’d changed the faulty piping in the oil-feed. He’d seen clearly that the jubilee clip was cutting into the rubber joint and if it cut too far – . Again he looked round, half expecting to see the spurt of bright hot oil heralding the colossal overheating that would drive the temperature needle clean off the dial, and to hear the shattering vibration of a seize-up, and he was quite relieved when he didn’t.
He rested the palm of his hand on the port engine, feeling its vibration run through his arm like the blood through his veins and so through his whole body. It was running well. Damned well, considering, he told himself.
Considering – considering – he glanced quickly at Dray as the little canker of doubt entered his brain – considering the slap-happy job he’d done the previous night. Skinner was a good engineer in spite of his indifference, good enough to know what he ought to have done and to realise the possible disaster that might arise from what he had not done, but he nevertheless attached little blame to himself. He felt only an angry resentment, a bitter sense that someone had played a dirty trick on him. After months of dreary hanging about on rendezvous, after months of monotonous waiting on the grey seas for an emergency call, with the war almost over and the days of urgent excitement past, some fool would have to choose that particular day to fall into the drink – and on 7525’S beat, too.
He took his hand from the engine, which was running perfectly alongside him. Then he remembered uneasily that they’d both been running perfectly the previous day but there’d still been the damage in the oil-feed, a tiny fault caused by vibration, nothing to worry about in itself but something that might cause trouble with high-speed running for long distances. And that was something that had never happened for weeks. Not until today.
The engineer – the undoubted engineer – who lay beneath Skinner’s shiftless, casual, indifferent manner stirred uneasily. His conscience was nagging at him with the knowledge of what he had failed to do, prodding him like a tormenting imp with a sharp stick, urging him to do something when he knew it was already too late to do anything. All he could do now was wait for the bang and the stream of bright oil.
Skinner moved aft, where the boat sat low in the water. Beneath his feet he could feel the propellers turning at hundreds of revolutions a minute. The air about him was oven-hot and stank of oil and baked steel but it seemed twice as stifling because of the conscience that was gagging him, the sense of guilt that seemed to suffocate him. Thoughtfully, but almost without being aware of what he did, he lifted the cover of his tool-box and idly toyed through the tools inside, making sure they were all there.
All he could do now was hope and be ready.
Seven
More than four hours had elapsed since the Hudson had ditched and its crew had taken to the dinghy, four hours during which the search for them had been inaugurated and launches and aircraft were sweeping the wide wastes of the sea.
To Waltby, sitting in the dinghy and knowing nothing of all this, it was not the waiting that was so wearisome. The hardest thing of all was getting used to doing nothing. Never in all his life had he done nothing satisfactorily. His nervous energy had forced him into activity at all times – in fact, it had been nothing but his nervous energy and a congenital inability to sit still that had thrust him up to his present rank. During those years after joining the Air Force straight from school and after he had completed his apprenticeship, when all the other airmen in the barrack-room had been reading or resting or sitting in the canteen, Waltby had been studying. His efforts had brought him incredibly swiftly to the rank of sergeant and got him a peacetime commission, and eventually a posting to the experimental station at Boscombe Down. There, because he seemed to have acquired more knowledge than most in less time, they had let him specialise until he had become an expert in rocket development
His whole life seemed to have been marked out by the books and the documents he had read. Every new item of knowledge he had acquired – whether from Germany, Japan or America – had been another milestone on the way up. He had still been learning, even in the Hudson when the first sound of a chattering gun had made him hurriedly slam down his book and grab for his briefcase. Hammer-taps on the fuselage heralded the disintegration of Mackay’s wireless set and then Waltby had seen the pieces of metal fly upwards, outwards and backwards from the port engine and the sudden flow of oil as it streamed in a black, shining streak across the width of the main plane.
In the first paralysing shock of fear he had thought of a fighter he had once seen diving into the ground out of control and the scream as it plummeted down, straight down; and the sickening thump and the dust and the flying pieces of aluminium as it hit the earth, and he had visualised them all smashed to pulp inside the Hudson as it plunged into the sea – like the pilot he had seen. It was only when he heard Ponsettia firi
ng the turret guns and heard Harding and Mackay coolly discussing their chances as they wrestled with the sloppy controls of the plane that he realised how much braver than he were the young men who went out night after night into the black sky over the Ruhr. They had not lived too long with words and but for them all the words he himself had read or written would have been valueless.
And now, now that they were in the dinghy and the book he had been reading had disappeared into the dark fathoms of the sea with the aircraft, there was nothing to do but sit. His companions seemed to be feeling the same strain of boredom, however, he was relieved to notice. Harding looked paler and Mackay fidgeted constantly. When he wasn’t taking a turn with Ponsettia on the handle of the squawk-box generator he was fiddling with the flares, trying to row with one of the glove-like paddles or adjusting the sail.
All their other jobs, the jobs for which hundreds of pounds had been spent to train them, had finished as soon as the aircraft hit the water and carried with it below the surface the controls and the wireless sets and the navigator’s charts. The silence was marked, too, after the quivering atmosphere and the swift demands of flying and the smell of oil and petrol. Now there was only the dead slap of the waves and the hiss of the breaking crests.
They had got the mast rigged with difficulty, everyone getting in the others’ way in the crowded dinghy, and Mackay getting in the way of the other three with maddening persistence as he tried to do two or three jobs at once.
“Brother,” Ponsettia had drawled, “if you can keep this up for as long as we’re in the dinghy we sure are going to have a good rest. Take it easy, bud, take it easy.”
Mackay had whirled on him, nervous and energetic, eager to get on with something, and hostile as ever as Ponsettia picked up the challenge that he always held out. “Somebody’s got to do it,” he said furiously. “You don’t seem very bothered. I suppose you’re quite content to sit back and let someone come and find you.”
“Mac,” Ponsettia said placidly, “sometimes you talk cock.”
The growing hostility had been smoothed over by Harding and the three of them had continued with the process of organising their comfort They had unearthed all the gear attached to the dinghy – the hand-bellows, the heaving-line, the flare, the mast and the sail. Waltby had watched them silently, his desolate feeling disappearing slowly. He had been from the first completely at a loss in the dinghy, but the obvious fact that the others knew what they were doing reassured him.
“We ought to try to get the sail up,” Harding had said. “At least we might get somewhere then.”
Almost before he’d finished speaking Mackay was at work, stepping the telescopic mast.
“Where do you think we are, Canada?” Harding asked as Mackay bent over the aluminium rods.
“God knows,” the Canadian answered. “Somewhere due north-west of Antwerp, I guess. And pretty close in, too.”
Waltby listened to them weighing up their position, more than ever aware of loneliness and his own lack of ability compared with the naive sureness of these boys who were young enough to be his sons. He desperately wanted to do something useful and intelligent but he seemed only to get in the way. Once he had seen the sour look Mackay gave him as one of the stays for the mast caught in his clothing.
As a desk officer, this was his first real experience of the war. He had been too young for the first war and too important to be risked in the second. And, living and working where he had, even the bombs on London hadn’t disturbed him greatly. The bullets which had smashed Mackay’s wireless set and stopped the port engine in a spray of hot black oil reaching like wet fingers across the broad wing of the Hudson were the first bullets that had been truly fired in his direction in five years of hostilities. He felt suddenly unable to withstand the hardship into which he had been so unexpectedly flung.
Then, unhappily, he realised that half his depression came from the seasickness which lay on his stomach like a leaden weight, and the throbbing ache in his head where he’d banged it on the escape hatch. To force it from his consciousness, he concentrated again on watching the others.
Mackay and Ponsettia had now succeeded in stepping the mast and were engaged in fitting the sail. While they were both kneeling and Harding was reaching up painfully to assist them, the dinghy gave a particularly violent lurch that flung them all down in a heap again, half covered by the red cotton of the sail, and Waltby had to turn quickly in his seat to be sick over the side. By the time the others had recovered their positions he was sitting up again, quietly wiping his mouth with his frozen fingers as he hadn’t been able to get his handkerchief from his sodden pocket in time.
He seemed to shrink back into himself, vaguely ashamed of his weakness, at his inability to cope even with so small a thing as seasickness. Just then all he wanted to do was curl up and try to dissolve into a chilled, shivering sleep until he felt better, but he forced himself to smile weakly as Harding glanced at him, trying hard to pretend there was nothing wrong with him.
They sat back, exhausted by their efforts to rig the sail in the cramped dinghy. Harding lay against the bulbous yellow sides, half leaning against Mackay, his face pale and strained in the grey light reflected from the sea. Lonely and silent, Waltby was still – in spite of his proximity to the others – a being apart from the oneness of the crew, his sparse hair blown over his face, his coat collar up, his hand still clutching the saturated leather briefcase between his knees.
Ponsettia had started again to crank the handle of the squawk box. “Right, here we go, boys,” he said. “Never fear, Joe Ponsettia’s on the ball. I guess that little WAAF operator with the blonde hair and the squint is picking this up right now. She’d never pass up on a chance like this.”
They sat in silence for a while as Ponsettia laboriously turned the generator handle, each of them occupied with his own thoughts. The water was round their thighs in the bottom of the dinghy and splashed over the edge across them from time to time.
Then they tried, ineffectually, to paddle again.
“It was easy enough when we did it in the swimming bath,” Mackay choked in a furious voice.
“Brother, when you see a swimming bath as rough as this is let me know. Guess we’d better bale again or we’ll be going down with all hands.”
“Hell’s bells,” Harding said suddenly. ‘We’re a cheerful lot, aren’t we? We ought to do something to occupy ourselves. Anyone know any songs?”
“I only know ‘Charlotte, the Harlot, the Cowpuncher’s Whore’,” Ponsettia said, looking up from the bottom of the dinghy as he slopped seawater over the side. “Or, how’s about ‘Row for the Shore, Boys, Row for the Shore’, or ‘Round and round went our gallant ship, then she sank to the bottom of the sea, the sea, the sea, then she sank to the bottom of the sea’”?
“If you don’t shut up–” Mackay began in a strangled voice.
“Whacko!” Ponsettia grinned. “Mac’s threatening me. How’s about that Skipper? Let’s have a fight. That ought to warm us up.”
Harding hurried the quarrel past its climax by deciding they should have a meal. They spread their emergency packs out on their legs and stared at them, their minds busy with the thought of rationing.
“Water-purifying tablets,” Ponsettia said. “Say, that’s real handy with all this sea round us.”
“Biscuits,” Harding added. “They’re useful.”
“And energy tablets,” Ponsettia went on, as though he were taking up a chorus. “Just the thing if you feel like swimming home, Mac. A fishing line! Boy, I might have enjoyed that at any other time. Ground bait, too. Say, they do you proud. Cigarettes. Chewing gum. Compass. And what’s this? My, now, what a delicate thought – toilet paper!”
As they finished their meagre meal of a biscuit and a concentrated food tablet Harding heaved himself up weakly.
“Mac,” he said, “I think I’m going to be sick.”
“Hard luck, Skip. These dinghies are bastards in a bit of sea, aren’t they
?” Mackay’s voice had lost all its aggressiveness as he spoke to Harding. “Think it’s that whack you gave your tum?”
“I’m sure it is.” Harding smiled weakly and lay back against Mackay, his face grey with pain.
“Oh, Christ,” he said suddenly. “Here it comes!”
They helped him turn and he puked over the edge of the dinghy.
“Sorry, blokes,” he said unhappily, as he sat upright again. “Always was a rotten sailor.”
“Sure you won’t have my Irving jacket, Skip?” Mackay asked. “Perhaps it’s a bit of shock.”
“I’ve got an Irving jacket. Keep yours for yourself”
“I haven’t banged my guts.” There was concern now in Mackay’s humourless tones.
“Well, when my guts start to fall out you can wrap your jacket round to hold ’em in.”
Ponsettia watched them silently as he cranked the handle of the squawk box. His arm ached and his behind was cold where it touched the thin canvas; and his brain was uneasily dwelling on the time they had already been in the dinghy and what must be going on in the mind of the girl he bad met and fallen in love with so recently. He had a sudden feeling that his life until that moment had been full of insignificant things and that he was being called upon to die before he had experienced any of the important happenings in life, and he felt vaguely resentful.
Waltby was more concerned with the misery in his stomach than with immediate thoughts of rescue. But as he began to feel a little better he also began to have his first doubts about their future safety. He had taken their rescue for granted at first but now, with a shock as great as if one of the freezing waves had sloshed across them, he realised it was in no way assured. The sea was as empty and unencouraging as it had ever been.
For the first time he thought of his wife, who was supposed to be meeting him at the aerodrome where they should by now have landed. She was due to arrive by the early morning train – she would at this moment be mounting it, complete with her books and the inevitable knitting – to spend her first few days with him for months.
