by John Harris
“Botty’s stopped something,” Tebbitt shouted from inside the sick bay. “He’s bleeding.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me, you soft sod.” Botterill’s burst of bad temper was reassuring but Milliken, his job with the wire finished, slipped without thought below to where he was sitting on the deck, his eyes dazed, blood streaming down his face.
In the first instant of being inside the sick bay he realised he could see the swinging sky through a vast hole in the wireless cabin roof, and he saw also that the sick bay was pockmarked and torn with small holes. Slivers of wood and pieces of plastic from the wireless sets lay on the deck round Botterill in an untidy scattering.
“Get to hell out of it,” the wireless operator said fiercely. “I’m all right. Splinters, I think. From the sets mostly. I’m only cut. I can see, can’t I? I can talk. I’m not dead. You’re bleeding worse’n me yourself. Go and do summat useful. Tell the Skipper the wireless sets have had it.”
When he reached the deck again Milliken could see the dinghy ahead of them, tantalisingly close, its occupants quiet now. Beyond them, they could see the reason for the shore guns’ silence.
Through the rain which rattled off the deck again and set the Oerlikon glistening, Milliken saw for the first time the shape of a trawler in the mist, slightly to port of them, blue-grey and blurred but ominously high and powerful. Between them, the yellow bag of the dinghy with its huddled occupants heaved slowly out of the water, then slid over to the next valley and out of sight again.
“Where did that come from?” Milliken had quite forgotten the blood on his face by this time and stood panting and horrified at the sight of the trawler.
“She’s a Jerry,” Robb said calmly. “They must have sent her out to the dinghy some time since. Well, now she’s arrived. That’s why the guns have stopped. They’re frightened of hitting her.”
“What are these trawlers like, Flight?” Treherne shouted. “Dead slow, Skipper.” Slingsby sounded excited and more eager than normal. “Manned by scratch crews. I’ve heard they’re dead rotten.”
“Right, then,” Treherne said. “We’ve not far to go. Let’s get it over. They probably won’t shoot any more for fear of hitting the trawler. Take it away. We’ve got to do this damned quickly.”
The engines roared out again and the boat swung on to course for the dinghy and began to smash through the water once more. Milliken’s breath was stilled in his throat. He couldn’t have spoken then if he’d tried, for the excitement that left him tongue-tied.
Immediately their bows pointed to the dinghy they saw the flash of a gun on the trawler and a plume of brown-tinted water rose majestically up in a straight tower a hundred yards to port of them and hung there, apparently motionless, before the wind whipped the top off it and it seemed to disintegrate slowly and fall back into the sea.
“The bastards,” Knox was intoning to himself like an incantation. “The bastards. Shooting at us when we’re picking blokes out of the water. The bastards.”
“We might do it if they don’t get the range in time,” Robb was shouting in excitement, jigging crazily on the after-deck. “If only those swine ashore hold off, we might. We might.”
Almost before Milliken had realised what had happened they were on top of the dinghy, the great bow poised as though to smash it under. But Slingsby, with a skill that Milliken only half appreciated, had gauged it exactly and she dropped six feet away, crashing into a wave and drenching the occupants. The engines shut down abruptly and a heaving-line curled from Robb’s flung arm across the dinghy which Milliken was surprised to see had arrived safely alongside them.
“Thank God for you guys!” a Canadian voice shouted, and Robb and Westover, crouching from the waves that exploded upwards into their faces along the hull, began to haul in the line hand over hand. “We thought we’d had it.”
“Perhaps you have, chum,” Knox retorted. “Perhaps we all have.”
“Make it fast. Make it fast to the dinghy!” Robb was shouting in a cracked voice, and Milliken could see one of the men in the yellow raft fumbling with frozen hands to knot the line to one of the dinghy ropes.
Dray was slopping oil over the side of the launch forward so that the surface of the sea stilled a little as it drifted and spread, slimy, black, smothering the sides of the dinghy in an evil scum which drove the sea water into shining globules on its surface.
Then Milliken, dancing because he could no longer stand still, his senses functioning in a haze of blazing excitement from which all fear had disappeared, became aware that the shore guns, afraid of being cheated by the slowness of the trawler, were firing again. He could hear the rattle distinctly and the whine and hum of the bullets, and caught a glimpse of the flash of tracer passing over the boat.
The crash nets had splashed into the water by this time and Tebbitt was over the side, clinging perilously to the iron ladder that threatened with the motion to tear itself free from the boat.
Half a dozen hands reached up from the sea as Tebbitt leaned over, aware for the first time of an unconscious man in the dinghy. One of the survivors was yelling excitedly in an incoherent gibberish that was threaded through with a Canadian accent. “You first, Syd,” he was shouting. “Then the Skipper.”
“Never mind who’s first!” Robb shouted. “Let’s have you aboard. Come on, you’re nearest. Look slippy.”
Ponsettia glanced up quickly and reached out towards the ladder with frozen, clumsy hands.
“Can you make it?” Robb demanded. “Or do you want one of us down there?”
“We can make it.” Ponsettia made a grab for the ladder Tebbitt was standing on, missed it and almost fell overboard. Tebbitt, magnificent with his worries forgotten in the urgency of the moment, his strength performing the task for which it was intended, grabbed him as his head went down and with a muscle-cracking heave hoisted him, one-handed, upwards to where he was grabbed by Robb and Knox and dragged sprawling across the deck. Immediately he jumped up and attempted a dance on the rolling deck, which ended as his cramped legs buckled under him.
He grabbed Milliken joyfully round the neck as he was hoisted to his feet again. “Oh, brother,” he bawled, “am I glad to see you? You can have my cigarette ration for the next six months.”
“I don’t smoke,” Milliken shouted in excitement, backing towards the sick bay with Ponsettia. “You get below,” he ended with a show of authority that startled himself and he pushed the Canadian into the sick bay where he half fell down the steps and rolled sprawling on the wet floor, the water spreading from his clothes, while Milliken, clinging desperately to a lifeline again, watched Tebbitt over the side of the boat.
“Put a jerk in it!” Treherne was shouting. “She’s beginning to swing. Go ahead a little, Flight!”
The panting men on the after-deck, their feet slipping on the wet planks, sprawling on their knees half the time among the coils of the heaving-line, hardly noticed the next shell-splash as it leapt up only fifty yards away, and the crack of the gun went unheard in the shouting and the violent slobbering, sucking noise of the water immediately below them.
Tebbitt, the oily sea sloshing up to his waist, half blinding him, made a quick grab at the unconscious man in the dinghy, got him with one hand in his collar and yanked him up in a strangling grip so that he hung downwards like a lifeless puppy for a second before he, too, was sprawling on the deck and being dragged clumsily towards the sick bay by Milliken and Westover.
They clattered down the steps together, Milliken thinking fearfully all the time of all the precepts of medical training that came into his mind about the careful handling of unconscious patients. But this was an emergency, he thought wildly, panting with excitement as he scrambled round the man. Even as he leapt back to the deck he heard the tap of bullets on woodwork and saw splinters whip upwards in front of him.
The third man, barefooted, his hand bound with a black RAF tie, was already on deck and diving for the sick bay, almost bowling Milliken over
as he slid into his arms with a yell.
“My leg,” Mackay was yelling in a voice that had more fury in it than fear or pain. “The bastards have got me!”
Then he dragged himself to his feet, somehow before Milliken, and fell into the sick bay.
The fourth survivor was hanging on to the ladder, grasping a brief case that was fastened to his middle by his overcoat belt.
“I can manage!” he was shouting in a welter of noise through which Milliken could still hear the insidious tapping of bullets. “I can manage!”
“Don’t be a fool!” Tebbitt shouted back, heaving desperately as the sea threatened to carry the dinghy away from beneath Waltby’s feet; then Waltby with his brief case was on the deck with Westover in front of Milliken, face downwards and gasping. Milliken grabbed him by the arm.
“Below, below!” he shrieked, pulling Waltby towards the sick bay and realising in amazement in the same wild instant that he was talking to an air commodore.
“Leave the dinghy!” Treherne was shouting. “Full ahead, flight. Hard a-port. Over the sandbank. We’ve got to chance it.”
The boat leapt forward out of the oil-covered water with a jerk, sending one of Skinner’s empty drums rolling along the deck with a clanking, rumbling noise before it splashed over the side into the sea. Robb and Knox were clinging to Tebbitt as the boat smashed forward, desperately heaving him up to the deck against the roll as she heeled over on her beam-ends to send the other drum clattering over the side and tear the ladder from its fastenings as it was plunged beneath the water.
Dray almost fell into the engine-room hatch as the stern came round to the weather and Westover opened fire with the Oerlikon. The noise startled Milliken but he felt an immense satisfaction as, in one brief instant before he was swamped with the work of medicine, he saw the tracers go curling over the sea towards the shore.
There was a last plume of yellow water a hundred yards away on the port quarter as the launch justified all the work that had gone into its designing and pulled rapidly away from the trawler.
“Hold your breath, boys!” Robb shouted as they smashed into the broken water over the sandbank. “Hope it’s not low tide.”
The men in the sick bay, just struggling to their feet, were all flung together again as the launch plunged into the spray. Water leapt high over the bows and sped over the wheelhouse in slashing spouts that somehow found their way below deck, and the boat leapt and bucked like a frantic animal for what seemed ages, all its timbers groaning, its doors wrenched loose and banging. Then, almost before Milliken was aware of it, they were in the open sea again and the bullets were falling behind them.
“Thank God,” Robb breathed, flat on his face on the deck. “We did it! We did it! We bloody well did it!”
The roaring of the engines swelled as 7525 swung round and headed for home.
Milliken had thought several times during the past twenty-four hours that the sound of the exhausts as they beat towards England would be the sweetest music in the world when he heard it, but now it seemed more than that. It had a triumphant note in it, too – a blaring trumpet-song of defiance that heralded the end of his personal day of glory.
Four
There was a big brown staff car standing on top of the slipway as 7525 turned slowly out of the chop of the river, her bow dipping as the way went off her. The staff car’s matt-painted surface shone dully in the rain and on the wing of it a group captain’s pennant fluttered. Beyond it an ambulance stood out, muddily camouflaged and drab, against the dark buildings.
As she turned into the sheltered basin, edging towards the jetty, the wind flung the last few waves under 7525’s chine and the spray leapt outwards in a flat sheet. She looked low and fast without her mast, yet oddly crumpled and hurt, but Robb had found a brand new ensign in her flag locker and fastened it to the jackstaff aft so that it fluttered bright and blue and bold as the boat neared the shore. A destroyer had met them thirty miles out and offered assistance, but they had proudly refused it, asking only for their estimated time of arrival and a warning for ambulances to stand by to be sent by wireless. The holes in her sick bay cabin top and the stump of her mast were scars they were all anxious to show.
Milliken, still amazed to find themselves home and all alive, stood on the after-deck among the coiled ropes, watching the blue-clad figures moving down the black boards of the jetty. There seemed to be a reception committee to greet them and he saw a group captain’s sleeve rings in spite of the steady rain, and at least one officer with the broad ring of higher rank. Then he recognised the Station Medical Officer and the sergeant medical orderly, their shoulders hunched against the weather, and more than a dozen others – a few sailors from the motor gun-boat flotilla at the opposite side of the basin, and a few WRENS from the dinghies which lay aft of the launch trot. They huddled there together on the end of the jetty as 7525 came in closer, her engines popping noisily at low revs, her weary crew standing slouch-shouldered on her decks, their eyes haggard with sleeplessness, their faces covered with two-day-old beards.
Milliken’s heart was singing a joyous song of triumph and self-esteem. He wore a bandage round his head and his hand was swathed in lint There was blood on his face, that he had purposely not bothered to wash away. He was not in any pain beyond a bad headache and he was thoroughly enjoying the spectacle he presented and the fact that he was still doing his duty, holding a fender. He was on deck more because he wanted to show his bandages than because he thought he might be useful.
Through his mind were running over and over again like a mad refrain the lines from Henry V he had learned at school not so very long before. They clashed in his brain like cymbals and drums and trumpets. Then shall he strip his sleeve and show his scars, And say “These wounds I had on Crispin’s Day.” And for the first time since he’d heard them read out loud by a bored English master he began to understand what they meant and the tremendous pride that lay beneath them.
The fact that both his injuries were superficial and that neither had been inflicted by the enemy meant nothing to him in his exalted state of mind.
He had been strapping up the wound in Mackay’s leg when he had first realised that blood was dripping from his hand where he had cut it on the wire. Busy with his job, he had hurriedly wrapped his handkerchief round it and carried on.
“They hit you in the head, too, bud,” Ponsettia had pointed out “That’s a nasty gash you got there.”
Milliken had put his hand up to his forehead and had stared at the bright smear on his fingers with surprise that he had been able to go on working. In his mind, immediately, he had seen the words he had read so often in the newspapers in citations for decorations. “Although wounded himself he refused to be attended until he had seen that all the other wounded were comfortable.” It had a pleasant warming ring. The fact that he had not been in pain in no way detracted from his enjoyment of it, which had continued all the time he was working.
By the time he reached the bridge to attend to Treherne, the Skipper’s arm had already been put expertly into a sling. Robb was there, eating his inevitable corned-beef sandwich, apparently unperturbed by the recent excitement.
“Better have a look at that head of yours, doc,” he had said gravely.
As they dabbed away the blood Robb stared at the wound, puzzled. “What the hell have you been doing?” he asked. “Have you been banging it on something?”
Then Milliken remembered hitting his head on the edge of the oil drum, and his disgust knew no bounds as all his thoughts of heroism disappeared.
“Never mind.” Robb grinned, enjoying some private joke that Milliken suspected was connected with the gash on his temple. “Let’s put a bandage on it.”
Grinning to himself he had put a swathe of linen on Milliken’s head that was far more imposing than necessary.
“There,” he said as he finished, “you look like a hero,” and Milliken forgave him all his smooth sarcasm over the past two days.
As
the boat turned slowly to thrust her nose towards the trot of launches that were sawing up and down in the wind, grinding their fenders to pulp, reminding Milliken of a set of jumping horses on a fairground roundabout, he saw 7526 lying there, clean, undamaged, but with nothing triumphant about her, none of the glow of heroism he seemed to see about their own scarred hull. Loxton stood on the bows, silently watching 7525 swing round. It was he who caught the heaving-line flung by Robb and hauled in the mooring-rope and made it fast. As he slipped the eye over a cleat he waved and grinned in a gesture, which admitted defeat.
Suddenly the after-deck seemed full of people, all talking at once, with Ponsettia’s nasal Canadian voice joyous above the babble.
“Hell, brother,” he said to Milliken, “when I saw you pressing on through that rain you looked like my goddam dream boat coming in. When we saw that son-of-a-bitch trawler we thought we’d had it.”
“Get back,” Milliken said with loud authority. “Give the crew a chance. Let the dog see the rabbit. Get into the sick bay till you’re told to come out.”
“Sorry, bud.” Ponsettia dodged back humbly, pushing the others with him, as Milliken dropped his fender over the side with as much show of skill as the menial task could provide, and watched it ground flat as the two boats touched.
People from the jetty swarmed over 7525 immediately the ropes were ashore – the Group Captain and the broad-ringed brass hat with him, and the crew of the ambulance and the medical staff.
As they flooded round him, suddenly suffocating him by their numbers, Milliken flopped down on the edge of the Carley float, unexpectedly aware of his aching muscles and bruises and a sudden collapse of his elation in reaction. He saw the sergeant medical orderly standing over him and caught a glimpse of the doctor disappearing into the sick bay with Robb.
“How’s the injured man?” the sergeant asked Milliken.
Unaware of the rain that was flung over the boat from the shelter of the jetty, and the drip of water and the slap of waves, Milliken answered without lifting his head which seemed suddenly to rest on his shoulders like a ton weight of weariness.
