Our ship was abuzz with anticipation. After supper, sneaking a quick smoke on the bridge, we had taken bets as to where we might be heading. Tomas Resendes, a stocky, flat-faced quartermaster from Portugal had opted for Gibraltar. It was close enough to home, he said. But Clarence Belson, the third mate, had reckoned it would be further. He put a packet of fags on the Suez Canal and then the Far East. Joe was having none of it and pushed for South America. He’d never been in all his time and basing his faith on the laws of probability, with reckless hilarity, he raised the stakes to two. Clarie reluctantly agreed.
I genuinely did not care. The places I had been sent to so far had dazzled me with their difference. Across the world, each country I had seen wore its own distinctive clothes, the like of which had been beyond all my experience. Exotic colours, sounds and smells thrilled my whetted appetite. To return to any one of them would be exciting: to be sent somewhere new, so much the better.
Our sailing orders were top secret until they were opened by our skipper, according to protocol, at the raising of the Commodore’s flag, and then the news of our destination would spread like wild fire through the ship. I saw the flag go up and immediately left my viewing point, hurrying down towards the saloon and guessing that the first person I came across would probably already know.
It was Calhoun, the second officer and he was terse at the best of times.
‘Where is it to be then?’ I asked, screeching to a halt.
‘Slow down, lad,’ he put out a hand, palm down. ‘Montevideo.’
‘Montevideo?’
‘On the Plate estuary. Uruguay. South America.’ Joe would be whooping and Clarie Belson short on smokes for the remainder of the trip.
‘In convoy to Gibraltar. Then peel off and sail single ship across the Atlantic,’ he went on. ‘Pernambuco first. Down the coast to the mouth of the Plate. Montevideo.’
‘That’s fantastic!’ I beamed at him.
‘If you don’t mind the heat. And the mozzies,’ he returned sourly. ‘Better get yourself up to the bridge and fetch the code tables down to the radio shack.’
The code tables for the radio officers came in the same lead-weighted bag as the sailing orders and they were changed three-monthly as it was feared that, should they fall into enemy hands, they would prove a boon of inestimable value to any German U-boat commander. The cat would have the means to presuppose the whereabouts of a myriad of mice.
Calhoun stalked off and I took to my heels again, arriving on the well deck just in time to hear Joe crowing mercilessly at poor Clarie, ‘Well, Claribelle, I hope you’re not a sore loser. Cough ‘em up!’ Clarie dug deeply into his pocket, glum resignation written all over his face, and slammed a packet of cigarettes into Joe’s outstretched hand. They stared at one another for a second, Joe’s eyebrows raised comically and Clarie looking rueful. Joe stuffed the fags into his pocket with a flourish and then put out his palm again, fingers beckoning up and down. ‘There’s more,’ he said. ‘Come on, Claribelle. You can do it.’ He started whistling South American Way cheerily.
Clarie began to pat his pockets, feigning ignorance but eventually he grudgingly produced the second packet from his top pocket.
I laughed as I passed them and carried on up towards the bridge. From then on, Joe would start up whistling that song whenever Clarie was in earshot and Clarie would thump him on the arm and tax him for a cigarette.
My shift that night in the radio shack was less alarming than I had imagined. The archaic equipment was not so difficult to master after all, for though it was clumsy and slow to react, the principles were similar to those in kit I’d come across on other ships. I found I could generally work out what I did not know. Joe, Jamie and I would take four-hourly shifts twice in twenty-four hours, leaving us each with eight hours off between our watches. Joe gratefully allotted me the midnight to four slot because I offered. I liked the relative peace and calm of the small hours, the silence, save for the drumming of the engine and the steady swish of the sea as the old Sithonia purposefully sliced on through. I liked the unwatched liberty in being awake while others slept.
Joe did not. He’d crash in at 4 a.m, banging the door and clattering about, face folded still in sleep. Invariably, he’d knock the code tables to the floor and stumble around demanding coffee. Being a night owl, I’d sit with him for a while, at first because I wasn’t quite sure it was safe to leave him, half-asleep and jerky, in care of all our lives, but then I began to look forward to him coming. Sometimes, I fetched him coffee from the galley and I stood and smoked in the doorway of the shack. He’d sling his headphones sideways, holding one against his ear, and we talked. Of other journeys, of near misses and the war, of our families and of home. He spoke to me of Maggie, this girl who’d brought him from the wildness of his youth and given him a purpose, given him the self he’d thought that he might be but had been struggling to uncover. It struck me that he spoke of her with almost wistful reverence, as if he could not quite believe his luck.
I had known some girls, thought myself in love at times but had never yet felt what he was trying to describe. I thought his fondness due to leaving her behind, to the loneliness of men on ship. At nineteen, I had not yet been made to understand the measure of such a bond.
Sometimes I sat with him until five or so and then headed off, finally wanting sleep, to bed. Quite often, woken by Jamie’s morning rituals, I went back up there for the start of Jamie’s watch and collecting Joe, sauntered down with him to the saloon for breakfast.
Joe would start by hounding big Sam Tate about his cooking and Sam, a massive African and possibly the only man on board to compete with Joe in size, would laugh him off and grab him round the neck, pulling his head down low, and drub his crazy hair.
‘Say you’re sorry, you great thick oaf,’ Sam would holler. ‘Can’t go round abusin’ a man’s food and expect to get away with it.’ Joe would howl and scrabble to no avail and Sam would laugh his great deep laugh and eventually let him go. It didn’t take long for Sam to become Big Sam Cook to all on board. Joe, it seemed, had a name for everyone. And Sam, the only person on the ship who could pull it off with any credibility, returned the favour from time to time by calling him Little Joe.
Big Sam, as it turned out, had been far and wide, heading up the teams of cooks for numerous crews to every distant corner of the globe, and though he could hardly have been that much over thirty, he’d apparently been everywhere. And so one morning, soon after we’d left the Irish Sea, Joe asked him what he’d made of South America.
‘You two’re gonna love it,’ he boomed. ‘Went to Rio. It’s a beautiful city. Great food, nice bars. Beautiful women,’ he winked at me and then raised an eyebrow. ‘Willin’ too.’
‘Sounds bloody great,’ I enthused and, grinning at the prospect, turned to Joe to share it. He laughed too a little but without much real conviction and his eyes, as he shook his head, slid away from mine and found instead the floor. The direction of his thoughts was not too difficult to follow and his discomfort equally transparent.
‘Oarr, don’t tell me… Maggie!’ I scoffed, jerking out an elbow to jab him in the ribs, unable yet to quite believe there was a man alive who would pass up the chance of many women for the sake of one.
‘Maggie?’ You couldn’t get anything much past Big Sam Cook. Down in the galley, he heard it all. Within days of sailing, he’d managed to establish a reputation among the crew as being the ears and eyes of the whole ship. But, though affable and easy-going, he was neither discerning nor discreet. He listened but he also talked. You wanted personal information, you went to see Big Sam.
Joe looked up and, shrugging slightly, smiled almost shyly.
‘The love of his life,’ I said, not serious, tutting towards Joe and raising my eyes up to the heavens.
‘Well now, Cub, it’s funny you should say that,’ Joe laughed, his own sparkling with delight. ‘It’s very funny you should say that!’
As we steamed further south, the wea
ther warmed and the seas calmed and we settled down to largely uneventful days, punctuated only by our duties and the usual scaremongering among the crew. As with all the ships I had sailed on, the men were jumpy and easily spooked. It didn’t help that one balmy evening, quite soon after making the open ocean, we saw a swift corvette, capable of thirty knots or more, inexplicably shoot past the convoy and steam off station. As a result, someone was always claiming to have spotted a periscope or the hull of a U-boat and Joe began to keep a running tally. Tomas, who was particularly excitable, took the lead early on with about four ‘sightings’ in the first few days. Mick, the ginger, curly-haired bosun from Ireland, ran a close second. He was always swearing on God’s honour that he had seen a shiny pinprick in the far distance. To ensure I won, I took to leaning over the ship’s side, apparently scanning the waters and then jumping up, pointing and yelling wildly, ‘There, over there! There’s one!’ The first few times, deckhands from all sides would immediately drop what they were doing and rush harum-scarum to investigate.
‘Arh now, Cub,’ Mick would shake his head when he saw my twitching mouth and Joe’s laughing eyes, ‘would you pack it in, for pity’s sake!’ It was better not to risk it when the volatile Pat Murack was around, still less before Jim Mackingtosh. Known as Mac throughout the ship, his thick-set brawn denoted perfectly his bullish mind and he was as ignorant as he was humourless. Incurring the wrath of Calhoun was also something we felt best avoided. It was a foolish game but we reckoned it was worth it just to see Tomas, typically hot-blooded, hopping from foot to foot in sheer exasperation at our childishness.
I spent a lot of time with Joe and the more I did, the more I liked him. Everyone did. From the moment he had stepped aboard the ship, he had seemed to know everybody. He had a genuine word for and a ready laugh with all of them and he treated all with levelling good humour and open-hearted faith. From the deckhands to the cooks, officers to engineers, he made each one feel as if their presence was important to his contentment. The light of his attention beamed persistent warmth, persuading even the most awkward individuals to unfurl and to contribute. His real interest in, and predisposal to enjoy, the company of others was difficult to rebuf: people, despite themselves, wanted him to like them. Even hardened souls like Mac saw themselves more favourably reflected through Joe’s eyes and behaved less harshly in return. And once, one night in the saloon, I even witnessed Fraser, the remote and taciturn chief engineer, moved to laughter when Joe had chanced an arm and taken to imitating his distinctly Scottish burr.
This natural and unspoken understanding of others’ characters, his propensity to seek out the best in them, granted him a rare indulgence. As with a favourite child, people didn’t care to take offence if it had been Joe who’d crossed them. They’d tut and raise their eyes and grin his name. He got away with murder with his genial smile and easy grace. This was fortunate given that he displayed absolutely no capacity for quiet. He sang, he talked, he hummed, he joked, he hollered, he mimicked and he whistled. I could have killed him sometimes. Wherever he happened to be, at one time or another, one of his companions would end up shouting out, half laughing with exasperation, ‘For Christsake, Joe, shut up! Will someone shut him up?’
His presence was impossible to ignore for if he was loud, he was also restless. He could not keep still. Not only was he big, his enormous frame both broad and tall seemed to fill the room, but he was always on the move. It was as if his burly body could not contain his overactive spirit, which leapt up and out unbidden, producing in his physical being nothing short of constant motion. It was just unfortunate that the agility of his mind, manifest in this commotion of his person, was in direct conflict with his heavy, bearlike build. It wasn’t that he was clumsy, he just thought himself as fleet-footed as his thoughts, and failed to take into account the greatness of his size. Quite simply, he was larger, louder and more lively than life itself.
We sought each other out. I appreciated his interest in my well being, which turned out to be typical of his generous nature, and I made him laugh.
One Saturday morning though, I could not find him. I had slept through Jamie’s early wake-up call and had gone down to breakfast slightly late, finishing dressing hastily as I hurried down to the saloon. Joe had not come down to breakfast after his watch, which was unusual because his appetite was huge. I took my tea and went to look for him.
He was alone, sitting in the sun, with his back against the wall of the radio shack, oblivious to the burgeoning beauty of the day and the vast expanse of blue stretching out for miles behind. Head down, he was thoughtfully turning something over in his hand. It was a small, gold disc. Twice he stopped the turning and stroked the smooth surface of it with his thumb. When he heard me approach, he looked up and slipped it into his pocket. Sniffing, he picked up his tea and began swirling it gently around in its mug, both enormous hands knitted around it.
‘I was thinking about Maggie,’ he said. I slid down the wall next to him but didn’t say anything. If he wanted to tell me, he would.
I contemplated the frothing wake the ship spewed up behind her. Two long white furrows churned up in time to the constant hum of the engines and for a while we were silent.
‘She gave me this. When I left.’ He reached in his pocket and brought out the disc for me to see. It looked small, marooned in the palm of his hand. ‘Her father’s compass,’ he said, putting it away again.
‘I was going to ask her if she would marry me. But I didn’t. She was waiting for me to ask her. But somehow I couldn’t get it right. I couldn’t get the right words,’ he smiled wistfully. ‘Never can in front of her.’ He didn’t seem to need me to say anything, so I didn’t.
‘It’s her eyes, I think. They…’ he cast about for a suitable word, one apparently big enough, as if reduced by the very thought of them to the confusion of which he spoke. He moved his hands quickly in frustration, slopping his tea over them. ‘Orf!’ he exclaimed, shaking one and then the other. ‘It’s not hot.’
‘Anyway,’ he continued with a sigh. ‘I will do it when I get back. She’s all I want. From the first time I ever saw her. All I want.’
He stood up, stiffly, stretching out his great, long legs. ‘God, I can’t believe I made such a muck of it! Not doing it. What an idiot!’
I squinted up, shielding my eyes from the sun behind him. ‘She will wait,’ I offered uncertainly.
‘I know she will,’ he said. I sat on a while after he had gone, impressed by his unqualified confidence.
Later that morning, we were one of five ships to peel away from the main convoy and set a solitary course across the Atlantic for South America. I went down to the radio shack for my watch at midday and, by now at ease with our equipment, I took my book. The news bulletin came in at one as it always did and, having typed it up, I settled down for a quiet afternoon. I was relieved by Joe at four. After posting my notices in the mess rooms, I took the chance to find a deckchair up on the flat deck near the fo’c’sle, thinking that I might just have a kip. It was a hot afternoon, after five, and lulled by the steady droning of the engines and the sapping heat, it was not long before I fell asleep.
A change of rhythm in the humming of the ship brought me vaguely back to consciousness. I started awake. Looking at the sun, I could tell that we had changed direction too. Something must be wrong. I left my chair and began to make my way back towards the bridge, and as I did so, the prow turned again, almost at a right angle with the way we had just been heading. Zigzagging. The skipper was taking evasive action.
I met Jamie by the wheelhouse.
‘What’s up?’ I asked him.
‘Joe got a four-S signal. Real strong. From one of the ships up ahead of us.’
‘We can’t out-steam a sub. We only manage about ten knots at best!’ I hoped he might know better.
‘That’s why we’re zigzagging. If it’s just one, we might avoid it.’
‘And if it’s a pack?’
‘Well then,’ said J
amie dourly, ‘we’re doomed.’
In the early hours of Sunday morning during my watch, I picked up another four-S message. A faster ship than ours, maybe four or five hours ahead, had had another sighting of a submarine and so, determining the position of the ship in front on the direction finder, we took a wide detour of her co-ordinates, hoping that it would be enough.
By mid-morning, fears were running high. Everyone was on the watch, squinting out at mile on mile of glistening blue. It was another beautiful day, bright and clear, the sea and sky reflecting and admiring each other’s glory. It seemed impossible that something so threatening, so destructive should be prowling deep beneath us. But it was highly likely that we were steaming into a hunting pack of U-boats and, mid-Atlantic and painfully slow, we must have looked an easy target.
The third four-S message, which came at lunchtime, confirmed our fears. The hunting pack was down there somewhere, in all probability closing in. We steamed on, changing course at irregular intervals, the whole ship’s crew screwed up with tension. Waiting. Barely daring to look.
As darkness fell, we only had good fortune to rely on. That, and the dubious hope that whichever beady-eyed commander spied our darkened hulk had had an overly successful week and had exhausted his torpedo supply.
‘Get some kip,’ Joe said, unusually serious. ‘You need your wits about you come midnight.’ So I turned in and slept, the last time for many years, the sleep of the unhaunted.
CHAPTER 4
HIT
Asleep.
Flung, flailing from my bed. Hit the deck. And again. Smashing my elbow against the bunk end. My body. Sliding. Shaking. Hit? Me or us? Wet. Water. Salty water. The taste of it. Hands and knees in it. Vibrating. Sound. Deafening, crushing, ringing. Hissing. Palpable black. A sharp list to the left. Slam against the wall. Catching hold of the bed side. Staggering up. I am not hurt.
Making Shore Page 4
