Making Shore

by Sara Allerton

  And though we had been left unguarded at the hospital, the return of the soldiers and their guns, coupled with their perfunctory disinclination to answer any of our questions, assured us unnervingly of our status now as prisoners of war. It became all the more apparent when they returned us to the harbour and marshalled us aboard a small French sloop, the Dumont D’Urville, bound, we were informed by her cheerful little captain, for Dakar.

  ‘And Dakar would be…?’ Mac raised his eyebrows and shrugged his ignorance, looking from the commanding officer on the bridge, who could barely stop himself from bidding us all most welcome in his enthusiastic if imperfect English, to our skipper who stood among us on the well deck. The sun was high and hot, and the harbour walls of Villa Cisneros receding fast behind us.

  ‘It’s a port,’ Captain Edwards murmured. ‘Down the coast from here. In Senegal.’

  ‘I’ve been there,’ said Big Sam, slowly remembering. ‘Mebbe six, seven years ago. It’s a big port, isn’t it? There’s a huge old harbour there.’

  ‘Be Jerrys there? Or French?’ Jack broke out, loud enough for his apprehension to be evident even to our diminutive host, who started, and then began to beetle his way along the bridge to come down and join us. Jack continued anxiously, ‘Will they be waiting for us, d’you think? D’you think they’ll send us home? We’re civilian, ain’t we? Not fighting forces.’

  ‘Send us home?’ snorted Billy roughly, folding his arms. ‘Put us in some flaming camp, more like.’

  ‘If we’re lucky,’ Cunningham added wryly.

  ‘Given that this ship was waiting back there to bring us in, I should say that someone will be waiting for us, yes.’ Shooting Cunningham a withering glance, Fraser’s voice came calm and measured in an effort to give Jack, and perhaps the rest of us, some meagre reassurance, but he could not pretend that he believed our situation to be less serious than he thought. ‘But I doubt they’ll send us home. We’ll be on enemy territory.’

  ‘On my ship, non!’ The voice of the sloop’s captain from within our number startled us. Having approached behind Big Sam and Tomas, he was now squeezing himself between them, for he had quietly made his way, unperceived by most of us due to the modesty of his stature, into the centre of the group. Big Sam could have rested his elbow quite comfortably on his head. ‘The Germans, yes, yes. They wait for you in Dakar. I am sure they ask the question, for to listen your… disastre. But not to damage. Non.’ He grinned widely then at Jack, nodding his encouragement.

  ‘What’s he on about?’ Slim, looking flummoxed, nudged me in the ribs.

  ‘Fuck knows,’ hissed Billy, across me. ‘But the Jerries are in Dakar, waiting for us.’

  ‘How long will the journey take?’ asked Clarie, trying politely to divert the attention of our new and somewhat overeager ally from the disgruntled mumblings.

  ‘Four days we arrive. Until this time, on my ship, we are the friends.’ He spread his arms out wide, swivelling his upper body from right to left and back again in an effort to impress on all of us the sincerity of his statement. ‘My men give to you the assistance.’

  ‘And lots of food, I hope,’ muttered Mac gruffly, purposefully loud enough for everyone to hear.

  ‘Thank you, Captain,’ Captain Edwards spoke quickly over him. ‘We appreciate it.’ And our new patron, nodding and smiling at each one of us as he passed, scuttled back up towards the bridge. There was a short pause as we digested this information and then, sighing, Clarie concluded flatly, ‘He meant that the Germans are waiting to question us.’

  ‘Interrogate.’ Quietly, almost to himself, Slim corrected him, ‘Interrogate’s the word.’

  ‘Then what?’ asked Jack, the rising alarm plain in the tight constriction of his voice. Again, there was an ominous silence as we all considered the worst that could possibly await us. Swallowing, I looked down at what was left of my sagging pyjama bottoms. Blanched and worn in places into threadbare non-existence, torn, bedraggled, faded. Fit for nothing. All this way to die. I did not think so.

  ‘Fuck knows.’ Billy sniffed once again. ‘But we better get our bloody stories straight, make sure we tell it all the same, or there’ll be fucking hell to pay.’

  ‘Just tell the bloody truth,’ snapped Mick suddenly. He elbowed his way past me and Slim and, stopping in front of the captain and Clarie, he put his hands upon his hips and looked at Billy. ‘We don’t need a bleedin’ story. There’s nothing we got to hide. Just tell it like it was.’

  ‘What about the convoy? The cargo?’ Clarie asked him, apparently oddly nettled by the idea that anything we had to say would be of minimal importance to the Germans. ‘What about trying not to give over any information to the enemy?’

  ‘The Jerries aren’t interested in a load of bloody coal. We don’t even know what we were gonna be bringing back.’ Mick rolled his eyes and turned to address the rest of his frustration directly at the captain. ‘They know damn well where and how they sunk us. And any of them other ships of ours will bloody well be almost home again by now. We can’t tell ’em anything that’ll be much use to ’em. Eh, now, Captain, can we?’

  Captain Edwards nodded his agreement slowly. ‘Just tell them what they want to know,’ he said.

  The captain of the Dumont was as good as his word, as were his crew. They seemed keen to feed us well, the incentive perhaps their own discomfort at having to look so closely upon the unsightly disfigurement that dehydration and starvation had wrought upon our shrivelled bodies. They were both horrified and impressed by the version of our story, or as much of it as they could glean, from Fraser’s patchy attempts at translation and from the undoubtedly quite comical series of gesticulatory re-enactments to which the rest of us could treat them. And though we took comfort from their friendly hospitality, none of us could quite throw off the fearful apprehension that grew steadily more unnerving as we approached Dakar.

  Big Sam was right. The harbour there was huge and it was teeming. All the hardcore vessels of the German navy and the French, it seemed, must have been using it as a refuelling and re-fitment base, for wall-to-wall, line on line of basking submarines barred our entry. Their compact order was only broken by the presence of several enormous Q-boats. The glorious morning sun sparkled playfully on the narrow gaps of water, which slapped and bobbed between the dark sleekness of their glistening hulls, its blinding glare bouncing sharply back from the shiny metals of their mounted armoury.

  Tethered and tame, as tightly packed as stepping stones from one side of the harbour to the other, and submitting calmly to the ministrations of countless busy crews crawling all over them, they appeared unthreatening, entirely unconnected to the prowling, stealthy author of our destruction and subsequent misery.

  ‘Jesus!’ Mick breathed, struck with sudden wonder at the impressive display of German might, and overawed the more so perhaps, having become so unaccustomed to both noise and population. ‘Wonder if the bastard who did for us is here.’

  ‘Would you know ’im if you saw ’im?’ asked Wallace, and not waiting for an answer, he shook his head and pursing his lips, glowered, ‘I wouldn’t. More’s the pity.’

  ‘Why?’ Billy sneered sarcastically, irritated by Wallace’s speculative bravado, ‘What’d you do if you did? He’d be real scared, wouldn’t he? Tremblin’ in his boots at the sight of you.’ Butler sniggered and turned away, but Wallace, either too agitated by our imminent arrival or only too conscious of the truth of his utter disempowerment, merely shrugged and answered, ‘I’d’ve had a bloody good go at pissing down his fucking conning-tower.’

  Our sloop eventually found a berth, forced alongside one of the outer-lying U-boats and, led by the jovial captain and flanked before and after by his crew, we were trooped across the duckboard walkways, which lay across the hulls of the submarines to grant their crews easy access to the harbour walls.

  A posse of German soldiers watched our progress from the quay and as we got nearer, to a sharp command, two or three of them raised their rifl
es. One of the officers stepped forward to greet his French counterpart who, I noticed, did not return the German’s starched salute. As we were surrounded to be led away, the Dumont’s captain, nodding and smiling still, made a series of little bows to each small group of us that passed him. ‘Good chance!’ he offered encouragingly. ‘I wish you safe return.’

  We were taken to an enormous red-brick warehouse by the docks, at one end of which we huddled silently, shivering at its hollow coolness and at the empty echoes of German boots and scraping chairs that resounded from various recessed areas down the length of the cavernous hangar. I became aware as I stood with my arms folded and each hand clenched tightly up beneath my armpits that my feet, still bare and cold on the rough-hewn tiles, were suddenly warmly wet and stinging. I looked down quickly and following the small pool of rapidly spreading water to its origin, found that Jack, beside me, was still completely unaware that his trousers at the front and down one leg were now soaking wet and that he was standing in a pool of his own urine.

  I was about to exclaim but caught, in time, the look of frantic fear slashed across his face. Every single muscle from his furrowed forehead to the clenching of his jaw was taut, rigid with a horror-stricken apprehension that set his face into a stiff, uncompromising grimace, a petrified mask that reflected almost physical pain. His eyes, wide and restless, darted uneasily back and forth between the two soldiers who’d been left to guard us, as if convinced at any moment that one of them was bound to shoot. I glanced towards them. Though their guns were still trained in our direction, their eyes, which had had by now plenty of opportunity to gauge the depth of our destitution, conveyed far less aggression than what appeared to me to be more like sympathetic respect. I did not think that we were in the kind of danger Jack was clearly imagining.

  Besides, I was in no position to vouch for the reliability of my own body’s accurate function since its painstaking and faltering return from the brink of almost total collapse. I could hardly take exception to Jack’s involuntary lapse of muscular control induced by such evident, if what I thought might be misguided, terror.

  ‘Jack,’ I whispered. ‘Jack!’ He barely heard me but at my third, fairly loud attempt, he tore his eyes away and glanced at me. ‘Mmnn?’

  ‘They’re gonna question us. Not kill us.’

  ‘How d’you know?’

  ‘Look at us! We’re not armed. We’re skeletons. Jesus, I’m wearing bloody pyjamas! We hardly pose a threat. ’Sides, we’re civilians.’

  ‘They don’t know that.’

  ‘Course they do. They’ll know what ship we’re from by now. Don’t give ’em the satisfaction, eh Jack? Of knowing that you’re scared.’ I raised an eyebrow and taking him by his scraggy shirtsleeve, guided him gently forwards so that he stepped away and out of his own water.

  I could not explain it. Sometime, since the night I had sat beside Joe’s grave in the darkness, knowing that the morning after, we would be leaving with Guillaume, I had ceased somehow to be afraid. I knew now that I would make it. I had to. If not for my own sake, then certainly for Joe’s. It could have been that the gradual resuscitation of my body, revived by food and water, had in turn restored my ability to think more rationally. Or it may have been that the irrepressible hopefulness natural to youth never could entirely concede defeat and die. Or perhaps it was just that, without making any conscious admissions, I had opted to protect myself. Fragile, having been unravelled once, I could not again afford the risk of caring so much when I lost all.

  Consequently, I had begun to feel a strange, voyeuristic disassociation from my fate, which, inextricably bound up with that of the others, unfolded as I, with almost dispassionate curiosity, looked on. I saw myself less as a participant in our trials than as an impervious witness. It was not that I had ceased to care but that I did not need to. The question of my own survival was no longer pertinent, for sheltering beneath the quiescent shadow of Joe’s death and the unwilling promise I had made to his appeal, once again, I had become invulnerable.

  And so we waited. The only disturbance to the enormity of silence that began to settle uncomfortably around us lay in the sounds of the busy, bustling quay outside, which came muffled through the wooden heaviness of four or five great, musty, double doors, spaced about fifteen yards apart down the harbour side of the building. Their dark density held back an importunate sunlight that spilled determinedly through every crack and splinter, entreating but denied admittance. Its spangled shafts of yellow light traced perfectly the small rectangles of the high windows onto the floor, banishing from the confines of each flawless imprint the dank and murky shadows. And the dust, caught in their cast, danced and swirled and spun, directionless, on the luminous waver of the air. And still we waited.

  Eventually, with the appearance, and subsequent repeated reappearance, of a tall, sallow-faced young officer, we were pointed at and beckoned forward, one by one. In turn, we scurried barefoot after the heavy clipping of his boots across the uneven tiles, almost to the farthest corner of the massive space, where we were finally delivered before one of two tables. Positioned opposite one another but separated by the enormous width of the room, both were set back behind a couple of carefully positioned stacks of wooden crates, and were therefore hidden from the rest of our company. Two officers were seated on the other side of the table to which I was taken and the pair of them were still chatting genially to one another as I came to a standstill a yard or so before them.

  After what can only have been a matter of minutes, the older one, a man of about fifty whom I took to be the commander, looked up at me. His heavily greased white hair fell in thick, solid swathes across his forehead, disturbing the wiry profusion of his greying eyebrows and the spectacles that perched before them. Shoving his glasses back up to the bridge of his nose carefully, he took in my tattered appearance with one swift, dismissive glance and then folding his arms, he leant them on the table. The other officer, a younger, thinner man cleared his throat and, shuffling his papers, took up his pen. Eyeing me civilly, he told me to sit down.

  ‘Name please?’ he said, after I had done as I was told.

  ‘Cubby Clarke,’ I answered without thinking and then immediately corrected myself: ‘No, no, I mean, Brian. Brian Clarke.’ And then suddenly, as much to their consternation as to my own, I couldn’t stop myself from grinning widely, inadvertently allowing a ridiculous guffaw of unexpected laughter to leave my lips. That I could not even give them a nickname, however unconsciously done, without immediately feeling it necessary to disabuse them, would have amused Joe no end. His crinkly-eyed, sun-baked face had suddenly swum up before my eyes, as he shook his shaggy mane and laughed at me with easy humour. ‘Don’t ask Cub. He’ll tell you,’ I heard him say. I could not help but smile.

  Again, the commander pushed back his glasses and peered at me more closely. It was quite possible that the one he had before him now, given the circumstances, had lost his mind. There was a short pause as they waited for me to regain my composure and then, as though slightly disconcerted by my strange behaviour and eager to ignore it, the younger officer, sniffing, resumed his questioning. They wanted to know about the old Sithonia, our cargo and the convoy. Where we had been bound and where we had been sunk. If I thought they could be expected to believe that we had spent three weeks on a lifeboat without water and, from the coordinates I’d given them, ended up where we had in Africa. And as I answered them, having begun the interview on such an inauspicious note of nervous hilarity, I found myself continually having to fight to hold down at the back of my throat, in my armpits and behind my ears, the alarmingly inappropriate desire to laugh. At the mention of the Sithonia, Joe’s voice, laden with laughter, echoed ‘Snithers’ in my ear and when I mentioned South America, all I saw was Clarie glumly handing over cigarettes.

  The commander, elbows on the table and fingers playing ceaselessly up by the corners of his spectacles, watched my efforts and increasing discomfort with solemn perplexity. Finally, apparent
ly concluding that my disorder must be due to the extremity of my mental disintegration, he cleared his throat and brought the interview to a close at that. Shaking his head somewhat sorrowfully at his companion, he sent me off to join those among my crew who had already been questioned, and who were now being made to form a line in front of a long, low trestle table set up against the back wall of the warehouse.

  On it lay piles of shirts and shorts, each item clearly displaying the six-inch white circle denoting prisoner status. Old army boots, in various sizes and tied together by the laces, were piled up at one end and at the other, towels and toiletries. We were each issued with a couple of shirts, two pairs of shorts, a towel, a razor and a toothbrush and though not ungrateful, it struck me that the latter was fairly superfluous without the accompaniment of toothpaste, and one safety razor each would soon pale into insignificance before the wiry thickness of dirty, tangled hair that ran riot over every face.

  The officer dishing out the boots began to chew his lips and rifle through the pile uncertainly when he came to look at my feet, which, big anyway, were still discoloured and swollen with saltwater ulcers. He threw down a pair of size tens into which I duly tried to force the balls of my feet, but I could not get my heels to follow. I tossed them back up onto the pile and told him that I needed a size twelve. Jerking a thumb in the direction of Big Sam, already shod and waiting by the wall, he shrugged down at me, unconcerned, ‘Your friend has got the biggest boots. There are none bigger,’ he said. ‘You take those or nothing.’

  ‘Nothing, then,’ I answered, unable to contemplate even the thought of having my ulcerated feet chafed raw to bleed and ooze again, by the hardened, biting leather of a dead man’s boots. When the far double doors were finally flung open and we were led out, blinking into the blinding brightness of the midday sunshine, I was the only one who still went barefoot.