Convoy North (A John Mason Kemp Thriller)

by Philip McCutchan

  If you enjoyed reading Convoy North, you might be interested in Convoy of War by Philip McCutchan, also published by Endeavour Press.

  Extract from Convoy of War by Philip McCutchan

  ONE

  The weather was cold, very unseasonable for early August, but the North Atlantic was as ever unpredictable. The Commodore, on the bridge of the former Mediterranean-Australia liner Ardara, wore his bridge coat, the shoulder-straps carrying the thick gold bar surmounted by the crossed-triangle ‘curl’ of the Royal Naval Reserve, hands clasped behind a broad back as he scanned the convoy, watching the ships astern and on either beam. They formed a great spread of bottoms mainly in ballast out of UK ports for a troop and war materials pick-up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, currently on the starboard leg of the zig-zag and some of them having trouble with their station-keeping.

  The Commodore glanced aside as the Ardara’s master, Captain Arthur Hampton, joined him at the bridge screen. ‘Damn big target,’ he remarked.

  ‘It is, sir. We’ve been lucky — so far.’

  Mason Kemp grinned. ‘Don’t tempt fate! Homeward bound ... that’s when it’s more likely to come, when we’re laden. I doubt if we’ll be having much luck then, somehow. That’s the way things go.’

  Hampton nodded and turned away from the Commodore to pace his wide bridge wing. This OB convoy, which would turn into an HX convoy on the homeward route from Halifax, was the biggest ocean lift in terms both of ship numbers and the size of many individual ships that he had so far sailed in — no less than five liners, average 23,000 tons displacement apiece, liners that in pre-war days had sailed to Australia and South Africa, India and South America and the Far East; four deep-draught tankers of around 17,000 tons which would detach once the convoy was past 40 degrees west longitude to head for Galveston on the Gulf of Mexico to take on their potentially lethal liquid cargoes; a dozen sizeable dry-cargo vessels on hire contracts from such companies as the Port Line, Clan Line, Union Castle and British India, together with eighteen smaller ships, tramps in peacetime mostly, that would load to their marks in Halifax with all manner of humdrum cargoes that would help to sustain life in war-torn, besieged Britain. The Battle of the Atlantic had begun only three months before; none of the men who sailed beneath leaden skies this particular morning had any notion of how long that battle against U-boats and aircraft and surface raiders was destined to last, no idea of the scale of the sinkings that were to come.

  They had all, or nearly all, been in action before; some of them in the last lot, the 1914–18 war, as well as since September 1939. It was little more than a year since the period of the phoney war had ended with the threat of invasion following Dunkirk, and then the airborne Battle of Britain, but the months of continual sea-keeping had taken their toll of men and men’s endurance and they felt as though they had been at war for a decade. Peace forgotten, war had already become a way of life. Not for the merchant ships alone: the men of the warship escorts had done their share and more, the destroyers and corvettes, always too few in number and driven to the limit, bringing biting cold and wet and extreme discomfort to their ships’ companies as so often in the winter storms they rode gigantic waves that could make life aboard even the Queen Mary into a time of desolation. The North Atlantic could be hell, far worse than the Bay of Biscay, worse than the Great Australian Bight where the storm roared straight up from the southern ice or the westerlies bellowed round the globe in the High South latitudes. And always there was the potential threat of the lurking U-boats of Grand-Admiral Donitz and, when the ships were within their range, the Nazi air armadas, the reconnaissance Focke-Wulfs and the bombers.

  The escort apart, the best defence of the convoys was the zig-zag. The point was always made by the officers of the Naval Control Service and it had been made this time at the convoy conference held before the bigger ships joining from the Clyde had left the Tail o’ the Bank off Greenock. All masters of the Clyde contingent had attended, along with the Commodore of the convoy and the commanding officers of the naval escorts. So vital was the OB that additional escorts had been provided: four heavy cruisers and an old, slow, rusty battleship, a mixed blessing whose fifteen-inch guns might well be effective enough if the convoy should come under attack from a surface raider, a German pocket-battleship perhaps, but which the Commodore fancied would tend only to slow the convoy’s advance into safer waters beyond forty west.

  Commodore Mason Kemp lifted an eyebrow at Hampton as the latter’s pacing brought him close again. ‘I’m going below,’ he said. He rasped at his chin, and yawned. He had been almost all night on the bridge as the ships from the Clyde, having made the rendezvous with those out of Liverpool, moved away from the Bloody Foreland at Ireland’s north-western tip. ‘Shave, if nothing else! You know the orders, Captain: I’m to be called immediately if anything happens. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes in any case. Where’s that assistant of mine?’ He looked around, saw the RNVR lieutenant in the wheelhouse, and lifted his voice. ‘Williams!’

  A lanky figure emerged from the wheelhouse, clad in a duffel-coat, balaclava, thick woollen scarf and gloves. ‘Here, sir.’

  Commodore Mason Kemp grunted: there was a gleam of humour in his eye as he remarked, ‘Warm life for some. Where’s your normal sartorial elegance, Williams?’

  ‘Sorry, sir — ’

  ‘Oh, don’t apologize, it’s not vital.’ Kemp stretched. ‘You can go below when I return to the bridge — ’ He broke off as a shout came from the signalman of the watch. ‘What’s that, MacCord?’

  ‘Destroyer leader, sir, reports contact starboard. Submarine, sir.’

  Kemp caught Hampton’s eye. The long business of the convoy’s defence had begun already. ‘Sound action stations,’ he said.

  ***

  On the outbreak of war nearly two years earlier Captain Kemp, as he had then been, had brought his ship along the English Channel from Brixham, where he had embarked the pilot, to the Downs and Tilbury, homeward bound from Sydney. Soon after the ship had berthed in the basin the chairman of the line had come aboard and had been taken to the master’s day cabin. He said, ‘We’re going to lose you, John. I’m more than sorry, I need hardly say.’

  ‘Lose me?’

  ‘Yes. You’re RNR. And this has come for you.’ The chairman handed over a buff envelope marked ON HIS MAJESTY’S SERVICE, with the Admiralty crest embossed on the flap. It was addressed to Captain J. Mason Kemp, RD, RNR.

  Kemp said, ‘Not unexpected, Sir Edward. But what’ll they do with a captain RNR? They won’t give me one of their battle-wagons, I’ll bet!’ He held the envelope in the air, quizzically, as though keeping himself deliberately in suspense.

  The chairman said, ‘I understand the Admiralty’s bringing in the convoy system — right from the start this time. Carrying on where they left off in ’18.’

  ‘Commodore of convoys?’

  That’s my guess, John.’

  Kemp slit the envelope, using an ivory paperknife from his desk. The guess had been a good one. That afternoon Commodore Kemp left the liner to report to the Admiralty and then to proceed on a fortnight’s leave before taking up his war appointment. The liner was the Ardara. Leaving the ship with much nostalgia for a life that had come to a sudden end, it never occurred to the Commodore that within two years, after many convoys, he would once again be upon her bridge. He went home, home being an olde-worlde cottage in Meopham in Kent, and broke the news to his wife.

  Mary Kemp was no more unexpectant than he himself had been; one didn’t join the RNR and expect to be left to carry on one’s peacetime ways in war. Expectant, and accepting of the lot of a seaman’s wife, though with sadness for all the exposure to danger there would be.

  ‘Tripe,’ Kemp said, and grinned. ‘We’re all in it together. If I’d been left in the Ardara, I wouldn’t have been protected by different gold stripes, would I? Look on the bright side, Mary.’

  ‘What bright side?’

  He kissed her. ‘More leave. The
RN’s good at that.’ The Merchant Service wasn’t: an Australian voyage, then a week or so at home, and back again to Australia, world without end. Kemp had been married almost twenty years, and if he added all his leaves up he reckoned he’s seen his wife and children for a little less than two years in all. Young Harry, nineteen and likely to volunteer now for the navy, and Rufus, sixteen and currently with a few more days left of his summer holiday from Pangbourne, scarcely knew their father other than as a fleeting and somewhat autocratic stranger who reappeared at intervals. They had taken to calling him the Ancient Mariner, unflatteringly ...

  Mary said, ‘All right then, the bright side.’ She said it determinedly, then added, ‘I don’t know about Granny.’

  ‘Oh yes, Granny. How is she?’

  ‘Better than she thinks she is. You’d better go up and see her, John, otherwise — ’ She broke off. ‘Started already. Go on up, do!’

  A walking stick was being banged on the floor; flakes of ceiling came down. Commodore Kemp left the drawing-room and went up the twisty staircase down which Granny could never again walk, being bed-bound with all manner of disabilities, some of them real. Granny Marsden was in fact Kemp’s grandmother and had been inherited when Kemp’s mother had died. His mother had died young; Kemp had been devoted to her and had accepted the burden she had left. Granny Marsden at ninety-six was something of a miracle, if a tiresome one. Everlastingly expectant of death, she continued to survive, smoked like a dangerous chimney and drank two weakish whiskies every evening to help her sleep. She came of seafaring stock and in her childhood had sailed in the square-rigged ship commanded and owned by her father. She had been round Cape Horn to Chile and Australia not far off as many times as her grandson had taken the Suez Canal route to Sydney. She still had all her faculties and her hearing was as sharp as her voice; her eyesight was more than equal to the task of watching out that the right quantity of whisky went into her tumbler.

  She was propped up in bed by what looked like half a dozen pillows when Kemp entered the bedroom. ‘Well, Johnny,’ she said.

  Kemp bent and kissed her on the marble-like forehead. ‘Well yourself, Granny.’ It always struck Kemp as slightly ridiculous that a middle-aged shipmaster should be in the position of addressing anybody as Granny. ‘You look it, I must say.’

  ‘Look what?’

  ‘Well.’

  She gave a snort. ‘If you did but know. No one ever listens to me! I keep telling Mary — ’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure you do. She does her best.’

  ‘If you call — ’

  ‘Now, now, Granny.’ Kemp began to use his master’s voice, not wishing to hear criticism of his wife. It had its effect: Granny Marsden knew when she was being told to watch it.

  ‘Well,’ she said grudgingly, ‘it’s nice to see you again, Johnny. What are they going to do with you?’

  ‘Do with me? I — ’

  ‘There’s a war on, so they tell me.’ Kemp didn’t realize how many times he was going to be told there was a war on over the coming years. ‘That man Chamberlain, such an idiot. And as for Hitler!’ Words seemed to fail her, for she didn’t go on. ‘They’ll call you up, I suppose.’

  He told her the facts. ‘Second time round,’ he said. He had served right through the last war in the RNR, in Q-ships and later in minelayers, and he’d been torpedoed twice and had to swim for it. ‘War to end wars my foot!’

  ‘Your great-grandfather always said — ’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure he did,’ Kemp broke in quickly, for his great-grandfather had evidently said plenty; his sayings never ran out. He made his excuses and left the bedside; he would be up later to say goodnight if she wasn’t asleep.

  ‘Huh!’ Granny Marsden said scornfully. ‘How anybody’s expected to sleep in this house I don’t know!’ Kemp knew that the reference was to Harry, who possessed a bagpipe chanter and made hideous noises on it, though, out of respect for the wrath that would otherwise descend on his mother’s head, not unduly late at night. Kemp’s view was that within reason there were times when the old had to give way to the young with their lives before them and Harry, curiously perhaps, had talent in a musical direction, or so he insisted. He was currently employed by the BBC ... but when he came home that evening he confirmed what Kemp had foreshadowed earlier: he intended going along to the naval recruiting office within the next few days and joining up as an ordinary seaman. In the middle of this announcement Rufus turned up: it now being officially wartime, he had put on his Pangbourne cadet’s uniform and this brought a lump to Kemp’s throat. So young ... and God alone could tell how long the war was going to last. Rufus expressed the hope that it would last long enough for him to join in.

  One way and another, the home wasn’t going to be the same. Only Granny Marsden went on for ever.

  ***

  Two years on now, from Kemp’s first wartime homecoming: Paul Williams, lieutenant RNVR, looked at himself in the mirror in his bedroom at home in Hounslow. He liked what he saw: the second wavy gold stripe had only recently been sewn on to his uniform by Gieves on the Hard in Portsmouth, turning a sub-lieutenant into a full-blown lieutenant, and it gave him added importance, the equivalent of a captain in the army to whom in fact, being of the Senior Service, he would rank senior. More importance, in his view, was given by his new appointment to the staff of a convoy Commodore — even though he understood it to be normally a sub-lieutenant’s appointment. Never mind: no doubt an important convoy, a very large convoy, needed the extra rank. The personal staff would consist of himself and two signalmen, plus telegraphist ratings. The Commodore was to be an RNR with the Reserve Decoration, an oldie from the liners and probably with a constipated mind, but Lieutenant Williams could cope with that. So far in the war he hadn’t coped too badly, he believed, though his last ‘flimsy’ — the copy given all officers of their captains’ personal and confidential reports — had made use of the expression self-assertive and bouncy. A previous one had indicated cockiness but both went only to show that senior RN officers were also constipated mentally. If he had been all that, he wouldn’t have landed a staff job — which was how Williams thought of it.

  He saluted himself in the mirror, smartly. Then he coloured as he recalled not so long ago overhearing a leading seaman in his last ship referring to him as being all wind and piss like the barber’s cat. He had been mortified but had prudently turned a deaf ear. It wasn’t the sort of comment you made a song and dance about to the extent of putting the man in the rattle and having the phrase repeated loud and clear at Captain’s Defaulters. Anyway, wind and piss or not, it paid to be smartly turned out, since then you got noticed. Having saluted himself, the new lieutenant removed his cap and went downstairs, but not in time to hear the conversation between his father and mother. His mother had been fondly enthusing over her son’s elevation and appointment.

  ‘Staff,’ she had said almost reverently. ‘Isn’t it splendid, Fred?’

  ‘I don’t know so much.’ Williams’ father didn’t know the contents of the flimsies, but he would have been in some sympathy with the commanding officers. He knew his son pretty well.

  ‘But assistant commodore!’

  ‘Is that what he calls himself? I hadn’t heard ... and I wonder what the Commodore’ll call him!’ He filled in the blank for himself: ‘Commodore’s assistant, I reckon.’ When Paul came in, his father heaved himself to his feet. He’d got his stint at Air Raid Precautions; he was on duty as a warden. Working in the City, chief clerk in a firm of insurance brokers, he often didn’t get home till late but he was determined to do his bit to flatten out Adolf Hitler and teach the Nazis a lesson about ordinary Englishmen.

  Three days later Lieutenant Williams left Hounslow and went north by train from Euston, speeded on his way by the air-raid sirens and then the falling bombs, bound for the naval office in Greenock’s Albert Harbour to report to Commodore John Mason Kemp for the OB convoy.

  ***

  Kemp and Hampton met at the convoy co
nference, duplicates of which were being held in the other assembly ports. Kemp and Hampton, both Mediterranean-Australia Line, were old friends; and two years earlier, when Kemp had been taken out of his command for war service, Captain Arthur Hampton had been appointed master in his place: Hampton had never bothered with the RNR and had thus been left in peace, if such was the word, in the liners, now converted as troopships and on loan to the government as hired transports in the official term. Kemp had been delighted to be told at the Admiralty that he was to hoist his broad pennant in the old Ardara.

  ‘Just like old times, Arthur.’ Hampton, some five years before, had been his staff captain in the Aratapu, which as it happened was another of the troopships in the OB convoy.

  ‘Same but different, sir. No parties.’

  ‘They won’t be missed.’ One of the bugbears of liner life had been the entertaining, the enforced giving of Captains’ cocktail parties — the gin-palace aspect of the job — and the need to appear as often as his duty permitted at the Captain’s table in the first-class dining-room where there were important passengers to be entertained with small talk, something John Mason Kemp was not good at and had had to force himself into. He would have been highly surprised had he known how popular he was with most of his passengers. One thing he did know: right through his career in the liners he had been the target of forward young women and some not so young: the liner atmosphere did funny things to women, especially once the ship had entered the Red Sea. It had been all right until he had met Mary and married her; after that the female attentions had to be fought off, the more so when he got his promotion to staff captain and then Captain in Command. Senior officers could not afford to be put in compromising situations.

  Kemp was about to make a further remark to Hampton about the peacetime liners when the conference was called to order by a lieutenant-commander RNR. The conference, Kemp reflected, was to be a high-powered one: as the conversation died, the Chief of Staff to the Flag Officer in Charge entered the room. The Chief of Staff was a pompous-looking officer, rotund, two pisspots high in Kemp’s seafaring terminology, wearing a gold-rimmed monocle and carrying, of all things, a beautifully turks’-headed telescope. There was a good deal of other brass around: the Rear-Admiral commanding the cruiser squadron, no less than five four-ring captains RN from the cruisers themselves and the solitary battleship of the escort, each of them accompanied by his navigating officer. The remainder were a mix of commanders and lieutenant-commanders plus a number of lieutenants, mostly RNR or RNVR, from the smaller escort vessels — the corvettes — and the masters of the merchant ships.