Came the Dawn

by Roger Bax

  I found the little bay on the chart and on the map. I was just going to point out that shining a light out to sea was probably about the most suspicious thing anybody could do in those parts, when I saw something that set me tingling with excitement. On the shore above the bay the chart showed a pair of navigational leading lights.

  I explained the significance of the discovery to the others. The idea is that a ship approaching a harbour through waters where there are dangerous shoals can be led in on a safe course by keeping two specially-erected shore lights in a vertical line. One light is some distance in front of the other and the rear one is higher. As long as the lights are kept in line a ship is as safe as though it were on a radio beam. Directly the lights get out of line the ship knows she is off her course. If our dinghy kept the lights in line it could reach this particular bit of beach with complete certainty on the blackest night.

  Steve was impressed, but still a bit puzzled. He said: “If the lights lead you in there, they’ll lead other ships in too. It must be quite a populated spot, that bay.”

  I explained that on the contrary there was probably nothing there at all except the two light structures, which the chart said were automatic and unattended. It was clear that their purpose was to guide ships approaching Tallinn Roads away from a dangerous shoal called the Vake. But once the ships were safely past the shoal, and long before they approached the Viimsi coast, they would bring another pair of leading lights into line from the south and would alter course for the harbour. If our dinghy continued on its way to the Peninsula it would be away from all shipping.

  A great burden had rolled off my mind. The problem of making contact with the girls in the dark seemed solved. They couldn’t possibly fail to find the Viimsi lights, which were considerable structures near the beach. They could sit down in the dark near the water’s edge and talk about the Five-Year Plan until we arrived.

  Then Steve had a bright idea. “If the dinghy’s going to come in on a fixed track,” he said, “I don’t see why it need come right inshore. Why shouldn’t the girls swim out to meet you, with the lights in line behind them? After all, it’s only a matter of timing.”

  “That’s all,” said Denny sardonically, “just a matter of timing! All we have to do is to meet a couple of girls swimming in the dark at a certain split second four months ahead, and the whole thing’s in the bag!”

  We laughed. All the same, it was an idea which enormously reduced certain obvious risks. If there did happen to be coast-guards about, a dinghy coming in at night and taking two girls off the beach would arouse instant suspicion. But nothing could look less like an illegal attempt to leave the country than two girls undressing on a beach on a summer night, piling their clothes on the sand, and swimming off gaily into the darkness. They could do it under the very nose of a coastguard and get away with it.

  There were hazards in this swimming project, of course. Denny, the landsman, said he’d never seen Svetlana swim, and he thought that in any case she’d need a lot of practice. Steve, with alacrity, said he’d see to that. Then again, none of us knew whether it was practicable to swim out from a shore keeping two lights in line behind you, but I could imagine myself doing if it I swam on my back or trod water occasionally. The girls could hardly come to any harm—the sea would be warm, and in the Baltic there wouldn’t be any strong tides at that time of the year. There was, I supposed, just an outside chance that they might miss the dinghy, though if we all conscientiously kept the lights in line I couldn’t see how. Even if we did miss each other no harm would be done. They would simply swim back and meet us ashore. Personally, I thought the idea an excellent one.

  Then the cautious Denny had to raise a new doubt. He said, “I suppose those Viimsi lights are still there?”

  How did I know? The chart was the best I could get, but still an old one. Now that I studied it more closely I found a warning panel which read, “The existence and position of many of the lights, buoys and other aids to navigation shown on this chart and formerly maintained by the Russian Government cannot be relied on.” That was twenty years ago. It was difficult to know what the secretive Russians had done since then. For one thing, there’d been a war. On the other hand, leading lights of some sort on Viimsi were vital to the safety of Tallinn Harbour and could scarcely have been dispensed with. But it was plain that we should have to make certain, for our whole plan was beginning to turn on the lights. They would have to be checked on the spot. There was clearly a lot of work in store for Steve’s Estonian dressmaker, if he could trace her.

  There was not much more that we could usefully discuss together. Denny and I would have to tackle the major problem of reaching Viimsi, but over that Steve couldn’t help. Nor could we help as far as the girls were concerned. Steve would have to handle the Russian end alone and give us the ‘all clear’ if he could. I felt we had made a good job of the outline plan—it was full of hazards that couldn’t be eliminated but there was nothing on which one could put a finger and say ‘That’s impossible.’ After a little more discussion we agreed that contact with the girls should be established a quarter of a mile off the Viimsi lights at 10 p. m. local time on the night to August 14. That was something to work to. I undertook of give Steve a list of the matters on which we should want assurance by cable.

  Just before we broke up Denny said: “Suppose at the last minute either we or they can’t make it. Do we have an arrangement to try again?”

  That was a poser. The most likely reason for last-minute failure would be bad weather, and over that we were going to need all the luck in the world. We didn’t know then, of course, that the summer of 1947 was going to be the finest of the century. Our ‘second string’ plans were rather half-hearted from the beginning, chiefly because the obstacles to a second attempt seemed almost insuperable. For us, it would mean taking Dawn out of Tallinn Bay and hanging about conspicuously in the approaches for an extra day. The girls might have much greater difficulty in keeping the appointment on the second night. All the same, if necessary we should have to make the attempt. We agreed that if we failed to make contact at the set time on the first night we should all try again the night after, and that if we were again unsuccessful we would abandon the undertaking. However remote the prospect might be that a second attempt could succeed, it was good for morale to know that the possibility existed.

  We had one more meeting with Steve before he left, and cleared up some minor points. He told us that he’d fixed up with his bureau in London to keep in touch with me about cables. We gave him a provisional sailing date for Dawn—June 15. He took short noncommittal letters back with him for Marya and Svetlana. Most of the news, of course, he would tell them. After a rather depressing discussion we agreed that Svetlana should go through with her divorce—which cut no ice in British law anyway—to keep the Soviet authorities sweet and herself out of Kazakstan.

  Denny had to be at work on the day Steve left, but I went down to the airport to see him off. He was in buoyant spirits. Over a last drink at the buffet he urged me not to worry about his end of the affair. “From now on, tovarisch,” he said, “your job is to be at the rendezvous on the tick. My job is to do all that’s humanly possible to see that the girls are there. If we both keep our eye on the ball, we’ll be okay.”

  I said: “I don’t know why you’re doing this, Steve. It’s damned dangerous, and you don’t have to.”

  His eyes creased up in the old quizzical smile. He said: “Maybe I find life too uneventful. Maybe I just like you and Marya and the others.” He put his glass down. “Or maybe,” he added, “I’m just tired of watching Uncle Joe push people around. Say, we’ll make a date. We’ll have a party in your flat on October 15—that’s my birthday. There’ll be—five of us, and the drinks’ll be on you. Okay?”

  “Right,” I said, and gripped his hand. Passengers were being called for the ’ plane. Just before he went out on to the tarmac he said, “Don’t forget to keep careful track of all my broadcasts all the time.”
And as an afterthought he added, “Shall I give Marya a kiss for you?”

  I called, “Just one!” I’ve never known a correspondent yet who knew when to stop.

  Well, that was that. I put up a little prayer for his safe landing and went off to the flat to pack some things. The next item on the agenda was obviously to get back to Southfleet and see how Joe was getting on with Dawn. If we were to sail on June 15 or thereabouts we had little more than six weeks left, and there was so much to do that it hardly bore thinking of. Denny had given a week’s notice to his firm—much to their annoyance—and was determined to devote himself exclusively to boats for the rest of the time. There was one thing about Denny—having taken his decision he never looked back. He’d already begun to swot up navigation, and to my great relief he seemed completely at home with logarithms and angles and stuff that made my head reel. I suppose that was the result of his technical training. I felt I could safely leave all that part of the trip to him.

  Dawn was changed out of all recognition and I wasn’t surprised that Joe looked pleased with himself. He’d painted her a smart grey—he would have preferred white but I thought grey would be less conspicuous—and he’d had the white sails tanned a red-brown for the same reason. Joe said the mainsail was a bit old but there was certainly no time to have a new one made and he thought it would do unless we had a particularly hard blow. In any case, there was a storm-jib and trysail in the locker for emergency. All the ropes and rigging had been renewed and most of the gear. Altogether, Dawn was beginning to look as though she’d soon be ready for sea. Joe couldn’t have regarded her more affectionately if she’d been his own boat. He was very much on his mettle, not just to have Dawn ready for us in time but to make her one of the finest boats in the creek. All his pals were watching his progress, of course, and in that small, highly-skilled community he felt his reputation was at stake. He needn’t have worried.

  The days raced by. Joe had found a reconditioned engine that he thought would be suitable and Denny came down to help him fix it. I bought a new metal alloy dinghy which was roomy and yet light to handle and Joe snugged it down on the foredeck. While I was in town choosing the dinghy I bought a whole sheaf of additional charts. I felt no end of an old salt, but the chap behind the counter handed them over as nonchalantly as though they’d been a guide to the Tower of London. After that I rushed around making inquiries about how you cleared for foreign ports and arranging for special supplies of food and petrol.

  I told Joe of our plans in more detail, and he was as interested as though he’d been coming with us. He bent gravely over the chart of Tallinn and I pointed out the Viimsi leading lights and told him the part they were going to play. He studied the chart with an experienced nautical eye. Then he asked me where we proposed to anchor Dawn while we were making the journey in the dinghy.

  I said I hadn’t decided yet. “It mustn’t be too far from the shore if we’re to get back to her and clear territorial waters before daylight.”

  He pondered. “You haven’t a lot of choice,” he said. He indicated the wide stretch of deepish water opposite Viimsi. “You can’t drop your hook in twenty fathoms.” Then he suddenly said: “There’s another thing. How are you going to find Dawn again in the dark?”

  That was something we hadn’t thought of at all. The idea of combing Tallinn Bay at midnight looking for an unlighted yacht wasn’t exactly pleasing—and she’d certainly have to be unlighted. The solution was really obvious, and it came to me as I stared at the chart. “Why,” I said, “we’ll anchor Dawn in line with the Viimsi lights. Then as long as the rower keeps the lights in line on his way back he’s bound to reach her sooner or later.”

  Joe nodded. He studied the chart intently for a while and took some measurements. Then he said: “I think I’ve got a better idea. Why not anchor Dawn actually over the Vake shoal? The least depth is two fathoms, so she’d be in no danger. The shoal is lit by a lighted buoy with a flash every four seconds, so the dinghy couldn’t miss it. If Dawn were left close up against the buoy you could row straight for the flash without bothering about keeping the leading lights in line. It’s about the right distance—four miles from the shore—and handy for a quick run out to sea.”

  That was about the longest speech I’d ever heard Joe make, but every word of it was sound sense. His plan solved several problems at once. We could sail confidently into Tallinn Bay in the dark, knowing precisely where we were going. We could anchor at a spot which other ships would steer clear of because of the shoal, and we should thus avoid the danger of being either seen or run down in the dark. I made a mental note that Steve must be asked to check up somehow on the Vake buoy.

  I congratulated Joe on his ingenuity, and we rolled up the charts. I said, “Well, what do you think of the plan now that you’ve heard it all?”

  The light of battle—for it was almost that—faded from Joe’s eyes, and the old cautious look took possession again. “It’s fine,” he said, “on paper.”

  “You think we’ll run into trouble in Tallinn?”

  “I wasn’t thinking so much about Tallinn,” said Joe.

  “What, then?”

  “Well, I was thinking about a young fellow who was here last summer—an N.C. O. in the Army, I think he was, just demobbed. He’d made up his mind to sail to South America, single-handed, in a 22-foot ketch. He spent months fitting her out and laying in stores and getting everything shipshape and he was full of confidence about the trip.”

  “Well?”

  Joe grinned broadly. “He ran aground on a sandbank about ten miles from here and the boat broke up. He was taken off by the Margate lifeboat and got a shore job with a fishmonger at Canvey!”

  I realized that even Joe could be highly objectionable at times.

  Chapter Six

  As soon as his week’s notice had expired Denny came down to Southfleet to stay, and our preparations moved forward much faster. He applied himself to all his tasks with a doggedness which aroused my admiration, and he was quite impervious to the sly digs Joe used sometimes to make at his expense. Having decided that summer had come, and that the long woollen underpants he usually wore in winter were no longer necessary, he now wore a very short pair of shorts, and Joe said that with those knobbly knees he only needed a long pole to make him look like an overgrown boy scout. He had sought the advice of a chemist about his tendency to seasickness. I can imagine it was a most earnest interview. The result was that he arrived at Southfleet equipped with three different nostrums, one of which he took every time he went out in a boat. I don’t know whether it was the pills, or smoother water, or sheer will-power, but he had no more misadventures of that type. His worst trouble was clumsiness. His feet were still a constant menace. He was always standing on a rope end, or stepping back into a pot of paint, or giving his head an almighty crack on some projection in the cabin. No doubt he would learn to move more cautiously once we were at sea, but he was obviously going to learn the hard way.

  Just because he was so awkward aboard, I was uncomfortable about his inability to swim. He was just the kind of chap to trip over something and take a header into the sea. I tried to give him a few lessons in the creek. He did his best but it was hopeless. It went against his deepest instincts to take both feet off the ground at the same time. In the end we decided that the time would be more profitably spent in sailing.

  Denny always fetched the papers in the morning, and one day he came back with a rather grim look on his face. He said: “More trouble. Have a look at this.”

  Joe and I gathered round. What had caught Denny’s eye was a short paragraph from a correspondent in one of the Scandinavian capitals reporting that a couple of small ships had been mysteriously involved with the Russians in the Baltic. One of them had disappeared altogether with her crew, and it was believed that she had either been sunk or taken by the Russians into some port. The other boat was found floating but damaged, and minus her crew. The report said it was considered possible that a Russian patro
l boat had intercepted both ships on the high seas.

  The story was a little disturbing, but I wasn’t inclined to attach too much importance to it. The report was no doubt published in good faith, but there was a good deal of hypothesis about it, and the facts might be quite different. At various times a good deal of unreliable news about Russia had come out of Scandinavia. This story might be on a par with reports of ‘flying saucers’ in the Baltic, which didn’t seem to have amounted to much in the end.

  “Anyway,” I said, “even if the Russians are behaving like that, I don’t see that there’s very much we can do about it except keep a sharp lookout and hope for the best.”

  A mischievous look came over Joe’s face. He said, “You’d better take the old punt gun.”

  I said, “What punt gun?”

  Joe led us round to the back of his workshop, where there was a lot of old junk. Fastened to a stake driven into the saltings was a light skiff which he said had once been used for wild-fowling. It had evidently been long neglected and was in bad shape. “I thought I might use it,” Joe said, “but I’ve been too busy. I bought it last year. The owner was anxious to get rid of it, so I did him a favour.”

  “Why was he anxious to get rid of it?” asked Denny suspiciously.

  “As a matter of fact,” said Joe, “he blew a finger off messing about with a charge. Put too much powder in or something. Look, this is the gun.” He undid the canvas cover and disclosed a rusty metal barrel, a good ten feet long, lying in the bottom.