Maddon's Rock

by Hammond Innes

  “No, Bert,” I said. “This is Dartmoor all right. I’ve often seen it—from the outside.”

  “Dartmoor!” Bert’s tone was one of utter disgust. “Blimey!—give me the merry Glass’a’se any day.”

  “Come on—stop that talking?” the warder bawled out with sudden impatience. Then he marched us away out of the sunlit compound between the granite blocks into the cold, dark interior of the prison with its clanging doors and the sound of iron-shod boots ringing hollow on stone-floored passages. We were inspected, interviewed, docketed, clothed and finally marched to our cells. As the iron door clanged shut and I was alone, I realised at last that we had been absorbed into the soul-destroying machinery of the prison. The walls closed in on me, the ceiling clamped down on my head, the barred square of light that was the window seemed to recede until it was barely wide enough to put my hand through. A sudden panic seized me. I felt crushed by the smallness of that rectangular cubicle. Six paces long four wide. Steel bars at the door. Steel bars at the window Pencil scribbles on the walls. Initials and dates cut deep into the stone. The dingy carbolic cleanliness of it clamped down against my brain so that I wanted to scream. And ahead of me streamed the years I was to spend there. Four years—say, just over three if I got full remission for good conduct. One thousand, one hundred and twenty-six days! No—I should still be here in 1948, and 1948 was a leap year—one thousand, one hundred and twenty-seven! Twenty-seven thousand and twenty-four hours! One million, six hundred and twenty-one thousand, four hundred and forty minutes! And I had calculated all that in a minute. Just one minute! And more than a million and a half minutes to go. I suddenly felt I wanted to scream. Footsteps sounded in the empty corridor, keys jangled. I sat down on the bed. I must get a grip on myself.

  Then somebody began tapping on the wall. I replied. Thank God for my basic training. I knew morse and realised suddenly that even in the confines of my cell I was not alone. I could talk. The jail telegraph was morse. The message tapped on the wall above my bed was passed on from Bert and told me that he was in the next cell but one. The knowledge that Bert was there, even if I couldn’t see him or talk to him, was a great comfort to me.

  I am not going to dwell on the time I spent in Dartmoor. It is only an interlude in the story and has no real bearing on what happened later, save that it toughened me mentally and physically. I doubt whether, without that period in Dartmoor, I should ever have had the guts or desperation to do what I eventually did. It was sheer desperation that drove me to Maddon’s Rock on one of the wildest sea enterprises it is possible to conjure up even in a dream. It was Dartmoor—the damp, grim, granite awfulness of Dartmoor—that gave me the courage. Now, as I look back on the year I spent in that wretched prison, it seems like some frightful nightmare, so faded and veiled are its memories by more recent happenings.

  The dread of solitude, however, has never really left me. I hated that cell with a bitter loathing. It crowded in on me, it symbolised my isolation from the rest of the world, it was the thing above all that seemed bent on destroying me utterly—crushing my spirit and warping my brain to madness. I have always had a tendency to claustrophobia—a dread of being alone in small, enclosed spaces and a morbid curiosity in any cave or shaft that took me into the bowels of the earth. The result was that I was happiest sweating my guts out in that damned quarry which had provided the stone to build the prison or labouring on the prison farm. I didn’t mind the cleaning, the discipline, the work—so long as I was in the company of other human beings. Even now I cannot read accounts of men who suffered solitary confinement in German concentration camps without feeling panic seizing at me. I think if that had happened to me I should have gone mad. But as long as I had plenty of hard work during the day and a book to read at night, I managed to stave off the feeling of loneliness that I dreaded more than anything else.

  There were about three hundred military prisoners in Dartmoor at the time. Of these only about a third were in for military crimes for which they had been sentenced, like Bert and myself, by court-martial. The rest were soldiers who had committed civil offences for which they had been tried and sentenced by civilian courts. Their crimes covered the whole gamut of civil offences—assault, theft, arson, burglary, manslaughter, looting. Some of them were pretty tough; hard-bitten die-hard criminals from London’s East End, sly characters from the race-courses, tough little men from the Gorbals district of Glasgow, men to whom razors came more readily to their hands than a rifle, men without any social conscience, bullies, liars, cheats, habitual criminals, murderers, men with minds so warped by their upbringing that they took it for granted that the world and every one they met in it was against them. All the riff-raff, hooliganism, abnormality that the Army had swept up in the maw of conscription and had been unable to digest. And a few, like Bert and myself, who seemed to have landed up there by mistake.

  I’ll never have a better schooling in world misfits than I had there. Sometimes it made me hate my own kind I was so disgusted. And sometimes I wanted to burst into tears at some example of kindliness exhibited by a man who looked tough enough to kick his best friend to death if he should so much as trip over a curb and be temporarily at his mercy.

  All the time I was in Dartmoor I never really ceased to be conscious of the grim history of the place. You couldn’t escape it. There were initials everywhere. J.B.N. July 28, 1915—1930. I always remember that. It was deeply etched into the wall above my bed. I often wondered about J.B.N., for I had been born on the day he entered Dartmoor and by the time he was out I was a boy of fourteen. The cells, the prison yards, the workshops, the kitchens, the laundry—everywhere the ghosts of these men who had been forced to live out long stretches of their life in this place clung to walls and tables and benches in the form of initials and dates. But these ghosts of the past were not obtrusive. They were too numerous. The walls had seen too much misery and wretchedness and hopelessness to retain any impression of individual cases—only there was a general atmosphere of wretchedness imprisoned on those damp-streaming walls.

  It’s a strange irony that this prison, which had been built for French and American prisoners of war at the beginning of the nineteenth century and had been a horrible Home Office ash-can for the country’s human refuse for almost a century should now hold British soldiers. But we weren’t the only occupants of Dartmoor. Ours was a world apart, an almost military world with prison discipline. But there was another world within those walls—the world of Borstal. Why the authorities turned over part of this most disreputable of all our prisons to be a home for Borstal Boys, God knows. But they did, and the boys shared the Moor with us. It was not an easy marriage. Their world was a softer, pleasanter world than ours. They were divided into houses like a school. They were allowed a number of little privileges which made our own lot harder to bear. And the easier discipline gave rise to riotous outbreaks for which there was no cure. For these boys were only boys in the eyes of the authorities. Their ages were anything up to twenty-three or so, and many of them were hardened criminals.

  All these impressions came slowly. At first I was too dazed and too absorbed in the task of adjusting myself to the life to absorb much of the atmospere. But gradually I came to take the background for granted and then, when I had time to think and take stock—that was when I began to feel frightened. But I got over it. I established a routine for myself so that I would never have time to think. I always made certain I had something to busy myself with in the evenings in my cell. I caught up with the days and kept a calendar, but I never allowed myself to think of the months stretching endlessly ahead of me. I tried not to think of what had brought me here. To kick against the pricks and to count the days to release—that would bring no satisfaction. I no longer tried to sort out the mystery of whether there really had been something wrong with the Trikkala’s boats or what Captain Halsey had been up to during the twenty-one days he had been sailing in an open boat in the Barents Sea. I accepted it all and that way got some peace of mind.
I tried not to think about myself at all, but abstract things—geography, history, cross-word puzzles. Anything but myself. I wrote to my family to tell them where I was. It was not an easy letter to write. I knew how hard they would be hit by the news that their son was in Dartmoor. But after that my correspondence with them was easier, for it became entirely impersonal.

  But letters to Jenny were more difficult. We fell into a regular correspondence. And whilst I looked forward with the excitement of a school kid to a letter from her, keeping it in my pocket unopened for days, trying to make it bridge the gap to the next, they were a weakness in the armour of acceptance and indifference I was building to my condition. For she wrote to me of the Highlands, of hunting, of sailing in the lochs, she sent me plans of the Eilean Mor, took me all through her reconditioning almost plank by plank. It was hard, because she wrote of things I loved which were out of my reach. But her letters were a real contact with the outside world. They were my one form of dissipation in the routine of forgetfulness that I had planned. They made me think of the future, of what I should do at the end of my three years. They made me unhappy. And yet I loved them as the one bright thing to look forward to from day to day.

  So the spring warmed into summer. VE Day came and went. Then VJ Day. The leaves turned on the trees behind the church and blew in gay clusters around our marching feet as we turned in at the prison gates. Then winter clamped down, hard and black. The moors became thick with mists. In November a drift of powdery snow stung our faces on an early parade. The walls of our cells streamed with damp. Our clothes never seemed dry. The moors, so pleasant to summer visitors stopping for tea in their cars, became a mysterious, frightening void. The mists closed down on the prison for days at a time so that the great rocky battlements of the surrounding tors were seen as dim glimpses through fleeting gaps in the murk.

  All this time Bert and I were in constant contact. Messages passed back and forth between us through the intermediary of a burglar who occupied the cell between us. This burglar had been on the Moor before. He was a hardened criminal, a mixture of Scot and Irish with a small bullet head and a wicked temper. He had been in R.E.M.E. till he burgled the till of a Naafi canteen in a big military camp near Carlisle. He was always planning escape. He never did anything about it. But he’d work it out to the last detail and then pass it on to Bert and myself. It was his way of passing the time. He might just as well have done cross-word puzzles.

  Sometimes Bert and I managed to talk to each other. I remember one day he was in a great state of excitement. We were in the same work party and he kept on catching my eye, his face all a-grin. As we fell in to march back to the cells he pushed his way alongside and whispered, “I seen the dentist, mate. They’re goin’ ter give me me denchers.” I looked at him quickly. I’d got so used to him without them that I couldn’t visualise him with teeth. The screw in charge of the party told us to stop talking.

  Then one day about a month later I met Bert on our cell landing while on the way to empty some slops and barely recognised him. The wizened little monkey face was gone. His mouth was full of teeth. They grinned at me like horse’s teeth. It was as though he had filled his mouth with some white pebbles and was afraid of swallowing them. It made him look grotesquely young. I’d never thought about his age before. But now I realised suddenly that he could not be more than thirty-five. The teeth moved up and down as he spoke.

  However, I think I got used to them quicker than he did. Scotty, our burglar chum, spent hours relaying to me Bert’s comments on those teeth. Bert came in for a lot of chaff, but he gave as good as he got. He was popular with everybody. With or without his teeth he continued to grin and crack jokes.

  Christmas came and the snow began to pile up on the Moors. For a week in January we seemed to do nothing but clear the snow, shovelling a way through the drifts to keep the roads open. “Huming snowploughs, that’s all we is,” Bert grumbled. But I enjoyed those days out in the snow. It was warm working and if we made good progress discipline was relaxed and we were able to talk and sing.

  Then suddenly the snow was gone and the moors glowed a warm golden brown in crisp sunshine. Life began to stir even up on those bleak hills. An occasional bird began to sing. The men became restive. They smashed up their cells. Fights became more frequent. The Borstal Boys started organised rioting. I was infected by the general spring malaise. The limitations of my cell began to irk me more and more. I wanted to smash it up. But I was scared—scared of chokey. I couldn’t face solitary confinement. I had fits of terrible depression, violent longings to get out and walk in freedom across the moors. I found my thoughts becoming dominated by memories of shady walks in summer woods, meadows of buttercups beside a river and the sparkle of water in sunlight as my sailing dinghy trod the wavelets in Cornish estuaries. And all these longings began to focus on Jenny. I started counting the days to each letter, getting miserable and angry when they were late, or what I chose to consider as late. I found myself upbraiding her in my letters and then tearing them up. And then one day I woke up to the realisation that I had fallen in love with her. I cursed myself for a fool. I was a prisoner in Dartmoor, disowned by my fiancée, a failure to my parents. What future could I possibly have? What could I possibly offer her? In a fiendish debauch of mental masochism I didn’t write to her for three weeks, so that she wrote to me asking why I hadn’t written, was I sick, should she come down and see me? I hated myself then, hated myself even more when I wrote a dull, impersonal letter in reply.

  And then suddenly the world changed and my cloak of misery and frustration fell away from me in the eager burst of enthusiasm with which I concentrated all my thoughts on one single idea.

  It happened this way. I got hold of papers whenever I could. One of the screws, a jailer named Sandy, was a decent sort and used to slip me one now and then. I read them avidly. They gave me great satisfaction. It was an impersonal contact with the outside world. They produced the illusory feeling that I was sitting by my own fireside. On the 7th of March, it was—7th March, 1946. I managed to see a copy of the previous day’s issue of one of the London dailies. I was glancing through it with the pleasant absorption that went with the illusion that I was part of the world about which I was reading, when my eye was caught by the single word Trikkala. It was in the second head to a down-column story on the front page. It was quite short, a paragraph or two, but it started my brain racing with a thousand half-digested thoughts and suspicions.

  I tore the story out and the worn fragment of newsprint lies on my desk as I write. This is what it said:

  FIRST POST-WAR UNDERWATER TREASURE HUNT

  Trikkala’s Master to Salvage Bullion

  NEWCASTLE, TUESDAY—Captain Theodore Halsey, master of the Kelt Steamship Company’s 5,000 ton freighter, Trikkala, at the time she was sunk, plans to salvage the half-million pounds worth of silver bullion that went down with the ship some 300 miles north west of Tromso. He and several other survivors of the Trikkala have pooled their resources to form a limited company called Trikkala Recovery. They have purchased an ex-Admiralty tug and are equipping it in a Tyneside dock-yard with all the latest deep-sea diving equipment. It is already fitted with azdec which will be used to locate the wreck.

  When I met Captain Halsey on the bridge of the tug, which has been christened the Tempest, he said, “I’m glad you’ve come along to-day, for it is exactly a year now since the Trikkala was mined and sunk.” Captain Halsey is short and stocky with a neat black beard and sharp, restless eyes. His movements are quick and decisive. His manner is confident. “I don’t think there is any secret now in the fact that the Trikkala carried a valuable cargo of silver bullion. I intend to lift that bullion. I know where she went down. It happens to be in an area where the depth is reduced by a wide shelf of rock. I believe she lies on that shelf. If I am right then I am convinced that with the help of the improvements in diving equipment and methods achieved during the war, we shall be able to raise the bullion.” He described the expedit
ion as the first post-war underwater treasure hunt.

  He introduced me to his officers, both Trikkala survivors. Pat Hendrik, a Scot, had been first officer. He looked tough and competent. Lionel Rankin had just come out of the Navy after fourteen years. He was a Warrant Officer. Two other Trikkala survivors are among the crew. All are in the syndicate. “We feel that those who had the misfortune to be on board the Trikkala when she was hit and who survived a three weeks’ voyage in an open boat in winter should be the ones to claim salvage on the recovery of the bullion,” Captain Halsey said to me. “And I think we’ll do it. We aim to leave on 22nd April, all being well.” He refused to reveal who was backing the expedition, merely repeating that the five survivors had a financial interest.

  God knows how many times I read that story through. I went over it word by word. And all the time something at the back of my mind kept fidgeting my brain with the thought that there was something phoney about it. For the first time since I had been in prison I let my mind roam over the events and conversations on board the Trikkala. And all the time the thought rattling round my mind was, why are all these survivors still together? Halsey, Hendrik, Rankin, Jukes and Evans—they were together on the deck of the Trikkala when we were put on to the raft, they were together in the open boat that was twenty-one days afloat in the Barents Sea before being picked up, they were together at our Court-Martial, and here they were together again on board a tug going in search of the Trikkala’s bullion. Rankin had even got out of the Navy to be on that tug. They must be very sure of recovering the bullion. And why hadn’t some of them got jobs? That Halsey and Hendrik should be together in the venture was reasonable. But Jukes and Evans might have been expected to ship on other boats and be at the other end of the world. Was it chance that brought them all to England at the same time to ship with Halsey? Or was it something else? Suppose they were afraid of each other? Suppose they shared some awful knowledge? Suppose the boats had been tampered with?