The Lonely Voyage

by John Harris

  As the Eastern Star limped home on creaking engines that had long been due for the scrapyard, faces were worried and more than one of the crew was taut with apprehension.

  “I’ve got a lad with the Gunners,” I heard. “I hope to God he’s all right.”

  “He’ll be OK, mate. Our boys are heading for the coast.”

  “Not half they aren’t! Christ, and the war not twelve months old yet!”

  “The bastards are machine-gunning women and kids,” Yorky breathed. The ruthlessness of this new form of warfare seemed to bewilder him. “And parachute blokes dressed like parsons and women. Jeeze,” he said savagely. “I know there’s a war on but you can’t go off like that.”

  Old Boxer never had his ears far from the wireless those first days of the battles in France, a stark look in his watery old eyes, a drawn expression about his mouth. His tongue was full of bitter comments on the War Office authorities, but I knew his bitterness was only a defence against sour thoughts on a system that had twice rejected him…

  Then the wind rose and the ship began to stagger a little. One of her engines ceased its revolutions altogether. and we left the wireless and its grim news and turned our attention to the more immediate emergency of getting the ship home. Like all sailors, we felt our calling was above the pettiness of nations. Our only enemy was the sea.

  But I wasn’t the only one, I’ll bet, who felt uneasy when the skipper had to indicate our inability to keep up with the rest of the convoy, and we received the return signal from the guardian destroyers to continue alone.

  “Well, mates,” I heard Yorky say down on the foredeck, as we watched the other ships disappear hull down over the horizon, the last of the sunshine on them, “you can start off singing ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’.”

  It was two hours before daylight, with the night at its darkest, when the submarine got us. The clanging, screaming crash of the explosion brought the ship to a shuddering halt and left her wallowing in the dark valleys of the waves. The tremendous blackness of the night was lit suddenly by a vast sheet of flame that sent flickering points of light racing along the wavetops.

  The watches were just changing and Old Boxer and I were together near the bridge when the crash brought us to our knees.

  “God Almighty!” Old Boxer muttered fearfully. “He’s got us!”

  The flash had disappeared, leaving us again in utter blackness, our eyes blinded by the glare. He didn’t put another into us. He probably knew one would be enough for the old Eastern Star. The sound of the engines had stopped and there was only the slap and swish of the waves against the hull as the ship began to swing beam-on to the sea.

  Number One, who was officer-of-the-watch, came tumbling down the bridge companionway. Torches were visible in the forecastle alley silhouetting running figures of men. Aft, I could see a flicker of flame – only a lick still, but already clawing its way across the deck.

  “Jump to it!” I heard the skipper shouting in the darkness. “Get these boats away!”

  I stumbled away to my boat-station, my feet clumsy on decks that were already sloping, then the ship lurched and I heard another crash. As I reached my boat I realised Old Boxer had disappeared.

  Around me was the frantic hurrying of men clutching all manner of private possessions, treasured things, poor things mostly, all they could snatch up and carry with them. A damp breeze was blowing into my face, and I remember enjoying it even in that moment of excitement, with the ship sinking underneath my feet.

  But there wasn’t time to stand about, thinking what a lovely night it was. By the light of flashing torches I was aware of half-dressed figures stumbling past me, bulky with lifebelts, and carrying overcoats and jerseys. Some of them had been in the lifeboats before and knew how cold it could be.

  The Bosun was swinging a hammer at a refractory bolt that had been jammed by the explosion and wouldn’t move, and the clanging added to the din. He was swearing all the time as he worked, not in panic, but in desperate, furious anger.

  “The bloody thing’s never stuck before,” he was saying. “Every bloody boat drill it came out. And now it has to bloody well stick when the old cow’s sinking under us.”

  He stopped to let one of the engine-room crew past, stumbling under the weight of another figure – it looked like the donkeyman. The newcomer bundled his load into the boat without ceremony and climbed in after him.

  “Fell down the ladder, the clod,” he said. “Nearly brained me. Knocked ’isself out on the ’andrail.”

  I could just make out in the beam of my torch steel stanchions twisted into knots by the explosion and steel plates torn like paper round a gaping hole in her side just abaft the funnel. Then someone bumped into me in the darkness and I turned to curse him for his clumsiness.

  It was Yorky. I recognised him by his short figure and his vest, which had a flat-iron mark on the front where he’d burned it. As he clambered towards a boat I saw he had his concertina under his arm.

  “Where’s ’Orace?” he shouted.

  “God knows,” I said. “Are you all right?”

  “Just got out the engine-room in time. The other poor devils must ’ave copped it. The ’ole bloody lot come down on top of ’em, ladder-staging and boilders and Gawd knows what. Where’s ’Orace, Jess?” His voice was cracked and sharp with apprehension.

  “Never mind him,” I said. “He’ll turn up. He’s alive. I’ve seen him. Get into that boat. You’re holding up the traffic.”

  “OK, Mister Mate.” He grinned and tumbled into the lifeboat with the others.

  Someone was calling a roll on the starboard side of the ship. “Axsen.”

  “Here, sir.”

  “Abrahams.”

  “Aye, aye.”

  “Garnett.”

  “’E’s ’ere, sir. Only ’e’s got a lump on ’is ’ead like a bleeden egg. ’E’s all right, though.”

  “Right. Young.”

  Suddenly someone jostled my elbow and I turned angrily to face old Boxer. “Where’ve you been?” I demanded angrily. Someone else was having to do his job.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Had to get something.”

  “Well, you’re wanted on those falls. Lay on that rope.”

  As the boat descended with the shrieking of pulleys we could hear the gurgle of water in the scuppers aft where the deck was awash. The mainmast was lying over the side in a tangle of rigging, and the deck was buckled in a great bulge like a blister. The alleyways were only gloomy caverns, hollow shells that were no longer part of a living ship, tombs in which our voices and the sound of escaping steam echoed. Already boxes were floating about the decks, with smashed hatch covers and broken doors, and we could hear them bumping against the stanchions.

  Even as we shoved the boat away from the ship’s side the Eastern Star lurched again in the oily water, and through an open port above the slapping of the waves I heard a crash as a cupboard burst open and knives and forks and plates were slung across the decks after the forms and the clothes and the grey sea-water that had begun to seep into the cabins.

  “Come on, heave away!” I shouted from the stern of the boat. “This is no time for sight-seeing! Lay on those oars!”

  When daylight rose the Eastern Star had settled lower in the water in a great patch of shining oil, but she was still in sight, her bows high in the air, groaning with the stress on her plates as though she were alive. Of the submarine that had destroyed her there was no sign. For a while, without waiting for the order, the oars stopped their movement and everyone looked back at her, useless, reeling from the sloshing of the waves under a lowering sky, lopsided and ugly, like a drab old vulture with a broken wing, her sides split open and the cargo and the oil spilling out of her.

  “Well,” Yorky said, “now we are up the bleeden pole, we are. Proper. There goes our little grey ’ome in the west, complete with the roses round the door.”

  Her bows rose higher as we watched until the keel was clear and red and rusty above the wat
er.

  “She’s going,” I said.

  Almost without a gurgle she slipped away beneath the water like a great drowning animal, with only bubbles of air to mark her grave, and the spreading patch of oil on the water dotted with floating objects.

  We watched her disappear, our eyes red-rimmed with weariness, our faces haggard with the cold. One of the men in the bottom of the boat was whimpering slightly with the pain of a broken arm. The muttering grew silent for a moment as we became aware of the vastness of the sea and our own puny smallness on its great plains.

  “Keep your eyes skinned,” I said as briskly as I could manage, trying to keep their spirits up. “There’s bound to be a destroyer come back for us.”

  My voice sounded happier than I felt. Seeing all that water and the size of our boat on it started that damned lonely feeling again. It shut down on me like a fog in the Channel, chill and depressing and damp.

  We huddled down out of the wind to wait, our stiff faces coated with the salt rime that blew over the bow of the lifeboat as she lifted out of the valleys in the grey-green waves. The lonely feeling grew stronger on me as I swayed to the movement of her. I held the tiller, steadying her when she corkscrewed through the swell and, oddly enough, just then I thought of Minnie and my unfortunate marriage. I felt I’d been too near to death for us to carry on as we had been doing. I felt I had to make some effort when I got home to sort out our affairs. Surely, I thought, something could be salvaged from the wreck. War was no time for domestic misery.

  I glanced across at Yorky, wondering what he was thinking. From one swinging hand trailed the concertina. His face was devoid of expression. Old Boxer was next to him, leaning across the gunwale, staring forward, grey wisps of sparse hair blown across his eyes, his face gaunt and bleak as the weather. His throat was bare and lean, and there were flecks of white whiskers on his face.

  “I’m a flying-fish sailor just ’ome from ’Ong Kong!” Yorky suddenly started to sing and the words were blown aft to me. There was no light-heartedness in the song, though, only a futile determination to be cheerful.

  When the destroyer came in sight we raised a cheer, but it died quickly. Yorky watched her shrewdly as she swung broadside on to the waves to make a lee of calm water for us to pull alongside.

  “Looks a bit smarter nor the Eastern Star,” he commented. “’Ow’d you fancy serving in ’er, ’Orace? That’s the job for a matelot. Nice clean quarters. None of the old straw mattress to sleep on. None of the old donkey’s breakfast in the Navy, eh, I’ll bet.”

  Old Boxer suddenly turned his back on the battleship as we headed towards her. His eyes were glittering pin-points and I noticed he was nursing the only thing he’d bothered to save from the Eastern Star, the thing he’d gone back to the forecastle to salvage. His fingers were blue with cold as they clutched the shabby naval sword and scabbard that was the symbol of Boxer tradition, its silver facings tarnished and green with salt rime.

  Book Three

  One

  When I reached home the first thing I saw as I came out of the station was the crowd round Wiggins’ boat-yard and my interest was roused immediately. All the same, I never intended crossing the road to see what was going on, but so obviously there was something in the air it drew me towards it. At first I imagined there’d been an accident, and I thought immediately of Kate Fee and Dig. Then I saw it wasn’t that kind of crowd. There seemed to be hardly any staring and not much comment. It mostly consisted of men – though it’s true there were a few women there – and they were waiting, not watching.

  I must have looked a bit of a sight as I stepped out of the station. My clothes were filthy with salt water and oil. My chief concern in the train from Liverpool, where we’d landed after crossing over from Ireland, was to get some money and a clean shirt, because when the Navy dumped us in Londonderry none of us had anything but what he stood up in. But in spite of my scarecrow appearance, not one of the people outside Wiggins’ looked twice at me.

  I’d decided on the way home I was going to enjoy myself for a week or two. I was tired and dirty and had no ship to worry about. I felt that for a few days, until they sent for me, I could quietly forget the war. I’d plenty to keep me busy for a while.

  I watched Old Boxer and Yorky hurrying away from the train to the pubs with a couple of quid they’d borrowed, one carrying the shabby naval sword, the other a parcel and the battered concertina. I let them go. For once I felt I wanted to be alone. I wanted to get home to Minnie and sort things out with her. I wanted peace and affection at that moment. Not a pub crawl.

  But peace wasn’t heading in my direction just then. My cards hadn’t been marked that way. The crowd at Wiggins’ gate drew me like a magnet…

  It was clearly not just an ordinary crowd, but it wasn’t until I’d left the station entrance that I realised that the people in the road were only the overflow from inside. Then I saw there was a policeman on duty to keep the sightseers away and a petrol lorry was standing in the roadway. Inside the yard another lorry was discharging its cargo into the storage tanks. Obviously there was something in the wind.

  As I picked my way through the crowd towards the offices I saw fishermen, trawlermen and merchant seamen around me, a few civilians in jerseys, and even a clergyman still wearing his clerical collar. Men were sitting on bedrolls and hammocks and planks. They were lounging on the piles of canvas and even squatting on the stacked wash-basins. A group of naval one- and two-ringers were chatting by the office door with a few ratings, complete with kit-bags and oilskins. I caught the word “Dunkirk” over and over again as I pushed past.

  Beyond the wharf, I noticed the biggest collection of small boats I’d ever seen. There were yachts, motor-launches, small fishing-vessels, boats that normally plied out to the Light and back from the beaches round the headland, and the Skylarks and the Daisybells that did the trip up the river with holiday-makers aboard. They were moored haphazardly alongside, one to another, their masts and rigging a spider’s web across the sky. And at the stern of them, bobbing and curtseying to the movement of the water, there seemed to be every rowing-boat and whaler that the river had ever floated. The creeks and loading-steps must have been scraped bare. They weaved and danced in the wash of passing vessels; old and new; red, white, yellow, green and blue; the bright and the varnished rubbing shoulders with the paintless and the worm-eaten. Then I remembered an item of news I’d heard on the wireless, days before the Eastern Star was torpedoed, and I knew just what they were waiting for.

  The Admiralty had asked the owners of all self-propelled pleasure craft to send in their particulars. As I’d heard it I’d wondered what it was all about. Now I suddenly knew. The War Office was preparing to evacuate the Continent.

  The Londonderry newspapers we’d bought, to catch up with the news when we landed from the destroyer, had been full of strong black headlines, dark and foreboding as mourning clothes, as sombre as that speech of old Churchill’s we’d heard on the hotel wireless where they billeted us. His words had a heaviness that didn’t hide the fact that something had gone wrong. There’d been a disaster to British arms and the retreating BEF was streaming into Dunkirk.

  And now boats were needed to save them. Small boats, big ships, anything that would float, and the staff officers had come to the river requisitioning whatever they required, everything that was available. They were doing the same, had we only known it, at Teddington, Kingston, Hampton Wick, Ranelagh, Chiswick, right up to the Wash and west to Weymouth and the border of Cornwall. Huge tows of pulling boats had already left for Dover and the evacuation had begun.

  All day, while the windows in Dover and Ramsgate shook and rattled to the roll of gunfire across the narrow stretch of water, the stream of vessels had gone out and returned, bringing back the first of the grimy men from Dunkirk harbour, their faces drawn with weariness, their clothes coated with dust and stained with oil and water. They were pouring into Dover, rank after rank of them, cramming every available space
on every available vessel that could carry them, English and French together; wounded helping the wounded, streaming from the ships across the docks into the waiting trains; gulping gratefully at clear air and snatching hungrily at the cigarettes and cups of tea the girls held out to them. They were already appearing in back areas in the country, dog-tired, asleep on their feet, flooding into town halls and church rooms, and flinging themselves down and snoring.

  We didn’t know all this then, though, for there was only a hint of it in the papers still. But as fast as boats came back to Dover, more went out. The SOS had gone across England like the beacons that had warned of the Armada – to the rivers and harbours half-way round the country. They’d decided to lift men direct from the beaches.

  Wiggins’, as the biggest boat-builders in the town, had been instructed to act as agents for the Admiralty, and every boat in the river that would move under its own power was being collected at their wharf. All day naval ratings had been fitting what guns they had to whatever boats could carry them, and there’d been a constant procession of men into the office where Katie Fee was struggling with documents and satisfying the demands of those who were wanting papers, compasses, charts, rations, fuel and water. A policeman outside the door was directing the volunteers. There were holiday-makers – the early ones – in blazers, alongside dock labourers and merchant seamen from ships laying up for repairs, some sober and some none too sober.

  Kate had been dragged from her bed in the early hours of the morning by an urgent message that had sent her to the taxi waiting outside the door and down to the boat-yard by the weak light of dawn, just as the first of the boats and the first of the men had begun to arrive. She’d been at it ever since. Her meals had been brought in on trays, and the bobby at the door had brought her cups of coffee from a café across the road.