‘Right to the nearest half-pint, sir.’
The trim was the weight and balance of the submarine, according to the weights and positioning of gear, stores, ammunition, etcetera that she had in her at any given time. It was the first lieutenant’s job to work it out and have the right amount of water-ballast in each of her internal trimming tanks; you’d know whether or not he’d done his sums correctly when you got out there and dived to check it out. If he’d got it wrong you could either have difficulty getting her down at all, or she might plummet down and hit the bottom. At the top end of the Great Pass where you’d be making the dive there were only about seventeen fathoms of water – say a hundred feet or so.
Stern way had come off her and she was beginning to move ahead, her fore-casing swinging to point southwest. Mitcheson said: ‘Midships. Stop starboard. In both engine-clutches.’
Electric motors were used for close manoeuvring, since the diesels couldn’t be put astern, but being out in the clear now he was preparing to change over to main engines. He added: ‘Steer two-one-oh.’ Glancing back at the depot ship then, up at the shelter-deck where a small group of other submarine C.O.s had gathered to see him off. Individuals were barely recognizable in the worsening light, but he lifted his cap and waved it, saw answering waves and heard a shout of ‘—luck, Mitch!’
Luck was a commodity one certainly did need. Granted that the basic essentials were professional skills, judgement and experience, you needed your ration of luck too. In recent months it had run out on far too many good men and fine ship’s companies. Neither skill nor experience were sure defences against – for instance – a drifting mine in a black night on the surface, or a new field of them laid in an area which only days before had been clear. There were other hazards than mines, of course, but it was generally assumed that mines would have accounted for most of the recent losses.
‘Engine clutches in, sir. Ship’s head two-one-oh…’
In daylight hours at about this stage there’d have been a ritual exchange of salutes, ship to ship, the shrill of a Bosun’s Call from the submarine’s bridge answered by the mellow tones of a bugle from that high quarterdeck. But it was past sunset, ensigns had been lowered all over the huge expanse of harbour, and after sunset one didn’t pipe. He’d ordered: ‘Half ahead together. Three hundred revolutions’ – revs for ten knots, roughly – and the signalman, Tremlett – known to his mates as Jumbo – passed the order down. Forbes had moved to the after end of the bridge, where it opened into the cage-like structure that housed the Oerlikon gun; he was leaning over, checking on what the casing party was doing back aft there. The engine order meanwhile was repeated from below and you heard the clash of the telegraphs, the sound coming up through the conning-tower and the open hatch here at your feet, and a second later the diesels spluttered and rumbled into life. A haze of exhaust thickened the dusk astern for a moment or two, then dissipated, the stench of it fading too as the submarine began to forge ahead.
Mitcheson had his glasses up, checking on his route out across this broad acreage of slightly choppy, darkening water. Some destroyers were due to enter at about this time, but there was no sign of them yet; there was nothing on the move, in fact, except one of the battle-wagons’ picket-boats cutting a vividly white wake out from behind the coaling arm, and a couple of liberty-boats on their way in to the Arsenal Basin. A signal-lamp was still flashing some almost book-length message from one of the big ships’ foretops: a morse exercise for midshipmen, probably. And anchor lights had been switched on, on the moored and anchored ships, the lights’ reflections sparkling on the jumpy surface.
Spartan’s engines rumbling steadily now, driving her to pass about midway between the coaling quay and – off to starboard there – the inner breakwater where the spud-run trawlers were moored. The ‘spud-run’ was the colloquial term for the inshore supply operation to Tobruk, where an 8th Army garrison was surrounded and besieged by Germans. Trawlers and destroyers ran that gauntlet every night, week in and week out, the destroyers making their own fast trips mostly in darkness with deck-cargoes of stores and ammunition, and the trawlers escorting slow convoys of small steamers, lighters in tow of tugs, and so forth – and subject to air attack every minute, every mile. To submarine attack as well, of course, but the main threat along that desert coast was from the air. Might not be for much longer – touch wood: the ‘buzz’ was that General Auchinleck was preparing to launch a new offensive that would roll the Afrika Korps back over their now very stretched lines of communication.
Please God. Because meanwhile, Malta’s survival was in the balance, with no realistic hope of being able to run any convoys through from this end while all the desert airfields – as well as those in Crete – were in Axis hands.
In the past week a convoy had got into Valletta from the other end, though. Cunningham had taken his fleet to sea from here as a diversion - or intimidation, in its effect on the Italians – while no less than twelve merchant ships under powerful naval escort had been run through from Gibraltar. So for a month or so anyway the Maltese wouldn’t starve or run out of ammunition. But – there again: if Spain came in, and Gib had to be evacuated…
The casing party were coming up. Climbing over from the fixed rungs on the outside of the bridge and dropping into the hatch with practised ease, but McKendrick – Sub-Lieutenant, R.N., torpedo and gunnery officer and in charge of the casing when leaving or entering harbour – was still down there, and so was the second coxswain, a leading seaman by name of Lockwood, making their final checks. The ‘casing’ was the perforated steel deck extending fore and aft above the more or less cylindrical pressure-hull; it was no more than a kind of staging which filled with water when the boat was dived, but there were various apertures in it, mainly for stowage of ropes and wires, and it was essential that they should be properly shut and the bolts driven securely home. You didn’t in fact take ropes or wires to sea on patrol, in case depthcharging shook them loose so they’d then wrap themselves round the boat’s propellers; but there was anchor gear as well, up on that pointed bow, and just one loose link of cable that might rattle and be heard on an enemy’s hydrophones could be enough to finish you, when you were being hunted.
The coaling quay was abeam to port now, cranes and derricks standing like prehistoric monsters in the gloom. And the dark solidity lying off the extremity of its curved arm was the battleship Valiant. Of her sister-ship Queen Elizabeth – Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham’s flagship – all that was visible from here was superstructure, her fighting-top, above that stone-and-concrete barrier. QE was at the Gabbari berth, with a floating gangway connecting her to the shore, and enclosed – as was Valiant – in her own anti-torpedo nets.
Mitcheson stooped to the voicepipe. ‘Come five degrees to port.’
‘Five degrees to port, sir. Two-oh-five.’
To pass well clear of Valiant and also of Admiral Vian’s cruisers - Naiad, Galatea, Euryalus, the Australian Hobart… Beyond which – half a mile out to starboard, in line from here with the angle in the outer breakwater like the crook of an arm enclosing them – lay the demilitarized French ships. The old battleship Lorraine – on her own, in deeper water – three cruisers including the flagship Duquesne, a handful of destroyers. They’d landed their oil-fuel, ammunition, torpedo warheads and the breechblocks of their guns, and about seventy per cent of their crews had been shipped home to France.
Three thousand yards to go, roughly, to the entrance. Or rather, exit – where by this time they’d be opening the boom, the boom-gate vessel dragging the nets aside to let Spartan out. To let her sneak out… It could feel like that, if you opened your imagination to it. Slipping the leash, stealing out into the darkness – utterly alone, and secret…
Half the fascination, probably. Certainly had been, initially. For himself, anyway, and most likely had been for others too. But you didn’t talk about it. Anyway you became inured, accustomed to the life and to that sense of loneliness; you forgot the tingling of
excitement, the inner thrill that drew you into it in the first place.
Until something happened to remind you: introspection setting in, in consequence. Not that she knew a damn thing about it…
‘Casing secured, sir.’
He glanced round, saw McKendrick – and Leading Seaman Lockwood, whom McKendrick would have sent up ahead of him, at this moment lowering himself into the hatch, the light from below catching a glint in those wide-spaced eyes as they met and momentarily held Mitcheson’s. Then he’d gone down into the tower: a thickset, slow-moving man in his late-twenties, slow-speaking too when he spoke at all. His wife, baby son and the girl’s mother had been killed in one of the raids on Devonport, earlier in the year. Mitcheson asked McKendrick, ‘What did we decide about the Vickers ammo, Sub?’
‘One round in five’s tracer and one incendiary, other three armour-piercing. All the pans are loaded that way, sir.’
He nodded, turning back. ‘Fine.’
Forbes asked him, ‘Fall out harbour stations, sir?’
Reminded, he stooped to the voicepipe. ‘Fall out harbour stations. Patrol Routine. Three-six-oh revolutions.’ Then to Forbes, ‘Put a charge on after the trim dive, Number One. If we need it. Whose watch’ll this be?’
‘Teasdale’s, sir. I’ll send him up.’
Johnny Teasdale, Sub-Lieutenant R.N.V.R., was navigating officer – as well as a grandson of the nationally famous company Teasdale’s Boots and Shoes of Northampton. Spartan beginning to lunge a bit to the swell now, her long forepart slamming into the white-streaked humps of black water, spray flying to leeward like lace while under this perforated platform foam sluiced white and seething over the curve of pressure-hull. Sounds and images all so familiar that one’s feeling was of getting back to normal – at least, to the semblance of normality that one knew best. And even a bit more than that. It was odd, really – if you stopped to think about it – that one should be acutely aware of leaving her back there, but at the same time find satisfaction in getting back to sea.
What one was for, he supposed. And a job one was moderately good at, therefore found satisfaction in. Part of it, too, was a sense of anticipation – excitement, even: a reflection perhaps of that gleam he’d seen in Lockwood’s eyes.
The trim dive – after leaving the Great Pass, the channel where minesweepers would have been at work this afternoon – went off well enough, and while they were down there in peace and quiet at forty feet Mitcheson used the Tannoy broadcast system to explain the purpose of the patrol. Then he surfaced the boat, and Leading Cook Hughes heated the evening meal, a concoction which he called Irish Stew. Hughes often served this on the first night at sea, having prepared it in harbour, and whenever he did so a Leading Stoker by the name of Pat O’Dare was asked how many Irishmen he reckoned had gone into it.
One of the rituals…
Another – in the wardroom – was the dice game that followed supper. The hour or two after the evening meal was always a good time, on patrol especially when you’d been dived all day and at last with the hatch open could smoke again, after the long day’s abstinence. In the wardroom, grouped around the square table in the cupboard-like space which was enclosed on three sides by bunks and on the fourth by the passage which ran fore-and-aft right through the boat, you played poker-dice – cards sometimes, but mainly dice, most frequently Liars, or for a change some variety like double Cameroon – and chatted, talking a certain amount of shop but ranging over all kinds of other subjects too. Conversations tended to come back to the war, of course; life was the war, lives were ruled as well as threatened by it. By and large, the threats to others loomed larger than those to oneself. To families at home – the bombing, for instance – although the massed attacks on London seemed to have been abandoned now, thank God. There’d been one last, frightful night of it back in May – the 10th of the month, Mitcheson remembered – before the Luftwaffe’s main strength had been shifted east for the attack on Russia. But on that night –10 May – the Germans had set 700 acres of London on fire and killed more people than had died in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Fifteen hundred dead, 2000 injured – in one night… Spartan had been with the 8th Flotilla at that time, and in the interval between hearing the broadcast news of it and at last getting Elizabeth’s letter assuring him that she was all right, Mitcheson hadn’t slept much. She was an M.T.C. driver – Mechanized Transport Corps – driving brasshats and other VIPs to and from the War Office, Admiralty, Air Ministry, 10 Downing Street, the various regional commands, and so forth. He’d felt certain that she’d have been in the thick of that inferno; and she’d anticipated as much, had written – on the morning of the 11th, a hurriedly scrawled air-letter form:
Ned my darling, I know you’ll have been biting your nails down to their quicks – and no doubt knocking back the gin…
Elizabeth, he thought. What the hell to do…
Tell her?
But ‘making a clean breast of it’, as the saying went – mightn’t it be more self-indulgent than forthright or honourable? At least partly a way of getting it off one’s conscience by hurting her?
The dicing and chatting period was over now, and Mitcheson was alone with the Night Order book on the table in front of him. The main lights had been switched off, soft red ones glowing in their place – for the sake of bridge watchkeepers’ night vision, so you weren’t completely blind when you went up top. Barney Forbes was up there now, McKendrick and Teasdale were flat out in their bunks, and Chief-Lieutenant (E.) Matthew Bennett R.N. – had gone aft to tuck his engines up for the night, or to smoke a final pipe while yarning with whichever of the artificers was on watch. Matt Bennett was an Old Etonian graduate of the naval engineering college at Keyham, and a very competent, conscientious engineer. Spartan rolling and jolting as she drove westward, on a track roughly parallel to the line of the desert coast; it was noisy in her dimly lit, white-enamelled interior, cold too with the night air being sucked down through the hatch into the steel lungs of those steadily pounding diesels. He’d ordered a speed increase from 360 to 380 revolutions, to be sure of making good at least twelve knots; if there was much enemy ‘air’ around tomorrow, forcing one to make some of the passage dived – dived progress being very much slower, on electric motors instead of diesels – well, it was better to be ahead of schedule than behind it, at this stage.
He glanced down at the Night Order book, checking on what he’d written under the date-heading 14 September.
Course 283, 380 revolutions to make good 12½ knots, running charge starboard.
Our destination is the Gulf of Bomba, ETA off the gulf 0400/16th.
Call me BEFORE any emergency arises.
Call me at 0530.
His officers knew very well that he’d much rather be called to the bridge unnecessarily fifty times a night than not called on the one occasion when he should be. And the shake at 0530 was in order to dive the boat before dawn, staying down for an hour or so while the light grew. It was a precaution against being caught against a brightening horizon by some Messerschmitt or Heinkel screaming invisibly out of the tricky western darkness – or even by some trigger-happy Hurricane or Spitfire. Tonight, the primary threat would be of submarine attack – Italian or German, there were a lot of U-boats in the Med at this stage – but the night was moonless, pitch black, too dark to make a zigzag necessary. That particular threat was mutual, in any case; Spartan would be at least as quick on the draw as any Kraut.
‘Burning midnight oil, sir?’
Bennett, back from his visit to the engine-room. Thin-faced, with a mop of brown hair and rather pale eyes deepset under a bulge of forehead. Pipe still going… He was twenty-six: the closest in age in this wardroom to Mitcheson, who was thirty-one. Mitcheson asked him – tipping a cigarette out of the tin and putting a light to it – ‘Donkeys not complaining yet, Chief?’
‘Not as yet, sir.’ Bennett tapped the table for luck. ‘Donkeys’ were the engines. ‘We did quite a bit of work on ’em, this t
ime in.’
‘I know you did.’
He’d seen the litter of dismembered diesel parts, a week or so ago. Not that he spent much time on board, during the harbour periods. There was no reason to: his officers knew their jobs, and he left them to get on with them. Of course there was always a certain amount for a skipper to attend to – paperwork, for instance, and other administrative chores including the formal interviews with ‘requestmen’ and defaulters. Defaulters were mercifully few, in this ship’s company. Those who were hauled up before him were almost invariably cases of drunkenness or brawling ashore, and nine times out of ten it would involve one or more of a small number of individuals who were prone to that sort of thing. They’d be picked up by the naval patrol and delivered on board the depot ship together with a report that had to be investigated, punishment administered according to ‘Scale’ – penalties as laid down in King’s Regulations and Admiralty Instructions. So many days’ leave stopped, so many days’ pay… But by and large one’s time in harbour was one’s own.
And Lucia would be at a bit of a loose end, in the next two or three weeks.
Or would she?
The thought grated. But she’d had a very full social life, he knew, before he’d come into it. Dozens of friends, at least half of whom were male – and a lot closer to her own type and background than he was. Which might be to his own advantage, of course – the appeal of novelty, the very fact he wasn’t French, Greek or Egyptian – or even Italian, for God’s sake. But she still wouldn’t be sitting at home, he guessed, on these long evenings.
Frowning, glancing through a haze of cigarette-smoke at the engineer and wondering whether he – Bennett – knew about Lucia. Or rather, how much he and the others knew. There wasn’t a doubt that they’d know of her existence, that there was some girl with whom he was tied up. Some bint, was the word they’d use. Pigeon-Arabic, Middle East forces’ vernacular: ‘Shufti the skipper’s bint, old boy…’ They’d know of her first because a submarine flotilla was a small, tight-knit community in which everyone knew everyone else and the C.O.s were the stars, therefore objects of special interest; second because it wouldn’t have escaped them that he’d been spending far more of the days and nights ashore than he ever had before; and third – well, there’d been one ‘sighting’ of which he was aware, and might well have been others. The one he knew about had occurred a week or so ago when he and Lucia had been getting out of a gharry outside a nightclub called the Monseigneur, and young Teasdale had been passing with friends at that moment. Teasdale had seen Lucia first, and stared: then he’d seen who she was with, and his mouth had still been half-open as he snapped off a salute.
Love For An Enemy Page 3
