by David Black
No mention of ‘Dad’. Harry knew better than to pry. ‘Is she proud of you, Red, your mum?’
Cross smiled, ‘Oh yes, sir. Says I’m making something of myself, sir. Unlike me dad ever did.’ Then he frowned and said no more.
‘Well, what would your bloody mum say, if she knew what you were getting up to now?’
‘She’d be ashamed of me, sir,’ and suddenly Cross looked very young and in despair.
‘Well, I won’t tell her, Red.’
Cross looked up, and Harry wondered whether he was going to start crying. ‘Thank you, sir,’ said the lad, from deep in the slough of despond.
‘Something’s making you like this, lad,’ said Harry after leaving a long minute and time for them both to have a slug of their coffees and rum. ‘You really should tell me what it is. I want to know. I’m not just coming it the “concerned officer”, honest, Cross. I’m not.’
Cross, hunched now, looked at him and sighed, making his decision.
‘When I’m at sea, sir. Doing my job. I’m all right. But I get onshore… I been out here in the Med two years now. No home leave. Should’ve been home by now, but I got sick… sand fly fever… stuck in Bighi when my last boat went home, left without me.’ He paused as if considering the enormity of the injustice of it all. ‘…Did a stint as spare crew then Scourge… and there’s no sign of us goin’ home anytime soon, is there, sir.’ He paused again. It wasn’t a question he’d just asked, more an acceptance of reality. ‘It’s the war. It just seems to go on and on, sir. When we was on Malta through the bombing, sir, it was like if we could just get through all that, we’d be okay. Well… we did. But it’s not okay. Nuthin’s changed! It’s all still going on… ’cept everythin’s bigger now… bigger and more… on and on. And I’m just wee Billy Cross… a name on a ration bill somewhere… the only thing says I’m still alive… an inky scrawl’s all that’s between me and nuthin’. The bloody war! Sometimes, I wonder if I’m ever going to see home again. My mum. Family. Sometimes, I can’t even remember our street… what it looks like… it just all gets on top of me, sir. And I go… ah, what the fuck… Oh God! Sorry, sir…’
‘Red,’ said Harry, raising his mug to touch Cross’s. ‘If it’s any consolation, I know exactly how you feel.’
*
Harry had Farrar, Harding and Ainsworth round the wardroom table with Reynolds and Hibbert for a quick orders meeting before getting the two soldiers and their radio ashore.
‘Sorry we’re going to be late, Sergeant Reynolds,’ Harry said. ‘It was the gale. It threw us. How badly is it going to bugger up the op?’
‘Beg your pardon, sir?’ said a puzzled Reynolds, looking even more the dapper grocer than usual.
‘Your rendezvous deadline with the partisans,’ said Harry, now puzzled himself. ‘We’re going to be over thirty hours late at last calculation.’
‘I wasn’t told anything about a deadline, sir,’ he replied, looking at Hibbert sitting next to him, the wiry little corporal’s face wreathed in his usual inane grin. ‘Our briefing officer from Cairo, Major Curley, just said for George here to paddle ashore as soon as, after we arrive, and establish contact. He speaks a bit of Serbo-Croat, his mum coming from that way, sir. They are expecting us but only when we get there.’
Hibbert nodded his assent vigorously.
Harry looked cross. So what was all that guff Shrimp had told him about having to get there on time, regardless? ‘Get to sea, Mr Gilmour! There’s no time to lose! The mission depends on it!’ That guff.
Until it dawned on him that Shrimp had only wanted him out of the way, fast. Just as it dawned on him why. If Scourge was halfway up the Adriatic on ops, no amount of squealing from the Bonny Boy was going to bring him back again anytime soon. He was a good man, Shrimp Simpson, always had your back.
‘Oh, well I must’ve got it all arse-to-tit,’ said Harry, back smiling again. ‘So, Corporal Hibbert. We wait until nightfall to enter the bay, get you and your folbot up onto the casing, and off you go. If you’d speak to Number One to arrange rendezvous times for you coming back… tomorrow night, I take it? Yes?’
‘Yessir! Definitely, sir,’ said a still grinning, still nodding Hibbert. Then, as if it were a witty, bon mot afterthought, ‘…Aye, aye, sir!’ And with that he sat back, immensely pleased with himself.
Dear God thought Harry, but he smiled too.
After it was over, the men all got up, bent over by the curve of the hull above their heads and bumped and jostled their way for’ard along the cramped gangway. Harry gestured for Harding to stay a minute. He wanted to talk about Cross.
‘Cross,’ said Harry, once Harding had shuffled back into the tight space behind the wardroom table, his face grinning back at him through the insipid light, not a care in the world. ‘He’s been trouble lately,’ Harry went on. ‘But I don’t think he’s a complete King’s bad bargain. So, I’m not going to hand him over to the depot ship.’
‘No, sir,’ said Harding, non-committal. He was curious to see where this was going.
‘He is, after all, one of us,’ said Harry, letting the thought hang there for a moment. ‘And if it’s something that’s getting to him, and God knows he’s not the most imaginative of our souls, then we should be helping him. And asking how many others are starting to fray at the edges too?’
Harding shrugged, ‘Me, for one, sir. I’m frayed all the time. Frayed promotion will never come. Frayed Windass will burn the ham…’
‘Shut up, Miles. I’m being serious. I was thinking about something those Eighth Army chaps told us about Monty. About how he’d go about chatting to ordinary soldiers then write a letter to their people back home… show the high command cared… cheer everybody up. I think I’m going to write to Cross’s folks. Can you think of any others I should write to?’
As Harry was finishing, McCready came sliding into the banquette, balancing a mug of coffee and a huge wedge of toasted sandwich filled with grilled sardines. ‘Would you write to my mum too, sir?’ said McCready, not noticing the scowl on Harry’s face. Captain or not, Harry wasn’t sure where stood in telling the young sub to ‘piss off, this is a private conversation!’ In the Andrew proper, Harry, as captain, would only have been sitting there at the mess president’s invitation. A guest. But this being the trade, he wasn’t sure what the wardroom etiquette was on a boat.
Harding headed him off by addressing McCready instead, in louche tones, as the young sub bit into his wedge, ‘You have a mum, Tom? Well, bugger me! Who’d’ve thunk it! I somehow never saw you as having a mum. I’ve always seen you more as a… sort of… naturally occurring phenomenon really… an experiment… something they’d cultivated in the greenhouses at the back of Britannia… that hadn’t quite worked…’
‘I thought that was you, Vasco,’ chomped McCready through an overstuffed mouth.
‘Your captain has asked you a question,’ said Harry, exasperated.
‘No, sir,’ said Harding.
‘No, sir, what?’ said Harry.
‘No letters,’ said Harding. ‘For a start, you’re not a general. And, if you write to one family, you have to write to all of them. Which you don’t have the time for. And anyway, it just isn’t done. The only time you’re supposed to write to families is if somebody’s dead. And that’s only to say “sorry” and “can you send another one”. There is a war on, sir.’
Harding watched as Harry considered this, which was easy to do, considering there was barely three feet between their faces in the tight little space, each of them looking as if they might be already dead and already embalmed, bathed as they were in the anaemic yellow wash from dinky little wall fittings and their tasselled-fringed floral shades. For a moment, he felt as if he was looking at a fellow passenger in a crowded compartment on the Brighton Belle, stuck in a tunnel and fretting over a Times’ crossword clue.
‘Crew morale,’ he heard Harry say under his breath. ‘I’ve got to do something about crew morale…’
Five
>
Harry, on the bridge, was absently aware of the crew on the fore-casing, hauling Cpl Hibbert’s folbot aboard. The cheery little commando had gone ashore last night, and right on plan, he’d turned up again tonight. Recognition signals had been exchanged, and here he was. Harding was down there dealing with him, another shadowy figure in the scant wash – from a high, waxing quarter moon – among the little mob of sailors, grunting and muttering.
Harry wasn’t paying attention; still lost in thought. He’d been remembering HMS P268, his first real command; the new-build S-class he’d been appointed to back in Greenock all those months ago; the one that had never made it out the fitting-out dry dock. All bare steel and unconnected cable runs and the flash of welders’ torches and Mr Donaldson, the ironworks manager who never got tetchy or snappy and met every new problem with the merest furrowing of his brow. A short man with a crescent of grey hair under his battered soft hat, economical of speech and profligate in his smoking habits, in his stained charcoal three-piece suit, a knotted bow tie like Churchill and stout black boots that looked like they’d been built on the Clyde too.
How he’d theatrically rise from whatever task he’d been involved in, to pause and address whatever harassing niggle Harry had come up with now. Patient to a fault, but not once failing to make it plain that Harry, the impatient new captain, was doing nothing more than getting in the way. Everything was coming together from scratch, and he, Mr Donaldson, having done it many times before, was best placed to know the order in which to do it, so could he please let him get on with his job.
And Harry, his regular forays from his dockside shack, sometimes armed with rolled-up plans, determined to be master of the challenges ahead. He’d been smiling to himself earlier, remembering the charge-hand electrician they’d called ‘Haile Selassie’ because of his beard and the fact that he always wore a beret – another pugnacious bantam, with milk-bottle-bottom glasses.
Harry had caught him on board sitting on a bucket with a roll-up cigarette hanging from his bottom lip; Harry was too new on the scene to know there was always a cigarette hanging from his lip. This particular one, however, had been unlit. Harry hadn’t noticed that. All he had seen was ‘Haile’, tool bag at his feet and wedged comfortably over the space where the Asdic dome was going to sit, reading a copy of the Daily Worker.
The din on board had been tremendous; drilling, caulkers hammering, men working with steel. Harry remembered shouting at him, more to be heard above the din than in anger. But he was angry. Time was getting on, the boat was falling behind and this son of toil was sitting on his arse perusing communist propaganda!
‘…and you know quite well that smoking is completely forbidden on board! Anywhere!’ had been Harry’s final accusatory flourish.
‘Aye, ah do,’ ‘Haile’ had said. His expression half puzzled, half curious.
‘You’ve got a cigarette in your mouth!’ Harry had yelled.
‘Aye,’ ‘Haile’ had replied. ‘And ah’ve got a hole in ma arse, but that doesn’t mean Ah’m’ a flowerpot.’
Harry had found Mr Donaldson in the wooden dockside electrical store, where there was a sloping desk to lay out plans, and he had immediately begun to rail at him about communist loafers, slipping schedules and the downright insolence of his workers towards Albion’s stout, fighting tars. Harry on Scourge’s bridge, looking back on that afternoon, reflected on how it was just the sort of guff you’d expect from an overwrought new skipper with a new toy to play with and smirked at his own… youth?
Mr Donaldson, having drawn himself up from the plan he’d been studying, his face as mobile as one of those Easter Island statues, stood patiently waiting until Harry’s outrage petered out. Then he’d said simply, ‘He was keeping out the way, Mr Gilmour. Not loafing.’
‘Keeping out the way of hard work!’ Harry had barked.
‘They’re fitting your torpedo tubes, Mr Gilmour. Big, ungainly and prodigious heavy buggers they are too. There’ll have been a squad of platers and a craneman lowering each one into what is a very confined space… as I’m sure you know,’ said Mr Donaldson. Then he’d paused as if to consider the full depth of ignorance confronting him. There’d been a sigh, and only then had he begun his exposition, ‘Once each tube is in, a welder goes down to tack it in place, so that your Mr “Selassie” can go in after him and start on the wiring… and when he’s done a bit, he comes out and waits until the plumber goes in and fits tubing, and when the plumber’s done, he goes back and starts wiring the next bit. You found him waiting.’
Harry had remembered frowning gravely, to cover feeling like a gauche schoolboy having to have the subtlety of some great work of art explained to him… in front of the girls.
‘Not a bad joke, though, eh?’ Mr Donaldson had added with a wry grin. ‘He’s a helluva man for the wee witty asides, is “Haile”.’
It was a funny old game, this command business. You’d have thought command was all about imposing your will. But it wasn’t. As old ‘Haile’ had demonstrated. Sometimes, when you sought to impose, you only ended up making a prat of yourself. Sometimes, things had to take their course. It was the knowing when to do what that was the art. That old, diminutive Irishman who’d been his first cox’n on P268 had taught him that with their first draft of sailors. A raggedy bunch, tumbling off the back of a three-tonner on the dock on a drizzly afternoon, all flapping navy blue trench coats and huge, bulging, white kit bags and caps crammed on at all angles. God knows why they’d been dumped on the dock, there was no room for them on a submarine still fitting out. Someone was going to have to march them back out again and up to that school that had been requisitioned as a temporary barracks.
What was his name again? That cox’n. An older man, short, jolly face like Staff Sgt Reynolds. Doyle? Dunphy? A country boy long ago, Harry’d guessed, who’d obviously decided potato picking wasn’t for him and upped and took himself off to see the world instead.
‘There’s a few bad deals in that lot,’ he’d confided in Harry in that quiet, conspiratorial way he’d always had with him, as if he’d been wanting to tap his nose and wink at you as he passed on his wisdom, except you didn’t do that with an officer. Harry had expected him to say he’d already drawn up a work schedule crammed with drill and yard duties to bring them all into line.
‘Cut ’em all a twenty-four-hour pass, sorr,’ he’d said. ‘Let them all go off and get pished. Then we’ll wait and see who comes back.’
Harry remembered turning on him, slack-jawed with shock and incredulity, ‘What? I need a crew that’s ready to go to sea in less than ten days, cox’n. That can take this boat on trials. Not some bloody rabble that only turns to when it feels like it!’
‘Oh, I agree sorr. But sorr. With all due respect. You don’t have the time to work through them all making sure each one of them is going clap on and pull with the rest, sorr. There’s at least three I know I don’t want on my… on your boat, sorr. ’Cos I can see they don’t want to be here either. Come six a.m. tomorrow, they won’t be present. So we lets the shore patrol take care of them, sorr. Quickest way, sorr.’
It was a lesson on how to build a crew. If you’ve got rotten apples, let them chuck themselves. The ones who remain are always glad to see them go anyway, glad they don’t have to carry them and glad they don’t have to start the commission having to stand-to while you drag the boat through a tedious round of shouting and charges. Not when you can start with a smile and a wink instead.
Yes, Doyle – or was it Dunphy? – had taught him that all right, the benefits of stepping back, letting them that know get on with the job. You could see the logic if you only stopped to look. Because your subordinate officers also needed to assert, if not impose, their authority too. And as captain, you had to let them and make sure the crew saw you do it. They needed to know you had confidence if they were to have confidence too. Also, it opened out a bit of distance between you and the men, and you needed that. Your very remoteness made your authority believable. B
ecause if the crew really got to know you, they’d probably burst out laughing.
Easier to do when you all started off together though, Harry thought. But that Jerry bomb going right through the as yet unborn P268’s empty motor room and detonating against the concrete bottom of the dry dock right under her had peeled off her saddle tanks like the segments of an orange, and broke her back. She’d gone in a flash from a brand new submarine, waiting to make her first dive, to a random collection of scrap. Unsavable. There’d be no starting off all together for the captain and the crew of the P268.
And now there was this crew, the one Harry had inherited. The Scourges. They’d already done their growing together long before he’d arrived. Even so, he’d thought he’d been doing okay with them. But how could he know? He hadn’t been through what they had together. And they’d been out here in the Med a long time.
Back in the Lazaretto wardroom, the general feeling was a boat was good for a year. No more. That was as long as you could expect before her operational efficiency began to fall off… and her luck to run out. Scourge had been out here a bit longer than a year now. Other boats had been out longer, but then most of them had ended up posted overdue, presumed lost.
Those had been Harry’s thoughts since his talk with Cross.
What was his crew thinking now? About the fiasco over their almost sinking the ‘safe passage’ ship off Vichy and all the scuttlebutt about how the Captain S had had it in for their skipper? Had it started more of them – or even all of them – brooding? Wondering if this new boy would ever get them all home?
And what about himself?
The worry that maybe he’d stepped back too far.
He was lost in this reverie when Staff Sgt Reynolds came clambering back up the conning tower ladder, his face all blacked up. He should’ve been down there helping load parts of his radio set into Hibbert’s folbot and getting into his own. That had been the plan. Hibbert coming back meant the rendezvous had been made. Now all that was left to do was to get him and Reynolds ashore, and the link-up with the partisans was all sewn up. Scourge could get back out to sea and on with the job of sinking enemy shipping.
