‘Very pleased you have come,’ he said, his voice a little wheezy. ‘Very pleased. You’ve been to sea yourself, haven’t you?’
‘I have, yes, sir.’
‘Don’t call me “sir”, there’s no need; besides, you’re a captain yourself, aren’t you?’
‘I’ve been a shipmaster, yes, but not a naval officer, and I’ve found some naval officers object to the use of the title, so since leaving the sea I only use it rarely.’
‘Huh. There are some damned fools in the navy. If you’ve been in command you’ve borne the burden. I’m a master mariner myself,’ he said as, now leaning upon Charlotte’s arm, he tottered round the arm of a large settee and fell back into it. ‘Do sit down,’ he offered, waving me to an adjacent chair. ‘You’d better call me John,’ he added.
‘I’m Richard,’ I replied awkwardly.
‘I know, it’s on your book.’ He held out a hand and looked up at the hovering Charlotte. ‘Pass it over, would you, m’dear? It’s on the bookshelf there.’
I watched him take the familiar red-and-silver book, a paperback edition by John Murray, the red for blood and slaughter, the silver for the ice and cold of the Arctic. Carefully his ancient fingers turned the pages.
With the light on the side of his face I could see him properly now. The skin was stretched tightly over the skull and the grey eyes were rheumy behind magnifying lenses. But he wore a shirt and I recognised the neat club tie under his dark-green cardigan. His pair of fawn trousers were immaculate and his tanned shoes bright with polish. He was clean-shaven and clearly he or Charlotte had taken some pains over his appearance.
‘Tea or coffee?’ she asked.
‘Er, coffee please,’ I replied, distracted from my scrutiny of her father.
‘Yes,’ he said slowly as he continued to search through the pages, ‘I was a master mariner before I joined the Royal Navy, but I only made commander,’ he looked up and gave me a disarmingly charming and rueful grin. ‘I didn’t get up to very much after PQ17.’
‘Then you were involved with PQ17?’ I said, though what I wanted to say was ‘I’ve never seen your name or any reference to you in any document or account that I have read about that disastrous event,’ but I held my tongue.
There was a silence and then he found what he was looking for in the book and gave me his full attention.
Nodding, he said, ‘Yes, I was. I was at the heart of it…’
‘At the Admiralty?’ I asked. I had interviewed people who had been at the Admiralty that fateful day and had no knowledge of this old boy’s presence.
He shook his head. ‘No, I was in the Arctic…’ he paused and I waited for more. Then he said, tapping the book, ‘this is a very fair account but you have to conclude that Sir Dudley Pound acted very foolishly, however you try and mitigate things.’ I nodded. ‘All that stuff about his arthritic hip and his lack of sleep, the stories Alanbrooke told of him being like a dead parrot and falling asleep at the Chiefs of Staff meetings and then the diagnosis of the brain tumour and his death on Trafalgar Day a year later…’
I held my tongue and waited as he drew breath before resuming.
‘You know he went into Churchill’s bedroom when they were both in Washington and told the Prime Minister he couldn’t go on?’ I muttered that I had heard the story. ‘And you know Churchill said in his History of the Second World War that he knew nothing of the background to Pound’s decision to scatter the convoy?’ Again I muttered that I was familiar with the passage in The Hinge of Fate, the fourth volume of Churchill’s monumental history. ‘Winston was lying, of course, he knew all about it.’
‘I did know that,’ I interrupted, still irked by my summons and wondering where all this was getting us, ‘and I said so in my book…’
‘Oh yes, you said Churchill dissembled, but you did not say why, because you did not know why.’
‘And you do?’ Aware that my tone had been challenging and rude, I added quickly, ‘I mean, you know why Pound ordered the convoy scattered? That there was a reason, a real, justifiable reason?’ I must have sounded quite incredulous at this point, and I think it was at this instant that I forsook my peevishness and felt the first tug of enthusiasm, because the old fellow leaned forward and fixed me with those grey eyes in the same way his daughter had in the hall outside a few minutes earlier. This was the cusp of our encounter.
After it everything changed.
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Why d’you think I’ve asked you to come and see me?’
At this point Charlotte arrived with the coffee and there were a few moments as we sorted out cups, saucers, sugar bowls, teaspoons and the milk jug. When we were settled she announced she would leave us alone and would be in the garden if we wanted anything. She announced that she would bring some sandwiches in an hour, if that would be all right. I thanked her and turned again to her father. I remember at this point all my feelings of irritation had certainly vanished. I was not in doubt that what the old man had to tell me was important, nor did I care that it nullified two chapters of my book. I was only conscious, with a thrill, that I was glad I had come and that I was in a unique position to hear an historical and official secret. I was quite unprepared for the fantastical story I was about to hear.
‘Like the boys and girls at Bletchley Park,’ he said, ‘I was afterwards told to keep my trap shut, firmly and for ever, but the secret about Ultra is well known now and I am very close to my end. Perhaps I should not have decided to break my imposed silence now had I not received a copy of your book for my birthday, but I don’t think any of the secrecy matters any more and it is a pity that the truth should be lost.’ I remained utterly silent as he sucked coffee and then, with a trembling rattle, put the cup carefully back on the saucer on the little table Charlotte had set before him. Then he looked directly at me and I caught something of the man he had once been, and of the injustice I had done him as he said, ‘You say in your book that the tragedy of PQ17 was that not one man-of-war was lost in the defence of the merchant ships. That’s not true. My ship was lost and I was the sole survivor.’
‘What ship was that then?’ I asked, and I remember that my mouth was dry.
He seemed to gather himself for a great effort, moving his shoulders and drawing himself up a little in his chair. I watched him swallow, his Adam’s apple bobbing under the thin skin of his neck. ‘I had better start at the beginning.’
* * *
I did stay the night and most of the next day. A week after I had left, while I was already busy reworking my narrative from the notes I had made, I received a second telephone call from Charlotte.
‘I thought you should know,’ she said, and I think I already knew what she was going to tell me, ‘my father died peacefully in his sleep last night.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, genuinely moved.
‘He forbade me from placing any notice in the papers,’ she went on, and then added after a brief pause, ‘You are going to tell his story, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I replied.
Hamburg
August 1939
Had he known it at the time, John Clark’s war started a few days earlier than history’s convention records. He was not alone, for the world had been sliding towards a second cataclysm since the vindictive terms of the armistice ending the First World War extracted punitive terms from the German nation. The Chinese had been fighting the Japanese for several years and the first Nazi pogroms against the German Jews had already split many families, sending hundreds into exile. But for people like John Clark, who was better known to his contemporaries as Jack, the busy occupations of daily life excluded any real appreciation of the palpable movements of history, still less of the ineluctable quality of their consequences.
On that fine late summer morning the sun rose over the great maritime city of Hamburg in a blazing orb, burning off a slight mist that lay over the turbid waters of the River Elbe. It caught the greened copper spire of St Michael’s great church and, just
as its first tentative light had released the song of birds a few hours earlier, now it initiated the excruciating din of the hammers of a hundred riveters as they commenced another day’s work in the city’s busy shipyards. To the uninitiated, few places on earth can convey such an impression of hellish disorganisation as a shipyard in full production. The cacophony of the riveters is but a part of the dislocating horror of such places. That which Clark entered that morning was no exception. Beyond the offices from which the construction of a dozen vessels was being simultaneously planned and overseen, lay the huge ‘shops’ and rolling mills which processed the steel plates and joists brought from the stockyards. With a skill equal to true artistry these inanimate grey rectangles assumed graceful curves which were then despatched towards the building ways that sloped down to the great river. Here they were united to a thousand similarly treated plates and grew into the elegant lines of unlaunched hulls which towered above the concrete slips, each one surrounded by scaffolding and staging. The scene teemed with the movements of hundreds of men; overhead the cranes and gantries moved newly formed plates into position; here and there the blue flame of oxyacetylene cutting torches blazed, elsewhere the small portable furnaces of the riveters and their mates glowed redly. Drills screeched as they bored through adjacent plates and then incandescent rivets were thrown with apparent disregard, caught by the expert wielders of tongs and inserted into the holes, to be hammered by pneumatic power until they drew steel so tight that even the pressure of the ocean four fathoms below the surface could not intrude.
Beyond the building ways those hulls nearing completion rode high in the water at the fitting-out berths. Here a more complex process was in train, for they were receiving the final fittings, from accommodation blocks to the light fittings in individual compartments, from masts and derricks, to bureaux for the cabins of their officers. In such an environment, as he walked to a smartly painted hull riding high in the water alongside number one fitting-out berth, Clark’s thoughts were very far from considerations of international tension, let alone war, for his mood in standing-by a brand new cargo liner was far from gloomy. On the contrary he was optimistic, for the splendid new ship was unequivocal evidence of global reinvestment and marked an easing of the economic depression that had held the world in thrall since the Wall Street crash ten years earlier. Clark’s entire life for the past four months had been devoted entirely to the completion of the new ship, one of a class of powerful twin-screw, eighteen-knot vessels intended for the Far Eastern Service of the Eastern Steam Navigation Company of Liverpool. The ESNC was more familiarly known as ‘Dent’s’ or ‘Dentco’, after the family who had founded the shipping house in Liverpool 120 years earlier. They had then owned sailing vessels, largely employed in the India and China trades which had been opened up when the old East India Company lost its monopoly, but when Dent’s moved into steam, the new name was coined to reflect this shift of technological gear. Clark’s new ship, in common with her seven sisters – four of which were being built in British yards, with one just launched in Rotterdam and another almost completed in Copenhagen – was a motor vessel, not a steamship. However, it was not anticipated that the board of the Eastern Steam Navigation Company would change the company’s name again. Perhaps a more relevant tradition, instituted in 1870 when Dent’s had ordered the first of their line of famous steamers, was that of the new ship’s name. The introduction of steam had brought a predictability about schedules unknown to the world of sail, which, allied with the telegraph, transformed the operation of merchant ships into a thoroughly modern business. This shift in culture had resulted in what a later age would call ‘branding’ and manifested itself in a company house style designed to impress potential shippers both in Europe and in the Far East. Thus, along with distinctive funnel designs and hull colours, Dent’s fast cargo ships all bore the names of explorers.
As had been his custom for many weeks, Clark walked up the gangway of the Ernest Shackleton that bright morning with a list of queries to review before his morning meeting with the builder’s representatives over coffee at ten o’clock. Each daily conference threw up queries and differences as the Ernest Shackleton neared completion and the ceremony of handing the ship over to her new owners approached. Clark was the ship’s designated chief officer and with the second engineer formed Dent’s representatives presiding over the final phase of the building. Whatever deficiencies the new ship revealed in service would not be attributed to her German builders, but to Clark and his colleague, Gerry Hunter, an outspoken Ulsterman. This point was emphasised by Dent’s harassed marine superintendent when he paid his fortnightly visits to inspect progress.
‘I have eight ships to supervise,’ he would complain, ‘and it doesn’t help to have three of them building on the ruddy Continent. I might as well be at sea again for all the time I get at home!’
Clark and Hunter tactfully and dutifully commiserated with their superior and, after he had left for Copenhagen, or Rotterdam and the ferry at the Hook of Holland, got on with their own task. This was demanding enough, and ranged from the relatively trivial to the complex and apparently more important. Thus, in addition to such matters as ensuring that the correct fittings were put in the wardrobes of the dozen passengers the Ernest Shackleton would soon carry, it was equally vital that the pipework and pumping arrangements of her ballast, oil, water and deep cargo tanks all functioned correctly. The arguments over the specification and the realities of construction were usually reconcilable and amicably settled. They rarely provoked anything more than merely technical disputes with the staff of the German yard, who were, it seemed, eager to get the job finished. If, in this busy time, Clark or Hunter were unaware of greater events impinging upon their lives, it was simply that the shipyard, in common with others in Hamburg, had very full order books. They could not blame the German officials for wanting the British order completed and the Ernest Shackleton on her way to the Oderhafen to start loading her first cargo for the Far East. They were eager to be finished themselves, though they wanted the ship in serviceable order, for Dent’s were exacting masters.
Both men observed that the radical National Socialist government of Adolf Hitler had galvanised German shipbuilding. That much was clear to the two busy officers as they did their morning rounds of the ship, ticking off items in their notebooks or making additional comments, taking measurements or discussing details with the foremen and chargehands each assigned specific work aboard. But, at a more personal level, the lack of rancour aroused in the daily meetings was also due to the popularity of Hunter and Clark. The former because he was a man of outrageous opinion whose extreme Northern Irish accent made his English incomprehensible to German ship managers eager to practise their linguistic skills, but who made them laugh; and the latter because he could not only understand and interpret Hunter, but spoke German fluently. It was this ability which had recommended Dent’s board to order Clark to stand-by the new tonnage being built in Hamburg.
Dent’s were well aware of this talent, for Clark’s father was a director of the company. Clark senior had married a beautiful German girl named Lisa Petersen, whom he had met in Hamburg when he had been second officer of the company’s steamer Henry Hudson. In 1901 this ship had conveyed members of the board of the Eastern Steam Navigation Company to Hamburg, where she was scheduled to dry-dock and where her passenger accommodation was used as a boardroom for negotiations with a rival German shipping company. On the evening of their arrival Dent’s held a reception which the ship’s officers were obliged to attend. Lisa Petersen accompanied her widowed father, the chairman of F.G. Petersen Reederei, and in his distraction as he met Sir George Dent lay his daughter’s fate: she and the Henry Hudson’s second officer fell head over heels in love.
Predictably Herr Petersen heartily disapproved of the marriage, but for two years the young lovers were intransigent. In the end Lisa’s angry but indulgent father capitulated, extracting only a promise that the offspring of the young couple would
be taught German and would visit Hamburg as often as possible. The match did the young Christopher Clark little harm, for the board of Dent’s had come to an arrangement with their German competitors and were by then running a joint service to Chinese ports. Certain difficulties arising over the operation of ships in Chinese waters persuaded the joint boards to consider a common representative in the Treaty Port of Chinkiang. Christopher Clark soon found himself promoted to master and, after one voyage in command and with the title of ‘Captain’, the young couple were sent out to Chinkiang, where Captain Clark acted as marine superintendent, presiding over the interests of both companies until the arrangement foundered in the First World War. Life in the International Concessions of the remoter Treaty Ports took on a slightly surreal air, with the small isolated British and German communities abandoning their personal friendships and pretending neither group existed. Christopher and Lisa were almost totally ostracised, their prestige and, to the local population, the important fact of their ‘face’, diminishing with the severing of the joint service provided by Petersen’s and Dent’s. This strained life ended when Clark was posted to Hong Kong, where few knew of Lisa’s nationality and where the couple continued to live, as far as was possible, a life of social inconspicuousness until the war ended. By this time they had two children, Carl and little John, who was eight years old and destined, in due course, to follow Carl aboard the static British public-school-cum-training-ship Conway as a cadet. Carl, passing out of Conway in 1915, joined Dent’s and while still only an apprentice was torpedoed twice by U-boats of the Imperial German Navy. He did not survive the second attack.
After the war Captain Clark returned to sea and made several voyages before being invited to join the board of the Eastern Steam Navigation Company. By then the brief post-war boom had turned sour. The depression in shipping was followed by a greater universal economic disaster. British shipowners felt beleaguered; mergers and takeovers occurred; the board of Eastern Steam were steered through these difficulties in part by the skill of Captain Clark, whose partnership with the new chairman, Sir Desmond Cranbrooke, was crucial to the company’s survival. Curiously, both of these men were destined to play small, circumstantial, but significant parts in the fate of convoy PQ17.
Dead Man Talking Page 2
