Lieutenant Commander Hewett hated the name of the ship, hated his senior officer and had found himself at odds with two of his own officers. With the exception of his first lieutenant, they were men of the Volunteer Reserve, the RNVR, men who at best were yachtsmen and at worst had what he called ‘an enthusiasm for the sea engendered by some fucking uncle giving them the Wonder Book of Ships and the Sea for their tenth birthday!’ adding, as he slipped from the general to the personal, ‘One fraternises with the hands, of whom he is fundamentally frightened, thinking he can ingratiate himself by criticising me, while the other is a supercilious little turd who spoke of his privileged ownership of a ten-ton cutter with the gravity of a master mariner describing his last ship.’
Clark pulled a face. ‘Ah, the last ship, eh. Always the best one was on, and certainly always better than the present one.’
‘Exactly! Little cunt.’ Hewett spoke with vehemence.
By the time the war was six months old, Hewett had escorted several convoys and they had lost a few ships. Then had come his promotion into Daisy. The corvette was the least popular ship in the escort group, largely on account of the misjudgements of her commander and her consequent failure to be in the right place at the right time. As other commanders developed instincts for anti-submarine warfare, Hewett remained intellectually obdurate. His ship became known as ‘Drooping Daisy’; ashore his men were in regular fights with their colleagues in the other ships in the group.
Clark was to learn all this later. That evening, acting as Hewett’s confessor, he learned that there were insufficient escorts in the North Atlantic and what there were, were poorly manned by inexperienced ship’s companies. It was a disaster, Hewett explained, and it was getting worse as the Germans got into their stride. During the previous convoy, his first in command of Daisy, they had had a real mauling. Hewett had been blamed for the loss of two merchantmen and his senior officer had said as much, castigating Hewett in a blistering interview in his cabin. It was only with difficulty that Hewett’s failure had not been exposed in Brenton-Woodruffe’s Report of Proceedings.
‘I tell you, Jack, it isn’t the bloody Jerries who fuck you, it’s your own side. My bloody boss, Commander Guy Brenton-Woodruffe, is a scalp hunter and is out to get me shifted, so, here I am, enjoying a quiet one or two beers before I shove off in a day or two to do another stint out there.’
‘If you’re not happy, why don’t you let him transfer you…?’
‘No! It’s a matter of pride, Jack,’ Hewett bristled. ‘Anyway you know I’m no coward.’
‘Of course.’ Clark remembered that Hewett had rescued two Chinese firemen from a nasty engine-room fire aboard the Robert Fitzroy some months after he himself had left the ship. Hewett had received a Lloyd’s medal and the decoration of the Royal Humane Society for the act, though Clark noticed neither ribbon adorned his naval reefer as it had done his Eastern Steam Navigation Company uniform. He imagined Hewett had turned aside the wrath of Commander Brenton-What’s-his-Name by pleading his previous gallantry. No, Gus Hewett was not a bad chap to have alongside in a tight corner when an animal reaction of raw courage was required, but he was no man for quick, cool decisions in a crisis, and his charm masked a congenital laziness.
‘But Gus, this war isn’t going to be over in a few months,’ Clark reasoned.
‘You’re telling me!’
‘Well then, submit to a transfer and time will give you another opportunity.’
Hewett waved Clark’s commiserating advice aside. ‘Oh, never mind, Jack, never mind. I got Brenton-Woodruffe to see that it wasn’t all my fault, that we had developed gremlins in our festering Asdic set at two critical moments, but you do, you really do, begin to wonder which bloody side the gods are on. Fortunately, the Asdic specialist who came aboard when we got in here threw half the bloody thing over the side and wrote a report which exonerated me but, you know how it is, give a dog a bad name… Anyway, enough about me. What about you, you old sod?’ he asked, ordering two more gins.
‘Well, I’m a sort of chameleon at the moment. I’m standing-by the Matthew Flinders as the resident derrick expert…’
‘Ah! I knew you were on your Daddy’s yacht,’ Hewett interrupted gleefully, glad of the change of subject.
‘Well, she’s not quite Daddy’s yacht these days.’
‘Well, she’s one of Dent’s new eighteen-knotters, isn’t she? Pretty much the same thing.’
‘Yes, she’s a cracking ship, but she’s undergoing conversion into a fast transport, so she’s anything but yacht-like. I’m still half wearing my Dent’s cap, but then, as you see, I’m actually wearing the King’s uniform.’
‘She’s a white ensign ship then?’ Hewett enquired.
‘Oh yes. And I’m undergoing some crazy conversion myself, metamorphosing into a King’s officer, with square bashing and sword drill.’
‘Just like the Conway, eh?’
‘Well similar, I suppose. I don’t recall us waving swords. Anyway, I think I graduate, or pass out in a week or two. I certainly hope so, I seem to have been buggering about like this for months. They send me back here to Glasgow periodically to run over the Flinders, then they take no notice of what I say while I’m learning the difference between the bands on an armour-piercing shell and the rings round a commodore’s arse, or something like that.’
‘You are clearly not the stuff of which the real navy is made, Jack…’
‘Please don’t you witter on about the real bloody navy. There seems to be precious little difference between us at sea, though ashore the merchant jacks are treated like shite. Mercifully, most of them are used to it. Anyway, all I want to do is get to sea and do some proper work. I’ve never felt so bloody well wasted. The work on the Flinders has been stop-start, stop-start for months now.’
And in that vein they consoled each other until the barman asked them to leave.
It was therefore of Jack Clark that Hewett thought when faced with the necessity of replacing his first lieutenant. Dictating his signal to his leading telegraphist he concluded with a flourish of his cigarette, ‘Request immediately available services of Lieutenant J.P.J. Clark, currently standing-by HMT Matthew Flinders Govan.’
Brenton-Woodruffe forwarded the request to the flag officer commanding the Clyde. The admiral’s staff, aware that a delay to the convoy was unacceptable and grateful that an officer was readily to hand, drafted Clark accordingly. They made no further enquiries before issuing the order for Clark to shift his traps instanter. Thus Clark, without ever completing his basic induction into the RNR, found himself aboard HMS Daisy in March 1940.
* * *
Clark was to spend nineteen months in Daisy and thereby become a veteran of the great battle in its early stages. An administrative flunkey, discovering the irregularity of his appointment, remonstrated briefly, but the exigencies of war soon confirmed the circumstantial wisdom of his post. Commander Brenton-Woodruffe was soon aware that the new first lieutenant of Daisy had transformed the ship and, as the Royal Navy gradually built up the resources with which it was to fight the threat to the survival of Great Britain, anxieties about Daisy subsided. It was no reflection on the abilities of the concussed young lieutenant, whose concussion kept him in hospital long enough to ensure that Clark remained in Hewett’s corvette; upon recovery, he was sent to a newly commissioned ship. The fact was that the old association between Hewett and Clark simply continued. Hewett’s charm and personal courage were impressive; he was also exceedingly tough, in the physical sense. He could stand on the bridge for hours, apparently impervious to fatigue, but he was slow to react, inclined to be indecisive at a critical moment and often failed, through lack of intuition, to understand what Brenton-Woodruffe required of him. Such deficiencies were not uncommon in those first months of anti-submarine warfare, but most escort commanders, honed in the early, inadequately prepared days of total war at sea, rapidly acquired the necessary skills. Later, with the establishment of training facilities at Tober
mory, where every commissioning escort was sent for the most rigorous exercises before being despatched on active service, most of this undesirable in-theatre learning was eliminated. Later still, the combat skills of senior officers were developed and honed at the Anti-Submarine Warfare School in Liverpool. But all this lay in the future.
What Clark brought to HM Corvette Daisy was an understanding, adaptable cushion between Hewett and his inexperienced crew. Only a little younger than Hewett, and yet carrying the weight of his pre-war experience in the merchant service as a credential necessary to awe the hardbitten regular petty officers appointed to every corvette in order to help transform the majority of ‘Hostilities Only’ sailors into proper seamen, Clark filled the bill to perfection. He immediately hit it off with the Daisy’s coxswain, who had served on the China station and with whom he shared common experiences of the Far East. Dentco’s ships were as familiar to a regular RN seaman as were those of the P & O, Blue Funnel, Glen and Ben Lines.
But it was in his relationship with Hewett that Clark crucially affected the reputation of Daisy, and it was soon apparent to her consorts that something had happened aboard the corvette. Initially, of course, her late joining of the escort was considered highly typical. Scoffing was common on all the bridges as Daisy approached, but especially on that of Brenton-Woodruffe’s destroyer, HMS Vortex, as he assigned her to her usual rear station. Clark, ignorant of these undercurrents in the group, had nevertheless swiftly realised the poor state of the ship’s company’s morale. A few probing questions had the coxswain spill enough of the beans to reveal the source of the trouble: Lieutenant Commander Hewett was a very nice gentleman, but his idleness prevented him from taking much trouble over details. Sadly, the otherwise exemplary former Blue Funnel officer had not been able to have much effect. As for the two sub-lieutenants, Clark discovered the supercilious yachtsman was only eager to demonstrate his knowledge of seamanship, while his tedious references to his experiences aboard his yacht were essentially only expressions of surprise that the principles of basic seamanship were common to most craft. It was a congruous fact that Their Lordships had acknowledged in their admission of such young men to the brotherhood of naval officers. The other sub was a rather colourless character who, while he lacked a degree of confidence when confronted with the rougher elements of the crew – the like of which Clark judged he had never encountered in his life before – nevertheless possessed an obvious gift for mathematics and trigonometry. Under some wise nudging from Clark, he was soon demonstrating the potential to become an able navigator. Long ago Clark had learned to harness the skills a man possessed, in order to get the best out of him and, within a week of joining, he had succeeded in turning over much of the duties of navigator to the young man. In company with a convoy these were not arduous, but they allowed Clark to concentrate on his own greatest deficiency, a deficiency that exercised the unknown Admiralty clerk who noticed it in Clark’s service record: his lack of any experience of anti-submarine warfare. He had mentioned this to Hewett as soon as he had reported aboard, but Hewett had pooh-poohed his misgivings.
‘Oh, don’t worry about that, Number One. We’ve especially trained ratings for all that sort of thing.’
Then, as they bounced round the Mull of Kintyre and the two of them were on the bridge, Hewett asked publicly as Clark peered into the Asdic compartment tucked away under the forward part of the compass platform, ‘D’you think you’ll get the hang of it, Number One?’
The laxity of Hewett’s approach to his dilemma in losing his experienced first lieutenant, and his present apparent lack of concern, appalled Clark and caused him to undergo a momentary, stomach-churning anxiety. Clearly he himself was supposed to be an expert. Looking at the slightly incredulous faces of the bridge messenger and the lookouts in this very inept and public exposure, he suspected he was supposed to be the expert. He presumed that Commander Brenton-Woodruffe, somewhere beyond the steady lines of grey merchantmen deployed ahead of Daisy, expected him to be one. Doubtless the admiral confirming his appointment to Daisy thought he was. The realisation hit Clark like a blow. It was clear that Hewett’s breezy revelation, unconsciously delivered to further batter the morale of the Drooping Daisies in the mess decks when the word got below that the new Jimmy had no idea what an Asdic set was, had to be turned round.
‘Of course I don’t know anything about it at all, sir,’ he jested. ‘I’m a merchant-navy man in disguise.’
The joke was feeble in the extreme but, linked with the buzz that the new Jimmy and the Old Man had sailed together before, it was taken to be evidence of an irreverent, chi-ike-ing relationship. Mercifully, any lingering notion that the new first lieutenant was as big a prat as the captain was swiftly dispelled in the days to come.
But that evening Clark had quietly and tactfully confronted Hewett in his cabin. ‘You know, what you have done is bloody silly, Gus…’
‘I didn’t know you hadn’t done the Asdic course,’ Hewett expostulated.
‘Oh, I’ve done the basics…’
‘Listen, chum, that’s all there is, for Chrissakes. I told you the bloody box of tricks is unreliable. We’ve had a lot of problems with it. Now I’ll trouble you to remember, for the purposes of good order and discipline, you don’t come bursting in here covered in indignation, and remember that I’m the commander.’
Clark regarded Hewett. ‘Fuck you, lieutenant commander, sir.’
‘That’s more like it. Now have a drink.’
‘No, not at sea.’
‘Then fuck you, Number One.’
In the few hours left to Clark before they reached the open Atlantic, Clark sat alongside the duty Asdic operator, a rating named Carter. As though idly flicking through the operator’s handbook, he surreptitiously observed the man’s technique as Carter swept the surrounding sea with the questing sound beam. The ‘noise’ of the churning screws of the convoy ahead rendered a wide arc obscured, but away out on either beam, the attenuated sound seemed to dissipate into the ocean with an almost mystical beauty.
It was an odd notion, Clark admitted to himself, but he was addicted to such strange things. They were part of what made the sea life so enduringly seductive to him. Just as watching the sweep of a fulmar petrel quarter their wake with motionless wings moved him to wonderment and pleasure, or as the sunlight upon Arctic ice had once struck him with an infinite beauty, or as the aurora had touched him, so that strange, scientific sound of the Asdic impulse, similarly fascinated him.
It was this novel fascination and a natural talent, inherent in most sea officers, for spatial conceptualisation, that caused him to transform Daisy’s reputation on the third day of the westbound convoy. At about ten in the morning Brenton-Woodruffe’s destroyer signalled she had a contact with a submarine, then another of the escorts ahead confirmed she, too, had echo-located a U-boat. The Drooping Daisies closed up to action stations and Clark ducked into the Asdic compartment, where, in a sweat of apprehension, he tried to understand what was going on.
For two hours in the distance the low grey shapes of the two escorts rushed about, busy with their counter-attack as the convoy, stoically maintaining its methodical zig-zag, moved steadily westwards. Although Clark could not see the tall columns of water that the attacking escorts threw up from their detonating depth charges, he was aware of the crumps of the explosions and swiftly formed, in his mind’s eye, a mental picture of the tactical plot. Deprived of sight, he, like Carter, relied upon the underwater sound transmissions, not of Daisy’s transmitted echo-location, but of the incoming noises and the rapid shift in their modulation and azimuth. While Carter unknowingly pulled faces as the noises came in to them through their headsets, Clark had no difficulty sensing what was happening. Afterwards Carter told his messmates the new Jimmy was ‘all right’, that he had ‘the gift’, but for the moment the sounds of combat drifted astern.
As Daisy shifted her station in conformity with the orders that provided for the detachment of escorts attacki
ng contacts, Hewett called him on to the open bridge and pointed out what was happening.
‘They won’t find anything,’ he said. ‘Jerry, if he was there and it wasn’t a bloody whale, will have done a bunk by now.’
Clark picked up a pair of Barr and Stroud binoculars and peered astern. He could see a flurry of wakes criss-crossing, and white columns where Vortex and Nemesia tossed their depth charges. The explosions thundered through the water while the shapes of the attackers faded into the grey murk. The convoy ploughed on and Hewett began a desultory conversation. And then Clark heard it: the echoing ping of a contact nearby.
Long before the fact had registered with his captain, Clark was beside Carter.
‘Green one-one-zero,’ Carter said sharply, indicating the initial bearing of the contact, ‘moving right.’
‘Yes,’ Clark responded excitedly, his heart racing. He repeated the information to Hewett.
‘Very well, er, hoist the attack pendant, Yeoman, and make to Vortex: In contact.’
‘Come to port sir!’ Clark exclaimed. He was closely watching the mean of the arc of bearing in which the echo responded with its greatest magnitude shift as Carter manipulated the questing beam. ‘Hard over! Steer one fifty and reduce speed!’
Dead Man Talking Page 9
