He said it without thinking, the logic of it simple to him, and Hewett repeated the order as if his own. After a second, as Daisy heeled to the turn, Hewett queried, ‘Reduce speed, Number One? Are you sure?’
‘Yes!’ Clark snapped, almost resentful at the interruption as he continued following Carter’s manipulation of the controls and visualised the track the U-boat was following. It was clear to him that, having successfully evaded the noisy demonstrations of Vortex and Nemesia, she had slipped in immediately astern of the convoy.
‘Depth charges!’ Hewett sang out.
‘Shallow setting!’ shouted Clark. ‘No, mixed pattern,’ he yelled. ‘Can you do that?’ he asked Carter as the operator wound his controlling wheel. The man nodded, unwilling to break his own concentration with speech.
The U-boat commander had no advantage in speed below the surface, he would have to take a peep through his periscope if he intended to attack. Unless he sought the shelter of the convoy’s collective underwater noise, the fact that he had turned inwards towards it argued he might be intending to attack before he lost the chance. He was clearly a bold man and Clark did not think Daisy’s Asdic had deterred him amid the noise of the convoy’s screws and the bangs of the depth charges exploding astern. It was a gamble but, even if he had gone deep, another depth charge going off over his head would not hurt.
Clark heard the response of the coxswain on the wheel below inform Hewett they were steadied on the new course. Sweat was pouring off Carter’s forehead as he kept the Asdic beam on the target. ‘He’ll be hearing us now sir. He’s bound to dive.’
Concentrating, Clark detected the imbalance of arc as Carter adjusted the machine. ‘He’s moving left… And diving!’
‘Yeah!’ Carter agreed.
‘Port twenty, sir, and increase speed!’ Clark yelled.
‘Port twenty and nine-oh revs!’ Hewett sang out obediently.
For a few long seconds they waited as the ping interval shortened. Then Carter called out: ‘Instantaneous echo!’
Clark never heard the order to fire, nor the clang of the gongs that sent the depth charges out from the mortars on each quarter and over the stem from the after racks. He was staring into Carter’s eyes as the rating ripped the headset off with an intensity that, in any other circumstances, would have been indecent.
The explosions rocked Daisy as she made off from her handiwork. Without prompting, Hewett turned her round to retrace her steps as Carter and Clark bent again to their task. Carter caught an echo, then it was gone.
‘The wake’s fucking it up, sir,’ he explained.
‘Yes, I see that.’ They waited. ‘There it is again…’
‘No, I’ve lost it…’
The faint noise of cheering came to them and then Hewett’s bulk loomed in the doorway. ‘We’ve got the bugger, Number One!’ he said with a broad smile.
Clark and Carter looked at each other. ‘I can smell diesel oil, sir,’ Carter said.
Clark was unconvinced. ‘We may have damaged a tank, or they may have released some…’
‘There’s oil on the water, Number One,’ Hewett was calling. ‘We have got the bugger, by God!’
Clark and Carter remained unconvinced. As the word spread like wildfire through the corvette, and the news was flashed to Vortex, rushing up in a smother of foam, the sense of exhilaration was almost tangible.
‘I’m not convinced,’ Clark muttered to Carter. ‘Keep looking.’ Carter bent to his controls again.
‘We’ve got the bugger,’ Hewett was repeating, ‘we’ve got the bugger! We’ve got the bugger!’
‘Christ, it sounds as though they’re fucking dancing! He must think his DSC’s in the bag,’ Carter muttered as he sent the sound wave out all round them.
‘Pay attention,’ Clark reproved him gently.
But the echo resonated out into the vastness of the ocean unimpeded. ‘Nothing, sir,’ said Carter as the captain’s bulk filled the doorway. Clark patted Carter on the shoulder.
‘Well done, anyway. At least none of the convoy were lost.’
‘Come up here you two and fill your lungs with that glorious stench,’ Hewett commanded.
They lost three ships in the next few days, and the Admiralty would only credit them with a ‘possible’, but the Daisies drooped no more. Vortex and Nemesia had lost the contact and, as far as they were concerned, the Daisy had saved the day. Moreover, Lieutenant Commander Hewett was generous enough to attribute the success of the attack to his new second-in-command: Lieutenant Clark had established himself as a man with a potent skill.
* * *
It was the nearest Daisy came to glory. Later, in the summer of 1941, Vortex ‘killed’ a U-boat and Daisy was mentioned in complimentary terms in Brenton-Woodruffe’s report, but for the most part victory went to the enemy and the Vortex’s escort group grew weary with their inability to prevent heavy losses in the slow convoys under their protection. But they made hundreds of attacks and, though most were unsuccessful and a few achieved the ambiguous status of ‘possibles’, Clark’s expertise as a submarine hunter remained undiminished. In fact, though he was not to know it at the time, promotion was withheld from Clark because, as long as he was saddled with Hewett, Brenton-Woodruffe wanted Clark riding shotgun.
But Norway, Denmark and France had fallen under German occupation by the summer of 1940, the British Expeditionary Force, minus its equipment, had been evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk, and Fascist Italy had joined the Germans. Britain, under threat of invasion until the Luftwaffe was defeated in its attempt to gain control of English airspace, stood alone.
Clark had been in London on leave when the blitz began. He had learned that Magda was in the capital with Diana Cranbrooke and the two women were attending meetings in connection with plans for dealing with the expected intensifying of air raids. To his relief, for he feared a rebuff, she had agreed to join him for dinner, after which they had gone dancing.
‘It is so good to hold you again,’ he had whispered as they moved among the other dancers.
He felt her press against him as she had once done at the Adelphi. ‘I am glad too,’ she whispered back. ‘I was horrible to you before. I’m sorry.’
He drew back and looked at her. He had never seen so beautiful a creature. It was as though the misery to which she had consigned him vanished in an instant. ‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘I am only glad that you remember me,’ he said, thinking of the broken romances and shattered marriages among the Daisy’s complement, revealed by his censoring the men’s private mail. ‘This war has made people different.’
‘I could not forget you, Jack. You were very kind to me.’
‘And Kurt?’ He asked.
She did not hesitate. ‘As you say, people change in war. Kurt belongs to another time. Besides, we were never actually engaged. We had, I think you would call, an understanding. It is all in the past now.’
‘Can we go somewhere?’
‘I have a room to myself. Diana is close, but it is quite private.’
‘And you will not shut the door in my face?’
She smiled, a beguiling curve of her wide and lovely mouth. ‘I did not shut it in your face before.’
‘Oh, I rather thought you did.’
‘You should have discovered that I did not lock it.’
‘You mean, had I come to you that night, you would not have turned me away?’
‘Perhaps that night I would, but as you’re asking me now, all this time later, I do not think I should have.’
For Clark, the brief interlude he enjoyed during Daisy’s boiler clean proved the happiest period of his life. As London submitted to German bombing he was caught up for a few days in the intensity of life lived under such extraordinary circumstances. They revelled in the wild, hedonistic, devil-may-care atmosphere. With the clubs, restaurants and pubs full of the remnant pride of expatriate Poles, Norwegians, Free French, Czechs and Belgians, he imbibed a slightly manic defiance that was in stark co
ntrast with the dour aspect of the grey North Atlantic.
Magda and Diana Cranbrooke returned to the Wirral a day before the expiry of his short leave. He travelled back with them, his attachment to Magda clear to anyone who cared to notice.
* * *
But if his affair made him happy on land, it made him miserable at sea. He had experienced similar pangs before, but nothing so excoriating, so demoralising as this. He was wracked by the misery common to lovelorn sailors, intensified by the risks of war.
‘Marry her,’ advised Hewett, observing Clark’s dejection on the eve of sailing when they were enjoying a glass of gin together. Hewett had himself long since tied the knot to a pleasant, dumpy young woman who had reminded Clark of a younger version of Jenny O’Neil. It did not prevent him flirting extravagantly with other women, but, as far as Clark had observed, Mrs Hewett possessed the ability, even at long range, to keep her husband faithful. ‘Otherwise she’ll run off with someone else, mark my words,’ Hewett concluded.
Clark grunted. He had proposed to Magda as he had lain beside her after their last night together. He could not believe his good fortune in making love to so sublime a creature, and had taken her acquiescence for reciprocated wonder. But his proposal had met with less eagerness and he had been disappointed, if not entirely surprised, by her response.
‘Perhaps, darling,’ she had said in her husky, post-coital voice, ‘when this war is over and if we are both still alive.’
‘We could be so happy…’
‘We are happy now, aren’t we?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then that is all that matters.’
And with that he had had to be content.
‘Well, she won’t agree until the war’s over,’ he said now to Hewett.
‘Bloody shame,’ said Hewett. ‘If only because I don’t think I can stand the sight of a lovesick first lieutenant mooning about my bridge. You’re too old for such nonsense, Jack. Next time we get a break I’ll get Dierdre to ask you both to stay and we’ll see what we can arrange.’
‘You’ll do no such bloody thing!’ Clark protested.
‘Don’t forget who’s in command here, Number One,’ Hewett said with his engaging grin.
‘How can I, sir?’ Clark said with an expression of mock pain upon his face. ‘Anyway, I’d better go and do my rounds,’ he said, rising and picking up his cap.
‘You ponder my advice, Jack,’ Hewett said as Clark drew aside the door curtain. And when he had gone, Hewett murmured, ‘or you’ll be too bloody late, old chap.’
* * *
The war in the Atlantic dragged on. After the debacle of Norway and the occupation of France, from which U-boats now operated, merchant-ship losses mounted alarmingly. But so too did the loss of escorts. Brenton-Woodruffe’s Vortex was torpedoed one night in May 1941 as she hunted a contact. As she steamed past a burning tanker, silhouetted against the blazing oil, she had formed an irresistible target to Kapitänleutnant Johannes Petersen, peering through the periscope, his white-covered hat reversed. Round his neck he already wore the Ritterkreuz.
In the aftermath the corvette Daisy was assigned the task of searching for survivors. She picked up twenty men. Brenton-Woodruffe was not among them and Hewett was profoundly disappointed. He should have liked ‘old Bee-Double-You’ to have owed his life to him. But this indulgent dream was cut short by the cry of ‘Torpedo!’
Hewett watched as the pale streak missed Daisy’s bow by a few feet.
‘God damn the bastards!’ Hewett raged as he watched the trail disappear into the darkness, compelled to hold his ship stopped while Clark and the seamen scrambled over the side and helped Vortex’s oil-soaked survivors inboard. It was not a battle that men of Hewett’s courage could shine in; Hewett wanted the bruising contact of aggressive action. For Clark, superintending the wounded and saturated wretches, it had simply assumed the qualities of a bad dream. Their struggle had ceased to be a battle in the sense that they had imagined a battle to be; it was simply a matter of endurance, of warding off attack, of countering it when it came and of picking up the survivors when they failed, as they so often did. For Clark it seemed like some inglorious playground scrap against a monstrous bully from which one could only emerge beaten; except that the metaphor was too trivial.
They were all growing tired, increasingly aware of the looming possibility of defeat, their only respite the boiler cleans which kept the Daisy operational. A month later they were ordered to the Clyde for their next.
During that leave in June of 1941 Clark was with Magda when they heard the news that Hitler had turned on his ally and invaded the Soviet Union. Russia had reeled under the blow.
‘Can Hitler be as stupid as Napoleon?’ Magda asked as they listened to the BBC news. They had the family home to themselves, apart from Captain Clark’s staff, for he himself had gone to Glasgow on company business.
‘Can he win?’ Clark countered. ‘At least we are not in this alone any more,’ he added, brightening, ‘and hitting at the communists is going to make things awkward for their sympathisers here.’
Despite the fact that Russia shared in the dismemberment of Poland, the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, offered Stalin help, and in the succeeding months convoys began to sail north, into the Barents Sea, round the North Cape of Norway, taking war supplies to the Red Army and the Soviet air force by way of Archangel and Murmansk.
HMS Daisy took no part in this new theatre, though Clark entertained a vague hope that he might go north once more. He had long ago forgotten his interview with Inglis and Gifford. Those events of the first few days of the war seemed to belong to another age. But the tales that filtered back from the Barents Sea, of the convoys being hemmed in to the north by ice and attacked from the south by the Luftwaffe’s aircraft from their bases in occupied Norway, began to persuade them that perhaps the North Atlantic was not such a bad place to be after all.
‘We’ve only got submarines to worry about,’ Hewett remarked as they steamed towards the convoy with its lines of merchant ships, each flying their column numbers in the bright colours of the International Code of Signals above their rusty grey hulls. ‘The poor buggers in the Arctic have got the lot: U-boats, ice, the Luftwaffe and a frosty reception when they get to Uncle Joe’s wonderful bloody Workers’ Paradise.’ Hewett lifted his binoculars and studied one of the merchantmen, a Ropner tramp. ‘And, of course, there’s all that midnight sun and midwinter gloom that you’d remember, Number One,’ he added conversationally.
‘Oh, I was only up in the Arctic during the summer,’ Clark replied.
‘Damn me, but isn’t that a bloody periscope?’ Hewett suddenly cried. ‘Wheelhouse! Ring on the revs! Action stations! Hoist the attack pendant! Make to Seymour…’
* * *
And so it went on until, berthed in Londonderry in December, they heard two pieces of news. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and Clark was to leave the ship.
‘I must say I find it difficult to be downhearted,’ said Hewett, referring to the news of Pearl Harbor as he handed Clark the signal. ‘This’ll bring the Yanks into the war properly, by God!’
Clark read the signal, his heart beating. He hoped for promotion and a command. Or just a ship of his own; several corvettes were commanded by lieutenants. From down in the wardroom, where the wireless was on, came cheers as the import of the news sank in.
‘The Admiralty?’ Clark said, looking at Hewett. ‘What in Hades can I do at the bloody Admiralty?’
‘Have a gin, Number One. I’ll be sorry to lose you.’
‘Thanks,’ Clark said, raising his glass to Hewett. ‘It had to come, I suppose, but I rather expected a command, or a half stripe…’
‘Or even both, you deserve ’em…’
‘Good of you… But the poxy Admiralty… I just don’t understand it.’
‘Well, it only says “Report to the Admiralty”. Doesn’t mean they’re going to give you a desk there.’
‘Well, th
at’s true,’ replied Clark, somewhat mollified.
‘Anyway,’ Hewett went on flippantly, ‘what do you know about what goes on at the Admiralty?’
‘Bugger all…’
‘Oh my, Number One, that could qualify you for flag rank!’ Hewett laughed and refilled his glass. ‘By God, it’s beginning to look really serious!’ Hewett held out the bottle. ‘Such rapid promotion calls for another gin.’
Christmas Cheer
December 1941
‘Good to see you, Clark.’ Gifford held out his hand.
‘I see congratulations are in order, sir,’ Clark said, referring to the augmentation of gold lace upon Gifford’s sleeve.
‘Oh, thanks. Actually we’re going to do the same for you. Between ourselves, your half stripe is overdue and I’m rather to blame.’
‘Oh?’
‘Well, for reasons that will become clear later, I’ve been keeping an eye on you and I blocked your promotion earlier in the year.’
‘I see.’
‘No, you don’t,’ Gifford said with a boyish smile, ‘but you will. Now, first things first, a cigarette and a cup of tea, I think.’ With the tea and an ashtray between them, Gifford sat back and became more expansive. ‘How would you like to go back to the Arctic?’
‘Russian convoys?’ Clark said, thinking of Hewett’s strategic summary of the polar theatre.
‘Yes and no. Well?’
‘Well, er, I’m not sure whether I’d actually like it, sir, but I go where Their Lordships direct these days.’
‘Huh! Don’t we all!’ Gifford smiled at him and added, ‘It would have delighted Captain Inglis to hear you say that.’
‘I’d forgotten him.’
‘He’s forgotten himself, these days. I’m afraid he’s lost his marbles, poor fellow. He’s in Netley Hospital and likely to stay there.’
Dead Man Talking Page 10
