‘If this war goes on for long, sir,’ Carter had said during a quiet moment when they had been carrying out the Asdic trials in Tees Bay, deliberately revealing the extent of his ambition and hinting at his appreciation of his and Clark’s situation, ‘I think we’ll be needing officers with a wealth of experience at Asdic operation.’
Clark had confined himself to a knowing smile and a grunting agreement, and he knew Carter well enough to see such a curt response was all that was required. Carter was a man who understood subtleties. Afterwards Clark realised that Carter’s drive was directed at encouraging his two assistant operators, Wilkins and Baker, both of whom had been recommended by their respective commanding officers. Gifford, Clark was soon to understand, must have leaned on some key men, for if these two ratings were as good as they promised to be, at least two commanding officers must be regretting the absence of able men.
You could not say that about at least four of the Sheba’s dozen seamen. The three leading hands seemed decent enough men, ranging in age between twenty-four and thirty-one. Two, Lambert and Page, were from Western Approaches; the third, a man named Roe, had come from a cruiser. The three ordinary seamen were all men whose records had been annotated with the remarks that they possessed ‘officer potential’. Educated and mature, of similar ages to the leading hands, their junior rating sat uneasily upon them. Success aboard Sheba demanded recognition by Clark and advancement to the status of ‘CW’ ratings, sailors being fast-tracked to commissions. But for the time being they occupied the lowest strata of Sheba’s microcosmic society, the menials upon whom the six men in between, those rated able seamen, looked down. It did not help that this worthy trio possessed names like Wiggins, Oliphant and Peacock. Such apparent pretensions were grist to the mill of Harding, Black, Saunders and Collins, whose obvious selection on grounds of ‘independence, initiative and aggressive spirit’ had been loosely translated by their first lieutenants as ‘truculence, indolence and a terrorising attitude’. No doubt these officers had been delighted to offload the free spirits in their midst with a ‘good riddance’. Fortunately the remaining pair, Lincoln and Davies, were quiet, detached men who kept themselves aloof from the petty power politics of the Sheba’s crowded little mess decks.
These dozen men, split into three watches, came under the coxswain, a man who rejoiced in the name James Cook. It amused and consoled Clark’s innately superstitious soul that, quite fortuitously, his little ship’s company contained the names of at least two famous explorers, Cook and Frobisher. To add his own as a third would need a respelling, Clerke for Clark, but the nearness of this third to the other two rather silly little coincidences gave a spurious meaning, by way of continuity, to his private fatalism. It was, he thought, a good omen.
As to his four ‘bad-hats’, he knew, with the instinct of long experience, there would come in due course a confrontation, and a confrontation with which, he suspected, Douglas Ireton Robertson Keith Frobisher would have some trouble. Time would tell.
Nevertheless, much would depend upon these twelve men, for upon them fell the work of tying the ship up, of letting her go, of taking away her boats, steering her, maintaining her lookouts and keeping her in working order above decks. And, when the final action for which she, and they, had been called into being as an entity came to pass, it would be they who would man the Sheba’s guns, torpedoes and depth charges and upon whom the speed and effectiveness of the Sheba’s attack would ultimately rely.
As for those who kept his little ship moving through the water, Clark entertained little anxiety. Lieutenant Olsen and his seven fellow Norwegians in the ‘black-gang’ were a bonded unit. The engine and boiler rooms were their province and Clark was swiftly made aware that any visit he made there, while not actually resented, was considered redundant. The Sheba might have been a British warship, but her engine and boiler rooms were Norwegian territory and a large Norwegian ensign was hung from a small galvanised block seized with wire to one of the cross bars of the engine-room skylight. Olsen dealt with whatever internecine rivalries, disputes or differences fragmented the men whom Frobisher in indiscreet moments referred to as ‘the trolls’. Not that Olsen kept himself aloof, for he enjoyed the society of the wardroom, where he could speak quietly to Storheill of his private anxieties in their native tongue. The presence of Storheill was thoughtful on the part of Gifford, Clark realised, partly on account of his providing a soulmate for Olsen, but also because the young lieutenant had had some polar experience and had visited Spitsbergen on several occasions before settling aboard Wilhelm Wilhelmsen’s cargo liners. Despite Frobisher’s rudeness, the first lieutenant was careful to avoid any such comments in the presence of Olsen and Storheill. He considered that, as the only regular officer aboard the ship, a greater gulf existed between himself and Clark, than between Clark and the Norwegians, for all had a wider range of experience in the multiple voyagings of their merchant ships. Occasionally he would come to remark, in moments of mock pique, that they should forget their charade of being a warship and hoist the red ensign.
‘Well, it would be sensible,’ Pearson would put in with characteristically misplaced didacticism. ‘After all, Number One, it was once the senior naval colour.’
Frobisher would curl his lip with disdain at the unseemly suggestion. ‘Remember Nelson,’ he would riposte.
As they steamed north, Clark, contemplating the transformation of his eclectic collection of men into a crew, concluded that they were better than he might have expected, bad-hats notwithstanding. The catering staff and the three telegraphists who completed his complement worked with quiet diligence. On the former much depended, for a badly fed ship lacked morale and, quite literally, the stomach for a fight. Day after day, irrespective of the weather, the cook would be expected to produce edible, restorative food of one sort or another. It would be a good barometer, Clark thought, of the truculence of his bad boys, to see to what extent they moaned about the grub, and whether such complaints moved from the merely ritual to the formal. As for his communications staff, he knew Gifford’s final orders would insist upon total radio silence on their part, the key to their mission being a passive role of listening and interpreting incoming radio traffic. Clark himself could not understand why anyone would want to man a radio under such circumstances. Radio rooms, or shacks as they were often referred to, seemed small, isolated and hermetic places, low on ventilation and high on claustrophobia. That wireless operators usually added to their discomfort by smoking was a mystery past his fathoming, but one from which was born an admiration. Clark had long ago learned to value particular abilities; his style of leadership relied upon harnessing them. Even his bad-hats, he reflected, had individual skills.
Now, as the darkness engulfed them on the bridge and in the wheelhouse, the subdued illumination of the radio room abaft the wheelhouse sent a sliver of light through an ill-fitting crash panel in the door. It was relatively unimportant but it irritated Clark. Leading Seaman Davies had proved useful as the ship’s extemporised carpenter. Tomorrow they would have to do something about that.
‘Cuppa kye, sir?’
Clark turned. A figure loomed close to him and he could smell the cocoa. ‘Oh, yes please. Many thanks. Who’s that?’
‘Leadin’ Seaman ’Arding, sir.’
‘Thank you, Harding.’ One of the bad-hats, Clark reflected as he sipped the scalding drink and wondered wryly what Harding had done to doctor the Old Man’s nightcap. Thinking of the horror stories he had heard as an apprentice, of the seaman who, in rough weather, carried the master’s tea in his own mouth until, upon entering the wheelhouse, he would gob it into the empty mug and hand it to the captain; of the steward resentful of the chief officer’s punishment for his drunkenness, who ejaculated into the mate’s soup! Clark sipped the kye; it was hot and sweet and delicious.
Sheba lifted easily to a heavy swell and then sank into the succeeding trough. There was a gale blowing somewhere to the north of them, but here, abeam of the Moray
Firth, it was a quiet enough night. Clark felt that strange relief that stole unbidden upon him at such moments of quiet reflection at sea. It was here that he felt truly himself. Jack Clark ashore was a different person, even the littoral environment of a shipyard was too obviously the concern of landsmen to please Clark’s soul. Even those amphibians who dwelt amid the cranes, gantries and slipways of a shipyard failed to understand the strange symbiosis that existed between the true seaman and his ship. Such men were dropouts who regarded that rare minority whose spirits were only happy at sea as moronic throwbacks to a more primitive time. Clark knew of this, knew too that nothing came without a price and that many regarded him as ‘odd’. He could not help it. He was as divided as any other seaman of his age and libido, a victim of his heterosexual lust and no fancier of his own sex. But Magda had twisted the knife in an old wound, persuading him that that peculiar, intense emotion that a few fortunate people enjoyed as love was not for him. He had assuaged his hurt in Jenny, knowing only that she had been an eager participant in their affair. It had been a mutually satisfying experience, of no great moment to either party; they had been friends at the beginning and parted greater friends at the end. He was, he concluded, a man who might enjoy temporary liaisons, but who should never marry, never bind himself with the ties of offspring. And in that unintentional smugness, the notion of self-reproach over Jenny failed to cross Clark’s mind, especially upon that night at sea, as Sheba ran north alone. On that particular night, he recalled long afterwards, nothing could diminish his deep satisfaction at being at sea. And the pleasure was peculiarly intense because he was not only in command, but he was bound north again, to the polar seas that had captivated him as a youth and which he had thought he would never see again. Happiness is only known in retrospect but that night Clark, his soul exposed, knew he was sublimely happy.
Given that there was a war on.
* * *
With their pendant number flying bravely, they passed the boom defences and entered Scapa Flow on a morning of mixed sunshine and showers. The breeze was from the north-west. It cut up the water of the anchorage, across which skewed the occasional fulmar, while the ubiquitous and populous herring gull screeched its familiar laughing cry, as if deriding the pomp and majesty of the Home Fleet. The flagship, HMS King George V, was moored to her buoy, a great grey angular shape whose outline reminded Clark of her sister ship, the Prince of Wales, which now lay at the bottom of the South China Sea with most of her company entombed within her.
Scattered about the flagship lay the grey monoliths of her companions in descending order of hierarchy. Beyond the heavy capital ships lay the cruisers in smaller imitation, and then the flotillas of sharp, pugnacious destroyers. The faint haze of heat rose above their funnels and the banked boiler fires below, the tiny bright coloured spots of ensigns, signal and command flags fluttered at their halliards, and among them passed the boats and tenders, busying themselves on the domestic affairs of the fleet. Sheba passed an outward-bound destroyer, her crew securing her upper deck as she headed for the opened boom. Across the wind-ruffled waters of the Flow the thin, persistent notes of the pipes carried; ensigns were dipped and ratings stood for a moment to attention, then HMS Sheba, having made her number to the signal station was ordered to a remote ‘explosives anchorage’ to await further instructions.
These were not long in coming, a fleet tender delivered a written order for Clark to take his ship alongside several Home Fleet destroyers and to trans-ship his cargo of torpedoes. For the remainder of that day Clark and his ship’s company went from one destroyer to another, carefully swinging the twenty-one-inch weapons on to their iron decks. It was pure ship-handling and seamanship, the mooring and unmooring, the laying alongside and the working-off from each destroyer as she swung to wind and tide in the erratic conditions of the day. But there were no embarrassments and, although a gust had pinned Sheba alongside one ship until she slowly swung in response, Clark felt he had adequately demonstrated his skill to his crew. To have their commander’s abilities confirmed was an important preliminary ritual in the delicate establishment of uncoerced discipline; so too was his message of thanks to the hands for having acquitted themselves well under the critical eyes of so many wiseacres leaning over the rails of the recipient ships.
‘What about the six remaining torpedoes, sir?’ Frobisher asked as he came up to the bridge in search of a cup of tea as the daylight leached out of the sky and Sheba swung away from the last destroyer and headed back for her anchorage. But before Clark could answer, the erratic clatter of the Aldis lamp diverted their attention.
‘Signal from the flagship, sir,’ the signaller reported, holding out the message pad with its pencilled upper-case scrawl. Clark read it and handed it to Pearson, who was manipulating parallel rules and dividers over the chart.
‘We’re to go alongside the depot ship,’ he said to Frobisher, turning to Pearson and saying, ‘Give me a course…’
Clark swung his glasses round the anchorage and steadied them on the ungainly silhouette of an adapted merchantman. ‘Ah, I’ve got her. Hard a port,’ he ordered. ‘Give her full ahead, Number One, let’s get her alongside before tea time.’ Frobisher straightened up from the telegraph against which he had been leaning and swung its handle. The engine-room repeater followed after a second, the jangling ringing through the wheelhouse. After a moment Clark steadied the helm and, as Pearson gave him a confirming compass course across the Flow, turned again to Frobisher.
‘I expect we’ll be alongside for a couple of days. We’re to have some modifications done.’
‘Oh, that makes lots of sense, having just come from the builder’s yard,’ Frobisher said sarcastically as he sipped his tea. ‘And it’s got something to do with the torpedoes, hasn’t it?’
Clark looked at his first lieutenant. Frobisher’s face was a pale oval in the twilit gloom and he could sense the sudden attention of the man at the wheel. Able Seaman Saunders would be eager for any scuttlebutt he could carry below to the mess deck.
‘Once we’re alongside, Number One,’ Clark conceded, ‘I want the officers mustered in the wardroom. Then we’ll clear lower deck and I’ll speak to the ship’s company.’
But Clark’s intended briefings were postponed. They were no sooner secured alongside the depot ship Tyne, than an elderly lieutenant in the uniform of the Volunteer Reserve came aboard and asked Clark to accompany him. Clark followed the elderly officer on to the old liner and was then escorted across the ship and out of her opposite side, where, at the foot of her accommodation ladder, a wooden pontoon moved uneasily in the slop alongside the depot ship. Moored to the pontoon lay a picket boat whose motion was infinitely livelier.
‘Orders to spirit you off quietly to the flagship, sir,’ the elderly lieutenant explained. ‘I’m sure you know why.’
Clark saluted the lieutenant as he passed over the depot ship’s side, and then saluted again as the elegant sprig of a midshipman in charge of the picket boat acknowledged him. A moment later Clark was somewhat apprehensively alone in the cuddy of the picket boat. The midshipman ducked his head down once to see if his passenger was all right, but otherwise they bounced across the Row for what seemed like an age until, coming into the lee of the King George V, the boat steadied, her engine slowed, then stopped, kicked astern and nudged another pontoon at the foot of the battleship’s after port accommodation ladder.
Clark gazed up at the towering upperworks above him. The battleship seemed huge. Her funnel and forebridge rising into the star-spangled darkness like some bizarre giant’s castle in a dream, she hummed with the rumble of internal machinery. At the top of the gangway the gleam of brass and pipeclay caught his eye, but he had no time for observation. Another lieutenant, this time young and immaculate, with a telescope tucked under his arm, saluted him and led him off into a labyrinth of alleyways, companionways and flats. The lieutenant walked purposefully, so much so that his progress was unbarred, and both officers and men going about the
great ship drew back from the pair of them. Clark at first thought he was to be taken aft, perhaps to the commander-in-chief’s harbour quarters, but their gradual ascent told him they were going upwards towards the bridge. Clearly he was to meet a senior staff officer. In fact, and quite suddenly, he found himself on what he afterwards learned was the admiral’s bridge, face-to-face with Admiral Sir John Tovey. At the intrusion the commander-in-chief of the Home Fleet turned from conversation with another officer. Clark could see a chart and some papers spread before the two men, illuminated by the lowered lamp hung over the chart table.
‘L’tenant Commander Clark, Sir John,’ the officer of the watch said breezily.
Clark snapped to attention and saluted. Tovey acknowledged the salute and dismissed the lieutenant. The commander-in-chief introduced his chief-of staff, then said, ‘We all know why you are here, Commander Clark. We have been expecting you for some time.’
‘There were some delays at the yard, sir,’ Clark explained, flushing.
‘No doubt. Well, I understand you are alongside the Tyne and your torpedo tubes will be fitted immediately. Special provisions have been made for you to draw whatever you require from the depot ship’s stores – Arctic clothing and the like. Within reason, of course. I don’t want you running away with the notion that you have a blank cheque.’
‘No, of course not, sir.’
‘Very well. As soon as all that has been accomplished, you are to proceed to sea and carry out trials. I am not proposing to complicate matters by having a special training programme drawn up for you, you know your objective and I think it best that you carry out your own programme, but if you require assistance, you are to make your request personally, by word of mouth, to the chief of staff here. We’ll give you a submarine for a day; I hope that will be sufficient. I hear that you and your ship’s company are all highly proficient.’ Tovey’s tone was dryly sceptical, ‘I hope you are.’
Dead Man Talking Page 17
