The Bonny Boy

by David Black

  But Harry wasn’t looking back at Portsmouth Harbour. He was gazing out to sea as he walked back alone from the small brick building where the attack teacher was housed, along the coastal path past the new escape training tower to the ageing ramparts of Fort Blockhouse which had dominated the western entrance to Portsmouth Harbour for over 300 years. Since 1905 the fort had been home to HMS Dolphin, the shore base for the Royal Navy’s submarine service, and Harry and his four fellow Perishers were billeted there for the first two-week segment of the course.

  There was not a single ship in sight in the offing, only the squat, round, stone bluntness of the Spitbank Fort, built there to defend the harbour back in 1878.

  ‘It was the Ryuho actually,’ said Mandy Trevanion, suddenly appearing at his side. She was referring to the Japanese carrier he had just “sunk”. ‘But that’s the last trick one I’ll fire at you,’ she added. She’d been stepping out to catch him up and now she fell in alongside, ‘I concede. You’re ship recognition is too good.’

  ‘It’s not the recognising them that’s the problem,’ said Harry. ‘It’s the hitting them.’

  ‘Uh-huh. But you blew the arse out of this one though, didn’t you,’ said Mandy.

  Harry turned and smiled at her. She was a big woman. Not fat, just … with lots of presence – tall, bountifully-bosomed and with such a beautiful face. She looked handsome and gorgeous and utterly imposing all at the same time in her crisp No 1s, with her single blue rings on her sleeves – and no rings on her fingers. It was hard to tell her age, early thirties maybe. Certainly older than the current clutch of Perishers, and a lot older than Harry, who had just turned 23.

  Harry had been wondering as he walked, Is Cdr Lipsey going to fail me? Yes I’ve just hit something. But that’s the first time in days. Does he think it was just a fluke?

  Now, with Mandy stepping out beside him, the thought running through his head changed to, He is going to fail me, and he’s sent you to try and soften me up for the blow. But he didn’t say anything; he was buggered if he was going to show weakness by even raising the subject.

  ‘He’s not going to fail you, you know,’ said Mandy, not looking at him. ‘You’re not the only one who’s been fluffing attacks.’

  Jesus Christ! She’s not reading my mind as well, thought Harry, not for the first time.

  But he’d been right about one thing: Cdr Lipsey had indeed told her to go and speak to Harry. Ten days into the course and Harry, its youngest entrant to date, was not settling down to the rhythm of it. It had been noticed that Lt Gilmour was a little distant with his fellow Perishers. He frequently didn’t stay in the wardroom after dinner, for the drinks and the unwinding; he’d been slow in coming forward when it came to the post-match discussions Cdr Lipsey convened after every outing to the attack teacher; and when it was his turn on the periscope, Lt Gilmour had been finding it damn near impossible to set up successful attacks.

  ‘There’s something troubling him,’ Cdr. Lipsey had said to Mandy. ‘He’s behaving like a fish out of water, when he should be right at home.’ That was before he ordered her to have a chat with, ‘our Mr Gilmour’.

  He said, ‘Make sure he comes to drinks tonight to hear the news. I don’t want him slinking off like he usually does.’

  ‘Fish out of water. Oh, very droll, Hugo,’ Mandy had replied, entirely inappropriately when talking to a senior officer, and in a manner only she could get away with.

  It was the same familiarity she employed, walking now with Harry. ‘The Perisher isn’t some glorified fairground shooting gallery, you know’ she said, sounding all ruminative as she kept in step with him and gazed out to sea too. ‘It isn’t just about being able to hit toy boats for prizes. It’s about what’s going on in your head. How you think. How you get out of scrapes. Whether you can keep your head regardless, and keep buggering on.’

  The blank horizon had turned quite beautiful now as she turned from it to frown at Harry, like he was the class’s slow child. ‘That’s what Uncle Hugo is looking for. Chaps whose heads are in the game. Consistency. Not just for someone to hand out stuffed teddy bears to.’

  Which was all true, as Harry knew. The entire attack teacher set-up bore no resemblance to reality. For a start, the “weather” was always perfect; there were no squalls or rain, or fog banks to deal with, or a choppy surface and flying spume to obscure your view through the periscope. And no escorts coming at you, with fantails loaded with depth charges, or aircraft coming out of the sun, or out of a cloud bank while your periscope is pointed the other way, and unloading a bomb-bay full on your head.

  Also, there was the unreality of a brick control room from which you carried out your attacks; in the attack teacher you didn’t have to worry about the trim, or battery charge, or currents, tides, or how close inshore you were, the depth beneath your keel. The whole atmosphere was so artificial sometimes you forgot what was for’ard and what was aft.

  No, the Perisher was all about you knowing how to draw yourself a picture: of where you were, and where the target was, and what you both were doing; of all those moving angles set in the middle of a huge and variable box, which one day, if you passed, you’d find set in an even vaster and more unforgiving ocean.

  The thing was, though, for these young two-ringers, it was all new. They might have been at sea on an operational submarine for years, but most of them had never had to carry out an actual attack. When you were a first lieutenant, the speed and course of the target wasn’t your responsibility. You weren’t expected to hold the target’s range and bearing in your head, or allow for how it was constantly changing depending on your speed, and the target’s, or the constantly changing director angle, at which you must fire. That was the captain’s job, and the captain’s alone. As a first lieutenant you had other jobs on the boat.

  So what Cdr Lipsey was looking for wasn’t expertise; he merely wanted to find out whether you could grasp what the new job was, and whether you could draw those pictures in your head and work with them, regardless of what mayhem was going on around you. And sink the enemy.

  Harry understood that. And for anyone who didn’t, after every attack, Lipsey had them all upstairs to tell them; he had them all sat round the big white table, where every move of target ship and submarine had been recorded while he’d compare their every move on the board with their own paper plots of what they’d thought they’d done – and then he’d tear their tactics to pieces.

  He’d go over every decision made by each potential skipper, decisions made after just one short look through the periscope, based on information that would have changed by time he took his next short look.

  Good skippers learned to hold the running picture in their heads, so the next time they called ‘Up periscope!’, they more or less could guess where they should be looking. Others didn’t. And to make matters worse, sometimes Cdr Lipsey would throw a spanner in your works, and when you next ordered ‘Up periscope!’, the target was nowhere to be seen and you had to go chasing round the compass looking for it. Getting “lost in the box” they called it, and as often as not by the time you found it again, your target had gone thundering past your DA and you’d lost all chance of a shot. Or worse, there would be a deafening clanging on the tin roof above you as the Wrens hurled down their collection of bakery scales’ weights indicating that your target had just run you over and sent you to the bottom.

  Harry had been on the course long enough to know all that by now.

  ‘I understand,’ he said to Mandy. ‘We’ve all heard about the Perisher out there in the fleet, you know. There’s no need to lecture me, Third Officer Trevanion.

  ‘I’m not here to lecture you,’ said Mandy, now all sniffy. ‘Who do you think I am, your form mistress? Stupid boy. I’m here to ask you to a party. Cdr Lipsey wants all you lot in the wardroom tonight for a little celebration.’

  ‘What celebration?’ asked Harry, thinking, How very Mandy; talking to her, you think you know the direction the conversation is
going in; and then it isn’t.

  ‘It’s a secret,’ said Mandy, with arch gravity, ‘And if you ever go all formal Missy-Third Officer on me again, while I’m being all charming and girly with you, you will feel my displeasure. And that will be nowhere near a delightful experience as your sordid little mind is probably dreaming about. See you later, my lovely.’

  And off she flounced with that self-possessed stride that only she could make look feminine and alluring.

  They’re letting anyone into the service these days, said Harry, smiling to himself, watching her make her exit past one of the sand-bagged gun emplacements that faced out to sea. There was a pongo sitting on the sandbag parapet smoking, and leering after Mandy’s retreating rear. Harry followed the tin-hatted soldier’s line of sight, thinking, Even if you did, mate, you’d never live to tell the tale.

  ****

  Harry had his own cabin in Fort Blockhouse, like all the other Perishers. He looked at himself in the mirror above his small shaving sink against the cabin wall. He suspected Cdr Lipsey hadn’t sent Mad Mandy just to ask him to a party. Harry knew it was all because of his attitude since he’d arrived back at Dolphin, how he’d been buttoning himself up, not joining in. And now even Lipsey was noticing.

  He was distracted, and he knew it himself – by the war, by what he’d seen and done, by how fast things were happening.

  It hadn’t even been two weeks ago he’d been standing, shaking, on a blacked-out jetty in Malta’s Grand Harbour having just walked off a badly damaged submarine that he was lucky hadn’t sunk under him, and then he’d been stepping off a Sunderland flying boat at Gibraltar, and stepping onto a fast Dido-class anti-aircraft cruiser for a cruise back to Blighty.

  Before that he had been in continuous action for eight months out there on battered, beleaguered Malta, where only two things had mattered: sinking Rommel’s supply ships; and not getting sunk yourself. On Malta theirs had been a tiny war; Jerry came over and dropped his bombs, and their scratch flotilla of little 600-ton submarines made their short forays into a narrow sea to attack a succession of enemy convoys. When in port, nothing had existed beyond the horizon; when at sea, nothing had mattered outside the eyepiece of a periscope. Exactly how his dear, dead friend and mentor Peter Dumaresq had once told him it would be: lots of little ships and aeroplanes and nasty little battles.

  Then he’d got on that cruiser, HMS Calliope, and suddenly he’d been back in the real Navy. It had been a rude awakening.

  She’d formed part of a fast escort group, shepherding home a fast convoy of empty troopships coming up from the Cape, calling at Gibraltar, Blighty-bound after delivering more divisions to Eighth Army and that mincing machine that was the desert campaign. And now she was going to carry him home too.

  It wasn’t that HMS Calliope’s wardroom hadn’t been a welcoming place: it had. It was the ship herself, what she stood for and that she was one of many. The discipline, the formality, the sense that while Malta had been locked in its own bloody little ruck, a whole big war had been going on over the horizon, regardless.

  Calliope looked like a whippet with gun turrets, sleek, fast and built for just one thing – engaging the enemy more closely. A beautiful killer, just like a Royal Navy cruiser should be, but just one cog in a growing, grinding machine.

  While he and his fellow submariners had been fighting and dying in their little boats, in their own little war, beyond the horizon the Royal Navy had been expanding into a veritable industry – sending more ships down the slipways, sucking in thousands more men to man them, fighting other, bigger battles in other bigger theatres, out across the entire globe.

  And if he had been in any doubt, when he had disembarked at Devonport, he’d come slam up against the vast, indifferent truth of it.

  He’d barely stepped off Calliope’s gangway when he’d received a right royal dressing down, right there on the quayside, from a captain he’d no idea who he was, over some breach of regulations regarding dress standing orders he’d never heard of. Not only had the captain been utterly uninterested in the fact that virtually every scrap of uniform Harry had ever possessed was currently lying shredded in the bombed out wreck of the Tenth Flotilla ’s old Lazaretto base, and that all he owned was what he stood up in, and a substantial amount of that scavenged from Calliope’s generous wardroom; no, the Captain had actually become outraged to the point of apoplexy that some RNVR Lieutenant had had the temerity to even attempt to point it out.

  It had been just the beginning. Over the following days all the rules and regulations and traditions and hierarchies – the whole sclerotic, hidebound, de-humanising, mindless majesty of it all, that he remembered all the way back to life in the wardroom of that old R-Class battleship in the spring of 1940, where his naval career had almost been sunk before it was even launched – came tumbling back down on him. Welcome-fucking-home.

  Right then, Harry had never felt more like some hapless civilian who’d somehow ended up in the wrong suit. He tried to imagine the feckless student he’d once been, who instead of getting himself all togged up for third year at Glasgow University, had walked into a Royal Navy recruiting office in order to join a war, which at that point had been all of two days old.

  He’d just been a daft lad back then, but he’d liked being a daft lad. Christ knew what he’d become now, or who he was going to end up as if he survived. Everything was changing because of the war, including him; and he was finding it all hard to take.

  But one thing was abundantly clear to him now, something he was sure Cdr Lipsey had sent Mandy to remind him: if he failed this course he would be out of submarines for good, and back in that big ship Navy Peter Dumaresq had helped him escape. That was the rule: if you flunked Perisher there was no way back. So he’d better pull his socks up.

  ‘Stop fannying about, Harry,’ he said to the mirror. Then he splashed water on his face, changed his shirt, put his tie back on, and headed for the party.

  Four

  The Royal Navy’s submarine service had always been something of a family concern. And ever since its founding in 1905 it had always been regarded as a bit of a riff-raff sort of outfit by its betters in the big-gun fleet. One Admiral actually described it as being ‘underhand, underwater and damned un-English’, and quite definitely ‘below the salt’ – slanders submariners bore with pride to the extent they collectively referred to themselves as, “the Trade”.

  Even with the service undergoing a massive expansion driven by wartime demands, the Trade continued to be a pretty close-knit community where a reputation could easily be earned, for good or ill.

  So the other four Perishers had all heard of Harry Gilmour, even before they knew he was going to be on their course. Indeed, when they’d asked why the fifth candidate was late, Third Officer Trevanion had deliberately not mentioned any name, but merely said he was coming all the way from Tenth Flotilla. That alone had marked him out; they didn’t get many candidates coming from Tenth these days, not because they weren’t good enough, but because out there in the central Mediterranean, few boats survived long enough to send their Jimmy on the Commanding Officers’ Qualifying Course.

  And then this youth had shown up. He was at least three, if not four years younger than any of the other commanding officer hopefuls – and he was Wavy Navy! And still Paddy Cullinan and Charles Maude from the Third Flotilla on the Holy Loch, Guy Serrell from the Ninth at Harwich, and Jacko Dunham from the Sixth at Blyth had all failed to put two and two together, not least because the bloke looked like such a kid.

  It had been Cdr Lipsey who had finally introduced him. Harry Gilmour. And then it clicked: he was the Wavy-Navy wunderkind who’d dragged Ted Padgett out of Pelorus after she’d been rammed and sunk in the North Sea, when everyone had thought Padgett was already dead – Padgett one of the old school warrant engineers and a Trade legend. Here was the Harry Gilmour who’d been with Andy Trumble when he’d taken Trebuchet into that Soviet fjord and got in amongst those Jerry ships assembling
for an Iceland invasion force; and who as number three on Umbrage had assumed command after her skipper had been lost overboard and her first lieutenant critically injured, and who then went on to execute a text book torpedo attack on his own that crippled two Italian cruisers, the Harry Gilmour who had been Malcolm Carey’s Jimmy when Carey had won his VC sinking that Jerry troop convoy in the Sicilian Channel. When had that been? Two weeks ago? And the fellow only an RNVR officer, too. So it was that Harry Gilmour. They’d all heard the stories.

  In the normal run of events, such a young officer aspiring to command would have automatically become the butt of every joke imaginable, regardless of whether it had been God himself who’d recommended him; and the fact that this babe-in-arms was a reservist would almost certainly have provoked hazing off the scale. But this was different; this wasn’t just any brat. His deeds preceded him. The other four candidates had no idea how to treat Lt Harry Gilmour. So they’d all fallen back on the old the Royal Navy catch-all response, and established a certain diffident distance.

  Harry hadn’t noticed, but Cdr Lipsey had. But that hadn’t been what was worrying Teacher. It was Harry’s general all-round lack of engagement. There was something on Gilmour’s mind, and if he didn’t shake it Lipsey knew he’d have to fail him. ‘After all, we all know he can hit things,’ Cdr Lipsey had confided to Mandy Trevanion, ‘because he’s done it. In real life. I don’t know what kind of daze he’s in, but he needs to be gee-ed out of it.’

  Like every Royal Navy wardroom within operational radius of a Luftwaffe airfield, the one on HMS Dolphin had stowed all its glittering baubles and fine trappings for the duration, so the officers had only a disparate collection of scuffed arm chairs and frayed floral sofas to disport themselves on under its hallowed roof. Lipsey had convened the Perisher course party in the far corner beside one of the dining tables, loaded with more booze than rationing should have permitted. Mandy Trevanion was in attendance along with a couple of other Wren officers and some of the ageing base lieutenant commanders to make up the numbers. It was a cheery band, considering. What war news there was to discuss was no longer dominated by disaster, but neither was it entirely good. Earlier chat had all been about how the Eighth Army was still managing to hold on along the Gazala Line near Tobruk, and about the recent stunning US Navy victory over a major Japanese carrier task force off the island of Midway. And how, in the Mediterranean, one convoy – Operation Harpoon – had just managed to fight its way through to Malta. But another had been forced to turn back. News from the Tenth Flotilla was still bad; having been driven from Malta by the German bombing, it was still operating out of Alexandria and having to run a gauntlet of anti-submarine patrols before it even got to Rommel’s supply convoys. News from the north Atlantic was bad too; the previous month’s convoy losses had been the worst of the war so far with U-boats accounting for over 800,000 tons worth of Allied shipping.