The Bonny Boy

by David Black

  Right away Harry knew there was something very different about her, and it wasn’t just the lack of make-up – rationing extended to make-up too – or that her hair, tucked neatly under her stylish little “Robin Hood” hat was no longer the lustrous blonde he remembered, but its natural light brown.

  ‘I’m coming home from work.’ she replied.

  Harry stared.

  ‘I work now. In the offices at Kincaids. The engine works. All we girls work now. Hadn’t you heard on your little boat?’

  Of course she did. Harry remembered the Government decree back at the end of ’41, that all single women between the ages of 20 and 30, who were “mobile”, were required to either sign up with the armed forces, or present themselves for war work. He’d actually thought about Janis for a moment back then, when he’d heard; smiling to himself trying to imagine her in a shipyard, in a pair of overalls trying to wield a riveter’s gun. But if he’d thought any more about it, he would’ve assumed her father would simply have employed her as his senior executive in charge of carrying his pencil case. But no. An office girl in Kincaids now. He searched her face for signs of how that had gone down. And reflected on what she’d just said.

  Her words on a page might have appeared snide, but the imperiousness he remembered was gone. The face, now Max Factor-free, was really rather pretty, but there was … something … there? Not there? He couldn’t decide.

  ‘What are you doing on this boat?’ she said.

  ‘Same as you really. Heading home. I’ve got some leave, at last. Not very long, though,’ said Harry, not elaborating, because you didn’t talk about what you did in the war. “Walls have ears”, being the watch words, nobody thought you rude.

  ‘If I’d known you were coming I might have made myself more presentable,’ she said. ‘But the war effort these days makes no allowances for us girls’ little necessities. Nobody cares about keeping our morale up.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said the gallant Harry. ‘You look very attractive.’

  But she didn’t hear his compliment. Her eyes were dancing over his shoulders, looking at the hills, not him. ‘Was there any particular reason you stopped writing?’ she asked.

  And Harry thought, well, maybe you haven’t changed that much. It was a classic Janis distortion. He hadn’t stopped writing: she had dumped him. There had been a boyfriend. Had he been a doctor? Harry couldn’t quite recall. Anyway, he’d known how to treat a lady, apparently, or so she’d said; and Harry hadn’t. So, tough, Harry. Then, after a while, right out of the blue, she had started writing again, but only after it had been in the local paper that he’d won a Croix de Guerre. That was the letter he hadn’t replied to. But he said none of that, only, ‘You told me you had a boyfriend and didn’t want to see me again.’

  Janis, still not looking at him, said, ‘I have no boyfriend. There was a selfish, self-important …’ She had been on the verge rehearsing again the list of denigrating epithets she routinely ascribed to her former beau, but it was as if she sensed it would say more about herself than she wanted, so she just finished with, ‘… man. Who wasted my time for a while. After you went away and abandoned me.’

  Harry made to explain, ‘Janis. I’m a serving naval officer …’ but then realised he’d be wasting his breath. Janis had always demonstrated an unfailing and rigid determination to stamp on anything that might suggest the world wasn’t as she said it was. But there was something else that made him pause – his realisation of what he’d been seeing in the scrubbed, un-armoured planes of her face, and hadn’t recognised until now: Janis was frightened. It was her hunted look that told him, the one people get when their world has collapsed around them. He felt a quick, aching stab of her compassion for her.

  It was the war. She’d been queen of the castle once, and how she must have loved the view from her pedestal; now she wasn’t up there anymore, now she was another office worker, down on the deck with everyone else. And she even couldn’t seek solace in their camaraderie, because her own superiority wouldn’t let her. Poor Janis. Harry tried to imagine how lonely she must be.

  ‘How will you spend your leave? She asked.

  ‘With my mother and father, I suppose. I haven’t seen them for so long.’ But the minute he said it, Harry had the feeling that somehow it had been the wrong answer.

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘With the keeper of the waifs and strays, and the conshie.’

  And there it was again: the hard, merciless core of her that he remembered so well. Except the hardness seemed more brittle now, like over-forged steel.

  Harry’s concern for Janis Crumley instantly evaporated with her words. He’d always been the sort of chap who would put up with a lot from people, mainly because he really couldn’t care less what went on in most folk’s mixed-up heads. But he always drew line at folk who presumed to malign his mother and father. And Janis Crumley had just crossed it.

  The waifs and strays bit he understood; Harry’s mother had taken in three evacuee children from Glasgow back in 1940. Aggie had been nine years old then, Archie six, and Margaret barely two. The children’s mother worked in a munitions factory, while their father, an Argyll and Sutherland Highlander, lay in some mass grave on the outskirts of Saint Valery. But the conshie bit – he’d heard that before about his father. Growing up there’d always been mutterings in the town, from folk who’d immediately clam up if he’d ever asked what they meant. Then he’d heard it again in a hotel lounge in Halifax, Nova Scotia, from some oily Whitehall roué.

  “Conshie” had been the Great War’s shorthand for “conscientious objector”, or in most people’s understanding then, coward. There had always been some dark question mark over his father’s war record back home, something that no-one ever talked about. Harry only knew one thing about what his father had done in the Great War, and that’d he’d only discovered much later, a fact that made any accusation of cowardice easily dismissible: his father had been awarded a Military Medal for bravery on the Western Front, won in 1918. But now here was that “conshie” word again.

  ‘What do you mean, conshie, Miss Crumley?’

  Janis looked up sharply, recognising the edge in his voice. She smiled, thinly, ‘Oh come on. Everybody knows Duncan Gilmour was a conshie. He used to flaunt it round the town.’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  Janis studied him, wondering whether he was being serious or not. When it dawned on her he was, her smile had widened; there was a glee in her eyes that some people get when an unexpected opportunity arises to punish further those who have offended them.

  ‘Your father refused to fight, Harry. Has nobody told you?’ she said eyeing him candidly, looking for evidence that her verbal blows might be landing. ‘While all the other young men were signing up, he went about mocking them for fools with all his anti-war ranting. He was worse than a holy willy …’

  A “holy willy”; it was the locals’ disparagement for religious zealots – never a well-regarded genus in this part of the world. Harry felt an involuntary smile on his face at her lapse into the common tongue.

  ‘ … he was a public outrage,’ she continued, warming to her subject. ‘Respectable women gave him white feathers and he wore them in his button hole! He had no shame about it. Then in 1916 they announced there was to be a call-up, for all men between eighteen and forty. If you hadn’t volunteered by the March, the government were going to put you in the army anyway. Every policeman in the town was waiting for one minute after midnight on the day, so they might be the first to put the cuffs on your father. But he disappeared. Nobody knew where he’d gone. Then he turned up. In France. On the Western Front,’ she paused to savour the confusion on Harry’s face.

  ‘Like the holy willy he always said he wasn’t, he’d gone and joined some religious order,’ she said. ‘There was a photo of him in the paper, all dressed up in khaki. A whole gang of them looking like they were soldiers. But they weren’t. They were all still pacifists, pretending. Just to get out
of fighting. They called themselves “The Friends’ Ambulance Unit”, or something. He was a stretcher bearer.’

  Harry felt numb. ‘Quakers,’ he said. ‘It was set up by the Quakers.’

  ‘Quakers, shakers. Whoever they were,’ she waved her hand dismissively. ‘It meant the army couldn’t make him fight like a real man. He still spouts the same pacifist nonsense, I hear. Will you be able to bear him, now you’re a hero? I read about your medals in the Standard.’

  He couldn’t think of anything worthwhile to say to her after that, so he turned away and squeezed himself between the other standing passengers to another spot on the crowded deck. As he went he heard her call, with a hint of confusion in her voice, as if she hadn’t quite understood what had just happened.

  ‘Harry? Harry. Do call …’ he heard her say to his back.

  ****

  Everybody at home knew Harry had been based practically next door for the past three weeks; he’d written to tell them. He’d even telephoned – twice. He hadn’t said what he was actually doing in Rothesay; one didn’t, these days, not over an open phone line. Just that it was training. And because that probably meant he was safe, his mother hadn’t needed to hear anymore. She didn’t know much about submarines.

  Each time the phone had been answered by little Margaret who must’ve been all of four years old by then, bubbling with excitement.

  ‘Your father has them rehearsing,’ his mother had explained. ‘He’s got them doing a play about the Kings of Dalriada.’

  Harry hadn’t been able to get his head round that when he’d heard it. His father, playing with children?

  After all the chaos of Harry actually coming through the door had died down, he sat in the kitchen, alone with his mother and a pot of tea. It was pure broken orange pekoe from a box stamped “Mombasa”, courtesy of Dunoon’s own Merchant Navy back-door supply chain that a local sherriff, if absolutely forced to recognise it, would’ve had to call ‘the black market’.

  ‘Who told you,’ said Harry’s mother, finishing pouring them both another cup. There was always plenty of milk in the town, but sugar was a problem. Harry however, had brought a couple of brown paper bags full in his pockets, pinched from Cyclops’ galley, so neither was stinting tonight.

  ‘I met Janis Crumley on the steamer,’ said Harry. He hadn’t wasted much time after sitting down for his first chat with his mother before broaching the subject of his father’s war, and all the secrecy surrounding it.

  ‘Really,’ said his mother. ‘She’s not finding working for a living much fun I hear.’

  ‘She found it fun to be the first to tell me that my father was regarded as a conscientious objector in the Great War. We both know about the talk. But this wasn’t talk I heard. She was very specific, right down to the white feathers.’

  ‘Yes. Well Janis would like telling you things like that.’

  ‘Why would she say it when she and everybody else knew my father served on the Western Front?’

  ‘Small towns are like that. They don’t change their minds when their prejudices get contradicted by facts. They just turn nasty.’

  ‘So what she said is true? Have you anything else to say on the matter?’

  Their conversation was being conducted in the most matter-of-fact tones, like discussing the weather. His mother sighed.

  ‘I told you a long time ago,’ she said. ‘You’re father did not want it discussed. Ever. And as he is also my husband, I have respected his wishes. Always. I told you that too. So I see no excuse for all your faux surprise and hurt.’

  ‘What about that he won a Military Medal? And don’t look at me like that. I know he won the medal, because I found it one day, but never said. But I didn’t know he’d been a stretcher bearer, until she told me. In a Quaker ambulance unit. Is it faux surprise and hurt I’m wallowing in over that, too?’

  His mother cast her eyes down. Duncan Gilmour had never made any secret of his hatred of war. Not just this war; every war. He’d railed against it, loud and long, and frequently in public. He’d come close to getting into trouble with the civil authorities because of his insistence in doing so to the pupils in his classes. War, and man’s stupidity. And he’d always taken his own son’s decision to abandon his university degree and join the Royal Navy in 1939 as a deep and grievous personal affront; and he had behaved accordingly on the few times they had come face to face since.

  Even coming home this time, after everything he’d been through in the Mediterranean, when Harry’s father had walked in through the door to find his only son sitting back at his kitchen table, he had acknowledged his return from war with barely a nod.

  ‘Won’t you at least tell me what happened?’ asked Harry. ‘She said he was a conshie, but he couldn’t have been a conshie. He won a Military Medal.’

  His mother thought for a while, and Harry didn’t break her silence. Then her expression said she’d made a decision.

  ‘Oh he was a conshie all right,’ she said, starting to smile at the memory. ‘It was all long before we were … an item, of course. But it was the talk of the steamie. And he didn’t care who knew it. When everybody was volunteering, he was refusing to. And he told everybody so. Most folk tried to ignore him, but others were scandalised. It was Mary MacDougall that handed him a white feather in the the Argyll Hotel in front of a full dining room. She was an ill-natured, mean-spirited and prodigiously ugly old hag. I was just a girl then, but I remember her still. Smelled of camphor. She thought she was humiliating your father.’

  ‘But she wasn’t,’ offered Harry.

  ‘Oh no,’ said his mother, with a fond smile on her face, remembering. ‘He threw it back at her apparently. Said it would be better employed tickling her fanny, seeing as it would most definitely be the only thing that’d ever tickle it!’ And his mother laughed, a throaty laugh at that.

  ‘Then conscription came in, and the night before the law officially changed, your father vanished. The local police, having heard his opinions on the war as much as anyone, reported him as being a deserter. They even sent out search parties into the hills looking for him. Idiots. But you’re right. He went off with the Quakers, and was already in Flanders before they’d traced him. The rest Janis has told you, I assume.’

  ‘Really? said Harry. He was going to add, ‘What rest?’ But he left it at that.

  Harry spent most of the next few days of his leave out of the house, walking in the Cowal hills with Gordon, his black Labrador, unhappy, dislocated. At times it seemed Gordon was the only one glad to see him back. The old days, where Harry and his mother had always talked, had gone it seemed. Apart from their exchange over his father’s war record, the only personal conversation he’d had with her had begun and ended with her saying, ‘I miss seeing Shirley about the house these days.’

  The older two of the evacuee children regarded him as they’d always done – with suspicion, like he was some grown up cuckoo who kept returning to what they considered their nest now. The youngest, the little toddler Margaret, was Meg now, and bigger, and whereas she used to throw her arms wide every time she saw her new big brother, now she only had eyes for his father, who with all his theatricals was now much more fun. Harry, on the other hand, had no idea how to talk to his father at all any more, even though he had so much he wanted to say now, knowing what he did, about both of them.

  And every time he went into the hills, he couldn’t stop thinking about Shirley.

  Cdr Lipsey had been right about not having to wait long for an appointment. One day, when Harry and Gordon had returned from one of their walks, there was a telegram from the Admiralty waiting for him:

  TO LT HJ GILMOUR. APPOINTED HM SUBMARINE H57 IN COMMAND. REPORT PNO CAMPBELTOWN SOONEST. FLAG OFFICER SUBMARINES.

  And that had been it: no fanfare, no parade. He held the flimsy slip and stared at the words with the dread exhilaration that they really did mean him.

  Seven

  ‘We seem to be agreed, Mr Prosser,’ said Harry, fitti
ng his elegant sextant back into its carrying case. He had just brought down Saturn, and his reading confirmed the position already calculated by the boat’s navigator, Sub-Lt Prosser.

  ‘Yes sir,’ said Prosser, with just enough flatness of tone to tell Harry how browned-off he was at having his work publicly checked by the new skipper. They were 30 miles west-southwest of Marettimo Island, right out in the mouth of the Sicilian Channel; His Majesty’s Submarine Nonpareil was right where she was meant to be, and early too, with a good half hour to go before first light, all of which was down to the diligence and experience of the boat’s navigator. Which Harry knew, and so did Prosser.

  For Harry hadn’t been checking Prosser’s work; he’d just been keeping his hand in. He’d always liked navigating: it told him exactly where he was and it gave him something to do; and these days it was good for stopping his mind going places he’d rather it didn’t. Unfortunately, it also meant he was prone to missing the little etiquettes of command that made a CO respected.

  Although Harry might, right now, technically be skipper of HMS Nonpareil, she wasn’t actually his boat. He was a replacement CO, appointed to command her, so her regular skipper could have a rest.

  This replacement berth should’ve been for just one patrol, but this was now Nonpareil’s second with Lt Harry Gilmour in charge. Her actual skipper, Lt The Honourable Henry “Flannel” Ferneyheugh RN, a ludicrously posh Yorkshirman, had been laid up with what was first thought to be flu, but turned out to be sandfly fever. He was still in Malta’s Bighi naval hospital, where they knew only too well how to treat the bloody disease, since sooner or later it seemed nearly everybody got a bout of the damn thing, the bloody little flies being so ubiquitous across the island.

  The Nonpareils weren’t happy. As far as they were concerned, Flannel, for all his flamboyant Wodehousian eccentricity, was a solid, careful CO who didn’t push any limits, yet they could still boast a respectable tally of sunk enemy ships sewn onto their Jolly Roger. And they liked that. Now they had this new boy foisted on them, his arrival preceded by his firebrand reputation – never a good thing on a solid, steady boat – which he had then promptly failed to live up to. So they were watching him – a fact Harry was equally well aware of.