Turn Left for Gibraltar

by David Black

  Chapter Two

  Harry wasn’t in the mood to see the cricket teams return either. He let Fabrizio head up to the bar, and then went and got his swimming stuff, intending to head off for the pool. The drinking would begin with ‘sundowners’, then progress to ‘aperitifs’ before the Italians and the British – English, really, since they made up the entire contingent, bar one – went into the mess for dinner, which was a dress-up affair with candles and waiters and lots and lots of wine. As for the Germans, they made a point of never joining them for dinner – or for anything, for that matter.

  Harry had been on the island a few days now, and wasn’t enjoying himself, unlike the Italian and English airmen. He supposed he was still in a bit of shock at the events that had brought him here. The bloody war: you never knew what was going to happen next. He should have been on Malta right now, joining his new submarine. Instead he was on another Mediterranean island, in the midst of what he could only describe as a bacchanalian revel, presided over by their own minor deity in the shape of Teniente Coronel Eurico de la Peña, who appeared to be behaving as if it were, in true Greek tragedy-style, all being played out purely for his own amusement. There was even a Greek tragedy-style chorus off to the side, courtesy of the Luftwaffe boys, providing commentary and moral disapproval.

  These dinners were rough affairs, especially after the remove. Which was the point at which Harry would eventually be allowed in. Up until then he was barred, because the local British consul had yet to approve his visit to the local tailor. Which meant all that Harry had to wear right now was borrowed stuff, which didn’t include white mess Number Twos.

  And, as he was informed by several of the RAF johnnies, seeing as he had not yet been kitted out with the proper mess kit, it was quite impossible for him to dine with the gentlemen. ‘Standards, old boy,’ they had explained. ‘Can’t let the side down.’

  However, he was always admitted in time for the ‘digestifs’ and then the ‘nightcaps’, and what that meant was, he was always in time for the ‘entertainment’. Mostly that seemed to centre around games of indoor rugby and a form of human steeplechase that involved a course with jumps made from sofas and soft furnishings, where the ‘jockeys’ had their wrists tied to their ankles and were expected to roll and tumble their way from starting whistle to finish.

  Harry, on his first night witnessing these events, had sought out another RNVR Sub-Lieutenant who was also a guest of the Spanish air force. The young man had sported the pilot’s wings of the Fleet Air Arm on his crisp, starched-to-a-blade mess whites, and was called Terry Oswald.

  They were all standing around the walls of the hotel’s beautiful, high-ceilinged, faux rococo dance hall. ‘Jesus Christ!’ Harry had observed as a field of steeplechasers had set off tumbling and rolling down the sprung floor and over the arrayed furniture to much whooping and yelling, and a never-ending, piercing commentary on the changing odds from some Italian flyer perched on a huge dresser.

  The young, chubby, curly-haired and deeply tanned pilot had nodded in solemn agreement. ‘Know what you mean, old man.’ Harry hadn’t noticed at first how much he was swaying. ‘Bloody crabfats!’

  Harry had recognised Jack’s ancient slang for the Royal Air Force, coined, legend had it, all the way back to the RAF’s origins in 1918, when the colour of their new uniforms coincided with the then treatment for pubic lice: a bluey-grey jelly called crabfat.

  ‘A complete amoral shower, the lot of them,’ Terry had continued. ‘Officers? Ha! I say. Not a scrap of moral decency, moral fibre or moral rectit . . . rectity . . . Ha! Did I say titty? Eh? . . . Not one of ’em . . . what’s . . . er . . . you know . . . being upstanding? The word? Anyway, not one, among them! Drunk, they are. And in the King’s uniform too! Drunk, I say!’

  ‘So are you,’ Harry had observed mildly.

  ‘Quite. You noticed. Yes, well, we’ve been corrupted, haven’t we? Me and Tyrell and Uncle Byron over there,’ Terry had said, gesturing to the other Fleet Air Arm boys. ‘It’s a bloody business!’ And then Terry had given him a bleary smile as he looked down at Harry’s empty glass and then back to his face. ‘Drink?’

  And then there had been the senior Royal Air Force officer, Group Captain Jock Mahaddie. A Jock by name, and as Harry had quickly discovered a ‘Jock’ by profession. That was something Harry was allowed to say, seeing as Harry was a Scot himself. He knew the type.

  ‘So. Another Jock, eh?’ Mahaddie had said, looking down his nose at him, rolling his ‘rrr’s and drawing out his nasal twang. ‘You don’t sound like one. No’ a proper one, oany-wise. Where from?’

  ‘Argyll, Sir,’ Harry had replied respectfully.

  ‘Argyll, eh? And what d’ye do when yer no’ knittin’ socks then, eh, laddie?’

  Again, respectfully, Harry had replied, ‘I am a submariner, Sir.’

  ‘Submariner, eh? Where’s yer submarine then? Eh?’

  ‘It dived, Sir.’

  ‘Don’t come the smart alec wi’ me, laddie!’

  ‘I was upstairs, I fell off, it dived. That’s how I’m here, Sir.’

  Mahaddie had thrust his face into Harry’s, so close Harry could see the individual thinning hairs on his porridgy brow and the little ripples of skin, already sagging to jowl, predicting how that face would look in future. He could even see blackheads.

  ‘. . . Is that right, laddie?’ he had hissed.

  ‘Sir,’ Harry had interrupted before Mahaddie could launch, ‘you know I can’t say anything to you about submarine operations. It’s regulations, Sir. I just can’t. I’m not being smart.’

  Mahaddie had slowly withdrawn his face, his watery eyes drinking in every one of Harry’s features for storage against the grudge he was going to bear. Of course Mahaddie knew; that was the trouble.

  ‘You could be anybody,’ he had said at length, and from that moment on had regarded him as such.

  Harry didn’t snap out of his reveries until he was already standing at the pool’s edge. To all the other internees, it would have been far too cold for a swim; but for Harry, now in his trunks, the Mediterranean autumn was positively balmy compared to the weather back in Blighty, where he’d been mere days before. He looked around, taking in the bleached medieval stone of the surrounding citadel’s walls, now brushed golden by the sinking sun, and the deep, dappled turquoise of the pool’s water, and for a moment considered how preposterous it was that it had taken a world war to actually get him from his rainy home to this travel-brochure paradise. Then he dived in. And right away, he was back, rehearsing in his head again the final stages of his journey from there to here.

  Chapter Three

  Had it all started a week earlier, or was it less?

  Harry had been lying stretched out on the wardroom’s banquette aboard His Majesty’s Submarine P413, keeping out of the way, as she crept along beneath a pristine turquoise Mediterranean sea at a sedentary three knots, the crew at ‘Watch, Dived’.

  The P413 was a Grampus-class minelaying boat, one of many Royal Navy submarines to be denied the dignity of an actual name as a result of some never-announced, obscure Admiralty policy. Some speculated their Lordships had believed that by merely numbering their submarines, the service might somehow appear more efficient, faceless and deadly. Others, indeed most, assumed it was one more slight handed down to an unloved arm. After all, the Senior Service was a gentleman’s service, and these johnny-come-latelies in submarines weren’t known as ‘the Trade’ for nothing.

  P413 had sailed from Gibraltar the previous evening and this was their first day submerged. If Harry, half-dozing, had been counting the hours, he’d have guessed the crew of P413 were most of the way through the forenoon watch by then – but he wasn’t.

  Harry Gilmour, the son of a schoolteacher, from a small seaside resort on the shores of the Firth of Clyde. It had been almost two years now since that Sunday morning when Prime Minister Chamberlain had made his speech announcing that ‘this country is at war with Germany.’

>   On the Tuesday, he’d walked into a Royal Navy recruiting office in Glasgow and signed up, when he should have been getting ready to begin his third year at Glasgow University instead. Two years ago, he’d been an undergraduate reading for an MA in Romance Languages – French and Italian. Now he was a Sub-Lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. A lot had happened in those two years: to him, and to the whole world. And the biggest thing to him was that he was now a submariner, on his way back to war again, to Malta to join a new boat, His Majesty’s Submarine Nimuae. Newly appointed Number Three, the boat’s Navigator, and now heading right slap bang into the middle of Britain’s bitterest fight of the war so far – the battle for the Mediterranean. Harry – the boy who’d loved messing about on boats, who’d hung around the Royal Northern Yacht Squadron’s clubhouse and boatyards at the end of his road, scrubbing and polishing anything for free, just to get a shot at crewing on rich men’s yachts. He used to dream of being a ship’s Navigator in those days, sailing upon exotic foreign seas. And now he was.

  ‘Isn’t it wonderful,’ Harry had been muttering to himself, ‘when dreams come true’, when a rating’s head popped around the edge of the wardroom cubby, and caught him. The young sailor’s scrubbed, bland face hadn’t even twitched a muscle. Officers talking to themselves? Nothing surprised the boy any more. Of course, he’d completely missed the heavy irony.

  ‘Mr Gilmour, Sir,’ he had said, ‘Cap’n would like to see you in the control room.’

  Harry would reflect later, when he had all the time in the world to do so, how even the most shattering of events often began in the most matter-of-fact fashion. He had prised himself off the banquette and headed along a passageway floored with slabs of tinned foods, following the rating, both men moving crouched because the deckhead above them was one long festoon of net garlands, strung end to end and stuffed with sacks of flour. The whole boat was like this; packed to the gills with supplies for beleaguered Malta – Britain’s tiny island fortress in the middle of a hostile sea, standing in the way of the lines of communication between the Axis armies in North Africa and the Italian mainland, under constant bombardment by the Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica and threat of imminent invasion.

  Which was why the minelaying HMS P413 was currently shipping over 120 tons of aviation spirit in long, specially welded tanks on her mine racks, for the island’s few remaining aircraft, and why her ballast tanks were full of diesel for the island’s generators and few remaining vehicles. Even the boat’s torpedo reload spaces were filled with boxes of ammunition for the besieged island – .303 for the fighter planes, and 20mm for the anti-aircraft guns. There were even other passengers on board, apart from Harry. Several soldiers of officer rank had muscled in on the senior rates’ space and there was also a civilian bound for the office of the island’s British Governor, who messed with P413’s officers. For P413, being a minelayer and therefore considerably bigger than most Royal Navy operational submarines, was on more or less permanent ‘Magic Carpet’ duty – the ‘Magic Carpet’ runs being one of the few ways left these days to keep Malta hanging on by her fingertips.

  Harry emerged into the control room. He’d passed through it on coming aboard, on his way to his allotted banquette, but this was the first time he’d set foot in it since leaving Gib. Coming aboard, he’d seen the other passengers’ gawp-faced, sick-looking expressions as they threaded their way through with their respective kits: the soldiers and the civilian all showing the mixture of fear, nausea and incredulity that normally overtakes non-submariners when they first clap eyes on the cat’s cradle of pipes, valves, gauges, telegraphs and cable runs – as they try to grapple with how any human could ever understand it all, let alone control and direct it – that, and the knowledge that all their lives depended on someone being able to do just that. And then, of course, there was how small it was. To Harry’s eye, however, P413’s control room was quite big, and with her First Lieutenant on the trim board and the Outside ERA standing by, and the senior rate on the helm and the ratings on the dive planes, all looked as it should be. P413’s Captain had just been stepping back and sending down the attack periscope when Harry had straightened up and announced himself.

  ‘Ah, Mr Gilmour,’ said Captain Clasp. Clasp wasn’t actually a four-ringer Captain, but a three-ringer Commander – but since he commanded P413 he was entitled to the honorary title; and from those solid rings on his shirt epaulettes, he was most definitely RN. He gestured as if to say, one minute, and then said to the First Lieutenant, ‘Right, she’s about fifty yards off the port bow now, and there is nothing about, so take us up, Number One. No rush; wouldn’t want to topple the poor buggers.’ Then he turned back to Harry, giving him his full attention.

  Commander Edgar Clasp was a short, fastidious man of indeterminate age – he could’ve been anything from twenty-five to fifty-five years old – with slick, brilliantined blond hair that was probably curly underneath, and a perfectly smooth, oval face set permanently in an expression of benign complacency. Together, these were features that should have yelled to the world, ‘Idiot!’ But they didn’t. Harry had liked Commander Clasp right from the minute he set eyes on him. And right after Clasp had first spoken to him, he’d liked him even more.

  ‘You were on Pelorus when she was lost,’ Clasp had said after they’d been introduced in P413’s wardroom, just before she’d slipped from Gibraltar. ‘Yes. I remember that name. Gilmour. It was you who hauled that disreputable rogue Padgett out of her, wasn’t it?’

  Pelorus had been Harry’s first boat and Ted Padgett her Warrant Engineer. They’d been rammed after straying into a British North Sea convoy in the dark, and Pelorus had gone to the bottom. That had been a long time ago. The winter of 1939 to ’40, before the war had got going properly. And Padgett would have gone down with her if it hadn’t been for Harry. A lot of her crew had. But not her Captain. Oh no, not Pelorus’s Captain, the Bonny Boy Bonalleck. He’d saved his own skin. There was a story there, but Harry, right then, hadn’t wanted to think about that. So all he’d said was, ‘Yes, Sir.’

  And at that, Clasp had thrust out his hand to be shaken. ‘Thank you, Mr Gilmour,’ he’d said, ‘for saving my friend.’

  Harry had shaken his hand and mumbled something about, ‘Didn’t really know him, Sir. Not for long. To be friends, Sir.’

  Clasp had held on to Harry’s hand. ‘You knew him enough to risk your life to save his, Mr Gilmour. In most people’s books, that’s best friends.’

  Harry had blushed at that, and Clasp had smiled his benign smile and let go of his hand. ‘Ted has many friends in the Trade,’ he’d said. ‘So your name is known now. Carry on, Mr Gilmour.’

  Now Clasp had wanted to see him.

  ‘Mr Gilmour,’ Clasp said, ‘I wonder if you could do me a favour?’ as if it were a request and not an order – which, coming from the Captain, it obviously was.

  ‘Of course, Sir,’ Harry said, as he was supposed to, as right next to his right ear, the First Lieutenant began issuing orders to blow main ballast tanks, and the Outside ERA began executing them. Beyond the Captain, the men on the dive planes were already planing up as P413, pushing through the water at slow ahead, together, began to rise.

  Harry, back in the control room of a Royal Navy boat again, at sea and operational.

  ‘Surfacing!’ someone said. And Harry, knowing right then that everything really was as it should be, had thought, God help me, but I actually feel at home!

  ‘We’ve spotted a lifeboat through the periscope while doing a routine all-round look,’ Clasp explained to Harry, ‘bobbing up and down on the usual Mediterranean short chop. It doesn’t look in very good nick. Neither did the two heads that suddenly appeared and then disappeared above the boat’s gunwale. So, we’re going to pick them up.

  ‘So when we surface, be a good chap, Mr Gilmour, and nip upstairs with the Bosun,’ the Captain said, ‘and haul aboard whoever’s in the damn thing before it sinks. They’re probably our chaps. I’ll send
a couple of lads up through the for’ard hatch to give you a hand if you need them.’

  It was standard practice in the Trade for the CO to go up first on surfacing but, seeing as they had surfaced in daylight, Clasp opted to stay by his periscope, which fully extended was going to let him see a lot further. Surfacing in daylight within range of enemy aircraft or surface units was, after all, a very risky proposition. So up went Harry, climbing the conning tower ladder behind the officer of the watch, whose name he couldn’t remember, and the two lookouts. P413 had come up slow so there hadn’t been that much seawater left sloshing around on the bridge to come splashing down on Harry’s head when the officer popped the hatch. But he’d been half-deafened when the officer had called down past him, ‘Horizon’s clear, Sir . . . but the lifeboat, Sir. There’s at least half a dozen of the poor buggers in her bilges.’

  And then suddenly Harry was on the bridge, surrounded by the entire azure dome of the Mediterranean sky, studded with high scattered tufts of white, and a turquoise sea empty but for its own little nicks of white froth, stretching out forever. Even the breeze was warm, despite it already being early autumn. It was a beautiful day, until he’d looked down into the lifeboat, already starting to bump against P413’s saddle tanks. In it was a scene of some squalor, and in the middle of the squalor there was half a dozen sunburned, beard-grizzled faces looking back up at him, all of them old, gaunt and filthy.