by David Black
The submarine’s crew had moved fast. A couple of ratings up out of the for’ard hatch with a boathook had hauled the lifeboat close aboard P413. Harry remembered one of the grizzled faces in the lifeboat struggling to move, fumbling for something and expending a great deal of effort, until he managed to produce a painter from under the prow and hold the end of the flimsy line feebly over the side to be grabbed by one of P413’s ratings.
The sailors in the lifeboat had once been merchant seamen, but now they were more like rag dolls, sprawled stupefied, watching everything as if it were happening on a remote screen. One of them, who had actually managed to talk a little, asked for water. A West Country accent, Harry remembered. The Bosun who’d brought a half-gallon can with him, passed it into the boat, and shouted for another one, walking back past P413’s deck gun to collect it from the conning tower. Harry recalled issuing orders; telling a rating to tie off the painter to secure the lifeboat; getting the rating on the boathook to drag in the lifeboat’s stern, so it could be secured; then telling them to get ready to go aboard the lifeboat and start passing over the survivors; he and the Bosun would lower them down the for’ard hatch. That was when the shout came; right bang on exactly the wrong time.
‘Unidentified aircraft off the starboard bow!’ a bridge lookout had bellowed. ‘Low, closing fast!’
And in the time it would take to draw a breath, Clasp’s voice, loud and crisp, ‘Clear the casing! Clear the bridge!’
And then two sharp blasts on the klaxon. The ‘Dive!’ order, so loud you heard it throughout the boat.
On Harry’s last Royal Navy boat, Trebuchet, her Skipper Andy Trumble could get her down in just sixteen seconds, from klaxon to periscope depth. P413 was a bigger, more ungainly boat than a T-class, but Harry had been quite confident that a Captain like Clasp would have had his crew trained to such a degree that P413 wouldn’t be that much slower.
The ratings hadn’t needed any encouragement: the second one was already disappearing down the for’ard hatch before Harry looked up and could see the tiny dot on the horizon moving with that dedication to purpose you never see in a seagull. When he looked back, the Bosun was standing by the conning tower ladder in the act of slinging down the other half-gallon can. He might as well have been ten miles away.
Harry dropped to his knees. ‘Mr Gilmour . . .!’ the Bosun shouted. Harry started to tear at the knot in the painter that secured the lifeboat to P413’s deck, but his fingers felt like big sausages.
It had been one of those frozen moments when events are moving very fast, and time runs like congealing tar: where you’re noticing the small and the irrelevant, when you should be moving fast; when your mind steps aside, when it should be racing ahead. When he looked up again, he vividly remembered thinking how the Bosun’s huge shoulders stretched the oil-stained blue drill of his overalls until they looked fit to tear; the bushy gouts of grey hair that exploded from his ears and from under his cap; the doughy whiteness of his flesh starting to sag with middle age; how utterly ugly he was, with his jaw slack with horror.
Harry was never going to untie that knot, even as the P413 went down under him. It was going to stay tied. And it was going to drag down that tattered and frayed wooden lifeboat and all the poor bastards in it, battering it in all the blowing vents against the accelerating steel of a diving submarine, drowning the whole sorry shower. He remembered he’d still been thinking that as he reached for his clasp knife.
‘Get down that hatch, Bosun!’ he’d yelled.
‘Mr Gilmour . . .!’
‘That’s an order!’ This time brooking no argument. Thinking, grinning to himself in one fraction of a second, Oooh! Hark at little Napoleon there! And in the next, remembering the words of old Lexie Scrimgeour, the rich man on whose yacht he used to crew, telling him about knives at sea . . . ‘Always carry one, Harry,’ he’d said. ‘Always. Just because you can’t imagine now why you’d need it, believe me, when you do, you’ll really need it.’ How true, Harry was thinking, as he sawed away at the painter, how true.
The sea had been weltering around his knees when he’d finally cut through and launched himself over the lifeboat’s gunwale. The top of P413’s conning tower was already awash by the time it swept past, with only the periscope stands showing, and then she’d been gone, and the only sound had been the irritating buzzing of the approaching aircraft. When Harry had picked himself off the bottom of the lifeboat, he had been able to see it in all its glory, not that low, maybe at two hundred or two-fifty feet. His first reaction had been to squint closer at the small twin-engined monoplane, with its long sleek fuselage, glass nose and high tail fin, thinking P413 might have wasted her time – but the aircraft wasn’t a Blenheim, wasn’t RAF. She was Regia Aeronautica after all. He dredged the name Caproni 314 from his commodious memory for aircraft recognition silhouettes. A shagbat in the vernacular of the Trade; they were all shagbats.
The Caproni circled overhead, and he could see the face of her observer peering down at them. It made two long, low passes over their lifeboat, then lost interest and peeled away to the south-west, flying low and slow; more west than south, he remembered, into the setting sun. Harry had turned to look at his new shipmates. Less than twenty minutes ago, he’d been lying snug on a banquette, reading a book and contemplating lunch.
There had been some kind of discussion going on among the survivors, if their desultory grunts could qualify for such a description. The half-gallon can of water the P413 boys had passed over first was lying empty on the deck boards, but one of the men was clutching at another – the Bosun must have slung the second half-gallon can as he’d clambered up for the conning tower hatch. The debate had been about whether to drink it now.
And in that moment, Harry had taken in all that had happened; they were all deckhands with tans that had been acquired over decades, not days or even weeks. No officers or Petty Officers among them. They had been sunk, landed in this boat and there had been no attempt to do anything else. From the debris he could see, their survival rations had all been eaten. Obviously their water was gone too – likely in a series of binges with no attempt to spin it out. No attempt had been made to pitch a mast or ship the oars and row. One of them was explaining patiently to the others how they were all saved now; how the submarine would just stooge around until the Eyetie got fed up, ran out of fuel, or it got dark; then the sub would surface and they’d all be bundled aboard and dropped back at Gib.
‘How long have you been out here?’ Harry had asked. His question had been met with a sea of blank faces. No one knew; no one had been keeping count. ‘What was your ship?’ he’d then asked.
‘The John Bardine . . . Liverpool . . . general cargo,’ the one clutching the full half-gallon can had muttered. He’d showed no sign of letting it go. Harry had wondered if he knew what Harry knew – that they weren’t saved.
Harry had been watching the Caproni, some miles off, orbiting slowly just above the horizon, so that her observer could still see the lifeboat, but a periscope peeking up at wave height would not see it. Which was obviously the idea.
Not long after that, P413’s periscope had broken surface no more than twenty yards off their beam, and Harry had found himself looking directly into its single glass eye. He knew why it had appeared; Clasp wanted to know whether it was safe to come up. And, of course, it wasn’t. That crafty Eyetie had still been lingering just below P413’s line of sight, hoping she would surface so they could scoot right in and drop a bomb down her conning tower hatch before the lookouts had climbed out. Harry had drawn his finger across his throat, and then he’d given a thumbs down just to make sure whoever was looking understood; and he’d finished by jabbing his thumb to the south-west to let them know where the shagbat was circling. There was a long pause, and then the periscope lens started flashing. Someone was sending him Morse code, using a handheld Aldis lamp jammed against the periscope’s eyepiece, down there in P413’s control room, slowly, to make sure he understood. Which was ju
st as well, as Harry’s Morse recognition barely qualified as competent. Then it stopped, and Harry had given a wave and thumbs up to show he had understood; and then the periscope slipped back beneath the waves.
‘Are they coming up now?’ the sailor clutching the half-gallon can had asked, and Harry had shaken his head. No. The news had taken some moments to sink in through their listlessness, but when it did they’d all done their best to muster something akin to anger, croaking demands for explanations Harry couldn’t give them.
P413 hadn’t been able to surface again to rescue them because she’d been running to a schedule. As they had thundered through the previous night, going flat out on the surface, Clasp had told him all about it, as they drank coffee in the wardroom. Some six hundred miles ahead of them lay the shallows of the Sicilian Channel – a neck of water the Italians had sown so thick with mines, other submarines had spent weeks probing for a safe route through to Malta. They’d found one, but it involved pinpoint navigation and timing, and began by them having to reach the north side of the Skerki Banks on schedule and running fast on the surface at night to a point ten miles south of Marittimo Island – a point that they had to hit just before sunrise. Because after sunrise, the sky would be full of shagbats on anti-submarine patrol. There, they had to dive deep – 150 feet at least – and then run submerged on a fixed 120 degrees compass bearing for some sixty miles, timing their passage to arrive at twilight ten miles south of Sicily’s Cap San Marco, where they’d surface for a night-time dash to Valletta. Everything had to run on a stopwatch, because at the end there’d be one of Malta’s precious minesweepers, risking itself to escort them through the island’s own defensive mine barrier. And that was why Harry knew P413 couldn’t hang around, waiting for the Caproni to run out of fuel or for it to get dark. But he also knew he couldn’t tell this lot that. They might all get picked up by an Italian warship, and blab that there was a British submarine carrying supplies for Malta on its way, and the Italian Navy and the Regia Aeronautica would work out the rest.
Harry had tried to placate them, telling them that the submarine had to leave, because the Caproni was likely calling up every patrolling Eyetie destroyer and sub-chaser in the western Med, but it hadn’t stopped the grumbling. If any Eyetie was to turn up, couldn’t they torpedo it before it knew they were there? That was the whole point of being a submarine, wasn’t it? You saw them before they saw you? But Harry had stopped listening by then, too busy thinking, Well, this is a right bloody mess.
And that was when he’d informed them in a seriously forthright manner that he was buggered if he were going to sit about in this tub and wait to die like they’d been doing for God knows how long. First, the remaining water; it was getting rationed from now on, and he’d decide who got what and when. Then he told them to ship the oars, but it hadn’t taken long for him to realise that none of them was in a fit state to row, and that he couldn’t do it by himself; the lifeboat was too broad in the beam for him to sit on the thwarts and be able to dip both oars in the water at the same time; and anyway, the damn thing had been far too heavy for him to pull on his own. ‘So we’ll step the mast,’ he’d told them, ‘and fly something from it that’ll be easy to spot.’ There’d been no sail aboard – probably stolen out of the boat months or even years before. So Harry had dropped his blue uniform trousers, being made of the only material aboard not bleached by the sun, and up they went. Then they’d sat back again to wait, while the sun rolled inexorably across the cloud-tufted blue.
At first Harry had tried to get some chat going, a bit of let’s-look-on-the-bright-side banter, until one of the sailors had started telling him about their lot: how on the outbreak of war they’d all been bound by law to remain in the merchant service for the duration, and how the ship-owners had interpreted that service to their own advantage. And now that they were on the water – the minute, in fact, that they’d abandoned their ship – their pay had been stopped. That had shut Harry up, and left him even more depressed than these poor buggers already were. At least in the Royal Navy, if you got sunk or taken prisoner, the Admiralty continued to pay you, so your wife and children could continue to eat. But not our patriotic British ship-owners. These poor merchant navy bastards were out here risking everything, knowing if their number came up, neither they nor their families would get a brass farthing.
As twilight had approached, and Harry had been looking forward with creeping dread to his first night aboard this wooden hulk, that had been when the Spanish tuna boat had come puttering over the horizon.
Chapter Four
Teniente Coronel Eurico de la Peña was sitting with one buttock perched on the stone balustrade of the balcony, leaning back against one of the pillars, lugubriously savouring one of his cigarillos when Harry stepped out of his office door, followed by a roly-poly figure who went by the name of Mr Wingate. He was the British Consul in Palma. Teniente Coronel de la Peña routinely lent his office to the young, myopic Mr Wingate for his interviews with the interned British officers, it being the polite, courteous thing to do. For, as everybody agreed, Teniente Coronel de la Peña was nothing if not polite and courteous.
‘Ah, Eurico!’ said Mr Wingate, dithering over the office door, not knowing whether to shut it or hold it open for the Teniente Coronel. Not that anyone ever called the Teniente Coronel anything other than Eurico, as Harry had quickly noticed. ‘You are my guests and I am the host,’ he would say if they ever tried. ‘Ranks are for parade grounds.’
‘I have been keeping you from your office,’ continued Mr Wingate, still in his dither.
‘Not at all, George,’ said Eurico, for everyone was on first-name terms in this Spanish Caesar’s domain. Eurico slid off his perch with seamless elegance.
‘It is this young hero I wish to see, now that you have finished with him.’
Harry, who had been thinking how classical the Spanish officer had looked, poised there like a study of some Roman virtue, was taken aback. What could the great man want with him? And hero? What was that all about?
Eurico stepped forward and took the door, rescuing Mr Wingate from his indecision. Pleasantries were exchanged, and gracious till-we-meet-agains, and Harry and Eurico had each watched in silent amusement as the tubby figure of His Britannic Majesty’s representative had waddled away down the veranda, resplendent in his cream linen suit, perching his crisp panama hat on his unruly mop of mousy hair with one hand, and gripping his venerable Gladstone bag with the other.
‘So, Harry, you are official now,’ said Eurico, turning to him with one of his smiles and ushering him through the door.
‘Official?’
‘Your story checks out. You are who you say you are. And that, in your eager young fist, if I’m not mistaken, is your letter. For the tailor. Assuring him that if he fits you out with every item of uniform on the consul’s list, His Britannic Majesty’s consul will pay the bill.’
Harry smiled. ‘Yes . . .’ he’d been about to add ‘Sir’, but then remembered and said ‘Eurico’ instead, which produced a nod and a smile from his host.
‘I apologise if you find it difficult to use my first name,’ said Eurico.
‘Just a bit unusual, you being a senior officer, and me, well . . .’ and Harry tailed off, still struggling not to say Sir.
‘I know. It is very informal – but I do try to ask first’, and a twinkle came into Eurico’s eyes, ‘especially with you British. Some of your senior officers can be most punctilious.’
‘Oh, so you’d use rank if they asked you to?’
Eurico let out a bark of laughter. ‘Good grief, no!’
‘Then why do you ask?’
‘My dear Harry,’ he said, with the twinkle going full blast, ‘I’d never dream of being irritating, unless it was on purpose. Now, I think we have time for some coffee and a small Soberano before elevenses. How are you enjoying Hotel El Real?’
‘Elevenses? So you know about our daily standing orders?’
‘Oh yes, Harry,’ s
aid Eurico, screwing up his face in thought. ‘You English are very accomplished at dressing up anarchy in formal language.’
Harry couldn’t be bothered pointing out he wasn’t actually English, he’d lived with it for so long – and after all, Eurico was a foreigner . . .
‘Correct me if I get it wrong,’ Eurico was continuing, ‘but there are elevenses, at the time the name suggests, then there’s lunchtime aperitifs, then lunch, then digestifs, afternoon tea, sundowners, dinner aperitifs, dinner, digestifs, nightcaps and then – for those who wish – it’s time to get drunk. Oh, and not forgetting all the wine and port that attend the various courses of the meals too.’
‘Yes,’ said Harry, ‘it’s the RAF’s idea, apparently: they find that sort of thing amusing. Although it was Fabrizio who first told me about it, and with great glee.’
‘Oh, yes. Your Italian foes have been eager joiners-in.’
‘But not the Germans?’
‘But not the Germans,’ Eurico echoed. Both men paused to contemplate this, and Harry once again found himself wondering exactly how old the Teniente Coronel really was.
‘A most unamiable lot, the Germans,’ continued Eurico. ‘Have you met their senior officer?’
Harry hadn’t, but he’d heard of him. ‘Herr Oberst Alois Genscher, of the Luftwaffe,’ said Eurico and then sighed and rolled his eyes. ‘Or Arse Clencher, as I believe he is more commonly referred to.’
Harry laughed. ‘By the English – you know that too?’
Eurico made a little moue, as if to say, ‘Naturally’, and then added, ‘Oh, the Italians too – they particularly like that one.’ He paused then, before going on, ‘The Germans are believers. They can’t wait to get back to their war. The English and Italians? They are all just young men, young pilots . . . glad to be still alive.’
