by David Black
Chapter Sixteen
‘We lived in Sopot, and my life was a book already written before I was born,’ said Katty. She and Harry were sitting at what he had decided would be their table from now on, outside the café on the Sliema shorefront. The owner, Pauli, had even brought them a pair of blankets against the evening chill, to tuck them up while they enjoyed their knocked-off Royal Navy coffee, sold back to them. Harry had just asked the obvious cack-handed question about what she was doing here. He’d at least had the common decency to qualify it by saying sorry, and he could imagine how many times stupid, insensitive people had asked her that, but hey, she was a pretty exotic specimen: a displaced Polish person, on a British colonial outpost in the middle of the Mediterranean, under siege. His curiosity was, he thought, pretty understandable in the circumstances.
She smiled, with good grace. ‘Lots,’ she said. ‘Lots of stupid, insensitive people . . . Lots of times. But I’ve never been called a specimen before. Or exotic. You are the first. Were you meaning to be charming, or just impertinent? Don’t answer that. Since it is you, Harry. And only since it is you. I will grant that your curiosity might be understandable.’ Then she began stirring her coffee, not to end the conversation, but to create a little space before beginning her story.
‘I am from rural bourgeoisie. My destiny was to be rural bourgeoisie. I would become the lady of a house, with a husband, children. A servant or two. And a cook, obviously.’ She smiled to herself, at her oversight. ‘For girls like me, from families like mine, it was what happened.’
‘Lucky for you it all went wrong,’ said Harry helpfully. ‘Lucky for me, too.’
She ignored him, blew on her coffee and considered the approaching band of night rising out of the eastern horizon. Then, at length, she said, ‘It didn’t feel lucky at the time.’ Smiling at him, she added, ‘But then I didn’t know the Germans were coming, or that you’d be waiting for me here. Did I?’
Another silence. Harry stayed shut up this time.
‘The husband that should have married me, didn’t, so there were no children, and no money for even one servant, let alone a cook.’
Silence, again. Harry knew if he kept asking questions it was going to start sounding like an interrogation, like pulling teeth was the actual analogy that crossed his mind, but he was genuinely curious. He’d never met a real refugee before, and couldn’t imagine what it might take to force a person to up and run from everything they’d ever had or known.
But Katty knew what his silence was saying.
‘Don’t you realise that you are prying, Harry?’ she said. There was a flash of irritation in her eyes, but she swiftly covered it with an indulgent smile. Even so, Harry blushed deep red, down into the collar of his white uniform shirt, and his mouth clammed shut in mortification.
Mostly he looked so grown up, she thought, and more than just self-assured: an accomplished man. And then, pouf! She was having to comfort and cajole a child. Honestly, why were men such a trial? Oh well. She sighed and continued, if only for the sake of the rest of the evening’s harmony. After all, it wasn’t as though she were actually going to tell him anything. Certainly not the truth. She’d learned the wisdom of not doing that long ago.
‘I’m sorry, my Harry. Sometimes it feels as though my own personal story is the only thing I have left in my life I can keep private.’ She paused to take a languorous puff from one of the cigarettes she was always being given by one of her many friends in the RAF and the Army and the Navy, and from the office of the Governor too. Then she smiled again, through the smoke. ‘But not from you, mon cher.’
Another contemplative puff, but this was the actress in her now.
‘Oh, you know how families can do cruel things to each other,’ she said, as if she was looking back from far away, ‘especially when things don’t turn out as planned. Harsh words, slammed doors. Blame and accusation. The innocent tarred as guilty. That was when I discovered what had been just talent for amateur opera in a seaside town could become a meal ticket in the Warsaw nightclubs. And a girl does love an opportunity to flounce, you know. So I flounced. But I hadn’t been paying attention to what was happening beyond the front gates. Girls that age seldom do. They rely on their men to keep the world at bay for them instead. Oh, I made it to Warsaw all right, but I didn’t really get a chance to put my talents on display for very long, before there was a change of management. In the city, and of the country. The Germans. After that, there was a series of train tickets, mostly going south, mostly just one step ahead of disaster. Then a boat ticket from Constanta. And I got off here.’
‘You didn’t go all the way to Britain?’ asked Harry, leaving the question hanging.
‘Why? Just so as I could meet invading Germans, marching up Piccadilly, instead of down the Nowy Swiat in Warsaw?’
‘You’re more likely to meet the Germans here now,’ said Harry.
Which was true; everybody knew it. The mood on the island had been one of relief the day the Luftwaffe had left Sicily and headed for the Eastern front. The threat of imminent invasion had receded, but the Germans were at the gates of Moscow now, even as Katty and Harry chatted away outside their café on the Malta shorefront. If Germany knocked the Soviet Union out of the war, with all those spare planes going a-begging, walking into Malta wouldn’t be a problem.
While Harry was thinking this, she was looking frankly into Harry’s eyes. ‘There’s no one to look after me in England,’ she said.
When they walked home, Katty wouldn’t let him see her all the way back to where she lived in Floriana. She had a cavernous second-floor apartment all to herself there, that she was house-sitting for a French businessman and his Italian wife, now living in Buenos Aires for the duration. So when the two of them reached the Manoel Island causeway, she said, ‘This is your turn-off.’
It would be silly to walk all the way up into Floriana only to have to come all the way back down, wouldn’t it? She would see him at the office tomorrow; now, a kiss before you go.
Harry hadn’t been totally surprised. There had been a pall over the end of the evening that had left him wondering if it had been anything he’d said, or hadn’t said, but should have. He went back to his little hole of a cabin, and hooked back the curtain that served as a door only to discover that he was now apparently sharing it. The other bunk was occupied by a sound-asleep youth, and he could see from the uniform jacket, hung on the hook he normally used, that he was also an RNVR Sub-Lieutenant. He wasn’t in the mood to say hello if his new fellow officer awoke, so he quietly picked up his writing case and went back to the wardroom.
It was late and it was empty, and by candlelight he picked up again the letter he’d been writing to his mother. He told her about his new job as First Lieutenant on another submarine, and how that meant he’d been promoted to acting Lieutenant and how it would inevitably mean a second ring, and that she could tell his father that that would mean more pay. He wrote that to be irritating, knowing it would enrage his father, if his mother ever told him. Knowing she probably wouldn’t – knowing she always did whatever it took to protect his father, and yet never understanding quite why. Harry didn’t tell her any war stuff though, because that was all hush-hush. You didn’t discuss operational matters in letters to the folks back home: you never knew who might read it. And anyway, it would have terrified her, and he found himself now always doing whatever it took to protect her. Also, using his letters home to tell war stories would have enraged his father even more.
His mad father, who had fought in the Great War and yet believed every soldier to be a murderer, including his own son now – and who even refused to so much as touch any letter from him, yet interrogated his mother for every detail. His mad father, the gifted language teacher, well known in the town, with his war record that no one talked about – whose name was besmirched by rumours of conscientious objection, yet who’d been awarded a Military Medal: the gong a grateful nation handed out to non-commissioned ranks for bravery on t
he battlefield.
And now, according to his mother’s last letter, there had been a growing number of complaints against him, from parents furious at what he was telling his pupils: the ideas he was apparently trying to drum into them – unsound and un-British, and depending on who you asked, on a scale that ran at best from ‘pacifist propaganda’ to at worst ‘Nazi sympathiser’. Thinking about his father made Harry’s heart heavy. He could understand how a soldier could be so traumatised by war. Dear God, especially now, he could understand it. But his father didn’t want to be understood. He had become a crucible of ravening fury, driven by the power of his rage and eager to vent it. Ranting in his classroom and in the school’s corridors, ranting at people in shops and even on the street, ranting against the very idea of war. This war, all wars. Against all who spoke for it, and even against all who simply found themselves swept up by it, and forced to serve.
It was why Harry never mentioned his father in his letters home these days. Instead, he was telling his mother that he had heard from Shirley, who his mother knew well. Telling her that he had replied, but being careful not to mention what his letter had said, or rather not said. Nor, how these days he found himself back thinking about Shirley all the time, even when he didn’t want to.
He stopped writing and fought an urge to tear up his letter. He was waffling, and if he hated receiving waffly letters, he assumed others did too. He should be writing something more honest. But, he told himself, you don’t have time for all that emotional honesty bollocks, not any more. You have a submarine and a crew to get to know; impose your authority on, and deliver, ready to go to sea and ready to fight, to your new CO. That was what First Lieutenants were supposed to do. And Shirley? She had wanted to know where they stood. Jesus Christ! How many guesses did he get?
Harry, the boy, was too proud to admit that he didn’t know his own mind, his own heart even. Too proud to admit he was confused. And firing off such bluff dismissals, even just to himself, made it easier for him to feel he was in control of what was happening between them. So there!
He finished the letter with a ‘Love, Harry’, and took it to the postbox, blissfully unaware that it wasn’t the only dispatch concerning him that went out that night.
Right at the beginning, when Shrimp had assumed command of the Tenth Flotilla, Max Horton, the Flag Officer Submarines, had told him that all recommendations for awards and commendations were to be processed with utmost dispatch. ‘Simpson,’ he’d said, ‘given the rate we’re losing them, it’s only right that if they’ve done something that deserves a medal, then they get it, before they get it.’
So a signal went out that night from S10, up the chain of command, recommending that Sub-Lieutenant Harris John Gilmour RNVR, of His Majesty’s Submarine Umbrage be awarded the Distinguished Service Order for his part in the successful attack on the Italian Navy heavy cruiser Fabrizio del Dondo, and the light cruiser, Gradisca di Isonzo on the night of the . . . etc., etc.
The next day was overcast and cold. Harry, wrapped in a greatcoat, had marched smartly up Scots Street with his latest translations. He was hoping to grab a quick bite of lunch with Katty before he had to get back down to Lazaretto Creek, where Nicobar was trotted up with a U-class. Now he’d been appointed, it was his first priority to get down to her and get to know his new boat.
The N-class were an improved version of the Unity- or U-class boats like Umbrage, which had originally been designed in the late ’20s as target boats, or ‘clockwork mice’, for training anti-submarine destroyer crews. They were notoriously slow and notoriously under-armed. A U-class going flat out on the surface was lucky to hit ten knots, seven knots submerged, and frequently they were left standing by the fat slug merchant ships they were trying to sink. Their Great War- and sometimes Boer War-vintage twelve-pounder deck guns could barely blow a hole in a wet paper bag. And they only had a salvo of four torpedoes for’ard, with single reloads that required the crew’s entire messing area to be stripped down to get at them.
But their new diesel-electric power system was a blessing to operate under wartime conditions: it meant U-class boats always ran on their electric motors. Unlike with previous submarine designs, on the surface a U-class boat’s diesels acted not as engines, but as generators to deliver power to the motors, while submerged, it was business as usual, with the batteries delivering the power.
The set-up removed the need for big clutches to synchronise one or the other on to the two propeller shafts, and with that, all the maintenance headaches that followed. Also, they were handy little boats for the confined waters of the Med.
With the N-class, they’d just upped the performance. The newer boats were fifteen feet longer and three feet wider in the beam, while their diesels packed an extra one hundred horsepower, giving the boats a top surface speed of thirteen to fourteen knots . . . Some claimed to have beaten even that. They were equipped with a better three-inch gun and they were fitted with two stern tubes, port and starboard, which meant they could go on patrol with ten torpedoes.
Harry should have been keen to get aboard and take a look, and not be set on having lunch with some gorgeous pouting nightclub singer. He should’ve been on Nicobar first thing.
Any half-decent Jimmy would’ve had a slacker like Harry up on Captain’s Report, but this was the last thing on Harry’s mind as he rounded the corner and came face to face with the front door of the RAF HQ, and it was even further from it, when he saw who was coming out.
Katty, in her fur coat, had just stepped on to the pavement, and was tucking her hair into a warm woollen scarf she had wrapped about her head. Harry had been on the point of raising his hand and calling, when Chally stepped out behind her, wearing a flying jacket over his usual battledress. He put his usual proprietorial arm around her waist, propelling her off down the street, at a pace that looked just a little too quick for her.
Harry’s expression when he got up to the photoreconnaissance office to dump the translations was not a happy one.
‘You look like you’ve heard already, Sir,’ said one of the erks who worked as a technician in the photo lab.
‘Huh? What?’ Harry wondered if his look of shock at what he had just witnessed was so transparent.
‘Jerry, Sir,’ said the erk. ‘He’s back on Sicily. Chally was over this morning. All the airfields there, they’re chocka with Luftwaffe kites, and more coming over the hill, he says. The film’s just being printed up now. Jerry’s back. And we all know what that means . . . we’re going to start copping it again. Just in time for fucking Christmas. Bastards!’
‘Oh,’ said Harry, as he placed his bundle on Katty’s desk, and caught traces of her scent still lingering, wondering why she had worn it to work that day when she, like every other woman, had so little to waste.
‘Oh, if you’re looking for Miss Kadzow, Sir,’ the erk added as he went out of the door, ‘she’s just gone, Sir. Went off with Flight Lieutenant Challoner for a spot of lunch . . . I’m sure I heard them say they were going to the Snakepit.’
When Harry got back down to Lazaretto Creek, as he walked out along the pontoon to where Nicobar was moored, the slim frame of her Cox’n was leaning over her conning tower. If such a thing didn’t constitute a severe breach of naval courtesy, Harry might have suspected he was being appraised by his new boat’s most senior rate, and that the appraisal was highly critical. In fact, when he called up for permission to come aboard, he could have sworn as he stepped across the brow that the man’s lips had been forming the words, ‘And about bloody time too.’
Chapter Seventeen
HMS Nicobar’s Cox’n was Chief Petty Officer Bill Sutter, and although he was regular Navy, he was of the new breed: a younger man than most of the CPOs Harry had served with, not as battered by weather or drink, and definitely better educated – more technocrat than swashbuckler. Tallish, slim and verging on the dapper when ashore, with an RAF-quantity application of Brylcreem on his dark waves, and his skills as a dhobeyman and ironer on
prominent display. All Harry had heard about him was that he knew his job, which made him downright infuriating when he went all punctilious on you – mainly because he was invariably right, and you knew it.
And, as he was about to learn, the other thing about Bill, as with all Navy men who aspire to inherit the mantle, just getting in step with the service’s traditions had never been enough: he embraced them as though they were carved on stone tablets. All things old-fashioned Royal Navy: good. Anything newfangled: bad.
And that was why, when Bill Sutter had been informed his new Jimmy was an RNVR officer, his first reaction had been: no good would come of it. He felt it in his water. And then, when it was revealed the RNVR officer was Harry Gilmour, his worst fears were exceeded. Everybody had heard of Gilmour. The boy who’d hauled Ted Padgett out of Pelorus. And now all this bollocks about how he’d blown the arses out of two Wop cruisers. All this told Bill Sutter was that he was about to get dumped with a poster boy with a big head.
And if that weren’t bad enough, Wonder Boy had turned up late for his tour of the boat. Well, that was an affront too far. What could a bloke say? Apart from he’d never known his water to be wrong, and the whole bloody Andrew was now gone to buggery. A Wavy Navy Jimmy: it was enough to make you say a bad word – strictly to yourself, of course, and maybe the rest of the Flotilla Chiefs’ mess deck.
But that was then. They were at sea now, and time had passed, and this Mr Gilmour had definitely been making his presence felt aboard Bill Sutter’s Nicobar. To such an extent that, looking at him now, this Wavy Navy Jimmy, trying to take a sight on a coastline that was as flat as a witch’s tit, purely for his own amusement, on a night as black as the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat – Bill actually found himself quite liking the lad.
Nicobar was working its way west-north-west, close inshore on diesels running charge into the battery, but at barely four knots, with 110 feet under the keel and shoaling. They were looking for a coast-hugging Jerry convoy that their last signal told them was on the way.
