Turn Left for Gibraltar

by David Black

  Lazaretto had radioed them rendezvous details for a night approach to Marsamxett: signal codes, to be flashed in the dark for the ML – the motor launch – coming out to meet them and escort them in. Everyone knew how hit and miss that could be, especially since the weather was so crap. Then the added alert to look out for mines: how they were to run in on motors, all buttoned up for collision, all watertight doors shut. Still, at least it meant no one would see they were coming home with no Jolly Roger flying. But the ML had arrived at the rendezvous on time, and the right signals were exchanged, and they had come in without managing to hit a mine. And now he was safe in the wardroom.

  When he arrived, Harry had spotted Napier and Yeo deep in conversation with one of the other boats’ Subs; they were hanging on his every word. He could tell there was news. Something had happened. He’d immediately wanted to go and butt in, but now he had his drink, he sought out Hubert instead. He didn’t want to get some flowery interpretation or hearsay comments on whatever event had caused this hubbub, and even new to the job as he was, Harry was well aware that First Lieutenants were supposed to know everything naturally, and that it didn’t look good to go jumping around, leg to leg, demanding, ‘What’s happening? What’s happening?’

  And that’s when he heard; and it wasn’t just that the Luftwaffe was indeed back, nor that they’d been stepping up their attacks.

  It wasn’t that the Luftwaffe’s return wasn’t big news. It was. They had begun with a couple of hit and run sweeps a few days after Nicobar had sailed, and now raids were coming in at a rate of six to seven a day: big coordinated shows with one hundred plus high-level bombers in each attack, with Me 109s on low-level strafing runs, and Stukas sneaking in behind them. They’d been mostly going after the airfields, but Grand Harbour had taken a pounding too. Especially when the remnants of Force F had limped back.

  For that was the other news. Just when Carey emerged from making his report to Shrimp, that’s when Harry was told. The bangs in the water hadn’t been Force F intercepting the convoy, it had been Force F running into enemy mines.

  ‘And we wondered why the E-boats hadn’t dropped any depth charges on us,’ Carey said to Harry as he too bagged a whisky. ‘They hadn’t been carrying any. They’d been up to other tricks: them and another half-dozen of the bastards apparently, all buzzing up and down the offing that night. Out laying mines. A whole new field. Beyond the existing one. And Force F charged right into them at twenty-seven knots.’

  Apparently Pelleas had hit three of the mines in quick succession and gone down in a matter of minutes. Harry closed his eyes, and could see her cleaving through the Mediterranean night, her huge battle ensigns flying; magnificent, until she hit the first mine. Then her four shafts still turning at maximum revs, driving all six thousand, seven hundred tons of her into the ripping, tearing blast of the next one, and the next. Her hull plates being peeled apart by the explosions, and her sheer momentum opening her engine rooms and magazines and ratings’ mess decks to a greedy sea.

  A fourth mine had sunk the J- and K-class destroyer Jocasta. The force’s other cruiser, HMS Patroclus, had hit another and had limped back, badly damaged. The other two destroyers, Darter and Dimapur had emerged unscathed and had returned to Grand Harbour laden with survivors. Both had been immediately turned around for a high-speed dash back to Gib. Patroclus was now in the dry dock, covered in camouflage netting and surrounded by smoke pots, with the dockyard workers working flat out to patch the hole in her so she too could make a run for it at the earliest opportunity.

  ‘Shrimp says they only picked up seventeen of Pelleas’s crew, and your mate wasn’t among them,’ said Carey, carefully watching Harry’s expression. ‘They got no one off Jocasta,’ he added, as if that made any difference. ‘Bit of a bloody night all round.’

  Harry couldn’t think of anything to say. The cruiser had a crew of well over five hundred men; the destroyer, over two hundred. But none of that seemed to matter beside Peter Dumaresq being missing, except he knew what that really meant. He was dead. If the other ships in the squadron hadn’t got him, who had? There would have been no other ships around.

  It didn’t seem possible. Dumaresq had seemed too full of life to allow himself to be killed – with too much promise, too big a career and his whole future beckoning. Somebody had made a mistake. Surely, somebody had made a mistake.

  ‘Bloody night indeed,’ said Harry, who could feel his eyes not quite focusing. ‘I think we should have another drink, Sir. No point in dwelling on it, eh?’

  ‘Jeez. It didn’t take Jerry long to give us a good boot in the cods, did it?’ said Carey.

  John knew when it was an emergency and had arrived with two tumblers. Harry and Carey swept them up.

  ‘I suppose this is the end of it then, Sir?’ asked Harry.

  ‘Not sure I follow,’ said Carey frowning.

  ‘Where the attrition rate gets too high, and we pull the plug?’ said Harry.

  Carey didn’t answer for a while, then he said, ‘You don’t get it, do you, Harry?’

  Harry just looked at him blankly.

  ‘Nobody’s pulling any plug, Harry,’ Carey said patiently. ‘Somebody has to be here to stop the Afrika Korps’ supplies getting through. And we’re it. Because the last time I looked there was nobody else about.’

  Harry: he’d used similar words himself, a mere couple of weeks ago: ‘nobody else here’. So he raised his glass, and smiled the lop-sided smile Carey remembered from Trebuchet.

  ‘Oh well,’ said Harry. ‘Drink up or crack up!’

  The next day the weather was still foul. No raids expected. Harry got up with a splitting headache, not improved by the sudden recollection that he had a crew to see to. But they had all been looked after the night before by Hubert: he’d shipped the lot up to Ghajn Tuffieha.

  The Nicobars, being old Malta hands, had nearly all been billeted out in apartments in Sliema, so when they came in, it was usually just a short walk off Manoel Island and up into the town. But three of the blocks had been blown to rubble in the bombing, and nobody knew when the weather was going to change and Jerry would be back again. So Hubert had laid on two of the island’s remaining rickety buses, with their windows taken out so their passengers wouldn’t get shredded by blast, and had everybody driven up to the rest camp, including all of Nicobar’s POs.

  So apart from Harry, it was just the CO, Napier and Yeo left in the base, and they all had their little stone cells, except the CO’s wasn’t that little and like all CO cabins, it opened on to the gallery.

  Harry sat down to a breakfast of fried bacon, reconstituted eggs, toast and coffee. There was only powdered milk for the coffee as the goats had got out during a raid and never been seen again. There was no one else about in the wardroom dining area, and as he looked so ill, the other steward, Dommy, a dark-haired, dark-tanned youth who could have been no more than sixteen, decided against annoying him with chit-chat. When Harry’d finished his food, however, he brought him his mail. A letter from his mother, and two other letters, scented, both of which he recognised even before he looked at the handwriting.

  There was also a small, flat package, franked and embossed with a Cross of Lorraine and the words La France Libre and a London address. He had another gulp of coffee and tore open the package. There was a little leather case inside, and inside that was a small bronze cross with crossed swords, on a green-and-red striped ribbon. In an embossed envelope was a slip of vellum; he slipped it out and started to read. But he didn’t get very far before his eyes started to fill. He saw his name, the name Radegonde, and that of Lieutenant de Vaisseau Gil Syvret. And that it was a Croix de Guerre, and apparently it had been awarded to him by the Comité national français for his heroism en combat avec l’ennemi while serving alongside officers and men of the Marine Nationale.

  Hubert, with a cup of coffee was suddenly sitting down opposite. ‘I know what that is,’ he said, settling himself. ‘Yours, I take it.’

  Harr
y looked up with a dumbfounded expression.

  ‘So, it’s yours,’ said Hubert. ‘Well, bloody good show! Well done, young Gilmour. Congratulations. No more than you deserve, I’m sure. But, of course, you know you can’t wear it. It’s against regulations to wear a foreign decoration on the King’s uniform. Sorry. But we’ll have to wet it, of course, you realise that.’

  They wet it that night with another party: songs around the old upright piano, and lots of Al Bowly and Guy Lombardo records. An attempt to get a game of drawing-room cricket going was vetoed by Hubert on the grounds they’d suffered too many cracked records of late and as there were no more convoys on the board, there’d be no chances soon to make up any further losses. Harry took all the jokes and ribbing in good part, and his fellow officers showed their appreciation that the tab was going on his mess bill by not getting too vicious.

  Harry grinned through the unreality of it all – the booze flowing and the laughter, and the memories of the people who weren’t there any more, and would never be there again. The number of times he’d thought, I can’t wait to tell . . . so-and-so, or so-and-so . . . who would love this, or so-and-so . . . who should be standing over there, the usual indulgent smile all over his face, that he’d never see again. All of them, who never would be there again to tell your story to, or stand there again, waiting to tell theirs. It felt as though the whole world was rollicking along like a runaway train, regardless of who was falling off. And all those left on board had no time to wave goodbye, their time all taken up with just clinging on.

  That morning, he’d sat with Hubert after breakfast and been told how things stood: the Luftwaffe top jock Kesselring was back on Sicily with another entire Fliegerkorps at his disposal. When Harry had asked how many planes that represented, he’d been told – a lot.

  ‘They’re obviously out to smash our offensive capability,’ Hubert had said, ‘so Luqa, Hal Far and Takali are being plastered, although they’re not harassing the seaplane base much. And of course the dockyards. But so far they don’t seem to have worked out where we are. You’ll have noticed there’s no ensign flying above the Lazaretto. We’re not advertising ourselves. And all the submarines in port, I’ve ordered to sit submerged on the bottom of the harbour throughout the daylight hours. Any repair work is being done at night. So we’ve not been a direct target yet, though the bombs do fly about a lot.’

  Valletta, Sliema and Floriana had all suffered damage, he’d said. As well as the areas around the docks, Senglea and Vittoriosa. The gas and electricity supplies had been disrupted, and even one of the island’s main bakeries had been destroyed, forcing bread rationing to be introduced for the local population.

  ‘There’s a new standing order you need to be aware of, Sir,’ one of the base Writers had told him later, when he’d gone into the Flotilla office to fill in some First Lieutenant’s paperwork. ‘Captain (S) has ordered that all personnel, no matter where they are on the base or anywhere on the island, on hearing an air-raid warning siren, must immediately seek refuge in the nearest air-raid shelter. He says we’re all needed for our proper jobs, so he doesn’t want to hear of any heroics, or people running about in the bombing trying to save the neighbours’ pet cat. Get undercover pronto. And stay there until all the shrapnel’s stopped falling. All that anti-aircraft shite we’re throwing up at them has to come down sometime, somewhere, and a lump of that on yer noddle, Sir, it’ll kill sure as a Jerry five-hundred-pounder.’

  Then Harry had gone back to his monk’s cell, and lain down to read his letters. He kept his mother’s for last.

  The first one he’d opened he didn’t even have to lift to his nose to smell the perfume. Janis. He almost threw it away then, but curiosity got the better of him. Five pages of typed script, finishing with her first name, signed in a quick inky scrawl between the final endearment . . . Lots of love . . . and the kisses . . . xxx . . . both typed.

  From the letter he learned that his award of the Croix de Guerre had made the local paper, and how proud she was of him and how she couldn’t wait to see him wearing it, and how dashing they would look together. Then there was stuff about how hard life was under rationing . . . the lack of nylons and make-up. How the war was dragging on, and the inconvenience. Harry had a sudden vision of her father, Mr Crumley, who ran a county-wide bakers and cake-shop empire, fussing about as his only daughter lay prostrate with distress, presumably from lack of cake. He got to the end of the letter without finding a single mention of the doctor – he was sure the man who’d replaced him as the object of her affections had been a doctor; but nothing, not even a brief aside. Nor was there a mention of the ‘Dear John’ letter she’d sent, dismissing him as her beau. Just a mild admonition that he hadn’t written for a while, and why hadn’t he, since he knew how much she missed him?

  He rested the letter on his chest and stared up at the hacked-at rock arch of his low ceiling and imagined himself as some latter-day Edmond Dantès, buried deep in the heart of the Château d’If, and he wondered how Edmond would have reacted to receiving a letter such as this from his fiancée Mercédès. He probably wouldn’t have bothered escaping, he decided, happy just to stay here instead, safe, deep in the deep, deep rock. In fact, he decided, that would suit Harry just fine too, for ever more.

  The perfume on the next letter was not so liberal. Katty couldn’t have had that much left and was obviously economising. The note inside was short and to the point: Where are you?

  ‘Good question,’ Harry said out loud to himself, before folding the note away and reaching for his mother’s letter. It confirmed the fact that news of his French medal was out. She told him she didn’t want to know how he’d won it, as she probably would never sleep again if she did, and she warned him not to do it again. One medal was quite enough for one war, and now he’d done his bit. So, enough! There was more news about the evacuee children, who were actually settling in – and how the older girl was becoming a real help to her, and how the younger, Aggie, nearly four now, had attached herself like a limpet to his father; and how her presence seemed, against all his irascibility, to be a calming influence. He hadn’t even come close, apparently, to the eruption of rage and fury Harry would have bet on when he heard about the medal. And then his mother mentioned Shirley, and how sad she’d been when Shirley had explained she and Harry were no longer writing to each other: how they had each decided to go their own way. She had liked Shirley, but could only assume they knew what they were doing.

  Harry rested that letter on his chest too. So Shirley wasn’t writing to him any more. Well, that was news. No more than he deserved, though. You tell a chap you love him, and all the chap does is start to waffle. He closed his eyes as he remembered Shirley that day on the Holy Loch, in her duffel coat, the explosion of chestnut hair bursting out from under the hood, there in the winter gloom on Ardnadam Pier, jumping up and down and waving at him in the crew boat, as he was coming ashore for a last few hours before Trebuchet sailed again on her last patrol.

  Then all the other memories of her began crowding in, until eventually exhaustion saw him drift off into dreamless sleep.

  The next day.

  Mahaddie started walking back towards the Riley 12, where Harry was sitting in the front passenger seat and Katty in the back. They hadn’t said a word to each other since Mahaddie had jumped out to go and talk to the two ground crew standing beside a shattered fuel bowser, whose tyres had been shredded and its cab peppered with bullet holes.

  They were on the edge of Takali airfield in the middle of the island, and from where Harry was sitting, all that was left of it were a few free-standing white stone walls surrounded by piles of rubble, and a random series of rock and earth berms stretching out across a flat plain. There were also a dozen or so tents, flapping and bellying in the wind and a few sandbagged enclosures with Bofors barrels sticking up out of them. The only aircraft in Harry’s field of vision were wrecks. On the far side of the field, scores of figures in khaki were hacking with picks and sho
velling, obviously throwing up even more berms around the perimeter. Blast pens for whatever surviving aircraft were left, he guessed, and for any new ones that one day might arrive.

  Mahaddie had one hand holding his side hat on his head against the wind and rain, and the other clutching the front of his greatcoat shut. Harry leaned over and opened the door for him as he came up, and a gust of wind rocked the little car as he climbed in.

  ‘Four Hurricanes operational,’ he said to Katty, who dutifully began writing it down, ‘and they can’t say how many they can bring up before the weather clears at the weekend.’ He started the engine, crashed the battered machine into gear and they headed off again, this time towards some tents.

  Another rain squall scudded in across the north end of the field – more intense rain falling in rippling sheets and turning the already grey sky even darker. Looking up, Harry doubted the racing cloud base was much above one hundred feet, and probably even less.

  ‘They want permission to cannibalise another Hurricane,’ Mahaddie continued, a frustrated growl directed at no one in particular. ‘They’ve got a list of new parts needing casting, except they don’t know when they can get the foundry going again, because they don’t know when the gas is going to get reconnected, but they want to get a few more kites airworthy now and not have to wait. Jesus Christ, if they go on like this our entire air strength will be in parts bins.’

  The big Jock wasn’t the same man Harry remembered from Majorca, or even from their little impromptu Mediterranean cruise. He didn’t seem quite able to fill a room any more, or even a car, the way he used to, wasn’t as loud, or as Scottish. It made Harry smirk to himself to think that maybe this was no bad thing. Especially as the man was actually beginning to communicate like a human being, in English and in a fashion that was understandable. Even the usual intense barrage of insults and abuse had all but abated.

  Mahaddie had captured Harry on his way in to see Katty, to ask her, ‘Where were you?’ But once Mahaddie had got in the way, there hadn’t been any time for Harry to do that. For Group Captain Mahaddie had got use of the RAF car, the last one left allowed to use petrol, and he’d already corralled Katty as his pencil pusher for the day. ‘Come for a ride!’ Mahaddie had boomed at Harry. ‘Tell me some jokes and cheer me up. Ye can put your hand on Katty’s knee when I’m not lookin’, if ye like. I’m sure she won’t mind if ye tell her it’s for the good of the war effort.’