by David Black
Leaning by the chart table, Gil registered the time and date. He wanted to remember this night; not realising then that this date would be burned into his memory forever, not by what was happening here, but by other events, far away.
It was the early hours of 3 July, 1940, and 2,500 kilometres to the south, a Royal Navy squadron was steaming off the Algerian coast outside the French naval base of Mers el-Kebir, preparing to decide the future of the French fleet in a far less merciful fashion than this RN Commander.
Chapter Two
Lieutenant Commander Purkiss’s desk was at the bay window end of a drawing room in a converted Victorian mansion overlooking the River Tay above Dundee’s bustling docks. Sleet slathered the window in sluggish wind-streaked rivers so that as he stood looking out, he could see nothing of the Fife coast across the slate-grey Tay, and barely the Eastern Wharf below, where the dockyard part of HMS Ambrose nestled.
HMS Ambrose, the Royal Navy’s shore establishment in Dundee, served the nation’s war effort through a variety of functions, one of them being home to an ad hoc, scraped-together collection of refugee submarines from several now-defeated Allies, now known as the Ninth Flotilla. Lieutenant Commander Purkiss was the base’s second-in-command, and usually he saw to it that he had as little as possible to do with those wretched submariners. Today, unfortunately, events had conspired against him. He struck a heroic pose in an attempt to shrug off his gathering gloom, while the two Wrens who typed and ‘did’ for him, looked up from their adjoining desks at his unimpressive back and shiny pate, and sniggered to each other. For Lieutenant Commander Purkiss was not heroic; he was, at heart, exactly what he looked like – ‘something in insurance’.
The only reason he was here now, in his blue suit and two and a half rings, was because of his earlier, largely failed, career in an earlier Royal Navy. As a boy, as the war clouds had gathered over Europe in 1914, he had emerged from the Royal Naval College, Osborne, a fully fledged ‘snotty’, or as known more formally, a Midshipman. Along with nearly all his classmates, he went straight into the gunroom of a dreadnought battleship and remained there for the entire Great War; part of the Grand Fleet, anchored between the gale-swept, treeless islands of the Orkney Islands’ Scapa Flow.
Four long years – the finest of his youth – marooned in a base that had begun life with one landing jetty and one peat-rutted football pitch to entertain over 40,000 sailors. The war had done little to improve its aspect and the battleship remained a universe away from any city street, bar or dance hall. Aberdeen was over 200 miles south and all the young Purkiss had had to look out over was a land and seascape where it was either raining or about to rain; a place where the only break with tedium was coaling the giant warships, or the very rare sorties to sea. Even when his ship had taken part in the Battle of Jutland in 1916, so far had been his battle squadron from the van of the fleet, he only discovered he’d been in a battle after they’d returned to the anchorage and the crew of a passing pinnace shouted it through the gunroom scuttle. The only time he ever saw a German warship was when the High Seas Fleet sailed into Scapa to be interned in 1919, long after the armistice had been signed.
A year later, Purkiss was retired from the Fleet, no longer required by an ungrateful nation. So he’d boarded a train to Cheltenham where he took to clerking like a natural, married a nice girl and settled down to cultivate his narrow view of a hostile world and nurture his permanent state of irritation. Indeed, no one could have been more irritated by the fact that the Great War, the so-called war to end all wars, hadn’t at all lived up to its claim. And now here he was, dragged into another one; dragged from his comfortable Cheltenham fireside, his wife and compliant, near grown-up children, and with only an extra one and a half rings for his trouble. And that was why, in these, the closing days of February 1941, the only comfort he felt left to him was to wallow energetically in self-pity and a relentless mealy-mouthed gloom, the comic bathos of which provided the only entertainment for his two Wrens in their otherwise tedious tasks.
And on top of it all, there was the bloody knock on his door that he’d been expecting.
‘Come!’ he barked, causing the girls to simper once more.
The door opened and in stepped an RNVR Sub-Lieutenant, cap on, and gas-mask bag and tin hat slung shoulder to hip over his No. 1 jacket. He was a tallish lad, neatly turned out, still full of the blandness of youth, thought Purkiss. Another child sent to try me. And he didn’t half look a bit pale. Surely not a sickly child to boot! The two young Wrens, on the other hand, saw nothing bland about him at all. Their eyebrows shot up in choreographed appreciation of this rather fetching young Turk who, even before he’d opened his mouth, had managed to brighten their day.
‘Gilmour, Sir,’ he said, coming to attention, but not, thankfully, trying to salute him. At least he knows that much, thought Purkiss, who would have been unable to return the salute as he wasn’t wearing his cap. ‘I was told to report to you by the dock office, Sir,’ continued the young man. ‘To present my papers. I am appointed Liaison Officer to the Free French submarine Radegonde.’
A cloud of deeper gloom descended on Purkiss at the mention of the submarine’s name. He walked over to his desk and sat down, then, almost as an afterthought, gestured to Harry Gilmour to sit also.
‘Well, your submarine is here all right, Mr Gilmour,’ said Purkiss, hands splayed over his empty desk. ‘We’ve been expecting you. Well, someone at least’, and then he changed his tone to something more imperious. ‘Radegonde’s books!’ he said.
It took a moment for Harry to realise Purkiss was talking to the Wrens. At the edge of his vision Harry was aware that one of the trim girls in uniform had shot up and was retrieving something from a metal filing cabinet. The entire room seemed in thrall to the timeless clack and silence of eternal bureaucracy. Purkiss’s fingers drummed lightly. When Harry managed to raise his eyes from them he was suddenly aware that Purkiss had been staring at him, his eyebrows in a questioning arch. In a fluster, Harry reached into his gas-mask bag.
‘Ah, yes, sorry, Sir. My, ah, orders, ah. Mmm . . .’ – rummage, rummage – ‘. . . here they are!’ And Harry produced an envelope.
The Wren arrived with documents, and Harry handed over his. Purkiss began his perusals. Slips of paper were passed to Harry, with a ‘sign these’. Finally his orders were returned for handing on to Radegonde’s Captain. Purkiss sat back with the air of a man who’d just completed a job well done. But it didn’t last. His face clouded over again. There was something on his mind. Something, Purkiss reflected to himself, very serious indeed. He began.
‘Your submarine is in dockyard hands at the moment,’ he said. ‘She’s having some new boffin-box fitted . . . you’ll still have to join her right away, though. Regardless of what mess she’s in. It’s all very inconvenient. Meanwhile, there’s a matter of some urgency for you to sort out. I have no idea how you are supposed to do it, but sort it out you will. Do I make myself clear?’
Not in the slightest, thought Harry. But Harry these days was too weary, too dazed, to fight back. He smiled a compliant smile. Purkiss’s frown deepened.
‘There is no one to do a handover with you,’ said Purkiss in a tone that said this was entirely someone else’s fault. ‘Your predecessor’ – the latter word sneered – ‘did not see fit to remain with the submarine until you arrived. They docked and he was down the gangway and off to Dundee West railway station. Neither us, nor his Commander (S), received his personal report. He also left outstanding a matter of even greater gravity. He has not returned Radegonde’s Confidential Books. I want them back in my safe this afternoon!’
‘Where are they, Sir?’ asked Harry, affecting keenness.
Purkiss eyed him, as if assessing whether he was being made sport of.
‘You do know what Confidential Books are?’
Of course Harry did. But Purkiss was going to tell him anyway.
‘They contain all the codes and ciphers and call-signs, recog
nition signals of the day, emergency procedures in case of emergency events . . . for the entire fleet . . . everything a German agent or Fifth Columnist could ever dream of . . . They can only ever be in one of two places. In the custody of a duly appointed and read-in Liaison Officer, or in that locked cupboard over there.’ Purkiss gestured, irritated, to an ungainly dark-wood, wardrobe-like edifice against the back wall. ‘They’re in neither,’ he said.
‘They’ve been lost, Sir?’ asked Harry, wondering what he was expected to do about it. This was a goad too far for Purkiss. And when he got angry, his voice became squeaky. He knew it, and that really irritated him even more.
‘Confidential Books are not allowed to be lost, Sub-Lieutenant!’ he squeaked. The Wrens simpered behind their typewriters. Harry looked shocked. ‘They are in a place where they are not permitted to be,’ Purkiss continued. ‘You are ordered to ascertain that place, retrieve them and return them to me for safekeeping until Radegonde is ready to return to sea. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Aye aye, Sir!’ said Harry.
‘Well . . .?’
‘Yessir. Sir. If you could tell me where . . .?
‘I don’t keep little drawings of where every ship in the dockyard is located, Sub-Lieutenant. Ask at the dock office.’
‘Who should I ask for? Her Captain? First Lieutenant? Do you have a name?’
Purkiss glared at this impertinence, unable to speak. Even through his fatigue, Harry, a sea-going, fighting officer, was getting a bit pissed off with this desk-bound oaf, even if he was a Lieutenant Commander.
‘And the boat, Sir? What about the boat?’ he persisted, goading him now. ‘What do I need to know?’
‘Need to know, Sub-Lieutenant?’ A pause, to let the sneer in his voice sink in. ‘Her CO is called Syvret. He keeps a pet dog on board. And he calls it Stalin. That should tell you all you need to know about Radegonde. You are dismissed, Sub-Lieutenant. And remember: this afternoon!’
Sub-Lieutenant Harry Gilmour RNVR – Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve – was still a bit of a rare beast even in the early months of 1941. A Royal Navy officer, who wasn’t entirely Royal Navy; not quite your proper Andrew – which was, as Harry had learned, service slang for the service. The fact that you were ‘Volunteer Reserve’, and your officer’s gold braid rings on the ends of your sleeves were wavy and not solid; it all meant you weren’t proper RN, you were RNVR; a wartime expedient, an experiment. Officers recruited for hostilities only. No career path through Britannia Royal Naval College at Dartmouth; no steeping in all its attendant arcane traditions and lore.
The RNVR boys were the sausage meat in a sausage machine; a naval production line that fed civvy landlubbers into a converted Leisure Centre on the promenade at Hove, now miraculously transformed into an officer factory by the simple act of changing its name to HMS King Alfred; a place for manufacturing fighting sailors to feed a Fleet greedy for manpower as it hastily made up its numbers to meet the Hun.
They hadn’t actually swamped the senior service yet, but more and more were coming through. Bit of a bloody shower actually, if you’d asked any of the proper chaps. But, most of the more intelligent ones would have conceded, a necessary evil. If you were going to man a fleet expanding at a rate never before seen in its history, then you were going to have to get the blokes to man it, and not be too particular about it. The new boys would learn in time. They’d have to! But nobody should kid themselves they’d ever be proper Andrew.
So that was Harry. In, but not in; neither fish nor fowl. And as long as he sported those wavy rings, there would always be someone there to remind him.
But the wavy rings were out of sight, beneath a tightly buckled navy blue trench coat, when Lieutenant de Vaisseau Gil Syvret first set eyes on Harry, striding out down that miserable Dundee quayside in the slanting sleet, his gas-mask bag slung athwartships, lugging a not particularly bulky kit bag, and with a pair of what looked like Eskimo boots dangling down from around his neck.
Syvret was leaning over the bridge of his command, the Free French submarine Radegonde, scanning through the grey murk, up and down the bustle of the dock looking for that laggard, flat-capped worker they’d sent to hunt down the latest forgotten component for the new box of tricks that was currently being bolted into his control room.
And there was Harry, coming round the crane, weaving past a mound of scrap cable being added to by a gang of labourers with a rusty wheelbarrow who had hauled it off a rusted, ancient-looking minesweeper undergoing her refit on the adjacent berth. Harry was making a beeline through all that chaos of industry, directly for him. His new LO – Liaison Officer.
Oh god, oh god, thought Syvret, not like the last one, please.
His contemplation was disturbed by a discordant and screaming roar of aero engines. He looked west up the Tay and, coming over the rail bridge, he saw a twin-engined job – obviously a Jerry – and a smaller, single-engine fighter chasing it. They were out over the river, and the Jerry was jinking, engines racing.
Everyone on the dock stopped to look. There had been no air-raid warning, so bizarrely, no one was taking cover. The two aircraft looked joined, as if one was towing the other, as they swept low down the river, at less than 100 feet, Syvret estimated, over the coast heading for Claypotts Castle and were lost. Seconds passed. And then the distinctive tacka-tacka-tacka of machine guns echoed back. The fighter pilot; he’s waited until they’ve cleared the town before he’s opened up, thought Syvret. They are such gentlemen, the British.
When he looked down, the new LO was standing at Radegonde’s gangway, looking up, obviously waiting for permission to come aboard. See, I told you so! Syvret said to himself with a smile. ‘You are my new Liaison Officer, I must take it. Come aboard, please,’ he shouted down to Harry.
Introductions made, kit stowed, Harry sat with his new Skipper, each with a glass of red wine before them, in the submarine’s wardroom. The layout was similar to Harry’s last boat; an alcove set off the main passageway, but smaller and more homely. Harry didn’t realise at this point that there was more room for fripperies because Radegonde’s officers had their own tiny cabins, two to a berth for the junior ones and a single for their Captain – a luxury unheard of on a Royal Navy submarine. Other luxuries included a secure rack for wine glasses, a small wooden keg that held brandy, several crudely framed sketches that were neither fine art nor cartoon, and other souvenirs of foreign ports, including a Reichsmarine sailor’s cap, with a cap band that read Emden, hanging from a light fitting. The other thing Harry noted was that, on first appraisal, the entire boat appeared less cluttered, less of a cat’s cradle of pipework and cable-runs, than British boats; and cleaner too.
Harry’s musings were interrupted.
‘So it was a Junkers 88 being chased by a Spitfire,’ said Syvret. ‘You know these things.’
‘I’m a walking recognition chart, Sir,’ Harry replied with that lopsided smile Syvret was already coming to recognise even on such a short acquaintance. ‘Can’t help it. Some chaps had a misspent youth, me; I . . . well, you know. I was never any good at cards.’
Shy, thought Syvret, which is already a head start on the last one, hence all the facial contortions. And I particularly like the ‘had’, as in his relative youth. It shows you’re optimistic. Christ! You’re still just a teenager. And if you’re not, it’s only by a matter of days.
In the pause, Harry added, ‘Anyone would think there was a war on, Skipper.’
‘Captain,’ said Syvret. ‘I am the Captain, not the Skipper.’
But Syvret’s thoughts weren’t so severe; he was just making sure his new LO knew his place, remembering the last one.
‘Sorry, Sir,’ said Harry, a little mortified and showing it.
Definitely shy, thought Syvret, smiling to himself. And the grin; am I going to get used to it or is it going to make me want to kill him? But there were other things Syvret was seeing. This Harry Gilmour might be a boy, but he was a boy who’d been in a fight. Syvre
t could tell. You always could with the ones who’d actually been to war. There was something a bit knocked sideways about them. They’d been somewhere others hadn’t, and to greater or lesser extents, were still on their way back; as if they’d been knocked off course and had still to apply a touch of corrective helm, and maybe rebox their compass.
And what did Harry see? Certainly, a more mature man than himself; and one as handsome as his own father, but with a more hawk-like, European mien to him. Harry could imagine him a knight in the host of Charlemagne. Dark, with tight curls, and a skin pale, not olive, yet still exotic. And the eyes. Young men Harry’s age don’t recognise the colour of other men’s eyes, but if they are observant, they sense what’s behind them. But with this one, Harry saw nothing but a surface calm, flat as flat can be. Instinctively, Harry found himself liking him for no reason he could fathom. It was disconcerting.
‘And you are an experienced submariner . . . who speaks French?’ asked Syvret, raising his glass to Harry, with a smile, and taking another sip.
‘Yes, Sir,’ Harry replied, reluctant to expand on that. If asked, he’d have to stop and think about the number of war patrols he’d completed, and he was too tired to contemplate trying to explain that his first boat had been sunk with him it; or that his last had been battered into a crumpled, limping wreck by German depth charges, and that she was in a dry dock somewhere, with someone probably still trying to decide whether to repair her or just break her up for spares.
