Convoy (25 page)

At dinner the previous evening Yorke had been introduced to an almost bewildering number of officers, ranging from the chief radio officer to the senior second engineer, from the electrical officer (always known as ‘Lecky’) to the chief steward. Several of the officers had their wives staying on board – they were all going on shore today, in anticipation of the ship going out into the River Mersey tomorrow. They were an odd collection of women, ranging from the perky yet homely wife of the chief radio officer, who called everyone ‘luv’ and genuinely seemed to mean it, to Lecky’s wife, a sulky young woman whose features seemed too small for her face, her mouth puckered up in a perpetual discontented sneer at her husband, and whose hair had the startling red that could only come from a bottle. The women, Yorke decided, ranged from the girl next door who had waited for years for her man to ‘get his ticket’ and with the necessary Board of Trade Certificates to obtain a steady job, to a trollop who suddenly found herself pregnant and needed a husband.

Arriving in the saloon early for breakfast, Yorke found his guess had been right, the married men with their wives on board would be eating as late as possible. The only person there was the chief engineer, a stocky and bald man nearing sixty who was a self-proclaimed bachelor. He had a noisy habit of eating crisp, dry toast with his mouth open but was a cheerful man who had been with the ship, he told Yorke, ‘from the day the builders took delivery of the engine’. For a whole year before the war the
Marynal
had acted as a cargo liner – the chief engineer was careful to emphasize the
liner
, a ship carrying cargo or passengers on a regular route or line and thus not a tramp (which went from port to port touting for cargoes), with a top speed of sixteen knots.

‘Mind you, the owners never let us make passages at sixteen; our economical speed is just under twelve. But I remember the day we did our speed trials with all the builder’s men on board. Aye, that was a great experience, watching the revolutions creeping up and up, until we were making sixteen… But now it’s six-knot convoys for us. The engines are barely turning. Injectors sooting up, too. Suddenly the bridge phones down on a dark night complaining that the funnel is spouting sparks. Of course it is! Soot from weeks of slow speeds. Now I try to blast it out in the daytime. I did it once with a following wind and the mate had just had the fo’c’sle painted – you should have heard his language; he thought I’d done it a’ purpose. The fore part of the ship looked as though it had black measles.’

Yorke made sure he was in the saloon promptly at noon for lunch, hoping that the wives would make their husbands late as they primped their hair and tidied up their lipstick: there had been signs that one or two of them had learned from their husband that the naval officer on board had been serving in destroyers and if he was not careful meals for the rest of the day would be prying sessions.

He was lucky; again the only man there was the chief engineer. ‘You’ll go far, young man,’ the chief said. ‘You watch points. That’s what you’ve got to do to get on, watch points.’

Yorke was puzzled by the phrase but the chief added: ‘Them bloody women – you’ve got to get in quick when we’re in port: it’s the only time those wives get waited on and they love humbugging around, sending the stewards off for more glasses of water and complaining the toast is overdone. Overdone! Well,
that
tells you the kind of women they are. Anyway, watch points; nip in quick a’fore those female vultures descend on the feast table. Still, we’ll be rid of them by this evening. The Old Man says we move out into the river early tomorrow; the tug’s booked for seven o’clock. That means my little sewing machine will start warming up at six. And with a bit of luck she won’t stop for another six weeks or so.’

Yorke, finding the easy chair in his cabin grew hard lumps in odd places after half an hour, was just about to get up when there was a knock on the door and Watkins appeared with letters, two in official buff envelopes, one in the particular blue that Clare used, and another addressed in his mother’s handwriting.

‘Oh, by the way, Watkins, I was thinking of having a look round the DEMS quarters later this afternoon. Will you send Jenkins along to see me?’

An hour later Yorke found himself climbing down the vertical ladder to the DEMS gunners’ accommodation under the poop deck. What had once been a storage area had been divided into some medium-sized cabins, with one large cabin used as a mess. Tall, grey-painted lockers lined a bulkhead, showing where the men kept their clothing. There were four circular Players cigarette tins on the table which had been burnished on the outside so that they seemed to be made of stainless steel. Yorke picked one up and saw that instead of the usual fifty cigarettes, it was half full of sand. A safe kind of ashtray, but…

‘Where do you get the sand – firebuckets?’ he asked Jenkins.

‘No sir, there’s a tub of sand up in the forepeak to use in the firebuckets, and we can use it. The Mate’s scared stiff we’ll brew up a fire down here, with all those ready-use shells in the rack round the 4-inch just above us, so we can have all the sand we want. We usually bring him back a couple of sandbags full when we can get a swim on a nice beach in the tropics.’ He gave a shiver. ‘Times like this, sir, I don’t believe the tropics exist.’

Jenkins led him to the various cabins, where the men had their uniforms, blankets and cleaning gear laid out neatly, the soldiers sticking to the Army way and the seamen to the system they had been taught in the Royal Navy. The most impressive equipment, Yorke thought, was the Army topee, looking just like a light tan version of the London bobby’s helmet and about as unwieldy. He remembered seeing old coloured prints of British troops in India and in the South African war wearing such hats. Obviously the War Office had not changed the design for a century, although the troops in the Eighth Army went bareheaded whenever possible, something which even a year before the war would have been reckoned an invitation to the sun to send them mad, or at least start the process of frying their brains. Army-issue shirts still had buttons for spine pads of felt, though no one used them now.

Yorke’s days as first lieutenant of a destroyer were only a few weeks behind him, and he could remember all too well the quick inspection which preceded the captain’s inspection on Sundays. Well, Jenkins and his men had been working hard, polishing with O-Cedar whatever wood took a shine, rubbing away at metal with the Brasso. Handrails had Turk’s heads in white line at top and bottom, with canvas wrapped round in between and the seam carefully sewn in a sailmaker’s stitch, or for shorter lengths there was some good fancy work which had been scrubbed clean – probably with a couple of mugs of Parozone bleach in the water.

It all pointed to the men taking a pride in their quarters. In turn that meant they were proud of their ship and happy in her. All of which was a credit to Jenkins and the lance bombardier, the chief officer, and finally the captain. Keeping DEMS gunners happy must be the devil of a job because their normal duties were dull – in port it meant cleaning quarters, oiling and greasing guns, and scrubbing and restitching canvas covers. At sea there were long waits and occasional brief action stations…watches spent huddled in what little cover there was around the 4-inch gun when sailing alone. Off watch meant sleeping, playing uckers or cards, smoking, reading Wild West stories, looking once again through tattered copies of
Razzle
and
Men Only…

Inspection of the guns took half an hour. The Vickers 4-inch mounted on the poop was indeed an ancient piece but Jenkins obviously loved it, and so did the lance bombardier, with the affection young men had for a peppery grandfather. The shells sticking up like a row of stubby thumbs in a circular rack going right round the poop were well painted and then lightly greased. The 4-inch, Yorke could tell, represented a ‘proper gun’ to the men; something that might do some damage to the enemy. When he reached the monkey island above the bridge and found the canvas covers off the two Oerlikon 20 mm cannons he sensed these too were guns the men liked; weapons that could be trusted not to jam or play tricks. And they were, of course, very effective against low-flying aircraft; a well-aimed burst could bring down a four-engined Focke-Wulfe Condor or Kurier. There were twelve Hotchkiss to inspect in twin mountings, and it was clear that they found no favour in the heart of Jenkins or the lance bombardier. But they were well cared for; each small armour-plate shield, shaped like the window of a Gothic church, was well painted; the guns were lightly oiled; the canvas covers, neatly rolled and stowed at the rear of each mounting, were scrubbed and the stitching was firm.

For a moment Yorke thought of asking to see the grenade projector, and the PACs, which were obviously Heath Robinson devices, but he had glimpsed the rectangular green boxes (in which PAC cables were probably stored) on either side of the forward end of the monkey island, each with a rocket canted up beside it, and decided that DEMS gunners’ pay ought to be doubled if they were expected to handle such ludicrous but dangerous toys. He tried to picture the secret committee which had thought of, made, run trials and persuaded someone in authority to approve production of such devices for merchant ships.

Finally, back in his cabin, Yorke took off his jacket, loosened his tie – the laundry in London had put too much starch in the shirt collar and it made his neck sore – and started to read his letters. It was a game, a test of willpower, but he liked to see how long he could wait to read a letter. The two buff OHMS letters he could keep for a week without much trouble; but – he looked at his watch – an hour was long enough to wait to read what Clare had to say. He decided to leave hers until last. The first buff envelope told him that he had been overpaid 9
d
a week for nineteen weeks and would he take immediate steps to refund the money; the other told him when he was to go to Buckingham Palace to receive his decoration. On that date, he noted, the
Marynal
would be in mid-Atlantic and, with the rest of the convoy, starting the swing southwards towards the tropics.

The letter from his mother was short, humorous and newsy. Clare came to see her when she was off duty, and they went to various places that they had wanted to see for ages but had never managed to fit in before. They had heard two debates in the House of Commons and, she commented, several young Members were trying to score runs by attacking the way the war was conducted when any other Member with any guts would have asked them why they were not helping fight it, leaving the older folk to do the grumbling. ‘We shall no doubt hear a lot from these young gentlemen after the war,’ she wrote sarcastically, ‘because they are very glib. And, if the casualties increase, they’ll be the only young survivors.’

Clare began by giving news of patients he knew at St Stephen’s. Two surgical cases had recovered enough to be sent down to Willesborough and Sister Scotland, on the telephone last night making arrangements for them, wished to be remembered to him. The man now in his bed on the night the bomb dropped – as he read the words he could feel her body pressing on his – was a paymaster with a hernia and who had a terror of getting haemorrhoids. The rest of the letter, written the night he had left for Liverpool on the early train, was of the kind that made a man fold it carefully and put it in his wallet, and take it out in the lonely days before the next delivery of mail, and read it again and again.

A knock on the door startled him. It was one of the
Marynal
’s four cadets. The Navy and a few shipping companies called them midshipmen; most called them cadets; some referred to them as apprentices, which was the most accurate if not the most prestigious phrase: they were apprentice officers, even though all too frequently a third-rate company and a ruthless chief officer used them as cheap labour and made sure they never received a minute’s instruction in mathematics, navigation, cargo work or ship construction. From what he had heard, Yorke knew that such youngsters had to pick up what they could in their off-watch time, poring over the standard text books.

‘Blackout, sir,’ the cadet explained. ‘I’m supposed to shut the deadlights.’

‘Don’t worry; I’ll do them.’

The boy did not move; instead he looked embarrassed. He was, perhaps, just past his seventeenth birthday. From the nicks in his cheeks had to shave once a week and today was the big day. But he was smartly dressed even though his nails showed he had spent the day hard at work, probably in overalls; doing a seaman’s job. ‘I’ll do them if you don’t mind, sir. You see, I have to report to the Mate that I’ve seen them all secured, and you won’t want me standing here watching you.’

Yorke grinned and said amiably, ‘All right, you do that one and I’ll do this.’

He swung the deadlight – in effect a second port, only made of solid metal – across the glass one and screwed down the clips. The cadet had done the other one and said: ‘Thank you, sir. Are – are you coming with us this trip?’

Yorke nodded, and the boy took a deep breath. ‘Is it true you won a DSO in destroyers, sir? And was wounded?’

Yorke nodded again, and then said: ‘There are hundreds like me, you know!’

‘Yes, sir, but you’ve come on board with a lot of secret equipment and two wireless operators. If you’re doing a special job and need someone to help, well, sir, I’d be only too glad to do it when I’m not on watch.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Reynolds, sir. You see, I’m hoping to transfer to the RNR soon as a sub-lieutenant. I can when I’ve got two years’ sea time. Well, providing I pass the Admiralty selection board. I’ve got all the papers because I wrote to the Admiralty and they gave me all the details.’

‘How much sea time have you put in up to now?’

‘Just over a year, sir. And a year at nautical school. You can take your second mate’s ticket after only four years now – it used to be five. Then you can serve as a third mate. You’re always one behind your certificate you see, sir, until you get your Master’s ticket. Then you serve as Chief Officer for a few years, and get a command if you’re lucky. And it’s a good idea to take an Extra Master’s ticket, too.’