Convoy (33 page)

If she had not telephoned, he might not have noticed that there was always a Swedish ship on the list of an insider convoy. What was Clare doing now? On board the
Marynal
it was half past noon; in London it was mid-afternoon. Clare would still be on day duty. By now the ward would have been cleaned, dressings changed, physical exercises completed by the patients, lunch eaten, grumbled about and by now almost forgotten.

Those allowed up will be sitting round those still bedridden, playing cards, glaring at chessboards. Some will be reading; others will have gone to sleep listening to the wireless, the earphones askew over their heads. There will be grey clouds at the windows because yesterday’s depression will be passing north of the United Kingdom today and reaching down as far as London. Clare will be writing up reports, perhaps even snatching a moment to write a page or two more of a letter to him.

Her skirt, so lightly starched, a sort of white pinafore thing, the little bonnet pinned at the back of the head, the polished and flat-heeled black shoes, the black stockings (perhaps with a seam crooked), her wristwatch with the large dial and figures in Roman numerals which was consulted as every patient’s pulse was taken, her fountain pen clipped into a pocket, a severe black pen with a gold clip and a wide gold band round the cap. He could see so vividly the cool and calm Nurse Exton, who could quell an almost apoplectic commander with a chilly stare, bring a hush to a ward full of unruly men with a quiet, ‘Gentlemen!’ Nurse Exton, whose eyes and mouth at the height of passion were the essence of all love poems and songs. Clare, the cause of him being on board the
Marynal
, the cause of him wishing he was in London.

‘The
Echo
’s just coming through the second column from us, sir,’ the cadet said. ‘Must be making full speed.’

Yorke did up the toggles of his duffel coat, pulled the scarf tighter round his neck and went out on to the wing of the bridge, where he found Hobson and the cadet watching the
Echo
cut across the stern of the fourth ship in the sixth column, head across towards the
Flintshire
and then gradually turn to starboard to come up on the
Marynal
’s starboard quarter. Once again Yorke was startled at the difference in size; he had the feeling that from the bridge of the
Marynal
he could lob a cricket ball down the
Echo
’s funnel.

He trained his binoculars on the
Echo
’s bridge. There was Johnny Gower, one of the few clean-shaven men. His first lieutenant had a bushy red beard, a modern Barbarossa; there was one grey beard, probably some three-badge AB, one of the men who formed the backbone of the Navy, highly skilled at his job (he was probably a signalman), always grumbling, up to all the tricks for avoiding work, with more than twelve years’ service (one good conduct badge for every four years), and who had refused all promotion: not for him the questionable delights of being a petty officer, eating in the POs’ mess. It all meant responsibility and only fools became involved with that. The fact was that very often many first lieutenants faced with a difficult job would sooner put a three-badge AB in charge than a petty officer, because the petty officer was often a young and ambitious man with much less experience.

The
Echo
, like her captain, was paying the price for efficiency; because the lieutenant (E) was the kind of engineer who understood his machinery like a good conductor his orchestra, the frigate rarely had to go into the dockyard for the kind of repairs that were almost routine for other ships, so that the officers rarely managed to get leave. Johnny and his first lieutenant never had a day’s illness, so they missed sick leave. All of which meant that most of the officers in the
Echo
had been at sea in the North Atlantic almost continuously since the day the war began. They had been serving in a small destroyer, but the moment the
Echo
was ready for commissioning they were transferred to her so that the destroyer could go into the dockyard for a long-overdue modernization.

Yorke now understood the physical and psychological effect of such prolonged active service at sea because he too had been at sea continuously up to the time the
Aztec
sank. It was not until he was lying in the hospital bed at St Stephen’s with his hand and arm fixed like a broken spar that he realized his nerves were wound up tauter than an overtuned violin: another fraction of a turn, it seemed, and something would snap.

The Royal Air Force lately seemed to have come to terms with it, after that bad patch when the senior officers at the Air Ministry who had not flown operationally for twenty-five years had lashed out at air crews who were at the end of their tether through sheer strain. Those that collapsed were branded as LMF, a description dreamed up by men flying their war at safe desks and standing for ‘lacking in moral fibre’. Cowardice, in other words. This infamous label was often stuck on men who had flown thirty or forty bombing raids over the most heavily defended targets in Germany, showing that the worst wounds were inflicted by one’s own side.
The coup de grâce
usually came from some faceless low-grade individual in the Ministry of Pensions striking a blow for freedom by gipping a man ten shillings a week from his pension. Fortunately some of the younger doctors now in the RAF were men who understood the psychology of the air crews. Because they knew that in peacetime a businessman trying for months to stave off bankruptcy might step over the edge into a nervous breakdown, or a wife nursing a sick husband and struggling to make enough money to buy food and medicine and pay the doctor’s bills might well collapse. These doctors finally managed to persuade the Air Ministry that air crews were not supermen: they were ordinary young men who, night after night, spent a quarter of the twenty-four hours waiting for an anti-aircraft shell or a burst of cannon fire to blow themselves and their aircraft to smithereens. They did not sit there in fear and trembling: on the contrary, they flew, navigated, stood by their guns and aimed their bombs, but they knew they might not get home again. Most calculated the odds against them. So many hours flying time, so many raids left before the odds turned against… The worst part probably came in the hour or two before take off in the early evening. The village pub where they met on the nights they were not flying and played darts and sang and flirted was just down the road. For the older ones there would be rented houses nearby where wives lived, hearing the planes taking off and counting them as they returned before dawn. LMF. Every man was a coward, if he had the slightest sensitivity. A man without fear was a menace to himself and his comrades because, lacking in imagination, he could not be trusted to react sensibly to anything except an absolutely routine situation.

Now the
Echo
was less than a ship’s length away on the
Marynal
’s starboard quarter and Yorke scrambled up the iron ladder to the monkey island, where Jenkins waited with the microphone of the loudhailer.

Yorke nodded to the seaman. ‘How would you like a year in one of those?’

‘We were all saying this morning, sir, how we’re just waiting for them to call for volunteers.’

Yorke raised an eyebrow questioningly. There was a certain ritual to be followed when a leading seaman made a joke to an officer.

‘We’d make sure we didn’t step forward, sir!’

From the day a sailor joined the Navy he was warned by his mates never to volunteer for anything. ‘You volunteered for DEMS work,’ Yorke reminded him.

‘Yes,’ Jenkins said frankly, ‘an’ we get the finest grub there is, and discipline is sort of relaxed. More chance o’ getting the chop, I suppose; but I’d sooner take my chance in a lifeboat than in one of those Carley floats.’

Yorke took the microphone and looked across at the
Echo
.

‘
Marynal
. What are the symptoms?’

Johnny Gower’s voice was unmistakable, despite the distorted bellowing of the
Echo
’s loudhailer. He saw Yorke standing up on the monkey island and gave a cheery wave.

Yorke pressed the transmit button. ‘Feverish but will survive. Listen, have you noticed how the Swede comes back to the convoy at high speed until he’s three or four miles off, then slows down to about seven knots?’

‘Yes. Couldn’t be sure he wasn’t nervous and trying to get back into position without bumping someone. Can’t see very well from the other side of the convoy. Parallax and all that nonsense.’

‘He’s not nervous. Listen, Johnny, when he rejoins this evening why don’t you go close alongside and ask if he needs any help? Say you’re worried that he’s had to leave the convoy. And have your Asdic going.’

‘Right ho, Ned: I’ll switch with one of the corvettes and probably stay in that position for a day or two. I’ll report to the commodore by lamp so you can read the answer. If anything crops up tomorrow, ask for medical assistance again. Anything else? Very well, toodle-pip.’

Yorke went back down to the bridge to find Hobson waiting for him.

‘You didn’t say anything about a U-boat moving underneath the Swede,’ Hobson said. ‘Do you think young “Toodle-pip” will guess?’ Hobson made no effort to conceal the doubt in his mind.

‘Don’t worry about the “toodle-pip”; he’s been saying it to my certain knowledge since he was eight years old. When we left Liverpool he was second highest scorer on the list of U-boat killers.’

‘He has a very flippant manner, though,’ Hobson said, almost primly. ‘I noticed it at the convoy conference before we sailed.’

‘Don’t let that put you off,’ Yorke said and smiled as he remembered something. ‘Once his last two depth charges forced a U-boat to surface, so he rammed him. A few moments before they hit Johnny warned everyone on the Tannoy by bellowing: “What ho, she bumps!”’

‘Yes, very funny, I’ve no doubt,’ Hobson said, ‘but…’

‘It was his fifth U-boat,’ Yorke said, but did not add that Johnny had in fact deliberately rammed the after end of the U-boat, hoping to damage her hydroplane so that she could not dive again, and that the Germans had abandoned ship so quickly that a boarding party from the
Echo
managed to get below, turn off flooding valves which had been opened, and (thanks to previous training) find and disconnect two explosive charges. The
Echo
had then towed the U-boat back to Scotland and most of Doenitz’s secrets – particularly codes and ciphers – had been discovered. But the whole thing was so secret – the U-boat now had a British name and few people knew that the submarine doing trials was telling the Royal Navy even more about U-boats – that Johnny’s well-earned DSO had not been gazetted, and every man in the ship’s company at the time had been sworn to secrecy. The first Yorke knew of it was when Jemmy had described the vessel. Toodle-pip. Yes, Johnny was flippant. In Nelson’s day the sour Lord St Vincent would have disliked his manner, but perhaps recognized a man whose brain worked twice as fast as most of those listening to him.

Yorke could tell Hobson nothing of the capture but wanted to reassure him about ‘Toodle-pip’. Then he realized the gulf between someone like Johnny Gower (who would describe working twenty-four hours a day as being ‘a touch busy’) and Hobson (who believed firmly in calling a spade a spade) was too vast, even though both men put the same effort into a job.

By the time the Swedish ship came into sight over the horizon, the convoy escorts had switched round: one frigate was ahead of the convoy and another, the
Echo
, astern; there was a corvette also ahead, beyond the second frigate. The weather was improving, the seas easing down into the usual long ocean swells without wind waves superimposed on them. During the late afternoon the cloud had begun to break up – not showing ‘enough blue to patch a Dutchman’s trousers’ according to the old proverb but indicating that by midnight a star or two might be seen and sun sights would be possible tomorrow. The day after that the convoy’s course would begin to dip south towards warmer latitudes.

Yorke stood with Hobson at the after side of the bridge watching with binoculars. Again there was the almost uniform grey of the sea with flecks of white as a wave crest broke. The
Echo
’s grey camouflage paint blended well; only the straight outlines – stem, bridge, guns – stood out. Beyond her the
Penta
was lifting over the curvature of the earth: first the stubs of her masts, then the funnel and bridge section; a few minutes later the fo’c’sle came into sight, followed by the stem, and then the bow wave could be seen creaming away in a broad, whitish moustache, reminding Yorke inconsequentially of the Lord Kitchener posters of the last war, a pointing finger and the Field Marshal’s stern face with the caption ‘Your country needs you.’ To irreverent eyes twenty-five years later the worthy peer looked more like an irate company sergeant major detailing a dozen men to ‘Clean the officers’ latrines!’ Anyway, more to the point was that Kitchener had a fifteen-knot moustache, comparable to the bow wave of a fully-laden merchant ship of about eight thousand tons.

The
Echo
turned almost lazily as she reached the last column and began her sweep back across the stern of the convoy, her turn making a broad, smooth patch in the sea and reminding Yorke that a cruiser made a wide smooth patch among choppy waves by doing a high-speed turn so that her floatplane, previously catapulted off for a reconnaissance, could land in the flattened crescent and then be lifted on board by crane.

‘She’s still making fifteen knots,’ Hobson grunted. ‘Would she dare come in like that with a U-boat on the surface astern of her?’

‘As long as she’s between the U-boat and the
Echo
, what’s there for her to worry about? The U-boat’s about two hundred feet long, but not much of that shows above water. Only the conning tower, really. Providing the Swede steers straight for the convoy and doesn’t let the
Echo
get too far to one side or the other, the U-boat sits there like a child hiding behind his mother’s skirts.’